If I can just express this thing fully and clearly, that is running through my mind, that will be enough. Will it bring me happiness or satisfaction? I don't know, and it's not important. will anyone read it with care and understanding? It would be nice to think so, but that is not the purpose. A thought worth thinking, or a life worth living, is like a universe worth creating - it can't depend on something else, it has to contain its own value and be its own purpose. When God did the creation thing, He 'saw that it was good.' Only the devil would ask Him, 'Good for what? It's a question with no end, because any answer can be subjected to the same question again. It is tempting to make a barrier of the self; my happiness as good for me. Philosophers and religionists are fond of this answer, and it does seem to end the question, because no one can argue with me about my personal happiness, but what a small, mean world it confines me to! Nothing that is beyond my experience or beyond my comprehension can have any value to me - and that is almost everything. Besides, the fact is that by and large, I am not happy, and in such a small world how could I be?
This morning in the woods, amongst the undergrowth dying back at the end of the summer, I came across a little clump of flowers standing bright purple in the greens and browns. And if I hadn't been that way, if no one had seen them? Well I did see them and the seeing was a joy; but they did not need me to see them to justify their existence, and that too was a joy.
We should not call them suicide bombers; they are martyrdom bombers. Their purpose is their own happiness in paradise by means of doing God a big favour. Apparently, God wants us all to be Muslims, and He needs the help of the faithful to destroy the infidel. It's hard work, but the pay is excellent. Well, my faith is that each thing and each person is their own justification; this limited, confused and often unhappy person who is writing, and that limited and confused person who is blowing himself up - God sees that we are good; not good because He sees, not good because we do his will or fulfill his purpose, nor our own purposes, not good for anything, just good.
Dying is part of life. Things that don't die, like stones, are not alive. The two things are inseparable parts of one process. Birth and death are the limits of myself and myself is a limit on what exists. My skin separates me from, and joins me to the world, as my death separates me from and joins me to the life of the world; it is the limit of the limitation called me. And after, so we are told by those that heard it and misunderstood, comes paradise. But paradise comes first not last, and it is paradise and eternal precisely because there is no self, no me in it; it consists of the end of that limitation.
And that is the end of this line of thought; but the world continues...
13 Sept 2006
18 Aug 2006
...isms
Philosophy's full of them - Platonism, pragmatism etc etc. I could never be bothered to work out which was which and how they all linked and differed. I suppose it can be quite useful to have a name for a general way of thinking as a shorthand, and to avoid having to deal with repetitious arguments... 'Oh thats just another version of ...ism, how boring.' They do rather tend to take over one's mind and become the whole of philosophy, and I have decided to call this Ismism in order to save time and desparage it more conveniently. Classic examples of Ismism will not be gratefully recieved at this site.
It goes for politics and religion even more so, and I have been struck of late by how some people you can very easily talk to and some you can't. I'm fascinated by the possibility of communication - it seems a rare and wonderful thing that requires minds that are open to something new. So I am always going to be more interested in philosophies that are incomplete and provisional; once they have hardened into systems, with axioms laid out on tablets of stone, I start to find that there is nothing to do or say, except to accept or reject. People who have adopted this sort of system will tend to discount anthing which does not conform to the axioms as 'nonsense'. All they will do is show you, with more or less patience and condescension, where you have 'gone wrong'. In other words, they are impossible to talk to as they inhabit a different conceptual world. I quite like to try to liberate people from the confines of their certainty, but mostly it proves fruitless, and one learns to conserve one's energy and avoid the most obvious hardliners. One way to spot them early is by the tendency not to even attempt to understand what one is trying to say, but merely to pick up on some key word, God, freedom, identity, or some such, and rush in to tell you what it 'really means' (I'm looking at you, John).
It goes for politics and religion even more so, and I have been struck of late by how some people you can very easily talk to and some you can't. I'm fascinated by the possibility of communication - it seems a rare and wonderful thing that requires minds that are open to something new. So I am always going to be more interested in philosophies that are incomplete and provisional; once they have hardened into systems, with axioms laid out on tablets of stone, I start to find that there is nothing to do or say, except to accept or reject. People who have adopted this sort of system will tend to discount anthing which does not conform to the axioms as 'nonsense'. All they will do is show you, with more or less patience and condescension, where you have 'gone wrong'. In other words, they are impossible to talk to as they inhabit a different conceptual world. I quite like to try to liberate people from the confines of their certainty, but mostly it proves fruitless, and one learns to conserve one's energy and avoid the most obvious hardliners. One way to spot them early is by the tendency not to even attempt to understand what one is trying to say, but merely to pick up on some key word, God, freedom, identity, or some such, and rush in to tell you what it 'really means' (I'm looking at you, John).
11 Aug 2006
Pain
Wow, 2 comments in one day, how gratifying, I'm inspired!
By way of excuse/explanation/ for not laying my swine before pearls for a while, I shall now discourse on pain.
