Yesterday I came across an article which really caught my attention.  It contained a rather harsh analysis of the worldview behind science.

Is there a god? No. What is the nature of reality? What physics says it is. What is the purpose of the universe? There is none. What is the meaning of life? Ditto. Why am I here? Just dumb luck. Is there a soul? Is it immortal? Are you kidding? Is there free will? Not a chance! What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad? There is no moral difference between them. Why should I be moral? Because it makes you feel better than being immoral. Is abortion, euthanasia, suicide, paying taxes, foreign aid, or anything else you don’t like forbidden, permissible, or sometimes obligatory? Anything goes. What is love, and how can I find it? Love is the solution to a strategic interaction problem. Don’t look for it; it will find you when you need it. Does history have any meaning or purpose? It’s full of sound and fury, but signifies nothing.” I take this cutting-edge wisdom from the worst book of the year, a shallow and supercilious thing called The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions, by Alex Rosenberg, a philosopher of science at Duke University. The book is a catechism for people who believe they have emancipated themselves from catechisms. The faith that it dogmatically expounds is scientism. It is a fine example of how the religion of science can turn an intelligent man into a fool.

I wish I had a strong rebuttal against these accusations, but I don’t.  That is the worldview that science leads you to.  It’s incredibly bleak.  It’s not empowering, and as the author points out quite vividly, I don’t think it’s a worldview a person wanting to “Enjoy Life” is going to take on.  But do we need illusions and superstitions, and do they improve our quality of life?  I’d argue that those won’t help either.

There are probably critical ideas missing from the scientific way of viewing the world, but I have to be really careful with this one.  Bear with me.  I suspect that there are aspects to our existence beyond our sense organs, and therefore beyond testability and reason.  You may want to exclaim, “Jason, what are these aspects of our existence which you claim are beyond our ability to understand?”  First off, I don’t know whether they’ll always be beyond our understanding.  Maybe one day we will understand how it all works, but for now, I suspect we’re still in the dark on many key issues.  As for why I feel this way, I can only point you to vague feelings within me.  For a key example, take subjective consciousness.  Science likes to say, “Look, we’ve defined who you are.  You’re activity in your brain.”  I’d argue that that’s a half-truth.  I don’t deny that what I experience is directly correlated with that brain activity, but I just don’t believe that what goes on in my brain is the entirety of my existence.  When I eat an orange, there are rich, vivid personal subjective experiences of tasting the fruit, smelling it, and feeling its texture.  That’s different from the electrical pulses shooting through neurons.  There is no way to test and observe these things outside of experiencing them for ourselves.  I don’t know how things taste and feel for you.   Considering there are people who hate oranges, whereas I personally love them, we must not be having the same subjective experience.

The reason scientists fear this line of thought is because it opens a big nasty door to superstitious nonsense and humanity has suffered so much pain from superstition.  If I can propose there’s more to our existence than what we can observe with our senses, why can’t religious priests claim there’s gods, goddesses, and evil spirits?  We don’t have any tools to keep people’s minds in check, and before long people are irreconcilable conflicts.  ”My God is the true God, and if you don’t believe in Him, you must die!  Infidel!”  ”No, you’re the infidel!  Your culture and your ways are blasphemous.  All of you must be wiped off the Earth to cleanse it!”

What I think most scientists, including myself, want from our fellow humans is simply this.  Once we open that big door, and you all speculate about higher aspects of yourself and what may be beyond our senses, beyond death, and so forth, realize that it’s all speculation and that you don’t know for sure.  When you claim to have a personal revelation from the heavens, realize that it isn’t the highest form of truth, it’s the lowest form.  It’s mere guesswork.   It might be true, it might not.  You’re dealing with an empty hypothesis with nothing to back it up.  And since other people aren’t likely to have the same personal revelations you are, accept that many people will be believing widely different things, and they’re not evil for doing so.  If we just can just all live together peacefully and say to one another, “There are many mysteries to the world.  In the end, we just don’t know a lot of things” we’ll be fine.

Next I’d like to share my own feelings on the idea of truth.  I hear a lot of atheists say things like, “I don’t like a lot of the conclusions I come to anymore than you do, but if it’s true, it’s true.  I want to know the truth.  That’s what matters to me.”   There’s a lot of courage to that position and I greatly admire it.  Even so, deep down, I suspect it’s based on a fundamentally wrong way of viewing the world.  These are vague feelings I haven’t fully fleshed out, but I’ll share what I’ve came up with so far.

I’ve noticed a trend as I’ve studied science:  the more we understand about the universe, the more powerful we become.  This leads me to believe that “truth” only matters when you’re powerless to the forces of nature.  We seek the “truth” about this world when we’re so clueless as to how things operate, we’re not skilled enough to remold reality how we wish it.  But I suspect that as humans grow in knowledge, the “truth” will matter less and less.  The more relevant question will become, “What do I want to experience?”

I have another vague feeling that we’re not properly understanding what knowledge is.  We have a flawed idea of inside and outside.  Self vs the world.  I doubt it’s the correct way of viewing things.  Long ago, I can’t remember where on my blog, I raised a thought experiment where a man was merged with a super-computer, and this man wanted more and more mental power to understand and control the world.  He consumed the entire Earth and turned it into computational machines connected to his brain.  Craving more understanding and thought power, he consumed the entire galaxy and turned it all into computational thought machinery, used exclusively for his thinking and storing the vast knowledge he’s acquiring about the world.  After all, we have to remember that all knowledge has to be stored in some physical form as data, just like information on a computer disk.  It takes energy to store it, and energy to retrieve it.  This can be made highly efficient, but ultimately you won’t get around the law of conservation of energy.  There will be limits.

As this computational super-being expands, imagine the eventual limit.  That being would consume the entire universe and make every piece of matter its own personal mind.  At that point there is no distinction between the self and the outside world within that universe.  The whole nature of knowledge debate is thrown out the window.  The “world” is what you want it to be at that point.  You just change the data within your machines, and then simulate whatever environment you wish for.  You may say, “Well, the REAL truth is that you’re in a machine, like the Matrix.”  Yeah, and so what?  I guess if you want to build a probe and waste some of your energy flying around looking at your machinery, go for it.  But understanding the “truth” about that reality isn’t going to do anything for you.  Truth seems irrelevant at that point.

Knowledge of the outside world wouldn’t necessarily even have to exist in that universe.  It’d be a waste of energy and space.  Knowledge of the past wouldn’t matter.  All the transitions the matter had flowed through until reaching that almost God-like state of pure control and harmony.  To store knowledge of history and past states of existence requires space in a brain, or in a computer, or whatever.  The more of the past you try to store, the more you limit your own future potential because you could use that energy for your own creations.  You probably would and should only keep knowledge of the past things and forms which you find beautiful, so you could use them in your creations.   I’d keep 3D models of plants, lovely animals, birds, and so forth, but I don’t think I’d ever resurrect a virtual mosquito.  Send those to oblivion.  *hits delete button*

We humans need to know the truth about the world because we’re subjected to so many dangers and are weak.  The stronger we become, the less truth matters.  There might be some sort of evolutionary big picture where science is one of its first stages.  We move from an age of discovery to an age of creation.  I don’t know.  We’re still pretty far from that transition, but it seems to be the direction science is taking us.

I have a few more thoughts to share on this idea of “truth”.  There’s a good chance that we live in a universe with infinite parallel universes along side us.  The universe may well be a cyclic process with new big bangs happening all the time.  A universe is born from random quantum fluctuations, expands and expands, until it’s so thin it’s basically nothingness, and then random quantum fluctuations cause other big bangs, and so on, indefinitely.  The random fluctuations provide the initial conditions and raw material for us to work with.  We’re dealing with an eternal creation machine making every possible reality, with every possible law of physics.  What would the “truth” be?  That is there is no absolute truth?  That anything is possible?

Now let’s take a look at the ultimate end of science — complete mastery of the universe.  Once we achieve some sort of perfect state of harmony, what do we do with ourselves?  Say we built this grand computer out of ever spec of matter of the entire universe and immerse ourselves in every conceivable fantasy and paradise.  What then?  We’d have to periodically erase our memories to free up space for new memories.  Otherwise the entire universe would be consumed with storage of our past memories.  So in time, its inevitable that we’d have to forget things that have happened to us.  No matter how precious the memory, a romantic encounter from 2 billion years ago would eventually have to be thrown out to make room for new experiences.

If you think this through, imagine what you would you use your computational power for?  Say you enhance your brain and powers.  What are you going to want?  I’d presume you’ll want a virtual experience that’s very difficult to overcome, pushing you to the limits of your abilities.  Otherwise it’d be boring.  The only way to enjoy harmony is to rid ourselves of emotions as we know them.  I can’t conceive of a world without our emotions.  They make life worth living.  Emotions and feeling.  Being challenged.  They’re core laws and important creation factors of the universe.  And you’re definitely not going to want the “strategy guide” loaded into your mind, telling you all the answers to beat the game.  What fun is that?

