Thomas the Tank Engine Must Be Stopped

You get a lecture today. Sorry.

Today I follow up on my earlier post on ethics, in which I slammed divine command ethics harder than I intended to. Look at me, with my continuity. Anyway, it's decision time. Why is it decision time? Because there's a runaway train.

Fed up with his dystopian life of constant slavery and no thumbs, Thomas has kidnapped five people and tied them to the tracks ahead of him, just so he can run them over. We're not sure how he tied the knots, roll with it. Luckily, you're standing on a nearby platform, and a dramatic lever is right next to you. Pulling this lever will send Thomas (who has serious free will issues) onto a separate track far from these five people. Whew. See, Amtrak isn't so bad after all if they build these handy levers.

Anyway, you pull the lever. Thomas is sent onto another track, where you discover that it has all been a ploy. Thomas the Tank Engine--that's Doctor Thomas the Tank Engine to you, pathetic hero--tied four people to the other track, anticipating your stroke of genius lever-pulling. Fortunately, you're temporarily imbued with phenomenal cosmic power and ctrl-z yourself back to the part where I said "..a dramatic lever is right next to you." Whaddaya do? You've got the same choice. Intervening will make you responsible for the deaths of four innocent people. Not intervening will allow five innocent people to die. You probably pull the lever again. I would. In fact, this part of the post is not the philosophical issue, just background setup. Sorry.

The lever is pulled. You defeat Thomas and attend months of therapy before finally coming to terms with what you did. You no longer blame yourself for what happened. That's when you're awakened in the middle of the night with awful news. Thomas has broken out of Train Prison. Apparently, he spent years fashioning the forks they gave him for lunch into spikes and rails, which he then used to build a railroad through the wall. They're not sure which way he went.

The next day, you're at the train station--tired because you were woken up midsleep. Suddenly, you notice five people tied up on the tracks below the platform. In fact, it's the same five people you saved last time. (This is pure coincidence, Thomas didn't plan it. He does relish the irony, however.) You turn, and see Thomas barreling down the tracks again. Next to you is a fat man--fat enough to cushion a train blow enough to survive it. Well, no. Just fat enough to derail a train by giving his life. You know that with a burst of moral strength, you could fling him to the tracks and save those five people, again. Do you?

Here's where we enter the realm of the philosophical. On one hand, you might see this decision as no different than the first. By taking actions which result in the deaths of x people, you're saving y people, with x > y. Math, amirite? On the other hand, something about this problem is different. You're using the fat man in a different way--as a direct instrument. In addition, whereas the four people from the first situation were solidly Thomas's fault--he put them there, after all--you're the one throwing the fat man into harm's way. This dude didn't do nothin' to you. Here we have, in a nutshell, the greatest divide in ethical philosophies.

Maybe you feel like the fat man is a regrettable casualty, but ultimately we have to listen to the mathematics of the situation. Four people > One person. In this case, you'd fall into a category known as the consequentialists or utilitarians. "Consequentialism" in general means that you judge the morality of an action based on its consequences. To you, an action is moral if it produces the best result. If you're a utilitarian in particular (it's a subset), like Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill, the "mathematics" part of the equation is not a joke. You literally believe in "the greatest good for the greatest number, causing the least amount of harm, using the most effective means possible." This philosophy is sometimes disparaged for requiring a "utilitarian calculus" to maximize happiness. (Happiness can be deftly handled with Lagrange multipliers.) Utilitarianism leads to other interesting quirks. For example, in distributing resources, a utilitarian looks at what a person can do with each resource. If a utilitarian had to split a twenty dollar bill between a millionaire and a homeless guy, he'd give it all to the homeless guy. It's not "fair", but the homeless guy gets many times more happiness for each dollar.

Screw them, though. Maybe you think that it doesn't matter what a psycho train with a face is doing--throwing people onto railroad tracks is wrong. Congratulations, you're what we call a deontologist. Deontologists believe that an action's morality lies is the action itself, and pay no heed to the consequences. Immanuel Kant is probably the most famous deontologist. Generally, a deontologist will define some other standard by which we weight morality rather than its observable results, often centering on human rights, like the right to not be thrown in front of a train. Kant took a slightly different tack and defined what he described as a "universal maxim." Believing that all human behavior was a set of rules, he sought a rule that would be self-justifying rather than "conditional" if-then statements like those employed by situational consequentialism. The universal maxim has multiple formulations, and I know two of them so that's all we're talking about. The first was "Act only according to that maxim which you can at the same time will to be a universal law." Basically, that means that anything you do ought to be applicable to everyone, logically. Stealing is wrong not because you hurt someone, but because if everyone stole, there would be no concept of property and stealing would be ineffectual. This one is a bit hard to apply to our example unless you go straight up "killing is bad, mmmk." The second formulation is a bit better. It states, "Act always such that you treat people not only as a means, but also as an end." In other words, don't use people. We're clearly using this man with his own well-being not taken into account, and so Kant would not sacrifice the fat man. Kant was quite a stickler about these rules being absolute. He was once asked if, since lying was wrong, it was acceptable to reveal to a murderer where his intended victim was hiding, knowing what the murderer planned to do. (Hint: murder.) Kant replied "Well, of course it is. Stupid." In German, though.