I don't react very well to pain; it makes me even more irritable than usual, and I can't concentrate on anything. To be specific I have a 'bad back' and every then and right now, it 'goes'. When it happens I rush to take some nice pills that anti-inflame it a bit, and suddenly get all conscientious about doing exercises and stretches. What I don't generally do is be philosophical about it - it hurts, it's a pain, I don't like it, my life becomes a misery. Theoretically I know that pain is necessary; people who either don't feel pain, or who feel it but it doesn't hurt (that sounds weird but it happens), get into trouble and damage themselves. The pain when I move makes me rest and allows the body to heal, bla bla bla... Yeah but it hurts all the time and I'm all full of self pity and rage and I don't care about anything except I want it to stop.
Where I work is a hotel for disabled people, and one of the worst things is that I can see my own troubles are insignificant in relation to some of our guests, and yet they are, by and large, the nicest people you could wish to meet, and this is a bit of a mystery to me. If I was bedridden, incontinent, unable to eat solid food, hardly able to breathe or in constant pain, as a condition of life - permanently, I think I would be unbearable to live with, yet these people are an inspiration, generous, loving, full of humour, and clearly enjoying life to the max. How do they do it? Is pain good for the soul? It sure doesn't seem so in my case - but perhaps I'm biased? The other week there was a couple, must have been in their nineties, he used a walking frame, while she was in a wheelchair. And he came to ask me to lift his wife on and off the toilet, she had MS to go with her arthritis and something else which I forget, and he was just too frail to help her. And yet the love and joy that emanated from them, their simple humanity and warmth... I can't really convey, but it was a privilege to help them, bad back or no.
By way of excuse/explanation/ for not laying my swine before pearls for a while, I shall now discourse on pain.
I don't react very well to pain; it makes me even more irritable than usual, and I can't concentrate on anything. To be specific I have a 'bad back' and every then and right now, it 'goes'. When it happens I rush to take some nice pills that anti-inflame it a bit, and suddenly get all conscientious about doing exercises and stretches. What I don't generally do is be philosophical about it - it hurts, it's a pain, I don't like it, my life becomes a misery. Theoretically I know that pain is necessary; people who either don't feel pain, or who feel it but it doesn't hurt (that sounds weird but it happens), get into trouble and damage themselves. The pain when I move makes me rest and allows the body to heal, bla bla bla... Yeah but it hurts all the time and I'm all full of self pity and rage and I don't care about anything except I want it to stop.
Where I work is a hotel for disabled people, and one of the worst things is that I can see my own troubles are insignificant in relation to some of our guests, and yet they are, by and large, the nicest people you could wish to meet, and this is a bit of a mystery to me. If I was bedridden, incontinent, unable to eat solid food, hardly able to breathe or in constant pain, as a condition of life - permanently, I think I would be unbearable to live with, yet these people are an inspiration, generous, loving, full of humour, and clearly enjoying life to the max. How do they do it? Is pain good for the soul? It sure doesn't seem so in my case - but perhaps I'm biased? The other week there was a couple, must have been in their nineties, he used a walking frame, while she was in a wheelchair. And he came to ask me to lift his wife on and off the toilet, she had MS to go with her arthritis and something else which I forget, and he was just too frail to help her. And yet the love and joy that emanated from them, their simple humanity and warmth... I can't really convey, but it was a privilege to help them, bad back or no.
21 Jul 2006
Man, Nature, and Dawkins
The idea of 'memes' is itself a meme, derived from/associated with other memes such as evolution, rationality, science, etc. These memes may have a particular survival advantage of being 'true' in the sense of corresponding to the way the world is (or maybe not). It is also the case though, that the power to change the world that science gives to humans has led to new threats to the survival of the species through things like global warming and neuclear holocaust. So the theory of memes could be used as an argument against science and in favour of a return to a fundementalist and back to basics primitive society that is not in danger from this hubris, rather than the other way round. Just because it's true, doesn't make it conducive to our survival, and there is no room in a survivalist ethic for a romantic attachment to truth. The rise of fundementalism then could be seen as a Gaian attempt to restore the memetic and ecological balance which was destroyed by the western enlightenment and the rise of science. The clear duty (to the species) of anyone who understands this theory, then, is to give up science and promote religion.
But the whole concept of the selfish gene in the first place is just anthropomorphism gone ugly. You don't have to be a brilliant geneticist to notice that genes can only survive by cooperation, both within the organism and with the environment. Selfishness, almost by definition, is a form of myopic short-termism. Selfishness is a peculiarly human disease, which pervades the practice of science as it does every human practice, although the methods and principles of scientific enquiry are designed to eliminate this 'personal bias'. An old fashioned (non-evolutionary) psychologist such as myself, detects in the selfish-gene theory a case of gross projection, which goes a long way to explaining its popularity - our human failings become necessities of nature, and not our fault after all. I am not arguing for creationism, but there is more psychological sense to me in the idea of a fall from a state of innocence, from nature as Eden, into as state of conflict arising from self-awareness as the knowledge ofgood and evil. This self-awareness is what separates and distinguishes humanity from the natural world, and this gives rise to our contradictory relations on the one hand to God and on the other hand to Nature - our internal divisions result in a separate and separating relation to both. Our fall is out of the world, and into thought and time. What interests me is not the survival of thought as meme, or the replacement of religious with scientific memes, but the ending of thought as meme.
