Love, Pain, And Suffering In Life
September 2, 2010
I’d like to begin this little talk with a quote from Charles Darwin,
“What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature.”
- Charles Darwin, in a letter to his friend Hooker
I also would like to quote Richard Dawkins from his book The Greatest Show On Earth. I recommend you all read it. I’m going to bold some main points.
Nature is neither kind nor unkind. She is neither against suffering, nor for it. Nature is not interested in suffering one way or the other unless it affects the survival of DNA. It is easy to imagine a gene that, say, tranquillises gazelles when they are about to suffer a killing bite. Would such a gene be favoured by natural selection? Not unless the act of tranquillising a gazelle improved that gene’s chances of being propagated into future generations. It is hard to see why this should be so and we may therefore guess that gazelles suffer horrible pain and fear when they are pursued to the death – as most of them eventually are. The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. It must be so. If there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.
Parasites probably cause even more suffering than predators, and understanding their evolutionary rationale adds to, rather than mitigates, the sense of futility we experience when we contemplate it. I fulminate against it every time I get a cold (I have one now, as it happens). Maybe it is only a minor inconvenience, but it is so pointless! At least if you are eaten by an anaconda you can feel that you have contributed to the well-being of one of the lords of life. When you are eaten by a tiger, perhaps your last thought could be, What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry? (In what distant deeps or skies, burnt the fire of thine eyes?) But a virus! A virus has pointless futility written into its very DNA – actually, RNA in the case of the common cold virus, but the principle is the same. A virus exists for the sole purpose of making more viruses. Well, the same is ultimately true of tigers and snakes, but there it doesn’t seem so futile. The tiger and the snake may be DNA-replicating machines but they are beautiful, elegant, complicated, expensive DNA-replicating machines. I’ve given money to preserve the tiger, but who would think of giving money to preserve the common cold? It’s the futility of it that gets to me, as I blow my nose yet again and gasp for breath.
Futility? What nonsense. Sentimental, human nonsense. Natural selection is all futile. It is all about the survival of self-replicating instructions for self-replication. If a variant of DNA survives through an anaconda swallowing me whole, or a variant of RNA survives by making me sneeze, then that is all we need by way of explanation. Viruses and tigers are both built by coded instructions whose ultimate message is, like a computer virus, ‘Duplicate me.’ In the case of the cold virus, the instruction is executed rather directly. A tiger’s DNA is also a ‘duplicate me’ program, but it contains an almost fantastically large digression as an essential part of the efficient execution of its fundamental message. That digression is a tiger, complete with fangs, claws, running muscles, stalking and pouncing instincts. The tiger’s DNA says, ‘Duplicate me by the round-about route of building a tiger first.’ At the same time, antelope DNA says, ‘Duplicate me by the round-about route of building an antelope first, complete with long legs and fast muscles, complete with timorous instincts and finely honed sense organs tuned to the danger from tigers.’ Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but cannot be expected to worry a tiger – even if a tiger can be said to worry about anything at all – and certainly cannot be expected to worry its genes.
- Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show On Earth
Life and our universe were created by mindless processes, slowly grinding from lower, simpler life-forms to ever more complicated life-forms. It isn’t something that just sprang into existence. Everything has a reason. Nothing is arbitrary.
Besides the forms of pain and suffering Dawkins mentions, there’s also some others I’d like to discuss. Just a few weeks ago I saw a young man asking a young woman out to a social event. I happened to be sitting in the row right in front them and overheard their conversation. It was sad to see, but he was rejected. After the event took place, reflecting on what happened, all I could think about was sexual selection, and just how painful it all can be.
The more I learn about why we do the things we do, find myself thinking, “Are you serious? Is that why we do that? My god, how stupid. Just look at us. This is ridiculous.”
If the struggles we face with disease, poverty, sickness, war, and everything else wasn’t bad enough, species on this planet (including ourselves) undergo so much needless pain and suffering due to sexual selection. Animals battle tooth and nail for females to prove their worth. Since these battles oftentimes end in death, a sort of arms races develops between the males, and for moose, their horns continue to grow longer and larger. These horns soon become giant daggers, which they use to stab and mutilate one another in tiring, grueling battles, hoping to win the opportunity to mate with the females, so that their genes live on in the next generation.
But sexual selection doesn’t always lead to such brutal conflicts. Sometimes it leads species to, well, act silly. Many birds for example, to impress females, perform elaborate dances on forest floors, or sing songs at the top of their voices to prove that they’re healthy and the best candidate to mate with.
Everything comes down to gene survival. We as humans are no different. When that young man introduced himself to that young woman, he immediately was faced with the task of proving his worth. We don’t battle it out locking horns, or sing songs, or perform mating dances, but we still have elaborate mating rituals to prove our worth.