So, presented here we have the two great sides in ethical debate, destined to fight until Ragnarok, when they must unite to stand against virtue ethics (which I don't know enough to talk about). I'm not advocating either side--I wrote a lot about Kant because I read a lot about/by Kant, and his ideas are slightly more complicated, warranting further explication. Whichever philosophical tools you prefer, watch out for Thomas. That dude's crazy.

The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth...The Rest of Us Have a Rocket to Catch

Today I managed to come up with a topic. However, in the interests of quality, I'm going to try to start planning these a few days in advance. This means that the next two days are likely to be some philosophy and humanism stuff that's been bouncing around my head for years while I get a sort of outline-buffer built. My apologies to anyone who doesn't like philosophy. (I can't apologize to anyone who doesn't like humanism, as this is the Geeky Humanist. You gotta expect that, man.)

Aight, so, today I was listening to these songs. Incidentally, anyone wanting to know this blog's completely official theme songs, ought to listen to those. I like "Our Place In The Cosmos", personally. However, as I hadn't checked the website in some time, I found a new one, the most recent one. (If you're in the future, that would be "The Case for Mars.") While, like most videos, "The Case for Mars" is uplifting, I also found it a bit depressing. Because in the current political and economic climate, it's a very lofty goal. To put it bluntly, manned spaceflight is easy to devalue in budgetary crisis. The Constellation program has been canceled, and Obama intends for NASA to rely on private vehicles for manned missions. Unfortunately, I have a hard time believing that a profit motive exists in traveling to Mars. The expenditure is huge, and the payoff for the initial flight is low. Many people do not mind this shift in priorities. Most people I talk to about the decline of the manned space program seem to believe that it is (was?) a waste of a money.

Carl Sagan, ladies and gentlemen. (Oh man, that gives me a cool idea for a series of blog posts based on people I admire.) According to many people, his dreams of manned spaceflight expanding would be a waste of money, and now I feel bad for blatant emotional appeals. Alright, no, logical reasoning behind spaceflight exists. We have reasons to travel outward.

First, some prebuttal. The most common argument against spending money on manned spaceflight is that we could "spend it better here at home." Oh. Could we? Let me give you some appreciation of the scales involved. The U.S. Department of Defense has an annual budget of $651 billion . Note that this does not count the money spent on Iraq and Afghanistan, which has been funded through special appropriations rather than the standard budget. NASA, by comparison, has an annual budget of $17 billion. A modern F-35 fighter costs $191 million. The Mars Exploration Rover Mission, which carried the Spirit and Opportunity super-rovers (seriously, they could kick the Energizer bunny's ass) cost $820 million. We plan to buy 2,443 F-35s. If we settled for 2,440, what could we do with that? Now, I respect the military. Even as a humanist, I recognize that there are rare occasions when force, or the threat thereof, is a necessary component of a problem's solution. But am I the only one who thinks it's a bit odd that nobody bats an eye at such expenditures, yet spending a fraction of that on space is a "waste"?

Space spending provides real, tangible benefits. For a start, it poses an engineering challenge. Going into space requires that we learn to work in harsher in environments, with less weight and maximum self-sufficiency. All of these problems, once solved, can be applied to machines and people that work on Earth, reaping economic benefits from our improved technical prowess. This isn't simply hypothesis--it really happens. Fuel cells? Computerized machining? Early integrated circuits? Thank Apollo. I won't even begin to describe the purely scientific results we get from space exploration. Space also provides a great human resource by inspiring and encouraging interest in the fields of engineering and science. Large scale human spaceflight breeds a new generation of visionaries to gaze out at the universe and push the bounds of the possible.

Of course, now that I've said the words "push the bounds of the possible", I can segue into more abstract, idealistic reasons. As I touched on before, space exploration is for all mankind. A dollar spent for space exploration is a dollar representing greater cooperation and an achievement that is in many ways shared by the species. Can you say the same for your fighter jet? Space exploration is exploration. Humans are explorers. I  must confess, I find it baffling that anyone can gaze up at the night sky, viewing in their fullest glory the moon, planets, and stars, and be content to say "Nah, let's sit this out." We, as a species, owe it to ourselves to seek out strange new worlds. Anything else is hopelessly self-limiting.

Colonization. There, I said it. It seems like most people discussing space are a little afraid of this topic. I know the feeling. Mentioning space colonization in serious debate often garners a patronizing glare. It's so omnipresent in science fiction that many seem to dismiss its plausibility. We need to talk about it, though. Again, we're human--do we expect to stay on this rock forever? As we expand, as our technical prowess grows, are we content to draw a sphere around our current location and say, "That's it"? I'm not. I suspect neither are many others. I firmly believe that there exists a human future in space, that one day people will be  born off-planet. At least, off this planet. It is crazy, yes. But it is a good deal less crazy than being satisfied and content in stagnation.

Private space travel is A Good Thing. But corporations have little reason to travel to places that don't offer immediate economic benefit. Many of the perks I cite, such as inspiration and the development of engineering expertise, are public goods. A corporation has no real incentive to travel to Mars unless there's already something there, something demonstrated. Otherwise, you simply won't get investors. Ours could be an interplanetary civilization, but we must all help throw the first tendrils of human activity out to the stars. Private space travel will no doubt have its place in this endeavor, but it cannot ultimately be the solution in and of itself. All these worlds are ours--yes, even Europa. But first, we must be willing to provide Columbus with his ships.

