Everything Is Pointless

Metamorphosis Complete

2008-01-17T17:29:00.000Z

The question "Is this all?" has troubled countless unsatisfied minds throughout the ages, and, at the end of our tether, as it seems, here it is, still baffling but persistent.

To such discomfited minds the world of our everyday reality is no more than a more or less entertaining or distressful story thrown upon a cinema screen. The story holds together; it moves them greatly and yet they feel it is faked. The vast majority of the beholders accept all the conventions of the story, are completely part of the story, and live and suffer and rejoice and die in it and with it. But the skeptical mind says stoutly, "This is delusion".

Golden lads and lasses must, like chimney sweepers, come to dust.”

“No,” says this ingrained streak of protest: “there is still something beyond the dust?”

But is there?

There is no reason for saying there is. That skeptical mind may have overrated the thoroughness of its skepticism. As we are now discovering, there was still scope for doubting.

The severer our thinking, the plainer it is that the dust-carts of Time trundle that dust off to the incinerator and there make an end to it.

Hitherto, recurrence has seemed a primary law of life. Night has followed day and day night. But in this strange new phase of existence into which our universe is passing, it becomes evident that events no longer recur. They go on and on to an impenetrable mystery, into a voiceless limitless darkness, against which this obstinate urgency of our dissatisfied minds may struggle, but will struggle only until it is altogether overcome.

Our world of self-delusion will admit none of that. It will perish amidst its evasions and fatuities. It is like a convoy lost in darkness on an unknown rocky coast, with quarrelling pirates in the chartroom and savages clambering up the sides of the ships to plunder and do evil as the whim may take them. That is the rough outline of the more and more jumbled movie on the screen before us. Mind near exhaustion still makes its final futile movement towards that “way out or round or through the impasse”.

That is the utmost now that mind can do. And this, its last expiring thrust, is to demonstrate that the door closes upon us for evermore.

There is no way out or round or through.

H. G. Wells. Mind at the end of its Tether.

I suppose you might be curious to know what a man can be like who does not love men. Very well, I am such a man…

But what attracts you to them disgusts me. I have seen, as you, men chewing slowly, all the while keeping an eye on everything, the left hand leafing through an economic review. Is it my fault I prefer to watch the sea-lions feeding? Man can do nothing with his face without its turning into a game of physiognomy. When he chews, keeping his mouth shut, the corners of his mouth go up and down, he looks as though he were passing incessantly from serenity to tearful surprise. You love this, I know, you call it the watchfulness of the Spirit. But it makes me sick; I don’t know why; I was born like that.

If there were only a difference of taste between us, I would not trouble you. But everything happens as if you had grace and I had none. I am free to like or dislike lobster newberg, but if I do not like men I am a wretch and can find no place in the sun. They have monopolized the sense of life. I hope you will understand what I mean. For the past 33 years I have been beating against closed doors on which is written “no entrance if not a humanist.” I had to abandon all I had undertaken; I had to choose: either it was an absurd and ill-fated attempt, or sooner or later it had to turn to their profit. I could not succeed in detaching from myself thoughts I did not expressly destine for them, in formulating them; they remained in me as slight organic movements. Even the tools I used I felt belonged to them; words for example: I wanted my own words. But the ones I have dragged through I don’t know how many consciences; they arrange themselves in my head by virtue of the habits I have picked up from the others and it is not without repugnance that I use them in writing to you. But this is the last time.

Jean-Paul Sartre. Erostratus.

‘Now what?’ Gregory asked himself as he looked about him in the darkness. He quite soon discovered that he could no longer move at all. He was not surprised; in fact what struck him as unnatural was that he had actually been able to get about until then on such thin legs. Otherwise he felt comparatively comfortable. Admittedly he hurt all over, but he had the impression that the pains were gradually becoming fainter and fainter and would eventually go away together. The rotten apple in his back and the inflamed area around it, now completely covered with a soft dust, were almost forgotten. He recalled his family with sympathy and love. His own belief that he must go was if possible firmer than his sister’s. He remained in this state of vacant and peaceable reflection until the church clock struck three in the morning. He lived to see the first signs of general brightening outside the window. Then, independently of his will, his head sank to the floor and his last breath streamed feebly from his nostrils.

Franz Kafka. The Metamorphosis.

G + Lambda g = 8 pi T

2007-11-29T11:16:00.000Z

The Wall & A Hunger Artist

2007-11-26T15:36:00.001Z

Two short stories to consider:

The Wall by Jean-Paul Sartre

&

A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka

The Ape That Got Lucky

2007-11-10T12:09:00.000Z

We're All Just Nuclear Waste

2007-11-02T17:12:00.000Z

Umbrella

2007-10-25T00:44:00.000+01:00

Mathematics & Madness

2007-10-06T13:52:00.000+01:00

I cobbled together this clip from two films that I watched in the same week. The first part is a snippet from a BBC documentary called 'Dangerous Knowledge', about the work and fate of four very important scientists. From the BBC website:

In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.

I have already mentioned Turing on this blog before and I certainly recommend watching the full documentary to learn the other men's sad stories. I chose the extract that I did, because of Ludwig Boltzmann's identification with Darwin, and because I myself often wish to sit within a perfect unchanging moment...

The second part of the clip is from Darren Aronofsky's film 'π', about a mathematical genius who attempts to discover patterns in the stock-market, but appears to stumble onto the name of god! Of course all very far-fetched, but it is the protagonists solution to his problem which I found most interesting. Instead of committing suicide, a drill to the head seemingly removes his mathematical ability, and with it the pain and misery of his math-angst.

Anyway, I can't help but feel an affinity with all these characters, both real and imagined, even if their solutions seem a little drastic...

The Organism that Started it All

2007-10-02T13:52:00.000+01:00

A Lesson In Pessimism: Part II

2007-09-28T13:20:00.000+01:00

Continuing from 'A Lesson in Pessimism: Part I':

Granting the strong points in the pessimists’ claims, it is still possible to detect certain confusions and dubious inferences in their arguments. To begin with, there is a very obvious inconsistency in the way writers like Darrow and Tolstoy arrive at the conclusion that death is better than life. They begin by telling us that death is something terrible because it terminates the possibility of any of the experiences we value. From this they infer that nothing is really worth doing and that death is better than life.

Ignoring for the moment the claim that in view of our inevitable death nothing is “worth doing,” there very plainly seems to be an inconsistency in first judging death to be such a horrible evil and in asserting later on that death is better than life. Why was death originally judged to be an evil? Surely because it is the termination of life. And if something, y, is bad because it is the termination if something, x, this can be so only if x is good or has positive value. If x were not good, the termination of x would not be bad. One cannot consistently have it both ways. To this it may be answered that life did have positive value prior to one’s realization of death but that once a person has become aware of the inevitability of his destruction, life becomes unbearable and that this is the real issue. This point of view is well expressed in the following exchange between Cassius and Brutus in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (III.i.102–105):

CASSIUS. Why he that cuts off twenty years of life—
Cuts off so many years of fearing death.

BRUTUS. Grant that, and then is death a benefit:
So are we Caesar’s friends that have abridged
His time of fearing death.

There is a very simple reply to this argument. Granting that some people after once realizing their doom cannot banish the thought of it from their minds, so much so that it interferes with all their other activities, this is neither inevitable nor at all common. It is, on the contrary, in the opinion of all except some existentialists, morbid and pathological. The realization that one will die does not in the case of most people prevent them from engaging in activities which they regard as valuable or from enjoying the things they used to enjoy. To be told that one is not living “authentically” if one does not brood about death day and night is simply to be insulted gratuitously. A person who knows that his talents are not as great as he would wish or that he is not as handsome as he would have liked to be is not usually judged to live “inauthentically,” but on the contrary to be sensible if he does not constantly brood about his limitations and shortcomings and uses whatever talents he does possess to maximum advantage.

Okay, I'm going to have to interject right there. Morbid, and pathological seems a little harsh (ha) and certainly I am often troubled by the concepts of authenticity and integrity. Since everything is pointless, what do they really matter? Am I cutting my nose off, to spite my face? Having watched quite a lot of reality-TV singing competitions, I think most people do believe that they are the best, not fat, not ugly, and not stupid. Whereas in reality, most are stupid and ugly (or combinations thereof). I've mentioned before on this blog, that depressive people may be more realistic in their views of the world. Understanding that death is the end of everything, that we're not going to see our loved ones again, after they and we have died, and that everything that you get out of bed for in the morning, is pointless; that hard fought knowledge about the universe, cannot help but have an influence on behaviour. I won't argue that delusion isn't happier, but then science is about the truth, regardless of whether the answer is to the liking of humanity.

Think about a mother losing a child. It's all very well telling her that time will heal, that other people get over loss and grief, and that she'll see her child again in heaven. But reality is, that something treasured, is lost forever. It is understandable that some people never get over life events like that.

There is another and more basic objection to the claim that death is better than life. This objection applies equally to the claim that while death is better than life it would be better still not to have been born in the first place and to the judgment that life is better than death. It should be remembered that we are here concerned with such pronouncements when they are intended not merely as the expression of certain moods but as statements that are in some sense true or objectively warranted. It may be argued that a value comparison—any judgment to the effect that A is better or worse than B or as good as B— makes sense only if both A and B are, in the relevant respect, in principle open to inspection. If somebody says, for example, that Elizabeth Taylor is a better actress than Betty Grable, this seems quite intelligible. Or, again, if it is said that life for the Jews is better in the United States than it was in Germany under the Nazis, this also seems readily intelligible. In such cases the terms of the comparison are observable or at any rate describable. These conditions are fulfilled in some cases when value comparisons are made between life and death, but they are not fulfilled in the kind of case with which Tolstoy and the pessimists are concerned. If the conception of an afterlife is intelligible, then it would make sense for a believer or for somebody who has not made up his mind to say such things as “Death cannot be worse than this life” or “I wonder if it will be any better for me after I am dead.” Achilles, in the Iliad, was not making a senseless comparison when he exclaimed that he would rather act… as a serf of another, A man of little possessions, with scanty means of subsistence, Than rule as a ghostly monarch the ghosts of all the departed. Again, the survivors can meaningfully say about a deceased individual “It is better (for the world) that he is dead” or the opposite. For the person himself, however, if there is no afterlife, death is not a possible object of observation or experience, and statements by him that his own life is better than, as good as, or worse than his own death, unless they are intended to be no more than expressions of certain wishes or moods, must be dismissed as senseless. At first sight the contention that in the circumstances under discussion value comparisons between life and death are senseless may seem implausible because of the widespread tendency to think of death as a shadowy kind of life—as sleep, rest, or some kind of homecoming. Such “descriptions” may be admirable as poetry or consolation, but taken literally they are simply false.

There is no afterlife. Is death better than life? From the MacMillan Encyclopedia of Death and Dying (a cheery read indeed):

The World Health Organization estimated that approximately 1 million people commit suicide annually. Suicide is among the top ten causes of death and one of the three leading causes in the fifteen-to-thirty-five-years age group worldwide. In the United States, where suicide is the ninth leading cause of death (and where the number of victims is 50% higher than the number of homicides), the Surgeon General in 1999 issued a Call to Action to Prevent Suicide, labeling suicide “a significant public health problem.”

So you're more likely to kill yourself, than be killed by another person. Whether some people find life enjoyable and worth living, it is inarguable that some people don't. If you spend every second alive, in pain, it is understandable that you might seek the cessation of that pain, through death. For some people then, wishing that they had not been born in the first place, seems like a reasonable conclusion (if not a personal one). More importantly, one day the question will be moot. When the universe is dead, there will be no life, and with it, nobody to remember that you hung yourself or not.

Irrelevance of the Distant Future

These considerations do not, however, carry us very far. They do not show either that life is worth living or that it “has meaning.” Before tackling these problems directly, something should perhaps be said about the curious and totally arbitrary preference of the future to the present, to which writers such as Tolstoy and Darrow are committed without realizing it. Darrow implies that life would not be “futile” if it were not an endless cycle of the same kind of activities and if instead it were like a journey toward a destination. Tolstoy clearly implies that life would be worthwhile, that some of our actions at least would have a “reasonable meaning,” if the present life were followed by eternal bliss. Presumably, what would make life no longer futile as far as Darrow is concerned is some feature of the destination, not merely the fact that it is a destination; and what would make life worthwhile in Tolstoy’s opinion is not merely the eternity of the next life but the “bliss” that it would confer—eternal misery and torture would hardly do. About the bliss in the next life, if there is such a next life, Tolstoy shows no inclination to ask “What for?” or “So what?”But if bliss in the next life is not in need of any further justification, why should any bliss that there might be in the present life need justification?

Ifs and ands. Pots and pans. Everything always has, and always will be pointless and since we're not dumb enough to even entertain the nonsensical idea that a super-alien somehow created the universe for you and me, talk of what ifs, is just doubly pointless. Any meaning that you would like to come up with, is essentially the pointless ponderings of a pointless biological machine, constructed by natural selection, and hence of no great importance.

The Logic of Value Judgements

Many of the pessimists appear to be confused about the logic of value judgments. It makes sense for a person to ask about something “Is it really worthwhile?” or “Is it really worth the trouble?” if he does not regard it as intrinsically valuable or if he is weighing it against another good with which it may be in conflict. It does not make sense to ask such a question about something he regards as valuable in its own right and where there is no conflict with the attainment of any other good. (This observation, it should be noted, is quite independent of what view one takes of the logical status of intrinsic value judgments.) A person driving to the beach on a crowded Sunday, may, upon finally getting there, reflect on whether the trip was really worthwhile. Or, after undertaking a series of medical treatments, somebody may ask whether it was worth the time and the money involved. Such questions make sense because the discomforts of a car ride and the time and money spent on medical treatments are not usually judged to be valuable for their own sake. Again, a woman who has given up a career as a physician in order to raise a family may ask herself whether it was worthwhile, and in this case the question would make sense not because she regards the raising of a family as no more than a means, but because she is weighing it against another good. However, if somebody is very happy, for any number of reasons—because he is in love, because he won the Nobel Prize, because his child recovered from a serious illness—and if this happiness does not prevent him from doing or experiencing anything else he regards as valuable, it would not occur to him to ask “Is it worthwhile?” Indeed, this question would be incomprehensible to him, just as Tolstoy himself would presumably not have known what to make of the question had it been raised about the bliss in the hereafter. It is worth recalling here that we live not in the distant future but in the present and also, in a sense, in the relatively near future.

To bring the subject down to earth, let us consider some everyday occurrences: A man with a toothache goes to a dentist, and the dentist helps him so that the toothache disappears. A man is falsely accused of a crime and is faced with the possibility of a severe sentence as well as with the loss of his reputation; with the help of a devoted attorney his innocence is established, and he is acquitted. It is true that a hundred years later all of the participants in these events will be dead and none of them will then be able to enjoy the fruits of any of the efforts involved. But this most emphatically does not imply that the dentist’s efforts were not worthwhile or that the attorney’s work was not worth doing. To bring in considerations of what will or will not happen in the remote future is, in such and many other though certainly not in all human situations, totally irrelevant. Not only is the finality of death irrelevant here; equally irrelevant are the facts, if they are facts, that life is an endless cycle of the same kind of activities and that the history of the universe is not a drama with a happy ending. This is, incidentally, also the answer to religious apologists like C. H. D. Clark who maintain that all striving is pointless if it is “without final consequence” and that “it scarcely matters how we live if all will end in the dust of death.” Striving is not pointless if it achieves what it is intended to achieve even if it is without final consequence, and it matters a great deal how we live if we have certain standards and goals, although we cannot avoid “the dust of death.”

And so here is where the hedonists fall flat (in my opinion). Agree that everything is pointless; that without god, everything is permitted. There is no morality, only the rules of a minority, which attempt to control and restrict the behaviour of other human beings. And so I ask, striving for what? What standards and goals did we all sign up for? Who decides? The world today is a battleground of stupid ape descendants, who have carved up the land, and the people and riches in it. Every day people die. Every day people are born. War, disease, pain and misery. On one hand you have rich people, flying around in jets, with their obese children, and obese pets, working, spending, energy, energy, energy. And then they wonder why the world might be fucked up. If human beings really do ruin the one place in the universe they know can keep them alive, isn't that an absurd joke? And the piece argues that it's okay striving for today, even if there isn't a tomorrow. Fuck it if the oil runs out tomorrow, today we get our buck and fuck! All well and good for the people who prosper, but look around humanitarians and show me the world where everybody has enough to eat. We are all related, cousins from thousands of years back. And like a dysfunctional family, we're not ever going to get along. Live for today and be happy, is fine advice (seeing as everything is pointless). But I understand why some people choke trying to swallow it...

The Vanished Past

In asserting the worthlessness of life Schopenhauer remarked that “what has been exists as little as what has never been” and that “something of great importance now past is inferior to something of little importance now present.” Several comments are in order here. To begin with, if Schopenhauer is right, it must work both ways: If only the present counts, then past sorrows no less than past pleasures do not “count.” Furthermore, the question whether “something of great importance now past is inferior to something of little importance now present” is not, as Schopenhauer supposed, a straightforward question of fact but rather one of valuation, and different answers, none of which can be said to be mistaken, will be given by different people according to their circumstances and interests. Viktor Frankl, the founder of “logotherapy,” has compared the pessimist to a man who observes, with fear and sadness, how his wall calendar grows thinner and thinner as he removes a sheet from it every day. The kind of person whom Frankl admires, on the other hand, “files each successive leaf neatly away with its predecessors” and reflects “with pride and joy” on all the richness represented by the leaves removed from the calendar. Such a person will not in old age envy the young. “‘No, thank you,’ he will think. ‘Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past’” (Man’s Search for Meaning, pp. 192–193). This passage is quoted not because it contains any great wisdom but because it illustrates that we are concerned here not with judgments of fact but with value judgments and that Schopenhauer’s is not the only one that is possible. Nevertheless, his remarks are, perhaps, a healthy antidote to the cheap consolation and the attempts to cover up deep and inevitable misery that are the stock in trade of a great deal of popular psychology. Although Schopenhauer’s judgments about the inferior value of the past cannot be treated as objectively true propositions, they express only too well what a great many human beings are bound to feel on certain occasions.

To a man dying of cancer it is small consolation to reflect that there was a time when he was happy and flourishing; and while there are undoubtedly some old people who do not envy the young, it may be suspected that more often the kind of talk advocated by the prophets of positive thinking is a mask for envy and a defense against exceedingly painful feelings of regret and helplessness in the face of aging and death and the now unalterable past.

I must admit, that everyday I find myself thinking that another day has gone, That the earth has spun around once, on that slow journey around the sun. It is scary. Apes, huddled together on a rock, spinning in space. With no destination, but the grave. Okay, so some people can enjoy their time on earth. I get that already. But when you understand that life formed randomly, that humans are not inevitable, and that everything is pointless, it kinda sucks all the fun out of life, (because fun = endorphin release, and so what?). We are descended from creatures that survived and fucked. Thinking didn't factor into the equation until recently. No wonder that we intrinsically may feel that we have to do things. The heart and lungs don't need a reason to do their job. But a thinking brain, that has been taught science and learnt to see value in understanding the universe, cannot help but understand that having sex is just putting a weird body part into an orifice; that love is just a chemical state of the brain. And then, so what? Yeah you like it. Yes it's your drug. But other people are condemned for taking drugs. They are judged and their freedom is taken away, because they want to cut out the middle man and the bullshit and go, chemical drug > here is my brain. I certainly understand that particular strategy. But again, so what? Hedonism, and feelings are all so very physiological. And feelings are just these weird twinges you get, your body influencing your consciousness. So you get out of the bed, to feel weird? Absurd.

Perhaps you can see why I use these terms to describe myself:

Atheist. Nihilist. Anarchist. Pessimist. Misanthrope.

There is no god. There is no meaning. No one has the 'right' to dictate to another. Nothing will change. Human beings are idiots. :P
Part III soon.

Best Use for the Good Book

2007-09-20T14:22:00.000+01:00

Here is a small clip I edited together, from the film 'Monkey Warfare'. It's about a couple of anarchist scavengers, and their protégée pot dealer. Very funny, and certainly the best use for the good book, I've ever seen.

Dawkins Vs the Cannonball

2007-09-16T11:09:00.000+01:00

A Lesson In Pessimism: Part I

2007-09-13T16:24:00.000+01:00

A while back, I was browsing through the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, when I happened upon a short section called 'Life, Meaning and Value of'.

Lo and behold, it is a detailed rebuttal to the position to which I seem to have become entrenched - that is, it is a discussion and dismissal of pessimism.

Over four parts I will present the main arguments, and where appropriate chip in with my own comments. Enjoy. ;)

Schopenhauer's Arguments

The most systematic and probably the most influential, though in fact not the gloomiest, of the pessimists was Arthur Schopenhauer. The world, he wrote, is something that ought not to exist: The truth is that “we have not to rejoice but rather to mourn at the existence of the world; that its nonexistence would be preferable to its existence; that it is something which ought not to be.” It is absurd to speak of life as a gift, as so many philosophers and thoughtless people have done. “It is evident that everyone would have declined such a gift if he could have seen it and tested it beforehand.” To those who assure us that life is only a lesson, we are entitled to reply: “For this very reason I wish I had been left in the peace of the all-sufficient nothing, where I would have no need of lessons or of anything else” (The World as Will and Idea, Vol. III, p. 390).

Happiness, according to Schopenhauer, is unobtainable for the vast majority of humankind. “Everything in life shows that earthly happiness is destined to be frustrated or recognized as illusion.” People either fail to achieve the ends they are striving for or else they do achieve them only to find them grossly disappointing. But as soon as a man discovers that a particular goal was not really worth pursuing, his eye is set on a new one and the same illusory quest begins all over again. Happiness, accordingly, always lies in the future or in the past, and “the present may be compared to a small dark cloud which the wind drives over the sunny plain: before and behind it all is bright, only it itself always casts a shadow. The present is therefore always insufficient; but the future is uncertain, and the past is irrevocable” (ibid., p. 383). Men in general, except for those sufficiently rational to become totally resigned, are constantly deluded—“now by hope, now by what was hoped for.” They are taken in by “the enchantment of distance,” which shows them “paradises.” These paradises, however, vanish like “optical illusions when we have allowed ourselves to be mocked by them.” The “fearful envy” excited in most men by the thought that somebody else is genuinely happy shows how unhappy they really are, whatever they pretend to others or to themselves. It is only “because they feel themselves unhappy” that “men cannot endure the sight of one whom they imagine happy.”

On occasions Schopenhauer is ready to concede that some few human beings really do achieve “comparative” happiness, but this is not of any great consequence. For aside from being “rare exceptions,” these happy people are really like “decoy birds”—they represent a possibility that must exist in order to lure the rest of humankind into a false sense of hope. Moreover, happiness, insofar as it exists at all, is a purely “negative” reality. We do not become aware of the greatest blessings of life—health, youth, and freedom—until we have lost them. What is called pleasure or satisfaction is merely the absence of craving or pain. But craving and pain are positive. As for the few happy days of our life—if there are any—we notice them only “after they have given place to unhappy ones.”

Schopenhauer not infrequently lapsed from his doctrine of the “negative” nature of happiness and pleasure into the more common view that their status is just as “positive” as that of unhappiness and pain. But he had additional arguments that do not in any way depend on the theory that happiness and pleasure are negative. Perhaps the most important of these is the argument from the “perishableness” of all good things and the ultimate extinction of all our hopes and achievements in death. All our pleasures and joys “disappear in our hands, and we afterwards ask astonished where they have gone.” Moreover, a joy that no longer exists does not “count”—it counts as little as if it had never been experienced at all:

That which has been exists no more; it exists as little as that which has never been. But of everything that exists you may say, in the next moment, that it has been. Hence something of great importance in our past is inferior to something of little importance in our present, in that the latter is a reality, and related to the former as something to nothing. (“The Vanity of Existence,” in The Will to Live, p. 229)

Some people have inferred from this that the enjoyment of the present should be “the supreme object of life.” This is fallacious; for “that which in the next moment exists no more, and vanishes utterly, like a dream, can never be worth a serious effort.”

