If you recall in my previous postings, I stated my belief in a triad of aspects that make up a living being. The physical body, an ephemeral spirit, and the mind which connects that two. While this does add more dimensions to the previous mind-body arguments that this was first raised in, it also attempts to explain several of the arguments raised during the discussion of self. During one of our discussions, we used an example of a man who somehow had his brain removed and connected to his body through radio waves. As such, the man controlled his body as if everything was in place. However, the radio waves somehow were blocked, and the man lost control over his body and resided within his own conciousness within his brain, cut off from the world. The spirit is what appears to make the transfer from body to mind in that case. What happens to the spirit after physical death, which is the death of the body and mind (the mind being the result of overlap between spirit and body), is a matter of personal belief. Is this proof that there is a soul? Of course not. This is my belief that answers the chief example used during our discussion. The argument would last for eternity on the existence of a soul, simply because the only way to truly determine the existence of a soul (presuming a soul lasts after death) is to die. And no one’s coming back from that experiment.

The other issue raised is if one were to be copied exactly, would there now be two of that person? And the answer is no. The act of creation, of the creation of a sentient being, creates an entirely new being, a new soul if you will. The copy is a new person, even though it may look exactly like me and possess the same memories. It’s a similar case with identical twins (minus the exact memories bit). Do you call them the same name simply because they look just like each other? Of course not! This time however, the twin or copy in this case has the exact same memories of my life up until that point. Granted, there would be naming issues to work through, but if we went our separate ways then we would have completely different experiences in life. Ten years from now, my copy and I could meet up, and he would be slightly different from me, simply by virtue of differing experiences. As for the issue of whether or not my copy has a soul, I look to a Dao view of the world: in Daoism, the universe was not made. The universe was grown, if it was made then someone would be able to explain how it was made. So it is with souls, you cannot describe how a soul is made, instead it is grown with the creation of a new being. The universe is infinite, the creation of a new being is simply an offshoot of the universe represented by a physical shell.

I find myself reviling the idea that I have no free will over my actions. It’s an instinctive lurch in my gut that the idea that my life is nothing more than my genes and whatever has occured in my life. However, this is not the basis of a credible argument. Regarding this argument over free will, I must point out that it requires many things: an understanding on genetics, complete knowledge of the mechanics of the brain, and the ability to take those two previous requirements and applying them to every single human being on the planet. But then there are the other random events in the world: natural disasters and random acts of good and evil. If there is any sort of being that can comprehend all of these factors, then that being surely deserves the label of God.

It is my personal belief and experience that you can predict what people will do 9/10, based upon your knowledge of that person and their life experiences. There is that 1/10 chance though, that that person will surprise you. In my personal experience, I have found that everyone has a breaking point. A point where prior to reaching it, you can predict their actions based on that 9/10 odds. At that breaking point though, they follow through with the OTHER choices they have. That breaking point is not something that can be measured. No amount of genetic understanding or personal psychology will ever be able to measure where that point is. My personal experience comes from the relationship issues of other people. Many people find themselves being drawn to the same kind of person over and over again, and end up being hurt each time. Yet eventually they find the point where they change how they behave and deal with the people they’re attracted. Why does THAT time matter? You do the same thing and get screwed over by the same kinds of people over and over again, but at what point is it enough? Can you look at someone and say, “Ok when this person is hurt by this kind of person X amount of times, then they’ll change to THIS kind of person.” You look at someone walking into a situation you have seen them enter before, and expect them to repeat the same things they did before, but then they surprise you. They CHANGE.

That is the reasoning behind my revulsion of this lack of free will. You can predict how someone will behave in a given situation 90% of the time, but the remaining 10% is what is evidence of free will. That breaking point is the moment where a person has two paths: to follow through with that prediction, or to surprise everyone else and do something, ANYTHING, different. And there is no conceivable way to predict when or how a person will react and reach that breaking point. Some people may never change at that point, but the fact that some people do is evidence that true choice, no matter how rare, exists.

Posting for the week of 11/20/09

The question is if the new life we create our equal? For some reason, for animals and for AI, people have argued no. If we create life, then it is not equal. And there is certainly some truth to that. We are the creators. We are in the same position that God (whether or not It exists) is in to us. There is power in creation. Yet all of that means squat if our creations come back to destroy us (survival of the fittest). So in that regard are we equal? If we create fully sentient intelligence, then that means they have free will. You can’t create a complete sentient being without giving it all the capabilites that we have. If you create an intelligent being that can only perform certain actions, then you’re creating a very advanced and complex computer. For true sentience, you must give the creation free will.