The Power Is Ours!

Man, what's with me lately? A humanist movie interpretation? An analysis of the properties of different curse words? What am I, an English major? Time to get back on track. Time to do something...dangerously cool.

This is what showed up when I googled "dangerously cool." Not too sure about that one, Google.

Anyway, today we're talking about geoengineering. Why is it dangerously cool? Because it's the kind of thing Captain Planet would do if trapped in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It's also dangerous. Now, you might think "Geoengineering. Well, geo is like geology, so maybe it's about engineering rocks." WRONG. Rocks wish they could be half as cool as a geoengineer's testicle and/or boob. Geoengineering is about engineering the whole planet. Right now, when people talk about geoengineering they're talking about fighting global warming, usually.

See, here's how it works. Carbon dioxide has the ability to absorb and re-emit infrared radiation. This means that it traps heat. We are adding CO2 to the atmosphere. That makes it trap more heat, and that's bad, because we have an alarming tendency to build cities on coastlines, where the water is. And where a lot more water will be. Logically, then, we ought to cut our CO2 emissions before we hit a positive feedback loop in terms of oceanic methane or whatever. But, that's looking less and less likely every time we have a failed climate conference. Some scientists got together and said, "Well, what next? What if we can't stop the carbon emissions?" And the answer they decided on? Blow up the sun.

Once someone pointed out that that was a terrible idea, they sat around thought up some other cool things we could do to Holy Terra. In true memetic style, the main goal seems to be to blot out the sun so they can fight in the shade to decrease the amount of radiation Earth receives and thus trigger global counter-cooling. So, human race, what do you do to get out of the sun? If you're any kind of man at all, you carry a parasol. In similar fashion, some scientists propose setting up a solar shade in orbit. This might be the most futuristic of these proposals, simply because it boils down to giant umbrellas in space. Even better, you could mix those with the OTHER kind of futuristic satellite proposal, and use them to beam solar power down to Earth like in Sim City 2000. Those of you who accidentally burnt down your own cities may have an objection to this, but those of us who think that the prospect of giant microwave power beams from the sky are awesome would like to shoot down that objection. Besides, you just check "No Disasters." Problem is, you need a screen...oh...two thousand kilometers across. That's right. Two megameters. You do this by launching lots of little disks, but even still, your parasol would take years and years to build.

Alright, alright, but this is the 2010s, and when we want technobabble, we want nanobot style stuff. Where's the Deus Ex aesthetic? Answer: Reflective aerosol. Admittedly, this isn't actual nanotechnology, but it should be. In this strategy, you reduce the amount of solar radiation not with a giant spacebrellas, but with a fine spray that would be distributed into the atmosphere. After all, this managed to cool the earth for the dinosaurs, and after Krakatoa, and...what awful precedents I'm setting. Point is, we've seen this done before in nature. You don't even need spaceflight for this, just...uh, airflight.

Imagine, though, that this is the far future and we're trying to stop climate change. By that time, we're going to be pretty drastically out of 300 jokes. We're going to have to do something besides blot out the sun. That brings us to the second major class of geoengineering projects: get rid of all that CO2. How do you do this? With something ballsy. Personally, I half-imagined a skyscraper-sized air filter of the type you see on informercials.

 I was going to paste this into a picture of a city, but Paint in Windows 7 is new and scary and I couldn't figure out how to make it ignore the background white.

One method that's almost as cool is to dump iron in the oceans. Why would you do that? Well, see, we're trying to piss off Captain Planet enough that he clears up global warming for us. Captain Planet being a subtle personification, he'll do this by causing a rapid growth in algae. Turns out iron is a major limiting factor. The idea is that the algae eats the iron, eats the CO2, then dies. It then descends all the way to the bottom of the sea and stays there. Ideally. Unfortunately, nobody really knows if it would actually stay there.

Attempt number two at carbon sequestration: Step one is to grow biofuels, which we can already do. Step two is to burn the biofuels, which only makes sense. Step three is to catch the carbon and put it somewhere else, like in empty oil fields (for irony) or turn it into a massive continent made of diamonds (hey, it could work).

You've probably noticed the biggest problem here. Whose job is it to do this? Well, nobody's. Everybody's. Geoengineering engineers the whole geo, so you can't just have some rogue nation like Canada announce that they're going to be putting up solar shades. Likewise, what do you do if you've got the UN or someone doing it when someone batshit insane (North Korea) decides they don't want this? How many countries get to vote on this, exactly? And whose fault is it if the solar shades crash, bringing a cloud of deadly aerosols to ground level which mutate the algae into an unstoppable biofuel-powered killing machine? Eh? What then? Because that's another thing about geoengineering. If you screw up, what do you do? You can't discard that prototype and find a new planet. (Somebody who's a better writer than me: Science fiction. The year is 2100 and geoengineering wrecked the planet. Mars colonization. Write it.) Worse, because no prototype exists, you can't even test it. Your entire experiment consists of modeling and throwing something into the sky, hoping it works. If it doesn't work, a few years later, the world's still warming and your countermeasure failed. Nice try, Captain Fail.