Maybe we all complain about this world because it seems the difficulty setting is too high.  Most of us are so weak, without working together we can’t accomplish anything.  But maybe long long ago, we’ve beaten this game of life before.  We all sat in virtual reality and said to ourselves, “I’m bored.”  ”Me too.”  ”Let’s erase everything and immerse ourselves in the beginning.  We’ll work together and do it all over again.  I wonder how we’ll solve this game of infinite solutions this next time?”  Just a thought.  But if we’re finite beings, I don’t think many of us realize what the word “infinite” really means.  It never ends.

My conclusion these days is to embrace the world’s struggle as it is.  Try to overcome it as best you can, and find ways to work together.  This is some sort of cooperative experience.  I say this all with reservation though.  There is a lot of suffering and misery here.  As I said before, you have to realize that any speculations about the “big picture” of life are just that — mere speculation.  If you don’t agree with me, I’m not going to stone you to death, and I don’t believe you’re going to hell.

As I woke up today, I found myself wondering what it is that drives my near obsession with understanding the human mind.  By far it’s the subject I’m most interested in.  I have bookshelves of textbooks on neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, artificial intelligence, neural computation, and many more.  Though it’s been a rather long and winding road which lead me to all of this, over the years I’ve gradually found out just how important these areas of research are.

Back in 2002 the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), along with the Department of Commerce, created a report entitled Converging Technologies For Improving Human Performance.   In it you’ll find the same conclusion I’ve drawn from what research into these areas has to offer.

“Understanding of the mind and brain will enable the creation of a new species of intelligent machine systems that can generate economic wealth on a scale hitherto unimaginable. Within a half-century, intelligent machines might create the wealth needed to provide food, clothing, shelter, education, medical care, a clean environment, and physical and financial security for the entire world population. Intelligent machines may eventually generate the production capacity to support universal prosperity and financial security for all human beings. Thus, the engineering of the mind is much more than the pursuit of scientific curiosity. It is more even than a monumental technological challenge. It is an opportunity to eradicate poverty and usher in the golden age for all humankind.“

Few people today realize how powerful these technologies will be as they mature.  Right now they’re in their infancy.  Rates of progress are currently exponential and I expect they will continue to move forward very rapidly in the future.  When will these technologies completely reshape human society?  Will it be fifty years?  One hundred years?  Two hundred years?  I can’t pinpoint it down very easily, but I see the trends, and this is going to bring huge changes to the human condition.  I’d like to be a part if I can.

Things are going to be changing so rapidly, it’s hard to see very far into the future.  My father grew up in a rural area and he didn’t even have an indoor bathroom, access telephones, or electricity.  Just a generation later, I’m playing online games over the internet with people all over the world in 3D virtual worlds on my computer, sit cozily in my heated and air conditioned home, and have access to countless movies with Netflix.  That’s pretty crazy when you think about it.

I’m not an old man by any means.  I’m not even thirty yet.  Even so, when I was in high school in the late 1990′s, very few people had the internet.  I remember hanging out with guys on the basketball team and Mike was telling us how his family had just got access to the internet over dial-up.  That was the big thing.  We ran around with Walkman handheld cd-players, oftentimes with all our cds in a big folder in our backpacks.  Barely a decade later, we have nearly all human knowledge available at our fingertips, iPhones, and Kindles.  University lectures on almost every subject are available on Youtube.  Nearly every major book has been scanned and is available on the web in PDF form.  Every type of scientific dataset is becoming accessible and computable with Wolfram Alpha.  It’s incredible.

When I’m around college students nowadays, there’s about a decade age difference between us.  One of them noticed that I don’t carry a cell phone and just couldn’t believe it.  He asked how people got ahold of me.  I coyly replied, “They don’t.”  When I was in school nobody had cell phones.  We’d find a landline phone someplace and make our calls.

What will things be like a few generations from now?  I don’t think many of us can even imagine how much things will change.  If you had a time machine and could visit the Earth in five hundred years, I wonder if you’d recognize the place.  I’m beginning to think you wouldn’t.

The past week I’ve been reading Brian Greene’s new book called The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes And The Deep Laws Of The Cosmos.   It’s very late and I’m extremely tired, so I’m not going to write a long post here tonight.  If this is a bit brief and terse, forgive me.

What I find truly baffling about modern physics is that you can look at the universe from so many different angles, either from quantum physics, cosmology, string theory, take your pick, and they all point toward infinite parallel universes.  You have the multiple worlds interpretation of quantum physics, cosmology’s inflationary multi-verse, or string theory’s braneworlds, and they all point toward infinite parallel universes.  Read the book yourself if you don’t believe me.  Though there is a lot of speculation, this isn’t fringe science, and it’s not empty speculation.

It’s very probable that there are an infinite number of Jasons, in fact, an infinite number of Jasons in parallel universes which are exact duplicates of my entire universe, in every detail.   Every possibility already exists and has always existed.  By our actions, we’re not creating anything.  It all has always existed.

In a sense, no matter what you do, it doesn’t matter.  You’ll experience different things based on what you decide to do, sure, but in other ways, it doesn’t matter.  Say you’re currently living a life to “change the world.”  You’re going to feed the children of Africa.  You’re going to contribute some invention or technology which will leave a better world for the next generation.  You’re going to find every little puppy a home.  Try all you like, but you’re never changing anything.   The children in Africa, whether fed, or not fed, the possibilities exist and have always existed.  Children in Africa are starving to death, dying of diseases and poverty, and in other parallel universes Africa is a technological utopia and everyone’s living in pure bliss.  Both exist and are happening right now, and every gradation inbetween.  Nothing you do or can do will ever change that.

If this is true, and piles of evidence suggests it is, you can’t change the world.  The world isn’t something that can be changed.  The world is.  Period.  Done.  End of story.   Trying to change the world, or fight it, or overcome it, or defeat it, or anything like that, is just meaningless.

If you think it over, and internalize what this stuff means, you’re obviously not going to die.  How could you?  Infinite Jasons in every possible reality continue to exist after “I” “die”.  You don’t die.  I don’t die.  We don’t die.  Nobody dies.  Nothing to worry about.

Do you all exist?  Am I the sole instance of consciousness and you all are just the collapse of my wave function, based on what I “choose” to experience?  How does this choosing work exactly?  It wouldn’t “work” in any way I could ever understand.  Why do I choose one thing over another.  There’s no reason.  No why.  I just did, I guess?   I mean, I’ve been nursing a headache most of the day, and why would I have chosen this particular experience over others?   And if I did ever make such a decision, I certainly don’t ever remember existing in this prior state, and flying through all these options and weighing the possibilities.

You guys want to know the crazy conclusion I’ve came to?  I came to it years ago, and any time I mention it to people, they just look at me like I’m totally out there — we have no identity.

The key I’ve been needing to realize is that I’m not missing anything.   As Watts said, there’s no need to struggle and struggle and struggle.   It’s about enjoying the walk of life, no matter how strange or absurd a lot of it is.  It’s not about understanding it, and it’s impossible for us to understand it.  You work to understand the world to whatever degree you need or want to understand it, based on what you’re doing in that walk.   That’s the end of it.  With all these infinite branching parallel universes, how do you ever plan to wrap your mind about all of that?   It’s a waste of time.  I guess most of my thought experiments and thinking have lead me to that inevitable conclusion.   Just enjoy the walk, and nothing can harm me.  What could anyone or anything ever do to me?

I seem to greatly enjoy reflecting on how it’s impossible to escape this conclusion.  I’ve been wanting to write another blog post about how even if you could rewind time, and do things over as many times as you want, you’d lose more than you gain.  Maybe that’ll be my next post.  Until next time.  I need sleep.

Just the other day I posted a video where researchers in machine vision took a digital film of them roaming about a college campus and extracted a 3D model of the entire campus from the film images alone.  Depth information can be extracted based on the rate of how the colored pixels change relative to one another.  Pixels “further” in the distance change slower than those up close, and using computational algorithms you can use this basic idea to extract “space” from the images falling on the camera’s “eye”.

I’m a quest you see.  A quest I’ve been on for years.

“Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live.”

- Albert Einstein

This is all part of a larger quest which came long before I became interested in physics.  You see, I started off reading the works of philosophers such as Hegel, Kant, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and others.  I wanted to understand what “I” consisted of.   I later realized Einstein was on this same quest, and in a way, I want to pick up where he left off, focusing on how the subjective sense of space and time are created by our brains, and help physicists figure out how to combine relativity theory with quantum physics.

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.

-Albert Einstein

I’ve spent the past few weeks studying quantum mechanics.  I keep reflecting on things like Schrodinger’s equation, and try to think of how to find a distinction between myself and the objective world.  Somehow I’ve always hoped to better understand objective reality through physics, but I can’t get over some major philosophical hurdles.  Einstein seemed to struggle with the same problem.  In this letter to his friend Max Born, he was trying to find a way to hold onto a concept of objective reality as separate from a particular observer.  After all, physics gets its name from physical.

I just want to explain what I mean when I say that we should try to hold on to physical reality.  We are … all aware of the situation regarding what will turn out to be the basic foundational concepts in physics: the point-mass or the particle is surely not among them; the field, in the Faraday-Maxwell sense, might be, but not with certainty. But that which we conceive as existing (“real”) should somehow be localized in time and space. That is, the real in one part of space, A, should (in theory) somehow “exist” independently of that which is thought of as real in another part of space, B. If a physical system stretches over A and B, then what is present in B should somehow have an existence independent of what is present in A. What is actually present in B should thus not depend the type of measurement carried out in the part of space A; it should also be independent of whether or not a measurement is made in A.