The final “judgment of nature” is destruction by death. This is “the last proof” that life is a “false path,” that all man’s wishing is “a perversity,” and that “nothing at all is worth our striving, our efforts and struggles.” The conclusion is inescapable: “All good things are vanity, the world in all its ends bankrupt, and life a business which does not cover its expenses” (The World as Will and Idea, Vol. III, p. 383).

The Pointlessness Of It All

Some of Schopenhauer’s arguments can probably be dismissed as the fantasies of a lonely and embittered man who was filled with contempt for humankind and who was singularly incapable of either love or friendship. His own misery, it may be plausibly said, made Schopenhauer overestimate the unhappiness of human beings. It is frequently, but not universally, true that what is hoped for is found disappointing when it is attained, and while “fearful envy” of other people’s successes is common enough, real sympathy and generosity are not quite so rare as Schopenhauer made them out to be. Furthermore, his doctrine that pleasure is negative while pain is positive, insofar as one can attach any clear meaning to it, seems glaringly false. To this it should be added, however, that some of Schopenhauer’s arguments are far from idiosyncratic and that substantially the same conclusions have been endorsed by men who were neither lonely nor embittered and who did not, as far as one can judge, lack the gift of love or friendship.

If everything wasn't so pointless, I think I'd look forward to reading a lot more from Schopenhauer. Two questions though. Is life worth living? I for one still cannot answer this question. Finding ourselves alive is only a temporary situation anyway, but certainly a life filled with pain and misery would be worse than no life at all. Is happiness negative and pain positive? Like the author of the piece, I must admit this looks false, but as I've discussed before on this blog, happiness is a chemical state of the brain (the action of endorphins if you will) and as such is merely akin to a drug user getting a fix. Whether you think that is an admirable way to spend your time, is of course a personal opinion...

Clarence Darrow

Clarence Darrow, one of the most compassionate men who ever lived, also concluded that life was an “awful joke.” Like Schopenhauer, Darrow offered as one of his reasons the apparent aimlessness of all that happens. “This weary old world goes on, begetting, with birth and with living and with death,” he remarked in his moving plea for the boy-murderers Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, “and all of it is blind from the beginning to the end” (Clarence Darrow—Attorney for the Damned, edited by A. Weinberg, New York, 1957). Elsewhere he wrote: “Life is like a ship on the sea, tossed by every wave and by every wind; a ship headed for no port and no harbor, with no rudder, no compass, no pilot; simply floating for a time, then lost in the waves” (“Is Life Worth Living?,” p. 43). In addition to the aimlessness of life and the universe, there is the fact of death. “I love my friends,” wrote Darrow, “but they all must come to a tragic end.”Death is more terrible the more one is attached to things in the world. Life, he concludes, is “not worth while,” and he adds (somewhat inconsistently, in view of what he had said earlier) that “it is an unpleasant interruption of nothing, and the best thing you can say of it is that it does not last long” (“Is the Human Race Getting Anywhere?,” p. 53).

Darrow was an interesting fellow, and from what I've read of him, he seems to have understood life quite well.

Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy, unlike Darrow, eventually came to believe in Christianity, or at least in his own idiosyncratic version of Christianity, but for a number of years the only position for which he could see any rational justification was an extreme form of pessimism. During that period (and there is reason to believe that in spite of his later protestations to the contrary, his feelings on this subject never basically changed) Tolstoy was utterly overwhelmed by the thought of his death and the death of those he cared for and, generally, by the transitory nature of all human achievements. “Today or tomorrow,” he wrote in “A Confession,” “sickness and death will come to those I love or to me; nothing will remain but stench and worms. Sooner or later my affairs, whatever they may be, will be forgotten, and I shall not exist. Then why go on making any effort?” Tolstoy likened the fate of man to that of the traveler in the Eastern tale who, pursued by an enraged beast, seeks refuge in a dry well. At the bottom of the well he sees a dragon that has opened its jaws to swallow him. To escape the enraged beast above and the dragon below, he holds onto a twig that is growing in a crack in the well. As he looks around he notices that two mice are gnawing at the stem of the twig. He realizes that very soon the twig will snap and he will fall to his doom, but at the same time he sees some drops of honey on the leaves of the branch and reaches out with his tongue to lick them. “So I too clung to the twig of life, knowing that the dragon of death was inevitably awaiting me, ready to tear me to pieces.… I tried to lick the honey which formerly consoled me, but the honey no longer gave me pleasure.… I only saw the unescapable dragon and the mice, and I could not tear my gaze from them. And this is not a fable but the real unanswerable truth.”

These considerations, according to Tolstoy, inevitably lead to the conclusion that life is a “stupid fraud,” that no “reasonable meaning” can be given to a single action or to a whole life. To the questions “What is it for?” “What then?,” “Why should I live?” the answer is “Nothing can come of it,” “Nothing is worth doing,” “Life is not worthwhile.”

What ways out are available to a human being who finds himself in this “terrible position”? Judging by the conduct of the people he observed, Tolstoy relates that he could see only four possible “solutions.” The first is the way of ignorance. People who adopt this solution (chiefly women and very young and very dull people) have simply not or not yet faced the questions that were tormenting him. Once a person has fully realized what death means, this solution is not available to him. The second way is that of “Epicureanism,” which consists in admitting the “hopelessness of life” but seizing as many of life’s pleasures as possible while they are within reach. It consists in “disregarding the dragon and the mice and licking the honey in the best way, especially if much of it is around.” This, Tolstoy adds, is the solution adopted by the majority of the people belonging to his “circle,” by which he presumably means the well-to-do intellectuals of his day. Tolstoy rejects this solution because the vast majority of human beings are not well-to-do and hence have little or no honey at their disposal and also because it is a matter of accident whether one is among those who have honey or those who have not. Moreover, Tolstoy observes, it requires a special “moral dullness,” which he himself lacked, to enjoy the honey while knowing the truth about death and the deprivations of the great majority of men. The third solution is suicide. Tolstoy calls this the way of “strength and energy.” It is chosen by a few “exceptionally strong and consistent people.”After they realize that “it is better to be dead than to be alive, and that it is best of all not to exist,” they promptly end the whole “stupid joke.” The means for ending it are readily at hand for everybody, but most people are too cowardly or too irrational to avail themselves of them. Finally, there is the way of “weakness.” This consists in seeing the dreadful truth and clinging to life nevertheless. People of this kind lack the strength to act rationally and Tolstoy adds that he belonged to this last category.

Ha. Me too. I've quoted that Tolstoy story before, and it really is a very good description of human existence.

Strengths of the Pessimist Position

Is it possible for somebody who shares the pessimists’ rejection of religion to reach different conclusions without being plainly irrational? Whatever reply may be possible, any intelligent and realistic person would surely have to concede that there is much truth in the pessimists’ claims. That few people achieve real and lasting happiness, that the joys of life (where there are any) pass away much too soon, that totally unpredictable events frequently upset the best intentions and wreck the noblest plans—this and much more along the same lines is surely undeniable.
Although one should not dogmatize that there will be no significant improvements in the future, the fate of past revolutions, undertaken to rid man of some of his apparently avoidable suffering, does not inspire great hope. The thought of death, too, even in those who are not so overwhelmed by it as Tolstoy, can be quite unendurable.

Moreover, to many who have reflected on the implications of physical theory it seems plain that because of the constant increase of entropy in the universe all life anywhere will eventually die out. Forebodings of this kind moved Bertrand Russell to write his famous essay “A Free Man’s Worship,” in which he concluded that “all the
labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.” Similarly, Wilhelm Ostwald observed that “in the longest run the sum of all human endeavor has no recognizable significance.” Although it is disputed whether physical theory really has such gloomy implications, it would perhaps be wisest to assume that the position endorsed by Russell and Ostwald is well-founded.

Enough pessimism and reality for one day. I'll leave you to think about that for a bit. Part II will follow shortly...

A Line of Spectacular Proportions

2007-09-07T00:50:00.000+01:00

So I like this clip. When I think about human evolution, I often use this type of sweeping imagery and it really does help you comprehend the mind-boggling timescales involved. Just think of it. All those generations of stupid apes, sitting around not doing very much (think, eating and fucking). Maybe we were better off when we couldn't even string a sentence together.

And what came of it all? We sit around and bash our keyboards and trot out our self-important bollocks. Fuck the world. Fuck humanity. I think I'm just about ready to take my vow of silence, and never utter a single word again. If it was okay for my ancestors, then grunting and snarling is just dandy by me.

snarl.

Manhattan

2007-09-01T21:28:00.000+01:00

This clip is from Woody Allen's film "Manhattan", which I watched last night. It's nowhere near as deep and existential as "Love & Death" but it's still very charming and good for a laugh. Funny that Allen should provide his opinion as to why life is worth living. I've been sitting on a series of posts which deals with pretty much the same topic. And my delay in posting the thing, is because I don't know whether I think life is worth living or not.

Though I'm not convinced by Woody Allen's list, the fact that none of us asks to be born must certainly warrant consideration. And then the question becomes not, is life worth living, but, finding ourselves alive, is it better to commit suicide or continue living? And I think I'll only be able to answer that question on my death-bed (and depending on whether the intervening years/months/days/hours are filled with happiness or sadness, the answer will probably be different).

Anyway, I wish I had a friend like Woody. A pain shared is a pain halved (so I'm told - though I've yet to empirically test it). ;)

An Accumulation of Errors

2007-08-29T10:06:00.000+01:00

"All DNA ever needed to do was make perfect copies of itself. Left to its own devices, all that would exist on this planet would be little naked molecules of DNA.

We are NOTHING more than the accumulation of its mistakes, generated randomly and guided by natural selection".

Richard Dawkins

Dawkins Makes an Eye

2007-08-21T15:46:00.000+01:00

Here is a short clip from an old Horizon programme, with Richard Dawkins explaining how the evolution of the eye, might have proceeded. Enjoy.

Where Is Everybody?

2007-08-01T21:02:00.000+01:00

Occasionally I like to ponder the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe (given the fact that there's bloody well none on this planet) and so I was intrigued by Stephen Webb's book 'Where Is Everybody?', which covers some of the top reasons why we've yet to encounter ET. My personal favourite is amongst the selection on offer (they have no desire to communicate), but it is an extract from the conclusion that I want to share:

I believe that the Fermi paradox tells us mankind is the only sapient, sentient species in the Galaxy. (We are probably also unique in our Local Group of galaxies, since many Local Group galaxies are unlikely to possess a GHZ. Perhaps we are even unique in the whole Universe — although the finite speed of light means ETCs could now exist in very distant galaxies without us yet being aware of them.) Yet the Galaxy need not be sterile. The picture I have is of a Galaxy in which simple life is not uncommon; complex, multicellular life is much rarer, but not vanishingly rare. There may be tens of thousands of exceptionally interesting biospheres out there in the Galaxy. But only one planet—Earth— has intelligent life-forms.

Such a picture is often criticized as violating the Principle of Mediocrity. The picture seems to suggest that Earth, and mankind, is special. Is this not the height of arrogance? Paradoxically, at least to my mind, the expectation that other sentient species must be out there itself smacks of arrogance. Or rather, it achieves the tricky feat of being both self-important and self-effacing at the same time. At the core of this expectation is the belief that human adaptations, attributes such as creativity, and general intelligence, that we think important, are qualities to which other Earth organisms aspire and alien creatures may possess in even more abundance. Allow us a few more million years, so the logic seems to go, and we might evolve into the cognitively, technologically and spiritually superior beings that already exist out there. But the converse of this position is surely false. Give chimps another few million years, so the reasoning goes, and they too will be as intelligent and creative as us. But why should they be? Chimpanzees are good at being chimpanzees; dolphins are good at being dolphins; elephants are good at being elephants . . . Rather than patronizing these species for not exhibiting human characteristics, we should respect them on their own terms for earning a living in a harsh world that cares not whether they live or die.

On the other hand it is undeniable that mankind is profoundly different from every other species on Earth. We alone have language, a high level of self-consciousness, and a moral sense. We are special. But surely our uniqueness could not have arisen by mere chance, by the blind and random groping of evolution, could it? Well, why not?

As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in a delightful analogy, we can account for any growth in the complexity of living organisms through a drunkard’s walk effect. Imagine a drunk leaning against a wall. A few meters to his right is a gutter. If the drunk takes random equal-sized steps to his left or to his right, then he inevitably ends up in the gutter. No force propels him to his right; he moves randomly, and at any time he is as likely to move to his left as to his right. But the wall eventually stops his leftward motion; over time, there is only one direction in which to move. Eventually, completely by chance, the drunk stumbles into the gutter. The same effect can explain any advance we might observe in the complexity of organisms. At one end we have a wall of minimum complexity that organisms can possess and still be alive. This wall is where life began, and where most life on Earth remains. Over time, evolution tinkers with more advanced organisms; when life itself was young, that was the only available possibility — evolution could not try out simpler designs, because its path was blocked by the wall of minimum complexity. Some of the new designs worked, in the sense that the organisms were adapted well enough in their immediate environments to survive long enough to reproduce. And so evolution staggered on, like a blind drunk, tentatively producing organisms of greater complexity. After almost 4 billion years of random tinkering, we end up with the living world we see today. But there was nothing inevitable about the process; the purpose of evolution was not to produce us. Play the tape of history again, and there is no reason to suppose Homo sapiens — or any equivalent sentient species — would play any role at all.

Many eminent scientists argue that Mind is in some way predestined in this Universe. That far from being the outcome of chance, Mind is an inevitable outcome of deep laws of self-complexity. They argue that, over aeons, organisms will inevitably self-complexify and form a “ladder of progress”: prokaryote to eukaryote to plants to animals to intelligent species like us. It is a comforting idea, but I know of no definite evidence in its favor, and I believe the silence of the Universe argues against it. The famous French biologist Jacques Monod wrote that “evolution is chance caught on the wing.” Even more evocatively, he wrote that “Man at last knows he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the Universe, out of which he has emerged only by chance.” It is a melancholy thought. I can think of only one thing sadder: if the only animals with self-consciousness, the only species that can light up the Universe with acts of love and humor and compassion, were to extinguish themselves through acts of stupidity.

If we survive, we have a Galaxy to explore and make our own. If we destroy ourselves, if we ruin Earth before we are ready to leave our home planet . . . well, it could be a long, long time before a creature from another species looks up at its planet’s night sky and asks: “Where is everybody?”

And despite the fact that the universe irritates me in so many different ways, I can't help remind myself, that I'm taking it all, far. too. seriously...

Bye Bye Bergman

2007-07-30T20:17:00.000+01:00

So Ingmar Bergman died today. At least he had a good innings. The clip is from Bergman's existential classic, 'The Seventh Seal', which I watched recently and can highly recommend.

It seems rude not to mention that earlier this month a friend of mine died, who also had had a fairly good innings.

So here's to Death, the biggest (chess playing) cunt of them all! And as my friend used to say, "Live long and prosper"...

Isn't Evolution Funny?

2007-07-22T20:57:00.000+01:00

It's certainly been a while since I posted any words. Unfortunately I'm still not quite in the mood for anything too deep and existential, but I did want to share these two video clips. The first is from a National Geographic documentary on human evolution and shows what happens when chimpanzees are threatened by artificial leopards (it made me laugh!). And the second is from the brilliant 13 part documentary 'The Ascent of Man', by Jacob Bronowski, which reminded me a lot of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, and is well worth a watch.

There may be more to follow...but don't hold your breath...

Optimism

2007-06-28T00:59:00.002+01:00

Shit + Shit = Shit

2007-06-11T14:15:00.001+01:00

The Sadness Never Ends

2007-06-04T15:39:00.000+01:00

Dogma Free America

2007-06-02T17:28:00.000+01:00

I've been beset with technical issues this week (a sign from god perhaps) and combined with my increasing boredom, explains why I've not posted as regularly as I usually do. Things appear to be working now, so I'll continue...

Dogma Free America is a podcast which specialises in the 'news and views of dogma', and recently Rich, who runs it, asked if he could interview me about my experiences in parapsychology. Former media whore that I am, I did accept his offer, and I've just had news that the podcast is now up and live. I've not had a listen (and since I know what I said, I can't be bothered listening to me again) but I'm sure some readers may be interested; if not in what I have to ramble on about, perhaps in the other interviews that can be found there.

To Be Or Not To Be

2007-05-27T20:39:00.000+01:00

One of my problems is, I feel my angst. It can grip me, like a terror, and sometimes drive me to tears. And nobody can help. You can't petition god for a reprieve, nor expect special consideration from fate. All of our ancestors are dead, and we're all headed in the same direction...

Yesterday I sat in the bath and read two plays by Camus. The first, Caligula, is the true story of a nihilistic man, made king of the world, and the absurd acts he inflicts on those around him:

CALIGULA: ... But I'm not insane. In fact I've never been so lucid. It’s just that I suddenly felt a desire for the impossible. [Pauses.] Things as they are don’t strike me as satisfactory.

HELICON: That’s a widespread opinion.

CALIGULA: I suppose it is. But I didn't know it before. Now I know. [Still in the same matter-of-fact tone.] The world as it is is unbearable. That's why I need the moon, or happiness, or immortality, or something that may sound insane, but would help correct this world.

HELICON: That sounds fine. But no one could ever act on it.

CALIGULA: [rising to his feet, but still with perfect calmness] You know nothing about it. It's because no one dares to be logical and carry it through to its conclusion that nothing is ever achieved. [He studies Helicon's face.] I can see what you're thinking. What a fuss over the death of a woman! No, that's not it. I do recall that a few days ago a woman I loved died. But love is a side issue. Her death is no more than the symbol of a truth that makes the moon necessary to me. A childishly simple and obvious truth, a little stupid even, but hard to discover and harder to bear.

HELICON: And what is this truth you've discovered, Caius?

CALIGULA: [his eyes averted, in a toneless voice] People die. And they are not happy.

HELICON: [after a short pause] That’s a truth we manage to live with Caligula. It doesn't prevent most Romans from enjoying their lunch.

CALIGULA: [suddenly throws Helicon down violently] That’s because everyone around me is living a lie, and I want people to live with the truth. Remember, Helicon, I have the means of forcing them to live with the truth. They are deprived of knowledge and need a teacher who knows what he's talking about.

And from a little further on:

CHEREA: Since this world is the only one we have, why not plead its cause?

CALIGULA: No plea is necessary. The verdict's given: humanity has no special place in this world and whoever realizes that wins his freedom. [rising] You are not free. I alone am free. Rejoice, for you finally have an emperor to teach you freedom. Go away, Cherea, and you, too, Scipio. Go and spread the good news to all Romans.

[They go out. Caligula has turned away, hiding his eyes.]

CAESONIA: You’re crying. But what's really changed in your life? You may have loved Drusilla, but you loved others, myself included, at the same time. Surely that wasn't enough to set you roaming the countryside for three days and nights and bring you back with this . . . this cruel look on your face?

CALIGULA: [turning round to her] Why drag Drusilla into this? Can’t you imagine a person shedding for anything other than love?

CAESONIA: I'm sorry, Caius. I was only trying to understand.

CALIGULA: Men cry because the world's all wrong. [She starts to embrace him.] No, Caesonia. [She draws back.] But stay beside me.

CAESONIA: Whatever you want. [Sits down.] I’m no baby. I know that life's sometimes a sad business. But why deliberately set out to make it worse?

CALIGULA: You can't understand. But that doesn’t matter. Perhaps I'll find a way out. Only I feel the stirrings of nameless creatures within me, forcing their way up into the light - and I'm helpless against them. [He moves closer to her, but doesn’t see her] I knew people felt anguish, but I didn't know what the word meant. Like everyone else I imagined it was the soul that suffered. But it's my body that's in pain. Everywhere. In my chest, in my legs and arms. Even my skin is raw, my head is buzzing, I feel like vomiting. But worst of all is this grotesque taste in my mouth. Not blood, nor death, nor fever, but a mixture of all three. All I have to do is to stir my tongue for everything to become black and for human beings to revolt me.

Camus understood (and perhaps maybe, Caligula too). And the moral of Caligula is? You, live and you die, and hopefully a mad man doesn't fuck your wife in front of you and then have you killed...

The second play, called Cross Purpose, is the telling of the story, which is told briefly in 'The Outsider':

A man had left some Czech village to go and make his fortune. Twenty-five years later he'd come back rich, with wife and child. His mother and his sister were running a hotel in his native village. In order to surprise them, he'd left his wife and child at another hotel and gone to see his mother who hadn't recognized him when he'd walked in. Just for fun, he'd decided to book a room. He'd shown them his money. During the night his mother and sister had clubbed him to death with a hammer to steal his money, and then thrown his body into the river. The next morning. the wife had come along and without realizing revealed the traveller's identity. The mother had hanged herself. The sister had thrown herself down a well.

Ha. What a cheerful tale, but what a fun play it makes. Together, they are considered Camus' most pessimistic and nihilistic work.

And so I've been coming to the conclusion that there exists a great body of human thought, which argues that existence is pointless, absurd and arbitrary. That we live and die, with no reason or rhyme, and yet everyday we tell ourselves the opposite. There's only so many times it's worth saying or thinking that everything is pointless. Maybe if the world was a different place, and humans were a different type of species...

In 'The Outsider', Colin Wilson writes:

The atmosphere of the existentialist outsider is unpleasant to breathe. There is something nauseating, anti-life, about it: these men, without motive who stay in their rooms because there seems to be no reason for doing anything else.

And I realised after reading Wilson's book, that I am an outsider. There is no 'reason' for doing anything. And if there's something unpleasant about the outsider's atmosphere, rest assured he feels the same way, outside his room, breathing in the 'normal' air!

Finally, thinking about Camus' plays reminded me of 'Hamlet' (which I read over 10 years ago in college) and yet, only now, do I get it:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. - Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.

To be or not to be eh? Urghhh, I don't know...

Hypnotized Sheep

2007-05-22T13:51:00.000+01:00

I'm in a super-pissed off mood at the moment (long story - multiple reasons) but I want to share two stories that I got out of Colin Wilson's 'The Outsider' (which I've just finished reading):

[Tolstoy] cites an Eastern fable of a man who clings to a shrub on the side of a pit to escape an enraged beast at the top and a dragon at the bottom. Two mice gnaw at the roots of his shrub. Yet while hanging, waiting for death, he notices some drops of honey on the leaves of the shrub, and reaches out and licks them. This is man, suspended between the possibilities of violent accidental death and inevitable natural death, disease accelerating them, yet still eating, drinking, laughing at Fernandel in the cinema. This is the man who calls the outsider morbid, because he lacks appetite for the honey!

And:

There is an Eastern tale that speaks about a very rich magician who had a great many sheep. But at the same time this magician was very mean. He did not want to hire shepherds, nor did he want to erect a fence about the pasture where the sheep were grazing. The sheep consequently often wandered into the forest, fell into ravines and so on, and above all, they ran away, for they knew that the magician wanted their flesh and their skins, and this they did not like.

At last the magician found a remedy. He hypnotized his sheep and suggested to them, first of all, that they were immortal and that no harm was being done to them when they were skinned; that on the contrary, it would be very good for them and pleasant; secondly he suggested that the magician was a good master who loved his flock so much that he was ready to do anything in the world for them; and in the third place, he suggested that if anything at all were going to happen to them, it was not going to happen just then, at any rate not that day, and therefore they had no need to think about it. Further, the magician suggested to his sheep, that they were not sheep at all; to some of them he suggested that they were lions, to some that they were eagles, to some that they were men, to others that they were magicians.

After this all his cares and worries about the sheep came to an end. They never ran away again, but quietly awaited the time when the magician would require their flesh and skins.

More from 'The Outsider' when I'm less pissed off...

Death of a Window Cleaner

2007-05-21T20:40:00.000+01:00

Consider this sorry yet intriguing tale from the BBC, about the death of a window cleaner, who drowned head first in his own bucket:

A window cleaner drowned in his bucket of water after suddenly collapsing while he worked, an inquest heard.

...The father-of-one, of Fowler Close, Scholes, was working at the home of Miss Bebe in Whelley, near Wigan. She told the inquest: "I went outside to hang some washing at the back when I saw a ladder propped up against the wall. "I then saw Mark lying on the ground motionless, with his arms tucked in and his head tilted to the right inside the bucket.