So does that make them equal? Technically all forms of life (artificial or natural) are equal. There is no such thing as “better” or “worse.” You can argue all you want about the human capacity for intelligence and design, but drop an EMP over the world. Knock out all our technology. Then let’s see how well we do against Mother Nature. What would make artificial life subservient to us? Because we’re the creators? If we create fully functional sentient beings, then you can’t simply treat them as slaves or second class citizens. By virtue of having free will, our creations may very not tolerate that situation for very long. And looking back at human history, you can tell that uprisings are rarely pretty. So what if that happens? What makes us better if we lose? If we lose then who cares if we’re better than our creations? We’d all probably be dead. The simplest way to resolve that conflict is that by giving free will to our creations, we must acknowledge that we are creating beings with the same capacity for thinking that we possess. Is it an issue about having a soul? What is a soul? How can we make an argument against AI based on a soul, when we have no proof that there is a thing like the soul. If we create beings with the exact same intellectual and emotional capacities as us, then we are creating our equals.

Materialists hold that the body is controlled by the mind, and that we are just one very large and complicated flesh-machine controlled solely by the brain. And they do have a point: the brain is a vital part of being human. Damage to the brain more often than not affects how we act or if we can act at all. And indeed, you could theorize that genetics influence the wiring of our brains and that controls how we act, but what makes us who we are? Massive psychological trauma can affect brain development, but what about other things? If we were all based on our brains, then our brains would be based off the genetic blueprints of our parents. And there are indeed certain characteristics passed on in children, such as temperment and the like, but there are other traits that have nothing to do with what we were born with. Rather they are based on what they experienced while they were maturing. What makes these changes to the brain? How does having a bad experience (not a traumatic one) affect our brain development? There’s no physical damage being done to the brain, yet something changes. Could it be to that moment of chemical release? Possibly, but what about other chemicals released during development? And why would those chemicals stop affecting our brains as we grow older? That would require having to have the neurons in our brains rewired, but nerves are incredibly hard to regrow. Something else is being changed here, that is not simply neurons firing based off the interpretation of stimuli.

Yet the dualists don’t necessarily have the answer either. If the body is controlled by the mind, then what’s the point of the brain? If it was to simply focus as a recieving tower, then we should be able to find the part of the brain that “recieves” these signals. And there are parts of the brain that have nothing to do with personality, that instead control basic functions like eating and breathing. Technically, a person’s personality shouldn’t be changed if it’s part of the mind, and yet putting a railroad spike (i.e. Phinneas Gauge) through one’s head could change your personality completely (if it didn’t kill you that is). And while one could attribute it to “damage to the control tower” then that means we should be able to fix the control tower, or at least figure out where the control tower is getting it’s bloody signals.

But why does it have to be mind and body? Couldn’t the personality be a part of the soul (granted, soul could be interchanged with mind in dualism, but I refer to it here as a separate entity)? Mind, body, and soul. The body is the physical shell that science has been to thoroughly explain, the soul being the substance that is constantly refined and make us who we are. The mind, however, is the crossing over of the two, like the center of a Venn diagram, between the body and soul. Is it really so implausible for the mind to function as the bridge between the body and soul, to have properties of both? Materialists say that the mind is neurons firing off to release certain chemicals which affect ________. However, materialists also say that light is the emission of electrically charged particles. Yet look at electrons and light. It is both a wave AND a particle, two completely different things. Is it really so impossible for the mind to be a combination of both the body AND the soul? Breaking down particles to a quantum level (string theory), would it be improbably to say that the soul may be a result of quantum interactions between organic molecules? And I understand that there is very little to suggest either of these things, but there is also very little to contradict them. The question can only be answered by complete understanding of a human being. The answer as to whether mind and body are one or two separate entities is only answered by death, and the dead are in no shape to tell us THAT particular answer.