If one adheres to this program, then one can hardly view the quantum-theoretical description as a complete representation of the physically real. If one attempts, nevertheless, so to view it, then one must assume that the physically real in B undergoes a sudden change because of a measurement in A. My physical instincts bristle at that suggestion.

However, if one renounces the assumption that what is present in different parts of space has an independent, real existence, then I don’t see at all what physics is supposed to be describing. For what is thought to be a “system” is after all, just conventional, and I do not see how one is supposed to divide up the world objectively so that one can make statements about parts.

- Albert Einstein, in a personal letter to Max Born

The only way I can think to proceed is to fully understand quantum physics and relativity theory (which is coming along nicely these days for me), and then figure out the algorithms the brain is using to separate objects one from another, create a sense of existing within space, our sense of self, and how our sense of time comes to be.   It’s not an easy path, but it’s the only one I find fulfilling.  I’ve never wanted to write boring business software, or attend school, or work a job.  Unfortunately I’m forced to do these things.  But I always have Joseph Campbell’s quote in the back of my mind.

“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls”

- Joseph Campbell

Let’s see where this road leads.

I’ve never really found any definition or account of the “self” to be satisfactory.  To me, it’s the single most important question to answer, but I never seemed to make any progress.  The self is something unique, the set of all essential qualities making someone distinct from everyone else.  I’ve never been able to find any criteria which can set us apart from one another, and that has always troubled me.

I found myself falling back on the existentialist philosophy of Jean Paul Satre, and I conceived of myself as a sort of “freedom”.  If you’ve read his book Being and Nothingness, you’ll find it’s a book intended to battle determinism and any casual influence over us.  Though a great read, overall, the idea of “free will” doesn’t make any sense.  I don’t see any evidence that we have such a thing, and the more time I’ve spent dissecting the idea, I can’t understand what such a concept would even be. I’ve written about it before, and there’s no need to go into all of it again.

I read John Locke, David Hume, Hegel, and others.  How could I define myself, distinguishing myself from others and the world around me?  I thought that maybe it’s our thinking processes which set us apart.  But no,  animals can think too, just not to same degree we can.  Before long, we’ll have computers which will be able to out-think all of us, but will they have a “self”?  Their neural networks will process information according to the same algorithms our brains use, but whether or not they’ll be conscious, who knows.  As I’ve written neural network algorithms which emulate many forms of intelligence, I find human intelligence to just to be one algorithm our brain does, and it isn’t nearly as remarkable as people think it is.  In fact, I’d argue that we humans aren’t all that intelligent.  If we were, we wouldn’t struggle to exist and there wouldn’t be so much poverty and misery.

I thought that maybe it’s our memories and the timeline of our lives which define us.  But no, memories can be altered either by brain damage, disease, or if you were skilled enough, inserting false memories into someone’s brain.  Maybe we’re our physical bodies or our desires?  But no, none of those work either.  Our bodies are changing every day, cells dividing and splitting, and old cells dying.  Every so often, our entire bodies are rebuilt from new materials.  The same materials are reused by all of us.  And our desires are created by our brains.  If you alter your brain, you alter your desires — and the brain is chemistry all the way down.  Quantum effects are negligible at the scale of neurons.  To top it off, a person’s desires can be changed by what they know, and we learn by our experiences.  It’s “your” desire until you learn there’s better choices you could make.  When would that process ever end?  It doesn’t.  All evidence suggests we’re determined.  What you want is to feel happy and satisfied.  What you actually experience and do is beside the point.

Frustrated, I left the philosophy of self alone for years and dedicated myself to physics and other physical sciences where I could feel I was at least making some progress instead of just spinning in circles.  But then I got into neuroscience which brought me right back into the debate.  Being a rather philosophical kind of guy, I found myself reading the American Journal of Bioethics and came across a rather intriguing article called Personhood and neuroscience: Naturalizing or Nihilating?  It begins with the following introduction:

Personhood is a foundational concept in ethics, yet defining criteria have been elusive.  In this article we summarize attempts to define personhood in psychological and neurological terms and conclude that none manage to be both specific and non-arbitrary.  We propose that this is because the concept does not correspond to any real category of objects in the world.  Rather, it is the product of an evolved brain system that develops innately and projects itself automatically and irrepressibly onto the world whenever triggered by stimulus features such as a human-like face, body, or contingent patterns of behavior.  We review the evidence for the existence of an autonomous person network in the brain and discuss its implications for the field of ethics and for the implicit morality of everyday behavior.

I was drawn in like iron filings to a magnet.  This article shows the brain regions involved in creating the illusion of the self, and gives a basic understanding as to how they work.  Our brains process certain types of stimulation in special ways, and that’s where we get this idea of “self” and “others”.  After discussing how our brain processes faces and other types of human stimulation in these special areas, the authors move on to explain how there’s also special areas of our brain to process certain special patterns of motion.  These patterns are hard-wired in us to ascribe intentionality.  (quoting again from the article):

In addition to visual shape features such as static eyes, faces and bodies, certain patterns of motion are also effective at engaging the system.  In particular, contingent “behavior,” by which a stimulus seems responsive to its environment, can evoke a sense of intentionality and personhood.  In the famous animated film of Heider and Simmel (1944) two triangles and a circle move around the screen with motions that are interrelated, giving an impression of three entities interacting with motivations and intentions (see http://pantheon.yale.edu/~bs265/demons/causality.html).  The automaticity of this attribution is apparent in the difficultly of describing this film without using psychlogical terms such as “wants” and “tries” (Scholl and Tremoulet 2000).  This automaticity seems related to the trigger of the person network, in that a patient with complete bilateral amygdala degeneration described the film purely in pshysical terms (Heberlein and Adolphs 2004).

Brain imaging studies of Heider and Simel-type animations show that all of the brain regions shown in Figure 1 are activiated (Castelli et. al 2000; Martin and Weisberg 2003; Schultz 2003).  For example, in the study of Martin and Weisberg (2003), two sets of animations were presented: both were composed of moving squares, triangles and circles, which moved in a contingent interactive manner (e.g., as if dancing together or chasing each other) in the “social” set and in a manner consistent with mechanical motions (e.g., like billiard balls or objects on a conveyer belt) in the “mechanical” set.  Despire the absence of anything resembling a human being in these animations, the former set and only that set activated the fusiform face area, amygdala, temporoparietal junction and medial prefrontal cortex.

After I read this I thought, “Of course!”  When doing research on space and time, I wanted to know how well the brain intuitively understood the laws of physics.  It turns out that we have a system which is alright at judging the movements and behavior of objects in certain everyday situations, but it’s lacking in many ways.  Take a common mechanics problem.  Say you place a solid wood cylinder beside a hollowed out aluminum can, both with the same radius, and roll them down a ramp.

Which will reach the bottom first?  People have no idea.  (In fact, the university that did the study found that physics professors weren’t any better at this than normal people, without first doing their mathematical computations).  This isn’t surprising considering the brain has no way of figuring out problems like this.  Like our sense of space, which is only partially correct, our brain’s intuitive sense of how objects move and behave is only partly correct as well.

What does this have to do with personhood and the self?  People don’t move in simple patterns like the objects of the world.  Their movements are largely unpredictable.  If I were to throw a baseball in the air, it goes straight up, then back down toward the ground.  But if I throw my arm up and it stops mid-way in its free-fall, you’re not surprised.  Why is this?  You say, “Jason stopped it for some reason.”  Our brains evolved a separate area to identify special objects (living things), and we process them via a different system.  When an object seems to be “attuned” to its environment, responding to stimuli it like an animal with sense organs, we process it using special brain regions.  Instead of using the brain’s physical mechanics system, it instead analyzes motions of these special objects according to “intentions”.  It thinks in terms of locations of food sources, mating, desires, and trying to get “inside the head” of the thing you’re looking at.  We think, “What does this thing want?  What is it after?  What is it trying to accomplish?”  Your brain tries to imagine what that thing will do by simulating what you would do in that situation, and so forth.

This intuitive and automatic intention system is what we’re mistaking for free will.  People were too complicated to understand by other means, so the brain evolved the easiest route to analyze these complex behaviors – self reflection.  It’s not that people have free will.  It’s just our brains gave up trying to predict such complex behavior and instead found a new way of dealing with others.  This sense of “self” has allowed us to interact and cooperate with others in ways we couldn’t have otherwise.

To illustrate this point, think of autistic people.  An autistic child will climb up your body like you’re just another piece of furniture to use.  That’s because their “person network” in their brain isn’t working like ours, so they’re more “selfish”.  Ironically, they’re not more selfish, they’re less so.  They less understand their own sense of self and yours as well.  And as anyone who has worked with autistic children knows, they’re harder to work with and are less cooperative.

Our own sense of self is an illusion created by this person network.  We’re not separate from our world or those around us, but our brain creates this illusion because it was useful for these human shells to cooperate.  Even though it’s a fiction, it’s a good one.  It allows us to love, understand, and work with one another.