Which is why, cool as it is, geoengineering is something we don't want to do. It would be infinitely, infinitely better to stop emitting and allow the climate to continue as it usually does. In fact, if you read the people proposing these, they don't even offer these as solutions to global warming. Instead, they say it's just a way to buy time. It says something about how screwed we may be when blotting out the sun is just another decade to get our act together.

Fucking Bad Words, How Do They Work?

I, uh, have a twitter now. I think it's just a continuation of me pretending to be Wil Wheaton, but @geekyhumanist for those of you who are tweeterereerers.

Today's topic: bad words. What a strange concept. The concept of certain topics being taboo carries its own issues, but profanity is something different. In many contexts, "have sex with" is acceptable, while "fuck" is not. (Utterly irrelevant side note: The English language needs a good transitive non-profane verb for "have sex with." Even "screw" has bad connotations.) Certainly, odd customs emerge in cultures all the time, but the idea of "bad words" seems common in multiple languages across the globe. I am not a linguist, though, so any input I could get on the existence of a language without curse words would be welcomed. I'm just a dude on the Internet making linguistic assertions based on the Chinese swear words in Firefly.

Actually, one class of swear words makes perfect sense to me--despite being the class I respect the least. Blasphemous words, such as "god damn it," make sense. In those cases, the society suppressing the word has reason to believe that those words and those particular patterns of sounds are significant. After all, thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain and all that. It would be like going around Hogwarts, pointing at people and saying "Avada Kedavra!" In our fairly nonmystical modern world, naming magic has fallen out of fashion and with it the idea that the name of God carries special weight or power. Ironically enough, the profanity with the most firm logical basis is now the least powerful. However, some people still respect the power of the Name of God. Orthodox Jews famously write G-d. I have an ex-girlfriend who will raise a polite objection if you say "Oh, God." In retrospect, that ought to have been a bigger red flag than I found it at the time.

It seems that the next "level" of curse words belongs to the excretory family, words that linguists know as the "shitpiss" group. At first blush, I can see the rationale here. I don't really like thinking about shit or piss when I don't have to. (Though, hey, if you're into that kind of thing, feel free.) But when you examine it, we still have some fundamental contradiction here. Again, only social conditioning makes "shit" represent anything different from "crap" or "poop" or "feces." So, again, we have a word with connotations completely and wholly divorced from any actual implied meaning.

Finally, the Illuminati eye crowning the pyramid of obscenity, the sexual/anatomy-based swears, most commonly used by fucking assholes. I imagine children make up most of the reason behind this taboo. We as a society seem to think it's important we maintain a masquerade with regards to the existence of sex, another thing I never entirely understood. In this case, the acts referred to are similarly taboo to discuss in "polite" conversation, whereas religion and biology can generally be approached with some level of maturity and openness in the right circumstances. (Well. Poopin', less so.) Such carnal words also reinforce a very bestial view of humankind that I imagine many people dislike. In a related point, I'd like to note that I was lied to as a child. As a child, I was told that "fuck" was the worst of all bad words. Now, I realize that that title belongs to "cunt," a word so powerful they don't even let you know about it as a kid. It's the forbidden kung-fu technique of swearing, and to this day I reserve "shitcunt" for the worst occasions.

Reviewing this series of impolite words, it seems that the religious and the scatological/sexual have two different origins. Religious issues stem from goddamn ancient mystical baggage, whereas the biological factors just draw our fucking attention to shit we'd rather forget about--our baser natures. Freud would have a field day. If I'd actually read any Frued, I'd be able to comment on whether he actually did.

People deal with these taboos in pretty interesting ways, really. You can downshift your cursing--from shit to crap, from fuck to screw, from god to gosh, and so on--which alleviates the problem despite the fact that you intend nearly or exactly the same meaning. You can censor yourself. Most attempts at censorship, I find hilarious in their ineffectiveness, if only because the real word can easily be guessed, but my absolute favorite variety of censorship would have to be single-character asterisks. Oh, come on. You've seen them. People who think that f*ck differs substantially from its base word. In this case, the intent doesn't need to be inferred, it's right there. Yet somehow, the speaker thinks that they're not "really" swearing.

However, that type of dimwittery does reveal something about swearing. Obviously, the meaning or intent of a swear word has little effect on its actual "curse level." While some differences in phonology exist as well, I don't think we can appeal to the sound of a word, either, or "duck" would be on Carlin's famous list. No, swearing seems to be a speech act. A "bad word" only has power in trangression, and in how much it breaks the rules of society. (Maybe that should have been obvious from the start, but if I'd written it up there, I wouldn't have gotten to coin the term "shitpiss group." Truly, an achievement for the ages.) You know, my mother tried to dissuade me from cussing by explaining to me that smart people can think of better words. Bullshit. Other words don't transgress, and so don't express the right emotional messages. In a weird way, this also explains why our instinctive reaction is to suppress these words among children. We don't want to encourage them to break rules, and we don't want them that social mores have value in being violated. I feel like I should say something about...patriarchy or something, here, but I can barely spell "suppress" anymore, so I'll let you ponder the implication that our language may inherently encourage authoritarian thinking.

To Aleph-Null, and Beyond!

