What the #$*! is a Huckabee?

Christian Science Monitor comments succinctly refutes some of the conclusions of “What the #$*! Do We Know!?”:

Another common misperception is the role of the observer in quantum mechanics. A more useful term is “interaction.” It’s the interaction of the electron with its external environment – the experimenter’s probe, for example – that is involved. Quantum physics happens whether or not there is an observer. After all, there’s no conscious observer to mediate hydrogen fusion inside the Sun.

Mystical thinkers overlook this point. They stretch the theory to claim that it implies that human thought can manipulate matter and determine physical reality.

Quite. If the main selling point of a philosophy is that it offers us more control of the world, I’m suspicious. Do we really need to be able to control our environment? It seems grasping to me. I think a better way is to control ourselves… no… there’s that word ‘control’ again. How about ‘failing to act’? Instead of controlling our emotions and impulses like they are a deranged monkey that we are unfortunately tied to, we can just let them go. There’s no need to wear yourself out squashing your emotions — they’ll only pop up again — but you can always opt to fail to act.

In domestic violence situations, women are often with over-controlling men who pose a great deal of harm to them. Surely its ridiculous to suppose that women should follow a policy of ‘failing to act’. If anything, such a woman should act swiftly to rid herself of this kind of man! But such decisive action is often unsuccessful. The woman returns to her man and silently suffers under the same brutality. Why? She follows a policy of control – to preserve the love she feels towards this man, perhaps to squash her fears that she will never be loved again, she repels her instinct of self-preservation and struggles on.

Is this a cruel joke? Am I blaming the victim here? Hardly. I can think of nothing more empowering than to say to someone, “You have the tools you need to improve your life, they are right there in front of you.”

The Religon Virus

Richard Dawkins famously remarked that religion is a virus that infects your mind. Applying evolutionary theory to the realm of ideas is a fascinating subject and a tremendous insight, but I’m not sure that it supports the notion of the religion “virus”. Let’s talk about it.

10,000 years ago, life was pretty much kill or be killed, which is a pretty tedious way of passing the time. If the choice was between starvation and joining up with a religion that offered better odds of survival, which is more rational? It doesn’t have to be the best strategy, only the best out of the possibilities. A genetic analog is sickle cell anemia, which is a genetic mutation (”harmful virus”) that happens to also provide immunity to malaria.

Some atheists get very huffy that people flock to religion instead of supposedly superior ideas. Does Atheism confer an advantage? Maybe it does, but at the moment, the marketplace of ideas says “No.” It could be that people are mistaken and deluded, but its not at all obvious that society would benefit from the cessation of all religious activities, in the same way that “curing” people in Western Africa of sickle cell anemia would precipitate a deadly malaria epidemic. The cure could be worse than the disease.

Consciousness and Mind as Emergent Phenomena

Google’s lucky #1 winner for the keywords “emergent phenomena” is a short essay entitled “Consciousness and mind as emergent phenomena or emergent properties of the brain” wherein the author attempts to refute the idea that consciousness is emergent.

…we can dismiss all claims that consciousness, mind and awareness are emergent properties of matter or brains, because we need the presence of a mind for emergent properties and phenomena to appear in the first place.

But that’s not really true. An observer is only needed to identify emergent phenomena. In the example of the Game of Life, let’s imagine that an interaction arises that we would call a glider. If no-one is there to observe it, its constituent particles continue to operate according to the algorithm. Emergent phenomena technically don’t exist at all, they’re abstractions that make it easy to think about difficult things. I wouldn’t need the concept of a glider if I was capable of running the algorithm in my brain and fully understanding it, but meat computers are not well-suited to this task. The abstraction called consciousness does not exist in the material sense, but its handy to create it in your mind when thinking and talking about it.

Our author favors a kind of Buddhist dualism (I think), which I’m not very familiar with, but after wasting lots of time thinking about these things, the distinctions between materialism and dualism seem to disappear, especially with the additional of quantum mechanics. Dualism is often problematic for materialists, but materialists have an unfortunate tendency to confront these problems with “No, that’s wrong. F minus minus,” when it may be better to understand dualism as a high-level approximation that is complementary to materialism. A materialist view of the Game of Life would probably deny the existence of gliders and oscillators, and see consciousness as just an illusion created by neurons firing, which may be completely accurate, but the materialist stops him- or herself from considering the implications of such “illusions” for no apparent reason.

I think we’re tending toward a point of unification of dualism and materialism. Classical materialism took a severe beating with quantum physics, and we’re still discovering the full implications of that. Descartes is by no means back from the dead, but as it turns out, the universe is a great deal more mysterious than we thought.

Mainstream-itization is the point

[I wrote this on Plastic.com in June.]

For too long, members of subcultures have embraced obscurity as a badge of honor. That seems contradictory to me.

I believe the value of a subculture is that it provides the participants with expanded definitions of what it means to be a member of society . a kind of social experiment . to see if modifications to society are sustainable and healthy. Mainstream culture is naturally more conservative, because it provides a basic set of values which are at least moderately successful, and so participants are reluctant to make drastic changes to its make-up. But subcultures can perform experiments in safety, because if they are found to be unworkable, they implode without taking down larger society. If they are found to be workable, they are re-integrated and society advances.

However, this process has been short-circuited by individuals who participate in subcultures not because they believe it is objectively better than mainstream culture, but for the simple fact that its not mainstream. The problem arises when the subculture proves its sustainability and begins its integration into the mainstream. These individuals complain about the subculture becoming mainstream and then jump ship, leaving the subculture with a huge influx of uninitiated newbies and a near absence of ideological leadership. The subculturists’ worst fears are realized by their own actions.

Furthermore, many individuals in subcultures point to larger society’s inflexibility to change as a reason to reject it, but when it comes to evolution within their subculture, they suddenly turn into the very conservative atavists they once derided, recalling the allegedly good old days before all the new people showed up and things changed. This sort of hypocrisy is lamentable because it turns something which could improve all of society into nothing more than a historical curiosity that is jealously guarded by arrogant old-timers who refused to change.

The fact is that if a subculture has any worth at all, it should be integrated into the mainstream. Subcultures are destroyed by arrogant members who believe that it exists solely to supply them with a feeling of exclusivity and enable them to piss off their parents.

Karma Socialization

The following is a rambling exploration into how children might develop ethical guidelines and relationships with other people.

Variability of the number of a child’s older/younger siblings and the presence of a traditional masculine archetype in the home greatly affects that child’s understanding of social dynamics. Before the age of 4, a child undergoes a re-orientation where it becomes aware that other people share a consciousness analogous to their own, c.f. John Stewart Mill’s Problem of Other Minds. This is a tremendous shift in consciousness, and I posit that the relative success of this socialization greatly affects the child’s ability to empathize with others as an adult.

A child experiences several of these shifts throughout its lifetime. One key observation of these shifts is that they are not, as popularly imagined, discrete and separate. In fact, they share an exponential relationship. Each shift requires a critical mass of information and the brain development to support the complexities that the new outlook requires, each shift requiring exponentially more of each. A result of the exponential nature of a shift is that the new outlook subsumes the previous one. Its not an alternate of equal importance to the previous outlook, nor does it completely eliminate the previous outlook. Rather, the previous outlook serves as a foundation for the new outlook. In this way, a hierarchy exists but, at the same time, each outlook is of equal importance. Foundational problems propagate throughout the hierarchy, in the same way that a lack of understanding the fundamentals of arithmetic cause all kinds of problems if you are trying to do calculus problems. No amount of examination of the priciples of calculus sheds any light into the reason that your computations yield incorrect results.