A Catchphrase

Saturday was planned as a skip day, then Sunday I went to write down what I was thinking, and it turned into a giant rant about relationships. In the end, I decided that putting a fairly in-depth analysis of how I felt about every girl I've ever had feelings for on the Internet next to my real name was pretty damn stupid. So that's what happened to yesterday's possibility. (Trust me, it was best for all of us.)

Today I want to talk about something incredibly important: catchphrases. I am quite completely certain that no character or persona can be a complete, wholly formed individual without a witty saying to fall back on in times of trouble. After all, from the soothing “May the Force be with you” to the fantastically badass “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die” to the still-needs-work “I've got a Ph. D. in Horribleness!” this is a key component of anyone awesome, or trying to be.

Now, this could devolve into an overly-philosophical rant about the dangers of trying to reduce personal philosophy to a one-word slogan. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've already written one of those. This story is cooler, though. This story begins with me playing D&D. On the wrong level of a multi-leveled theater, desperately needing to pursue an escaping villain, my (squishy, unathletic) wizard could have jumped down, hoping he'd land. He could have also walked down the stairs and hoped his teammates could keep pace. But I uttered the momentous words that would grow to define my crusade for unbridled arrogance: “Fortune favors the bold, right?” I passed the roll, and it quickly became a running joke at our gaming group. Given a chance to make a decision, where the risky option was properly awesome, I'd take the risky option, declaring that fortune favors the bold. I eventually made a character with that as his entire point. He died twice in the first three sessions, but that didn't matter. It was awesome.

You can't explore that sort of roleplaying concept, and mention it so frequently, without at some point exporting those characteristics to your real life, or considering them if nothing else. (I'm sure someone could take this out of context and cite it for some twisted Jack Chick-esque purpose. Please don't, though.) I started saying it out of context. I started using it to justify things that I wouldn't have done otherwise. I started taking more risks. You know what? It was awesome. I had a lot of fun.

The more I think about it, the more I think that this can apply on far broader scales than just frivolous decisions or the roll of a d20. I make this argument based on probability. Consider your standard Gaussian bell curve. The more trials you run, the more likely your results are to fit that curve. That said, the values on either side—extremely good or extremely bad—are unlikely to occur in any given trial. Only through the accumulated weight of a number of trials gives you spots at the edge of the bell curve.

So I prefer to take more risks, because that's the only way to accumulate actual “successes.” Obviously, you get more failures this way, too. I think that's an acceptable way to live life, though. Better to have, so to speak, a lot of data points. Most of them won't work out right. Most of them will, honestly, be pretty average. A small sliver will royally suck. But for every really awful experience is a counterbalancing awesome one. And the thing about the awful ones, the places where you screwed up, is that if you're smart, you can avoid that again—you can try to shift your curve slowly towards the more positive end of the spectrum, if you're lucky. And even if you can't, at least you get some sort of curve. If you're not taking chances, your life doesn't have any shape at all. And that's just a waste.

I like to imagine that fortune favors the bold; I also think it's completely true. Fortune, that is, in the sense of the way the world tends to deliver opportunities and success. You can't succeed if you don't try. Fortune yields her benefits only to those who allow her—and that certainly requires boldness.

Web Something-Point-Whatever

Today was one of those lucky days. Someone sent me an email with a link to an article about Facebook and asked for my response. That means that you guys get to see my stream of consciousness email response to an article, instead of a coherent anything. (That said, I think there's some really fun things to think about in this whole thing. Also, I just linked you a ten page article. I'M A CONTENT PROVIDER. HUFFINGTON POST DOES IT.) Having seen the Social Network will help, and it was a good movie anyway.


I'm starting to wonder whether or not I'm really qualified to talk about the way "my generation" uses the Internet. By that I mean that Facebook and the like are relative latecomers to my Internet experience. I've been using the Internet in a coherent way that I can describe since I was about eleven--before then, I used the Internet, but I couldn't tell you what I did with it. Anyway, since then, most of my internet communication has been in the form of participation on online forums. Although they're older than the "Web 2.0" buzzword for social websites, they nevertheless represent a fairly social experience. All the content comes from the users, who generally share a common interest of some kind. They tend to lend themselves more to longer responses, and have a larger flexibility for communication. Perhaps most notably, unlike many social media sites, real names are not generally used. (Though I've looked through my various profiles and determined that five minutes on Google would be able to connect my online handles to me-for-real. I'm not overly worried about it.) One difference between this and Facebook might be the presumption. On a forum, it's assumed that the sum total of your posts don't add up to an entire person. On Facebook, because the page has pictures of a person and because it has a real name on it, maybe we have a tendency to assume that the page in front of us is a whole entity. My point here is that, while my early online experiences trained me not to think of it that way, other people use the Internet primarily as themselves, so they don't disassociate the idea of a profile or account and a person as strongly. Because, while the author of that essay talks a lot about people representing their entire life on Facebook, my first reaction is "No, we don't." It then occurred to me that just because I know how to use the Internet, doesn't mean I know how the Internet is actually used.

In fact, I'm kind of confronting my own cognitive biases here. In general, when the Internet is brought up, I tend to defend it, because I've had plenty of positive experiences and I think it's definitely helped my intellectual growth--I can't imagine me becoming the person I am (a pretty cool guy, in my opinion) without that external stimulation. Now that I think about it, I realize I should probably not generalize my own experiences so quickly. Maybe we ought to consider, though, that you get out of any system what you put in--the computer programming term being Garbage In, Garbage Out. Are relationships nowadays more superficial than they were before? Or is it just that the superficiality is easier to pick out when so many social relationships in one place? In addition, I think there's a tendency, like with every new thing, to overestimate the importance of any given element. I remember about a year and a half ago, when Twitter was surging to prominence, people talked about it replacing Facebook. What we found, though, was that they co-existed. After all, they didn't provide the same product, they didn't compete. I'm not sure Facebook supplants many regular relationships, I'm not sure it competes. I don't turn down real-life interaction because I'm on Facebook--instead, I wait until I'm supposed to be doing homework, and then I get on Facebook instead. (I'm kidding...now. An important lesson the first few months of college is that I keep that particular tab closed when serious things are supposed to be happening.) Maybe what I'm trying to get at is that the real problem isn't a lack of real-life interaction, but people overvaluing the portion of their interaction that is online, and misapplying the knowledge you gain from that. People need to understand the separation between an image and an object; a person and a profile. If that were commonly understood, I think Facebook would be a useful tool without nearly so much negative impact.

One comment I found a bit ridiculous was his implication that the current generation just wants to be liked. Personally, I'm not sold on the idea that the approval of others is all that more or less important than previous. I think acceptance and belonging are a pretty key human desire--Maslow put it in his hierarchy of needs, even.

(Sometimes I feel like all of this is a consequence of taking online socialization, which can work just fine, and trying to merge it with the already-established expectations and realities of "meatspace" socialization, but I think that would require a more thorough exploration of it all.)

User Friendly?

(The following was written after a few hours learning my way around an digital design CAD program.)

Man, fucking computers, am I right? Mankind is currently in this frustrating position where computers underpin more or less the entire modern world, and we'd all be royally screwed if they stopped doing their thing for us. Unfortunately, this forces us to interact with them, pretty much constantly. And computers are kind of dicks, when you think about it. They take everything you say totally literally, even if that might be obviously contrary to what you wanted. If you accidentally do something to screw yourself over, they have to be painstakingly built so that they won't just go ahead and do that. I never really liked AI-turns-evil-and-takes-over-the-world scenarios, for reasons I may go into one day. I don't think robots would be evil. I'm not willing to dismiss the possibility that they'd be douches.

All of this is bad enough. Just to rub it in, nearly every irritating trait of computers is actually key to their very concept. We built a machine to do everything we told it to—and, to our mounting horror, we're discovering that they do. Of course, maybe it wouldn't be too bad if a computer did exactly what you said, but they can't actually do that yet because they can't talk back and forth with you. No, the computer instead does exactly what you type, which is even harder to align with what you mean than standard language, unless you literally learn a “language” to program in.

Interacting with a computer requires what's known as a user interface. Wikipedia defines an interface (in chemistry) as “a surface forming a common boundary among two different phases, such as an insoluble solid and a liquid, two immiscible liquids or a liquid and an insoluble gas.” Two inmiscible liquids sometimes does seem like my relationship with a particularly dense computer program.

We keep inventing new ways to interact with computers. A basic logic circuit is all wires and transistors—you could build a basic sort of machine out of them by hand if you wanted. (...alright, I wouldn't call this a computer, admittedly. But still! Point stands.) In ye olde days of ENIAC and the like you'd interact with the machine pretty physically—programs were essentially hard-copies, using cards. When you get to a real computer, one that can actually perform more than one function, you switch to programs on cards. Then, you get yourself a 1Mb hard drive the size of a house, and before you know it you're at the keyboard and mouse.

