Don't worry I'm not going all Nostradamus on you. Recently I watched the film Transcendence, which has Johnny Depp playing a scientist who effectively gets uploaded to the internet and becomes the first truly artificial intelligence. It wasn't really that good. However, the story and main plot points I found very interesting and incidentally I have recently been considering the very ideas the film touches upon and so I thought I better write them down. You know for posterity or something. Please do read on.
The main point of the story emerges from the question of what exactly makes us human. Biologically our minds are just a series of complicated neural interactions. Our brain is an electrochemical soup and nothing more. What the film asks is, if you entirely copy the structure, interactions and connections of someone's brain, is that copy the same as the original person? Is something intangible, something more than just a chemical reaction, lost in between? Does the copy lack an all-important soul? To see my personal take on the arguments of the existence or not of the soul, you need only scroll down and find the post I have already written about it. I'm not sure exactly where I left it but it's somewhere down there. If you can't find it there, check behind the sofa. (If you can't be bothered to find it, basically, I think the whole idea of "souls" is tosh and yes we very much are just electrochemical soup.)
In the film, when Depp uploads his mind, he becomes incredibly powerful. He has the internet at his complete command, he can manipulate the stock market, he can literally do anything because everything is on the internet. Because the character is a scientist, he wants to expand his research and become as powerful and knowledgeable as possible. With his incredibly advanced intelligence and capabilities, he creates new technologies, develops nanobots that can cure any and every ailment, he can create things from effectively nothing. He becomes like a God (and the film doesn't hesitate to bash you around the head with the similarities between these advanced technologies and the divine).
The one advancement he makes (which got surprisingly little coverage in the film) is that the nanobots that he creates, which can literally cure the blind and heal the lame (*cough cough Jesus cough cough*) also connect the people they heal via wi-fi. This allows them to work both as individuals and as a collective unit all working towards the same goal. This idea of humanity being connected together, their brains literally on the internet, could I believe quite possibly humanity's salvation if it is ever developed and implemented.
The internet has connected people like nothing else in the history of the human race and is the greatest invention quite possibly in all of history. Well, fire and the wheel were big deals as well but the internet is right up there. I can, right now, at this very minute, contact someone thousands of miles away from me in real time. For the vast majority of human history this was an absolute impossibility and your best bet if you wanted to contact someone (in the next village let alone thousands of miles away) was a horse and a bit of paper. If you had paper. Or a horse. The internet has connected us as a species and yet...
Nigeria extremists abduct 91 people.
Gunmen fire on Pakistani flight.
Police seek man over Essex murder.
Ukraine army helicopter shot down.
Belfast killing spree revealed.
Libya in shock after activist's murder.
A handful of headlines from some news websites. How can this be? I can find out information instantaneously about things I don't understand, people I have never met. How can there still be so much violence in the world when knowledge and understanding are so readily available? Well the main reasons, I think, are that man may have this knowledge but whether we choose to access it and process it is entirely down to choice and it's still so much easier to hate, fear and destroy others than it is to empathize with them. But perhaps there is a way to bridge these problems.
Imagine a world where everyone's minds are connected to each other over the internet. You would be able to feel everything everyone else feels, hear the thoughts of everyone else and understand their feelings, motivations, desires, wants and needs. You would work as one piece in a collective whole. It would be absolute empathy. You would literally be stepping into every single living human beings shoes. How could you war with your neighbour if you understand all of their gripes, problems and also their hopes and fears. They would be your gripes, problems, hopes and fears just as much as they are theirs.
I personally believe that if this technology was developed (if it is possible) and implemented, including every human mind on the planet, war would be extinguished overnight forever. The human race would be of one mind. Think of all of human progress from fire to the internet. We have come this far whilst fractured and divided, our shared history marred by violence and hatred. Just imagine what could be achieved with every single person working towards the common goal of the preservation and continuation of the human race. Scientific advancements are accelerating at an unbelievable pace right now, united, humanity would develop technologies that would make the most advanced computers of 2014 look no better than an abacus.
7 billion minds all contributing to one great hive mind.
This idea I have actually kind of stolen...
Joe Halderman's book Forever Peace (sequel to the absolutely fantastic and biting satire of the Vietnam War, The Forever War) essentially has this idea as the major plot point. In the future, wars are fought by robot suits that are controlled hundreds of miles away from the battlefields (Remote controlled death machines? That's just crazy...) by soldiers that are all have their minds connected together. The soldiers experience everything their comrades experience, they share their memories and effectively work as a 7 brained organism (I don't know if Pacific Rim stole this idea but if you have seen that film it works in the same way as "drifting". If you haven't seen it, WATCH IT). It is revealed later in the book that there is actually a design flaw with this hooking up. If the soldiers stay connected for too long, they become super empathetic. They know what it is to be another person and so they become entirely unable to harm another living being. It's impossible for them. Now, soldiers that can't hurt people aren't very useful, so of course the military hush it up but anyway if you want to know what happens read the book.
The point is, I think that this could be a realistic outcome of the connecting together of people's brains. So, do I think that this could be a possibility for humanity's future? Yes. Why? Because it has to be.
Homo sapiens, as a species, could have quite easily come to an end during the Cold War. One cross word and the whole world could have turned into a ball of irradiated dust. As Electric Six sang in their song Dirty Looks, "Every nuclear war begins with two, Dirty looks". We are currently facing climate change which may well prove our undoing but if every mind was connected together...
No war.
7 billion minds working towards a common goal.
Infighting and partisanship a thing of the past.
I can't help but feel that we won't last long without this. Currently, we've been lucky, almost unbelievably so considering the near misses our species has had, but our luck may not last forever. If we are to survive into the future, the pooling of resources and ideas is essential but may never be achieved if we continue to be divided by borders, our differences, our cultures, our religions even the few centimeters of skin, bone and blood that separate our brains.
So when do I think this will happen? I have no idea. Possibly thousands of years. Quite possibly tens of thousands. Technology is moving, as I previously mentioned, at a simply phenomenal rate so perhaps it's closer than tens of thousands but it's still way, way off. I do hope I'm wrong and this technology is just around the corner but I somehow doubt it is. I also hope humans last long enough for this technology to become a reality. If they do, I can't even begin to imagine the wonders that this technology will give rise to. Our present would seem to our future descendants to be as barbarous, violent and backwards as parts of our not-so-distant past seem to us.
So if I don't think this will happen until years after my body has been reduced to dust and scattered across the Earth, what's the point in talking about it now? Well if you don't understand why I'm asking a philosophical question that currently has no impact on the world, you don't understand philosophy and you need to read my very first post on this page (Yeah that's right this whole post is actually just a big advert for all my previous posts. It's my blog and I do what I like with it!) but also you're wrong, asking this question can affect the here and now. Stopping to consider the potential, wide ranging effects of "super empathy" should (I hope) inspire you to try your best at every opportunity to empathize with your fellow human beings. We can't see into other people's minds but we can use our reasoning, intelligence, imagination and our imperfect existing empathy to try to understand. It's easy to categorize people as good and bad (For my analysis of why doing this is bad see... ah screw it you probably already read it anyway...) but no-one ever does something randomly. We all have our influences and reasons for our actions and the sooner we recognize that, the closer we get to a peaceful world where we work together to defeat our problems, problems that are universal. Next time you disagree with someone put yourself in their shoes. It's stuff we were told in school but it's something a lot of people forget. I know I forget it at times.
Christ, I sound like a right hippy don't I...
Friday, 27 June 2014
Sunday, 15 June 2014
Is Less More?
A little behind-the-scenes peek at how I write these here posts here. I think of something then spend a few days thinking about it, then I write it down, usually in one fell swoop, late into the night. I then, in the morning, look with horror at the jumbled mess of letters and punctuation marks that last night I believed were coherent sentences, rewrite it and then post it. Well this time... It's going to be pretty similar except without the days of thinking about the subject. Yes that's right this is going to have even less thought put into it than usual. I'm sure it will be fine. I came up with the idea for this post around 10 minutes ago in the shower. My hair is still damp. So on with the show!
I just realized I have secretly been a minimalist for quite a while. Its been so secret I didn't even realize myself. Until now!
I believe the artist Ad Reinhardt (who I literally just found out about. I am making this up on the fly) said it best when he said of art:
The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature.
This quote, quite nicely, sums up my rather newly apparent preference. I do like minimalism. I do think that less can be more. For me the most impressive art or music is the one that can do the most with the least, the fewer the number of words, the fewer colours. As is customary for this blog, I shall now poorly quote someone I can't remember the name of. A famous rock musician (I think) said (perhaps) that he thought it was a greater achievement to write a rock song with 4 chords on a guitar than it was for Beethoven to write a symphony with the many thousands of tones and sounds at his disposal and really I agree. Perhaps that is why my favourite band is Melvins. They don't always play around with complicated guitar solos or other "add ons" (although they can and have), they just play good solid music. One of my personal favourites is their song Night Goat (I have lovingly provided a link that I'm sure no-one will want to click):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwSOrd4E7yw
Look me in the eye and say that that opening bass line didn't send a chill up your spine. That bass line is a constant, like a drum beat on a distant hill. I love Night Goat. Another, more recently discovered, band that I think also have appealed to my love of simplicity is Evil Blizzard. Really it's ironic because they have 4 bassists. Their song Slimy Creatures I think could be said to have minimalist elements considering the full lyrics are "Slimy creatures / Ugly features" and the music itself doesn't deviate much throughout the song. Some might say this is a bad thing but to me it comes across as relentless (which is good). It's like a train being driven through your ear. That bass guitar (well all 4 of them) just keeps pounding along :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4OscceBWe0
Now of course I am aware that they are not strictly minimalist and actually are made up of more than one noise but it shows you don't need a million chord changes or a hundred different versions of the chorus to make a good song. The repetitive nature of both of these songs really appeals to me. I have no idea why. Maybe I'm a simpleton. But then again minimalism, as an idea, has been around a long time and there are interpretations of it in essentially every art style from music to literature to video games (Minecraft anyone?). So I am not alone in enjoying "pared-down design elements". But why did I have this sudden realization in the shower? Why have I, the least artistic person in the world, been thinking about minimalist art style? Well, recently, I went and tried to do some art...
Well when I say art...
When I say try...
I kind of became a bit obsessed by a certain blog called Propnomicon. Now, if you are a fan of the writing of H.P Lovecraft, you should also find this site pretty fascinating but you don't need to be a Lovecraft fanboy to think this stuff is legitimately awesome. Essentially it's what you get when you mix a load of artists, sculptors, prop makers and people with time on their hands and an extensive mythos based around eldritch horrors, unearthly beings and alien gods. And it's awesome. Seriously just look at some of the stuff people have made. I can and have spent hours looking at this stuff:
http://propnomicon.blogspot.fi/
Now my personal favourite objects exhibited on this website are the Cthulhu idols. Now if you don't know who Cthulhu is you need to:
1. Read The Call of Cthulhu by H.P Lovecraft.
2. Try to stop weeping in fear.
In the story, a statue of the octopus-headed, dragon-bodied being from beyond the stars, who lies dead in his house at R'yleh, is recovered from a cult gathering in the swamps of New Orleans and it's description and importance in the story, has captured the imaginations of many and so people have created their own versions of this disturbing sculpture, carved millennia ago, on some dark star.
(Just as an aside: This story and character are famous enough for Cthulhu not to be flagged as a spelling mistake but "favourite" and "colour" are. Americans...)
And by God, are these statues good. Browse through them and see the sheer love and craftsmanship put into these images. They are astounding. They are... inspiring....
Yeah, I had a go at making my own. Now my personal favourites of the statues shown are those that embrace a simple design (Surprise!). There are plenty that have exquisitely carved scales, tentacles that curl around, dripping slime, monstrous claws and look so incredibly life like that you almost recoil from them, but the ones that really hit home for me are the ones that are simplicity itself. They look like some ancient stone age man carved them with primitive tools in a dark cave, visions of the great beast torturing their mind. They are just a few lines and yet they are weighed down by the lore that surrounds this creature that is instantly recognizable. Stuff like this:
http://propnomicon.blogspot.fi/2013/10/cthulhu-fhtagn-gormly-edition.html
And especially this one (which incidentally was created by a Finnish artist!):
http://propnomicon.blogspot.fi/2013/06/cthulhu-fhtagn-jarvinen-edition.html
They are rough and worn and aged but essentially just clean lines and shapes and somehow all the better for it. They could be polished and detailed, every inch worked over, but the very fact they are simple adds volumes. It adds some mystery, which if you know Lovecraft, is the whole point of his stories. The terror of the unknown, the indefinable.