From what I can see, the most common selection criteria females humans use on men are rooted in our evolutionary baggage. Take body weight for example. Most women prefer men with a tight stomach, big chest, big biceps, and overall muscular figure. If they’re not into that, they at least would like their man to be healthy and trim, without all the fat.
This is because men in the past had to hunt and provide for their females. If they were fat and slow, they were less likely to be a good provider for them and the children, who would starve to death if they didn’t get enough food. That selection criteria made perfect sense back then, but it’s nothing but evolutionary baggage now.
Health is another indicator. Most of us avoid marrying a very unhealthy person. I saw a disabled man the other day walking with a cane. He was near blind and required a lot of help to get around. He’s not going to be all that popular with the ladies, I can tell you that. Once again, it comes down to not being able to provide as a hunter.
Other selection criteria are far more baffling. When a species comes to point where they have no predators, and are not struggling to survive, one sex within that species begins to use other criteria for mate selection other than just the ability to provide food and primary survival needs. You start to see fitness judged on how much energy an animal can be WASTE and the still be ok.
Styling your hair is a way of showing that you can waste lots of time and energy combing and primping, and yet still find time to gather food and do everything else you need to do. We don’t gather food any longer, and this makes no sense in a modern context, but once again, we still have our evolutionary baggage.
The world is filled with silly, wasteful enterprises. Take the male peacocks with their huge colorful tails. They shine them for all to see, and the females are to look at them and unconsciously say, “Wow. Look at how colorful his tail is. That must put him in a lot of danger from predators, but he’s able to survive nonetheless. He must be really healthy, fast, and strong.”
When I saw that poor young man get rejected, I don’t think he knew what hit him. He didn’t come across to me as an exactly brilliant individual, so he’s probably never thought about the “why” of it all. I couldn’t help but think about how that girl had all kinds of irrational selection criterion going on, and there he was, completely unaware of all of them, hoping to get a date. For whatever reason, she rejected him. It could’ve been a lot different reasons. I can’t really say.
Years ago I confessed to a girl and she rejected me. She told me I wasn’t this and wasn’t that, and didn’t agree with my views on life, or the lifestyle I’ve chosen. I didn’t get mad at her or anything. She’s a great girl, and I still think the world of her, even though we haven’t talked in quite a while.
Really, it’s no different than those birds in these videos. Here comes to female and I’m supposed to puff out my feathers and dance around in circles. If all the stars align, the moon turns dark red in an eclipse, earthquakes and volcanoes erupt, and angels dance on her bedpost, somehow things work out how they’re supposed to and she returns my feelings properly. The earthquake rumble wakes her up in the middle of the night and as the angelic choir sings she somehow realizes how much I mean to her and that I’m not that bad of a guy. One of these days I’ll pull the lever of the slot machine and get all 7′s.
As for this other young man, I was rooting for him. Overhearing it, I was like, “Go man, go!” Then she was like, “Welll….i Dunnooo…” Then I thought, “Awwww, why can’t the guy get the girl like in the movies!” It’s my guess that she wasn’t interested in him because she was out of his league. She was a very attractive woman, and he was, I guess you could say average? I’m certainly no expert on that sort of thing, but that’s what I’d guess. I’ve really lost touch with all those ways of thought. Who knows. Maybe she was really thinking, “Oh my god! I can’t believe he’s wearing sneakers like THOSE. Geez. Like I’d EVER date a guy like him! And ok, and ok.”
Sexual attraction in humans is probably the dumbest thing I can think of. The fact that perfectly healthy women are born, with no defects to them, yet are generally considered far less attractive than other women is such a mystery. I wonder all the time why I find one woman beautiful and another woman not so.
As best I know, here are some factors that contribute to our sexual attraction: Breasts are attractive because we’ve came to use them as an indicator of age, as large breasts sag when the woman gets older, so large breasts in a young woman is very attractive to males. Blond hair shows youth, which is why blondes are the most popular. A curvy figure shows off hips, and the proper proportion of hips to waist is a good indicator to how easily a child could be delivered. Other than that, it seems attraction is pretty much all about the proportions the woman is born with. For example, the distance between the eyes, how far down the nose is on the face, the chin, cheek bones, and that sort of thing. There’s some sort of algorithm the male mind runs a woman thorough and judges her attraction.
Most men of our species find the same women beautiful, and the same women ugly. The same applies to most women. It’s not universal, but there’s a strong tendency. The vast majority of women find Brad Pitt and George Clooney handsome, and if given the chance would probably get with them. Men are similar. If most men had the chance to get with a woman like Jessica Alba or Shakira, they would very likely take up the opportunity.
This is sort of thing happens all over the animal kingdom. Take the Saxony bird of paradise. You’ll notice that even though the top of this tree is filled with males, pretty much every female chooses to mate with the best looking male. Other males barely get to mate at all.