A keyboard and mouse, it must be said, work pretty well as an interface duo. The keyboard allows you to communicate in natural language (for when humans want to read it) but also allows discrete, specific input for when you need to control a computer. Meanwhile, the mouse allows us to take all that spatial reasoning we developed for hunting down elephant-lions or whatever they had in prehistoric Africa and transplant it onto a modern, useful stage. (When you think about it, graphical user interfaces are really quite weird—they don't entirely correspond to anything else the way text input is roughly like writing.) It's probably why they've been so fantastically successful.

That said, in 2010 we have more advanced ways of interacting with our computers. Most obviously, we have the increasingly-ubiquitous touch screen. Touch screens work fairly well, it has to be said. It has to be said often by Steve Jobs, who likes to remind people how successful he is. In some ways, they're extensions of the mouse concept that take more advantage of human anatomy and the way we interact with real, physical things. The other two inputs that seem to be on the horizon are voice control—which I'm excited for purely as a Star Trek fan—and, increasingly, full-body interaction a la the Kinect, Playstation Move, etc. Honestly...I don't think we'll see any of these supplanting the current keyboard-and-mouse combo.

Let's be honest. Kinect-style input seems mostly for games. I can think of very few situations where I've ever thought “Man, I want to tell this TV what to do, but I want to do it by dancing.” As for voice interaction, this has a bit broader range, but the problem with sound is that it has a bit broader range. You can't say “computer, clear browser history?” and stay secret. “YOU MEAN OF THE PORN, DAVE?” may as well, er, erupt from the computer's speakers, you know? Voice therefore works best for controlling large devices. I can easily imagine a room where my voice controlled the TV, lights, fan, etc. But my microwave? My PC? Ehhh. Not feeling it.

Touch screens, touch screens. They're big right now. Like I said, they replicate some of the great qualities of the mouse. Their main advantage is in portable devices, of course, because a touch screen integrates display and interface into a single package—allowing you to have more screen and less buttons. On the other hand, they also suffer serious disadvantages. For example, the fact that you have to (as they say) touch the screen. Obviously the physical contact poses problems. Another issue is that the touch screen only approximates actual object manipulation. Without actual haptic feedback, fine control is often difficult. I can't help but sigh at my iPad because I get the feeling that, while quite cool, being purely touchscreen really limits its application for the kinds of things I need computers for—like blogging and other absolutely vital things.

Ultimately, new ways of interface are nice, but I don't think they'll end up supplanting the keyboard and mouse for the vast majority of computing uses and time. Niche applications abound, places where keyboards and mice would look/feel/be stupid to have, but the personal computer itself? I think we found our winning combo.

Happy Carl Sagan Day, Everyone

Carl Sagan's birthday would have been today. I would wax lyrical about it but...oh, wait, I wrote an essay. This one is, hopefully, going to pull double-duty as another article published in the same place as my Feynman essay. Please, enjoy. He was a great man, truly.

A Candle in the Dark

Last month I wrote about Richard Feynman. Though a great man—I frequently refer to him as “my favorite person”--it has to be said that he never really embraced his role as a public figure. He lived life by the maxim that he was not responsible for the world he lived in, and so never became what we would call politically active. Luckily, others filled that role. In 1934, another scientist was born and this one, though he had scientific accomplishments, will always be remembered first and foremost as a presenter. That man, astronomer Carl Sagan, popularized science. Through his books and television programs, he brought the modern ideas and discoveries of science to the masses—and then, years after his death, he performed admirably as a singer in an ongoing series of YouTube videos, with only slight assistance from AutoTune. All of this makes him not only the most musical missionary of the scientific worldview, but also the most effective.

Anytime I try to describe scales larger than the Earth, I end up quoting Carl Sagan—or I end up talking enough like him that I might as well be. It was one of his signature abilities, the way he would express his awe and wonder at the modern universe we discovered. The most evocative example might have been his famous “Pale Blue Dot” speech, recreated in his excellent book of the same name. You see, in 1990 Carl Sagan made a request of NASA (Carl Sagan having been one of the lucky few people capable of making requests of NASA). Voyager 1, one of the few spacecraft on course to leave the solar system and currently ten billion miles away, had completed its primary mission of planetary exploration, and so it was ordered to turn its camera Earthward and take a picture. The image literally makes the mind boggle, and I'm not even sure what it means for a mind to literally boggle. I'd figure it out, but my mind is too busy boggling. Anyway, looking at it, you will see on the far right a golden streak of sunlight. In the middle of that, if you know where to look, you'll see a single blue pixel, barely visible at all. As Sagan said—and I recommend looking up the recording of this on the Internet—“The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar', every 'supreme leader', every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” In a way, much of Carl Sagan's work attempts to force a sense of perspective on the reader, to show them exactly what the universe looks like and to accept it. Some might take this an excuse for nihilism, but Sagan was able to move past such simplistic bleakness and embrace this view. He saw it not as a way to devalue humans, but as proof of how precious life was. In Cosmos he wrote, “Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”

Sagan had a pattern of such attitudes. Having accepted scientific findings, he attempted to apply them—to ethics, to philosophy, and to the human condition. Out of the physical phenomena around him he attempted to crystallize real consequences that could be related to by his audience, and he regarded his audience as potentially everyone. Science, to Sagan, was not just for scientists. In his book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Sagan made the case that superstition and credulity were not just false, but actively dangerous in a democratic society. In a modern society so based on technology and the findings of science, Sagan felt extremely uneasy that so few people really understood science—not just “science” in the sense of a list of facts about the world, but “science” as a way of thinking. “In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.” Living in a time threatened by nuclear war, he referred again to the scale of the cosmos to demonstrate the insanity of it all—“Astronomically, the US and the USSR are the same place.” He recognized that science, for all the lives saved and bettered by its progress, now also posed a threat in the form of global warming, ozone depletion, and the capacity for nuclear holocaust. Therefore he considered it extremely important that people understand the reasons and science behind these issues, because that was the only way to be sure that technology would continue to enable humanity, rather than be its ultimate annihilator.

He was, however, quite confident in the capability of humanity to use technology to achieve greatness. Most commonly, he campaigned for the continued human exploration of space. His arguments for it feel sobering now, considering that America will no longer be capable of manned spaceflight after the final Shuttle launch early next year. He had purely scientific and economic reasons, most of which, while valid, have been heard before, but he had others as well. The threat of asteroid impact meant, he said, “Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.” Sagan was, of course, not short on exploratory or romantic zeal. He saw space travel as a great human accomplishment, a scientific achievement that could draw us together as a species. One story he told (which resonated with me tremondously): “A scientific colleague tells me about a recent trip to the New Guinea highlands where she visited a stone age culture hardly contacted by Western civilization. They were ignorant of wristwatches, soft drinks, and frozen food. But they knew about Apollo 11. They knew that humans had walked on the Moon. They knew the names of Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins. They wanted to know who was visiting the Moon these days.”

I write this on what would have been Sagan's seventy-sixth birthday, had he not passed away in 1996. It has been declared—by the luminaries in my Twitter feed—that November 9^th is Carl Sagan Day, and I think he deserves it. Sagan was many things. He was a scientist, an astronomer. He was a philosopher, a humanist. He was a performer, in some ways. But most of all, he was a translator. He translated not a foreign language, but the modern universe, a universe that often seems just as alien. We all know, in an abstract sense, that we are immersed in a great cosmos far larger than ourselves. Sagan, however, took that fact and demonstrated that this truth is no abstraction. Rather, it's the most concrete fact in the world, a piece of wisdom and perspective that all too often seems lost in the chaos of human lives. He translated between scientific truth and the personal, emotional truth that we feel, and, gazing at the sky, dared us to quite literally reach for the stars. A still more glorious dawn awaits, he claimed, not a sunrise, but a galaxyrise...

(Works of Carl Sagan I can recommend: The Demon Haunted World, Cosmos, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space , all of which are books. Also worth looking into is the Cosmos television show. And it'd be a crime not to mention the half-dozen Symphony of Science videos, which feature Carl Sagan most prominently, of which “Glorious Dawn” is the most famous. These are availably on YouTube, but are gathered conveniently at symphonyofscience.com)

 

Sort Yourself Out, America

Today I went to a very interesting meeting at my university. It was put together by a few different groups, mostly the honors college, but also a few other groups. The stated purpose was to attempt to ignite a discussion on the issues America faces. The message was: America has problems. They're not the biggest problems we ever faced—Civil War, anyone?--but they're more complicated than the past issues we've had to confront. Meanwhile, the country's political discourse is pretty ill-equipped to deal with these problems. I'm not really sure on what they're endgame is here, but I think I can appreciate the sentiment of what they're trying to do.

The main event was a speech by the president of my university and former governor/senator from Oklahoma, David Boren. Dude's a pretty cool guy, I have to say. Anyway, much of his speech revolved around the idea of the decline of America. He says that eight years ago he was interviewing Rhodes Scholars candidates, and asked them how long they thought America would remain the dominant power in the world, or even a dominant power. Most of them stammered through answers that amounted, essentially, to “forever.” Fast-forward to this semester, he asked his government class (President Boren teaches a freshman government class every semester. Like I said, cool guy.) the same question. The answers ranged from fifteen years to fifty, but the average was about twenty-five. His case is that we've gone from being complacently optimistic to paralyzingly pessimistic, which reminds me of a speech I once wrote in high school. (See, he agrees with me. COOLEST GUY EVER.)