So I had a go at my own versions and they turned out pretty darn well if I say so myself. I currently have made 2 and a half wooden ones (the half didn't go so well and then went terribly when I managed to slash my finger open with the penknife I was using. Good thing that scars look cool) and one out of a cork. They all consist of 6 holes (the eyes) and some straight lines and that's it (except the half which was more complicated... and caused me to cut my finger. Minimalism is best). Anyone familiar with Cthulhu would (I hope) very easily see the resemblance and I achieved it with almost nothing. I think that's awesome.
(This is where I would add photos of my creations but I have no idea how to add photos to this blog and I feel it will be more effort than it's worth so sorry.)
But anyway enough backslapping of my own creative talent (they are so simple, I really did very little), this is what got me thinking about minimalism and for me it really is true that less is more. To strike fear and dread into people's hearts is easy with a ton of money, years of experience in the prop making world and professional materials but to do it in a simplified, stripped down form can be just as effective. Think about the current trend for über cheap, found footage films, but it's true for all the arts. I'm currently reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy which is also very minimalist and uses very few words to convey a lot of emotion about a man and his son (both of them never named) traveling through post-apocalyptic America and trying not to get eaten by cannibals.
The main point of this blog post (and all of those links I've put up for you) is that the flashiest, most over-the-top, the MOST isn't always the best or the most effective. Just a few lines in the right places can suggest otherworldly beings and conjure up a whole store of imagery.
You also don't need talent to do art stuff.
But you should be careful and wear gloves when working with knives.
I lied. Scars aren't cool.
I just realized I have secretly been a minimalist for quite a while. Its been so secret I didn't even realize myself. Until now!
I believe the artist Ad Reinhardt (who I literally just found out about. I am making this up on the fly) said it best when he said of art:
The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature.
This quote, quite nicely, sums up my rather newly apparent preference. I do like minimalism. I do think that less can be more. For me the most impressive art or music is the one that can do the most with the least, the fewer the number of words, the fewer colours. As is customary for this blog, I shall now poorly quote someone I can't remember the name of. A famous rock musician (I think) said (perhaps) that he thought it was a greater achievement to write a rock song with 4 chords on a guitar than it was for Beethoven to write a symphony with the many thousands of tones and sounds at his disposal and really I agree. Perhaps that is why my favourite band is Melvins. They don't always play around with complicated guitar solos or other "add ons" (although they can and have), they just play good solid music. One of my personal favourites is their song Night Goat (I have lovingly provided a link that I'm sure no-one will want to click):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwSOrd4E7yw
Look me in the eye and say that that opening bass line didn't send a chill up your spine. That bass line is a constant, like a drum beat on a distant hill. I love Night Goat. Another, more recently discovered, band that I think also have appealed to my love of simplicity is Evil Blizzard. Really it's ironic because they have 4 bassists. Their song Slimy Creatures I think could be said to have minimalist elements considering the full lyrics are "Slimy creatures / Ugly features" and the music itself doesn't deviate much throughout the song. Some might say this is a bad thing but to me it comes across as relentless (which is good). It's like a train being driven through your ear. That bass guitar (well all 4 of them) just keeps pounding along :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4OscceBWe0
Now of course I am aware that they are not strictly minimalist and actually are made up of more than one noise but it shows you don't need a million chord changes or a hundred different versions of the chorus to make a good song. The repetitive nature of both of these songs really appeals to me. I have no idea why. Maybe I'm a simpleton. But then again minimalism, as an idea, has been around a long time and there are interpretations of it in essentially every art style from music to literature to video games (Minecraft anyone?). So I am not alone in enjoying "pared-down design elements". But why did I have this sudden realization in the shower? Why have I, the least artistic person in the world, been thinking about minimalist art style? Well, recently, I went and tried to do some art...
Well when I say art...
When I say try...
I kind of became a bit obsessed by a certain blog called Propnomicon. Now, if you are a fan of the writing of H.P Lovecraft, you should also find this site pretty fascinating but you don't need to be a Lovecraft fanboy to think this stuff is legitimately awesome. Essentially it's what you get when you mix a load of artists, sculptors, prop makers and people with time on their hands and an extensive mythos based around eldritch horrors, unearthly beings and alien gods. And it's awesome. Seriously just look at some of the stuff people have made. I can and have spent hours looking at this stuff:
http://propnomicon.blogspot.fi/
Now my personal favourite objects exhibited on this website are the Cthulhu idols. Now if you don't know who Cthulhu is you need to:
1. Read The Call of Cthulhu by H.P Lovecraft.
2. Try to stop weeping in fear.
In the story, a statue of the octopus-headed, dragon-bodied being from beyond the stars, who lies dead in his house at R'yleh, is recovered from a cult gathering in the swamps of New Orleans and it's description and importance in the story, has captured the imaginations of many and so people have created their own versions of this disturbing sculpture, carved millennia ago, on some dark star.
(Just as an aside: This story and character are famous enough for Cthulhu not to be flagged as a spelling mistake but "favourite" and "colour" are. Americans...)
And by God, are these statues good. Browse through them and see the sheer love and craftsmanship put into these images. They are astounding. They are... inspiring....
Yeah, I had a go at making my own. Now my personal favourites of the statues shown are those that embrace a simple design (Surprise!). There are plenty that have exquisitely carved scales, tentacles that curl around, dripping slime, monstrous claws and look so incredibly life like that you almost recoil from them, but the ones that really hit home for me are the ones that are simplicity itself. They look like some ancient stone age man carved them with primitive tools in a dark cave, visions of the great beast torturing their mind. They are just a few lines and yet they are weighed down by the lore that surrounds this creature that is instantly recognizable. Stuff like this:
http://propnomicon.blogspot.fi/2013/10/cthulhu-fhtagn-gormly-edition.html
And especially this one (which incidentally was created by a Finnish artist!):
http://propnomicon.blogspot.fi/2013/06/cthulhu-fhtagn-jarvinen-edition.html
They are rough and worn and aged but essentially just clean lines and shapes and somehow all the better for it. They could be polished and detailed, every inch worked over, but the very fact they are simple adds volumes. It adds some mystery, which if you know Lovecraft, is the whole point of his stories. The terror of the unknown, the indefinable.
So I had a go at my own versions and they turned out pretty darn well if I say so myself. I currently have made 2 and a half wooden ones (the half didn't go so well and then went terribly when I managed to slash my finger open with the penknife I was using. Good thing that scars look cool) and one out of a cork. They all consist of 6 holes (the eyes) and some straight lines and that's it (except the half which was more complicated... and caused me to cut my finger. Minimalism is best). Anyone familiar with Cthulhu would (I hope) very easily see the resemblance and I achieved it with almost nothing. I think that's awesome.
(This is where I would add photos of my creations but I have no idea how to add photos to this blog and I feel it will be more effort than it's worth so sorry.)
But anyway enough backslapping of my own creative talent (they are so simple, I really did very little), this is what got me thinking about minimalism and for me it really is true that less is more. To strike fear and dread into people's hearts is easy with a ton of money, years of experience in the prop making world and professional materials but to do it in a simplified, stripped down form can be just as effective. Think about the current trend for über cheap, found footage films, but it's true for all the arts. I'm currently reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy which is also very minimalist and uses very few words to convey a lot of emotion about a man and his son (both of them never named) traveling through post-apocalyptic America and trying not to get eaten by cannibals.
The main point of this blog post (and all of those links I've put up for you) is that the flashiest, most over-the-top, the MOST isn't always the best or the most effective. Just a few lines in the right places can suggest otherworldly beings and conjure up a whole store of imagery.
You also don't need talent to do art stuff.
But you should be careful and wear gloves when working with knives.
I lied. Scars aren't cool.
Saturday, 31 May 2014
Shhhh!
I have started an experiment. I recently have had moments where everything has just seemed too loud. Have you ever had these moments, dear reader? Just when you become really aware of all the noise around you. It doesn't even need to be loud noise but just SOME noise. The ticking of a clock, air conditioning, the wind, cars in the street outside, the hum of the TV. So much noise! It's constant. It's kind of a cliche but with our "busy" lives these days (I am surely not busy enough right now to justify me saying that but whatever) it's actually very hard to find silence. Some people might suggest going out into nature, which for me is actually very easy. There is literally a forest over the road. In Helsinki. I love Finland. But for me that's no good. There is still noise, especially with it being spring. Every bird and insect is screaming it's lungs out in a desperate bid to pass on it's genetic material. I don't want relaxing bird calls, I want silence.
So, as I said, I have started an experiment. It is HIGHLY unscientific and really has nothing at all to do with science. What I have done is to purchase a pair of ear defenders like what builders have. It is my intention to, in the next week, use them every now and then, I'll be going for at least once a day for... a period of time. Now whether this will actually achieve anything at all, whether I'll come out of this with the patience and temperament of a Buddhist monk, have auditory hallucinations or just simply get bored of it, I don't know but it might make a good blog post so let's do it. I'll speak to you again in a week, though of course the time elapsed for you will be the time it takes to scroll down. It's like time travel or something...
...
WELL... it's actually been 2 weeks... and 4 days. I didn't feel one week was sufficient time and I may have forgotten to write this but now is a perfectly good time to put down some stuff for your enjoyment and to ensure that I can still write long pieces of text and order them in such a way that they are legible and perhaps (if the planets are properly aligned) enjoyable. So anyway:
I did not, unfortunately, get the chance to use the ear defenders everyday which was my intention; it's surprisingly difficult to find time to lie down and not hear anything. However I have, I believe, used them now on enough occasions to talk about it. Which is nice.
There are (at least for me) a number of stages that you go through when you opt for silence, firstly everything goes quiet (Wow! Revolutionary!), then as your ears adjust something a bit weird happens and you hear your own heartbeat. Now I'm still not sure if the vibrations are coming from my heart or my arteries, if what I'm hearing is what I would hear in complete silence or if I'm only hearing it due to the pressure of the earphones on my ears. Does this matter? No. What I'm saying is that you hear your own blood. Which is nice. Second stage you seem to start filtering out the blood sound and then you hear the sound of all of the collective damage that you've inflicted upon your ears. The whine of every concert, every building site, every time you've played music too loud through your headphones on the bus, comes back to haunt you like a sonic ghost (great name for a band by the way Sonic Ghost...) which makes you feel very guilty. Soon this gets filtered out as well by your brain and what you are left with is... weird. It's not silence exactly it's just... nothing. But also not nothing. Have you ever been in a really quiet place and it feels like you kind of have to make a noise just to stop your head feeling all weird from all the silence? Well that's what it's like.
Now at this point you are probably thinking I've just described a hellish, nightmarish scenario and you are, as you read this, humming loudly and turning the radio up, but please understand although all these things are weird they are also so refreshing. It's really strange just how much background noise there is in a silent room. It's really quite deafening and such a relief to get away from it for a little while.
Now one thing that I'm sure you all already know about, if you actually read my posts, is that I like thinking. Can't get enough of it actually. Leave me in an empty room long enough and I'll be having an internal debate with myself within the hour. Now thinking is bloody hard if there is even the slightest distraction for me. I have been cursed with a desire to always be considering life, death the universe and everything but with an attention and concentration span about as long as... Hey look a pretty butterfly!
So how has complete silence helped in this regard? Well it actually makes it worse. At first. It's very hard to think when you can hear your own blood supply wooshing around and the background hum of your auditory sins is incredibly distracting but once past these first hurdles, into the realm of weird silence, then your mind feels weirdly open. My imagination felt a lot free-er without any sound to break my concentration. I've never had a lucid dream (I really want to lucid dream but it still hasn't happened. Some day...) but I would imagine that this came fairly close to it.
I was once taught by my psychology teacher at college a relaxation technique that I have never forgotten and I can tell you it has safely carried me to the Land of Nod on many a sleepless night and combined with this weird silence it was like relaxation on maximum setting and brought on my almost lucid dream-like feeling. The technique on it's own is incredibly effective (at least for me) and when my psychology teacher demonstrated it to the class I almost fell asleep at my desk. It's based around the idea of... well lets say it takes up all the bandwidth of your mind and prevents you from being able to worry or think about things that make you tensed up or stressed.
