REALITY v1.0
by Laslo Godel
Copyright 1999 All Rights Reserved
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| Never buy
v1.0 of anything' was the standard advice about buying
the very first version of any computer software. Unfortunately, the
current
version of `reality' we are all living in appears to many of us to be
just
as bug-ridden and shoddily written as Version 1.0 of any computer
program.
While I would like to think the following essays provide a few
bug-fixes
and useful comments, I cannot guarantee that these won't have a few of
their
own. As with any cure for any malady, there are bound to be
unpredictable
side-effects (see SOLUTIONS).
Although the essays here are presented in alphabetical order, they also contain links to each other, so you can either start at the beginning and read them sequentially, or jump from one link to another. Some people will doubtless agree with my views and others vehemently disagree with them - that is perfectly normal. I apologize to the latter group, but would hope the former do not support them too enthusiastically (see BELIEFS). Whichever group you come to belong to though, I hope you will find reading Reality v1.0 to be an interesting experience.
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ADDICTION
**********************Most of us would think of any form of addiction in sharply negative terms. Yet certain forms of it may have evolved as a vital survival aid to the human species.
How could such an absurd-sounding notion possibly be true?
One of the most ancient areas of the brain in evolutionary terms, the limbic system, contains the well-known pleasure and pain centers. These centers enabled whichever primitive organisms that first acquired them to break out of the robot-like responses to stimuli and become able to learn new ones by trial and error. As I suggested in my book PereGaea, they enable the individuals of a species to learn via experience rather than the species as a whole having to learn via natural selection.
As organisms evolved in that World, many of their submechanisms of brain and body multiplied within each individual, mutating slightly as they did so. This allowed various sensors to widen the range of stimuli they could respond to. The retina of the first eyes contained just a few `rods' able to respond only to the one wavelength of light, so that the organism perceived only the presence or absence of moving monochromatic shapes. But as retinas grew in size and rods grew in number to improve visual acuity, some of those rods mutated into cones to allow other wavelengths, or colors, to be perceived. In our own eyes three only slightly different such cones predominate, and are sensitive to red, green, and blue light. Even though these wavelengths are so close together on the electromagnetic spectrum, they are sufficient to allow our brains to interpret mixtures of them as that galaxy of colors with which we perceive our world.
A similar copy-and-mutate process may have happened with the very first pleasure and pain centers to have evolved on our own world. These `emotion centers', as we'll call them, may then produce feelings we know as satisfaction, anxiety, frustration, disappointment, even subtle ones like peace, calm, harmony. But what exactly are these emotions, indeed what `are' pleasure and pain themselves? Ultimately we can't say anymore than we can say what `red' is (we can't describe that in terms of wavelength since that is what our eyes detect, not what our brains perceive). All we can say is that they are, like the emotion centers that produce them, slightly different from each other because they need to respond to different perceived `sets of events'. It is almost as if the limbic system contains an internal `tongue' which enables us to taste the experience of life, perhaps here too as sweet, bitter, sour and saline, or as some mixture of these.
But what are these `sets of events', and how are they perceived? What happens when the emotion centers register them? The emotion centers must do something more than merely `register' them, otherwise there would be no point in their existence. They would simply never have evolved.
The limbic system has a close relationship with the brain's cortex, the third and outermost layer of the brain (the first and oldest layer is the brainstem, this is concerned mostly with an organism's internal `housekeeping' functions, breathing, bloodflow, etc, though these can be modified in specific ways by messages from the limbic system, eg: the famous `fight or flight' response). The cortex, more specifically its frontal area, allow more complex organisms to plot, plan, decide, scheme, and ultimately organize behavior-plans to attain long-term objectives that will in turn bring pleasure and minimize pain in the future (I suggested a theory about how a `cortex' might do this in my book PereGaea). It is in effect the cortex which gives us our sense of time, for it allows us to see what might happen when certain amounts of it has passed (might the sense of `mightness' have its own limbic emotion center?) When the cortex signals the limbic system that a plan has reached its conclusion, the appropriate emotion center, perhaps the one for `satisfaction', can then signal the brainstem to prepare the body for the ingestion of richer foods, a sexual encounter, or some other form of survival-enhancing excitements. Other organisms will perceive these changes as a `mood-change' - which may cause their cortexes to alter their plans so that similarly `successful' outcomes might eventually be arrived at. This adds another useful function to the limbic emotion centers, they enable certain kinds of social interaction to occur, which may enhance the collective survival of the species. And that in turn promotes the evolution of yet more emotions and their corresponding centers, along with an even bigger cortex able to handle more complex social situations. This may well be why humans are as different from chimpanzees as those are from monkeys (see SPIRITUALITY).
We can now come back to the question of `benevolent' addictions which our pleasure-seeking emotions at least ultimately are. When a cortex plan is successful, the emotion center it stimulates in turn sends it a signal which causes it to retain that plan longer than it otherwise would. This also causes the cortex to formulate `subplans' which will cause the organism to place itself in a position where it may be able to follow the original plan again. That plan in effect lengthens. As the organism acquires more experience, its cortex may develop several alternative subplans that lead into that one key emotional gratificational plan. Conversely, the organism may develop plans and subplans that lead it away from painful situations. If it is a social animal and the pain has arisen from some form of dispute, emotion centers may have evolved that allow it to express what we interpret as anger, appeasement, even `reasonability'. Again I have described in more detail how all this might work in my book PereGaea.
Artificial narcotics such as heroin or cocaine can stimulate the emotion centers directly. This means that they in effect short-circuit the cortical connections that allow the organism to plan long-term survival strategies. In our world heroin seems to stimulate virtually all our pleasurable emotions at once. The vital link between mind and emotion, upon which our humanity ultimately rests, is then broken. The individual may achieve his nirvana, but he is likely to starve or, at the very least, lose the ability to earn the money to feed his addiction, even by dishonest means.
Do all these notions of `organisms', `limbic systems', `pleasure and pain centers' and `cortical plotting' mean we are really nothing more than machines? Eating and reproducing machines that operate most efficiently by stimulating each other in certain ways? In short, yes. Why? The long answer to that question is implicit in the following essays
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ALIENS
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Much has been spoken about the possibility of contact with extraterrestrials, whether there even are any, whether we have or will meet them here on Earth, on their own worlds, or on `neutral territory' in Space (see COLONIZATION). Much of it may seem fanciful. But with something alien, provided such notions don't contravene our laws of physics - or not too many anyway - fancifulness is culturally relative. In other words, can we really deride notions which, to most `educated' people, seem silly? Like little green men in flying saucers who have never known warfare and who, out of the goodness of their hearts, come to Earth to Solve All Our Problems?
And that's the trouble. Since we have absolutely no experience in this area, we can say absolutely nothing. For instance, the `common-sense' view is that, since any aliens must survive as we do in an environment which doesn't care whether any being survives or not, they will, through parallel evolution, develop much the same social structures as we have. They may as a part of that even acquire similar emotions to ours (see ADDICTION), although they will almost certainly display them differently from the way we do. Yet there is no evidence to support these suppositions, since there is no evidence to support any supposition. We might look back on our own history and at the often negative results of what happens when one human culture comes into contact with another. But can that really tell us anything about what might happen when human meets non-human?
While we have to try to keep an open mind here, assumptions of some sort are nevertheless unavoidable in any situation otherwise we would not be able to survive at all (see BELIEFS). In other words, if Contact is made, we are going to have to make decisions, and these can only be based on `intelligent guesses', or rather, on what seem like them at the time. To my mind, if we have to choose one assumption to `keep in the back of our minds' in the event of Contact, then I have to say the `common sense' one I've just described seems more likely to improve our chances of surviving the encounter than any of the `little green angel' ones. At least it is based on some experience, not on what that experience itself has so often shown us to be wishful thinking. It is for these reasons that I don't think we ought to attempt to make Contact ourselves by beaming radio messages through radio telescopes at promising looking stars, as I believe has in fact been done on at least one occasion. Not until we can at least travel between the stars ourselves, as well as possess correspondingly advanced defensive firepower. Otherwise any aliens we meet could insist we subscribe to their belief systems. Like so many of our own people, they too may believe in little green beings in flying saucers. Or even in fairies.
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ART
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I really don't know how one becomes an artist. There are so many random events that can start a person off on that path (see RESPONSIBILITY). But to my mind you only really start when, after what may be many years of learning the basic craft without which no art is possible, somehow, suddenly, you feel you are on the verge of discovering some whole new continent. Now, if only you can get there and explore... It is at that instant that you `cross the line' and becomes an artist. And if you realize what is happening, you feel immensely lucky, probably far more so than you probably would if you had won a million dollars in a lottery. You now feel you have something you feel is worth doing with your life. And even if, a lifetime later, you feel you have failed, you still feel grateful you at least had the chance.
There are so many hazards to overcome though that you may well find yourself in that situation. Just crossing to that continent is hard, for it can take much trial and error to turn that still hazy, nebulous idea into a firm notion of just how you are going to bring it to fruition. If it is a book or a movie, just how are you going to flesh out its theme with location, characters, situation? If it is a series of visual designs or a piece of music, how can you ensure that these will induce the same perceptions in your audience as they do in you? Just what words, sounds and images will you need to squeeze into your opus to produce that total effect you are after?
If you manage to reach that shore, exploration begins in earnest. You will traverse the mountains of ideas and inspiration, the valleys of uncertainty, the rivers of diversions, the forests of fashion, trends, and other people's well-meant notions. Some of those landscapes may be beautiful and exciting when passed through in the heat of discovery, others will seem even more sterile and bare than the ones of he shores you left behind, and will be very slow and tedious going indeed.
And during all that exploration, you might sink at any time without trace into a swamp of all-consuming despair, get lost in a jungle of insanity, or a lake of too many responsibilities, of simple survival in the `real' world for yourself and those who may have become attached to you. Like any explorer, you have to live to tell the tale, but if you do, you cannot help but tell it well.
You may find however, like other explorers, that life after life is even harder than anything that has gone before. Other explorers will begin to move into `your' continent, and many will find many fascinating things that you could not help but have missed because that continent was so huge. But eventually it will become known, and explorers will be replaced by surveyors, those who will produce good and interesting work, but which can now be no more than craft rather than art, of landscapes rather than horizons, of people rather than of peoples. Then the land speculators and real estate agents will move in, along with all the other frontier townsfolk. Livings can now be made, contracts signed, reputations built. Finally the cities arrive and, along with the highways and the freeways that connect them, the land becomes devoured and sometimes debauched, with the `hot new genre' little more than a veneer for that same tired old tales we've seen again and again, along with the tawdry and pornographic. Your `magic' continent is now no more than an extension of the old continent you thought you left behind.
If you are still young enough to up stakes and move on to find yet another whole new continent to explore, you are even luckier than you were the first time, since few artists find more than one continent in their brief lives. It is far more likely that some bright, new, young person will have the good fortune to leave his home on that `new' continent you discovered and discover a whole new one of his own. If you are not too old, you will share his delight, and perhaps even try and explore a few of its undiscovered mysteries yourself.
And we will, I hope, never run out of artistic continents to discover and discover and discover. Nor the energy to explore them, nor the tolerance for those who must. And that tolerance is just as limited as it ever was, because it is now added to by hordes of old inhabitants of continents long subsumed, of poetry, oil painters, `creativists', and, perhaps most conservative of all, rock musicians. The pressures to conform are perhaps now most severe amongst these `non-conformists'.
So how then would we recognize our new explorers? As always we can't. Because most quickly learn to keep themselves well hidden until they have their tale to tell, when they can then be seen to have told it well.
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BEAUTY
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It's always puzzled me why peacocks have such enormous, exquisitely beautiful tails. The conventional answer has been that this is because it is a superstimulus, bigger brighter tails act as stronger sexual attractants to the female of the species. So long as they don't impede the male bird's survival too much, they may become even more spectacular.
Yet this seems to me to be only one half of the equation. As the male bird's tail evolves its particular form, so surely must the female's instinctive preference for it, otherwise those males would be no better at finding mates than their duller brethren and their tails would eventually be lost to the species. Similarly, it's not impossible for peahens to eventually evolve who respond more vigorously to smaller, less brightly colored displays. Indeed something like this may have happened with other species. When we look at birds with less elaborate tails such as bower or lyre birds, we cannot know whether they once had tails even more outrageous than the peacock's instead of the lesser ones they have now.
What about the human instinct for personal attractiveness? Maybe we too have evolved similar such responses which, since they don't have any effect on our survival, can evolve relatively randomly. A purely chance male preference for hairlessness in females (and vice versa) may have caused us to lose our hairy coats. Other such sexual preferences may have even have caused the total displacement of all other humanoid species by homo sapiens sapiens.
And what are sexual stimuli based on but combinations of the even more primitive perception of line, form, texture and color via our limbic subcenters? (See ADDICTION.) We also appear to have evolved an appreciation for straight lines, regular geometric shapes, and `orderly arrangements', even though it is very hard to define just what these `really' are. More than a few people have tried to find out (amongst other things) by stimulated these centers artificially using various narcotics such as LSD and mescaline. We also have a preference for more subtle `aesthetics' such as simplicity and elegance (see SCIENCE). From where could these limbic affinities have sprung, since it is hard to see how they could have aided our survival in the earlier days of our evolution? They must, like all our proclivities, have evolved solely via chance. But since they did no harm, they were under no evolutionary pressure to recede (except again by chance). In the event they have remained with us long enough to became useful with the very first beginnings of science and technology, where order is of the very essence. Indeed they may have been responsible for their first beginnings. Occam's Razor is all about ultimate simplicity, and as such is the foundation of all science, since we have found that the simplest explanations of observable phenomena are usually the most correct, provided they are also complete. Even if we don't quite know why... (See GOD.)