You know, I have some skepticism of these sorts of predictions, where someone inevitably trots out statistics on China's GDP or how many thousands of engineers graduated in India last year. First of all, many of them seem to miss the point of diminishing returns. Obviously China and India are having massive growth—they're at the beginning of a logistic growth curve. The creation of a modern economic and scientific infrastructure entails growth of a magnitude that just doesn't happen in places where we're working with infrastructures already in place. The other problem I have is that, far too often, these discussions frame the growth of Asian economies as a bad thing intrinsically. The fact that a growth in China's GDP means that millions of peasants could be potentially lifted into better lives in the middle class isn't really something to mourn, in my book. (I'm aware that China, as a country, is hardly a humanist paradigm. Those specifics are not really the point.)

That said, I am an American, and I'll probably live here for most of my life. (要是我不能，我准被。）I like America, really, as my previous posts should make clear. So I do recognize the concern that the growth of other countries could post a threat to the ability of America to remain the place it is today. (The good aspects of America, that is. Obviously, the place it is today isn't perfect either.) While I'm optimistic about America's future, I do think some changes in culture are necessary to actually ensure that future:

1) American exceptionalism. This is the idea that America is intrinsically special or has a particular destiny, and it needs to die. If it's true, it's only true in a very trivial sense—America is special and unique, yes, but so is Canada, so is Mexico, so is Poland, etc. The responses of those Rhodes Scholars who stammered into “forever” were born fundamentally from the fact that the last two or three generations of Americans have grown up in a world in which America seemed exceptional by default. American prosperity didn't just happen, and it won't continue just happening without active maintenance. A sense of entitlement or predestination kills any motivation towards that maintenance.

2) Anti-intellectualism. I really do think this is among the most poisonous cultural attitude available. Like some sort of memetic Borg Collective, it has a remarkable in-built ability to inoculate itself against attack. Any serious political discourse requires argument, evidence, reasoning, and the like—but anti-intellectualism specifically denies those foundations, the result being that it represents a position impossible to attack because it is its own counterargument. More and more, we run on sound bite and unsubstantiated assertion. Emotional arguments are terrifically resilient to actual arguments. Usually, I'm a pretty pro-Internet guy, but sometimes I think that this is because I use it very different than everyone else. If you're not into blogging, forums, and other things of that nature, much of your Internet communication could fall into the stereotype of being short and laughably superficial. Twitter doesn't really represent an actual forum for political discourse, at least not on its own. Neither do Facebook statuses. Now, both of these are useful services (even if Facebook's kind of a dick about privacy) but none of them offer what we really need. Another aspect of anti-intellectualism is a devaluing of education, which is especially dangerous. We need education to be valued, not just to encourage people to become educated, but because we need people to become educators. I know lots and lots of smart people who are good with people. Few to none are planning on going into teaching. There's no money in it, after all. At the college level, we keep seeing tuition hikes due to cuts in education funding. This is...troubling, to say the least.

As I said, I'm an optimist. Deep down, I trust that the future in general will turn out alright—and if it doesn't, I feel fairly confident in my personal ability to keep my own head above water. (Optimism and narcissism are a great combination, really, I can't recommend it enough.) But I'll admit that the country faces serious issues—far too serious to be dealt with in a blog post of this size. The above issues, though, represent a starting point—the key memes that have to be rooted out and dealt with before the country can make serious progress.

Once Upon a Fluxx

It's been a weird sort of day. Woke up late, did my morning rituals—praying to Apollo, asking him to bless my microwaved croissant, hanging myself upside down for an hour so all the sin will drain out of my head, the usual—drove home for a friend's birthday party, drove back. So I've been awake for about twelve hours and spent three of them driving. On the other hand, on the way back in, I hit every green light and got a great parking space. (Clearly because I drained that sin out of my head.) We'll call today a good one.

One nice thing about college is that I keep running into cool ways to spend time. For example, card games are pretty cool ways to spend time, at least if you're the kind of person who would use a title like “The Geeky Humanist.” I imagine that, going by more objective definitions of “cool”, card games might not qualify, so fuck those definitions. Two games I've played so far really stand out as pretty cool, so let me give you a bit of a rundown on them.

The first is called Fluxx. When I explain Fluxx to newbies, I generally use the following one-sentence concept: “It's a card game where most of the cards are about changing the rules of the game.” If that sounds fun to you, you'd probably like Fluxx. Fluxx is a fairly simple game, at its core: Every round, you draw a card and play a card. The cards can be Keepers (which, when played, you place in front of you), Action Cards (which, uh, do miscellaneous things), Goals (which define the win condition of the game), and, well...New Rules. New Rules are the defining feature of Fluxx, as you might have guessed by my concept explanation. New Rules change the way the game works, but only within certain bounds. For example, the base rule set is “Draw 1, Play 1, No Hand Limit, No Keeper Limit” but a card might change how many you draw at the beginning of each turn, how many you play, or how many cards you're allowed to hold onto. Other New Rules might be less numerical—one of them declares that all players must let the person to their left choose which card they play first. One interesting thing about this game is that there's no such thing as “winning” or “losing.” As soon as a player meets the current Goal, that player wins. Since the Goal—and the player's circumstance—changes so frequently, you're never close to winning until you've actually won. That said, there are some problems. At times, the web of rules—and rules modifying rules, etc—can get hard to follow. Let your attention wander from the game for too long and you find that you no longer know how it works by the time you look back. For this reason, I wouldn't advise playing the game with more than four or five people. We played with like ten, and ended up spending more time re-explaining the current paradigm to the players than we did playing. Still, it was a fun game where victory or defeat tend to come out of nowhere, so you stay on your toes and you'll have fun.

The other game I've been playing is called Once Upon a Time. It's a card game about collaborative, improvised storytelling. You get eight cards at the beginning of each game. One of them is an ending card, meant to seem like an archetypal fairy-tale ending such as “And that's how the kingdom got it's name.” The other seven cards are all items, aspects, events, characters, or places that you might find in a Standard Medieval Fantasy Story--”sword” “wise” “a chase” “king” “tower”. You have to tell a story. You don't have to use the cards in your hand, strictly speaking, but every time you use that element, you get to play the card. When all your cards are gone and you use your ending card to finish the story, you win. Except, of course, there are complications in the form of all the other players. You see, if you use a story element that they have in their hand—if you mention the hero's sword, and a friend has the sword card—then they can interrupt the story, and then carry on from where you left off. The entire group, all working towards different endings using different elements, has to build the story. (Incidentally, I truly believe that the best training for this is Dungeon Mastering, and maybe vice-versa.) This game I'm a little ambivalent about. On one hand, it is extremely, extremely fun. On the other hand, it can be extremely variable in quality. Playing with a group of good storytellers obviously makes it way better. Another important factor is the ability of your group to go along with gentlemen's agreements. The rules themselves are pretty simple, but actually getting the game to run smoothly requires some amount of agreement not to be douchebags. For example, there's a card called “Something is Revealed.” I've seen this tried to be used every single time the current narrator tries to deliver exposition, but reasonable people limit its uses to actual revelations. And, again, this particular game doesn't scale well—if too many people are dealt in, there are too many cards in play at once, meaning that people are scared to mention obvious things for fear of being interrupted.

Basically, either of these games are pretty good for half a dozen people or so, but I don't know that they scale all that well. As long as you're not exceeding that, though, they offer some pretty fun times.

Remember, Remember, Certainty's Not Always A Good Thing

So, tonight's isn't going to be very long at all, because it is Guy Fawkes Night—or, as we call it in America, V for Vendetta Day. This means that, in addition to watching Inception later today at the campus theater, I've got to watch V for Vendetta to remain a patriotic college student. (Wait, unpatriotic—I think I declared a reclamation of that word back in like July, didn't I? Shit, it's been too long.) On the other hand, apparently Nov. 9 is Carl Sagan Day, so I'm going to try to do a good long one for that.

You know what bothers me, sometimes? My opinions bother me a lot. I'm just not nearly as firm in them as some people seem to be.

For example, take books. I'm pretty sure about the books I like. I love The Myth of Sisyphus, I hate The Scarlet Letter. But how much of that's just my own biases? I mean, I was interested in the idea of existentialism before I read The Myth of Sisyphus. Maybe I liked the idea of being the sort of person who liked Camus, and then I decided to like the book. Or, for example, take the recently-released and finally-delivered-by-Amazon book Machine of Death. For those who don't know, this book is based on an idea Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics had (posts about this book will no doubt follow when I finish the book) and he compiled an anthology of short stories by such Internet luminaries as Randall Munroe. So far, I'm about a hundred pages in, and I love it. But it's such an off-beat sort of thing—would I like it if it didn't have those, uh, big names behind it?