...Miss Bebe told the jury she thought Mr Fairhurst may have fallen while on the ground, rather than from his ladder. The hearing also heard that the window cleaner had complained about heart palpitations earlier in the year but had not told his doctor. Pathologist Dr Charles Wilson told the jury he had been informed that Mr Fairhurst had been assaulted in August 2005 which had led to memory problems. He said he could not rule out the incident being linked to his blackout - but was satisfied there was no foul play.

And the mind boggles as to what actually happened. Did he fall off the ladder and land head first in the bucket? Was he standing over it, and by bad luck, passed out and toppled in? Perhaps he'd been attracted to something in the bucket (like a raven that's spotted a shiny coin) and with his head in it, passed out and drowned?

Maybe he had been fiendishly murdered, by a rival window cleaner? The head in the bucket could've been a clue! Or perhaps it was some misadventure. He could have been practising for the Guinness World Record for holding your breath underwater in a bucket the longest.

Or maybe it was god or even aliens (okay, now I'm being silly).

The absurd theory I favour the most, is that it was a particularly poignant suicide. What better way for a window cleaner to go, than drowning in his own soapsuds?

And finally, is there a moral to this story? Water kills?!

Aristotle Also

2007-05-20T20:13:00.000+01:00

As a recent comment pointed out, Heine's 'sleep is good, death is better' is certainly not unique. Take this quote by Aristotle (from over 2000 years before Heine's birth):

Wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon.

Isn't that brilliant? Yet, I can't say whether I entirely agree or not?

Boredom Gained the Upper Hand

2007-05-19T10:57:00.000+01:00

Kierkegaard once wrote:

Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this. . . . The gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the upper hand.

Sleep is Good, Death is Better

2007-05-17T20:50:00.000+01:00

Empty Space

2007-05-15T19:35:00.000+01:00

Following on from the last post, I thought I'd share the picture that's lived on my desktop for the last year or so. Although the small version hardly does the scene justice (click on it to see the spectacular full-size version) it never fails to stun me, how immensely huge and old the universe is (and how small and insignificant humanity is).

Something equally impressive, although without the pretty pictures, is the Boötes Void. From Wikipedia:

The Boötes void is a tremendously large, approximately spherically shaped nearly-empty region of space, devoid of galaxies. At nearly 250 million light-years in diameter, it is one of the largest known voids, and is referred to as a supervoid. It was discovered in 1981 by Robert Kirshner, Augustus Oemler, Jr., Paul Schechter and Stephen Shectman in a survey of galactic redshifts.

It is located in the area of the constellation Boötes, for which it is named. To give an idea of its scale, "If the Milky Way had been in the center of the Boötes void, we wouldn't have known there were other galaxies until the 1960s." (Greg Aldering, University of Minnesota).

I also found a very interesting article on the void, at a blog called 'Accelerating Future', which contains this paragraph:

According to the Wikipedia article on the topic, the Boötes Void was mentioned in a novel by Martin Amis, “Night Train”, which centers around the mysterious suicide of a beautiful and successful astrophysicist Jennifer Rockwell. The immense size of the void leads her to conclude that there is no meaning to life, so she kills herself.

So that's my novel out of the window then! On a serious note, the more we learn about space, the more we understand that the heavens are not the playground of the gods, but are an empty and lonely expanse, the likes of which was never even imagined till we actually looked...

The Ninth Configuration

2007-05-15T00:20:00.000+01:00

Just when you were all giddy from the previous post... This clip is from a film that I watched recently. Written and directed by William Blatty (of 'The Exorcist' fame) 'The Ninth Configuration' surprised me completely. It is an absurd masterpiece and funny to boot. Think an even more existential version of 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest', with atheist astronauts, Hamlet for dogs, and psychotic Vietnam vets! If you don't believe me, look at the plot keywords on IMDB.

There is lots of poignant dialogue in the film, but I chose this last speech, purely because I sometimes get a very similar feeling come over me. The fear that Cutshaw describes in his, 'if there is no god, we are really alone' speech (with tears rolling down his face) is (in my mind anyway) quite reasonable given the pointlessness and absurdity of existence. We are alone in the universe and we're all going to die. Even to die amongst other absurd creatures hardly seems any kind of compensation really. But maybe I'm just too hard to please?

Blatty intended the film to be a damning criticism of atheism and an argument for the existence of god (I know because I listened to the DVD commentary!). He cries out to us, 'there just has to be a god, or life is depressingly absurd!'. Apparently there are quite a few versions of the film, and disappointingly the version I watched ended with a ridiculous paranormal happening, which proves life after death, converts the atheist, and everything turns out alright.

If you can handle these last few sickly sweet seconds, I can heartily recommend this absurd piece of existential cinema. Just remember ifs are for the weak (read agnostics). There is no god...

Grass

2007-05-14T20:53:00.000+01:00

All this talk of pushing buttons for pleasure, reminded me of the film 'Grass' and the scientific experiments investigating the effect of cannabis. Funny, eh?

Pleasure or Pain?

2007-05-14T17:00:00.000+01:00

Talking about Schopenhauer and suicide, today I found a very interesting essay by Schopenhauer on suicide. An extract:

The inmost kernel of Christianity is the truth that suffering - the Cross - is the real end and object of life. Hence Christianity condemns suicide as thwarting this end; whilst the ancient world, taking a lower point of view, held it in approval, nay, in honor. But if that is to be accounted a valid reason against suicide it invokes the recognition of asceticism; that is to say, it is valid only from a much higher ethical standpoint than has ever been adopted by moral philosophers in Europe. If we abandon that high standpoint, there is no tenable reason left, on the score of morality, for condemning suicide. The extraordinary energy and zeal with which the clergy of monotheistic religions attack suicide is not supported either by any passages in the Bible or by any considerations of weight; so that it looks as though they must have some secret reason for their contention. May it not be this - that the voluntary surrender of life is a bad compliment for him who said that all things were very good? If this is so, it offers another instance of the crass optimism of these religions - denouncing suicide to escape being denounced by it.

It is funny really that christianity could attain such popularity, preaching such idiocies. I guess you are what you believe. A rather bizarre example of christians enduring suffering for their faith, can be found in the practice of corporal mortification. From the Opus Dei Awareness Network:

Listed below are the ways Opus Dei numeraries practice corporal mortification:

Cilice: a spiked chain worn around the upper thigh for two hours each day, except for Church feast days, Sundays, and certain times of the year. This is perhaps the most shocking of the corporal mortifications, and generally Opus Dei members are extremely hesitant to admit that they use them. It is a painful mortification which leaves small prick holes in the flesh, and makes the Opus Dei members tentative about wearing swim suits wherever non-Opus Dei members may be.

Discipline : a cord-like whip which resembles macrame, used on the buttocks or back once a week. Opus Dei members must ask permission to use it more often, which many do. The story is often told in Opus Dei that the Founder was so zealous in using the discipline, he splattered the bathroom walls with streaks of blood.

Cold Showers : Most numeraries take cold showers every day and offer it up for the intentions of the current Prelate.

Meals : Numeraries generally practice one small corporal mortification at every meal, such as drinking coffee without milk or sugar, not buttering one's toast, skipping dessert, not taking seconds, etc. For the most part, eating between meals is not practiced. Opus Dei members fast on the Church's prescribed days for fasting, but otherwise must ask for permission to fast on their own.

The Heroic Minute : Numeraries are encouraged to jump out of bed and kiss the floor as soon as the door is knocked in the morning. As they kiss, they say "Serviam," Latin for "I will serve."

Silences : Each night after making an examination of conscience, numeraries do not speak to one another until after Holy Mass the following morning. (They do not say "Good morning" to anyone as they are getting ready.) In the afternoons, they try to avoid speaking until dinnertime. On Sundays, numeraries generally do not listen to music, especially in the afternoons.

So how stupid do you have to be to spend any time worshipping a non-existent god in ways that physically hurt you?

A while back I quoted this passage from Steven Pinker's book 'How the Mind Works':

Some parts of the mind register the attainment of increments of fitness by giving us a sensation of pleasure. Other parts use a knowledge of cause and effect to bring about goals. Put them together and you get a mind that rises to a biologically pointless challenge: figuring out how to get at the pleasure circuits of the brain and deliver little jolts of enjoyment without the inconvenience of wringing bona fide fitness increments from the harsh world. When a rat has access to a lever that sends electrical impulses to an electrode implanted in its medial forebrain bundle, it presses the lever furiously until it drops of exhaustion, foregoing opportunities to eat, drink and have sex. People don't yet undergo elective neurosurgery to have electrodes implanted in their pleasure centers, but they have found ways to stimulate them by other means. An obvious example is recreational drugs, which seep into the chemical junctions of the pleasure circuits.

And I wanted to know, if people are allowed to flagellate and mutilate themselves, where are the kind doctors working on a pleasure device that cuts out all the middlemen and delivers a jolt of happiness right when we want it? I found this damn interesting article over at DamnInteresting.com:

Between 1950 and 1952, another man named Dr. Robert G. Heath experimentally implanted similar depth electrodes into human brains, the subjects mostly comprised of mentally ill patients from state mental hospitals. His experiments were met with uneasiness from the scientific community at the time, yet he continued. Upon the discovery of the brain's pleasure centers by Olds and Milner in '54, he put much of his research focus there. He found that using ESB in these areas of a human brain had a similar effect as it did on laboratory animals, bringing the subjects immediate pleasure.

...Today, medical technology allows such electrodes to be completely implanted into the human body, including a battery pack the size of a book of matches. But these are a rarity, used only in very specific and extreme cases. Not even victims of intractable neuropathic pain or depression are permitted to have their pleasure centers wired. Individuals with happiness deficits are instead treated with drugs, which are both more and less invasive, depending on how you look at it. Medications don't involve holes drilled into the skull, but they do act upon the entire body, causing a host of unwanted chemical side-effects. Often they also result in a lifelong expense.

And I am actually outraged. We seemingly have the technology to end human misery for those that wish to take it, and if the technology is at present an unknown, it is because scientists have not pursued (or been allowed to pursue) this line of research with as much vigour as is necessary. The article concludes:

there is no way to know for certain how a human might change in response to such technology. One could also point out that many people never tire of other stimulations such as sex or pleasurable foods, and that while many people will naturally partake of those pleasurable activities a lot at first, most will gradually moderate the usage to times when it is most needed or appropriate. But nothing would stop an ESB-wired person from taking a day off work, putting a brick on the button, and enjoying an afternoon of bliss. As an added benefit over sex and chocolate, this technology isn't likely to result in unwanted pregnancies, disease, or weight gain.

It is absurd that any human chooses pain on the false promise of an eternal life and equally absurd that humanity knows how to create happiness, but denies itself. Come on people. There isn't anybody around to smack our hands from the cookie jar, and no higher power to disapprove.

I for one would consider testing such a device (although maybe I wouldn't be the first guinea pig). And would I get bored of pressing the button? That's a question I'm quite willing to empirically test...

Boredom

2007-05-13T19:36:00.000+01:00

Over the last few months I've been struck by an ever increasing boredom, and I've lost interest in many of the things that I once filled my time with. Everything is pointless, so what point in doing anything, and what fun is there to be had in existence, when it all comes to naught?

Quite aptly, I recently happened upon an interesting blog called Happiness & Philosophy, on which I discovered a link to an essay by Arthur Schopenhauer, called 'The Emptiness of Existence'. Some extracts will illustrate my current mood perfectly:

Of every event in our life it is only for a moment that we can say that it is; after that we must say for ever that it was. Every evening makes us poorer by a day. It would probably make us angry to see this short space of time slipping away, if we were not secretly conscious in the furthest depths of our being that the spring of eternity belongs to us, and that in it we are always able to have life renewed.

Reflections of the nature of those above may, indeed, establish the belief that to enjoy the present, and to make this the purpose of one’s life, is the greatest wisdom; since it is the present alone that is real, everything else being only the play of thought. But such a purpose might just as well be called the greatest folly, for that which in the next moment exists no more, and vanishes as completely as a dream, can never be worth a serious effort.

...That human life must be a kind of mistake is sufficiently clear from the fact that man is a compound of needs, which are difficult to satisfy; moreover, if they are satisfied, all he is granted is a state of painlessness, in which he can only give himself up to boredom. This is a precise proof that existence in itself has no value, since boredom is merely the feeling of the emptiness of life. If, for instance, life, the longing for which constitutes our very being, had in itself any positive and real value, boredom could not exist; mere existence in itself would supply us with everything, and therefore satisfy us. But our existence would not be a joyous thing unless we were striving after something; distance and obstacles to be overcome then represent our aim as something that would satisfy us—an illusion which vanishes when our aim has been attained; or when we are engaged in something that is of a purely intellectual nature, when, in reality, we have retired from the world, so that we may observe it from the outside, like spectators at a theatre. Even sensual pleasure itself is nothing but a continual striving, which ceases directly its aim is attained. As soon as we are not engaged in one of these two ways, but thrown back on existence itself, we are convinced of the emptiness and worthlessness of it; and this it is we call boredom. That innate and ineradicable craving for what is out of the common proves how glad we are to have the natural and tedious course of things interrupted. Even the pomp and splendour of the rich in their stately castles is at bottom nothing but a futile attempt to escape the very essence of existence, misery.

...If one turns from contemplating the course of the world at large, and in particular from the ephemeral and mock existence of men as they follow each other in rapid succession, to the detail of life, how like a comedy it seems!

It impresses us in the same way as a drop of water, crowded with infusoria, seen through a microscope, or a little heap of cheese-mites that would otherwise be invisible. Their activity and struggling with each other in such little space amuse us greatly. And it is the same in the little span of life—great and earnest activity produces a comic effect.

A comic effect indeed, but I'm not laughing. I'm bored and angry. Everything is pointless and like a universal acid, that knowledge reduces existence to the absurd. No ifs, no buts, and any arguments to the contrary are merely blah, blah, blah.

As far as I can see, the solutions are delusion, boredom or death, and given those choices, I can't decide which, if any, is the best (or worst). I've tried delusion, and it's over-rated. Suicide seems rather drastic (although very effective at eliminating angst and boredom). And boredom is a kind of torture (one I personally find quite unbearable for anything but the shortest of times).

"What to do, what to do?" I ask myself. Like Alice down the rabbit hole, surrounded by the nut-jobs of Wonderland.

Funnily, Schopenhauer lived to the ripe old age of 72, spending the last 27 years of his life alone, apart from a couple of pet poodles for company. According to Wikipedia he was a militant atheist and absolute pessimist, and if that description is not apt for Schopenhauer, it is certainly a good description of yours truly. I'm not yet entirely bored of my blog, so for now I'll keep on with my own pessimism and atheism. I just wish I could be certain I'd reach 72, and I might stop stressing so much...

98% Chimp. 100% Dumb

2007-05-10T20:20:00.000+01:00

Sometimes it stuns me, that people who are apparently very clever, can also say very stupid things. Last week I picked up a copy of 'What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee' by Jonathan Marks, a professor of anthropology. He was recently named a fellow of the AAAS, and I was interested to find out his opinion on human being.

Unfortunately, after reading the conclusion of the book, I couldn't really bring it on myself to read any more. An extract will show why:

Thirty years ago, in a widely read scientific-philosophical work called Chance and Necessity, the French molecular biologist Jacques Monod argued that evolution shows life to be meaningless. While this might easily be dismissed as “Sartre among the test-tubes,” it carried the authority of science, because a prominent scientist wrote it. Is the proposition true? Perhaps, but there is no way to know. There is no class of data to be collected that would indicate whether life is meaningful or not. It is not a scientific proposition.

More than that, it is a distasteful proposition. Bluntly put, people care more about whether their life has meaning than they do about whether they came from apes. If you tell them that science shows life has no meaning and that we came from apes, it is not surprising to imagine that they would reject both scientific propositions. In fact, it is pretty dumb to think otherwise.

The problem is that science is very good at answering questions people don’t care about. To the extent that physics aids the technology that allows you to reheat frozen food in a few minutes, it is obviously useful. But using technology derived from it, and caring about it, are different things. The things that people care about tend to be the things outside the domain of science—What is death? Will I always be able to take care of my children? Why do good things happen to bad people? How can I be happy?

All humans care about these things. All cognitive systems provide answers for them. In addition, they provide explanations for how humans and the world they live in came to be—as the scientific myth does. And more than that, other myths explain not simply how we came into existence, but why.

And science doesn’t.

Science explains how we came to exist more accurately than does any other myth. By its own criterion, it is therefore the best explanation. But it is an answer to a relatively small and trivial question. Science tells us that we are descended from apes, a fact that affects people’s lives and minds minimally, if at all. On the other hand, science says nothing about whether the cosmos is ultimately benevolent or just. The perpetual crisis in science education is largely the result of a consistent failure of scientists themselves to be educated about what they do and its implications.

Richard Dawkins writes in River Out of Eden:

[I]f the universe were just electrons and selfish genes, meaningless tragedies . . . are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor good in its intention. It would manifest no intentions of any kind. In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

And for good measure he adds, “DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”

Well, maybe we do and maybe we don’t. Since the author is not an expert on molecular genetics, we may consequently take his musings about DNA with a grain of salt, falling within the domain of folk heredity. But what about his dour view of the universe? Here Dawkins presents a consistency argument, not a test of an hypothesis. After all, the universe also has precisely the properties we would expect to find if it were benevolent and designed, and we simply didn ’t understand it, lacking the key to its pattern. If the only language you speak is Greek, other languages may sound like random noise, like “bar, bar, bar,” which is why the Greeks called non-Greek speakers “barbarians.” But that’s a statement about the limitations of the Greeks, not about the other peoples.

Random noise may be random noise or it may simply be stuff you don’t understand, which consequently looks or sounds like random noise. The history of modern science, after all, is about the discovery and imposition of order on what formerly looked like chaos. Perhaps ultimately there is just chaos, but Dawkins’s assertion about it is no more than that, an assertion. Dawkins ’s interpretation of the universe might be true, but again, since there is no positive knowledge we can acquire, no controlled set of data we can collect that would indicate whether it is in fact likely to be true, we are obliged to identify the statement as nonscience.

The scientist is, of course, welcome to his opinion. It is not, however, the case that his opinion about this is more scientific than any other. Indeed, since it reflects an inability to tell science from nonscience , it might actually be regarded as less scientific than any other. The important criticism, however, lies in the implications of teaching such philosophy as if it constituted science, indeed as if it constituted the theory of evolution. The scientist says: “Science has explained many things about the universe. Your life has no meaning. Have a nice day.” And then he is surprised and appalled at the public rejection of that philosophy. If the goal of science is to make people miserable, then Dawkins and his gloomy philosophy would seem to be the ideal evangelical tool.

But for those of us who think that perhaps people do have the right to be happy (or at least, as Thomas Jefferson believed, the right to pursue happiness), it is an impoverished and unfulfilling worldview. Small wonder it is so unpopular! Small wonder that people would rather derive pleasure from the comforting inanities of The Celestine Prophecy.

And here is the truth then. We are descended from apes. Life is meaningless. Everything is pointless. Don't shoot the messenger for telling you the truth. And if you're too scared to face it, go and join a monastery!

Most people = 98% chimp. 100% dumb.

Monod's the Man

2007-05-08T19:32:00.000+01:00

I don't suppose many people will get through the last post (given it's quite long), so here's a shorter dose of pointlessness for those with brief attention spans. According to Wikipedia, Jacques Monod was:

a French biologist who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965. Born in Paris, he was also awarded several other honours and distinctions, among them the Légion d'honneur.

Apparently he was a friend of Albert Camus, and in 1970 he published 'Chance and Necessity' which argues that the origins of life are random, and humans were a lucky happenstance:

… man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. Neither his destiny nor his duty have been written down. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.

I found an interesting interview with Monod at (shudder) answersingenesis.org:

John: Could I go back to the question of creation? As I understand your point of view, and as it has been put to me, traditionally Christians have said, ‘God created the world at the beginning; God at a certain stage created life; God was at many points involved’ Then science came along and said, ‘No, we can give you a determinist account of how the universe was created, and how life came into being, entirely by scientific laws; we have no need of the hypothesis of a theistic creator.’

Now, am I right in thinking that you have taken that one stage further, and said, ‘No, it isn’t in fact a determinist system; it is even more difficult to imagine God because of the elements of randomness that occur at many points in this story, and in fact, that are the whole thread holding the story together? God couldn’t have decided in the beginning to use this mechanism to create man because he couldn’t have predicted at the beginning that man would emerge from it.

Monod: You are quite right. The advent of man was completely unpredictable, until it actually happened.

John: So in other words, we would need a more sophisticated account of creation. I wonder if I could take one sentence from your book and see how you would regard it as an attempt at a more sophisticated account of the Creator. You point to two factors in the emergence of higher and higher forms of life: one is randomness, mutations; the other is natural selection. And what you say is that randomness is the nourishment which natural selection uses. And you say it is not to chance. but to these conditions—namely, of what is to be selected—that evolution owes its generally progressive course, and steady development which it seems to suggest. In other words, one could conceive of God using randomness, just so long as there was the pattern which he was imposing upon the results of the chance mutations.

Monod: If you want to assume that, then I have no dispute with it, except one (which is not a scientific dispute, but a moral one). Namely, selection is the blindest, and most cruel way of evolving new species, and more and more complex and refined organisms.

John: Cruel?

Monod: The more cruel because it is a process of elimination, of destruction. The struggle for life and elimination of the weakest is a horrible process, against which our whole modern ethics revolts. An ideal society is a non-selective society, is one where the weak is protected; which is exactly the reverse of the so-called natural law. I am surprised that a Christian would defend the idea that this is the process which God more or less set up in order to have evolution.

And Monod seems like he was a very wise person. I'll close with a great quote, attributed to him on his Wikipedia page:

A scientist who believes in god suffers from schizophrenia

The Opposition Agrees

2007-05-08T19:30:00.000+01:00

I'm finding it mildly difficult getting back into the swing of things, and my enthusiasm for pointing out the absurdity of existence seems to be on the wane (at least for the present). Fitting then, that today I found an article called 'The Absurdity of Life Without God' which reads like something from this blog (although I'll warn you, it's written by a christian). The piece discusses a variety of different sources (some of which will be familiar) and given that there is no god and everything is pointless, I felt compelled to reproduce a large chunk of it here:

The necessity of God and Immortality

Man, writes Loren Eiseley, is the Cosmic Orphan. He is the only creature in the universe who asks, “Why?” Other animals have instincts to guide them, but man has learned to ask questions.

“Who am I?” man asks. “Why am I here? Where am I going?” Since the Enlightenment, when he threw off the shackles of religion, man has tried to answer these questions without reference to God. But the answers that came back were not exhilarating, but dark and terrible. “You are the accidental by-product of nature, a result of matter plus time plus chance. There is no reason for your existence. All you face is death.”

Modern man thought that when he had gotten rid of God, he had freed himself from all that repressed and stifled him. Instead, he discovered that in killing God, he had also killed himself.

For if there is no God, then man’s life becomes absurd.

If God does not exist, then both man and the universe are inevitably doomed to death. Man, like all biological organisms, must die. With no hope of immortality, man’s life leads only to the grave. His life is but a spark in the infinite blackness, a spark that appears, flickers, and dies forever. Compared to the infinite stretch of time, the span of man’s life is but an infinitesimal moment; and yet this is all the life he will ever know. Therefore, everyone must come face to face with what theologian Paul Tillich has called “the threat of non-being.” For though I know now that I exist, that I am alive, I also know that someday I will no longer exist, that I will no longer be, that I will die. This thought is staggering and threatening: to think that the person I call “myself” will cease to exist, that I will be no more!

...And the universe, too, faces death. Scientists tell us that the universe is expanding, and everything in it is growing farther and farther apart. As it does so, it grows colder and colder, and its energy is used up. Eventually all the stars will burn out and all matter will collapse into dead stars and black holes. There will be no light at all; there will be no heat; there will be no life; only the corpses of dead stars and galaxies, ever expanding into the endless darkness and the cold recesses of space–a universe in ruins. The entire universe marches irreversibly toward its grave. So not only is the life of each individual person doomed; the entire human race is doomed. The universe is plunging toward inevitable extinction–death is written throughout its structure. There is no escape. There is no hope.