So we appear to have two major sets of aesthetics, those that aid our organic survival directly such as sex and humor (just as vital in complex social structures), and those that do so indirectly, such as those for simplicity and order. They can be inimical but certainly need not be, indeed virtually all our cultures are exquisite blends of the two (could `exquisiteness' be yet another emotion center?). We can see this most vividly in our computer-graphic representations of such things as equations, chaos, fractals, Mandelbrot Sets, and even some simple mathematical equations.
Ultimately all our cultures appear to rest on basically the same feedback loop of peacock tailfeathers and peahen preference for them. As artists explore new aesthetic forms, so the appreciations of their various audiences change and evolve, and apparently by chance in spite of what critics would have us believe (see ART). But now, for the first time in all our collective histories, a new `meta-culture' has entered all our cultures to link them together, that of science (see SCIENCE). It need not, as so many proclaim, subsume them all so that the whole of Earth becomes a monoculture (as if our whole world will be taken over by `the BLOB' as portrayed in many movie remakes). Even if it did, how long would it last? What wholly new aesthetic might we eventually come to see from an extraterrestrial culture, if we can perceive it as such at all? (See ALIENS.) Theirs will almost certainly have derived from a quite different source, especially if their brains have no equivalent to our limbic system because they evolved to cope with a very different environment.
Or to put it another way, if we could cross peacock with bower bird, what tail preferences would the progeny inherit? How would females of both species respond sexually to those progeny? How would those progeny respond to each other?
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BELIEFS
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How do we really know the Earth isn't flat? The suggestion has been made that the Earth's surface could `really' be like one of those old computer games in which objects, ships or satellites, that sail off one edge reappear intact from the opposite edge, moving at the same speed and direction as before. Similar arguments have been advanced suggesting that the Earth - or even the entire Universe itself - is `really' some other particular shape, a disk or multipoint star for instance, or a sphere, torus, pyramid or dodecahedron. Similar sorts of things can be done with that old wive's tale that the `moon is made of green cheese'. Although men have landed on it, an advocate of the notion would simply point out that `men have only landed on its surface. How do we know it isn't really 100% green cheese underneath?' Then, should it finally be proved once and for all that it isn't made of green cheese, that advocate could simply transfer his belief to any or all the planets of our solar system and claim that these are made of green cheese. Should that subsequently be disproved, he will simply move his claim out further, perhaps into neighboring star systems and beyond to the point where it may actually become impossible to prove that some object unreachable billions of lightyears away isn't made of green cheese (now how could we ever hope to prove that a black hole isn't made of green cheese?).
You can in fact go as far as you like with these sophistic sorts of arguments. And if you find it annoying that you can't quite shoot them down, then I know how you feel. I felt that way too until I discovered Karl Popper's notion of unprovability. To use my own slightly modified definition, `if a proposition or an assertion can be neither proven nor unproven, then it can have no validity' (There are a few problems with this though, I'll come back to these shortly).
Most people however simply make an appeal to `commonsense' when confronted with some unprovable notion they don't care for. The best commonsense definition of commonsense I've encountered to date is `what you pick up when you chuck all that philosophical rubbish out of your head and go out and learn about life'. But for some of us the fundamental questions still niggle at us in the backs of our minds. And commonsense can let you down badly. As a physicist might say, `it's nearly useless when you try to understand what makes reality really tick'.
Science itself provides some of the answer to the uncertainties here (see SCIENCE). In short, all science's theories, laws, models of reality are provisional, that is, treated as if they were `true' until they can be displaced by new ones. That whole process rests on observation, and the checking of those observations by impartial observers. Perhaps we could attach `confidence percentages' to theories that reflect the extent to which they appear to represent reality. For example, superstring theory might be assigned a confidence rating of 10%, whereas established theories like evolution and quantum chromodynamics might have confidence ratings of 90%. Nothing would ever have a rating of 100%, not in science, anyway. And this is the problem with unprovability - it means no proposition can really be completely proven or unproven. Even in mathematics, where 2 + 2 = 4 appears absolute and real, Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem states that `no logical statement can ever be completely proven from within the framework of the logic containing it'. Perhaps this is because mathematics - and logic - are only highly symbolized shorthand forms of the spoken languages we use to try and describe reality to each other. They are not a part of that reality itself, even though they may seem so.
Now, what kind of confidence ratings would one attach to the claims made by any of Earth's great religions? Or old favorites like astrology, numerology, and tarot card readings? That can rather depend on the people one has been in contact with. The number of people who would rate one or more of these as being 100% probably even now somewhat outweighs that number who would put it at less than 10%. Many of those people would make claims like `they represent higher truths which you, in your blindness, cannot see'.
And that, ultimately is the heart of the problem. What then `is' knowledge? Or in the language even commonsense occasionally permits: `How do you know for sure? You might be being conned by somebody.' Yet we simply cannot go though our lives continually questioning people, or our beliefs, or even the simple day-to-day variants of these we call `assumptions', otherwise we would simply become too neurotic to survive. If we look at a house and only see one wall, we don't assume that it has only the one wall like a house front on a movie lot. We assume it is complete. Similarly with all the other objects in our existence, cars, cats, computers. This is the basis, and value, of commonsense. The benefits usually far outweigh the penalties, though it comes at the price of sometimes leading us badly astray (see TRUST). I too am obliged to make certain assumptions, that is, have beliefs, even though I try to keep them as few as possible. I believe for instance that writing these essays may do more good for people than harm, else I could not write them.
Unfortunately, one major component of why we believe this rather than that may be because at some time in the past we were approached by somebody who made us feel uncertain about our belief in something, then they used the force of argument and personality to persuade us that theirs was `in fact' the correct belief. And that of course is the oldest trick in the book, especially for salespeople, whether of hair restorer or of religious salvation. Yet there is a positive aspect of persuasion. We have in most parts of the Western World at least hard-won democratic systems resting on a foundation of educated and literate populations. None of that could have happened without persuasion, without people coming to believe in something as if it were - or could become - absolute fact. Much the same applies in the messy real world of science, a new claim can be tested by other scientists, but they must often first be persuaded that checking the claim is worth the time and effort involved. And as for the rest of us, our livelihoods, to say nothing of our necessary feelings of well-being and confidence, so often depend on making the best decision we can, and committing ourselves to the outcome for better or for worse, whether we are getting married or choosing a career. Deciding to subscribe to a belief system which claims to offer guidance in such essential matters does not then seem so risky a step, especially if one has made one or two choices with unfortunate outcomes.
And there's the paradox. On one hand you have the absolute, rigid belief systems standing above the ocean of uncertainty like rocks, trying to persuade you that they are completely immovable, eternal. On the other you have the more relativistic structure of science, floating on that ocean like a raft, continually being added to by its hopeful inhabitants using materials that can never be permanent, for they must come from that ocean itself. But rocks can be worn down to nothing over time, rafts can break up if there are too many flaws in their construction.
To my mind the best resolution to this paradox is this: believe and assume the minimum of what you need to to get through life, as I say I try to take this approach myself. But for all else, take a lesson from science and keep all other beliefs provisional, perhaps even attaching rough confidence ratings to them. If you can find the right balance between belief and skepticism, you will have the advantages of both commonsense and open mindedness.
But of course don't believe me. You'll need to figure it all out for yourself.
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COLONIZATION
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Some of the best `hard' science fiction I have read, i.e, that with a solid scientific core, is set on Earthlike worlds that have been colonized by humans. The colonies may be recent or ancient, and may co-exist with indigenous fauna (or flora) that is intelligent or otherwise.
Only a few of these works however were centered around the question of whether we should ever colonize any such world at all. Most asked whether or not we should leave them to their indigenous lifeforms to evolve in their own way so that they might acquire the ability to leave their world at some time in the future. What in any case would be the point in expanding our already needlessly large numbers elsewhere? What would we achieve?
It may seem too soon to think about this, but in the nature of scientific discovery we may finally acquire the ability to navigate through space sooner than we imagine, indeed I hope we do (see EXPLORATION). We only have to look back at our own history to see what might happen again, when Caucasian white man expanded out of Europe (and before that, out of Africa according to current theory) into regions of the world where some, namely the many conquered indigenous peoples, believe he had no right to invade. But did that invasion happen entirely through ignorance and insensitivity? Of course not. It happened for all sorts of reasons. To gain resources and to fulfil Imperialist ambitions, certainly, but also to bring the gift of Salvation and Civilization to those who would clearly Benefit from it (as it was all believed then). Another largely forgotten but very important reason was simply to grab territory before someone else did, usually a foreign power whose interests were, or might be some day, contrary to ones own. In other words, if an indigenous people weren't invaded by one such power, they would have been by some other sooner or later. That power might have been kinder or less kind, who can say? All we know is that virtually no corner of the world remained uninvaded.
The current ethic now, when we do actually come into contact with some undiscovered culture, is to observe it as remotely as possible in order to prevent physical or cultural adulteration. Imagine though that we had somehow applied such a policy right from the very beginning of our history, when we first became able to move across vast distances in a systematic way. There would be no Europe, India, Asia, North or South America, no Australasia or South Pacific, though there may have been an Antarctica. Hard for us to imagine, isn't it? Especially since so much of our technology comes from America, one of those colonized countries, and Japan, in which this aspect of Western Culture has taken such firm root. All these regions would still be virgin territories, with all their original floral and faunal species intact. Perhaps all the world outside Africa (from where I am assuming man did originate) would have been some sort of giant World Heritage Park, visited by a select few with the appropriate scientific or financial credentials. That's if we had developed Science or even Finance at all.
So would `No Contact' be a policy we could realistically maintain when we finally come to explore the Universe? Or would the temptation to grab a beautiful world off somebody else be just too much? Even if we could resist that, might we still have to grab that and any other territory we could to prevent others grabbing it first? Colonization - and rapid population growth - may then become essential (or at least seem essential) to preserve our species. History would once more repeat as we explore new worlds, go where no world...
We would perhaps do well to reflect on the fact that none of this has so far happened to us, our World has not as yet been occupied (so far as we know) by a extraterrestrial power. How would we feel about becoming an `indigenous people'? Would we resist, as many of our own indigenes do? How would we feel if our occupiers had to defend themselves against their extraterrestrial enemies, and expected us to help them? Like other indigenes before us, we would soon begin fighting amongst ourselves, trying to decide just what we should do.
In this light, the ability to become space-going now seems urgent. If we can get into Space before that happens, much will then depend on what we find out there. There may be no space-going species that we can find for hundreds of lightyears. On the other hand, Space may be teeming with all sorts of such lifeforms - and political situations of unimaginable kinds (see ALIENS).
What we find would obviously influence our policy on how we approached new worlds. Lets begin first with the `empty space' scenario, then imagine we encountered three new worlds in succession: the first world has a high but not space-capable technology perhaps equivalent to our own today, the second world has little technology, perhaps equivalent to our Stone Age, and the third has no intelligent species that we can find at all. Contact with the first world might benefit both our species in ways that offset the inevitable harm, that is something that will need to be continually reassessed by both sides. With lower technology worlds, we might observe its inhabitants remotely so as to avoid cultural contamination. `Empty' worlds we might as well have, though we could treat them as `Extraterrestrial Parks' so that people can go explore them (see EXPLORATION). Again the idea of turning such a world into a copy of Earth with its teeming millions seems utterly pointless. Just a few `maintenance' colonies would be sufficient to keep our species alive if Earth was invaded.
In a crowded Space however, we might have to do things very differently. We would have to form alliances with any potentially friendly species, advanced or not, to improve the chances of survival of both. If we don't, the opposition will. Empty worlds we have to take and use for resources as quickly as we can, there may be no time to try to preserve the scenery. It would be a shame, but so would be the death of our species. Wouldn't it?
And if all that sounds like the history of ordinary old Human Life on Earth, then I suspect that the laws of politics are as likely to be as Universal as those of physics.
Perhaps the hardest thing to consider in these scenarios is what we might be like by the time our technology gets us to the stars. Will the first of us to arrive there come from a democracy that will decide through a process of consensus how to respond to the kinds of situation I've just described? Or will our species be represented by some authoritarian political system who may make decisions which the rest of us may have to live with for the rest of the life of our species, however long that may be? Or the life of whatever species we might invade?
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CRIMINALITY
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For the last fifty years or so the civilized world has thought it uncivilized to execute its criminals. Many arguments were advanced for this. For instance, capital punishment did not deter criminal activity, it actually increased it, even in the dark days when even relatively minor crimes could earn hanging or deportation. Capital punishment was as much an act of violence as the crime that resulted in it. Innocent people could all too easily be executed. And if there was any chance that a criminal could be rehabilitated, that chance should be taken, however slim.
But have the ideals these views reflected brought us the more humane society we had hoped for? Or have they too become just another set of entrenched catechisms, like the `flog 'em and hang 'em' ones it replaced?
If neither of these has worked, then what will? Obviously we can either execute, or not execute.
The last fifty years have brought much else with them besides the enormously heightened crime rate, including narcotics which on their own must generate more crime than virtually all other factors put together. Attitudes to sex have almost completely reversed, which means supplies of this particular narcotic (see SEX) can suddenly be cut, with all the violent responses that can bring. Then there is the growth of what can only be described as the criminal culture with its own unwritten rules of conduct and even manners of speech. And, worst of all, is the overall diminution of the morale of the public this extra crime has brought us, which puts further pressure on those at the bottom of the heap to become criminals themselves. While the average person may only have a low probability of becoming the victim of a crime, that is only an average. If your economic status is low and you live in the poorer areas of your community, your chances increase significantly. Being burgled and bashed several times a year are hardly uncommon.