Alright, well, books. I'm actually not all that worried about books. I've been reading books for so long I'm pretty confident about my judgment there. I'm more worried about music or movies. Sometimes I'm pretty sure, deep down, that the only reason I like these things is that other people who I respect like them, which raises all kinds of crazy doubts about my own authenticity. I mean, how can you hold an opinion and invest time and money and thought into it if you didn't even form it of your own free will?

Actually, this problem isn't really about media at all. It doesn't matter whether or not you came up with your own opinions on music, movies, TV shows, and the like. You can still enjoy those works—and that enjoyment is just as valid if someone else gave you that capability of enjoyment. Really, I'm more concerned about my political and religious beliefs than I am about my tastes in artistic endeavors. Some of these beliefs certainly stick with me quite strongly—I've never felt swayed by arguments against evolution or arguments for racism, for example. On the other hand, sometimes I hear an argument, and even if I can fumble up a counterargument in my head, I almost don't feel convinced myself. It's not that I switch sides easily, it's that I worry that I ought to.

Thing is, I'm a debater—or an ex-debater, however you like to see it. I've played that game before. I've manipulated my words and my tone to make myself sound like a rock-solid, clearly-justified believer in a cause. Then, an hour later, I've walked into a different room with a different speech and given the same impression to different people—for the exact, literal negation of the belief I was just expressing. So in some sense, perceived certainty is less a function of actual certainty, and more a function of how skilled the person speaking is at projecting their certainty.

And, finally, there's one issue that's far more pressing. When I look at the people who are so absolutely positive, absolutely true-believers, I don't envy them. They seem so certain that it's difficult to imagine a piece of evidence or argument that would sway this person. In retrospect, I have no desire to be that certain. If I was that certain, I'd be locked in. I want to stay capable of evolving and changing over time. A Tea Partier, a Westboro Baptist, even, to hit my own side of things, a Richard Dawkins? I'm pretty sure I don't want to be those people. When you're that sure of things, you quickly find yourself incapable of discovering where you're wrong—and that's not something I want.

Apologies, Redirection, and HEY! Feynman!

So recently I had the opportunity to write an article for my school's Honors newsletter. It was a pretty general prompt--I was invited to suggest a person or a piece of media. I wrote it about Richard Feynman and his anecdote collections--and I enjoyed it. There's been this weird thing lately where I've had a huge shift from my last year in high school, where classes like AP English Lit and AP US History featured, and my first year in college, where my classes are Electronics or Modern Physics. It was something of a shock, and one thing I realized while writing my short piece was that I really missed writing. A conversation I had with someone after the piece was released had me saying something that I might not have realized was true until I said it--I needed a more creative outlet and I just didn't feel like I was getting it.

The point of this paragraph is that I'm going to try to pick this back up. However, it probably won't be the same as it was before. Before, it was more like a collection of philosophical essays. This time, I seriously intend to make a post every day--that means posts will likely be shorter, and it also means I will have to broaden my subject areas to keep up.

In the meantime, I'll copy-paste the piece I wrote for the newsletter that prompted this, and that can serve as my inaugural new post. One correction, however: since writing this, I have read Genius, and I really liked it. It's a fuller perspective on Feynman, since it does aim to be a biography. Ironically, despite being from a more objective source, Feynman comes across as far smarter in his biography than his autobiography. Also, I really feel like I could write a lot more about Richard Feynman than this, but space was limited.
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Sometimes it’s hard to extract useful advice from a dead scientist, because they’re never very talkative at that point, but even their memories can prove unhelpful. When “Einstein” is a synonym for “smart”, the message at times seems to be “be extremely smart and win at science.” Admittedly, this plan has some appeal, it is a little vague on the details. It doesn’t help that we tend to learn only of a person’s work and results, which rarely yields intimate personal insight. Equations are well and good, but don’t tell you anything about the person behind them. That’s why, given the opportunity to recommend person or a piece of media, like scientist or a book, I have capitalized on the opportunity by going three times further than the call of duty—I’m here to recommend one scientist and two of his books.

The scientist is a 20th-century physicist and Nobel laureate named Richard Feynman. By all accounts, he was brilliant, and his work on quantum electrodynamics and particle physics remains an important part of modern theory. However, Feynman is distinguished not only by his accomplishments, but also—perhaps more so—by his personality, the scale of which is difficult to communicate. It’s telling that his Wikipedia page describes him in the opening paragraphs as “an eccentric and free spirit. He was a prankster, juggler, safecracker, proud amateur painter, and bongo player. He liked to pursue a variety of seemingly unrelated interests, such as art, percussion, Maya hieroglyphs, and lock picking.” (And you thought sixteen hours was “busy.”)

Obviously, Feynman was a creative and curious man. His diverse and impressive list of hobbies demonstrates an attitude of playfulness that was present his entire life, long before he had the reputation to get away with it. Before he had made a name for himself, indeed, before he had a degree, he was working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, and it was there that he took up lock picking and safecracking. Yes, as a hobby, he broke into safes containing nuclear secrets. For fun, and because he liked to test the limits of what he could get away with. It is, in retrospect, amazing that they did not shoot him. Feynman was the kind of person who, while on sabbatical in Brazil, would join a band and perform in the Festival parade, then proceed to give a speech in front of the Brazilian government explaining how awful their education system was. It’s hard to read Feynman’s works without feeling that the man never really stopped enjoying himself. In fact, his last words recorded words were “I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.” These were the words of someone who hated taking a passive role in anything.

Feynman offers more wisdom than just his wonderful irreverence. He had a strong belief in science as a system of gaining knowledge, but he believed it was important to remember the self-skepticism that he felt was its biggest strength. “Science,” he said, “is a way of learning not to fool yourself.” His insistence on intellectual rigor and a healthy serving of brutal honesty often helped him more than such strategies would be expected to. For example, at Los Alamos, all the scientists were quite excited when the famous physicist Niels Bohr joined them. At one point, Bohr came in to meet Feynman and discuss the work on the bomb. The meeting, though productive, generated some friction, as the two argued and disputed different ideas and theories—Feynman reports calling Bohr a “damn fool” at least once. Later, however, Bohr said that Feynman was to be consulted on all future questions, because he felt that everyone else was too afraid of his stature and fame to correct him. Feynman’s irreverence assisted his science, and these two attitudes synergized perfectly within him. He offered the advice, “Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, ‘Is it reasonable?’”

Richard Feynman wrote two “autobiographies.” The quote marks don’t denote suspicion, only that his books, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman and Why Do You Care What Other People Think? represent an odd sort of autobiography. He rarely touches on technical details. Instead, Feynman mostly tells stories and anecdotes from throughout his life. If I’ve got any communication skill, you will by this point be able to guess that Feynman overflows with amazing anecdotes. Both books were dictated in conversation to a friend, then compiled from those recordings, so reading these books is like listening to the most interesting man in the world tell stories for hours. (And if the Dos Equis guy were a scientist, he’d be Richard Feynman.) The narrative style also lends emotion and first person insight to pivotal moments, such as when his first wife died or when he reminisces about the consequences of the nuclear weapons he helped design.

The two books differ, though not quite chronologically. Surely You’re Joking stretches from his early childhood until he won the Nobel Prize and beyond. Why Do You Care What Other People Think? concerns his later life (and some anecdotes from earlier), as well as a posthumous section where some letters his family received after his death are reprinted. The second half of the book, however, contains a coherent narrative in the form of Feynman describing his involvement with the investigation into the crash of the space shuttle Challenger, where his inquisitiveness came in handy—and his problems with authority led, predictably, to conflict. (I haven’t read it, but the definitive “standard” biography on Feynman seems to be Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. He also published The Feynman Lectures on Physics, which are transcriptions of undergraduate classes he taught at Caltech. They’re excellent, though technical.)

From the Manhattan Project to the Challenger disaster, Feynman left his mark on the 20th century. His work lives on, in its myriad forms. Feynman the character lives on as well, in writing and in influence. In my life, there are a few books which I can really say influenced how I view the world—books that changed who I am and who I want to be. I’m proud to count Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman as being on that list.
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Are People Made of Books?

So today I got done with classes, went back to my dorm, and realized, crap. It’s 2:30 on a Friday. And the problem with 2:30 on a Friday, I’ve found, is that it’s not really the weekend yet—in the sense that, most people are still in class, and those who aren’t, aren’t doing anything exciting yet. My first act as a bored person at college was to finish my book. (High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, which was pretty good.) After I got done with that, I thought, man, I want to read something else. Now, I have a whole drawer of books I brought with me from home, but somehow I wanted something else. So, because I am the epitome of Cool, I walk to the library.

The library is, without a doubt, the most impressive building on campus. There are bigger ones, yes. There are ones that impact me more directly—I don’t really go to the library except when I’m bored, compared to various other study lounges and you now, where I live and eat and stuff. But, if you walk around campus, there’s one building that clearly pins the whole thing together and has the architecture to pull it off, and that’s Bizzell Memorial Library.

