High Technology
December 3, 2007

For a few weeks now I've been working on a deep post about two words: Value and Property. They are the nuggets that have been rattling around my mind on an ever more frequent basis. It's almost as if I've been waiting for a revelation to bubble up to the tip of my tongue, but alas all I've produced is distraction from my soon to be written subject. These two words represent things that are so abstract they probably cause Picasso to wince in his grave, yet they are used so casually one would think they are as simple as any thing.

I realized what I was actually waiting for was to start playing the key board. I know the ideas are in my head like little marshmallows starting to scab over. If I don't start dancing in black and white the ideas are bound to go up in a puff of smoke. It is the pen that will toast them into a tasty treat begging for digestion from anyone who's acquired a taste for the brain manifeast.

Values i5
December 7, 2007

Value, in any form, requires an agent: a being able to connect a desire, importance or need to something. It's easy to extend the concept of value to life forms whom don't posses brains through anthropomorphism. A plant definitely needs light and water for survival and natural selection rewarded those whom "sought" out these things with continued existence. However, the plant does not have the capacity to value anything. Light and water are a requirements for it's life, but just as a time piece requires winding to be, they can not place a value on the requirements without a self.

In today's hurricane of political rhetoric, Family Values (Christian Values), surfaces more and more as the most decisive character requirement of our representatives. Naively many people believe Christian values is synonymous with goodness. Jesus' message of unconditional love to all, on the surface, sounds like a great way to answer all of the worlds problems in one great swoosh. But Mi casa Su casa requires everyone on the planet to willingly disown all of ones property, including the self: thus the "I live for Jesus" line. Conspicuously most Christians don't actually value losing their self or their property. Christ was a communist minus the guns plus one god. Christian values is paradoxally one of oppression: Submission to an invisible ruler, Selflessness, Complete passiveness, Unconditional love, and Unconditional forgiveness. Baaaaa...

Family values are the Christian zeitgeist system of censorship and control. The group is comfortable with certain behaviors and the flock places a great importance on not permitting anything that causes them to feel uncomfortable anywhere . If this rampant xenophobia stayed in the walls of the church it wouldn't be a problem for us Montagues who think the bible is as important to life as cheese wiz. Most Christians are comfortable with a husband and wife having 2.2 children, a white picket fence, per pressured public school prayer and a day dedicated to a god. The Sabbath day is dedicated to reinforcing dilutions and the children forged are into the carriers of the faiths torch.

I haven't frequently used the word value with a modifier because to do so would seem to diminish the value I and/or others place on other things. It would be inhuman for a person to claim that an individual was worthless to humanity because they didn't have a family nor valued the prospect of one. Unconditional dedication to a family that tortures oneself is a form of masochism, not a demonstration of righteousness. I'm sure the Human family argument could be used to combat the segregate nature of Family values but including all humans into a value structure shatters any semblance of order, especially when masochists and hedonists are essentially included in the whole of humanity. Christian values ultimately revolve around Christianity and it's current popular version. Even the Christians themselves don't mutually agree what Christian values are. Catholic values, Protestant values, Buddhist values, Jewish values, Muslim values etc. might as well be used in discourse. Whatever religious values a naturalist finds themselves immersed in, the common thread is a devotion to irrational beliefs and "right" behavior based on "divine" text.

"Social" is the humane modifier to use in conjunction with non property based values. All healthy individuals within a family or church value society but not all of society value the church or nuclear family. Society, as a continuing whole, values everything it produces that isn't destructive of itself: from grand gold sculptures of deities to poop porn. The majority valuing one thing does not diminish the value of an individual valuing an other. The Social values that have relevance in the context of Family values is public behavior and policy. Every healthy human being values the lack of aggression against oneself and therefore values public peace and the system that maintains it with the least amount of effort. There is a range of public behavior, thus a gradient of values, that consenting individuals are peacefully capable of executing. On the conservative side is full dress attire, such as the burka or Sunday dress; on the wild side is group sex on the beach while popping whippets. Very few communities would like to be at ether extreme of the social value system, thus the only fair way to set the bar is by direct democracy. Obviously the notion of Nation State prohibits the ability of having a community (town or city) set the bar. It's not surprising to find American voters are concerned primarily that the president be Christian. I presume that most naturalists value State leaders that aren't influenced by invisible dictators or ambiguous "holy" text but more so on rational principles. Social values revolve around equal treatment, personal rights and private freedoms, peace and fair social freedom.

What trumps even social values is life values. Every rational human on the planet realizes that we are symbiotic beings on this life covered planet. We value our existence, the billions of ancestors we had and the invisible hand of selection that enabled us to be. Knowing this implies a responsibility to our future descendants and the society that hopefully will exist. If we were to loss the wild space and the animals and plants that surrounds us, we would lose a majority of our identity. It's no secret that this grand tragedy of extinction and dwindling resources and landfill space is happening this very moment. A future society, without the buffer of the wilderness and it's unmatchable ability to balance the forces of life on the planet, would end up depressed in a bio dome destined for sterility of living and life. The Human family is far to big and the primary reason is that group identity, nation state or religious sect know that population is directly related to group power. If we as a species value intelligent life on planet earth we need to give the wilderness back to nature and not fear a sub billion world population. Society values culture and culture is found in towns and cities. Life values that animals have the freedom to roam and uncultivated plants get majority of the water and light.

The irony is that a couple that values an enormous family must place the highest value on the singles who want free love and a life without kids. That's the only way to be a species that doesn't kill it's self by making to much of it's self by achieving a balance. The intrinsic problem is that couples who value the big family usually do so not for the family but more for societal impact reasons. Our society truly depends on our children and their courage not let any group identity persuade them to not own themselves.