So what can we do if we cannot return to the past nor continue with the present? We can go in a quite different direction. Virtually all executions in the past were for a person's first major crime, usually murder with violence. That should neither continue nor return, a person should serve the same jail sentence as he does now. Rehabilitation is then still possible, as well as a chance to prove innocence. If that person is found after his release to be guilty of a second such serious offense however, then on the balance of probabilities it is most unlikely he is being falsely accused a second time. He should then, I believe, be executed for that crime.
We do not however need to return to hanging or any other such brutally retributive method of capital punishment. Nor do we need to allow executions to become circuses, as used to be the case in Europe, and still is in some parts of the U.S. Modern technology allows executions to be carried out painlessly, compassionately, even pleasantly (see THANATOLOGY).
Civil Libertarians might object to this, along with the notion of the `balance of probabilities'. Unfortunately however the balance of probabilities is ultimately all we have in any judicial system in spite of any claims to the contrary. If we attempt to eliminate any risk of an innocent person being executed as we are doing now, then many, many more innocent people will continue to die at the hands of criminals. In other words, the painless, pleasant death of a probable criminal by the state seems eminently preferable to the death of a probably innocent person by gun, knife, or baseball bat.
Why should an execution be painless or pleasant? Ultimately we can't answer the question of why some people commit crimes (or do anything for that matter, see RESPONSIBILITY). Plenty of criminals come from good middle class backgrounds, they just enjoy committing the crime `for the fun of it'. Others are people desperately struggling to support their children and who succumb to temptation. There are endless motivations and causes.
For this reason an execution must be an act of compassion, even though the original crime almost certainly was not. Unfortunately however this could mean that some deranged souls will actually commit two serious crimes in order to be executed, that is, commit suicide. This could explain why hanging was an insufficient deterrent; many crimes are committed by people who feel they have nothing left to lose, including their lives. This has often been the case with crimes of passion. Therefore if a person is found guilty for a second major offense, then he should still serve the mandatory jail sentence for that as before. This sentence will then end in his compassionate execution. This will at least preserve the deterrence value we have now. Other social policy changes may also be of help here (see EUTHANASIA).
Executions of this kind should not however be restricted to the most serious crimes. Prisons are full of people with literally hundreds of less serious crimes to their names, such things as common assault, burglary, causing injury through dangerous driving, destruction of property, arson. These crimes may not end lives, but they can certainly spoil them, even ruin them. I feel that a point system could be instituted so that each crime, and each degree of seriousness of that crime, has a certain number of `crime points' associated with it, on a scale of 0 - 100 for instance. The arson of a single dwelling with no loss of life might bring perhaps 20 such Points, the setting of a forest or bush fire that destroys a whole neighborhood would on the other hand `earn' 40 points. If serious crimes are also brought into this system instead of the simpler one I have just described, murder would bring a minimum of 50 Points, with particularly vicious ones up to 70. Treason, since it could involve the death of millions, 90.
When a person collects 100 Points by whatever means, that person would be executed after completing his final jail sentence. The execution would need be carried out at some randomly determined time to avoid the media carnival that usually attends such events.
A problem may arise with people who have committed sufficient crimes to `earn' them over fifty Points. They may feel inclined to `get it over with' and commit a random murder or some other crime with a high number of Points. Just one more long jail sentence may not be enough to deter them, especially if they have become institutionalized. For this reason it may be vital that, as a person accumulates Points, he correspondingly loses more and more of his civil rights. At, say, forty points, random phone tapping becomes allowed, and above fifty, random searching of premises with no search warrant being required. Above sixty, constant automatic monitoring, perhaps with the assistance of a radio collar or implant. Up till now people with long criminal records have become folk heroes within the wider criminal community, but such monitoring would make such criminals too risky for other criminals to have around - unless they are of the same `standing'.
All this may still appear to be answering inhumanity with inhumanity, or violence with violence. But humanity is not absolute, it is what we collectively say it is. If a person acts towards another in a way that his or her victim perceives as `inhumane', then that person is voluntarily setting aside their own humanity, we are not doing it to them. Such people in effect become the most highly intelligent animals on Earth, and should be managed as such. Again Civil libertarians will no doubt object to this, they would claim that it would quickly lead to the creation of a police state. One can sympathize with this view, but unfortunately we are not too far from having a criminal state, like that which preceded Hitler's Germany, or the extremely horrible Argentinian Junta of the 1970's. Civil Liberties have to be balanced by Civic Responsibilities, a cause which has become somewhat unfashionable to champion with the same vigor.
To offset some of the more draconian aspects of the Crime Point system and encourage rehabilitation however, convicted criminals could lose up to ten points off their tally per year if they can demonstrate that they have made appropriate changes to their ways of life and the company they keep. But they would have to demonstrate this, otherwise the system would fail to catch those who perform crimes only occasionally. Since motivation behind a crime can be established in court with a reasonable degree of success, that could also help determine the number of Points to be assigned a person for his crime. Character references and suchlike would count for just as much here as they have done in the past. Some classes of crime would nevertheless need to be exempt from any form of remission; it would clearly be in an embezzler's best interest to behave himself for some years to better position himself for his next crime, if such was his intent. Similarly we cannot be sure child molesters will not offend again ten, twenty years after their initial recorded crime, they may not be sure themselves. Child molestation unfortunately does have a high rate of recidivism.
This Crime Point system would allow us to achieve a number of objectives. Firstly it would allow jail populations to shrink to more manageable levels, which would then give rehabilitation, still a major ambition of most judicial systems, a better chance to work. Second, it would help to contain and possibly reduce the influence of the morale-sapping criminal subcultures, this may also reduce the load on the judiciary. Third, it would reduce the risks of handing down a criminal inclination from parent to child, whether genetic or experiential. And fourth, it gives us a better chance to tackle the drug problem, which just keeps spreading.
Some people will inevitably claim that these ideas are just another form of neobarbarism. But who is being barbaric here? Innocent people are not only being killed horribly, but being turned into drug addicts, and what is that but a form of living death? Some people, especially many elderly, cannot bring themselves to return to their burgled homes. Of if they can or must, they may find themselves unable to touch any property that may be left. Their lives are thereby seriously disrupted with much pain and suffering. Similarly with embezzlement, this can involve much greater sums than bankrobberies. But unlike bankrobberies, the sums of money lost belong to just a few individuals, with little chance of recovery. And these people often turn out to have lost their life savings, earned through decades of work at jobs they may not have particularly enjoyed.
What about children? What should be the minimum age to which this Crime Point system applies? Even children as young as eight can be quite vicious and knowledgeable criminals, as anybody residing in a slum housing estate will attest. This would really need to be assessed from case to case; applying some arbitrary fixed age like `thirteen' isn't going to help determined young thugs or their potential victims.
What are the chances of such a Crime Point system being adopted by a society? Somewhat slender, since current penal thinking is so deeply entrenched worldwide. Also, resistance from the criminal culture would be considerable, indeed any politician seriously proposing it may fear for his life (like a police state, a criminal state would be no greater friend of free speech and the democratic process). Perhaps the most we could expect would be a botch (as has happened with the abortion laws of some countries) which would result in an even bigger disaster than we have now. Even a complete implementation would be subject to the `law of unforseeable side-effects', in other words problems may arise that cause it to come into doubt, and the will to fix it may not be there (see SOLUTIONS).
For these reasons I would say that most of today's criminals will live out their natural lives in complete safety, from the state at least. Indeed, some of the cleverer ones have already formed states of their own big enough to challenge those we know today. With the increasingly automated military hardware becoming available to anyone who can afford it, they won't need big armies to completely overpower those they choose too. This could spoil an otherwise interesting future (see FUTURE).
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DECADENCE
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Using the word `decadence' in the same sentence as `society' has now become so unfashionable as to appear all but obscene. But then that's not so hard to understand. There are still many advocates of hard-line Puritanical values who promote such an association with extreme vigor, even glee.
Yet there are some situations in which the association does retain, I feel, some currency. Imagine a society which has suddenly found itself to be in some peril, perhaps through some economic problem like a sharply reduced ability to borrow more funds because of an already huge debt burden. The government calls upon the citizens to moderate their wage demands or accept reduced social welfare benefits. This government is however nearing the end of its term in office and is facing elections. The opposition party, seeking re-election, is not only proposing an alternative course of action which plays down the threat, they also claim the government is exaggerating it in order to scare the populace into returning them to office. The opposition then proposes to lift wages and benefits `in order to inject more money into the economy' and to borrow even more funds from overseas even at the higher rates. "We can then employ people in public works not only to improve the infrastructure, but to ensure that economic demand is maintained as fully as possible".
The party proposing the least painful, not the most effective course of action will probably, in many of today's societies at least, be the one elected. That, to my mind, defines decadence in relation to a society. It may be that such societies contain too many people who have themselves become unable to take the hard, effective decisions rather than the easy, initially painless one in their personal lives. Or of not wanting to know about `economic rubbish' like debt burdens and internal deficits. Social Welfare systems struggle to cope with the grateful unemployed along with the genuinely so, for they have little choice (see UNEMPLOYMENT). The `exaggerated' threat then becomes all too real, the debt that is increased to solve it is simply increased further when the people's `spending power' is dissipated in imported luxuries .
And what's the cure? There is probably none but hard experience, both collectively and individually. Hard experience though can unfortunately do permanent damage, even cause death. People and their societies can be warned by outsiders, but such warnings are usually ignored because they can no longer tell the difference between warnings that should be heeded and those that should not. It's unfortunate, but that appears to be real life.
Also, it has to be said, there are some people who will say the kind of things I have just said in order to frighten others into conforming to what becomes a totalitarian regime. This too, believe it or not, is a product of a decadent society, for such a society will have lost its judgment, its `common sense'. And that is in fact nothing more than effective advice passed on from parent to child, either directly or through the education system, the knowledge of when hard decisions are necessary and what they should consist of. Once that is lost...
But once the hard work is done, there is always still room for fun, in fact that is when it becomes fun. For lives can only be happy when people know that the rent has been paid, the debts have been managed, the income is being fairly earned, and the children and their grandparents are being looked after.
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DEPRESSION
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The old cliché that being born is like being dealt a hand of cards is, like many clichés, still no less true for that. And if you should come to feel at some later stage in your life that you've been dealt a poor hand, you do at least have the opportunity (unless that poor hand includes genuine liabilities like belligerent stupidity) to turn that hand into a good hand, even a winning hand, through intelligent gameplay.
For example, minor psychiatric illnesses are relatively common throughout the developed world at least, especially depression (could one say such people have been dealt hands with no royalty cards?). Many such people may be unable to hold a job and therefore are obliged to live on some form of Social Welfare.
If you are in this situation, the fact that you have too much time on your hands can be turned into an advantage few other people have except for the very wealthy. You now have the time to pursue any goals you may have, at least those that do not require too much money. The best way to proceed initially at least is to acquire an education for yourself. You don't have to go to a college or a university, you may not have the entrance qualifications anyway let alone the temperament. But you can read introductory books, even children's books, on a vast range of subjects. My own very lucky pick was the Time-Life series on Science, which covered everything from mathematics to ecology; I read and enjoyed them all. Time-Life also published similar series on other topics such as History and Geography. Along the way you will come across other books on these topics, and of course magazines, good magazines. Amongst these I found `New Scientist' every week from Britain, and `Scientific American' from the U.S. every month. These list or review other fascinating books in a multitude of fields in depth. Even more important (for me anyway), they taught me much about the way of thinking behind science, and allowed me to improve my own (I hope). Self-delusion, of which I had been more than capable, began to become repugnant. I learned more about depression itself from these sources, and how one of its worst characteristics is that it feeds on itself. People tend to stay away from depressed people, which makes the victim feel even more depressed. Like alcoholism, ultimately you have to break the cycle yourself, and it's much easier to do when you know how that cycle applies to you.
And probably the only hope you have of finding your way out of your depression is to find something to work at, then work hard at it. If this means avoiding people, then avoid people. Part of the reason for your depression may well be that you have no talent for getting along with people, earning their respect and friendship. Not everyone has such a talent, just as some people simply cannot learn how to drive a car, no matter how many lessons they have. Since the ability to get along with people is so vital (you can be utterly talentless and still have a full and happy life), even if you do find your work, you may then find some difficulty getting the products of your labors accepted. But that is a risk you have to be prepared to take. By that stage though you may have become so involved in the work itself this may not matter very much. You just want to get on with it.
I did not really begin to find my own direction until the early 1980's, when computers finally became accessible to all. I began on that long endless road of learning about them as soon as I could afford to buy a kitset, which were quite common in those early days. Like many others who had gone before, I got that feeling that I could really use these things for something, if only I could figure out what. I also knew that while I enjoyed reading about science, I realized that I could never be a scientist, even if I had the temperament to accept the training. I had in fact attempted it in my youth, but had not measured up. I also knew I had no inclination to become an amateur. Very few worthwhile discoveries are made by amateurs, and most of those only in astronomy, where observers might spend years looking for new comets or asteroids and other such things.
To add one more piece to the jigsaw puzzle of this rebuilding of my life, I had also had a lifelong interest in Science Fiction. With my strengthening interest in science itself however, I soon dropped the fantasy categories and concentrated on the `hard' Science Fiction written around scientific themes. It naturally occurred to me that I could try to write such fiction myself, I had always had an interest in writing in general, but I knew that my solitary way of life - through my depression - had prevented me from acquiring the experience of life to anything the depth I knew was necessary. I also did not have an eye for settings such as landscapes, house interiors, modes of dress, speech characteristics, and all those other things like plot, characterization, and dramatic conflict that novelists must pay careful attention to. I enjoyed these things when done by other people (and done well) but, as with science, I felt absolutely no inclination to attempt them myself.
One more piece of the puzzle therefore needed to fall into place before I was able to begin what I was already beginning to feel would be my life's work. But I had no idea of what that piece might be.