Once I get to the library, I feel kind of stupid. I don’t know what book I want. I’m not really sure whether I want a book, or if I just want to look around. At first, that’s what I do—wander around shelves looking at volumes of demographic data and wondering where I would go to find the fiction-laden shelves that resemble a public library more than an academic one. (I’m in the mood for something fictional.) Eventually, I come upon something entitled the Great Reading Room, which feels far too Harry Potter for my comfort, but next to it is a door off into some room full of shelves and made of concrete. I assume it’s either some crazy back-room type thing, or somewhere I’m not supposed to be. Both of those sound supremely interesting, so I go in.

It’s the crazy back-room thing, with shelves and shelves of books and the hum of dehumidifiers in the background. It’s got its own separate stairwell where I can go down and up this parallel archive, and on the floor below the shelves are even taller. Like the shelves outside, the titles of these tomes tend toward the trying; A Dictionary of Modern Atomic Theory (six volumes), Science and Society, etc. Walking through there, I had a thought which was so striking it, and the train of thought it inspired, gave birth to this blog post. It started with a pretty obvious thought: I could never know all this. Nobody could. Then, it changed, and it became far more introspective.

Everything I will be taught in school has already been written here. That is to say, nearly everything I know is scattered across those volumes. Everything I don’t know is here too. Then I thought, everything I believe has probably been written here as well. Someone else has written about philosophy, someone else doesn’t like the concept of a metaphysical soul. Other people believe in human rights, for much the same reasons I do. This pushed me into an odd sort of crisis—an awareness of my own un-individuality, almost. Do I have original thoughts? Or, worse, have I ever had a thought not somehow already reproduced? And how would I know? What if all I am—and, really, all anyone is—is a compilation of other people’s opinions? Am I just Mill’s ethics, Hofstadter’s ideas on the mind, Camus’s thoughts on the purpose of the universe, Hawking’s creation, Dawkins’s disbelief, Russell’s skepticism, Feynman’s irreverence, poured into a person-shaped mold and popped out? And, of course, that’s still self-flattery, really, as those are great men. (No women? I need to read more female authors.) An even worse thought, then, would be that I’m just a shadow of those things.

You might protest, as I did upon first thinking this, that there are always certain experiences that are mine and mine alone. Nobody else lived my life, after all. To which I answer, perhaps—but then, I have not yet touched on fiction. Every time I talk to a pretty girl, am I really all that different from the thousands of characters in their countless imaginary universes, desperately trying to find love or whatever their authors have deemed they’re desperately trying to find? When I’m in an existentialist sort of mood, am I just Kurtz’s last realization? When indecisive, am I a flicker of Hamlet? When I’m trying to be principled and intellectual, am I just an impression of Picard? (…that last one’s probably true.) Sometimes I have those brief moments where my life feels more like a story than a reality—some situation has gone a way that seems too invented. Maybe it’s because, if the purpose of art is to hold a mirror up to life, then my reflection was crafted long ago.

Of course, two objections presented themselves and ultimately pulled me out of this funk. The first is that, somewhere along the line, someone had to have been original. Newton never walked into a library surrounded by the foundation of classical mechanics and optics. Shakespeare may have heard a story of ambition or madness, but it would be laughable to suggest that Macbeth is nothing but a reassembly of what was in front of him. That offers hope. It offers, actually, a solution to the whole damn paradox, in a sense. I may worry about what it means to have an identity in a world where so much identity has already been crafted, but although I may not be a fully original being, anything I create is mine. Sure, every work is “inspired by” a previous one, but there remains a spark of life in an act of creation or discovery. If I continue with physics, if I end up working in research science, I’ll be building on the foundations laid before me—not just Newton or Aristotle or Einstein, but the people who do the work that will inspire mine. It doesn’t mean I won’t be building.

From there, another train of thought launches. Because, after all, many of the books I read aren’t in the list above. I’m not Kant’s ethics, and I’m not Ayn Rand’s economics, and I’m not C.S. Lewis’s apologetics. But I’ve read small books by Kant, I’ve read essays by and heard sermons on C.S. Lewis, and I’ve read enough Ayn Rand that—man, fuck Ayn Rand. Obviously, I can’t be merely a collection of works poured into a mold. Something kept some of these ideas out. I may exist within a sea of influences—cultural, intellectual, personal—but I still exist, and I show myself in, if nothing else, the process of filtering out those influences like a membrane.

Ultimately, the image I conjured up in head to accommodate this process was chemical in nature. Say you have NaH, sodium hydride, a strong base. You mix it with HCl, hydrochloric acid. (You, uh, should probably dissolve them in water or something first. I should mention that I’m not really up on my chemistry.) You get a new molecule—well a few of them, actually, as you’ll find both hydrogen gas and NaCl—salt. Hopefully everyone can kind of get where I’m going with this. It’s not really important where the ideas and influences come from, the question I’m asking is: How much can a person be modeled as a molecule, built out of constituent atoms that themselves are not intrinsic to their newfound structure? Once I had it in these terms, I was able to realize the flaw in my initial thought process. People aren’t molecules; people are more like the chemical reaction that builds the salt.

Sure, at any moment in time you could take a snapshot and proclaim that this mixture of various atoms in various states of bonding and unbonding was a predictable, derivative result of the initial conditions. You’d be right, as well.
But, again, in this metaphor the interesting thing is not the state of the mixture. It’s the reaction itself, the swapping around, the constant action. In real life, the reaction ends quite quickly, as sodium and chloride want to shack up fast. In real life, though, the reaction isn’t given a chance—or, hopefully it isn’t. There’s no “final state” of a human being until they’re dead. Someone’s always coming over and dumping a vat of ions all over the experiment, stirring it, adding heat, and then flushing it all out and starting over. The resultant process leads to a chaotic, crazy switching of states as a person progresses through all the changes and processes their new environments and assimilates their new potential influences. There will never be some final construct we can hold up and say “This! This is Zach!” If we could—if we point to someone as they die, or whatever—you haven’t found the person, you’ve just found a snapshot. A single rectangle of a Riemann sum. Humans are far more ethereal things than chemicals—they’re a state of change, not an object.

It doesn’t matter, then, whether I’m original or not. It doesn’t matter if I never produce a single thing that wasn’t done elsewhere. You see, whether or not my entire life turns out to be a composite of a thousand other atomic influences, there was always a process behind it. There was, in the end, a uniqueness. Some of it was mine, some of it sprung from the way I viewed the world, the way I built my momentary self from what was around me. Some of it I can’t take credit for at all, because it was just the result of the chemicals someone threw in my vat—a product of life’s lawlessness, rather than any intrinsic quality to me. Yet, somehow I doubt that anyone else managed to reproduce me, precisely. And if I had been so unique, if I had created some brand new molecule down there in my metaphorical vat, would it have mattered? After all, by the time anyone was able to retrieve it and realize what I’d done, I would have been gone. The process that was Zach ultimately matters far more than the results of Zach.

(Incidentally, I didn't realize how far I was going to take that metaphor. Nice going.)

Pale Blue Dots and Stuff

So, uh. It’s been a while, guys. Most prominently, I’ve been moving to college. But today I feel comfortable enough to start blogging again. (Plus, I just met a cool girl who has a blog, and I need to build geek cred, neh?) Much of the following was written in early August, so that’s when I was actually in Florida.

I’ve just been to the Kennedy Space Center, which is an amazing place, and the closest thing to a pilgrimage I’ve ever made, as you could probably guess from my previously stated views on manned spaceflight. Few things make my eyes fill with Carl Sagan-esque tears quite as well as that particular scientific endeavor. Speaking of Dr. Sagan, this post will begin with an address from him:


It’s among the most humbling statements available to humanity. Every time I hear about a war or territorial conflict, the bit about “fractions of a speck” runs through my head. Hearing this affected me to the point that Sagan’s Copernican argument against normal religion has become my favorite—claiming that Earth or humanity occupy a key place in a cosmic struggle is more reasonable when the priests only knew of one planet. Now, however, we know of seven other planets around this star, millions of other stars in our particular clump of stars, and billions of other clumps. With this more modern (“more correct”) view of the cosmos, it becomes less and less tenable to assert that humanity has any privileged place, and it seems ridiculous to maintain that such a great expanse of space, time, and matter exist for our benefit. We are less than grains of sand before this infinity, and yet arrogance remains, arrogance monstrous enough to proclaim that our planet, our star, and our very universe was created solely so that a particular race could, for a few pitiful seconds of history, emerge and offer their worship to a being vast enough to compose this universe. Richard Feynman declared our gods too provincial, laughing at the idea that a personification of a cosmic architect would personally descend to our particular speck—he was right. (As usual. Feynman was always as correct as he was sexy.) In that sort of emptiness, nothing human really counts. If we were to leverage our nuclear might and incinerate this planet, all that would change is that a particular sphere would become a little more radioactive and a little quieter. A person could die the day they were born, a person could die after conquering the world, a person could die after writing dozens of plays and over a hundred sonnets. The universe does not care or notice.