This explains why the self can’t be defined – it never existed to begin with.  Like many things, when you look at the problem from the wrong angle, you never find a solution.  The self is a useful illusion, nothing more.  If you pull open the curtains, you find that it was never there, but it certainly feels real doesn’t it?  Our own fear of death is a way for us to give value to our time here and to also value the lives of others as well.

Even still, this all leaves me with a lot to think about.  I think we’re so unhappy dwelling on ourselves because it’s a hollow illusion.  There’s just not enough there to keep any real thinking person occupied, though it will leave you confused as you’re navigating the maze of mirrors.

Many years ago the philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote an ingenious essay entitled Where Am I?  It is a fictional story where the pentagon asks the professor to go on a top-secret mission deep within the Earth, but in order to complete the task, they need to remove his brain from his body due to extreme radiation.  They put his brain in a vat and then connect it to another body using wireless electronics.  Dennett then controls this second body for the mission, complications happen, and well, many interesting questions about identity and space are addressed throughout.  Professor Minsky, who was in charge of the operation, connected Dennett’s brain to a super-computer which was simulating his brain activity exactly.  At some points Dennett is controlling his remote controlled body via the super-computer and at other times via his brain.  I won’t ruin the rest for you.

I originally read the essay in a cognitive psychology textbook of mine, but I’ve just recently found out that he has made a “docudrama” acting out this entire scenario on film!  You have to watch it.  I loved it.

It won’t be all that long before nanotechnology makes this sort of thing actually possible.  If your body gets completely run down, it’s possible that it could be extracted, placed in a vat, and then remotely wired up to a prosthetic body.  And when you start thinking about things like this, carefully analyzing it all, it only gets more and more confusing.  At the very start you see Professor Dennett staring at his brain saying, “Here I am, staring at my brain in a vat.”  Then he soon catches himself and thinks, “No, that’s not right.  Here I am?  Isn’t the real me in the vat?”

I honestly think that humans will eventually shed their physical bodies in favor of remote controlled prosthetic bodies.  Not clunky looking cyborg bodies, but elegant bodies which are more beautiful and well constructed than our own.  Made of stronger materials, not needing all the burdensome upkeep, and much easier to repair if something goes wrong.  We’ll have mastered fusion power and have practically limitless energy.  We’ll erect giant super-computers which will simulate a virtual universe filled with all sorts of worlds in which we’ll stay “plugged into”.  Robotic sentinels powered by AI millions of times more intelligent than our own minds today will keep our brains functioning and when we wish to explore the real world, we’ll “possess” a robotic body and use it.  There won’t be a need to travel from point A to point B.  We’ll move as fast as our information technology.  I don’t think I’ll live long enough to see it (absent some huge breakthrough in medical technology allowing me to live for a very long time), but within a few hundred years things are rapidly moving that way.  It sounds like science fiction, but just study it out and look at the technology.  Something incredible is evolving here on planet Earth.

A lot of questions about space and identity arise in these scenarios.  We tend to associate ourselves with our bodies, but even by simply removing your brain and remotely connecting to another body removes that problem.  That’s not even counting virtual reality and its possibilities.  And are you even really your brain and nervous system?  To some extent you certainly are, but say you’re a mean-spirited person, unkind, and always unhappy.  We’re tempted to say, “So and so is such a mean person.  I don’t like him.”  But there will come a time in the not so distant future when we can implant small chips in a person’s brain which dampen signals from some regions and amplify signals from others and lift them out of depression, hatred, or any other unwanted behavior.  When your brain is in a vat, filled with nanobots supplementing your brain and altering its signals, you would consciously have experiences, but you’re not stuck with any particular personality, level of knowledge, or temperament.  We’re not anything which we currently think we are.  We’re not our bodies.  We’re not our location in space.  We’re not our personalities.  We’re not our gender.  We’re not our thoughts.  We’re not our desires.  We’re not what we know.  I don’t know what we are, but we’re not any of those things, at least not absolutely considering they’re all subject to change, especially with advances in technology.  We’re something beyond all that.  Beyond morality.  Beyond feelings.  Beyond emotion.

The collective consciousness of humanity is slowly rising from the depths, though it’s still wading around in the mud.  Originally we couldn’t accept anyone who worshiped a different God, wore different clothing, styled their hair differently, spoke differently, and had different cultural values.  Later we matured and realized the value in freedom, and governments allowed freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and protected minorities from the majority.  Humanity flourished in ways it had never done before.  Next we struggled with skin color.  Segregation was eliminated and humanity further prospered.  Even today racism is rampant, but it’s been diminishing with time.  Our next step is to accept gays, lesbians, and transgender individuals.  We’re not our gender or sexual orientation.  We’ll move beyond that.  Then we’ll move beyond geographic borders and stop fighting with one another over fictional lines drawn in the sand.  Later we’ll hopefully learn that a person isn’t what he or she does.  Their actions are a consequence of their nervous system, not some immaterial “free will”.  People seem to understand this in bits and pieces, such as economists pointing out how people respond to incentives, sociologists indicating how the poor and struggling are more likely to commit crimes, and psychologists telling us how people’s desires can be shaped by their culture and environment, but we still haven’t completely caught on.  We still hold to deep seated convictions of responsibility, justice, and retribution, and base our society around them.  We point fingers at individuals and say, “You’re bad.  You’re no good.  You’re evil.”  Instead we should ask, “What environment did this person live through?  How was this person raised?  What was he or she exposed to?  What are his or her brain scans showing?  Is everything functioning?”, and so on.  Empty blame won’t tell us why a person did what they did or help us learn how to fix the problem.  We’ll attribute it to their “free will” and say, “it’s uncaused, their spirit made a decision which controlled their body to do this or that”, instead of asking, “Why did this person do that?”  I think we still need laws enforcing retribution and justice, but very few people realize how the brain is chemistry all the way down.  As we do so, humanity will move into a new level of love and compassion, and instead of cruelly executing people, we’ll further research which brain areas aren’t firing, such as why the mass murderer feels no guilt or compassion, and supplement his or her brain with new implanted hardware, fixing their mind and behavior.

I think humanity is up for a long train ride and it’s going to be hell, at least initially.  This new technology is going to force governments to change and it’ll require radical shifts in our collective consciousness.  Religion is being thrown against the wall as more and more facts show how bogus its claims are and they won’t give in without a fight.  They’ll contest every form of progress and consider these developments as playing God and blasphemy.  Religiously motivated terrorism will only increase.  Our economic systems are failing us as more and more efficient methods of production are coming into place.  Robots will eventually take over all mundane work, and keep climbing in capabilities and worth to employers, leaving normal people unemployed.  Eventually people won’t need to work at all to live, but it’s unlikely that our governments and social institutions will be able to keep up with the rapid changes.  Millions and later billions will be out of work, trying to compete with augmented humans with better skills, trying to find ways to afford prosthetics, and struggling to work within this system of money, trade and competition.  Wealth disparities will be far beyond what they are today, and there will surely be wars and riots. When people can download knowledge and skills into their supplemented brains, old ideas of identity have to go.  Humanity may well be wiped off the planet by rich transhuman overlords who view them as worthless and have the masses exterminated.

But with all these new developments, people will be connected in ways they never have been before.  They’ll be able to share information and knowledge at the speed of light, brain to brain transfers.  Think about when we can beam experiences to one another.  Millions and even billions could instantly be made aware of injustices, “teleported” right on the scene.   We’ll be able to simultaneously receive information feeds from the same body and share near exactly the same experiences.  There will probably be movie theaters where thousands or even millions of people connect to the virtual body of a character, and we all live that character’s life, and see their perspective, live their thoughts, and feel their emotions.  And since it’ll be digital information, countless different perspectives could be absorbed and analyzed in ways far beyond what our internet and blogs are today.  There’s a lot to think about, and it’s all coming too fast to even begin to understand.

What drives you to do the things you do?  What makes you get up in the morning?  What’s your deepest passion?  As for me, I crave a deeper understanding of what’s going on around me.  I’ve set my aim on discovering something new about the universe before I die.  I want to add some new novel insight into our knowledge of reality.

I’ve never had a subject draw me in like physics does.   It seems like I have the same realization several times a day, “All of this is really going on.  All of these equations, vibrating atoms, oscillating electromagnetic waves, nuclear fusion reactions, etc.  That’s all happening and is the ultimate cause behind what I’m experiencing.”

Dr. Tegmark’s philosophy toward the universe reminds me a lot of John Locke’s primary qualities of objects.  Tegmark views the world as ultimately comprised of mathematical equations and algorithms of some sort.  Those sorts of thoughts have been running through my head lately as I’ve also been reading a book by Stephen Wolfram called A New Kind Of Science.  It explores an idea that reality may ultimately consist of just a few lines of code.  He explores simple algorithms and how they can produce very complicated output, and ties all of that in with the laws of our universe, chaos theory, how deterministic simple processes can produce unpredictable output, and so forth.  I’m still reading it all, so I can’t comment on it yet.  But anyways, Locke drew a distinction between what he called primary and secondary qualities of reality, and primary qualities were very similar to these ideas of Wolfram and Tegmark.  Primary qualities are properties of objects that are independent of any particular observer.  They include things like extension, motion, figure, and number.  Secondary qualities deal with how we subjectively experience those objects, such as smell, taste, and color.