One of the reasons why I had left my science studies at the University was that I had been seduced by Art, mostly painting, and mostly the Impressionists. What lonely oversensitive young man doesn't feel an affinity for Vincent Van Gogh? That however isolated me from my contemporaries, for during those time the Beatles, Hippies, Rock and things like that held the consciousness of the young. As I grew older I had to admit myself that not only was that art I had treasured a long-gone world, but that Art itself was now without value, that its `achievements' could now draw only momentary notice (or notoriety) rather than contribute anything of real depth to Life. The only `art' that mattered now was science and its byproduct, technology. And that feeling caused me to become even more isolated from my contemporaries, for most had actually become anti-science and worse, drifted off into spurious religions, mysticism and magic, the very things science was supposed to have freed Us from the shackles of.
Eventually however, the germ of an idea was sown. I had inevitably come across the writings of philosophers, or rather abstracts from these, and it seemed to me that much of these were written in pre-scientific times. Modern philosophers of science were of course interesting, but it seemed to me there was a gap here. Nobody appeared to be trying to build a model of Reality - which to my mind defines philosophy - using science as a springboard from which to do so. Contemporary philosophy was, so far as I could see, usually abstruse and inaccessible, with little apparent relationship to reality. In a word, empty.
The scientific field that looked most interesting to me in this context was artificial intelligence. I couldn't unfortunately understand everything being done in the field, but it seemed to me almost from the start that it was really two different things. One half, that what I now think of as being artificial intelligence, had to do with the automation of things that are a part of the world we have created, from chess-playing programs to expert systems that do things like diagnose illnesses from a carefully recorded set of symptoms. The other half, artificial consciousness as I saw it, had to do with machines that had to cope with real-world conditions, like the first obstacle-navigating and maze-negotiating mechanical `turtles'. I found myself to be more interested in this artificial consciousness, but only in its potential, not in what was actually being done. This looked crude to say the least, though I realized that most of this was caused by limited battery storage and the poor power-to-weight ratio of electric motors. In short, I was more interested in thinking about it rather than doing it, developing ideas that might be of interest to others with the relevant hardware and software knowledge. Sure, I knew that ideas can only be validated by experiment and new ones developed from these, but I had to take that chance and present what I had as a mix of speculation and science fiction.
Hence PereGaea was born, and I was reborn with it. It had taken me thirty years to get there from somewhat uncertain beginnings. And I have to say that most of the people who knew me through that time took me for a crank (and who is to say that I wasn't one, and am still one today?). But that is the risk you take when you have to find the long way round. At least though I have done something with my life, which like those of so many other depressed people, might otherwise have been uselessly wasted.
There are some problems I have not yet overcome however. Now that PereGaea is complete, the depressions return and I find it hard not to resort to the alcohol which I have never quite succeeded in giving up. It is a relief to have PereGaea finally published on paper rather than on disk in disk libraries, though I don't know why since digital publication on the Internet is now so clearly more appropriate for anything of a speculative nature. Maybe I can think of something else to do. Perhaps I could learn the relevant technologies and build some of those machines I described myself. I have to say though that Fiore de Concini in Brazil is already doing a far better job of this than I ever could. We shall see.
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ELEMENTS
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Near the end of my book Nummus, the predecessor of PereGaea, I described the `Parsi' as having developed the idea that there were four fundamental elements behind their reality and their existence: causality, probability, relativity and cybernetics. These then reduced further into two even more fundamental elements, the `serial' and `parallel' ways information can move within an `eventuum', the digital medium of which their Space and Time was constructed (in contrast to our notion of a `continuum'). This ultimately made it impossible for them to distinguish between an actual `reality' and the simulation of one inside their `comparator' (their equivalent of a neural net, though it operated in a very different way).
This to my mind could also be the case in our own reality. One of the purposes of this book therefore is to act as an `extension' to PereGaea, to show how the notions and concepts it contains could apply to our world as we collectively experience it.
For those people who have not read Nummus (Now long gone; I also have to admit it was not easy to read anyway), let me explain briefly just what the initial four elements were about.
Causality, perhaps the one we are most familiar with in our day-to-day lives, simply has to do with the way one event appears to be caused by another, and which may in turn lead to a third, or an entire cascade of events. Machines of course ultimately rely on causality to operate, in fact it is physically impossible for a machine not to operate provided it has been maintained according to the instructions of its designer and is operated accordingly.When the machine is operated outside of these limits however, or has begun to show considerable wear, its operation may then become more in accordance with the second of the Nummic elements: probability. Here the machine may run erratically, sometimes it runs, sometimes it doesn't. To a naive operator this may seem to be a matter of chance. Notice that word `naive'; to a knowledgeable operator its faultiness may not appear to be a matter of chance at all, but have a perfectly mechanistic cause which can be set right. The difference between chance and causality may be one of perception than of actuality, though paradoxically we have mechanistic methods of determining which is which, though none can be perfectly guaranteed.
Machines can also break down in ways which, to naive operators, appear to be their own doing. Some minor mechanical malfunction may for instance cause a machine to vibrate; a car engine with faulty mountings for instance. This vibration in turn increases the stress on a particular component, moving it out of adjustment so that the vibration gets worse. If this component controls the engine's revolutions per minute (rpm), and its rpm increases, the vibration will then increase further. The engine may eventually even self-destruct. Such a vicious circle is the basic concept behind cybernetics. `Virtuous circles' can also arise, if that control component responds to vibration by reducing the engine's rpm, the problem is at least self-correcting (though still undesirable, the engine may occasionally need to be operated at high rpm).
This brings us to the last of my four elements: `relativity'. One most often thinks of Einstein's relativity here, but this is just one sense of the word, there are many others. For instance, to return to my `engine' metaphor, there may be many better engines available, that is, ones that perform their intended function more efficiently and at less cost. Or worse ones, these may produce less power yet use more fuel. There is also the possibility that the same function may be performed without the need for an engine at all, i.e. by some other means, or that it may not even need to be performed at all. It all depends on how that function is perceived to fit relative to other functions, perhaps in some long-term plan. And that `plan' may not be perceived at all by those people designated by others to carry it out. And so on to a possible galaxy of viewers, all with their viewpoints that may or may not be connected, or only partially so...
It is extremely unlikely however that any of these four elements which I suspect underlie all the phenomena of our world will ever be found in isolation. In other words, all phenomena will contain all four in one proportion or another. Even a brand new engine may fail to perform (even with today's high manufacturing quality) because of some chance assembly error either of the whole thing or one of its components. Chance itself may not always be complete, the dice that may not be perfectly balanced, a random number generator for a Lotto draw may have a tiny bias in its design - no matter how vanishingly slight, even those systems designed to be `perfectly' random may at some later time may be shown to contain just a modicum of order. Similarly with cybernetic and relativistic elements, cybernetic systems must have a mechanistic system at their base to allow the feedback loops to operate, and no device of any kind can be seen in isolation from all other devices, whether or not they are of the same kind.
These four elements percolate through far more than these simple examples however, as I hope you will see as you read these essays. I do not label each of the topics each essay covers however according to whether they are primarily causal, probabilistic, cybernetic and relativistic, this will always be implicit. Otherwise the book would for you be unreadable, and for me unwritable. The same applies to those two even more fundamental elements, Serial and Parallel. All computers are made up of components that pass the data they process to each other either via serial lines or parallel buses.
If our reality really `is' a simulation inside a computer, it is here that they acquire their fundamentality, for the way the connections between and within the circuit elements are made and the software that initiates and controls the data flows then determine the nature of that reality (see GOD, MYSTICISM).
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EUGENICS
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As with Euthanasia, one of Adolf Hitler's greatest undocumented crimes is that he made such a botch of eugenics as to make even the hint of it all but unthinkable in today's civilized societies. And considering his version of it, that is perhaps just as well. The notion of Eugenics based on one person's aesthetic sense about what other people `should' look like no more enhances the survival of a culture than the preference of one sex's survival over another, as some cultures attempt even today.
There are forms of eugenics however which seem not only compassionate and humane, but are already carried out even in the most ethically cautious of our societies. For instance, if a woman (and her partner) discover through fetal examination that her child is deformed or defective in some way, she is able to abort that child, even though it may be some time after the generally favored time of three months. Most non-religious people find this perfectly acceptable. Whether they would feel that we can go further than this is moot, but I would hope that this is not beyond all consideration.
In essence, I would like to see the right to choose for the abortion of all fetuses with a specified list of conditions, not just at any time before the birth, but for some months after the birth, since some serious conditions are not revealed by fetal examination. Some are created by the birth process itself, others by accident after the child takes up residence within the home of its parents. If we don't allow such a decision to be made when it can be made with the minimum of suffering, the child itself may be confronted with several much harder decisions when it reaches the age at which it is able to make them for itself. That's if it can make any sort of decision by that time. A few such children do succeed in living full and rich lives, we see them in the media thanking their parents for their chance at life. But for each one of these individuals, there may almost certainly be dozens who wish the choice had been made for them before they became fully conscious, since they certainly have none now.
I also feel that eugenics of this kind ought not always be a matter of parental choice. If a child is born or becomes mentally or physically incapacitated, it should be euthanased unless its parents have the means and the ability to care for it throughout its life. No society should have to subsidize religious or ideological convictions in ways that will eventually cost it dearly. That money and those resources should be committed to the welfare of those people fully able to make decisions for themselves and act on them (see RESPONSIBILITY). If some people feel that distinguishing between the rich and the poor in this way is socially unfair, then it would be wiser to make this form of compassionate eugenics compulsory for all rather than just the indigent.
What should happen in cases where fetuses or children develop conditions which are merely likely to become disabling, that is, have perhaps a 50% chance of doing so? Huntingdon's Chorea, or Cystic Fibrosis, for instance? Some parents already chose to remain childless in these circumstances, others try to believe, rationally or not, that some future scientific advance (and there have been one or two) will cure the condition or minimize its effects. I think the latter parents are literally gambling with their child's welfare in a way that is quite inhumane. Once again that child may be placed in a position of suffering a crippling disease with no say in the decision which resulted in that. `Where there's life there's hope' is a notion you should feel free to apply to yourself, not impose on a child whom you are supposed to love and care for. Exposing anybody to even a 10% chance of being disabled is as criminal as driving while drunk and exposing other road users to similar odds.
To many people, such views as these would seem `negative' or even `anti-life'. To my mind however such folk stand to condemn far too many people to lives of needless and prolonged misery in the name of that `Life'. Who is being inhumane here? I would urge such people to examine their consciences in the light of what could become considerate and compassionate practice rather than that of their customary cruel `kindness' in such matters.
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EUTHANASIA
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Is death really such a terrible thing? A violent death certainly is, or any form of death, including that of a loved one, that is imposed against one's will (however, see CRIMINALITY). It is all but unthinkable if one is fit, active, and in love with somebody, or just in love with life itself. And in earlier decades and centuries when disease or war could take so many lives in so many horrible ways, death was not only highly visible, but reduced the chances of survival of entire populations. Whole societies could - and sometimes did - disappear.
Is our reality so different in the current era where death is less likely to be violent for most of us, at least in the developed World? To my mind our lives have become sufficiently different that we ought revise our attitudes towards death, both as individuals and as societies.
Since technology can now make death painless, even pleasant, I feel we can now come to see it as a solution to certain of the intractable problems of our existence which are unlikely to go away or, if they do, are usually only replaced by others. Those who suffer from AIDS should be able to elect it since that is an appallingly miserable way to die, and a cure may not arrive soon. Mental illness is, if anything, worse than AIDS. Even relatively mild ones like some forms of schizophrenia are just as miserable for their victims, only they don't die so soon, they can live as long as anybody else. Nobody should have to live like that for more than a year or two, when the chance of a cure becomes too slim. Some conditions, like painful terminal cancers, might continue to be treated with painkillers if the patient wishes, but he or she should at least be offered the choice of a more pleasant death. Extreme old age can also become a major burden, for the sufferer, the family both emotionally and financially, and the whole of society and the state that acts in its name.
To revisit an ancient argument, if such an act of compassion be allowed for animals, why not for those people who wish it? Should pilots be deprived of parachutes to make them fly their planes better, as was believed during World War One? But then euthanasia itself is a very ancient idea. I won't therefore go over old ground here, but will instead look at what I believe are new reasons to allow its practise.
What is the difference between a fool, a loony, and a criminal? This too is a very ancient question that has its roots in the even older one of `do we have free will?' (see RESPONSIBILITY). The fact that the different words exist suggests that we consider there are some. However, the activities of all three kinds of people have the same end result, they do harm to themselves or to others. A fool may do harm through what what we perceive to be ignorance or stupidity, a criminal through what we see as bloodymindedness. We place the loony in a no man's land of not being responsible for his actions, but of having committed them nevertheless. Cures for these conditions have come and gone, they have worked for a few, the rest have carried on in their helpless way. In my view the option of euthanasia should be available to these people just as for any normal person whose life has become intolerable. It should however be imposed on those adjudged to be criminals along the lines I have suggested in CRIMINALITY, and those assessed as being criminally insane. There is no possible kindness in keeping criminally insane people alive beyond the absolute minimum, they should certainly not have to be incarcerated in secure institutions for decades as they usually are now.
Some people feel euthanasia should be called what it `really is', killing people. The introduction of that notion can stop pro-euthanasia arguments in their tracks. But again, if there was thought to be no difference between the words killing and euthanasia, or murder, assassination, and self-defense for that matter, those words would not have been invented. The word killing could be used in their place but this would then devalue its role in describing violent killings that will always be unacceptable in any society. It would also invite a desensitization to it, a brutalization that may render too many people uncaring of whether death is inflicted or natural, violent or serene.