I wasn't planning on giving out this secret in this post (I was going to save it for a different post) but screw it, I might as well do it now:
First get into a comfortable position (lying down is probably best) and concentrate on your breathing. Slow and calm is the way to go.
Next imagine a red number 7 right in front of you. I usually imagine it on a whiteboard being drawn or painted onto a wall. Focus on the colour and shape of the 7 and nothing else. Fix it in your mind's eye.
Once you have it clear in front of you (It may take a few minutes. Be patient, no need to rush) watch as the red 7 fades away and is replaced with an orange 6. Again focus on the colour and the shape.
Once the orange 6 is clear in front of you watch it fade and be replaced with a yellow 5. Again same drill. Fix it, then fade it.
Next number is a green 4.
Then a blue 3.
After that a purple 2.
Last number is a white 1.
The 1 then turns into a light which moves around in front of you. You follow it and it leads you up 3 steps which you count as you step up them. 1, 2, 3. In front of you is a door. On the other side of the door is a place where you feel safe, secure, relaxed and free to do what you want. It can be a real or imagined place as long as it's relaxed and keeps you calm.
And that's it. Spend as long as you like in your new imagined calm place and forget all your troubles. If you want to come out of the calm place just retrace your steps back through the door, down the steps and count back through the numbers. I know it all sounds like hippy dippy crap but trust me it's so refreshing. Focussing on the colour and shape of the number takes up all the processing power of your mind and, if you are concentrating properly, it's very hard to think of other things because there is simply no room. Now this is most effective if you have someone else read out the steps to you as this then takes up the auditory part of your brain's processing power as well as the visual part. Of course if this isn't possible you could always go for complete silence...
Which is what I tried and I must say it works very well IF you choose the right moment to start at. Start too soon while you can still hear blood swooshing around in side of you and it's quite hard to concentrate but once you reach that point where the silence is just right your mind just get's carried away. Pretty soon I was walking around imaginary islands and seeing entirely make-believe vistas and quickly falling asleep incredibly peacefully.
So, just a relaxation technique and a bit of peace and I was exploring mental landscapes far removed from reality. What I found really strange was even without lying down and thinking about colourful numbers, just experiencing a much quieter world, I started feeling quite separate from what was going on around me.
It's really quite strange how detached you can feel from other people that may be sitting right next to you just by blocking out the sounds they are making. You have only your eyesight to confirm that they are there and it's suddenly very clear how even the sound of moving clothing or the other person's breathing or the other minute sounds they make, inform you, consciously or unconsciously, that you are not alone (I know you are thinking about farts. Well stop it. It's just childish. I'm trying to build up to a serious point here). Within only a few minutes of putting on the ear defenders, I start feeling a bit dissociated from everything around me. It starts off subtly but pretty soon you are wondering if you are doing that thing people do when they listen to music really loud through their headphones and just lose all sense of how loud they are. I swear one time during the last 2 weeks (I can't remember when. So scientific!) I started typing on the computer louder than usual. I only noticed when I saw how excessively hard I was tapping the keys. The sound of the keys had, it seemed, been helping to control how my fingers were moving. That's pretty cool. But then again also terrifying. What if I damaged my hearing? How long would it take for me to adjust? How would I cope? What impact would it have on my life? Would I become completely dissociated from reality unable to really connect with what is going on around me?
Now of course I am entirely aware that there are people in the world either born deaf or with some form of hearing difficulty or they have, later in their life, acquired damage to their hearing and they live perfectly happy and fulfilled lives. I have no idea what it would be like to have any of these conditions and I would have to be pretty ignorant to think I could get any inkling of what it would be like to live with them on a day-to-day basis from putting on some headphones a few times a week. It comes purely from myself and my own personal experiences when I say that it's kind of scary how dependent I am on my hearing, how easy it is to damage it and how terrifying it would be for me to lose my hearing. I, like pretty much everyone, like to think I can cope with bad things happening in my life. If I lost a leg in a car accident, I would find a way to cope. If I was paralyzed, I would work around it. Nothing is going to hold me back from my dreams! But how sure can I be? Would I really be able to cope with such a massive life change? Even the slightest hint of reduced hearing capability has got me losing touch with reality, what would permanent loss do?
This is all speculation and until (well hopefully I never will) experience it I will never know how I will react. It's not just hearing but all possible bad things. Who knows how you will cope with something or if you will cope at all. All I know is that I don't really want to find out how I would cope with it because that would mean experiencing it and so I have a new found respect for my hearing and have already taken steps to preserve it, my MP3 player is now at volume levels that my past self would be scoffing at but I have learnt a valuable lesson I won't soon forget.
Too Long/Didn't Read (TL/DR): Silence is golden but don't take your hearing for granted.
So, as I said, I have started an experiment. It is HIGHLY unscientific and really has nothing at all to do with science. What I have done is to purchase a pair of ear defenders like what builders have. It is my intention to, in the next week, use them every now and then, I'll be going for at least once a day for... a period of time. Now whether this will actually achieve anything at all, whether I'll come out of this with the patience and temperament of a Buddhist monk, have auditory hallucinations or just simply get bored of it, I don't know but it might make a good blog post so let's do it. I'll speak to you again in a week, though of course the time elapsed for you will be the time it takes to scroll down. It's like time travel or something...
...
WELL... it's actually been 2 weeks... and 4 days. I didn't feel one week was sufficient time and I may have forgotten to write this but now is a perfectly good time to put down some stuff for your enjoyment and to ensure that I can still write long pieces of text and order them in such a way that they are legible and perhaps (if the planets are properly aligned) enjoyable. So anyway:
I did not, unfortunately, get the chance to use the ear defenders everyday which was my intention; it's surprisingly difficult to find time to lie down and not hear anything. However I have, I believe, used them now on enough occasions to talk about it. Which is nice.
There are (at least for me) a number of stages that you go through when you opt for silence, firstly everything goes quiet (Wow! Revolutionary!), then as your ears adjust something a bit weird happens and you hear your own heartbeat. Now I'm still not sure if the vibrations are coming from my heart or my arteries, if what I'm hearing is what I would hear in complete silence or if I'm only hearing it due to the pressure of the earphones on my ears. Does this matter? No. What I'm saying is that you hear your own blood. Which is nice. Second stage you seem to start filtering out the blood sound and then you hear the sound of all of the collective damage that you've inflicted upon your ears. The whine of every concert, every building site, every time you've played music too loud through your headphones on the bus, comes back to haunt you like a sonic ghost (great name for a band by the way Sonic Ghost...) which makes you feel very guilty. Soon this gets filtered out as well by your brain and what you are left with is... weird. It's not silence exactly it's just... nothing. But also not nothing. Have you ever been in a really quiet place and it feels like you kind of have to make a noise just to stop your head feeling all weird from all the silence? Well that's what it's like.
Now at this point you are probably thinking I've just described a hellish, nightmarish scenario and you are, as you read this, humming loudly and turning the radio up, but please understand although all these things are weird they are also so refreshing. It's really strange just how much background noise there is in a silent room. It's really quite deafening and such a relief to get away from it for a little while.
Now one thing that I'm sure you all already know about, if you actually read my posts, is that I like thinking. Can't get enough of it actually. Leave me in an empty room long enough and I'll be having an internal debate with myself within the hour. Now thinking is bloody hard if there is even the slightest distraction for me. I have been cursed with a desire to always be considering life, death the universe and everything but with an attention and concentration span about as long as... Hey look a pretty butterfly!
So how has complete silence helped in this regard? Well it actually makes it worse. At first. It's very hard to think when you can hear your own blood supply wooshing around and the background hum of your auditory sins is incredibly distracting but once past these first hurdles, into the realm of weird silence, then your mind feels weirdly open. My imagination felt a lot free-er without any sound to break my concentration. I've never had a lucid dream (I really want to lucid dream but it still hasn't happened. Some day...) but I would imagine that this came fairly close to it.
I was once taught by my psychology teacher at college a relaxation technique that I have never forgotten and I can tell you it has safely carried me to the Land of Nod on many a sleepless night and combined with this weird silence it was like relaxation on maximum setting and brought on my almost lucid dream-like feeling. The technique on it's own is incredibly effective (at least for me) and when my psychology teacher demonstrated it to the class I almost fell asleep at my desk. It's based around the idea of... well lets say it takes up all the bandwidth of your mind and prevents you from being able to worry or think about things that make you tensed up or stressed.
I wasn't planning on giving out this secret in this post (I was going to save it for a different post) but screw it, I might as well do it now:
First get into a comfortable position (lying down is probably best) and concentrate on your breathing. Slow and calm is the way to go.
Next imagine a red number 7 right in front of you. I usually imagine it on a whiteboard being drawn or painted onto a wall. Focus on the colour and shape of the 7 and nothing else. Fix it in your mind's eye.
Once you have it clear in front of you (It may take a few minutes. Be patient, no need to rush) watch as the red 7 fades away and is replaced with an orange 6. Again focus on the colour and the shape.
Once the orange 6 is clear in front of you watch it fade and be replaced with a yellow 5. Again same drill. Fix it, then fade it.
Next number is a green 4.
Then a blue 3.
After that a purple 2.
Last number is a white 1.
The 1 then turns into a light which moves around in front of you. You follow it and it leads you up 3 steps which you count as you step up them. 1, 2, 3. In front of you is a door. On the other side of the door is a place where you feel safe, secure, relaxed and free to do what you want. It can be a real or imagined place as long as it's relaxed and keeps you calm.
And that's it. Spend as long as you like in your new imagined calm place and forget all your troubles. If you want to come out of the calm place just retrace your steps back through the door, down the steps and count back through the numbers. I know it all sounds like hippy dippy crap but trust me it's so refreshing. Focussing on the colour and shape of the number takes up all the processing power of your mind and, if you are concentrating properly, it's very hard to think of other things because there is simply no room. Now this is most effective if you have someone else read out the steps to you as this then takes up the auditory part of your brain's processing power as well as the visual part. Of course if this isn't possible you could always go for complete silence...
Which is what I tried and I must say it works very well IF you choose the right moment to start at. Start too soon while you can still hear blood swooshing around in side of you and it's quite hard to concentrate but once you reach that point where the silence is just right your mind just get's carried away. Pretty soon I was walking around imaginary islands and seeing entirely make-believe vistas and quickly falling asleep incredibly peacefully.
So, just a relaxation technique and a bit of peace and I was exploring mental landscapes far removed from reality. What I found really strange was even without lying down and thinking about colourful numbers, just experiencing a much quieter world, I started feeling quite separate from what was going on around me.
It's really quite strange how detached you can feel from other people that may be sitting right next to you just by blocking out the sounds they are making. You have only your eyesight to confirm that they are there and it's suddenly very clear how even the sound of moving clothing or the other person's breathing or the other minute sounds they make, inform you, consciously or unconsciously, that you are not alone (I know you are thinking about farts. Well stop it. It's just childish. I'm trying to build up to a serious point here). Within only a few minutes of putting on the ear defenders, I start feeling a bit dissociated from everything around me. It starts off subtly but pretty soon you are wondering if you are doing that thing people do when they listen to music really loud through their headphones and just lose all sense of how loud they are. I swear one time during the last 2 weeks (I can't remember when. So scientific!) I started typing on the computer louder than usual. I only noticed when I saw how excessively hard I was tapping the keys. The sound of the keys had, it seemed, been helping to control how my fingers were moving. That's pretty cool. But then again also terrifying. What if I damaged my hearing? How long would it take for me to adjust? How would I cope? What impact would it have on my life? Would I become completely dissociated from reality unable to really connect with what is going on around me?
Now of course I am entirely aware that there are people in the world either born deaf or with some form of hearing difficulty or they have, later in their life, acquired damage to their hearing and they live perfectly happy and fulfilled lives. I have no idea what it would be like to have any of these conditions and I would have to be pretty ignorant to think I could get any inkling of what it would be like to live with them on a day-to-day basis from putting on some headphones a few times a week. It comes purely from myself and my own personal experiences when I say that it's kind of scary how dependent I am on my hearing, how easy it is to damage it and how terrifying it would be for me to lose my hearing. I, like pretty much everyone, like to think I can cope with bad things happening in my life. If I lost a leg in a car accident, I would find a way to cope. If I was paralyzed, I would work around it. Nothing is going to hold me back from my dreams! But how sure can I be? Would I really be able to cope with such a massive life change? Even the slightest hint of reduced hearing capability has got me losing touch with reality, what would permanent loss do?