I know you believe
December 20,2007

The most distinguishing aspect of belief is that there is the possibility that the thing one believes is false. We all believe a few things, especially what we'll have for dinner tomorrow. In an astonishing display of denial, many supernaturalists insist that evolution is a belief. It's true that we'll never have a complete fossil record of every generation of every species, thus we are forced to speculate and thus believe certain specific scenarios took place. But we don't have to believe in evolution as a whole. We know that mutations take place and we know that nature provides pressure to select the most adapt individuals, thus we know evolution is a fact.

The two main arguments about knowing things from science and philosophy come from the quantum and matrix worlds. In the quantum world, pundits claim that since we can not know where a particle is or how fast it's going with absolute certainty we are forced to believe in its existence. Luckily most of the particles we interact with are clustered up into atoms and molecules. We don't have to believe they're there, we just have to except that our knowledge of they're exact location will always remain undetermined.

In the Matrix multiuniverse adherents claim that we can only believe because we interpret the world through our senses and our senses can be fooled. Therefor, we can never know what is real and what is being feed into our brain by a master programmer. And for that matter, we might not even be humans. We might be independent programs in a massive virtual reality program run by gamers one flight up in reality. Although I know that thinking is proof of being, we are not dependent on ourselves for proof of reality. The entire objective universe is proof of existence and it reveals a constancy through cause and effect. But I can hear Morpheus whisper, "The matrix has laws like gravity and stuff like matter..."

The belief in gods led naturally to this computer simulation version of dysfunctional disbelief in the natural world. And just as so many theologians claimed that they are spirits stuck in a fleshy imperfect body, todays sci-fi matrixlanders subordinate to computer operators, a sentient program thinking their self human, will says to their self, I believe this reality is not real. It's an evasive argument because it's relatively impossible to disprove and assumes that artificial computer simulations exist and can be self aware. It, along with the pink unicorn and god argument, demand that total knowledge of everything be achieved to discredit it's assertion. These people, or spirits/programs, "ought" to recognize the belief aspect: It is very possible (actually relatively infinitely probable) that they are wrong. The reason is simple and revolves around reason. In both scenarios there is a master agent, a being of some sort that has intent. The reason a master agent would create sub agents (programs/sheep) that lack the information of their true situation, would be for the entertainment of watching them try and discover the truth. But seeing as though the master agent would be the one setting the rules it would be they who allowed the sub agents to discover the truth. Or as in the movie The Matrix, we would be powering the process of fooling ourselves. Thus, the sub agents (people) would simply be extensions of the master agent (god) or a completely ridiculous redundancy which will eventually burn itself up. And that would mean that not only are we not real, but the agent that created us is also not real.

Obviously we are. To believe that we need to constantly believe that we are to be is ridiculous. Programs and spirits may be useful tools in describing the complex identity we have, the only thing we'll ever have, as we rent this body and dart around in a storm of fired synapses. But there is no reason to doubt reality. I know, therefor I am.

Meaning what exactly
December 29, 2007

After much investigation I've discovered that one of the driving forces that causes faith heads to latch onto their delusions is the belief that their life has infinitely more meaning if there is an invisible sky daddy fortifying their eternal meaning vessel. The standard issue argument against the naturalists is that our lives must be very shallow if all we can claim to be is the mortal human animal. The religious see us holding a glass that's empty and pity the loss of the contents. We reply, "What glass? I have a body"

It's as if those that walk in the kingdom of the holies, look at us humans and wonder how we can live from day to day, year to year, with the knowledge that at the end we'll "complexly" not be. It's assumed that since the secularists can't extract meaning from another dimension we are forced to place a valued rating system on the meaning of a persons life depending on how much their actions influenced, or their work influenced, future groups of humans. Logically the idea of god and the good Shepard is very comforting in this view of reality. In my opinion this is the cause that secular/religious people create idols of historically documented figures. The god child view also contains the belief that it doesn't really matter at all what one did or made, for as long as they loved the god and try to obtain the impossible perfection of his prophets, they have achieved the ultimate meaning in the eye of the god. Because apparently gods purpose was to create souls that could chose not to love him, thus creating a dualist system of mean and mean-nots. God must fear a world of atheists because then he would loss meaning, his purpose would be a failure and all would flash in a skillet of hell.

I'm not convinced that there is a value spectrum of meaning. Ether a person places meaning in something or they don't. If something had meaning placed in it, that meaning will always be a fact, even if the thing and the meaning giver fuzz out into the chaos of the universe. There is no such objective thing as "real" meaning by consensuses. There is success by consensus which is objective and measurable but just because 99.9% of the human population place meaning in a pattern of stars in the nights sky doesn't mean that a loner on a deserted island and his meaning of a split second falling star is any less meaningful. Nor does the mean of a collection of subjectively valued meanings have any relevance to individual or majority valued meaning; Meaning is not up for debate.

An interesting observation is that one can place meaning in something, then grow out of holding any meaning to the thing thus transforming it to a current state of non meaning according to the original meaning giver. But a fact of history can not be erased, and even though the meaning instiller fluctuates, once something gets a dose of meaning that dose can't be undone (sci-fi time travelers exempt - be careful what you mean to). Meaning is such a strange word because it's definition is reciprocal. Meaning is only comprehensible on a highly metaphysical level and thus understandably is used frequently in the dialog of god. Meaning is not godspeak's sole domain however. Most healthy people place ultimate meaning in society, mother nature and in their own existence: rightfully so. Naturalists know that this is the only life we'll ever have, and as such, nothing can have more meaning than every second we work to keep: waiting in the grocery store line or lining up for president. If we had an opportunity for eternal life, "our time" would be meaningless and that belief is a danger. Life on earth means everything.