Some people feel that euthanasia is little more than a form of `post-natal' abortion. I would actually have to agree with that, but then to my mind that is not an argument against it at all (see EUGENICS)
Many people would ask: what about the relatives of the newly-departed? Their parents, or their children? No man is an island that can be simply removed without altering the landscape he is a part of. The loss of a person suffering or likely to suffer may be severe and long lasting, certainly, but relatives will endure just as much suffering while that person is still alive. Also, many other people may come to suffer through his continued existence, especially if he becomes drunk, drives a vehicle and smashes into another containing an innocent family. And the question of whether the client was a fool, loony, or criminal will not make any difference to that final result. Though counseling for disturbed people ought to be available as it is now, allowing a person to end his own suffering should always remain that person's choice. Others may then be less likely to suffer as well.
Would not euthanasia though bring problems of its own? It has to be said that some of the arguments against it are perfectly reasonable. For instance, it is not unknown for an elderly person's relatives to harass that person to death in order to inherit his estate. Also, there is considerable risk of any newly-introduced euthanasia legislation being botched in an attempt to accommodate religious extremists in the way abortion laws have been in some countries. What kind of laws might some of the less ethically careful countries institute, perhaps as a means of reducing population numbers to match their shrinking resources? What might happen if a key person in a society, a company president or a scientist for instance, chooses to die, taking some vital knowledge with him? In my view we cannot know how serious these problems might be until some countries at least actually try the form of euthanasia I have outlined here, using `sunset' clauses that allow automatic review after a `reasonable' period of time has elapsed, perhaps five years. Then we will be in a better position to assess what will by then be fact rather than speculation. It can't be that much worse, with the crime, horror and bloodshed of our present world.
One other problem remains: the instinct we all have to live, no matter what, and to try and ensure that those whom we love do the same. It's a fundamental instinct that has been essential to our survival over evolutionary time, just as it has been for our predecessors on this world. But in order to build our societies we have had to learn how to repress many of our instincts or redirect them into more constructive channels. The instinct to explore has given us science and logic, without which any control of instinct would be impossible. The instinct to care has brought us all our judicial and welfare systems, hopelessly overloaded they may be. The instinct to live at all costs can now too surely be rechannelled so as to foster life, not bury it under its own errors and failures.
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EXPLORATION
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Although science and technology has allowed us to spread out all over the world, in a sense it has also taken the world away from us, for there is no region of it left for us to explore. Certainly, one might say there are infinite worlds to explore given to us through science and technology itself. But these are the provinces of those who have considerable training, the rest of us can only explore them second-hand (though this can still be very interesting, see DEPRESSION, also ART). Exploration appears to be a major part of the human spirit, we must feel able to escape our bounds and see what is beyond them. Just now though we cannot even leave the Earth except in very expensive rocket-powered dugout canoes. These can only be launched with very few people aboard and only very occasionally, and can only undertake very short voyages which hug the orbital shorelines of our planet.
What we need is some means of moving some object through space which does not involve the ejection of high-speed reaction mass through its rear. Ion propulsion engines overcome one limitation of these systems, that is, large quantities of reaction mass do not need to be carried aboard the vehicle. But as yet these provide a somewhat feeble propulsive force, certainly much less than what would be needed to even lift a people-containing vehicle off the surface of the Earth.
In any case, reaction mass propulsion of any kind is hardly enough to get us to the stars, where we really need to be able to go to have any chance of encountering other species and doing any real exploration. Indeed it is hard to see how reaction mass systems can be much use to us even in our own solar system. Travel times would still be months or years, meaning greater risk of damage during transit, and huge amounts of life support needing to be carried.
Quite often in our technological history the seeds of the next major technological leap are actually sown decades before. Sometimes this is in an earlier technology that was abandoned because it appeared to be a dead-end, or the technological infrastructure of the day was insufficient to allow further development. The transistor is perhaps the best-known example of both. If the old germanium-crystal `cats-whisker' rectifier used in radio reception in the early part of this century had been researched further, then the thermionic valve might have become an incidental curiosity and the whole of our technological history - or history, period - changed.
Could something like this be the case with space propulsion? Is there some device or principle that we already know, but have forgotten we know? Because no one has thought of using it - whatever it might be - in this connection?
To my mind it would be well worth our while committing billions of dollars in finding a way of reaching the stars. Before we become so overburdened with our own problems that we lose the exterior perspective needed to help overcome them. Because of the urge most of us have to explore, even if it has to be, initially at least, by proxy. And along with conventional avenues of research we could try some unconventional ones. For instance, perhaps we could set up a worldwide competition with a major prize to the first person or group to build a workable non-reaction mass spacecraft. Although we might then have a million cranks all struggling to build spaceships in their back yards, statistically one of those cranks is more likely to succeed than any of the others. Then we may all benefit as we at last take our chance to explore the stars. On the other hand we might not (see ALIENS). But that is the risk all explorers take, isn't it?
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FUTURE
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Clairvoyance is an illusion created by statistics: if you take a thousand predictions made by a thousand seers, one of those seers will come to be seen as far more prescient than the others. Scientifically, we cannot predict the future at all except in terms of possibilities and probabilities, no certainties or nevers, even for limited systems that behave `purely mechanistically' (see ELEMENTS). But the exercise is not entirely useless, indeed looking at what could happen is a vital survival aid since we can then try to prevent it if it is likely to mean harm, or foster it if otherwise. We may also try to predict a range of alternative possible futures that may come about if certain key events occur or fail to, perhaps once again assigning loose probabilities to their relative likelyhood. But `loose' will always be the best we can do, since the actual course of events will of course be unpredictable and may produce a surprise that was not, or could not, have been foreseen.
When I look into the future then, it is with these cautions in mind. I can only describe what I see as the most likely ultimate future of us all in the most general possible terms.
What I see happening is this: we will eventually replace ourselves, voluntarily I hope, with conscious machines able to travel in space, indeed live in it, with none of the deadly encumbrances and limitations of our present organic form. In other words, no food, shelter, sex and so on, just exploration (see EXPLORATION, INCENTIVES). I should say though that when I use the word `machines' I don't mean it in today's somewhat limited sense, but in tomorrow's in which a machine might look like one, but will have the same awareness of self and of other conscious entities, similar or different, as we do. Because these machines will almost certainly possess considerably greater sensory and effective capabilities than our own, their consciousness may be correspondingly far broader and deeper than ours with our immutable brains and bodies. Those future machines may go even beyond this and cast off their physical `shells', but there is no way I, with my own limitations, can ultimately consider whether this is even possible (see PereGaea).
How do we arrive at this nirvana, if nirvana it be? I think it may actually be inescapable if we continue developing our scientific and technological culture at the current pace, and that it could happen sometime in the next hundred years or two. Even if we should turn round and forsake our new planetwide culture and go back to the Stone Age (as I suspect many people believe we should), eventually a scientific rebellion and renaissance will once again take place and we will be on the road again to that glittering future. Even if the delay is a thousand years, that is barely an instant in the evolutionary scale of time.
Should we attempt to resist? Such a reality may, both for the machines and possibly for ourselves, turn out to be an improvement on what we have now. Whether these new representatives of Earth will however replace us humans or coexist with us is not, unfortunately, possible to foresee. If the latter, then our future may be like inhabiting a sociological game park, that is, we continue to live as we always have, but do not attempt to escape our new boundaries.
Could the ideas in these essays, along with some of the solutions I have suggested to our human problems, be seen to hasten the transition than hinder it? That is not my purpose. I too can ultimately only look at this here-and-now we live in and hope that I can help turn it into a better future one. We each must, after all, try to do that, otherwise some other kind of future may be imposed on us that we do not want (see BELIEFS, PARADOX, SOLUTIONS).
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GOD
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It's actually possible now to create an Earth-like planet in seven days - indeed seven hours. And it doesn't take a God. All it takes is a decent computer and a program to match. The results won't be all that convincing, it is after all only a simulation, but one gets the odd feeling that it won't be all that long before we can create the real thing in a comparable time.
And that, believe it or not, may be wholly within a computer. As I described in my book PereGaea, the whole of our Universe may already be a simulation inside somebody's computer (or the comparator my book described. See also ELEMENTS). And that somebody might himself (or itself) be a simulation in some other system Elsewhere. Ultimately we can't answer such questions as Who or Where since one of the current definitions of a Universe is `something its inhabitants can't perceive or escape to the outside of'. However, if we are inside some such simulation, it may be possible for us to discover the program under which it runs, and make alterations to it to suit ourselves. This might then allow us to create whole new worlds, amongst countless other things (see MYSTICISM).
Of course there is no way of knowing if there is really such a program, let alone if we can alter it. What it does mean is that all the claims made in the Bible are entirely possible, they could have happened just as it and all the literature it is ultimately founded on described. God could be very real, along with Jesus Christ and the Devil. However, as a corollary to that, so could all the claims made by all the other religions ever invented on this planet (and for that matter, possible beyond, see ALIENS). One might then suppose either that all religions are equally invalid since they all conflict, or that they are equally valid in that they are simply different interpretations of the same idea, that we were all created by Something.
Unfortunately there's only one thing we can say with any certainty here at all, and that's that we know nothing. We may think we can be guided by feelings, faith, and revelation on these things, but they are all products of whatever culture we belong to, our particular society, friends, etc. It is also unfortunate in the extreme that inducing such feelings is a prime tool of confidence tricksters and others who, perhaps even more dangerously, believe in their Message with a literally life-consuming ferocity (see RESPONSIBILITY, SPIRITUALITY, BELIEFS).
Just imagine if we could somehow prove God's existence. Then there could be no free will since we would feel compelled to do what we believe we are told by Him, or His `representatives' on Earth, real or false, to be His Will. Since he is believed to have specifically stated that we have Free Will and that our behavior is our choice, he must therefore have made it impossible for us to prove his existence.
There are other reasons to suspect such a `proof' is unlikely. If a scientist or philosopher did develop a proof that no other person on Earth could find fault with, (as some believe once happened with the Ontological Proof of God), how long would that state of affairs last? Would it be a week before somebody did find an error? A month? Even if it many years were to pass, could we ever be sure that it wouldn't ever happen?
In any case, would a God whose existence could be proved be much of a God? Once we learned anything absolute and definite about Him, wouldn't that not only limit the possibilities as to what he could be, but in turn put constraints on the nature of reality? Wouldn't we then come to feel we were living in a somehow limited Universe created by a God who was less than the perfection that the Western concept of God at least implies?
To my mind therefore the only approach we can take to the Existence of God is one of neither belief or disbelief. This is not agnosticism, it is essentially similar to the attitude we might take towards anything for which there is no evidence for or against, extraterrestrial visitations for example (see ALIENS).
Some people might find such a notion to be completely intolerable, especially those who feel `a great void' in their lives and feel that their existence is little more like `going through the motions'. They need a Purpose, both for themselves and for the whole of Existence. `Surely we don't just live and die like flowers?' some of them might ask.
The notion of `purpose' is solely a human concept, one that ultimately derives from our cortical propensity to plan, plot or scheme. Finding purposes to put objects to - and sometimes other people - in order to aid our survival is a key part of that. After one million years, it becomes hard for us not to see things in terms of Purpose, including ourselves and our lives. However, since we cannot know whether or not God exists let alone whether he has a Purpose for us, we cannot apply the concept to our existence in this way. We may have a purpose for flowers, but we can no more determine if we ourselves have a Purpose than flowers can. We are only able, so far as we know, to live and die as they do.
Since most religions of course claim otherwise, they draw large numbers of people into them as a result. However, subscribing to any such religion or some other belief system (see BELIEFS, INSPIRATION, TRUST) is unlikely to be more than a temporary palliative for the `purpose anxiety' any thoughtful person may suffer from. He or she is eventually likely to discover that they have joined a sort of club where God stands in for Santa Claus, always granting or with-holding requests made through prayer `according to His higher wisdom'. A Santa Claus who guides people through life like a father, punishing those who `stray' with disease, grief, loss of love. The rest of us prefer to accept such mishaps as a part of life and deal with them using our intelligence rather than faith. Whether God exists or not, I can't imagine He sees himself as a sort of narcotic.
How then to fill that void? Some of these religious clubs have in fact stumbled on what I feel is a better answer, and one which is well accommodated within most of the codes of morality we have invented. Here I am thinking of such organizations as the Salvation Army, World Vision, Red Cross. All these societies exist to serve their fellow man, whether they are Believers or not. There are of course many other non-religious organizations with similar aims, but the people in them all have one belief in common: helping out one's fellow Orphans of Reality is the only way of filling a void (see WELFARE). There are many other things we can do to help us find our way (see ART, DEPRESSION, SCIENCE).
So even if we cannot say whether God exists or not, we can at least bring our ideal of him to life in this real, everyday world we live in. That is not just the next best thing, to my mind it is the best thing. We are then more likely to determine what is needed and find ways of providing it rather than deluding ourselves with spiritual narcotics.
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HAPPINESS
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The ultimate end of conscious life is Happiness. But there are two kinds of this, short term and long term, and the activities involved in the pursuit of one may conflict with those of the other. Traps are based on this conflict, where a brief surge of happiness induced into a victim may blind it to a severe cost, perhaps even its life.
This conflict is the entire thing behind the evolution of intelligence, our individual ability to plan, plot, scheme for `future security', another term we like to use for happiness tomorrow. The cortical structures of our brain then expanded further to allow us to develop our basic social structures which, with the evolution of language, lead to our attempts to improve our happiness through cooperating our plans, schemes etc. Hence our rules, written and unwritten, embodied in our economic, political, ethical, and various belief systems.