The purpose of governments and laws is to provide and enforce a social contract that, through whatever means, prevents us from collapsing into total chaos and bashing each other’s brains in with rocks. Essentially the social contract being the protection of life and property, except in general, clearly defined exceptions (such as self defense). However, people personally must determine their own codes of conduct for themselves, for things NOT covered by the social contract (or at least should not be covered, such as homosexual marriage and smoking). Each human being represents his or her own separate consciousness, defining a separate universe through the eyes of THAT person. Every person is, in some way, his or her own God. YOU make the rules of right and wrong and the exceptions. Sure, the government and numerous religious organizations across the globe can tell you that these things right HERE are right and wrong, but at the end of the day you are still the one to actually adopt those rules for your standard of right and wrong.

That is what it means to be God of your own world, to be the final judge of what is right and wrong, of whether the exception was truly justified. Every single person in this world is different, yet every single one of those people is in control of his or her own world. Even identical twins differ in what they believe. That inability of being able to find pure right and wrong is a result of human diversity. As long as we are thinking beings, there will never be universal right and wrong. The only right and wrong that matters is the right and wrong that we decide upon, and the exceptions we encounter.

(This posting is for the week of 10/30)

The first stage, the aesthetic stage, suggests that people act in the constant pursuit of pleasure, with very little regard to the consequences. Indeed, this is supported by psychology about mental development, where all children go through a stage of cognitive development where it is difficult (if not impossible) to expand your mind beyond the self. However, the aesthetic is fully aware of what he or she chooses to do. The limits of the aesthetic are put in place by his or her peers, with the unconscious tradeoff being pleasure via peers or pursuing one’s pleasure to the extent that you alienate all of the people around you. That leaves aesthetics a very broad field to play with though. Eventually though, one reaches the point where he or she can no longer find pleasure playing withing those unspoken boundaries placed on us. At this point the aesthetic either breaks those boundaries and is put down by society, or conforms to the larger whole.

I have to disagree with the term “ethical” for this stage. I much rather prefer thinking of this as the humanistic stage. All three of the stages possess their own forms of ethics: the aesthetic maintains certain ethics to allow the pursuit of other pleasures while the “religious” stage pursues ethics of a higher calling. When I call this the humanistic stage, I mean that this is the stage that people live by the rules of the society they inhabit (at the very lowest level) to all of humanity (at the very highest in this stage). Argue all that you want about what does and does not make a man, but without society then we are not human. Look at the cases of wild children, if we have no human interaction (society) then we cannot grow into being humans. Human beings are born into this world as raw iron, and the course of the human experience forges that iron into a sentient human being accepted by his or her peers. Otherwise we become less than mindless beasts, not really belonging anywhere. This is the beginning of a long road where an aesthetic begins to search for a higher purpose other than the pursuit of personal pleasure. At this stage, that purpose is found by conforming with society. Do what should be done for the “greater good.” Of course there are different views of the greater good (i.e. Republicans and Democrats, etc) but all are united by the common purpose of being (at least overall) for the greatest good for the greatest portion of people. Yet there eventually reaches a breaking point, a crisis of faith if you will, where one has to question the rules that society has. Even if it’s just one rule, it opens the door to question others. Why is this law in place? Why does our society put value on this? What is the point of THIS? And from that one question, they begin the journey to the religious stage.

First thing first: throw away the term religious. It implies that a person at this stage is dedicating his or her life to a religion, when instead it is devoting oneself to a higher calling. This is not religious as much as it is transcending the human condition. Many people devote themselves to the laws of the society as the road to the greater good. The trascendant devotes him or herself to their own codes of moral conduct. If we follow the laws of society, which make us human, then we enter the social contract with other human beings. This is the formation of society. More importantly this is what makes us human. There are certain things you don’t do to avoid being ostracized by your society. The transcendant applies his or her own moral brand to the world. Few people go to the point where people can point and say, “That person is not normal” (for better or for worse) but the requirement for this stage (as I believe) is to acknowledge all the rules and laws that people agree to in the social contract, but then devote yourself to your own code.

(This is the blog post meant for the week of 10/23)

The example I use is torture. Many people agree that torture is a horrible thing. But what if it saves a life? What if it does save thousands, or tens of thousands? What if it saves you? What if it saves the countless people that would be hurt and damaged by the deaths of all those people. Is it worth it? And at what price? People say it’s wrong, that it costs us our humanity. But what is our humanity? What makes us human? The mere fact that there is another human being willing to kill tens of thousands of people suggests that there is something fundamentally flawed in that human being. In fact, it is a universal condition of every human being that we are flawed. And at the risk of sounding misanthropic, people are by their nature weak and pathetic. One in a hundred men can stand up and do something that requires strength. And then there are 99 who simply do nothing to change their current situation. Being human means enduring the pain and misery that come with trying to meet the standards and expectations of society. Being human is to be forced into a role that’s part of a larger machine to meet the approval of those around you.