This is all speculation and until (well hopefully I never will) experience it I will never know how I will react. It's not just hearing but all possible bad things. Who knows how you will cope with something or if you will cope at all. All I know is that I don't really want to find out how I would cope with it because that would mean experiencing it and so I have a new found respect for my hearing and have already taken steps to preserve it, my MP3 player is now at volume levels that my past self would be scoffing at but I have learnt a valuable lesson I won't soon forget.
Too Long/Didn't Read (TL/DR): Silence is golden but don't take your hearing for granted.
Friday, 25 April 2014
Permanence
What do people like to cling to in life more than anything? Well it's kind of up for debate but I would like to put forward my view that it is permanence. When it comes down to it, people don't like change. Here's why, why they are wrong and what you can do to stop your life from slowly descending into a routine that kills you just a little bit more inside everyday. Enjoy!
When I say permanence I mean a very specific thing. I think of it as the opposite of change, the continuation of how a state of being or an object is with no deviation from a set point. Humans it seems love things as they are. Of course there are revolutions and advancements but really on the whole people don't like things to be different from how they have always known them. It's taken years for people to win the right to marry whomever they like regardless of gender (in some places it's been won), it took years of protests, placard waving and the First World War to get women the vote, the Catholic Church still believes... well everything that the Catholic Church believes. Only a very few people like and want to upset the applecart. Most people are happy to plod along with their career, their life whether they take pleasure in it or not.
Well actually when I say that people are always bitching and complaining about their lot in life and how miserable they are but how many people actually go out and DO something to change things?
This aversion to changing "the natural order" of things stems (doesn't everything?) from our evolutionary past. Permanence can be good for a species. If a habitat stays effectively the same for thousands and thousands of years then the species can adapt to it's niche perfectly. A sudden change could wipe them out entirely within a few generations (Think of the dodo. Discovered: 1598. Last sighted: 1662. Less than a hundred years.), permanence can be a good thing. Humans have evolved to look for permanence, if not complete permanence then at least predictable changes. Which valley is it better to live in the one that has predictable weather and predictable floods every year or the one with erratic weather patterns that could flood at any time? I know which one I would pick. We have survived as a species because we are good at exploiting permanence and if it doesn't exist then we create it. Unpredictable rains ruining your crops? Irrigation saves the day! Differing temperatures throughout the year? Different clothes to help maintain just the right temperature year round!
Now some of you may be saying "Well yes if everything is going great people aren't going to change things but you just gave examples of people changing things from a bad situation to a good one! Humans love change!" Well yes and no. People have gone against the grain to try and make things better for themselves and others of course but not everyone and not all the time. People will endure a lot before they finally snap and change things and others will perhaps do nothing. Think of all the loveless marriages out there, the ones where people will wait until their 40's or 50's to finally tell their spouse they never really loved them and still others where they never tell them. Change is scary and unpredictable. There is a saying (I can't remember who said it or if it even has a recognised author) and it went something like "A known evil is better than an unknown evil" or something to that effect (Stick around for more half-remembered sayings from unknown authors poorly retold by me in blog form!). The point of the saying is is that with a repetitively bad situation at least it's repetitive. You can become hardened to it, it can almost become comforting just because you know it unlike that vague, shadowy thing off in the distance: the Unknown.
So that's a vague idea as to why people fear change but why is that a bad thing? Well it's bad because change is inevitable. Our universe is based on a system of ever transforming energy. Things grow and develop and then die and rot and are transformed into something entirely different and that's not even going into entropy which I won't get into now. It's the 21st century and you all have Google on your Smart Phone I-Blackberry Touches so go read about it yourself.
Things are destined to change and people need to accept it. One good reason for this is for adaptation. Lets return to our delicious, extinct, flightless friends the dodos. Why did they survive less than a hundred years after humans discovered them? Because they weren't prepared for us in the slightest. Not only were dodos delicious they also had absolutely no fear of humans. There were reports of them wandering up to hungry sailors just because they were curious and then their friends barely reacted as they got brained with a log simply because they didn't understand what was going on. Humans also introduced animals such as pigs and rats which competed with them for food and ate their eggs which conveniently were left in nests on the ground for easy access. They had affectively no natural predators on Mauritius and so they had lost their flight, their fear and their ability to withstand such a sudden wave of enemies.
And that brings me back to my point. We must accept change and prepare for it because if we are prepared we may be able to survive it. It's what has kept us going so far. Our adaptability is what has kept us alive and consigned the dodo to the fossil record.
So we should keep ourselves prepared for change but how exactly do you do that? Is there a special stretch routine or a vitamin pill that will do the trick? Unfortunately no it's something much more painful than that. You have to change things. Mix things up a bit. Rock the boat. Now when I say change things you don't need to do anything mad like shave "Punk" into your hair, change your name to Quark and move to the Pitcairn Islands
(Really interesting place actually. The least populated country in the world. It also has the highest number of sex offenders of any country and I can tell you it's pretty horrible reading about it. Maybe
don't go to Pitcairn...)
or something really crazy like move to Finland to be with your girlfriend, attempt to learn the language and apply to polytechnics to study for a Nursing degree (...), small changes are fine. Do you always eat the same cereal every morning? Try a different one! Do you always go to the same restaurants or bars when you go out? Go somewhere you haven't been before! Always wear the same old clothes? Wear something completely different to what you usually wear. Mix things up.
Little changes like this prevent stagnation. Think about your life. Are you predictable? Could you do things a different way? Do you wash the dishes in the same way every day? Do you have deeply entrenched routines that you just follow without thinking? Break them. What's the worst that could happen? There could be so many hidden benefits. What if you are missing out? If nothing else it will make you think and maybe see things in a new light, a different way. Prepare your self for change by facing the unknown. Take a little step off of the rails and see what happens. Why not?
I mentioned before those people from history that weren't content with their lot. They didn't want to just rely on the rains they wanted to water their crops now! These people are the people that first used fire, that first tamed animals, that invented the wheel. These people invented rockets that could take people into space. They brought down governments and tyrants, they overthrew kingdoms and fought for equality. Those people that stepped outside the boundaries, maybe just a little bit, are the people that have transformed and guided and CHANGED humanity. Change is good. Accept change. Don't just accept your lot like the dodo. Grow, expand, change.
When I say permanence I mean a very specific thing. I think of it as the opposite of change, the continuation of how a state of being or an object is with no deviation from a set point. Humans it seems love things as they are. Of course there are revolutions and advancements but really on the whole people don't like things to be different from how they have always known them. It's taken years for people to win the right to marry whomever they like regardless of gender (in some places it's been won), it took years of protests, placard waving and the First World War to get women the vote, the Catholic Church still believes... well everything that the Catholic Church believes. Only a very few people like and want to upset the applecart. Most people are happy to plod along with their career, their life whether they take pleasure in it or not.
Well actually when I say that people are always bitching and complaining about their lot in life and how miserable they are but how many people actually go out and DO something to change things?
This aversion to changing "the natural order" of things stems (doesn't everything?) from our evolutionary past. Permanence can be good for a species. If a habitat stays effectively the same for thousands and thousands of years then the species can adapt to it's niche perfectly. A sudden change could wipe them out entirely within a few generations (Think of the dodo. Discovered: 1598. Last sighted: 1662. Less than a hundred years.), permanence can be a good thing. Humans have evolved to look for permanence, if not complete permanence then at least predictable changes. Which valley is it better to live in the one that has predictable weather and predictable floods every year or the one with erratic weather patterns that could flood at any time? I know which one I would pick. We have survived as a species because we are good at exploiting permanence and if it doesn't exist then we create it. Unpredictable rains ruining your crops? Irrigation saves the day! Differing temperatures throughout the year? Different clothes to help maintain just the right temperature year round!
Now some of you may be saying "Well yes if everything is going great people aren't going to change things but you just gave examples of people changing things from a bad situation to a good one! Humans love change!" Well yes and no. People have gone against the grain to try and make things better for themselves and others of course but not everyone and not all the time. People will endure a lot before they finally snap and change things and others will perhaps do nothing. Think of all the loveless marriages out there, the ones where people will wait until their 40's or 50's to finally tell their spouse they never really loved them and still others where they never tell them. Change is scary and unpredictable. There is a saying (I can't remember who said it or if it even has a recognised author) and it went something like "A known evil is better than an unknown evil" or something to that effect (Stick around for more half-remembered sayings from unknown authors poorly retold by me in blog form!). The point of the saying is is that with a repetitively bad situation at least it's repetitive. You can become hardened to it, it can almost become comforting just because you know it unlike that vague, shadowy thing off in the distance: the Unknown.
So that's a vague idea as to why people fear change but why is that a bad thing? Well it's bad because change is inevitable. Our universe is based on a system of ever transforming energy. Things grow and develop and then die and rot and are transformed into something entirely different and that's not even going into entropy which I won't get into now. It's the 21st century and you all have Google on your Smart Phone I-Blackberry Touches so go read about it yourself.
Things are destined to change and people need to accept it. One good reason for this is for adaptation. Lets return to our delicious, extinct, flightless friends the dodos. Why did they survive less than a hundred years after humans discovered them? Because they weren't prepared for us in the slightest. Not only were dodos delicious they also had absolutely no fear of humans. There were reports of them wandering up to hungry sailors just because they were curious and then their friends barely reacted as they got brained with a log simply because they didn't understand what was going on. Humans also introduced animals such as pigs and rats which competed with them for food and ate their eggs which conveniently were left in nests on the ground for easy access. They had affectively no natural predators on Mauritius and so they had lost their flight, their fear and their ability to withstand such a sudden wave of enemies.
And that brings me back to my point. We must accept change and prepare for it because if we are prepared we may be able to survive it. It's what has kept us going so far. Our adaptability is what has kept us alive and consigned the dodo to the fossil record.
So we should keep ourselves prepared for change but how exactly do you do that? Is there a special stretch routine or a vitamin pill that will do the trick? Unfortunately no it's something much more painful than that. You have to change things. Mix things up a bit. Rock the boat. Now when I say change things you don't need to do anything mad like shave "Punk" into your hair, change your name to Quark and move to the Pitcairn Islands
(Really interesting place actually. The least populated country in the world. It also has the highest number of sex offenders of any country and I can tell you it's pretty horrible reading about it. Maybe
don't go to Pitcairn...)
or something really crazy like move to Finland to be with your girlfriend, attempt to learn the language and apply to polytechnics to study for a Nursing degree (...), small changes are fine. Do you always eat the same cereal every morning? Try a different one! Do you always go to the same restaurants or bars when you go out? Go somewhere you haven't been before! Always wear the same old clothes? Wear something completely different to what you usually wear. Mix things up.
Little changes like this prevent stagnation. Think about your life. Are you predictable? Could you do things a different way? Do you wash the dishes in the same way every day? Do you have deeply entrenched routines that you just follow without thinking? Break them. What's the worst that could happen? There could be so many hidden benefits. What if you are missing out? If nothing else it will make you think and maybe see things in a new light, a different way. Prepare your self for change by facing the unknown. Take a little step off of the rails and see what happens. Why not?
I mentioned before those people from history that weren't content with their lot. They didn't want to just rely on the rains they wanted to water their crops now! These people are the people that first used fire, that first tamed animals, that invented the wheel. These people invented rockets that could take people into space. They brought down governments and tyrants, they overthrew kingdoms and fought for equality. Those people that stepped outside the boundaries, maybe just a little bit, are the people that have transformed and guided and CHANGED humanity. Change is good. Accept change. Don't just accept your lot like the dodo. Grow, expand, change.
Sunday, 23 March 2014
Suicide
So. That's a scary title. 7 letters arranged into a specific combination and the fears and emotions it can stir up are really quite deep and powerful. I think it's time I examined it a little.
What could I possibly have to say about suicide? Well keep reading and find out. (Just to reassure you this is not a suicide note. Quite the opposite in fact. Do enjoy.)
Lets start off nice and safely. General facts and trivia. Nothing says inoffensive like the answers to pub quizzes (really bizarre pub quizzes about suicide...)
In India suicide is illegal. In Singapore you can be imprisoned for up to one year for attempting to commit suicide. Suicide was only decriminalized in Britain in 1961. It was decriminalized in the Republic of Ireland in 1993. A year before I was born.