When I first read Locke’s Essay in my late teens, I immediately thought of 3D graphics simulations on computers.  Primary qualities would be like the data structures you use to hold the simulation information.  You might store the 3D environment as a tree of polygons, and so on.  But take the person taking part in the simulation, viewing the computer monitor and navigating in the virtual world by watching the changing images on the computer screen.  All they see is a 3D world, and they have no idea how computer is creating that world absent being able to look at the code.  If they can’t see the code, the simulation engine could be programmed all sorts of different ways.  There’s no way of knowing.

Take the old video game Doom for instance.  When you play the game you see yourself immersed in a 3D environment as so.

But what about the code and data structures which actually produce that world you’re seeing?  Does the game produce those images similar to how the real world produces the images falling on our eyes?  No, not at all.  There’s no light rays shooting around the room, interacting with surfaces, scattering the light, and reflecting back into the player’s eyes.  In fact, the world isn’t even truly 3D.  If you look at the actual code and data structures which the Doom engine uses, you’ll see that it actually stores that 3D room you’re seeing as tree of 2D polygons strung together.

Notice that it’s actually 2D polygons, each with an assigned texture and height.  Textures are shared between polygons to save computer memory.   Neat huh?  Why do that?  It saves computational cycles.  Doom was written back in 1994, back when the top of the line computers were 486 66 Mhz, computers with like 16 MB of RAM.  You had to do things elegantly to save resources.

These sorts of thought experiments are what make me think that space is a subjective experience created by our brain.  True “reality” may well be something like Tegmark and Wolfram are alluding toward – an algorithm or mathematical structure of some sort, far different than how we perceive it.  Our neocortex is arranged in a hierarchy and when it processes images from our eyes, it naturally finds patterns, and patterns within patterns, and that’s what space is.  Our brain doesn’t care how the images were produced.  It’ll find space in any image or sequence of changing images.

I’ve always found it strange that no “space” exists within the computer.  When you’re playing Call of Duty on your XBox, there is no “space” inside the console.  Where does that giant environment you’re playing within exist?  It’s data on a disk.  It’s code.  It’s data structures.  For example, when you’re “moving” your game character, nothing is moving.  An internal variable stored within your character’s data structure, probably something like “WorldPosition.X, WorldPosition.Y, and WorldPosition.Z” are being changed.  The game’s environment isn’t moving.  It’s data on the system’s hard-drive, static and unchanging.  Well, unless the environment is destructible, as is common these days.  Then their vertex points change values, moving the block.

When I think of how the ultimate “reality” could be timeless and could contain all possibilities in some sort of infinite multi-verse, I think of this computer simulation analogy.  It helps me a lot.  For example, think of sitting in front of Microsoft Word.  Now imagine hitting random keys on your keyboard, filling up page after page with text.  Every possible book which could ever be written already exists.  If your fingers just happened to hit the right keys in the right order, a book would emerge.  The same applies to music.  Take a mp3 file.  Within that 10 megabytes of information, every possible song and remix already exists.  If I wrote a program which cycled through every possible combination of 1s and 0s for that 10 megabytes on your disk, every possible song that could ever be played would be played.  They all already exist.  They’ve always existed.  People never “create” anything.

Take the analogy a little further.  Instead of source code on a computer, with 1s and 0s, think of the laws of physics.  Instead of a hard-drive and memory, think of quantum bits of information stored in atoms.  With just a little thought, you see that physics is the programming language of reality.  You look at those equations and you see the “code” running our world.

But this way of viewing the world is missing something very important – it doesn’t handle subjective consciousness well.  It’s like seeing the world as a giant computer running a program, which seems to be largely correct, but it just doesn’t seem to be the entire picture.  The thing is, I’m immersed inside of this world.  I don’t know if I’m actually capable of “doing” anything, and I don’t know if I even have free will.  In fact, most evidence today seems to suggest the contrary.  But I do know I’m currently experiencing reality, and it’s not just information flowing about.  I’ve always struggled with a sort of dualism between those two ideas, objective reality and subjective reality.  I think George Berkeley was right when he criticized Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities way back in 1680-something.  The same arguments apply today when looking at Tegmark or Wolfram’s ideas.  Take an apple.  If you strip it of all its subjective qualities, such as its redness, the way it feels in your hands, its taste, and so on, what’s left?  What’s left for its “objective” reality?  Locke seemed to conceive this sort of geometric shape, information related to its motion, such as inertia, and other “data” and numbers.  Maybe that’s correct?

The ultimate problem is I can’t leave my body and see the world objectively, so how in the world can I know how things exist in and of themselves?  If the true “reality” is data and numbers and mathematical expressions, how would you “experience” that?  Meld with the math?  When I think about the world’s objects, it’s my brain doing the thinking, and it got its information from sensory impressions.  It then runs through its hierarchical process of pattern recognition and I call it “understanding”.  But that doesn’t mean that time is actually flowing how my brain makes me feel it does.  Things may not move how I think they move.  Like in the simulator, I can “move” an object by just changing a few variables at certain memory addresses in the computer.  That changes the images on the screen, which the person then experiences as an object flying across the room.

It is odd though.  When I play Doom, no matter what keys I press, and how much I explore, I’m never going to be able to learn how the game was programmed.  But in our world it’s different.  There’s clues everywhere.  There’s like this fractal structure within the information, baiting us to learn more.  Our universe repeats the same simple processes, over and over and over.  We’ve found a few simple equations which pretty much describe all of reality as we know it.

All the research I’ve been doing into machine vision and the brain are related to how that subjective sense of space is produced from sensory information and patterns.  I’m hoping that by understanding how that works in more detail, maybe it’ll shed some light on how a particular reality can be experienced from unchanging math equations and so forth.  It’s very vague and immaterial in my head.  I still don’t “get” subjective space completely, but I seem to be moving toward something.  I can write code which takes a series of images and the program will produce a “cloud” of 3D data points which resemble the 3D world on the screen.  The points will all lie on the walls, and so forth.  I’m not sure what sort of data structure to use to store the “walls” and rooms.  How does the brain store that information?  Well, it uses a hierarchy of six or so layers, storing patterns, and patterns within patterns, and patterns within those patterns, and so forth, up to six layers deep.

To me, that’s the bridge between subjective reality and objective reality as represented by math equations in physics.  Figuring that problem out. I want to keep studying how that subjective space is built up, and keep studying more and more physics, learning how those equations work.  I’ll keep working at roping the two together.

We’re rapidly approaching the day when we can immerse ourselves in virtual reality.  If you think the world is nothing but what you actually experience, then those worlds are true parallel universes.  You may say, “Oh no, that’s just data in the computer, and signals going through the brain, and so on.”  But an experience is an experience.  That space is space isn’t it?  Why is it a different sort of “space” than “real” space?  People are already interacting in it, having experiences together, and when we have true VR, will be fully immersed within it.  How is that not a true parallel universe?  It seems to me to be one.  Why is our world the “real” one and the others “virtual”?

I think “space” can be created in many different ways.  3D graphics algorithms in computer programming captures one way to do so.   It’s real space.  It produces the proper changes in patterns of information which a brain, which is particular type of information processor, can process and turn into a subjective sense of existing within it.  The code which runs electromagnetic waves, atoms, and how those waves scatter and interact with those groups atoms in physics “stuff” also contains those same patterns of information, which are processed into space.  The light rays form images on our eyes, which in turn give us a sense of existing within space.

But does an “objective” space exist?  I don’t fully understand that.  Things bend and distort in weird ways as you increase your speed, especially near light speed.  You have time dilation and the Lorentz contraction, and mass begins to increase.  I’m still not a master of that level of physics, so I have to keep working at it.   Our subjective “space” starts breaking down and not really working right.  Once that’s gone, you don’t have any intuitive “tools” to help you understand what’s going on.  The mathematical relationships in the equations are all you have.  It’s not easy.  I study it, get frustrated and wore out, study something else, and then go back to it, over and over and over again.  Like in quantum mechanics, things aren’t as separate and can exist in multiple locations at once.  The world of the very small is weird.  It’s all too strange.  This entry is getting too long.

Before I go, one last idea.  The brain is like a hard-drive and computer processor built into one.  It builds up a model of the world from sensory information fed into it.  I speculate that there’s two separate “realities” taking place.  If a reality is information and information processes, there’s the information structure within my brain, which is a certain flow of energy and information, and then there’s information flows outside my body.  When an object moves, the movement that I perceive is based on how the data structures within my brain are changed and manipulated, but “objectively” that movement may be something akin to some variable changing in my simulators I program all the time.  I think the whole “subjective” dynamic is based mostly in the fact that the brain is largely an internally connected information flow, only letting outside information flows in from sensory feeds.

It’s almost 6 AM and I’m dead tired.  I’m typing this while half asleep, so keep that in mind.  I’ll end it here.   I typed this out as is.  Very little proof-reading.  This is how information just spews out of my head onto a page.

I’d like to continue the discussion of yesterday and elaborate on a topic which is really interesting to me:  the yin and yang of the mind.  As I was reflecting on this idea today, I mainly considered how the mind is a swirl of yin and yang, like a lollipop.