I think evolution utilizes this to filter out ‘bad models’ Nest building birds will judge how well a male can build a nest before they’ll mate with them. If they can’t build a good nest, they never are able to find a mate. This is so the dumb birds, whose brains are no good, are not continued on. Only those clever birds who can build the nest are allowed to mate.
Humans and birds have a lot in common. Since this Australian bowerbird has no predators, the male goes to elaborate lengths to construct a flashy home, which he then uses to entice females to mate with him.
Some biologists and psychologists believe that we evolved our abilities to recognize art, music, and humor within our brains due to sexual selection criteria. These things developed in the same way that colorful feathers developed in the birds in these videos. Just like male peacocks, we strut around by being talented musicians, display our great sense of humor, our quick wit, or utilize a large useless vocabulary, with the main purpose being simply to show off how smart we are.
In a way you could say these are the very things that make life colorful. Then again, you could equally argue that the reason we FIND such things colorful is because our brains have evolved to find them so. You could equally well have evolved to find something else colorful and entertaining.
When looking at all of this from a broad perspective, I find it all a bit depressing.
I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met who haven’t yet found the “love of their life”. How many families have I seen broken up because of these silly mating rituals and the constant struggle to balance out the reward chemicals in their heads. “It used to be so fun, but now… it’s just not the same…”
Feelings seem to come and go and are all over the place. People struggle to make sense of our needless mating rituals and are in so much misery.
Then again, these mating games are what many live for. How many movies are made about love stories and romance? To them, that’s what life is all about. I guess I can’t blame them. That’s how the brain is structured to release reward chemicals. Regardless of all the pain it causes them and others, it does sometimes give them a big rush.
I wonder how much pain and misery women endure trying to keep themselves beautiful. How many hours do they have to spend in front of the mirror making sure their hair is perfect, their make-up just right, and their clothing stylish and perfect for their particular figure. They fight to keep their weight down. They augment their breasts. There’s just no end to it. It’s all to win the affections of a male and beat other females in this silly game.
Then it’s an uphill battle. They’re only young and pretty for a few years, then it very quickly fades. In their late teens they’re perfect. In their 20s they’re still great. In their 30s the aging is starting to show, but they still look good. At 40, you can see they’re getting older, but if they try hard enough, they can still be a “MILF”, as they’re called. At 50, the makeup and other products can’t hide the aging. They’ve lost it. Beyond that, they’re an old woman.
That leaves like a 20~25 year window? That’s nothing. I can’t speak for you all, but time flies. Why waste half of your life in front of a mirror playing a game you can’t possibly win?
It always hurts my feelings to see a beautiful woman having to fend herself off from all the guys approaching her, while 3/4 of the other women in the room are barely noticed. It’s just stupid. Instead of playing this stupid game, I think that all you ladies would be better off spending time developing your mind. That’s really what a man should admire.
The only reason us men are attracted to your youthful look as opposed to your more aged look is because your fertility drops with age, and back in stone age times, if we were to mate with a women, we wanted to make sure you properly have the child. Evolution slowly built us that way. That’s it. That’s pretty much the main reason this whole battle you’re fighting exists. Seeing it from the big picture, you’re just wasting the short life you have on this planet.
It’s amazing when you come to understand all this though. Our studies in neuroscience are now leading us to understand how reward chemicals work in our brains and when they’re released. I think, in time, we’ll change this whole system using science, modifying our genetics and brains, and none of this pain and suffering will exist anymore.
As for this whole process, I wonder what all we’ll keep and what we’ll scrap. I’d be curious to know.
One possible alternate world would be to grow our babies in the laboratory, and eradicate the distinction between male and female. Not too terribly far in the future, our science will reach a point where we no longer need separate sexes. There’s more expedient methods to share DNA, and create diversity, than by males and females sharing their DNA when giving birth to children.
People may ask, “What would a life without love be like?” That’s the wrong question to ask. Ask yourself instead, “If all it is is reward chemicals in my head, why not just alter how my brain works, and give myself that same rush and love of life all the time, instead of having to go through a long pointless mating ritual, which leads to so much pain and suffering.” You only care about love because your brain tells you to care about love. If we modified your brain, you’d care about something else instead.
As I said before, I think we’re leaving the era of biological evolution by natural selection, and we’re entering a world where we control all life development and cultural evolution.
I really want to understand all of this more. I want to study more into how sexual selection eventually led to music, art, and humor. It really is truly fascinating. Our world is beyond strange. The more you understand it, you just look at it and say, “Man that’s odd.”
Speaking of science and improving ourselves, I’ve also been considering the food we eat. I think with time we won’t eat food. We’ll learn how and why consciousness enters matter in different forms, and we’ll build our own bodies which are far better constructed. We won’t eat food and won’t need to destroy other life forms to maintain our own existence.