Anyone else think that's quite strange? Suicide, the intentional ending of one's life, being against the law. Why?
Suicide has long been associated with immorality in the majority of societies due to (really again?) religion. The Abrahamic God's really don't like the whole ending your life thing. They much prefer ending your life for you with horrifically painful diseases and literally earth-shattering natural disasters. Suicide was seen as an offence against God himself and in England and Wales it was also an offence against the Crown. Seriously, up until around 1822 the property and possessions of someone who had committed suicide could be seized by the Crown. If you killed yourself the Queen had first dibs on your stuff.
So why is it thought to be wrong and immoral? Again it comes down to good old basic survival. Hard-wired into every living thing on Earth (barring mental disorders and other reasons) is an instinct to survive. Run up to a wild animal and it will either flee to safety or it will attempt to tear your limbs off all in a bid to survive and live to reproduce another day. Suicide is the antithesis of this. For a species to survive and thrive it's members kind of need to... well... not want to die. In human society it's been thought of as bad and immoral because if people kill themselves they are no longer capable of helping the group. This is bad. Just being around raises the probability of a group surviving simply because of the old adage "safety in numbers". If you are one of 10 humans living together and one of your group members kills themselves the probability that the next time a lion wants a snack he's going to snack on you, increases. You don't like this. You don't want to be eaten by a lion. You really don't want anyone else to kill themselves because the probability will increase even higher. You really want to put off everyone else from killing themselves. Suicide is now immoral in your little society.
If suicide is supposed to be the last thing on people's mind then why is it that between 800,000 and one million people die every year around the world by suicide? It's is the 10th leading cause of death in the world today.
(As a side note I just want to say that that I find that number truly abhorrent.)
There are numerous triggers. Mental health issues are usually the first thing people think of. That grey, scary, hazy area that people don't really understand. Then there's addictions and substance abuse, problem gambling, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, emotional abuse, all of the above and more.
(I'm purposefully leaving out medical euthanasia as I feel that this is a separate topic that has different considerations and the questions it raises aren't ones that I'm going to be able to answer in this post. Perhaps next time.)
Whether it's bi-polar, bullying, depression or a myriad of other potential afflictions, the mind is capable of reframing someone's life to the point that that person believes their life is not worth continuing.
I politely disagree with them.
I have thought a lot about suicide. Before anyone starts worrying or phoning helplines for me, I would like to clarify that I have never attempted to commit suicide and when I say I have considered it I mean I have considered it purely philosophically and ethically in the same way I consider the existence of God or the soul. I have asked myself "Why is suicide a bad thing? What circumstances would it take for me to want to kill myself? Why shouldn't I kill myself right now?" Questions like these occasionally swirl round my head but again just to clarify I am not depressed, I am not in trouble and I do not want to kill myself. My life is seriously great right now. I know I live in Finland but the winters are really not that bad.
So what answers do I have for those questions?
For me (I can only ever answer for me) suicide is a bad thing because it is not relief or escape it's nothingness. It is an end to feeling bad but that doesn't mean it feels good. Feeling good can only be achieved whilst you are living. On the other side is nothingness which is neither good or bad it's just... nothing. Incomprehensible to the human mind. Zero. Zilch. Nolla (that's Finnish if you didn't guess). Problems can be bad. They can be awful. They can be great dark pits full of demons dragging you down and submerging you but suicide isn't going to save you. What suicide does is drag other's down the pit with you.
Suicide is often thought of as being a selfish act which to me has always seemed a ridiculously callous thing to say. It's like saying someone stealing bread when they are at the point of starvation is very selfish of the thief. Well of course it is! They are desperate! In my opinion suicide is not selfish but it is usually done without the thought of the effects to other people. I don't call this selfish because it's understandable and I attach no blame to it but it is a fact that those "left behind" suffer. Even if the person truly had no-one and was alone in the world, the very fact that someone ends up killing themselves in the 21st century with all the help that could have potentially saved them is depressing for me. I don't care if they are a pretty teenage girl bullied to death or an alcoholic pensioner that just can't take the world any more. It's sad when someone dies. When their own desperation causes their death for me it feels doubly sad.
Suicide is bad because it hurts people.
What circumstances would it take for me to kill myself? (Medical euthanasia shall be dealt with another time) I have no idea. I don't know what it feels like to be at that point. I'm not going to try and guess because I doubt I would be able to truly imagine it. All I really know is that right now, at this point of time in my life I don't want to die and I would like to continue living for as long as I can. I would also like to think that if I was ever at the point where it seemed like the only option, someone would come to me and help me see the other options. The ones that won't result in my exit from this incredible world.
Talking of incredible world, have you seen how incredible the world is? Do you know we know more about the surface of the Moon than we do the very depths of the ocean? New species are discovered almost every week. Alien life has yet to be discovered. Why would I want to die when there is so much to learn, so much to see, so much to experience, so much to live for? When I do eventually die (at the ripe old age of 300 if I can manage it) the universe will still hold secrets that the future descendants of mankind will still be trying to solve. I will never know everything there is to know about everything. I am but a cog in the wheel of the most advanced species in existence. I am a (admittedly a very small) building block the future will be constructed on. I may not achieve anything noteworthy in my life but even by just existing I have altered the trajectory of photon beams, I have radiated heat, I have contributed to the universe. I want to continue to contribute for as long as possible. I don't want to be nothing quite yet.
So what should you do if you feel the cold dark fear creeping up on you or the relentless crushing weight of the world on top of you? What should you do if you start thinking that the world would be better off without you?
Don't ask me I'm a 20 year old child living in Finland, what the Hell do I know?
If you find yourself in this sort of position then suicide is never the only option. Never. Even when you are absolutely sure it is the only course of action open to you, you are wrong. Talk to people that will listen and can help. There are so many sites and phone lines, and email addresses out there that I could spend all day linking them on this blog but if you are in the UK charities like The Samaritans can help with whatever problem you could possibly have and the vast majority of countries have helplines dedicated to helping you. Talk to someone. Please don't be one of those 800,000 to one million people. Something will always be better than nothing.
What could I possibly have to say about suicide? Well keep reading and find out. (Just to reassure you this is not a suicide note. Quite the opposite in fact. Do enjoy.)
Lets start off nice and safely. General facts and trivia. Nothing says inoffensive like the answers to pub quizzes (really bizarre pub quizzes about suicide...)
In India suicide is illegal. In Singapore you can be imprisoned for up to one year for attempting to commit suicide. Suicide was only decriminalized in Britain in 1961. It was decriminalized in the Republic of Ireland in 1993. A year before I was born.
Anyone else think that's quite strange? Suicide, the intentional ending of one's life, being against the law. Why?
Suicide has long been associated with immorality in the majority of societies due to (really again?) religion. The Abrahamic God's really don't like the whole ending your life thing. They much prefer ending your life for you with horrifically painful diseases and literally earth-shattering natural disasters. Suicide was seen as an offence against God himself and in England and Wales it was also an offence against the Crown. Seriously, up until around 1822 the property and possessions of someone who had committed suicide could be seized by the Crown. If you killed yourself the Queen had first dibs on your stuff.
So why is it thought to be wrong and immoral? Again it comes down to good old basic survival. Hard-wired into every living thing on Earth (barring mental disorders and other reasons) is an instinct to survive. Run up to a wild animal and it will either flee to safety or it will attempt to tear your limbs off all in a bid to survive and live to reproduce another day. Suicide is the antithesis of this. For a species to survive and thrive it's members kind of need to... well... not want to die. In human society it's been thought of as bad and immoral because if people kill themselves they are no longer capable of helping the group. This is bad. Just being around raises the probability of a group surviving simply because of the old adage "safety in numbers". If you are one of 10 humans living together and one of your group members kills themselves the probability that the next time a lion wants a snack he's going to snack on you, increases. You don't like this. You don't want to be eaten by a lion. You really don't want anyone else to kill themselves because the probability will increase even higher. You really want to put off everyone else from killing themselves. Suicide is now immoral in your little society.
If suicide is supposed to be the last thing on people's mind then why is it that between 800,000 and one million people die every year around the world by suicide? It's is the 10th leading cause of death in the world today.
(As a side note I just want to say that that I find that number truly abhorrent.)
There are numerous triggers. Mental health issues are usually the first thing people think of. That grey, scary, hazy area that people don't really understand. Then there's addictions and substance abuse, problem gambling, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, emotional abuse, all of the above and more.
(I'm purposefully leaving out medical euthanasia as I feel that this is a separate topic that has different considerations and the questions it raises aren't ones that I'm going to be able to answer in this post. Perhaps next time.)
Whether it's bi-polar, bullying, depression or a myriad of other potential afflictions, the mind is capable of reframing someone's life to the point that that person believes their life is not worth continuing.
I politely disagree with them.
I have thought a lot about suicide. Before anyone starts worrying or phoning helplines for me, I would like to clarify that I have never attempted to commit suicide and when I say I have considered it I mean I have considered it purely philosophically and ethically in the same way I consider the existence of God or the soul. I have asked myself "Why is suicide a bad thing? What circumstances would it take for me to want to kill myself? Why shouldn't I kill myself right now?" Questions like these occasionally swirl round my head but again just to clarify I am not depressed, I am not in trouble and I do not want to kill myself. My life is seriously great right now. I know I live in Finland but the winters are really not that bad.
So what answers do I have for those questions?
For me (I can only ever answer for me) suicide is a bad thing because it is not relief or escape it's nothingness. It is an end to feeling bad but that doesn't mean it feels good. Feeling good can only be achieved whilst you are living. On the other side is nothingness which is neither good or bad it's just... nothing. Incomprehensible to the human mind. Zero. Zilch. Nolla (that's Finnish if you didn't guess). Problems can be bad. They can be awful. They can be great dark pits full of demons dragging you down and submerging you but suicide isn't going to save you. What suicide does is drag other's down the pit with you.
Suicide is often thought of as being a selfish act which to me has always seemed a ridiculously callous thing to say. It's like saying someone stealing bread when they are at the point of starvation is very selfish of the thief. Well of course it is! They are desperate! In my opinion suicide is not selfish but it is usually done without the thought of the effects to other people. I don't call this selfish because it's understandable and I attach no blame to it but it is a fact that those "left behind" suffer. Even if the person truly had no-one and was alone in the world, the very fact that someone ends up killing themselves in the 21st century with all the help that could have potentially saved them is depressing for me. I don't care if they are a pretty teenage girl bullied to death or an alcoholic pensioner that just can't take the world any more. It's sad when someone dies. When their own desperation causes their death for me it feels doubly sad.
Suicide is bad because it hurts people.
What circumstances would it take for me to kill myself? (Medical euthanasia shall be dealt with another time) I have no idea. I don't know what it feels like to be at that point. I'm not going to try and guess because I doubt I would be able to truly imagine it. All I really know is that right now, at this point of time in my life I don't want to die and I would like to continue living for as long as I can. I would also like to think that if I was ever at the point where it seemed like the only option, someone would come to me and help me see the other options. The ones that won't result in my exit from this incredible world.
Talking of incredible world, have you seen how incredible the world is? Do you know we know more about the surface of the Moon than we do the very depths of the ocean? New species are discovered almost every week. Alien life has yet to be discovered. Why would I want to die when there is so much to learn, so much to see, so much to experience, so much to live for? When I do eventually die (at the ripe old age of 300 if I can manage it) the universe will still hold secrets that the future descendants of mankind will still be trying to solve. I will never know everything there is to know about everything. I am but a cog in the wheel of the most advanced species in existence. I am a (admittedly a very small) building block the future will be constructed on. I may not achieve anything noteworthy in my life but even by just existing I have altered the trajectory of photon beams, I have radiated heat, I have contributed to the universe. I want to continue to contribute for as long as possible. I don't want to be nothing quite yet.
So what should you do if you feel the cold dark fear creeping up on you or the relentless crushing weight of the world on top of you? What should you do if you start thinking that the world would be better off without you?
Don't ask me I'm a 20 year old child living in Finland, what the Hell do I know?