Yet one wonders if people are on the whole any happier overall than they were a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, a million years ago? Certainly medical science for instance has spared us much death and disease, but brought fierce drug addictions, overpopulation, and prolongation of life beyond the livable. Revolutionary new political systems like communism promised to prevent the very few from owning the very many, but all it did was change the system of ownership. Even the simple machines we use to improve our lives can also become guns, tanks and bombs. Is there any point therefore to progress? Should we stay as we are, revert to previous modes of life? Or just lie back and let progress take us where it will? (See FUTURE)
I suspect we have no control over that, such a decision will forever lie beyond us. There have been, are, and always will be a few people who want to change things for what they believe to be the betterment of their fellow man, or solely for the benefit of themselves. Most of us are somewhere in between, lying somewhere along that Gaussian Curve connecting Happiness Now with Happiness Future, helping ourselves while we help others. In essence we constantly struggle to find the balance between Moral Capitalism, where the many come to be owned by the few, and Moral Communism, where the few are always subject to the collective needs of the many. Some societies find different balances from others just as individuals do, but relatively few of either appear to be completely happy overall. It seems unlikely a lasting solution can be found since inevitably some well-intentioned acts will always prove to have disastrous consequences, while a few mean and selfish ones will result in unintended good.
Like all balancing acts, this one has to be carefully maintained else all is lost. It also requires a society to maintain the free and easy movement of all the social mechanisms that enable it to do that.
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INCENTIVE
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Imagine if you can that we finally become capable of building an android that is powered indefinitely by nuclear energy, is hardened against the elements so that it needs no shelter, can repair itself by fashioning what it needs directly from raw materials, and doesn't need to replace itself since its self-repair ability makes it everlasting. It would in effect be completely immune to those incentives which allegedly control us, like food, shelter, sex, fame, power, money, fun, and meaning. Most of these goals have shaped the evolution of our consciousness from pre-human times and brought us everything we have in our various cultures.
What incentive then would the android have to survive? Could it even be conscious in any sense we could understand, or even at all?
Here we have to consider the difference between consciousness and intelligence. Intelligence has to do with how we do things, finding ways of reaching objectives that are reliable, yet consume the least time and resources. Consciousness has to do with why we do those things, set our various goals and objectives. The consciousness of a dog will differ from that of a dolphin because they live in such different environments and have so few goals in common. Their intelligence however may be quite comparable, though as yet that can only be a matter of opinion.
In order to make an android conscious in any way we can understand therefore, would we have to `hobble' it so that it must, for example, periodically `feed' off an external electricity supply? Build an entire society of androids that provide specialized maintenance and support services for each other to gain that electricity and anything else they may require? Even include a form of `sex' so that the brains of any new androids are prestocked with a random combination of the learned experiences of two other androids? (how would they select themselves?)
At that point one might ask: what would be the point of building such a `society'? It would be interesting, certainly, we could learn a lot about ourselves. We could even turn them into slaves (if necessity is the mother of invention, laziness is the de facto father). Is consciousness totally about incentives? Does our own derive solely from our Limbic Emotion Centers? (See ADDICTION)
Perhaps an everlasting android could be built with a wholly different set of incentives. Its artificial `emotion centers' could cause its consciousness to resemble that of a professional person in that it would care for others before itself (it would not need to care so much for its own welfare), explore whole new areas of the universe like, well, an old-time explorer (it would not need an atmosphere or gravity to function, though it would need an interstellar drive, see EXPLORATION), and investigate new areas of what up till now have been human knowledge like a scientist (imagine a symbiosis between a Computer and a Neural Net (or Comparator, see PereGaea)). Although these incentives are for us culturally learned ones that ultimately derive from our limbic emotions, there seems no reason why they can't form the basis for a wholly new consciousness. One that is not just a replica of our own, but better. It may even have more of a soul than a mind.
There may be an interesting corollary to this. Now that us humans (at least in the advanced regions of the world) are finding our own basic Incentives easier to satisfy (food, shelter, and sex at least), we may find ourselves in the same position as the incentiveless android. If an incentive is continually satisfied, it is all but not there. Could our own consciousness actually diminish accordingly? Maybe we have the chance to remould it along the lines of the new `social' androids (see ART, DEPRESSION, WELFARE).
Could such androids incidentally have been constructed by intelligent beings billions of years ago? Might they now even be controlling the universe in some way, perhaps even rewriting the laws of physics to suit themselves? Maybe they even invented us (see GOD). There is simply no way we can answer such questions as yet and perhaps, because of our comparatively limited abilities, we never will.
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INSPIRATION
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Ever really been inspired by somebody? I mean, really inspired? Did you become caught up in an activity, a way of life, or manner of thinking that you would never have remotely considered prior to that? And did you ever later discover, perhaps to your extreme cost, that that person was a sham, that their `new world' was just the same old one of delusion and self-delusion under the usual tatty disguise?
So how can we really tell the difference between the genuinely inspired and those who are falsely so?
What exactly is inspiration? Ultimately, like so many of our basal feelings, I suspect it derives from yet another Emotion Center in our Limbic System (see ADDICTION). And that in turn perhaps evolved as a part of leadership, so vital to hold together the social group in pack-hunting carnivores such as we once were. Indeed it may have been a major impetus in the eventual development of language. Certainly we know that the ability to use language is a vital talent for inspiration and leadership.
But does inspiration need to be supported by capability? One can't help noticing that it can be solely a matter of personality, as we observe when the more flamboyant criminals appear to garner more public notice than leading scientists or charity workers. One might assume that inspiration must, if it is to endure, be supported by genuine capabilities that are perceived as such by his or her followers, potential or actual. However, con-men from the religious to the financial can be good at appearing to have solid backgrounds of achievement, that is after all the whole basis of their art. Conversely, there are those people who appear to have done little themselves, but who can inspire others to do genuinely worthwhile things, more than making up for what they were apparently unable to do themselves. This can happen in the teaching, editing, or critical review professions.
Another guide to `genuineness' might appear to be education. Highly educated people may seem more likely to be immune from the self-delusions from which false inspiration can start. Unfortunately there is no guarantee that a good education won't simply make self-delusion even more intricate and plausible, since the perpetrator can use his education to provide him with additional armaments to pursue his cause. Even science itself, perhaps the most hard-headed of occupations one can become involved in, has such examples. The debate over cold fusion back in the 1980's would be considered by many to be one such, though even now perhaps minds ought remain open.
Ultimately therefore we have only guidelines. Inspiration should be backed up by solid achievement, and the more trust an inspirator demands, the more closely those achievements should be looked at. That applies to their context as well; is what they claim they can do consistent with what they have already done? Even here though there are no guarantees, plenty of money scams were perpetrated by those who proved to be millionaires only on paper. So whether we follow some new would-be Jesus Christ, Muhammad, and Buddha at one end of the scale to Ghengis Khan and Adolf Hitler at the other, is unavoidably a matter of luck.
But then why do we have to follow anybody at all? Of course you do when you are young and still finding your way, learning how to live within reality, and any help, real or not, is going to be at least looked at. But ultimately you have to find your own way (see ART, DEPRESSION, GOD, SCIENCE, WELFARE), and that can become an even more fascinating experience if you are successful. Often to the point where you feel the urge to share it with somebody, even help them find their way. Perhaps help many people. As many people as possible...
Could you then become a false leader yourself, as can happen to the nicest people? Become unable to handle the massive feedback you receive, or begin to misuse the sense of power it inevitably brings? Perhaps that too is to some extent a matter of chance (see RESPONSIBILITY). Good Luck. Both to you and your followers.
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LUCK
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Luck, unlike history, is bunk. It presupposes some vague undefined supernatural agency, like `Lady Luck', that can overcome the vagaries of chance on one's behalf. This is really no different from claiming that God exists. While I can't answer for God's Existence (see GOD), we have to assume that, as the old saying goes, you must make your own luck as far as you can (see RESPONSIBILITY). And one can only do that by placing oneself in a position so that a `lucky break' i.e., useful chance event, is more likely to happen to you than not. Acquiring a good education is one such way, acquiring a skill another or, if one doesn't mind the financial hazard, an art (see ART, SCIENCE).
The notion of Luck though dies hard. National Lotteries like `Lotto' provide a good example of this. Virtually all these lotteries are designed to be games of pure chance, there is no known way of improving one's chances of winning a prize over anyone else's. No `schemes' are possible, indeed some countries even ban the advertising of Lotto winning methods for this reason. Many such schemes depend on some imagined property of numbers or even on the more traditional notions of numerology; the best safeguard against this is to think of the set of Lotto numbers as being nothing more than labels - or even as letters, the game would work perfectly well with letters of the alphabet, or even abstract symbols of some sort.
Nevertheless, we have all heard of `miracles'; of people winning the top prize by taking the barcode numbers off a beer can, or following some arcane and complicated system that brings them `their' win. Or even of people winning twice in one week. It is sheer co-incidence thrown up by the huge numbers involved; if you have millions of players with tens of millions of tickets, even the laws of probability cannot prevent deterministic-looking situations arising (see ELEMENTS). In some people's minds though, this merely `proves' the existence of some mechanistic law `behind' all this, that Fate is alive and well.
Much the same applies to the `anti-lottos' of life; maiming or death through disease, road accidents, criminal violence. Even where other individuals are to blame for these, chance often plays a key role in the way the victims are selected (see CRIMINALITY, RESPONSIBILITY). There are no `malevolent forces of nature at work' here, nor does anybody `deserve' to be a victim through some form of `natural justice'. Reality is neutral, it just doesn't care. Caring is up to us. It is we who have to try through our social structures, especially social welfare and insurance schemes, to ensure loss is minimized and that gains are spread as widely as possible without taking too much from those individuals who actually achieve them (see WELFARE).
All this may seem like an argument against Lotto and gambling in general. To some extent it is; Lotto especially seems like social welfare in reverse in that it redistributes funds from the many back into the hands of the few. In the case of state-run gambling systems however, if the price of entry is small and a good proportion of the money is redistributed through charities, then the benefits can outweigh the costs. The main risk is that some individuals will inevitably `invest' huge sums of money since they do not appreciate the odds involved or believe they can `beat them' through one of those above-mentioned `schemes'. And if there are a profusion of lotteries or gambling, they will simply defeat their own charitable purposes by vacuuming up significant portions of poor people's incomes.
Perhaps gambling institutions could be treated as being potential sources of addiction, like tobacco and alcohol. Not banned outright, but discouraged through state-supported television advertisements informing people of the risks. That way people have the best chance of making a free but informed choice. Even if, should they choose to gamble, it eventually proves to be a wrong choice. Life itself may be a gamble, but most of us try to manage it as intelligently as we can rather than rely on Lady Luck.
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MYSTICISM
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I have always felt that the current popular fascination for all things mystical from Astrology to Zoroastrianism to be extremely unfortunate. They not only obscure the genuine mysteries of our existence, but attempt to deride science, the one effective means we have of exploring them and perhaps even finding a few answers (see SCIENCE).
As I have said elsewhere (see PereGaea, GOD,ELEMENTS), it could be possible that the whole of the reality we experience is merely a simulation in a computer in somebody else's reality. If we could ever acquire the ability to manipulate the `software' or whatever it is that controls our reality, we might then become able to do things that would be physically impossible otherwise. Like levitate heavy objects without mechanical intervention, or teleport ourselves instantly from here to there. Like most technology though it would probably come at the usual price: the law of unforeseeable side effects. For example, what would such powers do to our nature and the way we perceive ourselves?
Some people would quite naturally claim that they already have such powers, though they might not describe themselves as altering the Reality Program (unless, perhaps, prompted to do so). Whatever form their claim might take, many would then insist that their `powers' come by disciplining their thoughts in the manner, for example, of certain Indian or Tibetan religions.
If they can ever demonstrate the effects of these powers in a scientifically testable way, then they will have made a genuine breakthrough. I have to say though that, in spite of the vigor of such claims over countless decades, this has never been done convincingly. To my mind the path, if there is one, will ultimately lie through science, and would constitute a revolution in that field. There would then be no limit to what we could know and do.
This makes it doubly sad therefore that we, like impatient children, so easily pass up the search for the golden chalice of genuine universal power for the glittering baubles of pseudomystical ones.
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PARADOX
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Whenever I hear the phrase `social conventions', I immediately think of all those mating and dispute-resolving rituals animals evolved to minimize the risk of injury and death to themselves and ultimately their species. And I guess that's what ours amount to, except that now they usually only allow human friend and foe alike a chance to assess another's intentions in various situations and decide how best to handle them. A society can then function at its maximum efficiency since its members have the most freedoms with the fewest restrictions.
But of course it doesn't quite work that way. Some of our conventions and the morals and laws many are translated into may grow to impede rather than aid our collective survival. Certain individuals may also learn to use them to disguise criminal behavior, or even use them to take the society over and control it according to their own ends. It may therefore be beneficial to review each convention we have from time to time to ensure that it continues to be beneficial and that no one is using it to gain some unfair advantage.
But how can we do that without developing some form of convention to try and achieve that - a convention which itself may be faulty or subvertible? This is rather like that old saying `who guards the guardians?'. Ultimately, in the Western world at least, the guardians are guarded by those whom they guard via the convention of democracy and all that goes with it. It has its risks (see DECADENCE), but like the jury system, a less unfair system has so far never been developed anywhere on the planet.
Could one ever be? I think this is most unlikely. One can see why most readily in the major western societies where pornography, the advertising and sale of sexual narcotics (see SEX), is limiting too many lives in the way all narcotics do. Freedom of speech, guaranteed under more than one constitution, differs from freedom of advertisement. Few societies allow the advertising of heroin or any such narcotic, some even ban that of tobacco and alcohol. This is because advertising is designed to hit our emotional buttons, to act as a narcotic itself so far as it can through the medium of sight and sound. Pornography could therefore be restricted on these grounds rather than protected under free speech. The manner in which it is so restricted then in effect becomes its definition.