Even if we only partially modified our bodies, think of how wonderful that would be. Imagine injecting little nano-bots into your bloodsteam which eat the plaque which builds up in your arteries, always keeping your heart and blood flow healthy. Imagine if other nano-bots chomped away at your excess fat, keeping your figure trim and healthy. Other nano-bots could notify your body of various vitamin and nutritional deficiencies, and a system could send a signal to your brain notifying you of the problem.
The future has amazing possibilities. In a way, nature is somewhat kind to us. I expect that as the human species develops we’ll extend our lifespan, probably living for millions, or even hundreds of millions of years. We may well become practically immortal. The thing is, we wouldn’t want to be immortal now. I know I wouldn’t – not if things had to stay the way they are now.
But the thing is, when we learn how to control reality, we also learn to control our lifespans. The two go together. Isn’t that amazing? Once we learn to control reality, we in turn learn how to extend our lifespan. The two happen at the same time. We’ve slightly improved our world over the past few hundred years, and we’ve also managed to extend our lifespans to a similar degree. Once we really improve things, we’ll vastly extend our lifespans. That’s neat. It’s like nature doesn’t force us to endure a miserable existence for a very long time.
Some people’s lives are good. Life can be good. I’m not saying all life is misery. I just think there’s too much misery around this place for my taste. There’s a whole lot of beauty to this world, but it’s not evenly distributed. Some people seem to have it all, while others end up with a pretty sucky life.
The era of pain and suffering on Earth is, I believe, only a temporary stage in the development of life. We’ll take over this universe and change it completely. The whole predator/prey/natural selection/evolution model was simply to get the ball rolling until conscious sentient beings develop which can take over and change that universe into whatever they wish. That’s my current view on things these days.
I want to understand our brain entirely. The more I learn about it, I just see the deep mysteries of the world unfolding. So many things I used to wonder about are finally becoming clear to me. I’m seeing that time and space aren’t what I think they are. I’m seeing why I laugh, why I have emotions, why I’m attracted to beautiful women, and the purposes all of these things served in our pasts.
Well I better call it a night. I have a lot of work to do tonight, so night everyone.
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A Faith Worth Having
September 1, 2010
I think this excerpt from a poem by William Wordsworth may well define my faith,
“….
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall ‘er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. ….”- William Wordsworth, an excerpt from Tintern Abbey
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Some Thoughts On Loneliness
August 29, 2010
Lately the subject of loneliness has been on my mind. In one of my past journal entries, I quoted Bertrand Russell saying,
“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined….”
- Bertrand Russell
Quite naively, I’ve thought of loneliness as a special sort of feeling I was supposed to feel when being by myself, as opposed to when I’m in a social setting. I’ve never felt any different one way or the other, so I didn’t understand loneliness, nor what it meant.
I think my misunderstanding has stemmed from reading articles like this, from Psychology Today,
Friendship is a lot like food. We need it to survive. What is more, we seem to have a basic drive for it. Psychologists find that human beings have fundamental need for inclusion in group life and for close relationships. We are truly social animals.
The upshot is, we function best when this social need is met. It is easier to stay motivated, to meet the varied challenges of life.
In fact, evidence has been growing that when our need for social relationships is not met, we fall apart mentally and even physically. There are effects on the brain and on the body. Some effects work subtly, through the exposure of multiple body systems to excess amounts of stress hormones. Yet the effects are distinct enough to be measured over time, so that unmet social needs take a serious toll on health, eroding our arteries, creating high blood pressure, and even undermining learning and memory.
A lack of close friends and a dearth of broader social contact generally bring the emotional discomfort or distress known as loneliness. It begins with an awareness of a deficiency of relationships. This cognitive awareness plays through our brain with an emotional soundtrack. It makes us sad. We might feel an emptiness. We may be filled with a longing for contact. We feel isolated, distanced from others, deprived. These feelings tear away at our emotional well-being.
- Psychology Today, The Dangers Of Loneliness
I don’t agree with that article at all. My stress and blood pressure are more prone to rise when I’m around people, not when I’m alone. When I’m alone and not bothered, that’s when I’m at peace. But isn’t it nice how they word things? The “dangers” of loneliness. Whatever. How about the “dangers” of mass psychology? Individuality is a virtue, until you become too different from the herd. That’s when they diagnose you as neurotic, and have psychologists tell you you’re in all sorts of danger.
When Bertrand Russell mentions loneliness, he makes it sound as if it’s a feeling of being surrounded by a lifeless, cold-hearted abyss. That’s when I immediately realized that I’m no stranger to loneliness.
I’ve felt that form of loneliness a lot. I think we all have. I came to appreciate love and marriage a lot more when I thought of things in that context. Being married to someone who understands you and loves you must definitely help out with those feelings of loneliness.