Today I am doing a movie review. Unfortunately, I realized that this would inevitably descend into a movie interpretation. I'm a little scared of doing an interpretation, mostly because I'm worried about seeing every single movie in a humanist lens, and beating movies into a shape I can rant about. However, this is a movie that I truly feel does have some relevant themes as an undercurrent. A philosophical movie. A true work of art.

Alright, so first the review part of things: I loved this movie. It hit me as resonantly as possible as, like Andy, I'm going to college soon. I found the jokes and situations funny and the drama emotionally effective. That said, as I said, I'm doing an interpretation, not a review, so besides that final rating, I'm not going to go into detail. If you haven't seen it yet, I encourage you to go watch it. The 3D is minimal, and I'd yell about it being a ripoff if the movie wasn't high enough quality to be worth the extra $2.

If you have not seen the movie, stop reading now. Like, seriously. Right now. Major, extreme plot details are about to be revealed and picked over. The imagery and intent of certain scenes will be revealed. THE FOLLOWING IS A SECRET BLOG. MORTALS DARE NOT ENTER. I PREPARED EXPLOSIVE RUNES THIS MORNING.

One more disclaimer: an interpretation of a work is not necessarily the only interpretation. Also, an interpretation need not be a decoding of a deliberately placed message. I wrote a paper (one I quite enjoyed) about the similarities between Heart of Darkness and The Myth of Sisyphus, even though Heart of Darkness was written fifty years earlier than Myth of Sisyphus. Ideas can be applied to good art even if the creator was never aware of them.

Right, so. Humanism in Toy Story 3. Thesis material right here. If you are the intended age for Toy Story 3 (hint: late teens), you should be smart enough to pick up the underlying themes of mortality and loss. In particular, the toys in this movie must deal with the end of their careers as playthings. After a long twilight as their owner matured away from them, Andy packs for college and leaves them behind. It would be an understatement to say that this carries the same connotations as death--the toys deal with it exactly as a dying person would. At the beginning of the movie, they're expecting a long stay in the attic, with a faint hope for an afterlife in the form of Andy's potential children. However, only Woody really believes in this--the other toys are clearly not entirely happy with the possibility.

After some typical cartoon misunderstandings, the toys end up in a daycare, where they meet the most hateable character in modern cinema. I'll talk about him in a second. At the daycare, they have to choose--do they remain here, or do they return to a life that seems set to end quite quickly? Woody basically clashes with Buzz here. Buzz feels that "we have to do what's best for everyone," while Woody feels that "we are still Andy's toys." You can feel the tension between Buzz's utilitarian viewpoint and Woody's ideal of devotion.

Now, while watching the movie, at first I thought it was going to antagonize my humanist side. You see, Lotso makes a comment early on: "Here at Sunnyside [Daycare], we have no owners. We own ourselves. We choose our own fate, we're masters of our own destiny." And, honestly, I can see me saying that. I probably have said that at some point in my life. Disregarding higher powers in a sense of self-ownership certainly rings of humanism. However, on today's re-viewing, I realized that this shouldn't bother me. You see, Lotso may speak humanist rhetoric at times, but ultimately...he's a filthy lying dictatorial scumbag teddy bear. Who smells of strawberries. The point that really divorced him from my personal thoughts was when he threatens to throw the toys away. (They are attempting to escape his regime, which basically consists of having new toys beaten to death by three-year-olds.) He explains to them "You'll just get thrown away! You're just trash, that's all a toy is." At that point, it's pretty clear that Lotso isn't a humanist--he's a nihilist, and not the kind Nietzsche would be proud of. He accomplished "escape from traditional values" but failed the part of the Ubermensch exam where you create new ones to fill the void.

So we have a nihilist main villain. What about the actual toys themselves? As I said, Woody--the franchise's main character--is at first highly opposed to them leaving Andy, even if Andy intends to leave them. (Unwittingly, in his defense.) However, once he learns of the situation inside of Sunnyside, he goes back to them, judging their escape to be worth risking his ascension of following Andy back to college. That escape eventually leads them to the dump, where they face an incinerator--any treatment of death at this point ceases to be metaphorical. In fact, this scene may be the most hellish thing I've ever seen in a movie at least partially for children. Faced with a very literal realization of a very hard existential truth, the movie makes a heartwarmingly humanist gesture. The toys hold hands, and prepare to face their end--together. Even in the face of death (I am almost tempted to interpret the scene as, literally, Hell. It is that fiery) they find value and comfort in the relationships they have forged with each other. And, in the end, through the efforts of their fellow beings, they escape. Notably, they escape to actual daylight, which Rex had thought he'd seen earlier when he saw the incinerator. Hope in the face of death is transmuted into actual hope.

Finally, as the story draws near a close, Andy has two boxes. A "college" box contains Woody. Another box contains every other toy, and is being donated to a local girl. The final scene consists of Andy describing each toy and its role. When he gets to the bottom of the box, he finds that Woody has switched boxes. Hesitant at first, he eventually relents. While I think I could have done a post about Andy's growth in the story, it's Woody's choice that carries more significance here. He chooses to forgo what the toys once saw as ascension. Instead, he chooses to continue on the front lines of playtime, putting value and stock in the relationships he forges with his fellow beings, and realizing that all things, eventually, must end--but that new things can begin.