The absurdity of life without God and Immortality

If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose. Let’s look at each of these.

No Ultimate Meaning Without Immortality and God

If each individual person passes out of existence when he dies, then what ultimate meaning can be given to his life? Does it really matter whether he ever existed at all? It might be said that his life was important because it influenced others or affected the course of history. But this only shows a relative significance to his life, not an ultimate significance. His life may be important relative to certain other events, but what is the ultimate significance of any of those events? If all the events are meaningless, then what can be the ultimate meaning of influencing any of them? Ultimately it makes no difference.

Look at it from another perspective: Scientists say that the universe originated in an explosion called the “Big Bang” about 15 billion years ago. Suppose the Big Bang had never occurred. Suppose the universe had never existed. What ultimate difference would it make? The universe is doomed to die anyway. In the end it makes no difference whether the universe ever existed or not. Therefore, it is without ultimate significance.

The same is true of the human race. Mankind is a doomed race in a dying universe. Because the human race will eventually cease to exist, it makes no ultimate difference whether it ever did exist. Mankind is thus no more significant than a swarm of mosquitos or a barnyard of pigs, for their end is all the same. The same blind cosmic process that coughed them up in the first place will eventually swallow them all again.

And the same is true of each individual person. The contributions of the scientist to the advance of human knowledge, the researches of the doctor to alleviate pain and suffering, the efforts of the diplomat to secure peace in the world, the sacrifices of good men everywhere to better the lot of the human race–all these come to nothing. In the end they don’t make one bit of difference, not one bit. Each person’s life is therefore without ultimate significance. And because our lives are ultimately meaningless, the activities we fill our lives with are also meaningless. The long hours spent in study at the university, our jobs, our interests, our friendships–all these are, in the final analysis, utterly meaningless. This is the horror of modern man: because he ends in nothing, he is nothing.

But it is important to see that it is not just immortality that man needs if life is to be meaningful. Mere duration of existence does not make that existence meaningful. If man and the universe could exist forever, but if there were no God, their existence would still have no ultimate significance. To illustrate: I once read a science-fiction story in which an astronaut was marooned on a barren chunk of rock lost in outer space. He had with him two vials: one containing poison and the other a potion that would make him live forever. Realizing his predicament, he gulped down the poison. But then to his horror, he discovered he had swallowed the wrong vial–he had drunk the potion for immortality. And that meant that he was cursed to exist forever–a meaningless, unending life. Now if God does not exist, our lives are just like that. They could go on and on and still be utterly without meaning. We could still ask of life, “So what?” So it is not just immortality man needs if life is to be ultimately significant; he needs God and immortality. And if God does not exist, then he has neither.

Twentieth-century man came to understand this. Read Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. During this entire play two men carry on trivial conversation while waiting for a third man to arrive, who never does. Our lives are like that, Beckett is saying; we just kill time waiting–for what, we don’t know. In a tragic portrayal of man, Beckett wrote another play in which the curtain opens revealing a stage littered with junk. For thirty long seconds, the audience sits and stares in silence at that junk. Then the curtain closes. That’s all.

One of the most devastating novels I’ve ever read was Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse. At the novel’s end, Harry Haller stands looking at himself in a mirror. During the course of his life he had experienced all the world offers. And now he stands looking at himself, and he mutters, “Ah, the bitter taste of life!” He spits at himself in the looking-glass, and then he kicks it to pieces. His life has been futile and meaningless.

French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus understood this, too. Sartre portrayed life in his play No Exit as hell–the final line of the play are the words of resignation, “Well, let’s get on with it.” Hence, Sartre writes elsewhere of the “nausea” of existence. Camus, too, saw life as absurd. At the end of his brief novel The Stranger, Camus’s hero discovers in a flash of insight that the universe has no meaning and there is no God to give it one. The French biochemist Jacques Monod seemed to echo those sentiments when he wrote in his work Chance and Necessity, “Man finally knows he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe.”

Thus, if there is no God, then life itself becomes meaningless. Man and the universe are without ultimate significance.

No Ultimate Value Without Immortality and God

If life ends at the grave, then it makes no difference whether one has lived as a Stalin or as a saint. Since one’s destiny is ultimately unrelated to one’s behavior, you may as well just live as you please. As Dostoyevsky put it: “If there is no immortality then all things are permitted.” On this basis, a writer like Ayn Rand is absolutely correct to praise the virtues of selfishness. Live totally for self; no one holds you accountable! Indeed, it would be foolish to do anything else, for life is too short to jeopardize it by acting out of anything but pure self-interest. Sacrifice for another person would be stupid. Kai Nielsen, an atheist philosopher who attempts to defend the viability of ethics without God, in the end admits,

We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons, unhoodwinked by myth or ideology, need not be individual egoists or classical amoralists. Reason doesn’t decide here. The picture I have painted for you is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me. . . . Pure practical reason, even with a good knowledge of the facts, will not take you to morality.

But the problem becomes even worse. For, regardless of immortality, if there is no God, then there can be no objective standards of right and wrong. All we are confronted with is, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s words, the bare, valueless fact of existence. Moral values are either just expressions of personal taste or the by-products of socio-biological evolution and conditioning. In the words of one humanist philosopher, “The moral principles that govern our behavior are rooted in habit and custom, feeling and fashion.” In a world without God, who is to say which values are right and which are wrong? Who is to judge that the values of Adolf Hitler are inferior to those of a saint? The concept of morality loses all meaning in a universe without God. As one contemporary atheistic ethicist points out, “to say that something is wrong because . . . it is forbidden by God, is . . . perfectly understandable to anyone who believes in a law-giving God. But to say that something is wrong . . . even though no God exists to forbid it, is not understandable. . . .” “The concept of moral obligation [is] unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain but their meaning is gone.” In a world without God, there can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgements. This means that it is impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil. Nor can one praise brotherhood, equality, and love as good. For in a universe without God, good and evil do not exist–there is only the bare valueless fact of existence, and there is no one to say you are right and I am wrong.

No Ultimate Purpose Without Immortality and God

If death stands with open arms at the end of life’s trail, then what is the goal of life? To what end has life been lived? Is it all for nothing? Is there no reason for life? And what of the universe? Is it utterly pointless? If its destiny is a cold grave in the recesses of outer space, the answer must be yes–it is pointless. There is no goal, no purpose, for the universe. The litter of a dead universe will just go on expanding and expanding–forever.

And what of man? Is there no purpose at all for the human race? Or will it simply peter out someday lost in the oblivion of an indifferent universe? The English writer H. G. Wells foresaw such a prospect. In his novel The Time Machine Wells’s time traveller journeys far into the future to discover the destiny of man. All he finds is a dead earth, save for a few lichens and moss, orbiting a gigantic red sun. The only sounds are the rush of the wind and the gentle ripple of the sea. “Beyond these lifeless sounds,” writes Wells, “the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives–all that was over.” And so Wells’s time traveller returned. But to what?–to merely an earlier point on the purposeless rush toward oblivion. When as a non-Christian I first read Wells’s book, I thought, “No, no! It can’t end that way!” But if there is no God, it will end that way, like it or not. This is reality in a universe without God: there is no hope; there is no purpose. It reminds me of T.S. Eliot’s haunting lines:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

What is true of mankind as a whole is true of each of us individually: we are here to no purpose. If there is no God, then our life is not qualitatively different from that of a dog. I know that’s harsh, but it’s true. As the ancient writer of Ecclesiastes put it: “The fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same. As one dies so dies the other; indeed, they all have the same breath and there is no advantage for man over beast, for all is vanity. All go to the same place. All come from the dust and all return to the dust” (Eccles 3:19-20). In this book, which reads more like a piece of modern existentialist literature than a book of the Bible, the writer shows the futility of pleasure, wealth, education, political fame, and honor in a life doomed to end in death. His verdict? “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (1:2). If life ends at the grave, then we have no ultimate purpose for living.

But more than that: even if it did not end in death, without God life would still be without purpose. For man and the universe would then be simple accidents of chance, thrust into existence for no reason. Without God the universe is the result of a cosmic accident, a chance explosion. There is no reason for which it exists. As for man, he is a freak of nature–a blind product of matter plus time plus chance. Man is just a lump of slime that evolved into rationality. There is no more purpose in life for the human race than for a species of insect; for both are the result of the blind interaction of chance and necessity. As one philosopher has put it: “Human life is mounted upon a subhuman pedestal and must shift for itself alone in the heart of a silent and mindless universe.”

What is true of the universe and of the human race is also true of us as individuals. Insofar as we are individual human beings, we are the results of certain combinations of heredity and environment. We are victims of a kind of genetic and environmental roulette. Psychologists following Sigmund Freud tell us our actions are the result of various repressed sexual tendencies. Sociologists following B. F. Skinner argue that all our choices are determined by conditioning, so that freedom is an illusion. Biologists like Francis Crick regard man as an electro-chemical machine that can be controlled by altering its genetic code. If God does not exist, then you are just a miscarriage of nature, thrust into a purposeless universe to live a purposeless life.

So if God does not exist, that means that man and the universe exist to no purpose–since the end of everything is death–and that they came to be for no purpose, since they are only blind products of chance. In short, life is utterly without reason.

Do you understand the gravity of the alternatives before us? For if God exists, then there is hope for man. But if God does not exist, then all we are left with is despair. Do you understand why the question of God’s existence is so vital to man? As one writer has aptly put it, “If God is dead, then man is dead, too.”

Unfortunately, the mass of mankind do not realize this fact. They continue on as though nothing has changed. I’m reminded of Nietzsche’s story of the madman who in the early morning hours burst into the marketplace, lantern in hand, crying, “I seek God! I seek God!” Since many of those standing about did not believe in God, he provoked much laughter. “Did God get lost?” they taunted him. “Or is he hiding? Or maybe he has gone on a voyage or emigrated!” Thus they yelled and laughed. Then, writes Nietzsche, the madman turned in their midst and pierced them with his eyes.

‘Whither is God?’ he cried, ‘I shall tell you. We have killed him–you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? . . . God is dead. . . . And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?’

The crowd stared at the madman in silence and astonishment. At last he dashed his lantern to the ground. “I have come too early,” he said. “This tremendous event is still on its way–it has not yet reached the ears of man.” Men did not yet truly comprehend the consequences of what they had done in killing God. But Nietzsche predicted that someday people would realize the implications of their atheism; and this realization would usher in an age of nihilism–the destruction of all meaning and value in life. The end of Christianity, wrote Nietzsche, means the advent of nihilism. This most gruesome of guests is standing already at the door. “Our whole European culture is moving for some time now,” wrote Nietzsche, “with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade, as toward a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.”

Most people still do not reflect on the consequences of atheism and so, like the crowd in the marketplace, go unknowingly on their way. But when we realize, as did Nietzsche, what atheism implies, then his question presses hard upon us: how shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?

The practical impossibility of Atheism

About the only solution the atheist can offer is that we face the absurdity of life and live bravely. Bertrand Russell, for example, wrote that we must build our lives upon “the firm foundation of unyielding despair.” Only by recognizing that the world really is a terrible place can we successfully come to terms with life. Camus said that we should honestly recognize life’s absurdity and then live in love for one another.

The fundamental problem with this solution, however, is that it is impossible to live consistently and happily within such a world view. If one lives consistently, he will not be happy; if one lives happily, it is only because he is not consistent. Francis Schaeffer has explained this point well. Modern man, says Schaeffer, resides in a two-story universe. In the lower story is the finite world without God; here life is absurd, as we have seen. In the upper story are meaning, value, and purpose. Now modern man lives in the lower story because he believes there is no God. But he cannot live happily in such an absurd world; therefore, he continually makes leaps of faith into the upper story to affirm meaning, value, and purpose, even though he has no right to, since he does not believe in God. Modern man is totally inconsistent when he makes this leap, because these values cannot exist without God, and man in his lower story does not have God.

Let’s look again, then, at each of the three areas in which we saw life was absurd without God, to show how man cannot live consistently and happily with his atheism.

Meaning of Life

First, the area of meaning. We saw that without God, life has no meaning. Yet philosophers continue to live as though life does have meaning. For example, Sartre argued that one may create meaning for his life by freely choosing to follow a certain course of action. Sartre himself chose Marxism.

Now this is utterly inconsistent. It is inconsistent to say life is objectively absurd and then to say one may create meaning for his life. If life is really absurd, then man is trapped in the lower story. To try to create meaning in life represents a leap to the upper story. But Sartre has no basis for this leap. Without God, there can be no objective meaning in life. Sartre’s program is actually an exercise in self-delusion. For the universe does not really acquire meaning just because I give it one. This is easy to see: for suppose I give the universe one meaning, and you give it another. Who is right? The answer, of course, is neither one. For the universe without God remains objectively meaningless, no matter how we regard it. Sartre is really saying, “Let’s pretend the universe has meaning.” And this is just fooling ourselves.

The point is this: if God does not exist, then life is objectively meaningless; but man cannot live consistently and happily knowing that life is meaningless; so in order to be happy he pretends life has meaning. But this is, of course, entirely inconsistent–for without God, man and the universe are without any real significance.

Value of Life

Turn now to the problem of value. Here is where the most blatant inconsistencies occur. First of all, atheistic humanists are totally inconsistent in affirming the traditional values of love and brotherhood. Camus has been rightly criticized for inconsistently holding both to the absurdity of life and the ethics of human love and brotherhood. The two are logically incompatible. Bertrand Russell, too, was inconsistent. For though he was an atheist, he was an outspoken social critic, denouncing war and restrictions on sexual freedom. Russell admitted that he could not live as though ethical values were simply a matter of personal taste, and that he therefore found his own views “incredible.” “I do not know the solution,” he confessed. The point is that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong cannot exist. As Dostoyevsky said, “All things are permitted.”

But Dostoyevsky also showed that man cannot live this way. He cannot live as though it is perfectly all right for soldiers to slaughter innocent children. He cannot live as though it is all right for dictatorial regimes to follow a systematic program of physical torture of political prisoners. He cannot live as though it is all right for dictators like Pol Pot to exterminate millions of their own countrymen. Everything in him cries out to say these acts are wrong–really wrong. But if there is no God, he cannot. So he makes a leap of faith and affirms values anyway. And when he does so, he reveals the inadequacy of a world without God.

The horror of a world devoid of value was brought home to me with new intensity a few years ago as I viewed a BBC television documentary called “The Gathering.” It concerned the reunion of survivors of the Holocaust in Jerusalem, where they rediscovered lost friendships and shared their experiences. Now, I had heard stories of the Holocaust before and had even visited Dachau and Buchenwald, and I thought I was beyond shocking by further tales of horror. But I found that I was not. Perhaps I had been made more sensitive by the recent birth of our beautiful baby girl, so that I applied the situations to her as they were related on the television. In any case, one woman prisoner, a nurse, told of how she was made the gynecologist at Auschwitz. She observed that pregnant women were grouped together by the soldiers under the direction of Dr. Mengele and housed in the same barracks. Some time passed, and she noted that she no longer saw any of these women. She made inquiries. “Where are the pregnant women who were housed in that barracks?” “Haven’t you heard?” came the reply. “Dr. Mengele used them for vivisection.”

Another woman told of how Mengele had bound up her breasts so that she could not suckle her infant. The doctor wanted to learn how long an infant could survive without nourishment. Desperately this poor woman tried to keep her baby alive by giving it pieces of bread soaked in coffee, but to no avail. Each day the baby lost weight, a fact that was eagerly monitored by Dr. Mengele. A nurse then came secretly to this woman and told her, “I have arranged a way for you to get out of here, but you cannot take your baby with you. I have brought a morphine injection that you can give to your child to end its life.” When the woman protested, the nurse was insistent: “Look, your baby is going to die anyway. At least save yourself.” And so this mother took the life of her own baby. Dr. Mengele was furious when he learned of it because he had lost his experimental specimen, and he searched among the dead to find the baby’s discarded corpse so that he could have one last weighing.

My heart was torn by these stories. One rabbi who survived the camp summed it up well when he said that at Auschwitz it was as though there existed a world in which all the Ten Commandments were reversed. Mankind had never seen such a hell.

And yet, if God does not exist, then in a sense, our world is Auschwitz: there is no absolute right and wrong; all things are permitted. But no atheist, no agnostic, can live consistently with such a view. Nietzsche himself, who proclaimed the necessity of living “beyond good and evil,” broke with his mentor Richard Wagner precisely over the issue of the composer’s anti-Semitism and strident German nationalism. Similarly Sartre, writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, condemned anti-Semitism, declaring that a doctrine that leads to extermination is not merely an opinion or matter of personal taste, of equal value with its opposite. In his important essay “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” Sartre struggles vainly to elude the contradiction between his denial of divinely pre-established values and his urgent desire to affirm the value of human persons. Like Russell, he could not live with the implications of his own denial of ethical absolutes.

A second problem is that if God does not exist and there is no immortality, then all the evil acts of men go unpunished and all the sacrifices of good men go unrewarded. But who can live with such a view? Richard Wurmbrand, who has been tortured for his faith in communist prisons, says,

The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe when man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil. There is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man. The communist torturers often said, ‘There is no God, no Hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish.’ I have heard one torturer even say, ‘I thank God, in whom I don’t believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.’ He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners.

The English theologian Cardinal Newman once said that if he believed that all evils and injustices of life throughout history were not to be made right by God in the afterlife, “Why I think I should go mad.” Rightly so.

And the same applies to acts of self-sacrifice. A number of years ago, a terrible mid-winter air disaster occurred in which a plane leaving the Washington, D.C. airport smashed into a bridge spanning the Potomac River, plunging its passengers into the icy waters. As the rescue helicopters came, attention was focused on one man who again and again pushed the dangling rope ladder to other passengers rather than be pulled to safety himself. Six times he passed the ladder by. When they came again, he was gone. He had freely given his life that others might live. The whole nation turned its eyes to this man in respect and admiration for the selfless and good act he had performed. And yet, if the atheist is right, that man was not noble–he did the stupidest thing possible. He should have gone for the ladder first, pushed others away if necessary in order to survive. But to die for others he did not even know, to give up all the brief existence he would ever have–what for? For the atheist there can be no reason. And yet the atheist, like the rest of us, instinctively reacts with praise for this man’s selfless action. Indeed, one will probably never find an atheist who lives consistently with his system. For a universe without moral accountability and devoid of value is unimaginably terrible.

Purpose of Life

Finally, let’s look at the problem of purpose in life. The only way most people who deny purpose in life live happily is either by making up some purpose, which amounts to self-delusion as we saw with Sartre, or by not carrying their view to its logical conclusions. Take the problem of death, for example. According to Ernst Bloch, the only way modern man lives in the face of death is by subconsciously borrowing the belief in immortality that his forefathers held to, even though he himself has no basis for this belief, since he does not believe in God. Bloch states that the belief that life ends in nothing is hardly, in his words, “sufficient to keep the head high and to work as if there were no end.” By borrowing the remnants of a belief in immortality, writes Bloch, “modern man does not feel the chasm that unceasingly surrounds him and that will certainly engulf him at last. Through these remnants, he saves his sense of self-identity. Through them the impression arises that man is not perishing, but only that one day the world has the whim no longer to appear to him.” Bloch concludes, “This quite shallow courage feasts on a borrowed credit card. It lives from earlier hopes and the support that they once had provided.” Modern man no longer has any right to that support, since he rejects God. But in order to live purposefully, he makes a leap of faith to affirm a reason for living.

We often find the same inconsistency among those who say that man and the universe came to exist for no reason or purpose, but just by chance. Unable to live in an impersonal universe in which everything is the product of blind chance, these persons begin to ascribe personality and motives to the physical processes themselves. It is a bizarre way of speaking and represents a leap from the lower to the upper story. For example, the brilliant Russian physicists Zeldovich and Novikov, in contemplating the properties of the universe, ask, Why did “Nature” choose to create this sort of universe instead of another? “Nature” has obviously become a sort of God-substitute, filling the role and function of God. Francis Crick halfway through his book The Origin of the Genetic Code begins to spell nature with a capital “N” and elsewhere speaks of natural selection as being “clever” and as “thinking” of what it will do. Fred Hoyle, the English astronomer, attributes to the universe itself the qualities of God. For Carl Sagan the “Cosmos,” which he always spells with a capital letter, obviously fills the role of a God-substitute. Though all these men profess not to believe in God, they smuggle in a God-substitute through the back door because they cannot bear to live in a universe in which everything is the chance result of impersonal forces.

And it’s interesting to see many thinkers betray their views when they’re pushed to their logical conclusions. For example, certain feminists have raised a storm of protest over Freudian sexual psychology because it is chauvinistic and degrading to women. And some psychologists have knuckled under and revised their theories. Now this is totally inconsistent. If Freudian psychology is really true, then it doesn’t matter if it’s degrading to women. You can’t change the truth because you don’t like what it leads to. But people cannot live consistently and happily in a world where other persons are devalued. Yet if God does not exist, then nobody has any value. Only if God exists can a person consistently support women’s rights. For if God does not exist, then natural selection dictates that the male of the species is the dominant and aggressive one. Women would no more have rights than a female goat or chicken have rights. In nature whatever is, is right. But who can live with such a view? Apparently not even Freudian psychologists, who betray their theories when pushed to their logical conclusions.

Or take the sociological behaviorism of a man like B. F. Skinner. This view leads to the sort of society envisioned in George Orwell’s 1984, where the government controls and programs the thoughts of everybody. If Pavlov’s dog can be made to salivate when a bell rings, so can a human being. If Skinner’s theories are right, then there can be no objection to treating people like the rats in Skinner’s rat-box as they run through their mazes, coaxed on by food and electric shocks. According to Skinner, all our actions are determined anyway. And if God does not exist, then no moral objection can be raised against this kind of programming, for man is not qualitatively different from a rat, since both are just matter plus time plus chance. But again, who can live with such a dehumanizing view?

Or finally, take the biological determinism of a man like Francis Crick. The logical conclusion is that man is like any other laboratory specimen. The world was horrified when it learned that at camps like Dachau the Nazis had used prisoners for medical experiments on living humans. But why not? If God does not exist, there can be no objection to using people as human guinea pigs. A memorial at Dachau says Nie Wieder–“Never Again”–but this sort of thing is still going on. It was revealed a few years ago that in the United States several people had been injected, unknown to them, with a sterilization drug by medical researchers. Must we not protest that this is wrong–that man is more than an electro-chemical machine? The end of this view is population control in which the weak and unwanted are killed off to make room for the strong. But the only way we can consistently protest this view is if God exists. Only if God exists can there be purpose in life.

The dilemma of modern man is thus truly terrible. And insofar as he denies the existence of God and the objectivity of value and purpose, this dilemma remains unrelieved for “post-modern” man as well. Indeed, it is precisely the awareness that modernism issues inevitably in absurdity and despair that constitutes the anguish of post-modernism. In some respects, post-modernism just is the awareness of the bankruptcy of modernity. The atheistic world view is insufficient to maintain a happy and consistent life. Man cannot live consistently and happily as though life were ultimately without meaning, value, or purpose. If we try to live consistently within the atheistic world view, we shall find ourselves profoundly unhappy. If instead we manage to live happily, it is only by giving the lie to our world view.

Confronted with this dilemma, man flounders pathetically for some means of escape. In a remarkable address to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science in 1991, Dr. L. D. Rue, confronted with the predicament of modern man, boldly advocated that we deceive ourselves by means of some “Noble Lie” into thinking that we and the universe still have value. Claiming that “The lesson of the past two centuries is that intellectual and moral relativism is profoundly the case,” Dr. Rue muses that the consequence of such a realization is that one’s quest for personal wholeness (or self-fulfillment) and the quest for social coherence become independent from one another. This is because on the view of relativism the search for self-fulfillment becomes radically privatized: each person chooses his own set of values and meaning. “There is no final, objective reading on the world or the self. There is no universal vocabulary for integrating cosmology and morality.” If we are to avoid “the madhouse option,” where self-fulfillment is pursued regardless of social coherence, and “the totalitarian option,” where social coherence is imposed at the expense of personal wholeness, then we have no choice but to embrace some Noble Lie that will inspire us to live beyond selfish interests and so achieve social coherence. A Noble Lie “is one that deceives us, tricks us, compels us beyond self-interest, beyond ego, beyond family, nation, [and] race.” It is a lie, because it tells us that the universe is infused with value (which is a great fiction), because it makes a claim to universal truth (when there is none), and because it tells me not to live for self-interest (which is evidently false). “But without such lies, we cannot live.”