It’s unfortunate for me, however, that I have a disposition that most women aren’t particularly attracted to. I’m probably far too self-absorbed, vain, and show apathy toward things that matter. By self-absorbed, I wouldn’t say that’s because I think very highly of myself, but because I tend to live within my thoughts, thinking about things, and am generally less concerned about the trivial day to day events of life.
I have to escape the monotonous boredom of everyday existence. To do so, I study difficult subjects and try to find answers. I think about the stars, the physical laws which govern their behavior, the origin of the universe, parallel universes, time travel, proofs for difficult mathematical problems, economics, the history of mankind, international relations, depth psychology, philosophical questions such as morality, indepth processes into how the mind works, and other things.
Take the most recent book I purchased “Spatial Cognition, Spatial Perception: Mapping the Self and Space”. The book covers five main topics:
1. What do animals know and how do they represent external space?
2. Perception and memory of landmarks: implications for spatial cognition and behavior.
3. Evolutionary perspectives on cognitive capacities in spatial perception and object recognition.
4. Does mapping of the body generate understanding of external space?
5. Comparisons of human and non-human primate spatial cognitive abilities.
It’s a fascinating book. I haven’t been so excited to get a book in a long time. When it came in the post, I immediately opened the box and my heart raced. I pumped my fist and was like, “Yeessss!”
The book goes into great detail about how different animals construct a model of space in their brains. It really is completely remarkable. It compares different species, how they navigate the world, and their brains. It talks about their memory capacity. It talks about how the progression by which each of their brains evolved over time, and shows the development. It’s exactly what I’ve been wanting to know for a long long time.
I was recently watching a lecture related to wasps, of all things. I found it completely fascinating.
Wasps really are mindless creatures, and I don’t think they have free will. They’re biological robots who follow a very simple set of programming instructions. Let’s explain their behavior, and I think you’ll be able to see clearly how mechanical they are.
There was one type of wasp (I can’t remember the name), that would go out and gather caterpillars. We could summarize its life and everything it does with the following few points:
1. Dig a hole in the ground.
2. Lay eggs in that hole.
3. Crawl out of the hole
4. Fly up in the air, do one or two loops around the hole, and find a caterpillar.
5. Sting the caterpillar, kill it, and bring it back to the hole.
6. Crawl down in the hole just to make sure nothing had crawled in during the absence.
7. Crawl back out, grab the caterpillar, and stuff it into the hole.
8. Seal off the hole with a small rock nearby.
After this the young egg would hatch and the baby wasp would feed on the dead caterpillar as it developed in that little burrow.
That’s simple enough. We’ve all seen wasps. What’s the big deal?
Well, you can totally screw with that wasp’s mind by doing very simple things. Wasps mechanically follow that procedure, and can do little else. For example, grab a few pine cones and wait until it crawls in its hole. Put the pine cones in some arrangement outside its hole. When it leaves its burrow to go find a caterpillar, it does its loops to memorize that environment. After it flies off, remove the pine cones and wait for it to come back. It’ll come back to the general area but have no idea where its hole is.
Even better is when you leave the pine cones there. It goes and gets its caterpillar and brings it back. It lays it just outside its hole and then goes in to check if everything’s ok. You then snatch the caterpillar and move it two inches to the right or left.
The wasp will then come out of its hole and walk to the location where it left the caterpillar. Then it seems to say to itself, “Uh oh. My caterpillar’s gone.” Then it goes airborn to do its two loops to memorize the surroundings. As it flies in the air it notices the caterpillar, “Oh, there’s a caterpillar.” It swoops down, grabs it, and then lays it beside the hole. It goes into its burrow to check if everything’s ok, and then you move the caterpillar, again. It comes out of the hole, says, “Uh oh, my caterpillar’s gone”, flies up in the air, does its loops, notices the caterpillar, grabs it, places it outside its hole, goes back in its hole… You can do this same procedure on the wasp until you’re tired of it. Scientists have repeated this upwards of 40 times consecutively.
Now why is this so fascinating to me? I wonder to myself all the time what “free will” is, or if it even exists. If it does, how developed does the brain have to be before we have a degree of freedom? Wasps have brains that do all kinds of things, but I don’t think they’re free to make decisions. They seem awfully robotic to me.
Now imagine a book filled with case studies of how different animals perceive space and the neat experiments that have been done. Fascinating isn’t it?
To use a simple analogy, I entertain the idea that our brain is kind of like a complex form of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. In that experiment, the photon can exist in multiple paths at once. In the same way, I wonder if maybe our brains can exist in multiple potential states, where the state isn’t determined in various areas, based on some sort of complex arrangement, and that we can shift the electric potential in a certain “direction” (a sort of collapse of a neural quantum wave function). Physical matter isn’t completely deterministic, and maybe our brain tissues can develop in some complex way in which indeterministic free will is possible.