Let’s start with being thankful versus being discontented.  The same mental mechanisms are used for both, yet one is considered a virtue while the other a vice.  The human mind has the ability to transcend space and time using its imagination.  It can imagine and or remember things that don’t currently exist, and if you desire, it can compare that to what is currently in front of you.  We do it all the time.  It’s how we know that time is passing and that things are changing.  It’s what allows us to understand the world, make decisions, and have a degree of control over our lives.  It allows us to choose who we want to be.  But like anything with great power, it’s a very dangerous tool as well.

If you compare “down”, we consider it being thankful.  We think of all the nice things we have in our lives and how much worse off we could be.  Using the exact same mental system, we can also look at our world and think about how much better everything could be.  This is comparing “up”.  Although what’s considered “up” and “down” (better and worse) are often relative to a person, you get the idea.

We’re often told to have big dreams and that we can accomplish great things.  But what is a dream?  It’s a state of discontentment.  It’s an imagined reality which you want to bring into existence.  It can be a dream to find a lover, to build a great company, or in some way change the world for the better.  Either way, it’s a state of discontentment.  The same system that allows you to better yourself is also what allows you to be discontent with your life.  They work hand in hand, yin and yang.  You can’t separate the two without destroying who you are, your dreams, and everything that you value.

I remember watching videos of a famous inventor talking about the future of nanotechnology, and how future humans will be able to immerse themselves in virtual reality, have any experience they desire, and also control the world all the way down to individual atoms.  At the same time, I could tell the man wasn’t very happy with the world he lived in.  He saw how much better things could be and that left him severely discontented.  Why wasn’t he living in that wonderful world?  The thought had to occur to him every single day.  The man has ten PhDs and is one the most brilliant men on the planet.  His mind has grown so large he can see possibilities far beyond most people.  He sees where humankind is headed and it’s wonderful.  But the same intelligence leaves him very unhappy.

Intelligence is generally considered a virtue.  The more you perceive the laws of this universe, the more power you have to navigate between all the infinite possibilities to the one you desire.  Every new scientific and engineering discovery we’ve made has allowed us more and more possibilities.  Metaphorically speaking, it’s like we’re reuniting to God.  Our drive to learn about the universe ultimately stems from this separation from the divine.  We yearn to be better, to go farther, to be stronger.  We want to explore, to learn, and to grow.  As we grow and learn, we find and acquire new things to be thankful for, yet ultimately those things grew from a discontentment and a longing for a better world.   If we weren’t bored and eager to explore, we never would have learned about all the wonderful sights we have to cherish in this world.  We can’t be thankful for something we don’t know anything about.

The same applies to love and hate.  The second you choose to love something, you also choose to hate something else.  With every decision we make, we flee one thing and gravitate toward another.  If you’ll love anything, you stand for nothing.  If you’ll believe anything, you have no principles.

This intimate swirl between yin and yang is so embedded in our nature that I don’t see how this law could ever be removed without us losing our humanity.  We can never be complete and satisfied.  The mind is built to be discontent and continually desire bigger, better, and faster things.  This universe of ours, this game of life we’re currently immersed in, isn’t something that can be “won”.  We were constructed by a yin and yang dynamic.  Our existence is not a static state, but is a flow, a process, a movement.  And that movement is directed by the world’s feedback system – success and failure.  We had replication with random mutations along with non-random selection, winners being decided by who was best suited to survive in the environment.  That striving to be better, stronger, and endure is infused in us in every aspect of our being, consciously and unconsciously.

Are any of you familiar with a philosophical idea called anti-natalism?  I was listening to various people debate the idea on youtube and found it strange that I’d never heard of it.  I hope I’m not oversimplifying the idea, but from what I gather, it’s the idea that it would be better if we’d never been born.  Wanting to learn more about this idea, I got ahold of a book by David Benatar called Better Never To Have Been.  He is one of the chief authors anti-natalists reference.  After reading a good portion of the book, it seems worthwhile to share what I think of these ideas.

I really wasn’t all that impressed with the book initially, but once I came to chapter 3, I liked the book a little more.  That chapter began as follows,

I have argued that so long as a life contains even the smallest quantity of bad, coming into existence is a harm. Whether or not one accepts this conclusion, one can recognize that a life containing a significant amount of bad is a harm. I turn now to show that all human lives contain much more bad than is ordinarily recognized.  [...] The worse a life is, the greater the harm of being brought into existence. I shall argue, however, that even the best lives are very bad, and therefore that being brought into existence is always a considerable harm. To clarify, I shall not be arguing that all lives are so bad that they are not worth continuing. That is a much stronger claim than I need to make. Instead, I shall be arguing that people’s lives are much worse than they think and that all lives contain a great deal of bad.

He next discussed the suffering and pleasures of this life from a hedonistic perspective.  This is a rather long quotation from the book, so forgive me.

Consider first the hedonistic view. Such a view will need to distinguish between three kinds of mental states—negative ones, positive ones, and neutral ones. Negative mental states include discomfort, pain, suffering, distress, guilt, shame, irritation, boredom, anxiety, frustration, stress, fear, grief, sadness, and loneliness. Positive mental states—pleasures, in the broad sense—can be of two kinds. First, there are those which are relief from negative mental states. These relief pleasures include the subsiding of a pain (such as a headache), the mollification of an itch, the abatement of boredom, the alleviation of stress, the dissipation of anxiety or fear, and the assuagement of guilt. Secondly, there are the intrinsically positive states. Intrinsic pleasures include pleasant sensory experiences—tastes, smells, visual images, sounds, and tactile sensations—as well as some non-sensory conscious states (such as joy, love, and excitement). Some pleasures have both relief and intrinsic components. For example, eating a tasty meal while hungry brings both relief from hunger and the intrinsic pleasure of fine-tasting food. (By contrast, eating insipid food while hungry might relieve the hunger, but it would do so without the intrinsic pleasure. Neutral mental states are those which are neither negative, nor positive in either the relief or intrinsic sense. Neutral states include the absence of pain, fear, or shame (as distinct from gaining relief from these negative states).

For the psychological reasons mentioned earlier, we tend to ignore just how much of our lives is characterized by negative mental states, even if often only relatively mildly negative ones. Consider, for example, conditions causing negative mental states daily or more often. These include hunger, thirst, bowel and bladder distension (as these organs become filled), tiredness, stress, thermal discomfort (that is, feeling either too hot or too cold), and itch. For billions of people, at least some of these discomforts are chronic. These people cannot relieve their hunger, escape the cold, or avoid the stress. However, even those who can find some relief do not do so immediately or perfectly, and thus experience them to some extent every day. In fact, if we think about it, significant periods of each day are marked by some or other of these states. For example, unless one is eating and drinking so regularly as to prevent hunger and thirst or countering them as they arise, one is likely hungry and thirsty for a few hours a day. Unless one is lying about all day, one is probably tired for a substantial portion of one’s waking life. How often does one feel neither too hot nor too cold, but exactly right?

Of course, we tend not to think about how much of our lives is marked by these states. The three psychological phenomena, outlined in the previous section, explain why this is so. Because of Pollyannaism we overlook the bad (and especially the relatively mildly bad). Adaptation also plays a role. People are so used to the discomforts of daily life that they overlook them entirely, even though they are so pervasive. Finally, since these discomforts are experienced by everybody else too, they do not serve to differentiate the quality of one’s own life from the quality of the lives of others. The result is that normal discomforts are not detected on the radar of subjective assessment of well-being. That we do not think of how much of our daily lives are pervaded by the discomforts mentioned does not mean that our daily lives are not pervaded by them. That there is so much discomfort is surely relevant on the hedonistic view.

The negative mental states mentioned so far, however, are simply the baseline ones characteristic of healthy daily life. Chronic ailments and advancing age make matters worse. Aches, pains, lethargy, and sometimes frustration from disability become an experiential backdrop for everything else.

Now add those discomforts, pains, and sufferings that are experienced either less frequently or only by some (though nonetheless very many) people. These include allergies, headaches, frustration, irritation, colds, menstrual pains, hot flushes, nausea, hypoglycaemia, seizures, guilt, shame, boredom, sadness, depression, loneliness, body-image dissatisfaction, the ravages of AIDS, of cancer, and of other such life-threatening diseases, and grief and bereavement. The reach of negative mental states in ordinary lives is extensive.

This is not to deny that there are also intrinsic pleasures in a life. These pleasures sometimes occur in the absence of negative mental states, and are best when they do. Intrinsic pleasures can also coexist with the negative ones (so long as the negative states are not of sufficient intensity to undo the pleasure entirely). Neutral states and relief pleasures obviously can also affect the quality of a life. It is better to have a neutral state than a negative one, and if one has a negative state, relief from it (as soon as possible) is better than no relief. Nevertheless, there would be something absurd about living for neutral states or relief pleasures, or about  starting a life in order to create more neutral conscious states or to produce more relief pleasure. Neutral states and relief  pleasures can be valuable only in so far as they displace negative states. The argument that it is better never to come into existence explains why it is also absurd to start a life for the intrinsic pleasures that that life will contain. The reason for this is that even the intrinsic pleasures of existing do not constitute a net benefit over never existing. Once alive, it is good to have them, but they are purchased at the cost of life’s misfortune—a cost that is quite considerable.