If you find yourself in this sort of position then suicide is never the only option. Never. Even when you are absolutely sure it is the only course of action open to you, you are wrong. Talk to people that will listen and can help. There are so many sites and phone lines, and email addresses out there that I could spend all day linking them on this blog but if you are in the UK charities like The Samaritans can help with whatever problem you could possibly have and the vast majority of countries have helplines dedicated to helping you. Talk to someone. Please don't be one of those 800,000 to one million people. Something will always be better than nothing.
Sunday, 16 February 2014
You Have No Soul And Neither Do I
Probably the most famous (and most often quoted) philosophical idea is that of "I think therefore I am". The great French philosopher Renee Descartes first put forward this idea and the majority of people that quote it have no idea what it means. What Descartes did to come to this conclusion is one of the simplest and yet also most revolutionary thought experiments ever. Descartes realised that the simple human senses that we use to make sense of the world (taste, touch, smell and so on) are actually very poor. They can be easily misled and confused. We've all seen those simple optical illusions that can confuse the part of the brain that deals with sight incredibly easily. He postulated (ooooo fancy) the possible existence of an "Evil Demon" that deceives our senses to influence us for it's own ends creating a false world around us (think the Matrix). A scary Evil Demon creating a fake world around you... scary. So with this possibility now raised what exactly in this world can we say definitely exists; that does not rely on our senses for us to know or experience?
Descartes questioned the existence of everything. He stripped everything back. He systematically eliminated everything that could only be known to exist through the senses and came to a rather uncomfortable truth. The only thing he could be entirely sure existed was himself. Everything else could be an illusion created by the "Evil Demon", the only certainty being that if he is thinking then he must exist as he would not be able to think without existing. "I think therefore I am". The chair you are sitting in. You can see it but couldn't that be an illusion? You can feel it but what if that's just false sensations being sent to your brain? You can smell it and taste it (Are you licking your chair? Gross.) but these can both be fooled too.
So Descartes was left stuck on a metaphorical rock in a vast sea of complete uncertainty. All he could be sure of was his own existence. Pretty scary huh? But Descartes had a way off his rock. He had a way out. He had an answer!
At this point Descartes went from being one of the greatest philosophers in history (I mean a true genius) to an absolute simpleton of the lowest order. What could he possibly say to undo all of his great work and reduce his fantastic thought experiment to nothing more than a badly constructed delusional mess?
Yep that's right he brought God into it.
Descartes said that even though everything else in reality may not exist, God (of course) exists ("But what about all the questioning? How do you know God exists? Through your senses? But you said...") and God is good ("Wait how do you kn...") so God would never deceive us so everything is actually real and our senses are great and all is right and happy in the world!
He actually did this. He came up with the most impressive piece of critical thinking ever and then he ruined it completely. It makes me weep to think that such a great mind was held back so much by his beliefs. For him it was fine to question the existence of reality itself but it was too much of a stretch to question his Lord. Really sad.
But how does this link to the (non)existence of the soul as described in the title of this here blog post? Well Descartes went one better than just giving everything up to God he also said that his thought experiment shows proof (of a sort...) of the existence of the soul. He reduced everything down to a singular "I" which he argued was his soul. His true essence, the essential part of himself that could not be divided.
I don't agree.
Before I go into why lets take a quick delve into the different philosophical beliefs about the soul. Plato believed in the existence of the soul and described it as being split into different parts. He used the allegory (fancy word for metaphor which is a fancy word for "story to make hard stuff knowable") of a chariot. The charioteer represents intellect and reason which tries to guide the soul to truth. The chariot is pulled by two horses, the one horse being moral impulse and "noble" passions, the other horse being irrational passions and... appetites shall we say. As these two horses are opposites there is conflict and it's not all smooth sailing. The charioteer must try his best to steer the soul as a whole to truth.
This idea may be familiar if you know anything about the psychologist Sigmund Freud. He proposed the idea of the Id, Ego and Superego making up the unconscious mind and being the driving force behind the personality and they are essentially the same as the chariot but rather than being immaterial soul-stuff they are constructions and ways of functioning in the brain.
In Hinduism (and many other beliefs) the soul is eternal and can be reincarnated into new bodies, the quality of your next life determined by how good of a life you have lived in your current incarnation. This idea helped cement the caste system which is still in some areas enforced today. Yay...
In Christianity... well there are about a bajillion differing views as always. Some say there is a soul and it's immortal, some say there is a soul but it's not immortal, others say that human souls are immortal but animal souls aren't (Thomas Aquinas to be exact. If he's right it means that you ain't seeing Fido in Heaven. Sorry but those are the rules. Apparently.) What they do seem to agree is that the soul is an incorporeal substance that makes up your personality and "inner self".
So does this mean there's a chariot lodged in your body somewhere? Well no obviously (that was just a "story to make hard stuff knowable") but if there isn't a chariot in you then what is in you making up your personality and where is it? What's it made of? How does it work?
As you are, I am sure, aware the soul has yet to be found in dissections of the human body (can you imagine if that did happen? "What's that squishy grey bi... OH JESUS IT'S THE SOUL!" But yeah that won't happen...). A supporter of the whole "humans have souls" argument would say this is because the soul is not a physical substance. It is not of this world. It is a spiritual substance that cannot be experienced by mere human senses. Now this sounds very impressive and mysterious but it is actually the perfect set up to, what I believe, is the most devastating argument against the souls' existence:
"If the soul is a transcendental, spiritual substance that cannot be touched or seen or experienced in any way in the physical world how exactly does it drive the body?"
The soul is often called the "ghost in the machine", the spiritual driving force of the physical meat suit we call the body but if this is true then how can the ghost press any of the buttons or pull any of the levers of this great complicated machine? Casper can't pick up a banana how is he expected to drive a monster truck?
(The idea of the "little man pulling levers in your head" leads to another argument against the soul. If the soul is the little man driving the body does that mean there is another little man driving the soul? And is there then another man driving that man and another driving that one and so on forever? Is it infinite regression? Does the chain stop at some point? If it does stop, why does it stop? What makes the soul so special that it is self-controlled? How does it self-control?)
How does the soul interact with the body? Is there a soul molecule? Does it swerve about and direct the physical molecules of your body? How do these two polar opposites interact? I would say that there is no interaction because the soul does not exist.
Another metaphor for you (this post is chock full of them...), a foreign student comes to visit a university and asks to be shown this university he has heard so much about. A lecturer takes him round and shows him the accommodation they have, the fantastic science labs, lecture halls, sports facilities, everything. He even shows him the brand new toilets. After the tour the lecturer asks the student what he thinks and the student replies "Those were all really nice buildings but where is the university?" (Hilarious isn't it? Isn't it? Well it shouldn't be. It's a metaphor not a joke. This is philosophy. This stuff is serious.) The student was expecting the university to be something above and more than just the buildings and it could be said that this is the same with people that dissect the brain to try and find where exactly the soul is.
When someone damages their brain their personality can change. Phineas Gage is a famous example (and it's an amazing story). His entire mood and personality changed after a metal pole got blown through his brain. He became short tempered and rude contrasting to how he was before the accident, a patient kind man who rarely lost his temper (Who can blame him right? I would be pretty short tempered and rude if a metal pole and been shot through my face at high speed). If the physical structure and well being of your brain can affect your personality then what is there to suggest that there is something over and above the brain itself that is the "real" you?
And then of course there is the fact that people change over time. How can the soul be "perfect, pure and eternal" if people change? I am certainly not the same person I was when I was, say, 13 (Thank God. Does anyone ever look back and think "I was so much better at being a person at 13..."?) so do souls change and grow? If this is true then what happens when we die? Do souls keep changing? After a million years of being a soul floating around Heaven, meeting all of your virtuous heroes and the greatest people of history, will you really be the same person that first arrived at the pearly gates?
I feel like people's opposition to the idea of us being simply the product of our brains, is somewhat rooted in the fact that us humans are a big headed bunch. "I'm more than just my brain! I have an immortal soul that is pure and complex unlike my simple physical body" (Snooty or what? Everyone looks down on this plane of reality until you tell them that you have a plate of cookies. All of a sudden they care a great deal about the real world...) It could also be the great fear of death that is instilled in our very genes. It's damn stressful knowing you are going to die. If there was a way for you to survive past death then wouldn't you want to believe in it? Wouldn't that be a great comfort? It also allows you to meet up with your loved ones! That would be nice.
So anyway back to Descartes (You thought I'd forgotten...). Descartes was a genius but unfortunately it appears he was human too and fell for the trap of wanting to believe in something so much he sacrificed proof and logic for it. He ran away from a scary thought and hid behind his God. So what is the "I" if we have no soul? Well some philosophers say Descartes was wrong to stop at "I". All that we can really REALLY be sure of is that thought is occurring. We can't be so sure that there is an "I" thinking but we know that there must be thinking happening somehow. So now we seem to be in an even worse position. We don't even have the "I" to lean on. Now it seems we are just floating thoughts in the void.
There is though, a way off the island of doubt. We accept reality as it appears. We have no proof, no evidence to say that reality is real but we also have very little reason to question it. Things usually stick to the logical rules that we observe in the universe. We can't rule out the possibility of the Evil Demon but there is nothing to suggest that it exists. So is it better to just accept that reality is real? If we do then we can explain why we can reduce everything down to just thought. The interactions of the brain come together to form the self. The shape of the different areas of the brain and the strength of the connections between them can explain the personality and the individual. The soul is not a single simple substance but the interactions of literally millions of neurons in your brain. This explains people's capacity for change, how people's moods and decisions can be influenced by what they eat, the weather, temperature, hormones. Everything becomes clear. When we die, we die entirely because our brain ceases to function. There would be no need for an afterlife.
But is it right to just give in and hide away from the question? Well is it really possible to keep asking the question? Descartes himself admitted that this total rejection of all of reality was essentially impossible to keep up. You still get hungry, tired, you still need the loo. Perhaps we are too rooted in reality to sufficiently question it. Descartes was so entrenched in Christianity he could not imagine a world where it was an illusion. Perhaps our soft, squishy, ape-brain is just too dependent on reality to be able to reject it. If we continue to grow and expand the capabilities of our mind, to develop our souls to even greater depths, then perhaps, in some distant future where man is unrecognisable but still considers this question, we may be able to contemplate it.
For now, the implications of rejecting the existence of the soul are really quite severe. The majority of religions that preach of an afterlife are cast aside. Psychics and other charlatans (sorry mystics) are put out of a job. We no longer have the crutch of the next life to fall on when times get tough. When our loved ones die we lose the hope that we will see them again. Is this too much to cope with?
I believe that when you die... well then at that point you are dead. That's it really. Brain activity ceases, you decompose, the materials that make up your body go back out into the universe to be used in some entirely new way. Why do I think this? Well there is no evidence that points to any other conclusion.
I have come to this conclusion through a lot of thinking. I've debated back and forth with myself (and others) and I can't help but come to this idea. One fact that put me onto this course of thinking was finding out that a woman is born with all of the eggs that she will ever produce. No more will be created during her life. What this means is that half of your genes are as old as your mother. How incredible is that. This revelation made me think and I realised that all the eggs are just cells that have split from other cells. It's also true of the sperm cells. They are merely cells that have split from other cells. Those cells split from other cells which originally were produced by another sperm cell and an egg cell. It's the same with those sperm and egg cells. They are from their previous parents sperm and egg cells and so on back back back for millions of years. You are an extension of your ancestors combined cells and, in many ways, not a separate being. You have just budded off them.
Now just let that sink in a second and see if it hits you the same way as it hit me. Just think what this implies. At no point in this long line cells begetting cells have cells spontaneously popped out of nothing. They have always come from previously existing cells. Life has never stopped and then started again (as far as we know), it's just been a continuos chain stretching across the eons to this very moment where I am writing this. We are all essentially one organism. We are made of the same stuff, we are all just cells growing forth from other cells. It's not just you and me and the rest of the human race. Every single living thing is made up of cells that already existed and replicated. This means that we are all (all known living things on this planet) the products of a small group of the original living cells. Those first living beings that came into existence through the collecting together of strings of proteins in just the right chemical conditions began to grow and replicate, and now here we stand. We are all connected and in the grand scheme of the universe there is almost no difference between you and the mould that grows on bread if you leave it out for too long. I think that's amazing. This idea doesn't make me feel small, on the contrary I feel like I am a part of the universe. I am not a single "I" sitting lonely on a rock, I am a part of a great system that is simply unimaginably old. I don't need a soul to feel special. I'm a living creature. That's incredible to me.