Why would you ever want to be that?

For years I had been trying to be human, to live a life like that, to meet the expectations and standards of the larger people behind. I was never very good at being human. But then just last night, it occured to me. I had based my life on a basic set of principles. But by trying to be human, I found myself making those basic things much more complicated, with things like “right and wrong” and other standards that society puts on people and no one really asks why. I began to attach different cases of what was “right” and what was “wrong” to two of the four basic emotions, desire and wrath. I began to fear what would happen if I were to not meet the expectations I had set for myself in my attempts to be human, and when it appeared I was not then I began to be miserable. Trying to be human has only ever made me miserable. So I stopped, and went back to the basics and realized that THOSE are what I should live my life by. When you dedicate your life to basic principles, you step outside of the realm of right and wrong. My personal basic beliefs and how they affect the four primary emotions (desire, wrath, fear, and sorrow) are something I would love to cover in my next blog posting, but in the interest of time and space I shant list here. By dedicating your life to a basic set of values, free from human conceptions and limitations, you transcend the pain and misery of being human. Your life truly becomes your own, and in doing so you set yourself free of the cycle of living to meet the demands of others.

Well Mr. Kant, wake up and smell the roses.

People are, at their very cores, incredibly selfish creatures. You may recall me touching on this point during my essay on the meaning of life. There would be no reason to do anything if we do not derive some sort of physical or psychological satisfaction from it. Once again, there’s nothing “wrong” (if we must use such worthless terms like right and wrong) in admitting this, because anyone who claims to be different is a liar. Allow me to offer an example: someone goes to a soup kitchen to give out soup to the homeless. He or she claims that by doing so is to better the life of the homeless in some way or form. By this explanation, the homeless are the “end.” However, why is this person going to the soup kitchen and sacrificing his or her own time? That person may say they wish to help the homeless, that they feel good in giving his or her time in order to help someone else. And there we have it: it makes them feel GOOD.

Some people may argue that we do things that we don’t like. We’re required to go to school. Well if we didn’t go to school, then it would create all sorts of legal problems. We go to school to avoid those legal problems, if for no other reason at all. In this case, you make your choice based on the lesser of two evils. You don’t like going to school, but you like it a lot better than dealing with the government.

It’s brutally naive of Kant to say that people should be the “end.” People will always be the “means” to our own happiness. That’s how society was founded. We’re a lot happier making nice to each other than we are beating each other’s brains out with rocks. If we want to use “right and wrong,” then I say it’s not wrong because it applies to EVERYONE. Not just some people, but ALL people. As such, we can only be judged on how the “means” we take benefit other people. Because in the end, we all have the same end. The only difference is how we reach that end.

Unless of course you follow in my footsteps and get an upper management job in Hell, but that’s the story for another time.

Now I must say, I do believe in a God. I don’t believe in a Judeo-Christian God, but I believe there is a God. I don’t know if It gives a crap, but there is something out there. If you want to get into that whole argument, then I ask that you refer to my previous post, “Are you there God? It’s me, Kris Clark.” But I’m getting off topic, allow me to first point out that I’m something of an agnostic deist. I believe there is a God that started the universe but is maintaining a very laissez-faire approach to it. The most contact that that God has with the world is dealing with the inevitable question of what to do with us when we die. Assuming there’s a heaven and hell, then I believe you get into one or the other based on the impact of your decisions in life on your fellow man. I find it just plain stupid that an omnipotent, omniscient God will send you to hell cause you went to the wrong church. Seems like a brilliantly STUPID decision to base your eternal judgment on.

Sin, as I define it, is any intentional action or decision you make that cause negative impact on someone else’s life, whether it be psychological, emotional, or physical damage or pain. Your eternal fate should be based upon whether you caused happiness and an overall positive effect to the lives you touched, or if you were a selfish bastard who was out for his or her own and you didn’t care who you stepped on to achieve. The former obviously deserves some kind of reward, the latter simply deserves hellfire, pure and simple.