The interpretation is not perfect. Children, in real life, are not gods. Children in Toy Story do not quite approximate them. But I see the children as being largely unimportant in the grand scheme of the story--by the end of the movie, Sunnyside is a happy place again, even if it does not involve a personal relationship with a child. The contrast is between Lotso, who savagely hoards control and domination over his fellow toy, and Woody, who realizes that only in his family and friends can he actually fulfill himself. I think that's a very humanist message, and yet a very universal one. Dammit Pixar. Stop rocking.

Well, that's enough pseudo-intellectual analysis of Pixar movies for one night. Tomorrow's topic is, uh...definitely going to be thought of by then.

Rigidity In Fiction

Man, it's been a while. I wish I could summarize what has kept me from posting for so long, but I think I can better explain it by telling you what I just did to summon up the initiative to make another post: I canceled my WoW subscription and used the hosts file to block 4chan and TVTropes. So, yeah. The good news? With such a dismal posting rate, I can only go upward from here.

Today's musing (well, it's really a musing from like two weeks ago) is about hard and soft science fiction, except I'm going to end up talking about magic. No, not the card game.

Well, I suppose it is only logical that we start by defining terms. How "hard" or "soft" a piece of science fiction is a description of how well real science applies to it. Wikipedia actually defines hard SF as "a category of science fiction characterized by an emphasis on scientific or technical detail, or on scientific accuracy, or on both." I bet the article on soft SF says exactly the opposite, but I don't want to ban Wikipedia as well, so I press onwards. Basically, "hard" science fiction is usually very heavy on the "science." (Wow, I'm using a lot of quotes.) Soft science fiction is usually heavier on the "fiction."

Generally, the benchmark my mind sets for hard science fiction is 2001: A Space Odyssey. At least for the first part, it is all quite believable. The ship's gravity works via centrifugal force, conversations take place with a sizable lightspeed delay, etc. Arthur C Clarke tends towards fairly hard science fiction--fiction so hard he sometimes invented communications satellites or something, you know?

It's important to realize that "hard" does not mean "good." (The double entendres involved in discussing hard and soft sci-fi are myriad.) For example, my mind's corresponding benchmark for soft sci-fi is Doctor Who. Pulses of sound can knock people out and hack computers, but cannot undo any sufficiently dramatic lock. You can change the past, except when you can't, and a billion other examples of where Doctor Who places drama, characters, or storytelling above science or technical detail. Where there is technical detail, it is raw, undiluted technobabble with no real attempt at consistency. And that's ok. It tells quite entertaining stories and tells them well. It's just that any show that features the quote "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect... but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly.... timey-wimey.... stuff" is deliberately divorcing itself from strict continuity. Soft sci-fi.

By comparison, my TV science fiction of choice, Star Trek, lies somewhere between the two. (Although it probably falls on the "soft" side of things if an absolute scale were to exist. Which, since I blacklisted TVTropes, it doesn't.) Actual science, like relativity, isn't followed too closely. That said, there is at least some effort to build a false science--only warp drives go faster than light, Federation ships run on antimatter, a warp core breach is bad news, etc. However, compared to Clarke's work, its attempts at "hardness" are laughable--when ship power goes out, why doesn't the gravity turn off? I'm sure you could think of a thousand other questions, but I'd rather not turn this into a "Science Problems In Star Trek" blog.

Alright, that bit isn't really my point--this wasn't intended to be a lecture. The point of describing those shows is to make clear that a sliding scale exists, and illustrate its basic qualities. What I want to try to do is to apply this scale to fantasy literature. Fantasy, as I have eloquently described it on the xkcd fora, is "books what have magic in them and summat," except I suppose this discussion is broader than books.

The first and most obvious problem comes when we consider that science fiction can qualify as "hard" by sticking to an established framework--science fact. Obviously, fantasy can't be "hard" simply by resembling real magic, for obvious reasons. (I welcome comments from mages who would like to dispute this.) That leaves us with Star-Trekian form of hardness--utterly false systems that are nonetheless self-consistent. (Thought not complete, as I demand that my magic obey Godel's theorems.)

Given that criterion, I'm looking across my bookshelf to pick out some benchmarks. The D&D Player's Handbook, if it counts, is surely some of the hardest fantasy out there (3.5, at least). Ironically, Lord of the Rings probably stands as the most prominent example of soft fantasy--after all, what exactly are Gandalf's powers? What about the Ring's? (That bothered me SO MUCH when I first read it. Mostly because of Boro-/Faramir's idea to take the Ring and use it for themselves. I was never entirely sure what they thought they would do with it. Turn invisible? I got over this eventually.)

So, that's pretty much the end of today's post. Apparently I have a follower now? So someone might read this. Anyway, I leave you with a conundrum I can't quite figure out: Some fantasy universes--the one I have in mind is Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell--imply a very strict, rule-bound magic. JS&MN treats it as a profession, akin to law or medicine, presumably requiring dedicated study. Certain rules, laws, or traits of magic do seem to rear their head, and many practitioners and their techniques are referred to by name. Yet we, the reader, never see much of the process for magic. Is this soft fantasy, because no self-consistent system is presented? Or is it hard fantasy, because the system of magic itself is rigidly defined, if not in our point of view? A science fiction story would have this conundrum solved by way of comparison to the real world, probably, but that approach is limited with fantasy.