What I like about this idea is that “free will” is confined to making decisions of a certain types, based on what the physical situation warrants – similar to how the Mach-Zehnder interferometer defines the possible paths for the photon. This is important because people don’t exercise free will at random. People could do all sorts of things, but they don’t seem to. For the most part, they almost all behave like normal human beings. I think their brains limits which decisions they have to choose from.
There’s a lot of problems with this idea though, which I haven’t been able to solve. If it’s true, then how does your free will only affect your body, while my free will only affect my own body? Is there some sort of subtle difference between my brain and yours? I don’t get that. I still don’t understand what forms the individual and makes them alive, distinguishing one person from another, or any animal for that matter.
I don’t think it’s a property of the physical matter itself, because the matter which composes us (the physical atoms themselves), changes throughout our lives. It must have to do with the aggregate forms the atoms take on. It has to be complicated though because our brains are changing all the time as we learn new things. Dendritic arms grow connecting different brain cells together.
But free will must also depend on a lot of other factors. A lot of what we think of as free will in species like ourselves really is likely to be just memory and complex brain functions. This sort of thing is what the book I just bought is about, which is my passion of research.
For example, think about speech. When we speak, most of us think we’re controlling our mouths and vocal chords using our free will and speech comes out. This is far from the case. If you have brain damage in just the right areas (Broca’s area), even if your vocal chords are fine, you won’t be able to speak or form coherent sentences. It’s really your brain which is doing all that. It’s the brain that generates the words to say and somehow links it all together and makes it work.
I don’t think that wasps have memory. Since it has no memory, trying to think how free will would work in it is very difficult. How can you make a decision if there’s no buffer space for you to lay out your different options in your mind? How will you weigh the options if you don’t have an imagination to think out the potential effects?
I guess that was a bit of a digression from loneliness. But you see, when I look at my own life, I’ve developed habits and ways of thought which relinquish any ties to other human beings. I spend little if any time developing relationships of any sort with people. I spend my days reading books like this, and thinking about problems most people rarely if ever concern themselves with. And the thing is, I don’t feel depressed about it, nor do I feel like I’m lacking things that other people with social lives have.
Because there’s so few people who find the things I study interesting, I’m by necessity confined to being a lonely person. I don’t see any way around this. Most people bond together through common interests. There’s few people interested in the things I’m interested in, other than really great scientists, psychologists, and thinkers.
It’d be really nice if I could sit in the pub reading “Spatial Cognition, Spatial Perception: Mapping the Self and Space”, and have cute girls come up to me saying, “Wow! I’ve read that book. It’s fantastic. Don’t you just love the chapter on ants and the detailed research into how they use the sun to get back to their nest? I love that stuff.” I’d instantly fall in love, but that won’t happen, ever.
That’s just a fact I’ve chosen to live with. I don’t really have any choice in that matter, I don’t think. I’ve tried living the normal life most people live but I find it intolerably boring. If people find the things I’m fascinated with boring, that’s just how it is. I’ve seen videos where Richard Dawkins talks about great scientists he admires as his heroes. Most all of them were/are just like me – taciturn and preferred isolated study to socializing. They had great problems on their minds which consumed their thoughts, and they were far less concerned with banal everyday experience.
Though I wouldn’t recommend my lifestyle to most people. Friends really are a valuable thing when you find them. They’re a rare and priceless thing. Treat them well. I’ve made the mistake of treating people dear to me with far too little respect. I regret that.
I have a problem with speaking my mind far too freely and I hurt people’s feelings. It reminds me of a quote I heard from a physics professor,
“People will forgive you for darn well anything, but not for being right.”
- Dr. Schmitt
With most people, having a cordial friendly relationship is more valuable than the truth of the subject matters being discussed. Everything you’re saying might be complete bullshit and make no sense, but if you’re friendly and everyone’s enjoying themselves, it doesn’t seem to matter.
I actually heard this quote during an astronomy course. Dr. Schmitt related the events of a social gathering, where a man there mistakenly assumed that our planet’s distance from the sun brought about the changing seasons. Dr. Schmitt was very tempted to correct the man, knowing full well that our tilt about our axis of rotation is the real reason for the seasons, but he didn’t want to be an ass.
I’m the guy who IS an ass (to my own detriment), and is unconscious of the fact that he’s being so. Completely socially unaware, I go on and on about our 23.5 degree tilt, the winter and summer solstices, and the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. And as everyone’s staring at me, wondering why I won’t shut up, I pull out a pad of paper and pen and say, “Here, let me draw it all out for you.” Then as I feel I’ve shown a new truth to my friend, they’re all thinking, “What a douchebag.”
When you spend a lot of time alone, like I do, you don’t understand that there’s complex social dynamics at these sorts of events, where people lose face and look stupid. Since I have no thought of what other people think of me, I’m totally unaware of these things that other people care a great deal about.