This is the dreadful verdict pronounced over modern man. In order to survive, he must live in self-deception. But even the Noble Lie option is in the end unworkable. For if what I have said thus far is correct, belief in a Noble Lie would not only be necessary to achieve social coherence and personal wholeness for the masses, but it would also be necessary to achieve one’s own personal wholeness. For one cannot live happily and consistently on an atheistic world view. In order to be happy, one must believe in objective meaning, value, and purpose. But how can one believe in those Noble Lies while at the same time believing in atheism and relativism? The more convinced you are of the necessity of a Noble Lie, the less you are able to believe in it. Like a placebo, a Noble Lie works only on those who believe it is the truth. Once we have seen through the fiction, then the Lie has lost its power over us. Thus, ironically, the Noble Lie cannot solve the human predicament for anyone who has come to see that predicament.

The Noble Lie option therefore leads at best to a society in which an elitist group of illuminati deceive the masses for their own good by perpetuating the Noble Lie. But then why should those of us who are enlightened follow the masses in their deception? Why should we sacrifice self-interest for a fiction? If the great lesson of the past two centuries is moral and intellectual relativism, then why (if we could) pretend that we do not know this truth and live a lie instead? If one answers, “for the sake of social coherence,” one may legitimately ask why I should sacrifice my self-interest for the sake of social coherence? The only answer the relativist can give is that social coherence is in my self-interest–but the problem with this answer is that self-interest and the interest of the herd do not always coincide. Besides, if (out of self-interest) I do care about social coherence, the totalitarian option is always open to me: forget the Noble Lie and maintain social coherence (as well as my self-fulfillment) at the expense of the personal wholeness of the masses. Generations of Soviet leaders who extolled proletarian virtues while they rode in limousines and dined on caviar in their country dachas found this alternative quite workable. Rue would undoubtedly regard such an option as repugnant. But therein lies the rub. Rue’s dilemma is that he obviously values deeply both social coherence and personal wholeness for their own sakes; in other words, they are objective values, which according to his philosophy do not exist. He has already leapt to the upper story. The Noble Lie option thus affirms what it denies and so refutes itself.

The success of biblical Christianity

But if atheism fails in this regard, what about biblical Christianity? According to the Christian world view, God does exist, and man’s life does not end at the grave. In the resurrection body man may enjoy eternal life and fellowship with God. Biblical Christianity therefore provides the two conditions necessary for a meaningful, valuable, and purposeful life for man: God and immortality. Because of this, we can live consistently and happily. Thus, biblical Christianity succeeds precisely where atheism breaks down.

And in a way, doesn't that say it all? What's the fucking point...

Love & Death

2007-05-07T12:25:00.000+01:00

This clip is from Woody Allen's film, 'Love & Death', which I watched for the first time last week, during my enforced absence. It's a very funny tale, somewhere between a Dostoevsky novel and a Charlie Chaplin film, and I was very impressed with the whole thing. I've never really paid that much attention to Woody Allen before, but apparently he's thought a lot about life, love and death, and certainly in this film he portrays an existential angsty man perfectly!

It's clear that Woody Allen has considered the non-existence of god, but the question I wanted to answer was, is he an atheist? From Adherents.com:

For all his questioning and agonizing. Woody Alien is a reluctant (he hopes there is a God) but pessimistic (he doubts there is) agnostic who wishes he had been born with religious faith (not to be confused with sectarian belief) and who believes that even if God is absent, it is important to lead an honest and responsible life. His observations and jokes about God and religion make him a favorite of theologians. Yet Allan Konigsberg was, he says, "amoral and impervious. When I say amoral I think of an incident with my grandfather, who was a kind and sweet man whom I liked very much. I was eleven or so and I found a counterfeit nickel on the street. It was clearly counterfeit. But I suggested fobbing it off on my grandfather, who was old and wouldn't know the difference. Now, this is an amoral act. My mother caught me later and asked, 'How could you ask for five pennies for a counterfeit nickel? That's terrible.' And I was unfazed by it. The consequences or the morality of it never crossed my mind for a second."

And I wonder if the same can be said about this incident (from Wikipedia):

Shortly after separating from [Mia] Farrow in 1992, Allen openly continued his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, Farrow's adopted daughter. Even though Allen and Previn denied he was ever her stepfather, the relationship drew much public and media scrutiny. At the time, Allen was 57 and Previn was 22.

So Woody Allen has seemingly nourished both sides of his being: the mind and the body. He's made a successful career from stressing about existence, and he's making love to a younger woman (which must be many men's fantasy). In 'Love and Death' he declares that the important thing is not to be bitter and that if god exists, he's an underachiever. Me, I am bitter because there is no god, and the underachievers in the room are us! Also I personally don't think any amount of younger women would make it all a sweeter deal, but perhaps that's just me...

Good Luck Charlie Brown

2007-04-25T15:42:00.001+01:00

Ever since I began to understand that everything is pointless, I've started noticing existential angst in the most normal of places. In fact I'd go as far to describe it, as like a big pink elephant sitting there in plain sight, only I was just to stupid to notice it!

And so when I happened across an article which discussed the existential merits of Charles Schulz's 'Peanuts', I was shocked that it has taken me many years to finally appreciate it! From PhilosophyNow:

Existence is problematic and disturbing. In one weekend strip, Schulz succinctly describes the horror of discovering one’s own existence in the world:
'Linus: I’m aware of my tongue ... It’s an awful feeling! Every now and then I become aware that I have a tongue inside my mouth, and then it starts to feel lumped up ... I can’t help it ... I can’t put it out of my mind. ... I keep thinking about where my tongue would be if I weren’t thinking about it, and then I can feel it sort of pressing against my teeth ...'
Sartre devoted an entire book to this experience – his 1938 novel Nausea in which his character Roquentin is alarmed to discover his own actuality. But Linus sums the point up very well in a few frames.

Over at the NewStatesman, I found a similarly interesting article about the importance of Peanuts:

Peanuts was part of my life because it was part of my parents' lives. On my father's dresser was a model of Lucy in a wooden booth, dispensing advice over the sign, "THE DOCTOR IS IN - 5 CENTS". My father was a preacher, a strong but gentle speaker with messages usually on the theme of "Be nice to each other". On one occasion, the church elders half-joked with him that he would be fired if he used Peanuts yet again in his sermon; the next Sunday, he opened with the story of Charlie Brown's eternal infatuation with the little red-haired girl. When life imitated Lucy's booth and he became a marriage and family counsellor, my father decorated his office with Peanuts posters. My mother, who taught high-school psychology, remembers the slogans on her posters - Charlie Brown complaining: "I've been nervous so long that, when I relax, it makes me nervous" and "Even my anxieties have anxieties".

And so perhaps I might benefit from a long afternoon's perusal of Peanuts strips, because as the PhilosophyNow article concludes:

While it is difficult to say what Sartre would have thought of Peanuts, we do know what Schulz thought of Sartre: “I read about him in the New York Times, where he said it was very difficult to be a human being, and the only way to fight against it is to lead an active life – that’s very true.” If any character has shown us the difficulties in existence, it is Charlie Brown

Foetus First?

2007-04-24T20:12:00.000+01:00

A couple of recent comments mentioned children and then I stumbled across this picture at DiscoverMagazine that just says it all. If reproducing is a way of achieving happiness, it's an absurdity nonetheless!

Cool Hand Socrates

2007-04-24T19:16:00.000+01:00

Talking of suicide, I came across an article today that I found quite entertaining. Called 'Escape from Anxiety' it is a discussion of existential anxiety as illustrated by the suicide of Socrates and the character of Luke (played by Paul Newman in the film 'Cool Hand Luke').

It couldn't help but peak my interest, considering that I had only recently learnt the story surrounding Socrates' demise. From Wikipedia:

[Socrates] was nevertheless found guilty for corrupting the youth of Athens and sentenced to death by drinking a mix of the poisonous hemlock. Socrates turned down the pleas of Crito to attempt an escape from prison. After drinking the poison, he was instructed to walk around until his limbs felt heavy. After lying down, the man who administered the poison pinched his foot. Socrates could no longer feel his legs. The numbness slowly crept up his body until it reached his heart. Shortly before dying, Socrates spoke his last words to Crito saying, "Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Please, don't forget to pay the debt." Asclepius was the Greek god for curing illness, and its likely that Socrates' last words were implied to mean that death is the cure, and freedom, of the soul from the body.

According to Xenophon and Plato, Socrates had an opportunity to escape, as his followers were able to bribe the prison guards. After escaping, Socrates would have had to flee from Athens. However, Socrates refused to escape for several reasons. 1. He believed that such a flight would indicate a fear of death, which he believed no true philosopher has. 2. Even if he did leave, he, and his teaching, would fare no better in another country. 3. Having knowingly agreed to live under the city's laws, he implicitly subjected himself to the possibility of being accused of crimes by its citizens and judged guilty by its jury. To do otherwise would have caused him to break his 'contract' with the state, and by so doing harming it, an act contrary to Socratic principle. The full reasoning behind his refusal to flee is the main subject of The Crito.

According to Xenophon's story of Socrates' defense to the jury, Socrates' purposefully gives a defiant defense to the jury because "he believed he would be better off dead." Xenophon's explanation goes on to describe a defense by Socrates that explains the rigors of old age, and how Socrates will be glad to circumvent these by being sentenced to death. It is also understood that Socrates not only wished to avoid the pains of old age, but also to die because he "actually believed the right time had come for him to die."

And you can find a more detailed account here. What is the plot of 'Cool Hand Luke'? If you've not seen it (and it's an interesting film, with poker to boot!) here is a brief synopsis, from Wikipedia:

Luke is sent to the prison camp for cutting the heads off parking meters one drunken night, and when asked what kind of thing that is for a man to do, his explanation is "Small town, not much to do in the evenin'. Mostly just settlin' up old scores." His unquenchable spirit makes the other prisoners idolize (and idealize) him, and leads to his Christ-like martyrdom at the hands of the authorities.

Luke is a man who could've done so very differently, but chose the only way he could find...

So what what does 'Escape from Anxiety' have to say about it all?:

While Socrates' life teaches about virtue, Luke's life teaches about nonconformity. Though these topics are worthy in themselves, Socrates' and Luke's lives more importantly show the absolute necessity of the life-saving anxiolytic affects offered by belief. Life begins free of anxiety, but developing rationality soon leads to an anxiety-crisis. By erecting all-encompassing belief systems, anxiety is abated. Consequently, if this analysis holds true, then life is anxiety-free when lived according to a belief system and anxiety-ridden when it is not. Death is preferable to a life ridden with anxiety. Ironically, then, in the cases of Socrates and Luke, survival in a life of anxiety requires attaining a belief system that leads to the death of those who hold it.

It goes on:

With Socratic virtue, every action is to be judged and rated according to its virtue. The most virtuous act is then chosen. Also, as Socrates' discovered, even thought and speech must be rated on a scale of virtue as well. Given the enormous number of actions and thoughts, virtue-based philosophy admirably serves the purpose of combating anxiety. Lukean nonconformity similarly serves this purpose well. Nonconformity for Luke mainly takes the form of repeated escapes, disrespecting authority figures on both the inside and outside of prison walls, and refusing to accept a superior position in the prison hierarchy for himself. The great amount of energy, both physical and mental, required by nonconformity more than offsets life's inherent preponderance of anxiety.

And finally:

Claiming that survival depends upon a belief system that directly produces death may seem counterintuitive, but this couterintuition is based on the misunderstood meaning of survival. As Socrates' says, "The most important thing is not life, but the good life." (48b) Life in itself is not worthwhile, only living the good life justly and virtuously is of any worth. If the good life is the virtuous life, then the good life is also synonymous with the life that most efficiently distracts against anxiety. Yet, distraction is subjective, so each individual must choose the belief system that "fits" him best. The sociological factors that contribute to the decision to choose one particular system (perhaps a religious revelation or an injustice) are irrelevant; simply put by Luke, "A man's got to go his own way sometimes." The important aspect is the fact that without this one belief system, life is not worth living. Socrates and Luke thus choose to die happily instead of living anxiously.

As each person encounters the anxiety-crisis, a belief system must be erected in order to overcome it. Consequently, the level of meaningfulness attributed to a belief is not based on the tenets of the belief itself, but the degree to which the belief reduces anxiety. In this simple inverse relationship, the stronger the belief, the more anxiety is reduced. However, knowledge of the latent purpose of this strong belief may weaken it, increasing anxiety. Conclusion: do not read this paper. Or, less elliptically stated, question your belief system and you will suffer the dreadful consequences!

Ha! Dreadful consequences indeed. So here distraction is offered as the route to happiness, through the abatement of anxiety. It sounds a nice idea, to get 'lost in life', but isn't it all a bit silly; dying for cutting the heads off parking meters or stoically drinking poison because of your beliefs? Ignorance is probably bliss, but it's also definitely ignorant too...

Suicide & Sisyphus

2007-04-24T15:15:00.000+01:00

I have always been interested in the very biggest of questions. Is there a god? Is there life after death? But ever so slowly I have been coming to the conclusion that the biggest question we face is whether to commit suicide or not, and over the last week I have been trying to get my head around Albert Camus' essay, 'The Myth of Sisyphus' which deals with the very same topic. In fact, on the first page Camus writes:

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question.

and continues:

One must brush everything aside and go straight to the real problem. One kills oneself because life is not worth living, that is certainly a truth - yet an unfruitful one because it is a truism. But does that insult to existence, that flat denial in which it is plunged come from the fact that is has no meaning? Does its absurdity require one to escape it through hope or suicide...Does the absurd dictate death?

Unlike the novels by Camus that I've recently read, 'The Myth of Sisyphus' is much harder going, and required two readings and lots of cogitating to ensure that I got the gist of it.

If I understand Camus correctly, essentially he argues that there is no point to existence, or meaning to life. Life is absurd. Most people ignore those facts and live their lives in delusion and hope (by believing in god, for example). But the absurd man understands his place in the universe and feels anxiety in the face of it. This anxiety is caused by feelings of how he hopes the world should be, and how the world actually is. We want there to be a god, a point, a meaning, a reason, immortality, but we find a hostile, lonely, pointless universe, indifferent to our survival, and this disparity drives the absurd man's angst.

Camus desires a real solution to this fundamental question. He doesn't want to just accept false hope because it is the easiest solution. And what does he conclude?:

There is thus a metaphysical honour in enduring the world's absurdity. Conquest or play-acting, multiple loves, absurd revolt are tributes that man pays to his dignity in a campaign in which he is defeated in advance. It is merely a matter of being faithful to the rule of battle. That thought may suffice to sustain a mind; it has supported and still supports whole civilizations. War cannot be negated. One must live it or die of it. So it is with the absurd: it is a question of breathing with it, of recognizing its lessons and recovering their flesh. In this regard the absurd joy par excellence is creation. 'Art and nothing but art,' said Nietzsche; 'we have art in order not to die of the truth.'

Camus uses the Myth of Sisyphus to illustrate his argument:

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.

It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.

You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward the lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.

It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.

If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Edipus, like Dostoevsky's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What!---by such narrow ways--?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. Discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

And my opinion is that I am not sold. Camus has failed to convince me that Sisyphus would indeed be happy, faced with unending torture (lest we forget that boredom and solitary confinement are tortures all the same). I don't have to imagine a happy Sisyphus, and in fact thinking about the myth, I can well imagine a bitter and depressed Sisyphus. Having attempted to prevent death, this is his repayment? To be taken away from his life and his family, and commanded by tyrannical gods to do meaningless work. 'Let me out of here! I demand to be freed.' 'Revolt indeed comrades! Wherefore art thou humanity?... ' And as time goes on, loneliness and futility set in. What is one step, up or down, when the journey is an infinite toil? Sisyphus may as well commit suicide now, because he hasn't got anything to look forward to, except maybe kindness from the gods and we can never be so lucky. What Sisyphus has, is the knowledge that his punishment is infinite. It then matters not whether he kills himself now, or in a hundred million steps. The choice will be his to make freely; the only power he has in his domain; to give up, when the pain gets too much (and deprive the gods of their sport).

In reality, no human can despair over an infinite punishment doled out by the gods. We are each given a finite sentence of life, without the certainty that Sisyphus is privilege to. Perhaps Sisyphus cannot commit suicide (and how do you know until you try) but human existence is not so assured. For those who find their existence a torture, suicide appears a legitimate response. Arguing that even in a mad deluded world, you should just fuck or make art (as Camus seems to suggest) is ludicrous. Give the monkey a banana, because I'm not impressed. If an absurd man wishes to make absurd art, then that is all well and good. But an absurd man who rejects false hope and absurd hobbies is left with complete nothingness. The choice then between inane pastimes and suicide is made much harder.

Existence is absurd. Suicide is absurd. None of us choose to be born. If we find the absurdity of existence too much to bear, at least the absurdity of suicide brings with it the end of angst and the end of absurdity. It seems Camus was right that suicide really is the greatest philosophical question. My own feelings on the matter are that either you play along and enjoy absurdity (to some degree) or you spend your life bitter, twisted and bored. Is suicide preferable to either solution, I really do not know?..

Big Bang to Man

2007-04-21T13:20:00.000+01:00

I'm already missing Carl Sagan's Cosmos, so here is one of the most important clips from the whole series. It tells the tale of the big bang to the evolution of man, in about 4 minutes and is exactly how my own mind visualises the universe and human history!

When you are watching it bear in mind that no god created the universe, made the earth or started life. As Carl says, it is all a big accident! And also remember that all of our ancestors are dead and one day, we will ourselves join that illustrious group of organisms, that came, saw and returned to non-existence...

Fat Louie on Precognition

2007-04-20T13:08:00.001+01:00

Let's take a step back in time. This clip is from the very first documentary I participated in, about the premonitions of David Mandell (who I've mentioned before) and is proof that only a few years ago, I really was a big, fat paranormal believer!

Bad Psychics!

2007-04-20T08:47:00.001+01:00

Here's something that might make you laugh (or cringe). The clip, posted on BadPsychics.com, is from a BBC show that I briefly appeared on, on Wednesday night. Called Nolan Live, I was supposed to be providing a sceptical opinion on the mediumship skills of Derek Acorah.

Unfortunately, it didn't quite go to plan, I got a bit flustered, and apparently the worst thing you can do on live TV is call heaven a load of rubbish and christianity a cult! All in all, it was a complete waste of time, and made me realise that the wider world just isn't going to change in my lifetime. People just don't want to hear that mediums are either deluded fools or charlatans, that there is no god or afterlife, and that everything is pointless.

This is why I gave up parapsychology and still believe discourse with believers is pointless! Good for a giggle though?...

Are Politicians Born Bad?

2007-04-18T12:21:00.000+01:00

I've been delaying this post for a while, because I wanted to discuss this topic after covering the origins of religion. However, here I am...

Now I've mentioned before that I believe there is a political element to religion that many authors often ignore. Religion has been used in the past, and is still used, as a method for keeping certain people ignorant and others in power. No doubt kingdoms were forged through brute force, whereas the priesthood gained power through stealth, and there have been groups of people throughout history, who have sought to prevent progress on the grounds of heresy. Proof that the great religions have a vested interest in maintaining a status quo. Of Ron Hubbard (the founder of scientology) it is said:

"... [Hubbard] began making statements to the effect that any writer who really wished to make money should stop writing and develop [a] religion, or devise a new psychiatric method. Harlan Ellison's version (Time Out, UK, No 332) is that Hubbard is reputed to have told [John W.] Campbell, "I'm going to invent a religion that's going to make me a fortune. I'm tired of writing for a penny a word."

So ha to the fools who fall for the tricks of charlatans! Moving on, in a recent post on psychopaths I asked:

isn't it intelligent to accrue resources and reproductive opportunities through deception, force and social manipulation? If you can get others to give you what you want, through the minimal effort on your part, isn't that an understandable strategy? And here I want to mention the idea of nefarious intentions: are there people who could be defined as a psychopath and yet choose to do what they do, understanding the ramifications? Are there people that just don't care, as long as they are okay? If you understand (or at least suspect) that everything is pointless, is there anything other than a man-made 'moral' code, which actually stops you from doing what you want?

And when I asked these questions I had certain people in mind. Interestingly, I recently discovered this article:

Cherie Blair and George W Bush have both eschewed typical light holiday reading this summer in favour of worthier tomes. Whereas Mrs Blair was pictured half way through the 800-page Postwar, an account of Europe’s recent history, President Bush got to grips with The Outsider, a philosophical novel by French intellectual Albert Camus.

And I admit that I do sometimes wonder whether the whole entire thing isn't an absurd joke. Bush reading Camus at Bohemian Grove. That is a genuinely scary thought.

I want to pose a serious question: Since men have known (or at least suspected) that everything is pointless for at least 2000 years or more, have certain individuals seen humanity as fair game to manipulate and control, to further their own ends? If one man's machine is another man's slave, isn't it at least possible that the modern world is in some part a contrived and absurd corruption, enforced on the majority? If I made a race of robots to do my bidding, would I be a bad man? What if I raised humans to the same ends?

Another, admittedly kooky but interesting documentary is Freedom to Fascism, which, despite some reviews I'd read, is worth watching and raises some interesting points. Here something I quoted recently from H.G. Wells is relevant:

if it is true that the majority of able spirits among the contemporary rich are, for the sake of power and preeminence, deliberately impoverishing a community which need not be impoverished, then the conception pervading this book of the progressive construction of a universally prosperous economic world community out of the current social order, is unsound. There is nothing to be hoped for along that line. There is nothing for it but, as the Marxists teach, a class war against the rich and the able, social insurrection, the breaking up of the whole contemporary organization of mankind in wrath and disgust, and beginning again upon a different ground plan, with whatever hope is left to us, amidst the ruins.

And I can't help but imagine, that if Herbert Wells were alive today, he'd be very suspicious of all the warmongering and a lot less optimistic about the fate of humanity.

Finally, are politicians born bad?:

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.

No Treason

2007-04-17T22:28:00.000+01:00

People being murdered is hardly a newsworthy event (except perhaps to the few involved), but I've already noticed the US Constitution being brought out to defend the right to bear arms. The argument goes that if the college students had had concealed weapons, somebody would have averted the slaughter, Jack Bower style.

All well and good, but certainly I can't imagine the same kind of loss of life if the murderer had only had a club at his disposal. Weapons makers must take some responsibility.

That being said, I also can't imagine a world without firearms, and certainly understand the strong feeling some have, in wanting to preserve their very existence. You only have one life and it is entirely reasonable to prevent other humans taking it!

Turning then to the US Constitution, I recently found this fascinating text by Lysander Spooner, called No Treason, which questions the very authority of the US Constitution and raises serious points about governments in general. Some extracts:

The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing. It purports, at most, to be only a contract between persons living eighty years ago. And it can be supposed to have been a contract then only between persons who had already come to years of discretion, so as to be competent to make reasonable and obligatory contracts. Furthermore, we know, historically, that only a small portion even of the people then existing were consulted on the subject, or asked, or permitted to express either their consent or dissent in any formal manner. Those persons, if any, who did give their consent formally, are all dead now. Most of them have been dead forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy years. And the Constitution, so far as it was their contract, died with them. They had no natural power or right to make it obligatory upon their children. It is not only plainly impossible, in the nature of things, that they could bind their posterity, but they did not even attempt to bind them. That is to say, the instrument does not purport to be an agreement between any body but "the people" then existing; nor does it, either expressly or impliedly, assert any right, power, or disposition, on their part, to bind anybody but themselves.