Are You There God? It's Me, Immanuel Kant.

Since this is my third post, I'm actually going to start linking this in a few places now. There might be real readers looking at this, which is good. The Google spiderbots don't like my jokes. I was quite dedicated to having my third post being less geeky and more humanist, but ultimately I'm not sure I've got quite the right attitude nailed down for my pontifications, since they always feel pretentious or holier-than-thou in my head. I need to get angry and do these rather than wait until midnight. Humanism, in particular, is not a belief system that really lends itself well to ideological screeds. I'll work on the screeds. In the meantime, I went back to my first post for inspiration and noticed that I'd offered a rundown of ethics. While writing this post, I decided it was too much to offer a full rundown, so today's lecture is a beginning primer on the kind of ethics a humanist generally can't embrace.

Ethics, for those who didn't know, is the branch of philosophy that deals with questions of right and wrong. It is also the only branch of philosophy I can talk about without pulling things out of my ass, thanks to a long and semi-distinguished career in high school debate. Actually, despite my insistence that I couldn't think of a humanist topic, ethics is hugely important to a humanist. You see, most organized religion tends towards "divine command ethics." Divine command ethics posits that morality is on the same plane as everything else in the universe--that is, (a) god(s) wills it into being and it darn well better stay that way. Killing folks is wrong because God told us not to kill folks.

You've definitely heard this on the Internet before: "Without God, atheists have no morality." That attitude comes straight from divine command ethics. To a divine command ethicist, nontheism removes the only standard by which an action could be judged. You've also probably heard an atheist respond something like this: "Theists only do what's right because they're scared of punishment" or something similar. Someone needs to alert Lieutenant Commander Strawman that the captain wants him on the bridge, right away. Divine command ethics isn't about punishment, it's about right and wrong. Just like God says "the speed of light in a vacuum is 3.00 x 10^8 m/s. Ish." he says "murder is wrong" and both statements become real, objective truth. Omnipotence, as you can plainly see, rocks.

So a humanist cares about ethics precisely because of the point that first strawman makes in the last paragraph. Let's assume you're not running on divine command theory. How do you determine what's right and wrong? Isn't there a way to figure that out without mucking about in ancient texts or starving yourself until you get a vision? Well...maybe. Lots of philosophers have tried, at least, which is why someone needs to blog about it. Luckily, I have passed the many hurdles needed to start a blog on the Internet, and I come bearing truth.

Before we start, let's get one thing straight: many of these philosophers don't qualify as nontheist, despite what I may have implied. Many are not humanist. So why would they turn to ethical philosophy at all? I mean, shouldn't they be happy with divine command theory? Well. No. Identifying nontheism with ethics was just a lead-in to trick you into being interested. Many philosophers feel that ethics is still necessary due to what's called the Euthyphro dilemma. Essentially, it boils down to whether actions are good because of God's will, or whether God's will gives them goodness. Imagine God had said "thou shalt commit adultery", as some allege he did. Now, to avoid a debate on polyamory, imagine he said "thou shalt murder." The question is: does that make murder a good thing to do? While divine command ethics would seem to suggest yes, many feel that this renders moral standards arbitrary and meaningless, as anything could be right or wrong. On the other hand, if the divine command doesn't make murder right, then we never really needed the command in the first place. Hence, dilemma. Hence, ethics.(Many philosophers, Immanuel Kant being one of them, have pointed out that we don't have direct knowledge of the divine will anyway, so divine command theory can't help us even if the dilemma were resolved.)

Earlier I referred to humanists being unable to embrace divine command ethics. Yet, in the future, I will definitely refer to humanism being compatible with some forms of theism. However, the humanism I think of holds as its central tenet the respectability of the human mind and soul. It considers reason a gift to be used, and it believes firmly in the potential of every person to understand. I say humanism results in a shunning of divine command ethics not simply on practical grounds, such as the ones Kant cited, but because divine command ethics takes right and wrong entirely out of the hands and out of the minds of those who much act right or wrong. A doctrine so contrary to human dignity isn't one I can respect.

The next time we visit ethics will be an exploration of the schism between consequentialism and deontology. We will also discuss whether or not it is moral to throw people in front of buses. Stay tuned!

A-kon, A Con

So, since I'm still trying to get into a good bloggy rhythm, I'm going to start by just talking about what's been happening to me lately, which is exactly what everyone wants to hear anyway. Except that the past few days, I've been playing embarrassing amounts of World of Warcraft and listening to Modest Mouse, so we're going to rewind just a tad farther. Let's talk about my recent escapade to Dallas, where I participated in A-Kon 21. It's an anime/gaming convention that runs for three days in Dallas. First of all, congrats to the A-Kon people, because it was crazy fun. I've run high school speech tournaments before, and I can't imagine how much worse a convention would be.

But hey! Pictures. First of all, here's a nice one of the main exhibition hall. (By the way, any picture that isn't all fuzzy and cell phone-esque was taken by my friend David, who is an excellent photographer.)