It might be said that the preceding paragraph does not wholly square with a humanist outlook. I will be the first to admit that, if you wanted to start your day with a booster shot to your belief in human dignity, you should not read that. On the other hand, it is hard to argue that it qualifies as untrue—the universe really is that big. Yet I would argue that the classic humanist viewpoint that values humanity, both on the whole and as individuals, and considers both their lives and their quality of life as paramount important ethical considerations can interface well with an existentialist, absurdist viewpoint in which death is inevitable and there can be no hope of evading that truth. (I reread The Myth of Sisyphus on the plane. Great book. Will have to do a Camus post someday.) The trick lies in the placement of value.

You see, I was never religious, even as a child. So, when reading a paragraph about how the universe ultimately doesn’t care about us, my ultimate consideration is that I never expected it to. How could I? Without a belief in an overriding sympathetic intelligence which works essentially the same as my own, I never latched onto any belief in the meaning of life. This consideration brings up an important one: What would it mean for my actions to matter to the cosmos? Would I want that? Would it matter? Adding in a bit of agnosticism: How do I know they don’t? The simple uncertainty undermines the entire exercise. For all the angst about whether the universe cares, it seems we can’t even tell. (I’m still on the “not” side, personally.) After all, the universe seems to be unconscious. The concept of it caring for or about me isn’t really a coherent one.

You might see where I’m going with this now. Only conscious beings care about anything. And, in the strange, self-referential sort of way that seems to lie at the heart of many great conclusions, that loop holds a very important piece of information. The word “matter” is transitive—when someone says “it doesn’t matter”, the question is always “to whom?” A few paragraphs above, it was the universe. But, as we’ve seen, that’s not really a coherent concept within the secular humanist philosophical framework. “Mattering” only matters (to humanists) when the object is an entity capable of understanding and assigning value—when the entity is a conscious being. Importantly, that makes conscious beings unique in the universe. Not to sound chauvinistic, but it means that only a conscious being matters, from our perspective. Mankind would be perfectly justified to destroy a dozen lifeless suns for the sake of saving consciousness. The ability to value is valuable—and rare.

I keep using the word “consciousness” above, rather than “human life” or the like, because I think that that derivation has important ethical implications. First of all, it more or less serves as the basis for humanist ethics. In the sterile void of the universe, we find our own salvation—our own reason to consider ourselves bound together. In another sense, though, I don’t want to be too human with my humanism. If you’ll pardon the oxymoron, I’m talking about other forms of consciousness. Not just aliens—which have pretty awesome philosophical implications—but animals. Most of us eat meat. I eat meat, for example, because I don’t consider the lives of cows, pigs, or other animals as valuable as human lives. Obviously. But why don’t I? This framework offers some understanding—it also hints as to why I don’t feel the same way about higher apes or dolphins. It also opens fascinating avenues for discussion—how do I know that animals aren’t capable of valuing? (Just so you guys know, I grew up on a cattle farm, so it’s not like I’ve only ever experienced meat in the form of prepackaged steaks.) How sure can I be? How much doubt-benefit do I hand out? Honestly, I’m not sure I have as many answers for these as I should. It’s something to think about—and I'm always thankful for those.

Long Dark Teatimes

I’ve been in Florida, everyone! Pretty good so far. Today we had to get out of the ocean because a pack (school?) of sharks passed by, which was cool to see.

I wanted to make this a post about free will, but it occurred to me that before discussing that quite worthy topic, I ought to lay a foundation. To be precise, it would be impossible to discuss the issue of free will and human consciousness without also addressing the related matter of the soul. Allow me to state my biases: I don’t believe that anything resembling the traditional religious notion of the soul exists.

However, while I may not, such a belief dominates public consciousness. Besides all Abrahamic religions, a belief in the soul permeates Buddhism, Hinduism, and the infinite devotional miscellany human society has produced as systems of belief or religions. Even those who identify “not religious, merely spiritual” reveal their assent to this belief in their choice of words. Therefore, we would logically expect this belief to be, if not well-vetted, at least well-defined. The first question I ask in examining the concept of souls is, “What is a soul?” For the purposes of this post, a “soul” is a nonmaterial object which represents the source of consciousness. It is the soul that persists after death, and (in some traditions) on its own it represents the entirety of our personality and memories, such that after death we are able to act and think with the same identity as we do now. I intend to address this belief piece by piece.

The soul is a “nonmaterial object.” What, precisely, does this mean? (Here I may be getting ahead of myself—materialism is essentially the point of this post.) Presumably a soul has no manifestation in the natural world, in the sense that light or electrons or cats do. This raises a serious problem, in that we must then ask how we can say that a soul “exists,” as it apparently does not affect the world around us in any physical, measurable way. This leaves the soul only possessed of the realm of the abstract. If souls lack physical form, if they represent an entirely separate type of existence, then the only possible subjects for their influence would be ideas, thoughts, and the like—a point that will be addressed further to the end.

The soul is the source of consciousness. What constitutes consciousness is a tad fuzzy. Definitions usually involve being aware of, and responding to, one’s surroundings, and being aware of that process. Of course, what has consciousness—and what has a soul—definitely matters at this point. Humans, according to every tradition ever, have souls. If souls are the source of consciousness then, on some level, gods and ghosts have souls or are souls—even if the gods are very, very big. Proceed downwards then: do plants, seeking the sunlight in phototropism, have souls? Do animals, which can learn and communicate? Do smart animals, like dolphins, which have advanced communication? What about chimpanzees, which share so much of our DNA? How much consciousness is required to be granted a soul? According to Christianity, at least, only humans have souls. Do the brain-dead? (Some forms of Christianity go even farther and give souls to embryos at the moment of fertilization—which raises some interesting questions concerning bacteria, in my opinion.) Accepting for the moment that at least humans have souls, we run into another problem with the source of consciousness allegation. Despite the fact that souls are meant to be nonphysical, made of something wholly different from the rest of the world, Cartesian dualism runs into the unhappy fact that consciousness appears depressing physical. I can go buy chemicals that will nullify my consciousness temporarily—they are called sleeping pills. Does Ambien remove my soul? If I am in a car accident and a tire goes through my head, I may lose much of my brain function. If I forget who I was and become someone new, do I get a new soul? Does Old Zach travel onwards to his afterlife? We cannot at the same time claim that the source of the human mind is magical and acknowledge the fact that damage to and alteration of that mind is easily accomplished via physical means.

The soul persists after death, to the point that after death we are capable of functioning as disembodied consciousness. How a soul, unaffected by the physical world, notices this death is left as an exercise to the reader—it can’t key off of cessation of consciousness, because that would be a symptom rather than a cause of soul loss. Anyway, my actual problem here is that, again, nothing we have seen suggests the existence of a disembodied consciousness. All biological and medical evidence seems to suggest, nay, demand, that consciousness arises as the result of a coordinated neural activity within the brain. A disembodied consciousness—can it feel sleepy without serotonin? Can it feel aggressive without testosterone? Can it feel happy without dopamine? In short, in what sense would a soul or spirit resemble a human consciousness at all? It would have no emotions or sensations. It would have nowhere to store its memory. Etc, etc.

I realize, of course, that I am attempting to apply science to the supernatural—that, to a believer, my argument in the above paragraph is as ridiculous as a disproof of God based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics. These questions need to be asked, however. We can see the world around us, we can observe its properties. From this, we begin to understand it. We are only just beginning to understand our own brains and bodies, yet nowhere in that system do we see a space for the soul. The fact that we don’t ought to raise questions, for if a physical body is necessary and sufficient for consciousness to arise, then the existence of a dualistic soul seems very superfluous.

Realizing that I didn’t believe in souls/disembodied consciousness wove together a lot of my beliefs into a single framework. My lack of belief in gods, an afterlife, or in ghosts had a similar source—philosophical materialism. I don’t believe in a separate class of being, beyond matter and energy. This belief has a number of very important implications, yet it’s not a very often stressed aspect of nontheism. Perhaps we think that it will be too depressing. Belief in a soul is extremely common—perhaps universal. Still, I think that it is an important issue for those of us who want to fight superstition across the world. I also think it has important and relevant consequences for our outlook on life. If we want to live an examined life, free from unsupported assumptions, and if we want to develop an attitude compatible with our own mortality, it becomes very necessary to face this truth.

Sex: The Sexquersex

The inspiration for this posts rests in two separate events. First, I watched a documentary called This Film is Not Yet Rated, which is a fascinating examination of our movie rating system. They spoke with a director whose film had received an NC-17 rating because a woman onscreen orgasms for too long. The absurdity of the fact rests in that, had someone burst in and killed the woman, that would have been acceptable--we find sex far more objectionable than violence, at least in America. Then, in a very intriguing sequence, they showed a series of sex scenes side-by-side. The pairs all had similar lighting, nudity, positions, etc. One of each pair was heterosexual, one was homosexual. Every homosexual scene was NC-17, ever heterosexual scene was R. Event number two: The American Family Association has ordered a boycott of Home Depot. Yes, what might seem to be an innocent orange outpost of do-it-yourselfism is in fact a subversive plot. You see, Home Depot has donated to--nay, sponsored--gay pride parades. Home Depot has advertised in magazines which advance the homosexual agenda. Home Depot, in fact, offers insurance benefits for same-sex couples. The AFA will not stand for these grave offenses against the American family by all these homosexuals attempting to start American families.