... It is obvious that, on general principles of law and reason, there exists no such thing as a government created by, or resting upon, any consent, compact, or agreement of "the people of the United States" with each other; that the only visible, tangible, responsible government that exists, is that of a few individuals only, who act in concert, and call themselves by the several names of senators, representatives, presidents, judges, marshals, treasurers, collectors, generals, colonels, captains, etc., etc.
On general principles of law and reason, it is of no importance whatever that those few individuals profess to be the agents and representatives of "the people of the United States"; since they can show no credentials from the people themselves; they were never appointed as agents or representatives in any open, authentic manner; they do not themselves know, and have no means of knowing, and cannot prove, who their principals (as they call them) are individually; and consequently cannot, in law or reason, be said to have any principals at all.

It is obvious, too, that if these alleged principals ever did appoint these pretended agents, or representatives, they appointed them secretly (by secret ballot), and in a way to avoid all personal responsibility for their acts; that, at most, these alleged principals put these pretended agents forward for the most criminal purposes, viz.: to plunder the people of their property, and restrain them of their liberty; and that the only authority that these alleged principals have for so doing, is simply a tacit understanding among themselves that they will imprison, shoot, or hang every man who resists the exactions and restraints which their agents or representatives may impose upon them.

Thus it is obvious that the only visible, tangible government we have is made up of these professed agents or representatives of a secret band of robbers and murderers, who, to cover up, or gloss over, their robberies and murders, have taken to themselves the title of "the people of the United States"; and who, on the pretense of being "the people of the United States," assert their right to subject to their dominion, and to control and dispose of at their pleasure, all property and persons found in the United States.
...What is important to be noticed is, that these so-called presidents, senators, and representatives, these pretended agents of all "the people of the United States," the moment their exactions meet with any formidable resistance from any portion of "the people" themselves, are obliged, like their co-robbers and murderers in Europe, to fly at once to the lenders of blood money, for the means to sustain their power. And they borrow their money on the same principle, and for the same purpose, viz., to be expended in shooting down all those "people of the United States"--their own constituents and principals, as they profess to call them--who resist the robberies and enslavement which these borrowers of the money are practising upon them. And they expect to repay the loans, if at all, only from the proceeds of the future robberies, which they anticipate it will be easy for them and their successors to perpetrate through a long series of years, upon their pretended principals, if they can but shoot down now some hundreds of thousands of them, and thus strike terror into the rest. Perhaps the facts were never made more evident, in any country on the globe, than in our own, that these soulless blood-money loan-mongers are the real rulers; that they rule from the most sordid and mercenary motives; that the ostensible government, the presidents, senators, and representatives, so called, are merely their tools; and that no ideas of, or regard for, justice or liberty had anything to do in inducing them to lend their money for the war.

And I couldn't believe this was written in 1870, not the modern day. How disappointing that times have little changed!

The Right To Be Lazy

2007-04-17T14:02:00.000+01:00

Today, I happened upon an interesting person, Paul Lafargue, who (according to Wikipedia) was:

a French revolutionary Marxist socialist journalist, political writer and activist; he was Karl Marx's son-in-law, having married his second daughter Laura. His best known work is The Right to Be Lazy. Born in Santiago de Cuba of a Franco-Caribbean family, Lafargue spent most of his life in France, with periods in England and Spain. At the age of 69, he and Laura died together in a suicide pact.

And I was intrigued about this man. What had Marx's son-in-law actually argued, in 'The Right to Be Lazy'? Thankfully I discovered an online version and recommend it as a very thought provoking and entertaining read. Some extracts:

A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. Blind and finite men, they have wished to be wiser than their God; weak and contemptible men, they have presumed to rehabilitate what their God had cursed.

...Jesus, in his sermon on the Mount, preached idleness: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” Jehovah the bearded and angry god, gave his worshippers the supreme example of ideal laziness; after six days of work, he rests for all eternity.

...Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption.

...Speaking of the labor of the workshop, Villermé adds: “It is not a work, a task, it is a torture and it is inflicted on children of six to eight years. It is this long torture day after day which wastes away the laborers in the cotton spinning factories”. And as to the duration of the work Villermé observes, that the convicts in prisons work but ten hours, the slaves in the west Indies work but nine hours, while there existed in France after its Revolution of 1789, which had proclaimed the pompous Rights of Man “factories where the day was sixteen hours, out of which the laborers were allowed only an hour and a half for meals.” What a miserable abortion of the revolutionary principles of the bourgeoisie! What woeful gifts from its god Progress! The philanthropists hail as benefactors of humanity those who having done nothing to become rich, give work to the poor. Far better were it to scatter pestilence and to poison the springs than to erect a capitalist factory in the midst of a rural population. Introduce factory work, and farewell joy, health and liberty; farewell to all that makes life beautiful and worth living.

...“The prejudice of slavery dominated the minds of Pythagoras and Aristotle,” – this has been written disdainfully; and yet Aristotle foresaw: “that if every tool could by itself execute its proper function, as the masterpieces of Daedalus moved themselves or as the tripods of Vulcan set themselves spontaneously at their sacred work; if for example the shuttles of the weavers did their own weaving, the foreman of the workshop would have no more need of helpers, nor the master of slaves.”
Aristotle’s dream is our reality. Our machines, with breath of fire, with limbs of unwearying steel, with fruitfulness, wonderful inexhaustible, accomplish by themselves with docility their sacred labor. And nevertheless the genius of the great philosophers of capitalism remains dominated by the prejudice of the wage system, worst of slaveries. They do not yet understand that the machine is the saviour of humanity, the god who shall redeem man from the sordidae artes and from working for hire, the god who shall give him leisure and liberty.
...Like Christ, the doleful personification of ancient slavery, the men, the women and the children of the proletariat have been climbing painfully for a century up the hard Calvary of pain; for a century compulsory toil has broken their bones, bruised their flesh, tortured their nerves; for a century hunger has torn their entrails and their brains. O Laziness, have pity on our long misery! O Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish!

It seems Lafargue was correct about a lot of things and funnily enough, earlier this week, I left this comment at the interesting blog, Duplicitous Primates:

...this evening I watched the episode [of Cosmos] where [Carl Sagan] discusses the possibility of extraterrestrial life and why there aren't aliens visiting us already. Unfortunately he neglects the possibility that when a species attains enough scientific knowledge and understands that everything is pointless, it doesn't see the value in making the huge effort to visit another bunch of equally pointless beings.

And maybe the really clever species are the ones that sort out the big problems, and then sit back (take the phone of the hook) and relax...

The Outlook of Mankind

2007-04-16T17:02:00.000+01:00

Here's an extract from 'The Work, Wealth & Happiness of Mankind' by H.G. Wells:

Uncertainties in the Human Outlook

Let us before we conclude devote a section to the possibility that this human adventure will fail. We have no guarantee against many sorts of cosmic disaster. There is the risk, an infinitesimal but real risk, of meteoric bodies hurtling through our system, bodies so large and coming so near to us as to destroy our planet as a home for life. So remote is such a mischance that Sir James Jeans can dismiss it as negligible. If the lot falls against us in spite of the odds, there is nothing to be said or done. Fate will end the story.

But other sinister possibilities, less catastrophic but in the end as decisive, are not so easily dismissed. We still know very little of the secular changes of climate, and it is conceivable that in quite a few years, in a hundred thousand or a thousand thousand, that is to say, this planet may be returning to a phase of widespread glaciation, or temperature may be rising to universal tropical and ultra-tropical conditions. Within the sun, for all we know, explosive forces are brewing - or on our earth itself - to heat or chill or shatter. Or again, if steady urgencies of upheaval and disturbance are not still astir under the feet of our race, the rains and rivers and waves will presently wear down our mountains and hills and flatten out our lands until one monotonous landscape of plains of exhausted soil and swamps and lagoons of tepid water has replaced the familiar scenery of our time. Or if these terrestrial tensions increase, our race will pass into a period of volcanic violence and earthquakes, forces from within breaking loose to thrust up new mountain chains and giving fresh directions to wind and sea current, and beyond adjustment.

Here plainly we are still under the sway of the Fates. Presently we may be able to foretell; later we may even control such fluctuations, but certainly the sun and planets and our little globe have their own motions and changes regardless of our needs and desires. The cards as they are played are being swept up for a fresh deal. The hand our race must play to-morrow may be very different from the hand we play to-day. There are no fixed conditions to human life, and if this new-born world community of ours is to go on through vast periods of time, man will have to be for ever guessing new riddles. Will he be able to get so far with his science as map out at length in their due order all the coming throws of the planetary roulette? Or get a mastery of the wheel? There will have to be an encyclopedia of knowledge for such feats as that, vaster than anything we can dream of to-day. There will have to be a mightier sort of man, very marvellously educated, and perhaps by virtue of an advancing science of eugenics innately better, to do things on that scale.

Such are the difficulties and problems for our descendants, that must slowly develop themselves age by age, even if they solve the riddles of our present civilization. But will mankind ever solve these immediate problems? There was recently published a very suggestive and amusing book by Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men. It is an imaginary history upon an astronomical scale of the future of humanity, a grimly cheerful mixture of biology, burlesque and satire. He sees our present species blundering through some further great wars and unified at last under American rule into one world state, a world state of a harshly plutocratic type which undergoes an entirely incredible moral and intellectual degeneration and ends in a new Dark Age. Homo sapiens is then practically exterminated by a catastrophe he has himself provoked, and only a few individuals survive obscurely to become the progenitors of two species of Homo who presently increase and come into conflict. The remoter speculations of Mr. Stapledon about the succession of latter Hominidae and their final extinction, vivid and amusing though they are, and stimulating as they will prove to those unversed in biological and cosmological possibilities, need not be discussed here. But the nearer issues he broaches do pose very disturbingly the considerable probability of a failure in our contemporary civilization to anticipate and prevent fresh world warfare and an economic crash. I see that possible economic crash nearer and larger and more important that he does, as a greater menace, indeed, than the militant nationalism from which it arises. But I believe in human sanity more than he does, I believe that that widely diffused will and understanding which I have termed "open conspiracy" may be strong enough to carry the race through the economic stresses ahead of us, and to delay, minimize and finally repulse the onset of war.

There has been a great quickening of the general intelligence about political and economic life in recent years, and the man of action and the man of thought have been drawn nearer together. There may be some dark chapters in human history still to be written, and provisional governments and a mightier Judge Lynch may figure in the drama. The forces that will carry on, develop and realize the abounding promise of our present civilization are by no means sure of victory; they may experience huge and tragic set-backs; but the balance of probability seems to be largely in their favour. If they win out, it will be men of our own kind, better, according to our present values, but men still - not beings specifically different and beyond our sympathy - who with a whole planet organized for the conflict will face greater problems, the long-period problems of terrestrial and cosmic changes which advance upon us behind the skirmishing dangers of to-day.

But nothing is certain. Men may breed and bicker too long, be overtaken by some swift universal epidemic they have had no time to arrest, perish of a phosphorous famine, or be destroyed by some war machine they have had the ability to invent but not the intelligence to control. In the Mesozoic Age great reptiles multiplied and dominated the earth, and suddenly they passed away. In the Miocene flourished countless varieties of huge mammals, now altogether extinguished. Why should we suppose that we are specially favoured items in the spectacle of existence. Millions of us are wearied, chased about, heartbroken, wounded and killed, for no evident good, in war; millions are destroyed by accidents without apparent reason or justice; beasts of prey in India and Africa slay and eat their thousands of "man the master" every year; millions die in unalleviated pain through a multitude of cruel diseases. Is there any difference in quality between one single case of a dear human being killed by cancer and the murder of a world? It is simply a difference of numbers and scale. If the universe can kill a child unjustly, so it can kill a race or a planet unjustly. If so many individual lives end tragically, why should not the whole species end tragically?

We may say, "It shall not", but what weight have such words?

The Plague

2007-04-14T19:14:00.000+01:00

Over a couple of recent posts I touched on the topic of the holocaust and declared that I had sympathy for those who found themselves depressed or angered in that situation. This week I've been reading a book which deals with another kind of concentration camp, but this time, instead of being manned by psychopathic Nazis, Albert Camus' 'The Plague' is a story of a town held siege by a particularly destructive form of bubonic plague. This is the second novel by Camus that I've read and again I was very impressed. It is a compelling tale of a normal cosmopolitan town on the Algerian coast, which is slowly overcome by a pestilence of biblical proportions. At first the occupants of the town are merely morbidly curious about the large numbers of dead rats, which pile in the streets, oozing blood. But when people begin to die and the town is quarantined from the rest of existence, all of the people of Oran find themselves at the mercy of a disease that kills without discrimination.

And I was struck at the contrast between Camus' hypothetical battle between man and bacterium, and the real life horrors of the holocaust. If the numbers of humans who had been killed due to war, stood opposite those who had been killed due to disease, surely the sick would outnumber the war-dead by many factors? And so, though we may not find ourselves in a concentration camp run by Nazis, we all (as one of the characters himself declares) carry the plague. But the plague is also not just an example of man's seemingly endless fight against disease (great as that fight is), but also a metaphor for life itself. In the midst of life, we are in death. The coming of the plague removed the blindfold from the eyes of the townspeople and revealed the stark reality of existence: that death is a certainty and existence is absurd!

The plague itself is ever present in the novel, although the reader rarely has to deal with it directly. Much of the book describes the behaviour of a few different men: a journalist trapped in the unfamiliar town, desperate to return to his wife outside the walls. The atheist doctor, who tries to help people and deal with the here and now. There are also some absurd characters, like a man who attempts suicide, whose mood improves greatly when everyone else is struck down by despair. And there is a whimsical author, who desperately attempts to forge a perfect paragraph (chopping and changing it often, and usually with very little difference) only to throw the whole thing on the fire when he is finally struck down with the plague.

One of the most interesting characters is a clergyman, who gives a rousing speech when the pestilence first begins to take victims, arguing that the townspeople had brought it on themselves. After witnessing the horrible suffering and death of a small child, the same clergyman was roused to even greater heights of religious fervour. An extract:

The preacher paused, and Rieux heard more clearly the whistling of the wind outside; judging by the sounds that came in below the closed doors, it had risen to storm-pitch. Then he heard Father Paneloux's voice again. He was saying that the total acceptance of which he had been speaking was not to be taken in the limited sense usually given to the words; he was not thinking of mere resignation or even of that harder virtue, humility. It involved humiliation, but a humiliation to which the person humiliated gave full assent. True, the agony of a child was humiliating to the heart and to the mind. But that was why we had to come to terms with it. And that, too, was why - and here Paneloux assured those present that it was not easy to say what he was about to say - since it was God's will, we, too, should will it. Thus and thus only the Christian could face the problem squarely and, scorning subterfuge, pierce the heart of the supreme issue, the essential choice. And his choice would be to believe everything, so as not to be forced into denying everything. Like those worthy women who, after learning that buboes were the natural tissue through which the body cast out infection, went to church and prayed, 'Please, God, give him buboes,' thus the Christian should yield himself wholly to the divine will, even though it passed his understanding.

How impotent religion is, in the face of natural selection! I thoroughly enjoyed 'The Plague' (if enjoyed is quite the right word) and it helped me to imagine how I would feel, imprisoned within a town, where everyone was slowly dying. If my loved ones too, were struck down with the fatal disease and taken away to die alone, what else could I do, but shake my fist in the air and berate existence? As the book notes on closing, plagues come, but never really go; they merely lay dormant waiting for another opportunity to exact more destruction in the future...

I'll end with one of Camus' amusing examples of the odd things that people do to fill their time between Point A (birth) to Point B (death):

From Tarrou's notes we gather that the old man, a draper by occupation, decided at the age of fifty that he'd done enough work for a lifetime. He took to his bed and never left it again - but not because of his asthma, which would not have prevented his getting about. A small fixed income had seen him through to his present age, seventy-five, and the years had not damped his cheerfulness. He couldn't bear the sight of a watch, and indeed there wasn't one in the whole house. 'Watches,' he said 'are silly gadgets, and dear at that.' He worked out the time - that is to say, the time for meals - with his two saucepans, one of which was always full of peas when he woke in the morning. He filled the other, pea by pea, at a constant, carefully regulated speed. Thus time for him was reckoned by these pans and he could take his bearings in it at any moment of the day. 'Every fifteen pans,' he said, 'it's feeding-time. What could be simpler?'

What indeed?

Angst Aid

2007-04-12T17:50:00.000+01:00

I'm an angsty guy, and the last couple of posts have inspired me to find out more about existential therapy. In doing so I happened upon an interesting paper, called 'Existential Anxiety and Existential Joy'. How could I resist? An extract:

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. Friedrich Nietzsche

Many existentialists (although by all means not all of them) concur with the view that life is essentially meaningless. A leading existential therapist (Spinelli), for example, writes:

Viewed from a wide variety of perspectives one could rightly conclude that life itself is a pointless enterprise. (2001, p.9)

On the other hand, a number of existential psychologists point out that humans require meaning to survive (see, for example, Frankl, 1970, 1978; Yalom, 1980). One can easily feel lost in a meaningless world which can be a great source of anxiety. The most frequent reason given for suicide is that the person has no purpose for which to continue living (Farber, 1968). So, even if we agree with Spinelli’s overconfident claim that there is no meaning of life, creating meaning in one’s life needs to be considered.

And the paper goes on to argue that:

existential anxiety can be transcended and replaced with a sense of existential joy. This requires having a frame of mind that is characterised by the synthesis of opposites (such as predictability and uncertainty, being and nothingness, life and death, individuality and belonging, etc.). This is not to say that this frame of mind makes life a bed of roses. A person with such an attitude will still at times experience unpleasant feelings or be unhappy, but if she does not allow herself to be thrown back in the world of opposites, the underlying feeling of joy can be maintained, which would give her the capacity to face whatever comes without anxiety.

So here I nail my colours to the mast. If tomorrow, I were whisked away to a desert island, allowed to live in peace, with a coconut tree on one side and a breadfruit tree on the other, I might attain happiness for a short while. Nothing like the existential joy that the paper talks about, but perhaps for a short time I might be allowed to enjoy, relatively stress free, that singularly unique experience that is, being alive.

However, such a satisfied state will not last forever, and sooner or later something bad is going to happen. My body will age and begin to fail, and then that fear of death kicks back in, leaving me berating existence until the last breath.

I therefore disagree that existential joy is achieved through transcending existential anxiety. It is merely the potential highpoint of a trajectory, from nothing, back to nothing. It is little wonder that people try their hardest to avoid the truth. What choice do you really have?

But at last I can recommend a minor aid to those who suffer existential angst, as I do! One of my symptoms is an incessant grinding of my teeth, as I sleep. I hardly remember my dreams, but I have the strong feeling that I continue my angst into sleep, and after too long waking up with a mouthful of ground enamel (and the realization that I am slowly losing my teeth, through stealth) I was advised to visit a dentist. Who provided me with a gum shield, and now for the first time in a long time, I have been sleeping like a baby. The guard is already a little mangled, but at least my teeth are spared for now!

So although it doesn't give me existential joy, it does give me some minor existential/dental relief...

Life Is Beautiful

2007-04-11T14:25:00.000+01:00

In my last post I briefly discussed Viktor Frankl and his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp, which led him to conclude that even in the midst of so much suffering, there is still meaning to be found in existence. Here's another extract from his book, 'Man's Search For Meaning' (source):

We who lived, in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

And I asked the questions:

If you're in a concentration camp, isn't it okay to be pissed off at the Nazi's for coming along and taking away your freedoms and very likely your existence too? Is it really 'best' to face such adversities with a smile, or is it okay to be depressed by the fact that 'life is [can be] a piece of shit, and then you die?

So last night I decided to watch a film I haven't seen in many years, called 'Life is Beautiful'. It's the very Chaplinesque story of a lovable, bumbling Jewish waiter who falls in love with a girl and ends up in a concentration camp, with his young son.

As the clip shows, in the face of adversity, Guido was chirpy to the very end and so, represents the kind of person that Frankl was describing.

But after watching 'Life is Beautiful' again, nothing has changed with me. If it were me instead of Frankl or Guido, I would be angry. Angry that others had split me up from my family, were abusing me and my loved ones, and that they had no other plans but to kill us. In those circumstances I feel justified in being angry at other people. Without other humans to make the weapons, the ammunition, to serve as soldiers, or support an inhumane regime, none of it would have happened.

And to be honest, the horrors of the concentration camp are merely the end of a spectrum of interference and abuse by humans on humans, which occurs daily...

Frankl's Search for Meaning

2007-04-10T00:34:00.000+01:00

Thanks to a recent comment left by Pablo, I was put onto the work of Viktor Frankl, who, according to Wikipedia:

was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist as well as a Holocaust survivor. Frankl was the founder of logotherapy and Existential Analysis, the "Third Viennese School" of psychotherapy. His book Man's Search for Meaning (first published in 1946) chronicles his experiences as a concentration camp inmate and describes his psychotherapeutic method of finding meaning in all forms of existence, even the most sordid ones, and thus a reason to continue living. He was one of the key figures in existential therapy.

And I was surprised that I had never heard of Frankl or existential therapy before. Here is a small extract from 'Man's Search For Meaning' (source):

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way — an honorable way — in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."

What if you don't want to love? Or don't have anyone to love? What about those who reject love as just another of life's illusions? What about those who are bitter, and those who find happiness in other people's suffering? What about those who don't believe in honour?

If you're in a concentration camp, isn't it okay to be pissed off at the Nazi's for coming along and taking away your freedoms and very likely your existence too? Is it really 'best' to face such adversities with a smile, or is it okay to be depressed by the fact that 'life is [can be] a piece of shit, and then you die?

I'm intrigued by Frankl's story, and he looks worthy of further investigation. That being said, his conclusion 'all you need is love' is a familiar one, and I guess not far removed from, everything is pointless, be happy...

Poincaré's Pleasure

2007-04-08T21:34:00.000+01:00

According to Wikipedia, Jules Henri Poincaré:

was one of France's greatest mathematicians and theoretical physicists, and a philosopher of science. Poincaré is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as 'The Last Universalist', since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime. As a mathematician and physicist, he made many original fundamental contributions to pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and celestial mechanics. He was responsible for formulating the Poincaré conjecture, one of the most famous problems in mathematics.

In his research on the three-body problem, Poincaré became the first person to discover a chaotic deterministic system which laid the foundations of modern chaos theory. He is considered to be one of the founders of the field of topology. Poincaré introduced the modern principle of relativity and was the first to present the Lorentz transformations in their modern symmetrical form. Poincaré discovered the remaining relativistic velocity transformations and recorded them in a letter to Lorentz in 1905. Thus he obtained perfect invariance of all of Maxwell's equations, the final step in the formulation of the theory of special relativity.

And Poincaré apparently came up with this:

The Scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it; and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing and life would not be worth living. . . .

Universes Within Universes

2007-04-08T16:32:00.000+01:00

I'm nearing the end of my Cosmos adventure and I again recommend getting hold of a copy, if you've never seen it. Here are a couple of very interesting extracts from the book of the series:

...very likely, the universe has been expanding since the Big Bang, but it is by no means clear that it will continue to expand forever. The expansion may gradually slow, stop and reverse itself. If there is less than a certain critical amount of matter in the universe, the gravitation of the receding galaxies will be insufficient to stop the expansion, and the universe will run away forever. But if there is more matter than we can see - hidden away in black holes, say, or in hot but invisible gas between the galaxies - then the universe will hold together gravitationally and partake of a very Indian succession of cycles, expansion followed by contraction, universe upon universe, Cosmos without end. If we live in such an oscillating universe, then the Big Bang is not the creation of the Cosmos but merely the end of the previous cycle, the destruction of the last incarnation of the Cosmos.

Neither of these modern cosmologies may be altogether to our liking. In one, the universe is created, somehow, ten or twenty billion years ago and expands forever, the galaxies mutually receding until the last one disappears over our cosmic horizon. Then the galactic astronomers are out of business, the stars cool and die, matter itself decays and the universe becomes a thin cold haze of elementary particles. In the other, the oscillating universe, the Cosmos has no beginning and no end, and we are in the midst of an infinite cycle of cosmic deaths and rebirths with no information trickling through the cusps of the oscillation. Nothing of the galaxies, stars, planets, life forms or civilizations evolved in the previous incarnation of the universe oozes into the cusp, flutters past the Big Bang, to be known in our present universe. The fate of the universe in either cosmology may seem a little depressing, but we may take solace in the time scales involved. These events will occupy tens of billions of years, or more. Human beings and our descendants, whoever they might be, can accomplish a great deal in tens of billions of years, before the Cosmos dies.