I actually took a huge psychological evaluation here recently, and my results were interesting. They rated your mindset and way of life by several different categories. When it came to learning for its own sake, I was 98/100. My value of education and knowledge was 97/100. My interpersonal skills and prudence was 3/100.
So yeah, that about explains me. Completely clueless when it comes to people, especially women.
It’s quite funny really. I was watching the film Pride & Prejudice, based on Jane Austen’s novel, and there was a moment in the film where this awkward priest was asking the main character, Elizabeth, to marry him. She replied that there’s no way she could make him happy, and basically that they were a terrible match. That really was profound to someone as dumb as me.
It’s not that I thought they’d make a good couple. I could tell that he was a terrible person to be around, and that they were completely incompatible. That man was incompatible with every woman on Earth. But here’s where I found myself wondering. The very thought of marrying someone in order to make you happy was something I don’t think I’ve ever thought of. That had never crossed my mind. Never. My mindset is to be self-sufficient and that you need to make yourself happy. It’s not someone else’s job to make you happy, nor can they do so. I thought of marriage as a sort of arrangement where life is better with them than without them, and you sort of rationally weigh being single versus having them. Even if they don’t add all that much, if it’s a positive gain, why not marry? This is coming from someone with a 3/100 in interpersonal skills, so just keep that in mind.
I went out for a walk that evening and thought to myself, “Marrying someone to make you happy. Trying to make someone else happy. What in the world could that possibly involve?” I walked for an hour and during that time couldn’t even conceive, even in my fantasies, the majority of my happiness coming from a relationship with a woman. I’m just being honest, even if that makes me look terrible to all you reading this. I thought to myself, “What if you’re ALREADY happy? What if you ALREADY have a good life?” It’s so remote, and I’ve never met a woman even remotely that interesting. Someone through which I could define the majority of my life, just by the relationship with her. I can’t picture it. And if she is that amazing (and she’d have to be one hell of a woman), the likelihood that she’s interested in me, of all people, is next to none. My odds at a relationship of that sort are so low, I’m probably more likely to win the lottery buying a few lotto tickets at the gas station.
Love and relationships throws me for a complete loop, every time. I don’t understand it. I don’t get it. With my 3/100, what can I expect? I don’t understand these words that lovers say to one another. I think that means I only understand what’s going on in around 3 out of every 100 social situations. “You’re everything to me. It’s all for you.” What? Define “all”? When I try to understand it, I come to a conclusion that it’s something you feel, not something you think about. The words are just a means to make known the feelings you have within your heart. That’s why none of it makes sense. They’re not meant to be logical. They’re meant to instill and communicate feelings which I don’t think I’ve ever experienced myself.
Of course, going for a walk in isolation, not talking to anyone other than myself, surely isn’t going to find me the answer to this issue. 
If I marry a woman one day, I’d treat her beautifully. What I’d value most are long walks outdoors together talking about deep subjects. Even better would be to work together on intellectual pursuits. When I was watching Dr. Bronowski’s series The Ascent Of Man, I believe he had his wife help him research the material he was presenting in the series. That’d be an incredible relationship. That is so amazing actually that I can barely comprehend being in such a marriage. That would be beyond wonderful. I’d marry a woman who wasn’t into everything I study, if she had a pleasant personality. But I guess having an intellectual partner is my ideal. I think that’s the only thing I could ever truly fall in love with a woman for. Her intelligence. 95% of what matters is her intelligence. 4% personality. 1% everything else.
When I think about Bertrand Russell’s definition of loneliness, I feel just as lonely around people than being alone. The thing is, being alone I can read my books and consume myself in interesting material. When I’m around most people, I’m forced to endure mindless dribble. It’s no wonder why I choose to stay home with my books every time.
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Problems For Creationists – Part II
August 23, 2010
Yesterday I pointed out that if the universe had been created 6,000 years ago, we should only see stars within a radius of 6,000 light years from our planet. This of course isn’t the case. We see stars within our own Milky Way which are almost a hundred thousand light years away, and can see galaxies billions of light years away.
Another major problem creationists have to contend with is the geographic distribution of species. I’ll let Richard Dawkins handle this one,
It is almost too ridiculous to mention it, but I’m afraid I have to because of the more than 40 per cent of the American population who, as I lamented in Chapter 1, accept the Bible literally: think what the geographical distribution of animals should look like if they’d all dispersed from Noah’s Ark. Shouldn’t there be some sort of law of decreasing species diversity as we move away from an epicentre – perhaps Mount Ararat? I don’t need to tell you that that is not what we see.