Next he looked at our lives from the perspective of desire fulfillment.

Rather little of our lives is characterized by satisfied desires and rather a lot is marked by unsatisfied desires. Consider first how vulnerable our desires are to the vicissitudes of life. No desires for that which we lack are ever satisfied immediately. Such a desire must be present before it can be satisfied and thus we endure a period of frustration before the desire is fulfilled. It is logically possible for desires to be fulfilled very soon after they arise, but given the way the world is, this does not usually happen. Instead, we usually persist in a state of desire for a period of time. This time may vary—from minutes to decades. As I said before, one usually waits at least a couple of hours until hunger is satiated (unless one is on a ‘hunger-prevention’ or a ‘nip-hunger-in-the-bud’ diet). One waits still longer to get rest when one is tired. Children wait years to gain independence. Adolescents and adults can wait years to fulfil desires for personal satisfaction or professional success. Where one’s desires are fulfilled, this fulfilment is often ephemeral. One desires public office and is elected but not reelected. One’s desire to be married is eventually fulfilled, but then one gets divorced. One wants a holiday but it ends (too soon). Often one’s desires are never fulfilled. One yearns to be free, but dies incarcerated or oppressed. One seeks wisdom but never attains it. One hankers after being beautiful but is congenitally and irreversibly ugly. One aspires to great wealth and influence, but remains poor and impotent all one’s life. One has a desire not to believe falsehoods, but unknowingly clings to such beliefs all one’s life. Very few people ever attain the kind of control over their lives and circumstances that they would like.

Not all one’s desires are for that which one lacks. Sometimes we desire not to lose that which we already have. Such desires, by definition, have immediate satisfaction, but the sad truth is that that fulfilment often does not last. One has a desire not to lose one’s health and youth, but it happens all too quickly. The wrinkles appear, the hair goes grey or falls out, the back aches, arthritis ravages one’s joints, the eyes weaken, one becomes flabby and saggy. One wishes not to be bereaved, but unless one’s desire not to  die is thwarted sooner rather than later, one must soon face the death of grandparents, parents, and other dear ones.

As if this were not bad enough, consider next what we might call the ‘treadmill of desires’. Although the fulfilment of some desires is temporary because the fulfilment becomes undone, desire fulfilment is much more often temporary because even though the desire remains fulfilled another desire arises in its place. Thus the initial satisfaction soon gives way to new desires.

Then Benatar takes a quotation from Abraham Maslow, the famed psychologist.

…need gratifications lead only to temporary happiness which in turn tends to be succeeded by another and (hopefully) higher discontent. It looks as if the human hope for eternal happiness can never be fulfilled. Certainly happiness does come and is obtainable and is real. But it looks as if we must accept its intrinsic transience, especially if we focus on its more intense forms.

- Abraham Maslow, Motivation And Personality

That’ll do for quotations from the book.  You should have a general idea as to the sorts of things Bentar focuses on.  Pretty dark eh’?  I decided to reflect on these ideas as I went for my walk today and within ten to fifteen minutes of serious contemplation, I came to one singular conclusion:  the human mind and its incessant chattering makes our lives far more miserable than need be.  If you can’t learn to still your mind and exist in the moment, these sorts of thoughts will consume you and leave you depressed.

Here’s the deal.  A lot of animals out there live entirely in the moment.  Though their lives are nothing but a continuous struggle, they have limited memory capacity, and mostly live in the moment.  They only suffer when they’re actually being eaten, or are in battle, or are truly starving.  Otherwise they seem to enjoy nibbling on your garden’s tomatoes, singing while perched up on a tree limb, or bathing in the sunshine.  Us humans on the other hand, we have the ability to imagine and anticipate things we aren’t currently experiencing.  This helped us survive in the harsh world we live in, but it also makes us miserable.

Very simple animals are like toddler babies.  If it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind.  Us adult humans are different.  You can walk around the corner and I will still be aware that you’re in the hallway.  I will know that you’re still there, and even if you’ve ran away somewhere and hid yourself, I will start reflecting, “Ok, where did he go?  He must be somewhere nearby.”  This powerful ability allowed us to evade and outsmart predators and hunt prey, while also allowing us to control the world around us.  However, this same mental ability allows us to imagine all sorts of things that aren’t there, anticipate upcoming problems, and even foresee our own deaths.  Emotionally it’s a double-edged sword.

Many of the problems Benatar focuses on throughout these first few chapters  are related to what I’d call our “mental model” system.  I’ll try to explain what I mean.  Take the problem of watching yourself growing old, flabby, and wrinkly.  Your mind has this mental model of the world where it stores this time-sequence of your life and the things you experience.  This also includes your body.  So you look into the mirror and think, “I’m not as pretty as I once was.  I used to be thin and attractive.  Now I’m old and fat.”  You remember when you were attractive to members of the opposite sex, and maybe even reflect on past encounters you had thirty years ago in the past.  The brain wanders from the moment and instead of just having an experience, it starts roaming all over the place, comparing this moment to God knows what other moments.  You start comparing yourself Jennifer Aniston, Megan Fox, and other celebrities.  You compare yourself to your friends, neighbors, and coworkers.  You compare and compare and compare.  You contrast and compare.  You contrast and compare.  The mind just keeps working and working and going and going, generating endless discontentment.

Religion is another problem with this mental model system.  Using words we’re able to communicate ideas to others, allowing us to anticipate events that aren’t necessarily happening to us right then and there.  You can say, “Jason, watch out!  There’s a poisonous snake under your bed!”  I might not have ever seen the snake but I’m thankful that you warned me about it.  Yet this is a dangerous tool.  People start warning you about things that don’t exist and put your mind in all sorts of unnecessary fears.  The religious priest starts warning you of the all powerful, all knowing, ever-present deity watching your every move, ready to throw you into the pits of hell if you commit even the slightest transgression against ridiculous laws.  Were you attracted to the beautiful woman that walked by?!  LUST!  Pray to the holy virgin and REPENT!  And if you believe this invisible being exists, and that there is this invisible order with heaven and hell, and all of that, your mind is just going to torture itself for no reason at all over petty things that don’t matter.  It’s natural for a man to be attracted to a beautiful woman.  It’s part of your biology.  It’s ok.

As I walked and walked, I remembered my history classes in school.  Think of what history is.  It’s like a giant warning call for all the madness that happens in this world, and how crazy people can be.  It’s preparing us for all sorts of disasters and how to properly react to them.   But such preparations come with a serious cost.  Our minds are being pounded with negativity and we come out emotionally damaged.  “Ok class, today we’re going to watch what happens when men have wars.  Brace yourselves.”  The little sixth graders come back from their chocolate milk break to watch civil war reenactments, people marching off in lines blasting each other with muskets.  They see a man bleeding on the ground, screaming in pain.  Then they read about the Persian empire, the Macedonian phalanx, and see Alexander the Great roaming around with his troops.  These young minds are imagining men being impaled with spears, blasted with guns, stabbed with swords, hung on crosses and whipped to death, and on and on.

If we lived in the moment, we wouldn’t have to experience all of that unless it actually happened to us, and even then it would probably be a rather short experience.  Somebody may run up to us with a rifle and shoot us, or we may be stabbed and die within a short period of time, and so forth.  But instead we learn what all these things are so that we can be prepared, and the list of dangers is practically unlimited.  So you worry and worry and worry and worry.  Am I prepared for this?  Am I prepared for that?  What am I going to do about this?  What am I going to do about that?

As young children, we roam around the backyard playing with our toys and friends, laughing and having fun.  We’re not worried about anything and don’t know anything.  We just make the most of what’s around us and live in the moment.  And because of that, children are happy.  But by the time we get older, we’ve been pounded with so many warning calls, and are in such fear and dread, most of that simple joy is gone.  But we can’t avoid this.  Oftentimes the only way to avoid future pain and suffering is to properly plan for it and avoid it.  Take this video for example.  A lot of the starvation and misery we face in the world today is due to overpopulation.  We have to stop having babies.

The world is so large and filled with problems, we often want to just shut it off.  We have to reflect on thousands of important things which we’ll never actually experience ourselves, such as planning to avert future disasters.  We have to worry about the welfare of people all the way across the world.  We have to stay up to date on political issues and the economy.  We have to properly watch our financial investments.  We have to hold our government accountable so they don’t drag us off into more wars and destruction.

When we lived in simple small tribes you directly experienced the world.  Our sensory systems were adequate for the task.  It’s not too hard to keep up with a small tribe of people.  You know them all by name, have went out on hunts with them, and they know you as well.  Now that’s no longer possible.  The world is too big and too complicated.  We stay glued to our computers and television sets watching and reading the news.  And what do they feed us?  They tell us about the most important worries we need to deal with.  Dictator such and such is slaughtering thousands for no good reason.  Religious psychos are discovered to be working on nuclear facilities.  Bankers are scheming to implode the economy and leave us poor and in rags.  And then you ask yourself, “What can I do about all of this?”  You then realize that you’re completely powerless, filled with fear of things happening all across the world.