And slightly further on:

There is an idea - strange, haunting, evocative - one of the most exquisite conjectures in science or religion. It is entirely undemonstrated; it may never be proved.

But it stirs the blood. There is, we are told, an infinite hierarchy of universes, so that an elementary particle, such as an electron, in our universe would, if penetrated, reveal itself to be an entire closed universe. Within it, organized into the local equivalent of galaxies and smaller structures, are an immense number of other, much tinier elementary particles, which are themselves universe at the next level, and so on forever - an infinite downward regression, universes within universes, endlessly. And upward as well. Our familiar universe of galaxies and stars, planets and people, would be a single elementary particle in the next universe up, the first step of another infinite regress.

Much as I love Carl, isn't that just mind-bogglingly absurd?

Cosmos

2007-04-07T10:17:00.000+01:00

One of the reasons I've been feeling uninspired this week is because I've been watching Carl Sagan's amazing 13 episode documentary, Cosmos. It really is a fantastic series and I was surprised to learn quite a lot of new information from it (despite being nearly thirty years old).

So why do I find myself uninspired, by one of the most inspiring of our species? Because Carl is just so giddy about it all. He finds wonder and beauty, where I only see a huge, old universe that cares not for our affairs.

I was trying to understand Carl's optimism and found this extract from a biography:

All his life, Carl Sagan was troubled by grand dichotomies—between reason and irrationalism, between wonder and skepticism. The dichotomies clashed within him. He yearned to believe in marvelous things—in flying saucers, in Martians, in glistening civilizations across the Milky Way. Yet reason usually brought him back to Earth. Usually; not always. A visionary dreams of a better world than this one. He refuses to think that modern society and its trappings—money, marriage, children, a nine-to-five career, and obeisance to a waving flag and an inscrutable God—are all there is. Sagan was blinded, but not by these. He was blinded by the sheer glory of the new cosmos that was unveiled by science during the first two decades of his life. This cosmos was an ever-expanding, unbounded wonderland of billions of galaxies. And across the light-years, Sagan dreamed, random molecular jigglings had perhaps spawned creeping, crawling, thinking creatures on alien landscapes bathed in the glow of alien suns.

And I found this sentence from a NY Times review of two biographies of Carl:

Both books delight in the discovery that Sagan smoked bales of marijuana and attributed to the weed vital moments of intellectual inspiration.

So Carl Sagan was another who wanted to get high and sail the stars. In Cosmos he is a happy chappy dreamer which is all well and good, but even Hunter S. Thompson, blew out his brains in the end:

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt"

Nihilism, Transhumanism & Hedonism

2007-04-07T09:40:00.000+01:00

A couple of months ago I was sent a rather cryptic email suggesting that I check out the work of Aubrey de Grey, who (according to his Wikipedia page) is:

a controversial biomedical gerontologist who lives in the city of Cambridge, UK. He is working to expedite the development of a cure for human ageing, a medical goal he refers to as engineered negligible senescence. To this end, he has identified what he concludes are the seven areas of the aging process that need to be addressed medically before this can be done. He has been interviewed in recent years in many news sources, including CBS 60 Minutes, BBC, the New York Times, Fortune Magazine, and Popular Science. His main activities at present are as chairman and chief science officer of the Methuselah Foundation and editor-in-chief of the academic journal Rejuvenation Research.

So he's an interesting fellow, and his website (Sens.org ) has more in-depth information about his plans for curing aging. I also discovered that de Grey was the winner of the 2004 H.G. Wells Award for Outstanding Transhumanist of the Year, which, according to Transhumanism.org:

is conferred annually by the WTA Board of Directors on the person who has made the most outstanding contributions to the transhumanist cause in the previous year.

Given my great admiration for H.G. Wells I was suitably impressed.

This week I was searching around for information on nihilism and discovered a couple of interesting sites, including an entry in the Internet Encylopedia of Philosophy:

In The Dark Side: Thoughts on the Futility of Life (1994), Alan Pratt demonstrates that existential nihilism, in one form or another, has been a part of the Western intellectual tradition from the beginning. The Skeptic Empedocles' observation that "the life of mortals is so mean a thing as to be virtually un-life," for instance, embodies the same kind of extreme pessimism associated with existential nihilism. In antiquity, such profound pessimism may have reached its apex with Hegesis. Because miseries vastly outnumber pleasures, happiness is impossible, the philosopher argues, and subsequently advocates suicide. Centuries later during the Renaissance, William Shakespeare eloquently summarized the existential nihilist's perspective when, in this famous passage near the end of Macbeth, he has Macbeth pour out his disgust for life:
Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

I couldn't really hope to say it better, could I? I next happened upon a site which I had quite a hard time understanding, that asks the question, 'Why does anything exist?' The site (Hedweb.com) is home to UK philosopher David Pearce, who has this to say:

The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life.The abolitionist project is hugely ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and morally urgent. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved because they served the fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture - a motivational system based on heritable gradients of bliss. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health.It is predicted that the world's last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable event.

Two hundred years ago, powerful synthetic pain-killers and surgical anesthetics were unknown. The notion that physical pain could be banished from most people's lives would have seemed absurd. Today most of us in the developed world take its routine absence for granted. The prospect that what we describe as psychological pain, too, could be banished is equally counter-intuitive. The feasibility of its abolition turns its deliberate retention into an issue of social policy and ethical choice.

Recently I posted this paragraph:

eventually a species that solves all of its problems will succumb to an eternal tedium: if death, illness, poverty, need and pain are eventually abolished, won't existence merely progress until everyone just sits around pressing the button to stimulate the electrodes in their brains (because they've heard all the stories, and it's still more fun than anything else)?

And this is what Pearce appears to hope for. A future where everyone is doped up to their eyeballs on happiness pills. Do we commit suicide as the nihilists often seem to conclude, or do we put our efforts into the transhumanist endeavour (and work to eliminate pain, suffering, illness and death) only to end up with a species of happiness junkies? Did humanity really do all it did, so its descendants could be permanently stoned?

Finally, as if to give this story an ending of sorts, according to Wikipedia, David Pearce also set up the World Transhumanist Association (the organisation that gives out the H.G. Wells award, that was given to Aubrey de Grey). And another day goes by, where I appreciate the absurdity of existence, just that little bit more...

The Death of Turing

2007-04-04T16:09:00.000+01:00

I'm feeling a little uninspired at the moment, so today I turned once again to the 'The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics', in which I found this extract from Andrew Hodges' biography of Alan Turing (Alan Turing: The Enigma):

Alan Turing's death came as a shock to those who knew him. It fell into no clear sequence of events. Nothing was explicit - there was no warning, no note of explanation. It seemed an isolated act of self-annihilation. That he was an unhappy, tense person; that he was consulting a psychiatrist and had suffered a blow that would have felled many people - all this was clear. But the trial was two years in the past, the hormone treatment had ended a year before, and he seemed to have risen above it all. There was no simple connection in the minds of those who had seen him in the previous two years. On the contrary, his reaction had been so different from the wilting, disgraced, fearful, hopeless figure expected by fiction and drama, that those who had seen it could hardly believe that he was dead. He was simply "not the type" for suicide. But those who resisted a stereotyped association of the trial in 1952 with the death in 1954 perhaps forgot that suicide did not have to be interpreted in terms of weakness or shame. As Alan had quoted Oscar Wilde in 1941, it could be the brave man that did it with a sword.

The inquest, on 10 June, established that it was suicide. The evidence was perfunctory, not for any irregular reason, but because it was so transparently clear a case. He had been found lying neatly in his bed by Mrs. C- when she came in at five o'clock on Tuesday 8 June (She would normally have been in on the Monday, but it was the Whitsun bank holiday, and she had had a day off.) There was froth round his mouth, and the pathologist who did the post-mortem that evening easily identified the cause of death as cyanide poisoning, and put the time of death as on the Monday night. In the house was a jar of potassium cyanide, and also a jam jar of a cyanide solution. By the side of his bed was half an apple, out of which several bites had been taken. They did not analyse the apple, and so it was never properly established that, as seemed perfectly obvious, the apple had been dipped in the cyanide...

Anyone arguing that it was an accident would have had to admit that it was certainly one of suicidal folly. Alan Turing himself would have been fascinated by the difficulty in drawing a line between accident and suicide, a line defined only by a conception of free will. Interested as he was by the idea of attaching a random element into a computer, a "roulette wheel", to give it the appearance of freedom, there might conceivably have been some Russian roulette aspect to his end. But even if this were so, his body was not one of a man fighting for his life against the suffocation induced by cyanide poisoning. It was that of one resigned to death.

Like Snow White, he ate a poisoned apple, dipped in the witches' brew. But what were the ingredients of the brew? What would a less artificial inquest have made of his last years. It would depend upon the level of description, "not the will of man as such but our presentation of it." To ask what caused his death is like asking what caused the First World War: a pistol shot, the railway timetables, the armament race, or the logic of nationalism could all be held accountable. At one level the atoms were simply moving according to physical law; at other levels there was mystery; at another, a kind of inevitability...

The God Part of the Brain

2007-04-02T23:20:00.000+01:00

I've just finished reading Matthew Alper's book 'The God Part of the Brain'. It comes highly recommended by such personalities as E. O. Wilson and I was certainly looking forward to reading it. It describes the journey of the author as he attempts to understand what god is and why it is so important in so many people's lives. It is a mixture of science and personal reflection on the implications of the science, and at first I was struck by the similarity to my own experiences.

Alper's hypothesis is simple. Since religious belief represents an almost universal trait across our species, he believes that it has a genetic component: there is a gene which codes for a god part of the brain:

As a result of our species' capacity for self-conscious awareness, we suddenly needed to be configured in such a way that we could meet the new demands imposed on us by our internal environments. What this meant was that those individuals whose brains possessed some genetic mutation that could withstand the overwhelming anxiety induced by our awareness of death, were more likely to survive. Those most likely to survive, consequently, were more likely to pass whatever advantageous adaptation they possessed onto their offspring.

As generations of these protohumans passes, those whose cerebral constitutions most effectively dealt with the anxiety resulting from their awareness of death were most apt to survive. This process continued until a cognitive function emerged that altered the way these protohumans perceived reality by adding a "spiritual" component to their perspectives. Just as the human brain had evolved linguistic, musical, and mathematical intelligence, we apparently evolved "spiritual intelligence" as well. (p. 122)

First off, there are what I consider to be some gaping holes in Alper's theory. Consider this similar extract:

sites responsible for generating every trait we possess, from stereoscopic vision to opposable thumbs, must have a specific reason for having emerged in us. Since the driving force behind evolution is the preservation of a species, every trait must somehow serve to increase that species' chances of survival. This is evident in every organ we posses - excluding, of course, those vestigial parts such as the caudal vertebrae or coccyx (that evolutionary memento of our predecessors' tails) or the appendix (a relic of our grass-eating days), two examples of anatomical parts which, because we no longer need them, were selected out of us. Because all traits must perform a specific function that will serve to increase a species' survivability, if humans posses specific neurophysiological sites responsible for generating spiritual and religious consciousness, then the same must hold true for these parts as well.

We need therefore ask: What is the advantage of possessing spiritual consciousness? What function might such an adaptation serve that it could enhance our species' survivability? What is this trait's rationale, its reason for being? Again, as is true of all traits, if human spirituality didn't possess some very specific adaptive value, if it didn't somehow serve to enhance our species' survivability, it would never have emerged in us. (p. 103-4).

My criticism of Alper's theory comes down to three particular claims. First, that 'every trait must somehow serve to increase that species' chances of survival' - let's call that an ultra-adaptationist claim. Secondly that because religion is found in most members of our species that it is somehow hard-wired into the brain - the innate claim. And finally that 'the driving force behind evolution is the preservation of a species' - a claim for group selection. Each of these arguments, I will show, is based on a misunderstanding of how evolution works.

First is his apparently ultra-adaptationist claim that every trait must somehow serve to increase the species survivability. However it is easy to see that not every part of a creature's biological makeup is perfectly designed by natural selection, and evolution is not about achieving a perfect creature. From Dennett's 'Darwin's Dangerous Idea':

Let us consider the most extreme form of Panglossian adaptationism imaginable - the view that every designed thing is optimally designed. A sidelong glance at human engineering will show that even this view not only permits but requires the existence of plenty of undesigned stuff. Imagine, if you can, some masterpiece of human engineering - the perfectly designed widget-factory, energy-efficient, maximally productive, minimally expensive to operate, maximally humane to its workers, simply unimprovable in any dimension. The waste-paper collection system, for instance, makes recycling by type of wastepaper maximally convenient and agreeable to the staff, at minimal energy costs, and so forth. A Panglossian triumph, it seems. But wait - what is the wastepaper for? It's not for anything. It's a by-product of the other processes, and the wastepaper collection is for dealing with it. You can't give an adaptationist explanation of why the disposal/recycling system is optimal without presupposing that the wastepaper itself is just...waste! Of course, you can go and ask whether the clerical operations could be made "paperless" by better use of computers, but if that happens not to be the case for one reason of another, there will still be wastepaper to deal with, and other wastes and by-products as well in any case, so there will always be plenty of undesigned features in a system that is maximally well designed. No adaptationist could be such a "pervasive" adaptationist as to deny it. The thesis that every property of every feature of everything in the living world is a adaptation is not a thesis anybody has ever taken seriously, or implied by what anybody has taken seriously, so far as I know. If I am wrong, there are some serious loonies out there (p. 276)

So certainly religiosity doesn't have to be an adaptation. It's not the given that Alper implies. Moving on to the claim that since religiosity is a shared attribute amongst members of our species, that it must therefore be genetic. Some more from Dennett:

showing that a particular type of human behaviour is ubiquitous or nearly ubiquitous in widely separated human cultures goes no way at all toward showing that there is a genetic predisposition for that particular behaviour. So far as I know, in every culture known to anthropologists, the hunters throw their spears pointy-end-first, but this obviously doesn't establish that there is a pointy-end-first gene that approaches fixation in our species.

Nonhuman species can exhibit a similar, if reduced, capacity to reinvent the wheel, even though they lack culture. Octopuses are remarkably intelligent, and although they show no signs of cultural transmission, they are smart enough so that we should not be surprised to discover them individually hitting upon lots of Good Tricks that had never been posed as specific problems to their ancestors. Any such uniformity might be misread by biologists as signs of a special "instinct," when in fact it was just their general intelligence that led them again and again to hit upon the same bright idea. The problem of interpretation for Homo sapiens is multiplied many times over by the fact of cultural transmission. Even if some individual hunters are not bright enough to figure out for themselves that they should throw the pointy end first, they will be told to do so by their peers, or will just notice their practice, and will appreciate the results immediately. In other words, if you are not totally idiotic, you don't need a genetic basis for any adaptation that you will pick up from your friends in any case.

It is hard to believe that sociobiologists can make the mistake of ignoring this omnipresent possibility, but the evidence is striking that they have done so, again and again (Kitcher 1985). Many instances could be listed, but I will concentrate on a particularly visible and well-known case. Although E. O. Wilson (1978, p.35) states clearly that the human behaviours to be accounted for by specific genetic hypotheses should be the "least rational of the human repertoire...In other words, they should implicate innate, biological phenomena that are the least susceptible to mimicry by culture," he goes on (pp. 107ff) to claim, for instance, that the evidence of territoriality in all human cultures (we human beings like to call a bit of space our own) is clear proof that we, like very many other species, have a genetic predisposition wired in at birth for the defence of territory. That may be true - in fact, it would not be at all surprising, since many species manifestly do exhibit innate territoriality, and it is hard to think of what force there might be to remove such a disposition from our genetic makeup. But the ubiquity of territoriality in human societies is by itself no evidence at all for this, since territoriality makes so much sense in so many human arrangements. It is, if not a forced move, close to it. (p. 486-7)

So, just as there is no 'throw-spear-pointy-end-first' part of the brain, it seems unlikely that there is a single 'god' part of the brain, which has arisen as an adaptation to existential angst. Religion could just be a Good Trick, which from small beginnings has grown a life of its own.

Finally, what I felt was Alper's greatest crime against evolution, was in claiming that evolution works for the good of the species. Since I've plundered more than enough from Daniel Dennett, here's an extract from Richard Dawkins' 'The Selfish Gene':

Evolution works by natural selection, and natural selection means the differential survival of the 'fittest'. But are we talking about the fittest individuals, the fittest races, the fittest species, or what? For some purposes this does not greatly matter, but when we are talking about altruism it is obviously crucial. If it is species that are competing in what Darwin called the struggle for existence, the individual seems best regarded as a pawn in the game, to be sacrificed when the greater interest of the whole requires it. To put it in a slightly more respectable way, a group, such as a species or a population within a species whose individual members are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the welfare of the group, may be less likely to go extinct than a rival group whose individual members place their own selfish interests first. Therefore the world becomes populated mainly by groups consisting of self-sacrificing individuals. This is the theory of 'group selection', long assumed to be true by biologists not familiar with the details of evolutionary theory, brought out into the open by Robert Ardrey in The Social Contract. The orthodox alternative is normally called 'individual selection', although I prefer to speak of gene selection.

The quick answer of the 'individual selectionist' to the argument just put might go something like this. Even in the group of altruists, there will almost certainly be a dissenting minority who refuse to make any sacrifice. If there is just one selfish rebel, prepared to exploit the altruism of the rest, then he, by definition, is more likely than they are to survive and have children. Each of these children will tend to inherit his selfish traits. After several generations of this natural selection, the 'altruistic group' will be over-run by selfish individuals, and will be indistinguishable for the selfish group. Even if we grant the improbable chance existence of pure altruistic groups without any rebels, it is very difficult to see what is to stop selfish individuals migrating in from neighbouring selfish groups, and, by inter-marriage, contaminating the purity of the altruistic groups. (p. 7-8)

I shall argue that the fundamental unit of selection, and therefore of self-interest, is not the species, nor the group, nor even strictly, the individual. It is the gene, the unit of heredity. (p. 11)

The idea that evolution works on the level of the species has been thoroughly put to bed by the success of the genetic level taken in neo-Darwinism. As such, Alper should have steered clear of explaining religion as something that has evolved for the good of the species. In reality religion seems to be neither good for the species (fostering increasing hostilities between religious groups) nor a sure thing dictated by biology.

Don't get me wrong. In spite of these glaring errors, 'The God Part of the Brain' is a thought provoking read and Matthew Alper is certainly absolutely correct in the most important conclusion: that atheism is the way to go. Alper's final thoughts though are not so much that everything is pointless, but that familiar chestnut, that whatever the answers are, there is beauty and mystery to behold. Regular readers will know my opinion of beauty and I can't help but feel I expected more from Alper (given the lengths he went to, to discover the answers).

In an upcoming post, I'm going to try and present an alternative to Alper's theory and describe how I imagine religion developed.

Is Intelligence Inevitable?

2007-04-01T22:49:00.001+01:00

Quite a while ago now, I asked the question 'Is Paris Hilton Inevitable?' Pinker covers a similar topic in his book, 'How The Mind Works' when he discusses the possibility that SETI may find humanlike intelligence elsewhere in the universe:

a SETI fan might ask, isn't it true that animals become more complex over time? And wouldn't intelligence be the culmination? In many lineages, of course, animals have become more complex. Life began simple, so the complexity of the most complex creature alive on earth at any time has to increase over the eons. But in many lineages they have not. The organisms reach an optimum and stay put, often for hundreds of millions of years. And those that do become more complex don't always become smarter. They become bigger, or faster, or more poisonous, or more fecund, or more sensitive to smells and sounds, or able to fly higher and farther, or better at building nests or dams - whatever works for them. Evolution is about ends, not means; becoming smart is just one option.

Still, isn't it inevitable that many organisms would take the route to intelligence? Often different lineages converge on a solution, like the forty different groups of animals that evolved complex designs for eyes. Presumably you can't be too rich, too thin, or too smart. Why wouldn't humanlike intelligence be a solution that many organisms, on this planet and elsewhere, might converge on?

Evolution could indeed have converged on humanlike intelligence several times, and perhaps that point could be developed to justify SETI. But in calculating the odds, it is not enough to think about how great it is to be smart. In evolutionary theory, that kind of reasoning merits the accusation that conservatives are always hurling at liberals: they specify a benefit but neglect to factor in the costs. Organisms don't evolve toward every imaginable advantage. If they did, every creature would be faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. An organism that devotes its matter and energy to one organ must take it away from another. It must have thinner bones or less muscle or fewer eggs. Organs evolve only when their benefits outweigh the costs.

Aliens will only evolve intelligence under the right conditions. And that seems simple enough. Thinking about it, there are practical examples of this in our own historical record. The dinosaurs ruled this planet for over 160 million years and yet presumably never attained civilisation. Bacteria too have been around for much longer (as have the plants) and yet again, none have seemingly stumbled into humanlike ways of doing things. If the path to intelligent creatures is in fact a very lucky one (requiring specific types of pressures to shape it) then Pinker is right in dismissing SETI as unlikely to provide us with proof of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe - in fact most life out there is likely to be very unintelligent and thus not able to send us nice signals. The universe itself is extremely big and old, and no doubt we are not the only intelligent life that has evolved or will evolve in the future. But as to whether we'll ever meet any real life intelligent aliens, only time will tell.

Fools the Year Round

2007-03-31T22:16:00.000+01:00

This morning I pulled an April fools' on my girlfriend (successfully I might add) and then an hour or two later it dawned on me that it was March 31st. A story from Newsweek reminds me that most people are fools the year round:

A belief in God and an identification with an organized religion are widespread throughout the country, according to the latest NEWSWEEK poll. Nine in 10 (91 percent) of American adults say they believe in God and almost as many (87 percent) say they identify with a specific religion. Christians far outnumber members of any other faith in the country, with 82 percent of the poll’s respondents identifying themselves as such. Another 5 percent say they follow a non-Christian faith, such as Judaism or Islam. Nearly half (48 percent) of the public rejects the scientific theory of evolution; one-third (34 percent) of college graduates say they accept the Biblical account of creation as fact. Seventy-three percent of Evangelical Protestants say they believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years; 39 percent of non-Evangelical Protestants and 41 percent of Catholics agree with that view. Although one in ten (10 percent) of Americans identify themselves as having "no religion," only six percent said they don’t believe in a God at all. Just 3 percent of the public self-identifies as atheist, suggesting that the term may carry some stigma.

Wow. Only 3% atheists and nearly half reject evolution. Poor, deluded fools...

The Problem With Infinity

2007-03-31T16:56:00.001+01:00

Everything is pointless, but is there a chance that any species could exist for infinity? From an essay by Alan Lightman (Beginnings and Endings from 'The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics'):

The following scenario is possible if astronomers fail to find enough cosmic matter to close the universe and make its temporal future finite. Today, just ten billion years after the "big bang," we sit on a hospitable planet in stable orbit around a middle-aged and reliable star. But after another ten billion years elapse, the sun's fuel will be close to exhaustion, and it will expand to encompass the orbit of the earth. Even if we were ingeniously to evade that catastrophe, we would find ourselves evicted from the solar system after about 10¹⁵ years by the close passage of a neighbouring star. Likewise, the sun and its associates will probably be dispatched from our Milky Way galaxy after 10¹⁹ years. Any stars remaining in galaxies will have completed their steady slide into an all-consuming black hole at the galactic nucleus after about 10²⁴ years. Any beings with the resilience and ingenuity to survive all this will still have to cross their greatest hurdle - the decay of all matter. After about 10³² years, we expect all protons and neutrons and nuclei to have decayed away. All that will survive are leptons and light, and slowly evaporating black holes. Only after a fantastic 10¹⁰⁰ years will the black holes that were once galaxies evaporate away, leaving behind unpredictable naked singularities and a sea of inert particles and light. Throughout these aeons of lingering decay, the shape of the cosmos may change as radically as its contents. The last vestiges of geometrical symmetry will be lost.
If life, in any shape or form, is to survive this ultimate environmental crisis, then the universe must satisfy certain basic requirements. The basic prerequisite for intelligence to survive is a source of energy. Such a source could be present even in the indefinite future, if there were a deviation from a complete uniformity in temperature and some degree of disorder. The potential for this does seem to exist. The anisotropies in the cosmic expansion, the evaporating black holes, the remnant naked singularities are all life preservers of a sort. Even when the black holes have all dissolved and the naked singularities are few and far between, irregularities may still grow on a cosmic scale and provide a source of heat as they eventually are smoothed out. An infinite amount of information is potentially available in an open universe, and its assimilation would be the principal goal of any surviving noncorporeal intelligence. As the temperature approaches absolute zero, never quite arriving there, the reaming aeons seem doomed to eternal tedium. But where there is quantum theory there is hope. We can never be completely sure this cosmic heat death will occur because we can never predict the future of a quantum universe with complete certainty; for in an infinite quantum future anything that can happen, will eventually...