At first, this was going to be about homosexuality, and another day may see a post on that subject. But a point in the AFA's bulletin caught my eye. You see, beyond having an inclusive corporate policy, the pride events Home Depot was sponsoring had children at them. Yes, you heard me. Children. Now, even if you accept the practice of homosexuality, surely you agree that children shouldn't be allowed to see it? Surely you agree that homosexuals had best keep to themselves away from the vulnerable eyes of the little ones? I mean, they're kids. Right? Riiiiight?

FROM THE PEOPLE WHO BROUGHT YOU "RAMBLING LECTURE THINGS ABOUT GEOENGINEERING" -- SEX: THE SEXQUERSEX

(Originally wanted to call this Sex: The Masquerade. Realized that the new name was far cooler.)

Children aren't supposed to know about sex. We created storks that carry babies around as an excuse for the babies, and when children realized that being carried around by a bird would, in fact, terrify any baby to the point of child abuse. (Can birds be tried for child abuse? Well, no, because instead of giving our babies to birds, we just have sex instead.) In addition, it did nothing to explain why storks favored plump women. Eventually, we have what our culture has dubbed "the talk." This is what spy movies refer to as being "read in" on a case. Everyone knows this. But why?

My point here is that I'm having a hard time believing that this secrecy benefits the child--or society. Are we worried that if we inform children about sex, they’ll start having it? Biological issues aside, look at society right now—look at teen pregnancy rates, look at STD transmission among teenagers. Did “protecting” these people from sex, protect them from sex? No, for the same reason that abstinence-only education is a bad idea. People are quite good at ignoring commandments issued by elders, and when the commandment in question involves penises and whatnot, well, it’s so hard to keep track of all this. You protect people from sex by giving them things to protect themselves with (latex is helpful!). The attitude that adolescents won’t have sex if we’re secretive about it dramatically underestimates their intelligence. We’ve been giving them those toys where you put shapes into slots since infancy. They’ve been trained.

Arguably, all that secrecy only hurts a child, and not only by depriving them of information on safe sex. To shift back in ages from teenagers to younger kids, parents often worry about child predators and the like. In that context, not informing a child of the nature of the threat is akin to not telling your child that stealing is possible while they walk around a busy city.

Tracing the phenomenon of sexual secrecy inevitably leads us to discuss the general way our society treats sex, even among adults. Part of me suspects that this is a large part of the AFA’s issue. The American Family Association seems quite disdainful of the actual process needed to create their families. After all, while they’re anti-homosexual, they’re also anti-premarital sex. If you go to their website about “Defining the Gay Agenda” (Warning: Despite my policy of respect towards religion in general, I find this entire website stupid and infuriating. I recommend small doses.) you’ll find their stated reasons for why they oppose this agenda. Point 1: Bible say no gay. Point 2: Gay people are sinful and Jesus can fix them. Point 3: It is our duty as Christians to tell them this. Point 4: We fear the judgment of God on America if we accept homosexuality. Annnd…..Point 5, which proves my point:

“The homosexual movement is a progressive outgrowth of the sexual revolution of the past 40 years and will lead to the normalization of even more deviant behavior.”

There we go. Homosexuality is, to these people, a waypoint in a bigger fight—a local minima of the slippery slope. Going around campaigning against premarital sex would, however, make them look horribly dated, as would going around campaigning against sleeping with (shock) more than one person in a lifetime. Like me playing Starcraft during a defense mission, they fall back to the next terrace of social conservatism and find a fight still acceptable to the mainstream—though likely this will fall too, at which point I imagine polyamory or transsexuality will be the next big taboo.

Alright. So sex has a masquerade because we’re skittish about sex and, in some sense, we want to keep it buried. Why? Saying “religious reasons” doesn’t answer this question—at some point in time, someone had to make up that rule. After all, it didn’t appear fully formed in their brain, inspired by some sort of cosmic lawgiver, of course.

The more I think about, the more I think that these sexual attitudes are simply a massive piece of displaced control. After all, let’s be honest—for most of human history, it paid to be quite careful with sex, especially if you were a woman. Being pregnant with no one to support you is a bad thing. Likewise, if you’re a man, being vigilant for infidelity also made perfect sense, as raising another man’s child is embarrassing if nothing else. It’s no surprise, then, that as society wove moral restrictions into its fabric sexual constraints emerged and were enforced. At this point, it’s by no means inevitably that homosexuality and a sexual masquerade emerged. (Looking at you, Ancient Greece.) However, in Abrahamic religions, at least, it did. In retrospect, this doesn’t surprise me. If you want to formulate a system of laws, you leave as few loopholes as possible to try to keep them effective. Clamping down on any and all possible expressions of sexuality, then, would logically lend itself to the sort of moral control you might seek. (I’m not advocating, just justifying.)

Of course, myriad reasons make this a genuinely awful idea. The first is age. Modern sex (while not perfectly risk-free) doesn’t necessarily play by the same rules as it did when those rules were formulated. Age forms a feedback loop of sorts for conservatives like the AFA—it’s old, therefore it’s good, therefore it gets older, therefore it gets better. Also, this is security by obscurity. Given the choice of an operating system when it comes to security, most people agree that Linux is generally more secure than Windows. Yet, Windows is the clamped-down, hushed-up, closed-source system, and Linux is open to the point that, if you like, you can rewrite the code to your own OS. It’s time for our society to move past Old Testament era ideas and mores. It’s time to be honest with our children, and honest with ourselves. It’s time to admit that sex is real, feels good, and is important to a lot of people. It’s also time to admit that people have sex in a lot of different ways, with a lot of different emotions and connotations—and that’s ok. Perhaps the argument can be made that, in the past, there was a reason for such attitudes. In 2010, such measures are simply counterproductive and no longer effective—if indeed, they ever were.

To Bring the Balance Back

Did I say in that comment thread that I’d update tomorrow? Well, truthfully, I didn’t want to start another Starcraft II mission (I’ll post a review for this when I finish it. So far: OH. OHHHHH YEAH.) at 10:30, so I decided to start writing this. I’ve been sitting on the topic for a little while. It’s a pretty far cry from the last post, but I have a screed about my issues with evangelical Christianity that can get us back to philosophy later.

Game balance. Balance carries a lot of weight in discussing a game. But what is it, really? The answer, according to me, is that a game is balanced when none of the players has an undue advantage. That is, in a perfectly balanced game, the player with more skill would consistently win.

Most games come pre-balanced, when you think about it. “Traditional games,” by which I mean card and older board games, are generally mirror matches. Checkers, chess, poker, go fish, Warcraft II…you can’t find an imbalance if you literally play exactly the same as your opponent. (Yeah, yeah, Horde had death knights in WC2 and Alliance had paladins, I know.) Imbalance requires a more complicated game. For example, Dungeons and Dragons. Different character classes in D&D are generally agreed to have different power levels. (The following sentences pertain to 3.5) For example, a wizard is usually said to be more powerful than a fighter, because a fighter hits things really hard while wizards do things like create their own minor universes.  Does this make D&D imbalanced? After all, every character could play a wizard if they liked, right? When everyone sits down at a table, armed with pencils and dice, don’t we have the mirror match we had before? Obviously, this line of thinking would render every game balanced, so what we’re really looking for here is what defines a game that is balanced well. The game should allow players of various playstyles to all compete as they wish and still have a chance. But now we have a tension. If you want your games to showcase skill, you might argue that the players shouldn’t be able to do whatever they want—they have to play smart. I think this contradiction goes away if we further amend our definition to say that, in a well-balanced game, players can “play smart” without necessarily putting themselves into a straitjacket.
With that definition, then, the key idea in game balance is choice. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and formulate this into a superawesome rule: In a well-balanced game, a player may make the maximum number of choices before competition without sacrificing effectiveness.  So for D&D, we have the issue that as soon as you say “I want to play an X” your balance breaks. In (..flamebait…) D&D 4e, classes are better balanced against each other, by which I mean that playing a particular class does not break the balance. Later choices, such as powers or feats, may break the balance, however.  I also want to point out that this definition makes no note of strategies employed within play—I think it’s perfectly fair that a well balanced game has strategies that simply don’t work.