Descartes questioned the existence of everything. He stripped everything back. He systematically eliminated everything that could only be known to exist through the senses and came to a rather uncomfortable truth. The only thing he could be entirely sure existed was himself. Everything else could be an illusion created by the "Evil Demon", the only certainty being that if he is thinking then he must exist as he would not be able to think without existing. "I think therefore I am". The chair you are sitting in. You can see it but couldn't that be an illusion? You can feel it but what if that's just false sensations being sent to your brain? You can smell it and taste it (Are you licking your chair? Gross.) but these can both be fooled too.
So Descartes was left stuck on a metaphorical rock in a vast sea of complete uncertainty. All he could be sure of was his own existence. Pretty scary huh? But Descartes had a way off his rock. He had a way out. He had an answer!
At this point Descartes went from being one of the greatest philosophers in history (I mean a true genius) to an absolute simpleton of the lowest order. What could he possibly say to undo all of his great work and reduce his fantastic thought experiment to nothing more than a badly constructed delusional mess?
Yep that's right he brought God into it.
Descartes said that even though everything else in reality may not exist, God (of course) exists ("But what about all the questioning? How do you know God exists? Through your senses? But you said...") and God is good ("Wait how do you kn...") so God would never deceive us so everything is actually real and our senses are great and all is right and happy in the world!
He actually did this. He came up with the most impressive piece of critical thinking ever and then he ruined it completely. It makes me weep to think that such a great mind was held back so much by his beliefs. For him it was fine to question the existence of reality itself but it was too much of a stretch to question his Lord. Really sad.
But how does this link to the (non)existence of the soul as described in the title of this here blog post? Well Descartes went one better than just giving everything up to God he also said that his thought experiment shows proof (of a sort...) of the existence of the soul. He reduced everything down to a singular "I" which he argued was his soul. His true essence, the essential part of himself that could not be divided.
I don't agree.
Before I go into why lets take a quick delve into the different philosophical beliefs about the soul. Plato believed in the existence of the soul and described it as being split into different parts. He used the allegory (fancy word for metaphor which is a fancy word for "story to make hard stuff knowable") of a chariot. The charioteer represents intellect and reason which tries to guide the soul to truth. The chariot is pulled by two horses, the one horse being moral impulse and "noble" passions, the other horse being irrational passions and... appetites shall we say. As these two horses are opposites there is conflict and it's not all smooth sailing. The charioteer must try his best to steer the soul as a whole to truth.
This idea may be familiar if you know anything about the psychologist Sigmund Freud. He proposed the idea of the Id, Ego and Superego making up the unconscious mind and being the driving force behind the personality and they are essentially the same as the chariot but rather than being immaterial soul-stuff they are constructions and ways of functioning in the brain.
In Hinduism (and many other beliefs) the soul is eternal and can be reincarnated into new bodies, the quality of your next life determined by how good of a life you have lived in your current incarnation. This idea helped cement the caste system which is still in some areas enforced today. Yay...
In Christianity... well there are about a bajillion differing views as always. Some say there is a soul and it's immortal, some say there is a soul but it's not immortal, others say that human souls are immortal but animal souls aren't (Thomas Aquinas to be exact. If he's right it means that you ain't seeing Fido in Heaven. Sorry but those are the rules. Apparently.) What they do seem to agree is that the soul is an incorporeal substance that makes up your personality and "inner self".
So does this mean there's a chariot lodged in your body somewhere? Well no obviously (that was just a "story to make hard stuff knowable") but if there isn't a chariot in you then what is in you making up your personality and where is it? What's it made of? How does it work?
As you are, I am sure, aware the soul has yet to be found in dissections of the human body (can you imagine if that did happen? "What's that squishy grey bi... OH JESUS IT'S THE SOUL!" But yeah that won't happen...). A supporter of the whole "humans have souls" argument would say this is because the soul is not a physical substance. It is not of this world. It is a spiritual substance that cannot be experienced by mere human senses. Now this sounds very impressive and mysterious but it is actually the perfect set up to, what I believe, is the most devastating argument against the souls' existence:
"If the soul is a transcendental, spiritual substance that cannot be touched or seen or experienced in any way in the physical world how exactly does it drive the body?"
The soul is often called the "ghost in the machine", the spiritual driving force of the physical meat suit we call the body but if this is true then how can the ghost press any of the buttons or pull any of the levers of this great complicated machine? Casper can't pick up a banana how is he expected to drive a monster truck?
(The idea of the "little man pulling levers in your head" leads to another argument against the soul. If the soul is the little man driving the body does that mean there is another little man driving the soul? And is there then another man driving that man and another driving that one and so on forever? Is it infinite regression? Does the chain stop at some point? If it does stop, why does it stop? What makes the soul so special that it is self-controlled? How does it self-control?)
How does the soul interact with the body? Is there a soul molecule? Does it swerve about and direct the physical molecules of your body? How do these two polar opposites interact? I would say that there is no interaction because the soul does not exist.
Another metaphor for you (this post is chock full of them...), a foreign student comes to visit a university and asks to be shown this university he has heard so much about. A lecturer takes him round and shows him the accommodation they have, the fantastic science labs, lecture halls, sports facilities, everything. He even shows him the brand new toilets. After the tour the lecturer asks the student what he thinks and the student replies "Those were all really nice buildings but where is the university?" (Hilarious isn't it? Isn't it? Well it shouldn't be. It's a metaphor not a joke. This is philosophy. This stuff is serious.) The student was expecting the university to be something above and more than just the buildings and it could be said that this is the same with people that dissect the brain to try and find where exactly the soul is.
When someone damages their brain their personality can change. Phineas Gage is a famous example (and it's an amazing story). His entire mood and personality changed after a metal pole got blown through his brain. He became short tempered and rude contrasting to how he was before the accident, a patient kind man who rarely lost his temper (Who can blame him right? I would be pretty short tempered and rude if a metal pole and been shot through my face at high speed). If the physical structure and well being of your brain can affect your personality then what is there to suggest that there is something over and above the brain itself that is the "real" you?
And then of course there is the fact that people change over time. How can the soul be "perfect, pure and eternal" if people change? I am certainly not the same person I was when I was, say, 13 (Thank God. Does anyone ever look back and think "I was so much better at being a person at 13..."?) so do souls change and grow? If this is true then what happens when we die? Do souls keep changing? After a million years of being a soul floating around Heaven, meeting all of your virtuous heroes and the greatest people of history, will you really be the same person that first arrived at the pearly gates?
I feel like people's opposition to the idea of us being simply the product of our brains, is somewhat rooted in the fact that us humans are a big headed bunch. "I'm more than just my brain! I have an immortal soul that is pure and complex unlike my simple physical body" (Snooty or what? Everyone looks down on this plane of reality until you tell them that you have a plate of cookies. All of a sudden they care a great deal about the real world...) It could also be the great fear of death that is instilled in our very genes. It's damn stressful knowing you are going to die. If there was a way for you to survive past death then wouldn't you want to believe in it? Wouldn't that be a great comfort? It also allows you to meet up with your loved ones! That would be nice.
So anyway back to Descartes (You thought I'd forgotten...). Descartes was a genius but unfortunately it appears he was human too and fell for the trap of wanting to believe in something so much he sacrificed proof and logic for it. He ran away from a scary thought and hid behind his God. So what is the "I" if we have no soul? Well some philosophers say Descartes was wrong to stop at "I". All that we can really REALLY be sure of is that thought is occurring. We can't be so sure that there is an "I" thinking but we know that there must be thinking happening somehow. So now we seem to be in an even worse position. We don't even have the "I" to lean on. Now it seems we are just floating thoughts in the void.
There is though, a way off the island of doubt. We accept reality as it appears. We have no proof, no evidence to say that reality is real but we also have very little reason to question it. Things usually stick to the logical rules that we observe in the universe. We can't rule out the possibility of the Evil Demon but there is nothing to suggest that it exists. So is it better to just accept that reality is real? If we do then we can explain why we can reduce everything down to just thought. The interactions of the brain come together to form the self. The shape of the different areas of the brain and the strength of the connections between them can explain the personality and the individual. The soul is not a single simple substance but the interactions of literally millions of neurons in your brain. This explains people's capacity for change, how people's moods and decisions can be influenced by what they eat, the weather, temperature, hormones. Everything becomes clear. When we die, we die entirely because our brain ceases to function. There would be no need for an afterlife.
But is it right to just give in and hide away from the question? Well is it really possible to keep asking the question? Descartes himself admitted that this total rejection of all of reality was essentially impossible to keep up. You still get hungry, tired, you still need the loo. Perhaps we are too rooted in reality to sufficiently question it. Descartes was so entrenched in Christianity he could not imagine a world where it was an illusion. Perhaps our soft, squishy, ape-brain is just too dependent on reality to be able to reject it. If we continue to grow and expand the capabilities of our mind, to develop our souls to even greater depths, then perhaps, in some distant future where man is unrecognisable but still considers this question, we may be able to contemplate it.
For now, the implications of rejecting the existence of the soul are really quite severe. The majority of religions that preach of an afterlife are cast aside. Psychics and other charlatans (sorry mystics) are put out of a job. We no longer have the crutch of the next life to fall on when times get tough. When our loved ones die we lose the hope that we will see them again. Is this too much to cope with?
I believe that when you die... well then at that point you are dead. That's it really. Brain activity ceases, you decompose, the materials that make up your body go back out into the universe to be used in some entirely new way. Why do I think this? Well there is no evidence that points to any other conclusion.
I have come to this conclusion through a lot of thinking. I've debated back and forth with myself (and others) and I can't help but come to this idea. One fact that put me onto this course of thinking was finding out that a woman is born with all of the eggs that she will ever produce. No more will be created during her life. What this means is that half of your genes are as old as your mother. How incredible is that. This revelation made me think and I realised that all the eggs are just cells that have split from other cells. It's also true of the sperm cells. They are merely cells that have split from other cells. Those cells split from other cells which originally were produced by another sperm cell and an egg cell. It's the same with those sperm and egg cells. They are from their previous parents sperm and egg cells and so on back back back for millions of years. You are an extension of your ancestors combined cells and, in many ways, not a separate being. You have just budded off them.
Now just let that sink in a second and see if it hits you the same way as it hit me. Just think what this implies. At no point in this long line cells begetting cells have cells spontaneously popped out of nothing. They have always come from previously existing cells. Life has never stopped and then started again (as far as we know), it's just been a continuos chain stretching across the eons to this very moment where I am writing this. We are all essentially one organism. We are made of the same stuff, we are all just cells growing forth from other cells. It's not just you and me and the rest of the human race. Every single living thing is made up of cells that already existed and replicated. This means that we are all (all known living things on this planet) the products of a small group of the original living cells. Those first living beings that came into existence through the collecting together of strings of proteins in just the right chemical conditions began to grow and replicate, and now here we stand. We are all connected and in the grand scheme of the universe there is almost no difference between you and the mould that grows on bread if you leave it out for too long. I think that's amazing. This idea doesn't make me feel small, on the contrary I feel like I am a part of the universe. I am not a single "I" sitting lonely on a rock, I am a part of a great system that is simply unimaginably old. I don't need a soul to feel special. I'm a living creature. That's incredible to me.
Wednesday, 5 February 2014
It's a miracle! He's wrote another thing!
Soooo...
Miracles.
No.
Here's why:
Miracles are defined as "an event not ascribable to human power or the laws of nature and consequently attributed to a supernatural, especially divine, agency." So a miracle by definition is something that breaks the very laws of nature, something seemingly impossible, incredible, fantastical. The only thing capable of these feats is an omnipotent deity or supernatural force. The conversion of water to wine, walking on water, rising from the dead... pretty impressive. Personally I prefer Derren Brown but each to his own.
So why don't I believe in miracles? Well mostly because I don't ascribe to any particular religious belief (see other posts for why) so when I come across something that doesn't seem to make sense or have a logical cause then I don't just instantly say "[Insert appropriate deity/supernatural force here] has done this! Praise be to [him/her/it]!" I like to find out how and why the event has occurred.