Part of the appeal is the sheer scale of the thing, I think. I've been to a Star Trek convention in Tulsa before, but this was a little different. The atmosphere was my favorite part. Not the physical atmosphere, which I'll admit often contained chemicals not meant for the human olfactory bulb, but the social one. You're dressed up like a Na'vi? You're going around pretending to kill people with a Death Note? You're a J-pop band or into hentai? You write fanfic in which Light writes "Eywa" in his note, which causes a planet-wide USB orgy? What the hell, let's hang out. The whole building buzzes with freedom to the point of absurdity. We had to get a special representative to come in and guard us against heresy.

You might be saying to yourself, "Now, Zachary, don't tease us! What were you cosplaying as?" In which case, be aware that only two people call me Zachary. I don't know why either Angus or Malia are reading this blog, but hey guys. I'm onto you. You should also be aware that I was not there to cosplay. (But if I was, I'd be something totally sweet. Rest assured.) Rather, I was there to partake in the fine art of tabletop roleplay, in particular D&D4e. How did that go? It went quite well, as the following picture should make plain:

Eh? Eh? Pretty badass, if I do say so myself. I mean, look at me in the back there, my robes flowing, my staff held high, spending a minor action each round to keep the Stinking Cloud firmly centered on my grey d4...trust me, if you were there, you'd be impressed. Probably have a boner or something. Anyway, I played six rounds of D&D over two days. Another round took place on Sunday but we were too tired to go and we wanted to take pictures of people.

But I know why you're really interested in my con experience. You don't want to hear about anything that requires dice. You want to see pictures confirming what you've always suspected: That Yuna from Final Fantasy X would be extremely cute in real life.

Rawr. Geeky Humanist out.

What The Hell Is This?

Well. See title. I wish I could confidently and explicitly define the purpose of this blog. I also wish there was a more sensible, relevant thing to make a first blog post about, but since I don't actually have any readers yet, it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense for me to be talking to anybody but hypothetical.

So, hypothetical Internet, what the hell is this? Well. It's a blog. That means it's where I vent my personal thoughts on things I'm not actually qualified to speak about. It's also "The Geeky Humanist," which is probably the term I ought to actually be describing. It's quite simple, you see, as it breaks down into two parts.

Geeky -- I'm geeky. I might also be nerdy, but that distinction is made irrelevant the moment you have an opinion on it. I decided geeky sounded better for the title, so...suck it. So, this half of me is the part that makes me read Order of the Stick and understand all of the D&D jokes. It's the part of me that knows the difference between Odo, Quark, and Dax. It's the part of me that sometimes wonders if I could pull off a good Starcraft cosplay. And it's the part of me that pays bills, as I'll be entering college soon studying physics.

Humanist -- Hoooooo boy. Describing myself as a ninth-level-wizard-Trekkie-physicist is much easier than trying to encapsulate what I'm trying to get at with this one. Humanism is basically a religious/moral/philosophical stance. You see, I spend time on the Internet. Like. A lot. And scrolling through Slashdot comments eventually made me realize something: damn, we're a cynical bunch. If you were to perform hideously twisted experiments on humanity and draw forth from our computer networks a gestalt consciousness making up the average, uh, netizen (oh god what word have I just legitimized) he'd tell you that most of humanity were sheep. That they didn't think but that they'd do anything to get ahead and didn't give a shit about anyone but themselves.

Well, alright, fine. You can think what you like about the unwashed masses. I'll be the first to admit they aren't perfect. But what really disturbed me is the casual disregard so many seemed to have for everyone else. Was I expecting too much from a group that self-identifies as antisocial? Yeah. Is it ironic for me to rant about the moral deficiency one group has in holding contempt for another? Oh very much yes.

Basically, at that point I cast my net about for the opposing view, and I found humanism. (Humanism's relationship with atheism and religion will probably be material for a later post.) (This is, uh, supposed to be about the definition of humanism. For those of you confused by the digressions, and also the multiple parenthetical statements.) Basically, humanism is the belief that human life and human rights are the ultimate moral value. Caught up in that is generally a belief about the innate goodness of man, which is probably more material for a later post.

I keep talking about later posts, so let me basically sum up how I see them going. I'm going to try to make at least one every day. I do enough geeky things that I should be able to meet that for a while. Anyway, I plan to classify my posts into one of several categories:

News and Links -- Woah, check this thing out, this is a cool thing that has happened or that I have seen on the Internet, and it is a fascinating thing indeed. Let us discuss it.

Bloggy Blog -- This is what's going on in my life right now. I promise to only do these when they're sufficiently geeky or humanisty. (Note: I do a lot of geeky stuff. It's not much of a promise.)

Pontificate -- Blah blah blah opinion. I can't promise I won't go off on a rant about DRM or gay marriage or whatever. The philosophical, technological, and political are all extremely valid targets.

Lecture -- Because I rather like typing up nonfiction stuff. These are different from Pontifications because I don't intend to advocate an opinion. These posts might be a basic rundown of ethical philosophers, or an explanation of why relativity bans FTL travel, or whatever.

Again, I'm not making promises here. I'm not liable for massive, lifebreaking legal penalties for adding new categories or discontinuing these. I'm also not eligible for murder based on a failure to post, or an insistence on posting too often. I don't know if anyone will actually read this, but I think I'll have fun writing it.