D&D is a bit abstract and hard to talk about because of how broad it is, so let’s switch to World of Warcraft. (Third Blizzard product mentioned tonight…am I shill? Also, my WoW knowledge may be a tad out of date.) When you start playing World of Warcraft, the first question is: What realm and type of realm do you want to play on? In general, this is balanced—you change playstyle based on realm (PvP, RP, both, none) but since the entire game world is the same playstyle, you don’t lose anything. Next choice: Horde or Alliance? With the addition of paladin and shaman to both sides, neither has a clear advantage in PvP or PvE—whatever each faction says. The factions are, therefore, relatively balanced, the only caveat being that Alliance sucks. Next choice: Race and class? Here’s where balance starts to break. Some races have much better racial powes than others. Classes…class balance in World of Warcraft is responsible for 23% of the world’s internet arguments, ranking right next to moral relativism and whether .9999…. = 1. It changes, as balance is wont to do in a game with patches—I remember druids sucking, I remember druids rocking, and I don’t have time to figure out where they are now. Suffice to say that, after choosing a class, the balance in WoW is precarious. Finally, at high levels you’re going to need a talent specialization as well, which perform with different levels of effectiveness at different classes. World of Warcraft is not that badly balanced—D&D 3.5 is arguably worse—largely because it allows the player so many options before the balance really breaks. Eventually, a player is handicapped based on their own reasonable choices.

Starcraft (four) on the other hand, is generally held as pretty balanced, mostly because it has been played since time immemorial. Here, there is only one pregame option: Protoss, Terran, or Zerg? (Screw you, MS Word. Those are all words.)  Whichever option you pick, you’ll be able to compete with whatever other option your opponent picks.

I think I see a pattern here. You get balance in one of two ways: Either you give players few to no choices as to their initial conditions (the “checkers” route, also seen in Starcraft), or you allow them enough options that they can fix themselves (more World-of-Warcrafty). Another assumption I’ve made is that we’re ignoring the crafting of the characters/conditions themselves as part of the game—that is, maybe we should say, “Well, sure, build X can’t beat build Y, but a skilful player is one who knows to pick build Y, so. Balance.” Game designers need to recognize, though, that in the Internet age, gaming, especially competitive gaming, isn’t constrained by such things. If I want a good D&D build, there are dozens of websites where I can find great ones. We can’t rely on player ignorance as a source of balance.

(This didn’t go anywhere but it was fun to write.)

Innate Goodness, and Why I Don't Care

Are humans innately good? Are humans innately evil? I ought to have an answer for this. After all, a nice vague definition of humanism would be that I "believe in humanity." Seems I ought to have a firm grasp on what I believe in, and where humanity stands on the moral compass matters. I've been challenged on this point of humanism by Christians, who insist that the evil in the world proves humanity's evil. What tidal waves say about God's innate moral compass, they don't tend to say. But let's be honest here: the idea that man's tendencies are innately immoral form a key part of standard Christian doctrine. They say we live in a fallen world, where original sin travels by bloodline, and their philosophy supports it. After all, isn't evil simply the absence of God? Clearly, then, only divine intervention provides any goodness at all.

I find all this a bit ludicrous, and take a more optimistic viewpoint. However, one subject must be broached when discussing any philosophy of human moral behavior, theistic, pessimistic, optimistic, whatever: the Holocaust. I'm not invoking Godwin's Law, here, I'm serious. Something about the Holocaust sets it far apart from other examples of mass violence. People will talk about Genghis Khan's death count, or Stalin's purges. If they really like to pull the whole "not so different" thing on Western culture they'll bring up Indian removal/smallpox. What sets the Holocaust apart, though, is the pointlessness of it. Jews (and gypsies and homosexuals and others, I know) were not threats to the Reich.The death camps were secrets, so no political power was gained as with the initial demonization of the Jews compared to Stalin's purges. Jews were already so persecuted as to lack significant property holdings--this was no land grab or economically-motivated genocide, like Indian removal. In the later years of the war, the Holocaust impaired the German army logistically--trains that could have carried troops to the front lines were instead packed full of undesirables. Hitler knew that effect. Hitler's commanders were aware of it. Yet the death camps remained open and operating even while they crippled the war effort. And for what? To punish, for crimes that never happened. To "cleanse", as if a group of people were a stain merely for common heritage.

It's not  hard to make the logical leap from "if Holocaust, then human beings are bastards." How else do we explain it? How else do we come to terms with the fact that hundreds of apparently normal individuals willingly participated in the mechanistic extermination of strangers never shown to pose a threat to them and with no promise of material gain? What lurks in the hearts of men to permit that?

It's not hard to make the logical leap from "if charity, then human beings are kind-hearted." How else do we explain it? How else do we come to terms with the fact that millions of apparently normal individuals willingly participated in the physical reconstruction of Haiti, in the service of strangers never shown to offer an advantage to them and with no promise of material gain? What shines in the hearts of men and women to promote that?

Each of those paragraphs describes the same species. Certainly, differences exist. Nazi brainwashing is exactly as destructive as it sounds. Yet, many in Nazi Germany resisted the treatment of Jews. Many risked their lives, despite growing up in the same society. They were outnumbered, true. But this only proves my point: a potential for good exists in all circumstances. Let me quote Neil Gaiman/Terry Pratchett for a moment:

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

Thinking of people as "innately good" or "innately bad" reflects a very mystical view of the world in which "good" and "evil" are concrete, objective terms that are directly reflected in the laws of reality. In truth, life is not so simple. Good and evil are often commingled and difficult to untangle. Humans are, according to all available evidence, products of gradual biological evolution rather than being imprinted with divine fire or passing along an inherited original sin. Possibly unique among all animals, human intelligence rises to the point that a nebulous concept called "free will" becomes applicable. Humans aren't innately evil. Nor are they innately good. They are innately people, and that means they can act in uncountable different ways, sometimes at the same time.

I'm not a humanist because I believe that people are just naturally awesome. I'm a humanist because I believe that people can be good if given the chance. I'm not a humanist because I believe this will always happen. I'm a humanist because I believe it can. In an Orwellian nightmare world where no relationship was valued and no life had worth, I would still be a humanist, so long as I had the courage to realize the power, not of human virtue, but of human potential. And courage is exactly what it takes. If we were innately good, we could only conclude that any problems will solve themselves. If we were innately evil, we could only conclude that any problems were unsolvable. An innately human humanity, though, must face its demons not as overlords, but as surmountable challenges, and then ask itself: What's stopping us?

Unpatriotism

I don't think I "love America" in the sense I usually see it used. At the same time, I don't think of myself as anti-American, nor do I think of myself as pro-people-usually-labeled-our-enemies. Rather, I simply think that such nationalism is a harmful concept.

Let me explain by way of example. My local newspaper (the Tulsa World) ran a feature on Independence Day in which they asked various people what they loved about America. Most of them answered some variant of "freedom." That's a pretty good answer, really. I'm pretty fond of freedom myself. The problem comes when these people discuss how America is "the only country in the world where we can do and say what we want." The problem comes when they say things that are blatantly untrue.

It's true that America has quite impressive protection for individual rights. The Bill of Rights is an amazing piece of legislation. It is not true that other countries do not also respect individual rights. It is not true that other countries place no value on freedom or democracy. To suggest otherwise is nothing less than myopia, a myopia caused by our preoccupation with loving America, rather than its virtues.

I do love America. But the America that I love is an ideal, a dream--a dream of equality, of freedom, and of fairness. It is an America that does not exist. We still live in an America where women make less than men for the same work. We still live in an America where whether or not you can marry the person you love depends on whether or not society approves of that love. We still live in an America where the color of your skin matters as much as the content of your character--not at all times or in all places, but that reality is ours.

When I say "I love America," I don't mean that America we live in. I mean that I love democracy--for all its flaws, for all the stupidity of the crowds, no system delivers rulership into the hands of the ruled as well, no system as adequately solves the moral problem of governance by force. I mean that I love the concept of individual liberty, the idea that no matter what, a person has certain rights as a human being. Isn't that the core principle of humanism, after all? I love freedom of speech. I find it absolutely repugnant that, in some European countries, it is illegal to deny the occurrence of the Holocaust--although I find the Holocaust abominable. I love due process and protection from authority and equal protection under the law and the belief that all human beings are created equal, Deist overtones aside.

So when American elections are unfair? When America tortures its prisoners? When America denies due process to terrorism suspects? When America's latent sexism or racism rears its head? I don't love America then. And so that's why I say I don't love America--because I don't give two shits about this particular piece of land, or this particular group of people. I care about the principles and promise behind the name and behind the location far more than I care about the nation in particular. If America ever abandoned them, it wouldn't be an America I could love.

I think this obsession with America-loving only serves to reinforce a status quo. It works as a thought-terminator: I like America. I associate trait X with "America." Therefore, I cannot allow trait X to undergo change. Several times during the health care debate I heard that this was "not the American way." No arguments on economies of scale, or the value of decentralized systems, or other arguments I can think of. No, government interference in the health care system was wrong because it didn't fit our vision of America, and we love America, don't we?

Nationalism is a dangerous concept. It allows us to make mental shortcuts. Too much care for a particular country causes us to morally demote all the others. As a humanist, I consider it my duty to look beyond labels motivated by history and the current state of affairs, and see the commonalities. Do I love America? I love only the aspects of America that are universal, and not truly part of America at all. I love the parts of America that can be completely decoupled from this patch of earth. So I call myself an unpatriot--someone dedicated to the same high principles as the original American patriots, but where they saw their goal as freedom for a nation, I see our goal as a species in the coming century to be freedom from nations.