And from Pinker's 'How The Mind Works':

The mind is a neural computer, fitted by natural selection with combinatorial algorithms for causal and probabilistic reasoning about plants, animals, objects, and people. It is driven by goal states that served biological fitness in ancestral environments, such as food, sex, safety, parenthood, friendship, status and knowledge. That toolbox, however can be used to assemble Sunday afternoon projects of dubious adaptive value.

Some parts of the mind register the attainment of increments of fitness by giving us a sensation of pleasure. Other parts use a knowledge of cause and effect to bring about goals. Put them together and you get a mind that rises to a biologically pointless challenge: figuring out how to get at the pleasure circuits of the brain and deliver little jolts of enjoyment without the inconvenience of wringing bona fide fitness increments from the harsh world. When a rat has access to a lever that sends electrical impulses to an electrode implanted in its medial forebrain bundle, it presses the lever furiously until it drops of exhaustion, foregoing opportunities to eat, drink and have sex. People don't yet undergo elective neurosurgery to have electrodes implanted in their pleasure centers, but they have found ways to stimulate them by other means. An obvious example is recreational drugs, which seep into the chemical junctions of the pleasure circuits.

Why don't people have the surgery? If people want to be happy and we already have a viable shortcut, isn't it reasonable to make use of it? Relating this to the first extract, isn't the prospect of an infinite future almost as distressing as a future of complete annihilation? As Lightman points out, eventually a species that solves all of its problems will succumb to an eternal tedium: if death, illness, poverty, need and pain are eventually abolished, won't existence merely progress until everyone just sits around pressing the button to stimulate the electrodes in their brains (because they've heard all the stories, and it's still more fun than anything else)? And so you work and strive for a future of nothingness or the slim chance that your descendants might live forever in eternal tedium.

Why did reality have to turn out to be so absurd? All I know is I don't want to die, but given more time, perhaps that'll change.

Thinking Similar Thoughts

2007-03-30T23:47:00.001+01:00

After the disappointing conclusion of Pinker's 'How The Mind Works', I was pleased today to discover two individuals who seem to have made the final step to understanding that everything is pointless. First thanks to ChooseDoubt for pointing me to Struggles For Existence, the website of John Hartung:

"I already exist" you say? ... but what if there comes a time when there will be no evidence — none whatsoever — that you, Kilroy and I were here? "Well ... I won't exist then, but I exist now" sounds like a sensible reply.

Sorry to disagree, but I do because there is a difference between a magician's illusion of sawing a woman in half and actually sawing a woman in half — a difference in consequences. Prospects [Prospects for Existence … one of Hartung’s papers, available on his site] argues that if a time comes when there is no evident difference between life having existed and life having been an illusion, we are conglomerations of matter and energy which merely perceive themselves to be alive. Put differently, if life vanishes without a trace, as is slated to happen if the universe unfolds without interference from us and our descendants, we will not exist then, so we do not exist, in any meaningful sense, now.

[Hartung goes on to argue that] if we agree that there is a problem about the future that affects the meaningfulness of our lives in the present, then we can discuss doing something about both. That's why I want to badger you about existence and offer an alternative to pie in the sky. Prospects proffers eternal consequence, and so existence, through making ourselves the ancestors of a line of descendants that will evolve forever. That is an empirical possibility which, considering the alternative, ought to be pursued.

And looking around the site, Struggles For Existence seems to cover a lot of the same ground as this blog and is well worth a look. Somebody else who has been thinking similar thoughts, is Matthew Alper, author of 'The God Part of the Brain' which I started reading today:

And if God does not exist? Then I am no longer the extension of some transcendental force or being, no longer one with any exalted spiritual realm, no longer infinite or eternal. In short, if there is no God, I am mortal. And if I'm mortal? Then death is the decisive end of my existence. These few fleeting years of life will be the only ones I will ever know. And when they're done, "Out, out, brief candle!" This person "I" called "me," the sum of my conscious experience will be snuffed out for all eternity. Without God, there is no transcendental realm. Instead, I am abandoned to the spiritless forces of a coldly indifferent and mechanistic universe, an expendable cog in a soulless machine - here today, gone tomorrow - a random event in an arbitrary universe, no more significant than a speck of cosmic dust. Consequently, without God, life holds no intrinsic purpose or meaning.

Thank god there are some sane people in the world. That others understand actually does make me feel a bit better! More on 'The God Part of the Brain' soon.

And Man Asked God

2007-03-30T21:56:00.000+01:00

ClockWorkLouie

2007-03-30T01:37:00.000+01:00

I am Pinocchio made wood again.
I am the Tin Man with his heart repossessed.
I am the troll who lives in his hole
and watches the billy-goats wonder at grass.
I am the universe made clockwork,
only to discover that it was all a big waste of time.

And you ask me how I feel or what I want? HA!

Weird Juan

2007-03-29T19:13:00.000+01:00

Here's a strange tale from the Guardian (although I think the strangeness is all in the telling):

Bloody, satanic, amnesia case baffles Italian police

Police and prosecutors in northern Italy are wrestling with a mystery that brings together a man with memory loss, evidence of devil worship and a blood-drenched apartment.

One evening earlier this month, a dishevelled young man wandered into a Carabinieri barracks at Vercelli, between Turin and Milan. He said he had no idea who he was, or why he was there.

Three days earlier, on March 16, the owner of a bed-sit outside Bergamo, more than 70 miles away, had broken into the flat. The tenant had not paid his rent and she wanted to know if he was still there.

She found a scene of pure horror. The apartment was in chaos and there were signs everywhere that it had been used for a satanic rite.

There were upturned crosses, and the walls and floor were smothered with esoteric symbols written in blood. Police forensic experts estimated that as much as 3l had been splashed around.

Only later was it established that all of it belonged to the young man who had turned to the Carabinieri.

He has since been identified as a 22-year-old called Daniele - investigators have not released his surname - who, until recently, worked in a nearby factory. His family said his only real hobby was UFOs.

They told police that, last September, he had suddenly broken with his past. He had left his job and spent his savings, though his relation with his parents, whom he now says he cannot recognise, continued to seem normal.

According to a report in the daily Corriere della Sera, psychiatrists who have examined Daniele are convinced he is not feigning amnesia. Doctors, meanwhile, have found he has a scar, about an inch long, on his right arm and a series of smaller punctures on other parts of his body.

But there is no evidence that Daniele had taken drugs, and the marks do not correspond to those left when blood is extracted in the normal way by medical staff.

Among the puzzles vexing investigators are how a man who had lost almost seven pints of blood could have made his way 70-odd miles across country - and what happened to him in the at least three days that he was missing.

Domenico Chiaro, the prosecutor who has taken up the case, has said he is treating it as a case of attempted murder.

But he and the Carabinieri working for him are hampered by a number of factors. The hard drive in Daniele's computer is missing, as is the SIM card of his mobile phone.

As for the young man himself, all he can offer them is the faint recollection of an abbey.

And again I remember the St. Bernard sized slime mould, and wonder if someone's pulling somebody's leg!

Spanner in the Works?

2007-03-29T17:37:00.001+01:00

So I reached the end (with only minimal skipping) of Pinker's excellent book 'How The Mind Works'. Throughout, he explains that the mind (like the body) is a system of modules, which have been designed by natural selection, over time. The heart is a pump, the eyes sophisticated cameras and the brain is a computer designed to process information. Nothing particularly earth-shattering, and I would say that he's absolutely correct in almost everything he writes.

But when it comes to his final chapter on the meaning of life, Pinker throws a spanner into the works and declares that there are just some things we may not have the computational abilities to understand:

Our thoroughgoing perplexity about the enigmas of consciousness, self, will, and knowledge may come from a mismatch between the very nature of these problems and the computational apparatus that natural selection has fitted us with. If these conjectures are correct, our psyche would present us with the ultimate tease. The most undeniable thing there is, our own awareness, would be forever beyond our conceptual grasp. But if our minds are part of nature, that is to be expected, even welcomed. The natural would evokes our awe by the specialised designs of its creatures and their parts. We don't poke fun at the eagle for its clumsiness on the ground or fret that the eye is not very good at hearing, because we know that a design can excel at one challenge only by compromising at others. Our bafflement at the mysteries of the ages may have been the price we paid for a combinatorial mind that opened up a world of words and sentences, of theories and equations, of poems and melodies, of jokes and stories, the very things that make a mind worth having.

And here I absolutely disagree. History has shown that the human brain is quite capable of things which our ancestors couldn't even have imagined (like sending probes out to the far reaches of the solar-system) and given enough time of peaceful productivity (with no catastrophic natural disasters) our species would have a very good chance of solving any and all of the major questions that face us. It is funny that Pinker quotes Ecclesiastes:

a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to love, and a time to hate.

Because in a recent post on Ecclesiastes, I quoted this:

You must have noticed that no modern romantic who quotes this passage (“For every time there is a season…”) ever quotes the conclusion to the passage: “What's the point of bothering with anything, since the ceaseless round is ceaseless?”

And that is exactly my criticism of Pinker's book. How can you so fully explain the mind and human behaviour and then just stop short? Everything is pointless, really is just the logical conclusion. Funny that both Dennett and Pinker preach a similar philosophy of evolution and its impact on human being, but just can't quite find it in themselves to say "everything is pointless"...

Finally, I present one last quote from 'How The Mind Works' which sums up my entire attitude towards the arts (something Pinker spends some time discussing - concluding that most of it is a kind of stimulant for the brain):

Anyone who lived through the craze for Indian raga music after George Harrison made it hip in the 1960s appreciates that musical styles vary from culture to culture and that people most enjoy the idioms they grew up with. (During the Concert for Bangladesh, Harrison was mortified when the audience applauded Ravi Shankar for tuning up his sitar.)

One man's untuned sitar is another man's groovy tune. Get me off this ride, they're all f*cking insane...

Are Men Slime?

2007-03-29T15:19:00.000+01:00

I'm nearing the end of Pinker's 'How the Mind Works' and if you're looking for a thorough overview of evolution and psychology, you couldn't start in a better place. Although a lot of what Pinker covers isn't particularly new to my ears, it's interesting seeing somebody who understands evolution well, applying it to consciousness and the brain. I've had to resist the urge to quote huge reams from the book, but here are two extracts which I just couldn't help reproducing:

Are men really slime, or are they just trying to look like slime? Perhaps in questionnaires men try to exaggerate their studliness but women want to avoid looking easy. The psychologists R. D. Clark and Elaine Hatfield hired attractive men and women to approach strangers of the opposite sex on a college campus and say to them, "I have been noticing you around campus. I find you very attractive," and then ask one of the three questions: (a) "Would you go out with me tonight?" (b) "Would you come over to my apartment tonight?" (c) "Would you go to bed with me tonight?" Half the women consented to a date. Half the men consented to a date. Six percent of the women consented to go to the stooge's apartment. Sixty-nine percent of the men consented to go to the stooge's apartment. None of the women consented to sex. Seventy-five percent of men consented to sex. Of the remaining twenty-five percent, many were apologetic, asking for a rain check or explaining that they couldn't because their fiancée was in town. The results have been replicated in several states. When the studies were conducted, contraception was widely available and safe-sex practices were heavily publicized, so the results cannot be dismissed simply because women might be more cautious about pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

An awakening of male sexual desire by a new partner is known as the Coolidge effect, after a famous anecdote. One day, President Calvin Coolidge and his wife were visiting a government farm and were taken on separate tours. When Mrs. Coolidge was shown the chicken pens, she asked whether the rooster copulated more than once a day. "Dozens of times", replied the guide. "Please tell that to the President," Mrs. Coolidge requested. When the president was shown the pens and told about the rooster, he asked, "Same hen every time?" "Oh, no, Mr. President, a different one each time." The president said, "Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge."

...Other desires of gay men, like pornography, prostitutes and attractive young partners, also mirror or exaggerate the desires of heterosexual men. (Incidentally, the fact that men's sexual wants are the same whether they are directed at women or directed at other men refutes the theory that they are instruments for oppressing women.) It's not that gay men are oversexed; they are simply men whose male desires bounce of other male desires rather than off female desires. Symons writes, "I am suggesting that heterosexual men would be as likely as homosexual men to have sex most often with strangers, to participate in anonymous orgies in public baths, and to stop off in public restrooms for five minutes of fellatio on the way home from work if women were interested in these activities. But women are not interested."

Indeed! ;)

Hexagons in a Bucket

2007-03-29T10:30:00.000+01:00

Following on from my last post on the mysterious hexagon at Saturn's north pole, the Scientific American blog points out that the only real explanation offered so far, comes from:

Thomas Bohr (grandson of Niels), who last year produced geometric whirlpools by spinning the bottom of a water-filled bucket while the sides remain stationary.

From Nature:

Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby have created similar geometric shapes (holes in the form of stars, squares, pentagons and hexagons) in whirlpools of water in a cylindrical bucket1. The shapes appear easily enough once the bucket is spinning at a rate of one to seven revolutions per second, they say.

Tomas Bohr and colleagues made plexiglass buckets, 13 and 20 centimetres across, with metal bottoms that could be rotated at high speed by a motor. They filled the bucket with water and spun the bottom to whip up the liquid into a whirlpool that rose up the sides of the container.

This set-up is very similar to the rotating bucket that Isaac Newton used in the seventeenth century to investigate centrifugal forces.

The researchers found that once the plate was spinning so fast that the water span out to the sides, creating a hole of air in the middle, the dry patch wasn't circular as might be expected. Instead it evolved, as the bucket's spin sped up, from an ellipse to a three-sided star, to a square, a pentagon, and, at the highest speeds investigated, a hexagon.

And in the end, the hexagon in space turns out to not be that interesting at all. Go figure!

Hexagons in Space

2007-03-27T20:19:00.000+01:00

Talking about mathematics and the structure of the universe, here's a new image taken by the Cassini probe, of a hexagon pattern which is circling Saturn's north pole. From NASA:

"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We've never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn's thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is."

The NASA site also has a fantastic video of the phenomenon. Strange eh?

Pinker On How The Mind Works

2007-03-27T17:36:00.000+01:00

I'm about half-way through Steven Pinker's 'How The Mind Works' and I must say it's not remarkably different from Dennett's 'Consciousness Explained', which I guess is good news because they both highlight that science is certainly on the right track to explaining how the mind actually works! First, an extract:

The complex structure of the mind is the subject of this book. Its key ideas can be captured in a sentence: The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life, in particular, understanding and out manoeuvring objects, animals, plants, and other people. The summary can be unpacked into several claims. The mind is what the brain does; specifically, the brain processes information, and thinking is a kind of computation. The mind is organized into modules or mental organs, each with a specialized design that makes it an expert in one arena of interaction with the world. The modules' basic logic is specified by our genetic program. Their operation was shaped by natural selection to solve the problems of the hunting and gathering life led by our ancestors in most of our evolutionary history. The various problems for our ancestors were subtasks of one big problem for their genes, maximising the number of copies that made it into the next generation. On this view, psychology is engineering in reverse. (p.21)

None of which should really come as a surprise. Pinker's thesis is essentially a marrying of the computational theory of mind with evolution, to produce a very useful explanation of mental phenomena. I'm suppressing the urge to skip straight to the last chapter on the meaning of life, and I'll report back further, when I've finished reading the whole thing.

But, I want to relate this to my previous two posts on 'math angst' (which is the angst regarding what mathematics actually is). Pinker is arguing that human beings are computational machines, built by natural selection and specialised in the 'cognitive niche' (whereby our ancestors were particularly good at outwitting other organisms, to their benefit). And here again, for those people who don't quite get my 'existential angst' is an illustration of the absurdity of existence. We survive to reproduce. We compute to survive. To compute is to calculate and to calculate means to do maths. But maths is mysterious and the best I can come up with is that it is somehow related to the structure of the universe. From Wikipedia:

Mathematics (colloquially, maths, or math), is the body of knowledge centred on concepts such as quantity, structure, space, and change, and also the academic discipline that studies them. Benjamin Peirce called it "the science that draws necessary conclusions". Lynn Steen and Keith Devlin maintain that mathematics is the science of pattern, that mathematicians seek out patterns whether found in numbers, space, science, computers, imaginary abstractions, or elsewhere.

So it seems that organisms that could identify patterns in the world (and perform mathematical calculations on them) found that the answers were useful to helping them survive and reproduce. But there is no inherent meaning in any of this. Maybe this explains why humans are drawn to the patterns of music, art and mathematics - but I don't really see pattern worship as anything particularly interesting. One woman's unmade bed is another man's modern-art after all.

More on Pinker soon.

Barrow Full of Shit

2007-03-27T00:33:00.000+01:00

I was going to discuss mathematician, cosmologist and physicist, John Barrow in the last post on math angst, but I thought he deserved his own post. I found an interesting talk by Barrow to the Royal Society, where he discusses what maths is (amongst other things):

'What is mathematics and why does it work' ? In this talk John Barrow takes a look at some of the ways in which mathematics can tell you things about the world that you cannot learn in any other way: how computers have extended the reach of human mathematicians, the simple nature of many hard' problems that no computer can solve, how to win at dice and even discover whether the Premier Football League is just a random process. He explains the modern concepts of chaos and complexity, showing how we can use them to shed light on Abstract Expressionist art, detect art fraud, and discover why it is possible to send spacecraft to the Moon with pin-point precision and yet fail to predict tomorrow's weather.

But now consider this: in 2006 Barrow was awarded a grant of over £700,000 from a religious organisation. From the Guardian:

So what is Barrow's work all about? His abiding point, it seems, is that science and religion need not clash in quite the manner that the likes of Richard Dawkins would suggest; as Barrow puts it, "Many of the deepest and most engaging questions that we grapple with about the nature of the universe have their origins in our purely religious quest for meaning. The concept of a lawful universe with order that can be understood and relied upon emerged largely out of religious beliefs about the nature of God." To ask the big scientific questions, he seems to suggest, is a quasi-religious enterprise - one that "has transformed the simple-minded, life-averse, meaningless universe of the sceptical philosophers" - and the mathematical aspects of astronomy are a perfect case in point.

Isn't this backdoor theism? Trust somebody who looks at the wonder of the universe (and the mystery of mathematics) to conclude that god is behind it all. For the rest of us who appreciate the answers evolution gives us, the mystery of maths is like the mystery of consciousness - it isn't going to make the universe pointful (and we won't find the signature of god in either location).

I say it often, but science never promised that the answers would be appealing - only that we'd try and get at the truth. Mathematics is strange, but then so is existence. The whole god damned thing is thoroughly absurd! But if things are ever going to improve, then the bare minimum required of science is to police its own members. Science and religion are mutually exclusive. Professor Barrow, step away from the money and let's feed some starving people. Scientists should not promote the supernatural. We've got a difficult enough job dealing with reality.

Math Angst

2007-03-26T19:35:00.000+01:00

When I was at school, I hated maths. I'm still terrible at mental arithmetic, but as I always say, if god had intended us to be able to do sums, he wouldn't have invented the calculator! Recently I've been trying to understand what the heck maths is actually all about and so I pulled out a book I've had for years (but never really looked at), 'The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics', and lo and behold there is a whole section on 'math angst'. Here's an extract (from an essay by Eugene Wigner):

The first point is that the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it. Second, it is just this uncanny usefulness of mathematical concepts that raises the question of the uniqueness of our physical theories. In order to establish the first point, that mathematics plays an unreasonably important role in physics, it will be useful to say a few words on the question, "What is mathematics?", then, "What is physics?", then, how mathematics enters physical theories, and last, why the success of mathematics in its role in physics appears so baffling. Much less will be said on the second point: the uniqueness of the theories of physics. A proper answer to this question would require elaborate experimental and theoretical work which has not been undertaken to date.

And with that you might be beginning to understand why maths provokes angst. It is at the same time vital to our existence and yet bizarrely detached from it. Do we invent maths or discover it? It drives me crazy thinking about it. So what is mathematics then? Some more from Wigner:

Somebody once said that philosophy is the misuse of a terminology which was invented just for this purpose. In the same vein, I would say that mathematics is the science of skillful operations with concepts and rules invented just for this purpose. The principal emphasis is on the invention of concepts. Mathematics would soon run out of interesting theorems if these had to be formulated in terms of the concepts which already appear in the axioms. Furthermore, whereas it is unquestionably true that the concepts of elementary mathematics and particularly elementary geometry were formulated to describe entities which are directly suggested by the actual world, the same does not seem to be true of the more advanced concepts, in particular the concepts which play such an important role in physics. Thus, the rules for operations with pairs of numbers are obviously designed to give the same results as the operations with fractions which we first learned without reference to "pairs of numbers." The rules for the operations with sequences, that is, with irrational numbers, still belong to the category of rules which were determined so as to reproduce rules for the operations with quantities which were already known to us. Most more advanced mathematical concepts, such as complex numbers, algebras, linear operators, Borel sets - and this list could be continued almost indefinitely - were so devised that they are apt subjects on which the mathematician can demonstrate his ingenuity and sense of formal beauty.

In fact, the definition of these concepts, with a realization that interesting and ingenious considerations could be applied to them, is the first demonstration of the ingeniousness of the mathematician who defines them. The depth of thought which goes into the formulation of the mathematical concepts is later justified by the skill with which these concepts are used. The great mathematician fully, almost ruthlessly, exploits the domain of permissible reasoning and skirts the impermissible. That his recklessness does not lead him into a morass of contradictions is a miracle in itself: certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin's process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess. However, this is not our present subject. The principal point which will have to be recalled later is that the mathematician could formulate only a handful of interesting theorems without defining concepts beyond those contained in the axioms and that the concepts outside those contained in the axioms are defined with a view of permitting ingenious logical operations which appeal to our aesthetic sense both as operations and also in their results of great generality and simplicity. The complex numbers provide a particularly striking example for the foregoing. Certainly, nothing in our experience suggests the introduction of these quantities. Indeed, if a mathematician is asked to justify his interest in complex numbers, he will point, with some indignation, to the many beautiful theorems in the theory of equations, of power series, and of analytic functions in general, which owe their origin to the introduction of complex numbers. The mathematician is not willing to give up his interest in these most beautiful accomplishments of his genius.

So maths is about beauty? Isn't that a 'crock of shit'? Perhaps it's my aversion to maths, but I just don't understand the concept of beautiful mathematics. I do at least think I understand this paragraph, from Stewart Shapiro's 'Philosophy of Mathematics':

It is surely correct to maintain that if there had never been any language (or any people), there would be trees, planets, and stars. There would also be numbers, sets of numbers, and Klein groups, if not baseball defenses. Such is the nature of ante rem structures. Once a language and a theory impose a structure and sort the universe into objects—be they abstract or concrete—one can sometimes speak objectively about those objects, and we insist (surely correctly) that at least some of the objects were not created by us. Counterfactuals about the ways the world would be must themselves be formulated in our language and form of life—for we know no other. Trivially, had there never been any language, there would be no means of discussing, say, stars, as distinguished from the particles they contain and the galaxies that contain them. However, the lack of sortals available to speakers in a given possible world has nothing to do with which objects that world contains.

So although I think no-one really knows the answers, it seems that maths is related to the structure of the universe and that's why it works...