Propaganda may also be approached in a similar way, for what is it but political or religious ideas promoted through such advertising techniques? Firmly-held beliefs or one sort or another are unavoidable as a part of coping with reality (see BELIEFS), and believing that other people should share them is often a part of that. This means such beliefs must be presented in a vivid and graphic way otherwise people simply won't notice them amongst the immense babble of our ever-accelerating information explosion. Promoting them on television with all limbic stops out is more likely to get them across than writing an essay or a book.
I myself believe such propagandists ought to be prepared to take part in any discussion that may challenge their belief systems, and display a willingness to modify or reject any part of them that conflicts with clear evidence. If they cannot or will not, they should then be actively discouraged via counter-propaganda in the same way as tobacco or alcohol consumption is in many societies, or in extreme cases denied access to the media like any other drug pusher. For ideas and beliefs can, if relentlessly advertised, become narcotics (see GOD). Even though Communism can for instance be made to sound as beneficial to all as Christianity (which it in many ways it actually resembles), few people would attempt to advertise it now because of its propensity to be taken over by clever thugs. Yet not so long ago it was heavily advertised not just by its adherents, but many people in the West who refused to look at the clear evidence against it.
There is yet another paradox behind why we cannot hope for democratic perfection. One of the most effective ways we have so far found to ensure our social conventions do the most good and the least harm is to try not to be too annoyed when a few people go against them to try new ones. But that too can produce an imperfect situation, for some of the alternate subcultures that result may become so sizeable they challenge the culture they sprang from. They then threaten to completely destroy rather than modify a set of conventions which, while imperfect, have overall served us well. That risk is however offset by that at the other extreme, of having to live with rigid sets of social conventions for thousands of years, as have some of our societies on Earth. Freedom to experiment allows us to adapt to competition better. One can't help but notice that some of the archaic societies on our world tend to be somewhat anti-science, and are suffering as a result.
This balancing process between conservatism and revolution can again be compared to what happens in the animal world. One cannot help but notice that the vast majority of vertebrate land animals have a head, torso, and four limbs. Birds and fishes are streamlined. Eyeballs have essentially the same structure and function much the same way in all species that have them. So for all the conventions that have been broken, from the outrageous tail-feathers of the peacock to the flatfish having both eyes on the same side of its head, there are at least as many that have been kept, perhaps the majority, because they can only be broken at a specie's peril. But a species can only determine which through natural selection.
Can we hope to be able to do any better? Many people would claim for instance that the Ten Commandments at the basis of most Western Religions are still the best set of rules for people to live by. But there are many situations where they ought not be applied, or where one must take precedence over another should they conflict. Man should put asunder violent marriages; one should be able to defend oneself against violence. Situation ethics and white lies can be entirely appropriate in some circumstances, despite the best wishes of moral absolutists. Many of us may believe in standing up for our principles, but sometimes conflicts can only be resolved through discussion and compromise, with a final arbiter should a decision need to be made and acted upon. Principles taken to extremes can become perversions.
Perhaps we can propose a new law of human affairs (or of Nature itself); the Law of Paradox: No law can be created which does not subvert itself in some situation or another at some time, including perhaps this Law.
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POVERTY
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Poverty in the western world at least is often compared with that in the 1930's depression era. Some surprise is expressed at the fact that it's victims don't seem to be able to cope as well as they did then, evidenced by the currently higher crime rates and the apparently lower willingness for people to help each other. But the nature of the poverty now is so different. Back then, people did not have the stereo and T.V. sets to buy. Cars were rare, and seldom needed with the smaller cities and extensive tram, bus and train networks. Drugs except alcohol and tobacco were all but unheard of; and those social palliatives seldom cost anything like today's heroin or cocaine habits.
Now there are higher expectations in living conditions; better beds, washing machines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and better buildings to put them in. Being without just one of these items today can make a family feel more deprived than one in the 1930's, who would not of course even thought of such items. Nor, just as importantly, did their neighbors. Color television was not around to constantly remind a person of their lack of these things, the radio and printed media advertisements for the items that were available then could never have been so vivid. It was also socially fashionable to think the needs of others took precedence over those of the individual. Selflessness was next to Godliness, the Community was All.
There are however some advantages poor people have now they did not have then. Those same televisions, along with computers, can be used to help educate oneself. The car can be used to attend a night school, community college or even a university. Yet one must find the energy, the will, the drive to do these things, and poverty itself can sap that, especially if one has a lot of children, or is constantly tired through malnutrition. A helping hand from somewhere can help, but that can provide only so much help, whether it is a government welfare scheme, a charitable group, or even ones friends. Ultimately you are on your own, with your own strength and your own will and determination, just like everyone else.
So is it realistic to expect all poor people to pull themselves out of that mire? Just how many people categorized as `poor' according to any criteria do succeed? Probably a similar percentage to those who manage to give up narcotics.
There is another possible cure for poverty, though many people would no doubt feel it is worse than the disease. Virtually everybody in the Western World at least believes the right to give birth to children is automatic and incontestable. If challenged, protests are raised like `Nazi Germany', `sitting in judgment', and `why should only the rich have children?' But if poverty is so extremely unpleasant, why do so many poor people bring so many children into it, children they are supposed to love? Prior to the 1950's they had no choice. But now they do, and few appear to be exercising it. Poor families can be happy families, but this is rapidly becoming the exception rather than the rule because of all those things they cannot have. The market for unskilled labor is rapidly shrinking in an increasingly automate-or-die world (see FUTURE). And welfare payments are and never will be enough even in the wealthiest societies, especially when the children of the recipients go on welfare, and have yet more children to go on welfare. And for the usual multitude of reasons advanced by sociologists, the molestation of those children has become rampant.
Is this humane? Or would a system of child-raising licences actually be more humane? Would such a system cut back the deprivation, malnutrition, undereducation that makes poverty such a vicious circle?
Much would depend on what criteria were set. For instance, should child-raising licences be restricted to couples who have been formally married for at least five years, thereby giving some indication of their mutual commitment and ability to see it through? Personality checks to ensure the stability of a marital relationship does not come through intimidation or even abuse of one spouse by another? Should regular employment over five years be a major qualification? How many children should a couple be licensed to raise? Would this depend on the type of employment and the income derived therefrom? Should it depend also on the monitoring of how the first and any subsequent children progress? Are they well nourished, well-educated, well-adjusted physically, mentally, and emotionally?
And how would illegal pregnancies and childbirths be dealt with? Compulsory abortion or euthanasia respectively, with the compulsory sterilization of both parents?
It's hard to imagine any society instituting something so draconian and fraught with ethical risks for a pay-off that wouldn't even begin to appear for twenty years at least (see SOLUTIONS). I think most people would prefer to muddle through with the situation we have now. It is unfortunate that poverty for many is the price we all have to pay for freedom from the kind of administrative systems child licensing would require.
Yet I still think child licences are worth trying. We can then attempt to find solutions to the `side-effect' problems as we go rather than allowing them to frighten us away from what could be a very real solution to Poverty. Why should we inflict our fears on others who need not have to suffer them? Our huge dinosaur societies risk growing too big and immobile to survive, choking themselves to death under their own impossibly huge bulk. We now have a chance of a painless way of reducing that bulk and becoming the slimmer, more nimble societies we could be. Then we would be better able to survive new disasters we cannot as yet foresee.
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RESPONSIBILITY
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Many people still hold the ancient question: `Free will or predestination' to be a perfectly valid one. Such notions as predestination however belong to that era when it was thought the Universe operated like an infinitely huge piece of clockwork. Modern ideas such as probability theory (see ELEMENTS), chaos theory, quantum physics, and Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle have all put paid to that. To my mind the question is now `free will or chance?'. Do we jump when we decide to perform a certain action, or are we pushed by our genetic makeup, upbringing, culture, education, and so on?
I covered the essentials of this in my book `PereGaea.' However, for those of you who have not read it, let me put it like this: The vast majority of decisions are made by comparing them to decisions in the past that were most similar and had a positive outcome. When there are no such decisions, indicated by the fact that several match those in memory equally poorly and have a mix of good or bad outcomes, then all the circumstantial factors mentioned above come into play. The decision is then in effect made almost entirely by chance. Methods may sometimes even be used to ensure that it is chance, tossing a coin perhaps. Sometimes even the method of making the decision itself may even become the subject of a decision.
We cannot therefore, I suspect, assert with any absolute confidence that Free Will exists or doesn't exist. Like God, its existence cannot apparently be proven either way (see GOD). However, this then immediately raises the question: `can we really be held responsible for our own actions, whether they are perceived to derive from virtue, or from criminality'? (see CRIMINALITY). Up until now all our laws and moral codes on which virtually all our societies and cultures are founded assume that Free Will is absolute, and that we are responsible for our actions except in cases where a person can be described as mentally retarded or ill. So ingrained is this bedrock of our consciousness that it is very hard to imagine any kind of alternative. The nearest we have come is through the ideas underlying such ideologies as socialism, communism, and christianity, where those who benefit the most from their cultures (i.e. are taught or somehow become adept at making survival enhancing decisions) contribute some of their profits to support the existence of those who lack such a capability for one reason or another. It in effect replaces the notion of `responsibility' with that of `insurance', that is, some people may no more be able to guard against the consequences of their own decisions or those of another than they can against some natural accident or calamity.
In practice however, both are appropriate even though they seem mutually exclusive. The most stable societies on our planet are those that have found a balance between the two, by maintaining market economies so as to generate via taxation the funds to support a strong welfare program. This not only provides the best resolution of the `Free Will versus Chance' paradox, but also the best foundation for the democratic processes that allow that balance to be continually discussed and maintained. There are a few modifications to the process I would like to see instituted (see EUTHANASIA, CRIMINALITY, PARADOX, and POVERTY), but by and large about one quarter of the population of our world have found reasonably workable systems, perhaps for one of the few times in human history. We can only now hope the other three quarters will develop ways to achieve the same end.
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SCIENCE
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One often reads of eminent scientists who look back on the moment when they made their salient discovery as having experienced a `profoundly religious' feeling, or of having been overtaken by an `absolute awe of nature'. Other aesthetic responses are also described, such as beauty, elegance, simplicity. Reference is often made too of the sharp contrast with the mind-bending drudgery, frustration, and set-backs that the years of experiment leading up to such fine moments almost invariably involve.
One thing this does not sound like is the so-called `inhumanity' that many people in this `advanced' age customarily assign to science. Indeed, I for one get the impression that most of the anti-science movements, the so-called `New Age' and other remnants of the hippie era, plus a good many religious movements, are a good deal less humane than those whom they accuse. Certainly there is no shortage of spectacular cases of cults that have gone wrong.
Many of these Believers would in turn simply say: `but what is science but a ritual? Isn't it just a culture just like any other?' There is one major difference however between the culture of science, and cultures that center round rituals and traditions. As we've seen throughout history, when one culture invades another, the invaded culture takes on many of the characteristics of their invaders and, to a lesser extent, vice versa. What is kept and what is discarded is largely determined by chance, often according to what the leading personalities in both happen to favor. As the generations pass, the two cultures merge into one.
Science operates somewhat differently. If a scientist claims to have made a new observation about some phenomenon or discovers some new process, other scientists can immediately check it out to determine if the claim stands up. If it does, it is added to the body of scientific knowledge (but see BELIEFS). If it stands up only partially, other scientists explore further and make adjusted, or even different, claims as a consequence. If the claim is proven false, it does not become part of the scientific culture except perhaps as a historical footnote.
Of course it is not always as simple as that since remnants of earlier cultures persist. It is for instance helpful to already have some kind of reputation in order to get ones discovery published in a prestigious journal that is likely to be read by the majority of scientists in one's field. Many scientists will dismiss any claim out of hand (i.e. without checking it) if it appears counterintuitive or against current thinking (i.e. `paradigm'). Belief systems persist here too, even though in science all theories are supposed to be provisional, even those with apparently solid foundations like Evolution and Relativity Theory. But at least the basic mechanisms exist for a claim to be proved `beyond reasonable doubt', and if it is so proved, it becomes culturally independent. In other words, it becomes `true' in India, Japan, Iraq, Britain, the Moon, and so far as we know, anywhere else in the Universe that supports an environment in which the claim has relevance. No other `culture' we have is like that, nor any religion, in spite of any fundamentalist claims some may insist upon.
Does that make science `superior' to all other cultures? No, because it is very easy to point out science's limitations, which it does in fact recognize itself. For instance, it cannot explain the reason for our existence, `why everything is'. But then no culture can, in spite of the claims of so many to the contrary. Can Science by the same token be `inferior' to any other culture? Again, no, because the seeds of scientific thought can be found in any of Earth's Cultures. The fact that these seeds only flourished and grew in Renaissance Europe is an accident of chance, and by its rapid growth, enabled science - along with those European Cultures - to infiltrate all others. This was not only through the technology it fostered, but through the analytical thinking it bestows on its beneficiaries.
And the future? Is it possible that one day all human cultures will try to turn their backs on science as some are currently doing, so that it effectively disappears off our planet? That is actually impossible to say since science no more provides a way of seeing into the future than logic, instinct or religion does (see FUTURE). However, if we ban all science, we would then, to be consistent, need to ban all technology from our world as well. People would once more die in agony of the simplest diseases, throw their lives away on repressive belief systems, and dress once more in furs from animals which they had killed and skinned themselves with their bare hands. What seems more possible is a compromise, that scientific research would be banned from some specific point and all technology would not be allowed to progress beyond the current level. This would almost certainly mean we would not leave the surface of the earth and travel to the stars. This would to my mind be unfortunate to say the least (see EXPLORATION).