I think it was Steve Jones, the geneticist who said that while we share 98% of our genes with chimpansees, we also share 50% of them with the banana. It seems that the whole of the living environment is a close relative in genetic terms. If that 50% of us influenced our vaunted intelligence, we would all be radical environmentalists, like St Francis, whose brothers and sisters were birds and animals. But if genes are not selfish, perhaps there is a gene for selfishness unique to humans and closely associated with intelligence. The way we tend to think of ourselves and the way we generally behave is very much 'as if' we had different, selfish genes (or are they just memes?). The endless conflicts of class, race, nationality, religion, culture are very much based on identification of 'people like us' against 'others'. But the genetic facts deny such identifications and distinctions and cannot be used to either explain or justify them. On the contrary, the way we behave in general 'explains' why we have come up with this strange theory.
Evolutionary psychology makes great use of game theory, and gains the credibility of mathematics thereby. But game theory assumes the reality of seperate identifiable individuals with differing interests, it is not clear that it is relevant to something that is 98% chimp and 50% banana. It's not that there is no competition in the natural world - round here the squabbling of seagulls is completely commonplace - but it is misleading as a dominant metaphor for evolutionary processes, because competition is only possible on the basis of a more fundamental cooperation. In order for game theory to apply, we have already to be in agreement about playing the game.
Bananas do not want to survive; they do not compete with us or with each other. They live and develop according to their (genetic) nature, and reproduce, or not. Chimps are more complex; they seem to like their children, and look after them; they seem more consciously to compete and cooperate, but we do not attribute to them a desire to continue their 'bloodline' as we used to call it before we discovered genes. One can see how our ideas of family, tribe, nation, race self have arisen from our complex behaviour as social animals, but it does not seem useful to then use those ideas to explain how this complex behaviour came into being, let alone to explain the fundamental processes of nature.
But the whole concept of the selfish gene in the first place is just anthropomorphism gone ugly. You don't have to be a brilliant geneticist to notice that genes can only survive by cooperation, both within the organism and with the environment. Selfishness, almost by definition, is a form of myopic short-termism. Selfishness is a peculiarly human disease, which pervades the practice of science as it does every human practice, although the methods and principles of scientific enquiry are designed to eliminate this 'personal bias'. An old fashioned (non-evolutionary) psychologist such as myself, detects in the selfish-gene theory a case of gross projection, which goes a long way to explaining its popularity - our human failings become necessities of nature, and not our fault after all. I am not arguing for creationism, but there is more psychological sense to me in the idea of a fall from a state of innocence, from nature as Eden, into as state of conflict arising from self-awareness as the knowledge ofgood and evil. This self-awareness is what separates and distinguishes humanity from the natural world, and this gives rise to our contradictory relations on the one hand to God and on the other hand to Nature - our internal divisions result in a separate and separating relation to both. Our fall is out of the world, and into thought and time. What interests me is not the survival of thought as meme, or the replacement of religious with scientific memes, but the ending of thought as meme.
I think it was Steve Jones, the geneticist who said that while we share 98% of our genes with chimpansees, we also share 50% of them with the banana. It seems that the whole of the living environment is a close relative in genetic terms. If that 50% of us influenced our vaunted intelligence, we would all be radical environmentalists, like St Francis, whose brothers and sisters were birds and animals. But if genes are not selfish, perhaps there is a gene for selfishness unique to humans and closely associated with intelligence. The way we tend to think of ourselves and the way we generally behave is very much 'as if' we had different, selfish genes (or are they just memes?). The endless conflicts of class, race, nationality, religion, culture are very much based on identification of 'people like us' against 'others'. But the genetic facts deny such identifications and distinctions and cannot be used to either explain or justify them. On the contrary, the way we behave in general 'explains' why we have come up with this strange theory.
Evolutionary psychology makes great use of game theory, and gains the credibility of mathematics thereby. But game theory assumes the reality of seperate identifiable individuals with differing interests, it is not clear that it is relevant to something that is 98% chimp and 50% banana. It's not that there is no competition in the natural world - round here the squabbling of seagulls is completely commonplace - but it is misleading as a dominant metaphor for evolutionary processes, because competition is only possible on the basis of a more fundamental cooperation. In order for game theory to apply, we have already to be in agreement about playing the game.
Bananas do not want to survive; they do not compete with us or with each other. They live and develop according to their (genetic) nature, and reproduce, or not. Chimps are more complex; they seem to like their children, and look after them; they seem more consciously to compete and cooperate, but we do not attribute to them a desire to continue their 'bloodline' as we used to call it before we discovered genes. One can see how our ideas of family, tribe, nation, race self have arisen from our complex behaviour as social animals, but it does not seem useful to then use those ideas to explain how this complex behaviour came into being, let alone to explain the fundamental processes of nature.
7 Jul 2006
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