Case in point (and one of the funniest stories in the entire world) the story of the "crying" trees in Frezno, California. A tree outside of a cathedral started to weep the tears of God himself (strange how they didn't say they were the tears of Allah or the tears of the Norse goddess Freyja just went straight for their own god...). People came from all over to bask in the glory of God's wonder. Crying trees. Pretty incredible huh? The one problem with this is that it wasn't actually tears. It was bug poop. Aphids were sucking the sap out of the tree and then pooping out a liquid-like substance that rained down due to the sheer number of the aphids. So people were travelling from all over to go and stand under a tree and get crapped on by aphids whilst calling out to God Almighty. In my opinion funny as Hell.
So how was it that people so easily believed that these were the tears of God? Well first off ignorance. These people didn't know about the aphids. This is perfectly excusable. They didn't know. Fair enough (although it does apparently happen every year and there were trees down the road that were also "crying" but anyway...) people can't be expected to know the reason for something they have never seen before (...every year...) but the way you react to something new is down to you as a person. Why didn't anyone question this? Well the second reason they believed this was a miracle is that they have never had to question anything in their entire lives. This is now just speculation but something tells me that they haven't ever had to think of anything for themselves. Parents, school, politicians and right the way through their lives the Good Book. They have been brought up to follow and at no point was questioning encouraged.
Now I don't see myself as some "free-spirit, man!" or some counter-culture guru who "knows the way things truly are" (I'm not that much of a dick). I am absolutely sure that I have been influenced by my parents and society and all the other various influences that can influence me but what I believe sets me apart from those who believed a tree was crying is that I would ask "Why is this tree crying?"
If I saw a tree crying I would not go "Wow. That's cool. God must have done that" I would find out exactly how plant-life had developed the ability to cry then I would probably offer it a tissue and tell it to pull itself together. My mind boggles that the first person that noticed this just accepted that this must be a miracle and didn't question it which brings me onto reason number kolme (3 in Finnish. Does that count as revision?): These people were looking for a miracle.
It's a sad fact that on this speck of rock and water, which is spinning round a massive (but not that massive in the general scheme of things) ball of nuclear fusion, not everyone is quite content. People are always looking for signs, especially from their chosen deity, because loneliness, for most, is a fate worse than death. In the TV series Vikings, a Northumbrian monk is kidnapped by vikings (surprise!) and contemplates the slaughter and sale into slavery of all his kinsmen. He calls out to God and asks why this has happened and why He won't answer his prayers, desperately looking for a sign that he is not alone because that would be so incredibly crushing.
(Rather cleverly, on the writers part, he hears a noise and then finds an owl has flown into the house. He says "Oh it's just an owl" but if he was a viking he would see this as a sign from the gods. Owl's have no meaning in his own religion and so it is dismissed as a coincidence...)
If you had a sign, anything at all, to show that you weren't alone in this gigantic infinite void we call the universe, how reassured would you be? To know that everything will be ok and you don't need to be scared anymore. Perhaps more importantly that you are right about the way the world works.
"Wait a minute" I hear you say "just because this one was poop doesn't invalidate all the other miracles!" and that's true but I can dismiss a fair few more miracles with only a single sentence.
Why did God perform this miracle?
"Jesus has appeared in my toast!" Why?
"The Virgin Mary has appeared to me on a cork!" Why?
The really stupid miracles where it's Jesus' face on some toast or his mum on a mouldy wall are simply pareidolia (Google it, I'm not doing everything for you...). Why would Jesus turn up on some toast? An omnipotent deity, that can literally create and destroy matter itself spends his time taking selfies with heated bread? Seriously? I kind of talked about this in the post I did on religious hypocrisy but if I was God I think malaria would come higher up on the list of "Stuff I should deal with" than imprinting my likeness with the help of electrical appliances onto wheat products. Anyone that actually believes that that's what God does is essentially insulting their one true deity.
Even the famous ones like turning water into wine and walking on water were (if they have been reported truthfully and accurately in that most inaccurate of books) stupid miracles. Very impressive tricks but it's not going to do much for tsunami victims.
These are just useless miracles, obviously they are stupid but what about when someone is saved from a natural disaster or survives a horrific car crash unscathed? What about when Jesus fed the 5000 or healed the sick? Well I think I can cast a shadow of doubt onto these miracles with one question too:
So God is selective?
Jesus feeds the 5000 but leaves all the other starving people in the world to go hungry? He cures one guys leprosy but doesn't actually eradicate it from the face of the planet? He heals SOME blind and lame people but still leaves open the possibility and opportunity for everyone else to go blind or lame?
This stumps the whole "All loving God" idea pretty good. He saves some guy from a car crash but the kid born with a hole in their heart doesn't get a look in. How loving.
At this point the devout believer in miracles desperately flicks though his papers and tries to find a miracle that can survive this barrage of questioning. They don't find one.
The only way out of this is to accept that their God cares more about toast selfies than dying children, accept that their God is not all-powerful or he isn't all-loving, accept that their God is selective and may well not love them or reject the existence of miracles. I suggest that the last one is the most comforting and doesn't impinge on God (as long as you can live with the whole "part of His plan" thing and that he isn't going to come and save you. You will have to save yourself or look to others for help).
So why doesn't God intervene? Well imagine that miracles are real, the laws of nature are putty in the hands of God. It would be terrifying. The laws of nature could change at any time. What if God decides to turn off gravity or walking on water becomes possible for everyone? What if it was more subtle like increasing the boiling temperature of water by 1 degree? How would you be able to live in this world of uncertainty? It would be utter chaos. But the world is not chaos it is strictly ordered. Why would God create such order and then 6000 years in (there are actually people that think the world is only 6000 years old which isn't actually far out. I mean they are only wrong by a few BILLION YEARS) just go "Screw it I want to walk on water" or "Crap, out of wine. Quick pass me the Evian"?
Miracles make no sense. It's non-sensical. It's bloody stupid.
So next time you see a story in the newspaper or hear of a miraculous occurrence, please stop and think to yourself "Could it just be bug poop?"
Miracles.
No.
Here's why:
Miracles are defined as "an event not ascribable to human power or the laws of nature and consequently attributed to a supernatural, especially divine, agency." So a miracle by definition is something that breaks the very laws of nature, something seemingly impossible, incredible, fantastical. The only thing capable of these feats is an omnipotent deity or supernatural force. The conversion of water to wine, walking on water, rising from the dead... pretty impressive. Personally I prefer Derren Brown but each to his own.
So why don't I believe in miracles? Well mostly because I don't ascribe to any particular religious belief (see other posts for why) so when I come across something that doesn't seem to make sense or have a logical cause then I don't just instantly say "[Insert appropriate deity/supernatural force here] has done this! Praise be to [him/her/it]!" I like to find out how and why the event has occurred.
Case in point (and one of the funniest stories in the entire world) the story of the "crying" trees in Frezno, California. A tree outside of a cathedral started to weep the tears of God himself (strange how they didn't say they were the tears of Allah or the tears of the Norse goddess Freyja just went straight for their own god...). People came from all over to bask in the glory of God's wonder. Crying trees. Pretty incredible huh? The one problem with this is that it wasn't actually tears. It was bug poop. Aphids were sucking the sap out of the tree and then pooping out a liquid-like substance that rained down due to the sheer number of the aphids. So people were travelling from all over to go and stand under a tree and get crapped on by aphids whilst calling out to God Almighty. In my opinion funny as Hell.
So how was it that people so easily believed that these were the tears of God? Well first off ignorance. These people didn't know about the aphids. This is perfectly excusable. They didn't know. Fair enough (although it does apparently happen every year and there were trees down the road that were also "crying" but anyway...) people can't be expected to know the reason for something they have never seen before (...every year...) but the way you react to something new is down to you as a person. Why didn't anyone question this? Well the second reason they believed this was a miracle is that they have never had to question anything in their entire lives. This is now just speculation but something tells me that they haven't ever had to think of anything for themselves. Parents, school, politicians and right the way through their lives the Good Book. They have been brought up to follow and at no point was questioning encouraged.
Now I don't see myself as some "free-spirit, man!" or some counter-culture guru who "knows the way things truly are" (I'm not that much of a dick). I am absolutely sure that I have been influenced by my parents and society and all the other various influences that can influence me but what I believe sets me apart from those who believed a tree was crying is that I would ask "Why is this tree crying?"
If I saw a tree crying I would not go "Wow. That's cool. God must have done that" I would find out exactly how plant-life had developed the ability to cry then I would probably offer it a tissue and tell it to pull itself together. My mind boggles that the first person that noticed this just accepted that this must be a miracle and didn't question it which brings me onto reason number kolme (3 in Finnish. Does that count as revision?): These people were looking for a miracle.
It's a sad fact that on this speck of rock and water, which is spinning round a massive (but not that massive in the general scheme of things) ball of nuclear fusion, not everyone is quite content. People are always looking for signs, especially from their chosen deity, because loneliness, for most, is a fate worse than death. In the TV series Vikings, a Northumbrian monk is kidnapped by vikings (surprise!) and contemplates the slaughter and sale into slavery of all his kinsmen. He calls out to God and asks why this has happened and why He won't answer his prayers, desperately looking for a sign that he is not alone because that would be so incredibly crushing.
(Rather cleverly, on the writers part, he hears a noise and then finds an owl has flown into the house. He says "Oh it's just an owl" but if he was a viking he would see this as a sign from the gods. Owl's have no meaning in his own religion and so it is dismissed as a coincidence...)
If you had a sign, anything at all, to show that you weren't alone in this gigantic infinite void we call the universe, how reassured would you be? To know that everything will be ok and you don't need to be scared anymore. Perhaps more importantly that you are right about the way the world works.
"Wait a minute" I hear you say "just because this one was poop doesn't invalidate all the other miracles!" and that's true but I can dismiss a fair few more miracles with only a single sentence.
Why did God perform this miracle?
"Jesus has appeared in my toast!" Why?
"The Virgin Mary has appeared to me on a cork!" Why?
The really stupid miracles where it's Jesus' face on some toast or his mum on a mouldy wall are simply pareidolia (Google it, I'm not doing everything for you...). Why would Jesus turn up on some toast? An omnipotent deity, that can literally create and destroy matter itself spends his time taking selfies with heated bread? Seriously? I kind of talked about this in the post I did on religious hypocrisy but if I was God I think malaria would come higher up on the list of "Stuff I should deal with" than imprinting my likeness with the help of electrical appliances onto wheat products. Anyone that actually believes that that's what God does is essentially insulting their one true deity.
Even the famous ones like turning water into wine and walking on water were (if they have been reported truthfully and accurately in that most inaccurate of books) stupid miracles. Very impressive tricks but it's not going to do much for tsunami victims.
These are just useless miracles, obviously they are stupid but what about when someone is saved from a natural disaster or survives a horrific car crash unscathed? What about when Jesus fed the 5000 or healed the sick? Well I think I can cast a shadow of doubt onto these miracles with one question too:
So God is selective?
Jesus feeds the 5000 but leaves all the other starving people in the world to go hungry? He cures one guys leprosy but doesn't actually eradicate it from the face of the planet? He heals SOME blind and lame people but still leaves open the possibility and opportunity for everyone else to go blind or lame?
This stumps the whole "All loving God" idea pretty good. He saves some guy from a car crash but the kid born with a hole in their heart doesn't get a look in. How loving.
At this point the devout believer in miracles desperately flicks though his papers and tries to find a miracle that can survive this barrage of questioning. They don't find one.
The only way out of this is to accept that their God cares more about toast selfies than dying children, accept that their God is not all-powerful or he isn't all-loving, accept that their God is selective and may well not love them or reject the existence of miracles. I suggest that the last one is the most comforting and doesn't impinge on God (as long as you can live with the whole "part of His plan" thing and that he isn't going to come and save you. You will have to save yourself or look to others for help).
So why doesn't God intervene? Well imagine that miracles are real, the laws of nature are putty in the hands of God. It would be terrifying. The laws of nature could change at any time. What if God decides to turn off gravity or walking on water becomes possible for everyone? What if it was more subtle like increasing the boiling temperature of water by 1 degree? How would you be able to live in this world of uncertainty? It would be utter chaos. But the world is not chaos it is strictly ordered. Why would God create such order and then 6000 years in (there are actually people that think the world is only 6000 years old which isn't actually far out. I mean they are only wrong by a few BILLION YEARS) just go "Screw it I want to walk on water" or "Crap, out of wine. Quick pass me the Evian"?
Miracles make no sense. It's non-sensical. It's bloody stupid.
So next time you see a story in the newspaper or hear of a miraculous occurrence, please stop and think to yourself "Could it just be bug poop?"
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