Why would all those marsupials – ranging from tiny pouched mice through koalas and bilbys to giant kangaroos and Diprotodonts – why would all those marsupials, but no placentals at all, have migrated en masse from Mount Ararat to Australia? Which route did they take? And why did not a single member of their straggling caravan pause on the way, and settle – in India, perhaps, or China, or some haven along the Great Silk Road? Why did the entire order Edentata (all twenty species of armadillo, including the extinct giant armadillo, all six species of sloth, including extinct giant sloths, and all four species of anteater) troop off unerringly for South America, leaving not a rack behind, leaving no hide nor hair nor armour plate of settlers somewhere along the way? Why were they joined by the entire infraorder of caviomorph rodents, including guinea pigs, agoutis, pacas, maras, capybaras, chinchillas and lots of others, a large group of characteristically South American rodents, found nowhere else? Why did an entire sub-order of monkeys, the platyrrhine monkeys, end up in South America and nowhere else? Shouldn’t at least a few of them have joined the rest of the monkeys, the catarrhines, in Asia or Africa? And shouldn’t at least one species of catarrhine have found itself in the New World, along with the platyrrhines? Why did all the penguins undertake the long waddle south to the Antarctic, not a single one to the equally hospitable Arctic?
An ancestral lemur, again very possibly just a single species, found itself in Madagascar. Now there are thirty-seven species of lemur (plus some extinct ones). They range in size from the pygmy mouse lemur, smaller than a hamster, to a giant lemur, larger than a gorilla and resembling a bear, which went extinct quite recently. And they are all, every last one of them, in Madagascar. There are no lemurs anywhere else in the world, and there are no monkeys in Madagascar. How on Earth do the 40 per cent history-deniers think this state of affairs came about? Did all thirty-seven and more species of lemur troop in a body down Noah’s gangplank and hightail it (literally in the case of the ringtail) for Madagascar, leaving not a single straggler by the wayside, anywhere throughout the length and breadth of Africa?
Once again, I am sorry to take a sledgehammer to so small and fragile a nut, but I have to do so because more than 40 per cent of the American people believe literally in the story of Noah’s Ark. We should be able to ignore them and get on with our science, but we can’t afford to because they control school boards, they home-school their children to deprive them of access to proper science teachers, and they include many members of the United States Congress, some state governors and even presidential and vice-presidential candidates. They have the money and the power to build institutions, universities, even a museum where children ride life-size mechanical models of dinosaurs, which, they are solemnly told, coexisted with humans. And, as recent polls have shown, Britain is not far behind (or should that read ‘ahead’?), along with parts of Europe and most of the Islamic world.
Even if we leave Mount Ararat to one side; even if we refrain from lampooning those who take the Noah’s Ark myth literally, similar problems apply to any theory of the separate creation of species. Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution? Why would he put lemurs in Madagascar and nowhere else? Why put platyrrhine monkeys in South America only, and catarrhine monkeys in Africa and Asia only? Why no mammals in New Zealand, except bats who could fly there? Why do the animals in island chains most closely resemble those on neighbouring islands, and why do they nearly always resemble – less strongly but still unmistakably – those on the nearest continent or large island? Why would the creator put only marsupial mammals in Australia, again except bats who could fly there, and those who could arrive in man-made canoes? The fact is that, if we survey every continent and every island, every lake and every river, every mountaintop and every Alpine valley, every forest and every desert, the only way to make sense of the distribution of animals and plants is, yet again, to follow Darwin’s insight about the Galapagos finches: ‘One might really fancy that from an original paucity . . . one species had been taken and modified for different ends.’
- Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show On Earth
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A Problem For Creationists
August 22, 2010
Take a look at the night sky. It’s well known that many of the stars are tens of thousands of light years away. The farthest stars we observe in the Milky Way are around 95,000 light years away from us. There are innumerable galaxies which are millions or even billions of light years away from us. Now if this is the case, then when God created all of these galaxies and put them in their positions, did he also create all the light beams already in place? If He didn’t, then we shouldn’t see anything but those stars within 6,000 or so light years from us. The rest of the night sky should be black. New stars should be appearing in the sky each night as their light just reached us for the first time. However, this isn’t what we observe.
If you’re not convinced by the fossil record, the common ancestry found within all of our DNA, or potassium-argon dating, then this alone should be enough to convince you that creationism is wrong. I’m thinking that over the next few months, each time I come across a piece of evidence like this, I’m going to post it on here for creationists to look at.
The picture we see in our telescopes gives factual evidence for the Big Bang. When you look out using say the Hubble telescope, you see this,
Looking through a high powered telescope is like looking into a time-machine because the light reaching us is coming from different distances and was emitted at different times. Quite a profound thing to think about.
There’s so much waiting for you to understand. Give up your superstitions and learn the truth about our universe. We’re a part of something truly amazing. The universe is very big and very very old. We can’t even begin to comprehend 13.7 billion years. It’s even harder to comprehend that our universe is likely just one member of a multi-verse.
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