Your mind tries to build a mental model of this super-complicated world, with all of its intricacies and dangers, but it’s inadequate for the task.   You realize that you can’t protect your children.  You can’t protect your friends.  You can’t protect your family.  You’re powerless.  There’s little you can do about anything and you just do what you can.  Your brain runs in circles trying to figure things out but it just never has enough information nor the time to sort it all out.

But that all is just the beginning of the mental chatter!  Just as Benatar points out, that same mind is not just worrying about the world.  Oh no.  It’s also wondering what’s wrong with your personal life and loved ones.  You have all these desires which aren’t playing out how you intended.  Why is your love life so screwed up?  Why are your children such a mess?  What doesn’t your husband love you?  Why are you stuck in a boring job?  What did you do wrong?  Why did all of this happen to you?  Why did things turn out this way?  And on and on and on it goes, chattering away.  It flails away, trying to fix every problem in the world and struggles for even simple answers.

I allow the chatter at times, and I care about the world and the issues we face as a nation and as a people.  I care about helping the poor.  I care about civil liberties.  I care about women’s rights.  I care about pollution.   Yes, I care about all these things.  I also have my share of suffering, but do what you can when you can, and otherwise try not to worry.  Try to shut off the chatter and just experience the life coming in from your senses.  Find good things in your world which you can be thankful for and make the most of your short life.  Bertrand Russell seemed to advocate a similar position.

The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things, or, if it is night, about nothing at all….It is amazing how much both happiness and efficiency can be increased by the cultivation of an orderly mind, which thinks about a matter adequately at the right time rather than inadequately at all times.  When a difficult or worrying decision has to be reached, as soon as all the data are available, give the matter your best thought and make your decision; having made the decision, do not revise it unless some new fact comes to your knowledge.  Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.

- Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

Our emotional systems and mental model system evolved together and they were designed for a much smaller world.  They don’t always work well together in our modern society.  Biological evolution isn’t keeping up with cultural evolution.

Sometimes we just have to experience the moment.  Don’t let your mind stray off all over the place, thinking inadequately about anything and everything at all times.  Keep your mind disciplined.  Lock it in the present in the room with you, learning new interesting things.  There’s a time and a place for thinking about troublesome things, and it’s not all the time.

Just recently the new semester began and I found myself in a physics course.  Shortly after going over his syllabus, my professor had a short talk about science and religion.  Basically he said that science deals with things that can be objectively observed and tested; everything else is religion.  As I was on my way home, I wondered if there were any beliefs in my head which he would consider religious in nature.  To my surprise, I found that my entire motivation and reason for living is rooted in “religious” beliefs.  I suppose I should explain.

I was tempted to go up to him after the lecture and ask him, “Would it be religious of me to believe that you’re conscious, as I am?”  I’d be curious to hear how he’d respond, and I may just go up to him and ask him that very question.  It’s been bugging me.  Here’s why.  There is no objective test I can perform which will tell me whether or not you’re conscious.  I can believe you’re conscious, and if I’m really curious, I may well even open up your skull and examine your brain.  But even so, I will not be able to observe your personal subjective consciousness, no matter how hard I try.  Even if I monitored all the electrical activity in your brain, I still wouldn’t know if you’re conscious or not.  There’s no possible way to observe it.  It’s a complex emergent property based on neural activity, or well, so I believe.  I believe it exists by a leap of faith.

The thought that I may be living amongst a mob of zombies is a very depressing thought.  I don’t think I could be happy thinking that all of you are just a bunch of complicated robots.  I could never enter an intimate relationship or friendship with any of you.  I’d want to slap you on the side of the head and say, “There’s nothing in there!  How can you say you understand?  That you care?  That you’re happy?  That you’re sad?  You’re not alive!”

I thought about ethics.  If I’m to live in this scientific way, and only believe things that can be observed and tested, I’m not allowed to believe you all are conscious.   That’s a pretty big problem considering it’s what all my morality is based on.  I try to the best of my ability to avoid harming other sentient beings.  I believe you’re having a conscious experience just as I am, and I try (though I’m not always successful), to help make your day a little easier, and also not cause you unnecessary pain and suffering.  But if you all are not alive like I am, I’m not going to treat you the same way I do now.

If you all are zombies, there’s no reason for me to go out of my way to help you if you’re in need.  The poor?  Who cares, they’re not even alive.  Fight for universal healthcare?  For women’s rights?  Why?  That’d be like playing that online game, Second Life, and fighting for healthcare rights for the 3D avatars.  There’s no point in that.  I would treat you guys humanely only because I wouldn’t want you to turn on me and cause me suffering.  In all other cases, I’d try to stay out of your way.  I’d feel no guilt in using you.  I’d feel no guilt if I caused you pain or misery.  I wouldn’t even feel guilt if I took out a gun and blew your brains out.  You wouldn’t be conscious, so who cares?  It’s like playing in some sort of advanced virtual reality simulation.  My goal at that point is to maximize my happiness and fun while trying to minimize pain.  There’s no other moral imperatives.  I’d argue that there is no morality in such a world.

Considering I’m around physicists and other scientists, I notice them saying things which don’t make much sense.  When I was signing up for classes for my second semester, I remember my adviser saying, “You’ll probably do alright.”  The keyword to notice there is “probably”.  What sort of probability theory was that based on?  I’d be curious to hear how such a thing can be calculated.  The professor doesn’t even know me.  I notice that my Dad never talks that way.  He’s a pastor and in that same situation he would have said, “You’ll do fine.  Just work hard and you can do it.”  He has faith in people and believes it’s up to them as to how they’ll perform.  But that can be dangerous too, considering it sometimes blames people for things which aren’t always their fault.  If a person is thrown into a class they’re not ready for, and then fails the course, it’s not their fault – their adviser failed to properly direct them.  But it’s interesting to watch the scientist’s attempt to remain in this non-partisan position, acting like, “We can’t be certain how you may end up, but I have reason to believe that if you take this course, there’s a 95 out of 100 chance that you’ll get an A.  But don’t ahead of yourself,  I can never know for certain.”  We as a society have never solved this problem.  We struggle with personal responsibility, and who to place the blame on when something goes wrong.  Are the poor always responsible for their lot in life?  Do the rich deserve all the good fortune that has come their way?   More generally we can frame the problem this way:  if people have free will, there’s no way of saying what a person can or will do.  Ultimately they’re completely unpredictable and their course in life is up to them.  If we believe people are predictable, the only way we can predict their future actions is by confining them to their past, which isn’t a great plan either.  We know people aren’t random, but they also oftentimes break the chains of our expectations.  It’s quite a difficult problem and I know I don’t like people telling me who I can or can’t be.

For most people in the world, here is how I treat them: I believe they’re the best judges as to how to live their lives.  I believe in freedom.  I also like to apply faith.  To use a baseball analogy, I’ve always had a belief that you should keep pitching to someone as long as they’re willing to swing.  Let them have a chance.  Even if they’ve always struck out, and never applied themselves, give them another shot.  They deserve that much, no matter who they are, or their past history.  If they’re willing to step up to the plate again, don’t judge them.  Respect them and pitch the ball again.

I’ve never been much of the lovey-dovey type, but I love people in my own sort of way.  I’m not the type to hold you, or cry with you, and I’m not very good at consoling, but when everyone else on the baseball field makes fun of you, and tells you you won’t amount to anything, I won’t be in their number.  And when everyone else gets tired of pitching to you, I’ll slide on my cap, walk to the mound, and work with you until you can hit the ball.  I’ll throw you slow underhands until you get used to it, and I’ll show you how to hold the bat.  I won’t judge you, yet then again, I’m not one to praise unless I see real improvement and effort.  You don’t have to impress me with your first try.  I’ve never believed in “geniuses”.  I believe in second, third, and fourth chances.  Tenth chances.  One hundred chances.  I feel that’s what respect is.  I’ll be honest with you, believe in you, and help you until you get it right.  As long as you respect my time, I’ll respect yours.  If I see that you really want something in life, and I can help you get there, I’ll take time out of my schedule to help.

On another note, if you’re a zombie, I’m not going to pitch you the ball unless I enjoy doing so.  If you’re zombies, I’m the only judge that matters.  If you get in my way, and I have the power to move you, I’ll take any recourse that is convenient and necessary.

I don’t believe in living solely for others, or in being some sort of grand sacrifice for humanity, but I do I believe that we all owe our fellow human beings something.  Not everything, but something.  My life hasn’t been spectacular by any means, but what good things I’ve had I owe to the people of my community, my family, my country, and our world.  Is this a religious belief?  If so, I’m a very religious person.

Consciousness is what really matters in this universe.  Otherwise it’s just a big pile of dead stuff, dark and empty.  I worry that people work so hard to avoid the poisons of conventional religion that they end up throwing out the good things as well.  I guess growing up in a Christian home, I take certain ways of thinking for granted.  My family never would say, “You’ll probably be ok.”  When I heard that I just thought, “That’s just weird.”  There needs to be love, faith, and thankfulness when dealing with each other.  Science may be able to show us which behaviors are most conducive to making people happy, but a lot of moral behavior requires effort on our part, and without faith in others, and a sacred belief that conscious suffering should be avoided at all costs, we have no reason to care, and caring is what really matters.