Could things go the other way so that science becomes a religion? It certainly has many qualities that could give it `religious' appeal. Perhaps first and foremost is `Occam's Razor' upon which it is founded, that (to paraphrase) `the simplest theory appears to be the one that most often fits the observed facts'. The thought that God or Nature (see GOD) works in the simplest possible way has a strong appeal for us, because it implies that the whole universe is simple in the principles of its operation, even though it may be complex in its detail. That in turn suggests that one day we might understand it, and become rather Godlike ourselves, or at least have some insight into a godly state. And that could mean science comes to acquire religion's worst properties of rigidity and all-dominance. Sooner or later this could be rebelled against, perhaps even putting us at risk once more of enduring the anti-science alternative I've just outlined.
Perhaps it is best that, by and large, current attitudes persist. Science itself does encourage skepticism as a safeguard against too strong a belief in its own theories and hypotheses. After all, even though some scientists believe we are actually close to a `Theory of Everything', we can be sure that as soon as such a thing is claimed, the following week a scientist would surely come out and say `now hold your horses. What about this...'
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SEX
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Sex apparently evolved as a quicker way of enabling a species to adapt to changes in its environment rather than random mutation, or some other mechanism like hermaphroditism, would have allowed. That also meant however that organisms adapted to solo survival had to be induced to come together to reproduce themselves. Limbic systems therefore had to evolve emotion centers dedicated to this purpose. As a result, Sex is in effect an inbuilt narcotic we are all literally born with an addiction to. Yet these centers, unlike most others, cannot be fully stimulated with an artificial narcotic because that can only happen when another person of the appropriate sex is present. Aphrodisiacs can only amplify an existing stimulation, they cannot supplant that need for a partner unless, perhaps, one is an onanist.
If this `narcotic addiction' is built in, how then do we cope with it both as individuals and as a society, since its source cannot be removed? Especially since we are so demonstrably poor at coping with narcotic addictions of any sort?
We do have other needs which could also be thought of as inbuilt narcotics, like that of satiating hunger or of thirst. We have found that the best, if never completely perfect, way of meeting these needs is through developing rules that determine who shall receive what (but see PARADOX). The `distribution' of sexual resources has usually been managed in the same way, with sets of rules that not only determine who satisfies the needs of who, but also what happens to any resulting children. They also enable the parenting of children to continue over the several years necessary to allow them to learn about and adapt to usually highly complex adult lives. Even though these rules more often than not cut across the random attractions of people, they are still considered by most people to be a small price to pay compared to the probable disastrous consequences that can ensue when they are broken. Sexual addiction can become as highly compulsive as any other, one can even become addicted to somebody one doesn't actually like as a person. And should it have to end for any reason, withdrawal symptoms can be as severe as with any narcotic and can last for years. Here too, murder, rape, insanity can result, and cause those other addictions to be substituted in their place.
In this context it seems amazing that the narcotic of sex is advertised far more widely and pervasively than any other, far outweighing even alcohol and tobacco. This goes some way to explaining why it is so often confused with love at one end of the scale (see SPIRITUALITY, TRUST), or combined with mutant limbic narcotics at the other such as child sex, sadism, and violence.
Yet it also has to be said that repressing sexual narcosis in too extreme a fashion can produce ghastly perversions of its own of the kind one associates with the Victorian era, the Puritans, or various religious sects, ancient or modern. It is no more effective than Prohibition was against alcohol in 1920's America. How then should we `manage' sexual narcotics, since that's about all we can hope to do?
The contraceptive pill may have protected people from the consequences of sex, but not from its addictive properties. The lack of awareness of this distinction may have been responsible for the extreme pro-sex propaganda of recent decades. Only now is this beginning to look rather like advertising the virtues of heroin without mentioning its severe cost. The solution? Perhaps, just as many countries do with alcohol and tobacco, discourage but do not attempt to ban. End the pro-sex propaganda (assuming that is even remotely possible and promote abstinence as a form of emotional safety. It will be roundly derided and laughed at, but eventually the pendulum will begin to swing back, though hopefully not so far back that the even more dangerous vindictive repressiveness of the past makes its return.
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SOLUTIONS
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Just imagine if a society did adopt some of the highly unorthodox `solutions' to our social problems I have suggested in various essays in this book (eg EUGENICS, EUTHANASIA, POVERTY). The effect on that society would be electric. Conservatism of a kind never seen before would run rampant through the populace. Poor people would begin to feel even more unwanted and oppressed. Those on the political right would throw wildly expensive parties lasting weeks. Social workers would resign in droves, Civil Libertarians would emigrate to `freer' societies. The share market would destabilize as the free world boycotted trade with such a society, or threatened to. Catch-cries like `Censorship of Humanity', `Apartheid of the Poor', `Thin End of the Wedge' would be heard across the land and well out to sea.
What would such a society be like ten years later however? To be fair, the law of Unforeseeable Side Effects makes this hard to predict. It would be nice to think that crime would have diminished along with mental illness, that the judicial system will at last have become unclogged. It would be nice to think that the children of the poor would at least have diminished in number even if their parents as yet had not. It would also be nice to think that all its citizens would have come to adjust to the new situation. But inevitable many would not. Whole new problems would also no doubt have arisen, some of them caused directly by those new policies. Inheritances left by euthanased people, voluntary or otherwise, would be contested by those who claimed that improper conduct had occurred. Crimes would be committed by people who's lives were still so warped jail and execution was not a deterrent. Some of the aged would die under circumstances some felt were suspect. Religious people would be seen by many to have had the right ideas after all. Their numbers might even swell...
Happiness (see HAPPINESS) cannot be guaranteed. To my mind though it still seems that more people will experience it more often with these Solutions than if things are left as they are. On the whole, most people will come to see them as having paid off.
How likely is it though that such policies are likely to be enacted at all? Considering their obvious association with Fascist philosophies as embodied by Hitler and Mussolini, most people would consider them unthinkable. The antics of the loony right, who probably would support them, would cause even more people to agree. Also, since most countries in the west at least are governed by Democracies, its hard to imagine any political party, old or new, conducting a successful election campaign if this incorporated just one of these solutions, let alone all of them. `There are no simple solutions,' is a catch-cry that would cause it to be rejected. And that to my mind is one of the most unfortunate notions of the twentieth century, because it discourages people from even looking for simple solutions that may just work. In my view, simple
solutions that work are far better than complex ones that don't. Unfortunately much western social policy appears to consist of the latter.
Do I think therefore that the solutions I have outlined in these essays are worth trying to bring into being? Sometimes I think humanity is like an old car, soon as you fix one thing something else goes wrong with it. Nevertheless I think we must try, for the reason I have suggested often: that leaving things as they are seems an even more vicious, inhumane and incompassionate philosophy than anything I have outlined herein. It is rather like comforting a small boy who has just had his first bee sting, without first pulling out the sting. Pull the sting first, then comfort the boy. Let those people die who want to die. Then those who don't want to die are more likely to receive the attention they need. Execute painlessly those who ruin the lives of others. Even if they cannot help it, better one life lost than two. Or three. Or four...
This is not vindictive, but compassionate and humane. We need practical compassion, real humanity, that produces compassionate and humane results.
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SPIRITUALITY
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Experiments with monkeys and apes have shown some interesting differences in their self perception and their ability to `map' this perception onto others of their kind, that is, place themselves in the other's situation. In short, monkeys are unable to do this, whereas apes can. A monkey can emit a warning signal when it sees a predator, even a word that distinguishes one type of predator from another (e.g: from the sky, from the trees, or on the ground), but that's all it can do. It cannot then determine if a particular monkey, even its young, has seen it if the predator is obscured from that monkey's view. Apes can however do this, and respond with a rescue attempt if they perceive it to be necessary.
The difference between these two protective instincts suggests how our own more complex caring instincts, social values and ultimately our spirituality may have evolved.
But what exactly `is' spirituality? Or is it one of those things with as many definitions as there are human cultures or people?
Other experiments with apes over the last few decades have shown that they can become quite sophisticated linguists, it is mostly a matter of lacking the hardware and the complex `wiring' to it that complex speech requires. But they also do not, so far as I know, have the same ability to use words to describe words or language to describe language, as we do. We have acquired that self-referential capability, as well as that which enables us to describe everything about ourselves to ourselves, even those most interior of instincts in ways that allow us to modify those instincts even more effectively than our cortexes can (see ADDICTION). Spirituality would appear to be our caring instincts isolated from ourselves in this lingual way, then amplified beyond the natural through the same use of language to become `ideals', just as we have elevated Sex into Love (see SEX).
Indeed we appear to have done this with all our innate urges, even our aggressive `nonspiritual ones. We even have complex mixes of the two, for instance Karate, Tae Kwon Do and other such `martial arts'. This is I suspect not only an important part of our Cultural Evolution, it feeds back into it, giving us all our various Gods and Devils (see BELIEFS, GOD). However, this can exact a stiff price. When some members of a society, as politicians or other leaders, try to induce the rest of that society to commit themselves to some mutually beneficial course of action (as well as place their confidence in those politicians and vote for their future survival), it is usually by way of invoking such `higher' spiritual ideals (see INSPIRATION). Unfortunately the malevolent can also do this; the rallying cry of Home, Family, Nation for instance was pre-eminent in Hitler's Germany. Those ideals may then become somewhat devalued in the aftermath. Other would-be leaders must then find replacements. Since these can really only be different words for the same ideals, much depends on their presentation. And what can that be but more words, backed up by a few appropriate deeds to amplify their credibility? If those leaders actually do lead their people some way into their promised land without too stiff a price being paid, those new words can come to play their role in the cultural evolution of spirituality.
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THANATOLOGY
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As I have consistently suggested in many of these essays, any form of euthanasia or execution ought involve painless, even pleasant, forms of death. Most books on such topics however quietly omit to mention just how such are to be carried out. I however refuse to do that. If I am seriously suggesting that people die voluntarily or otherwise, then I cannot sidestep that unpleasant but necessary fact. It will also serve as a reminder that both involve killing people, whatever euphemisms I or anybody else might attempt to use for it (one can already see the media taking this out of context: `Essayist seriously proposes killing people'). I find the idea as essentially distasteful as you do, that is a part of my own cultural conditioning too. But I do feel that continuing with lives that involve intense or prolonged suffering of a person either directly or as a result of his or her actions outweighs any consideration of taste.
How reliable though are current methods of ending lives, putting down animals for instance as compared to killing them in slaughterhouses? Reliable as these methods may be, let's suppose they may be no more so for human beings than anesthesia. Stories abound of people who have been fully conscious throughout even complex surgery. Though the chances of this happening to a person are comparable to being struck by lightning, it is still too high for any form of euthanasia. To prevent such an event from occurring, two or even three drugs would need to be used, perhaps in sequence, along with constant monitoring which has just recently become highly reliable. All this would nevertheless have to be followed by the opening of a major artery to the brain to make absolutely certain.
If that is distasteful, it becomes even more so when the question is asked `who is going to carry out these procedures?' Doctors are forbidden through their Hippocratic oath, nurses have their own codes relating to patient care. It would have to fall to a new professional paramedical group who would receive all the training considered appropriate to their task. This would involve psychiatric training as well as physiological, for these `thanatologists' would also need to take a vital part in the counseling of people voluntarily presenting themselves for euthanasia.
Would there be many volunteers for this thanatological profession however? There are many people of the appropriate background who have already given serious thought to the ethics of euthanasia. The suggestions I have made in these essays may crystallize the thoughts of many of these people into serious consideration and actual participation should the political and legal hurdles be cleared and thanatological centers actually begin to be built.
Public acceptance of these concepts may take some time, but I suspect it will eventually come, just as it has with cremation in preference to burial. As with this, only those people with firmly-held religious convictions are likely to maintain their opposition indefinitely. This is unfortunate, one can only hope they don't take the same extreme actions as some have with abortion. They have every right to attempt to ban it amongst themselves, but not across the wider population.
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TRUST
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If you have ever been treated with sodium pentathol, you will know that this so-called `truth drug' makes you feel so warm, kind, and trusting that you just love to open your heart to another and reveal all. This suggests to me now that our limbic systems have actually evolved emotion centers for something as subtle as trust, both in our predilection to give and receive it. It cannot be solely cultural, since many other other social animals, dogs, elephants and chimpanzees for instance, behave as if they possessed such centers too.
Trust also appears to have a strong cortical component, indeed it may have been one of the main evolutionary pressures behind the growth of the cortex. In any new situation we encounter, there may be very little or no information to go on, or there isn't time to get it. We just have to make the best assumptions we can in order to deal with it (see BELIEFS). And that applies just as much to the people we encounter, not just strangers, but associates, friends, relatives, even family. Notice the apparently ascending order here, this reflects the not always safe assumption that we can place increasing degrees of trust according to relational closeness and frequency of contact.
Why should this be so? Many people have asked down through the millennia `why can't we learn to trust each other? We are all human, aren't we, with the same ultimate interests, goals. Isn't that the whole idea behind our societies, even our civilizations, co-operating for the common good?'
Unfortunately, as I've outlined in other essays (eg: CRIMINALITY, BELIEFS, RESPONSIBILITY, YOUTH), interests can conflict, especially when vital resources run short, misunderstandings occur, or a mentally ill or criminal person acts in a way contrary to that which he leads another person to expect. But people who have demonstrated trustworthiness in the past can also occasionally breach a trust. A person may be asked to perform a contract that is so confining as to render that person unable to carry it out, whether it is one of employment or of marriage. It can also be a matter of ideology; some people believe that acting in a consistent, trustworthy manner is somehow boring, that people who do lack character and personality. Such people may even claim that human nature is basically fickle and that we should not attempt to deny that. In contrast, other people cannot live without layers of security, of locks, passwords, behavior codes, `correct' dress and demeanor. Could both extremes be said to arise from under or over sensitive trust centers in their limbic systems? Either type of response to the uncertainties of trust can certainly lead to considerable harm.
What can we do? Some people always trust others first, only ceasing to do so when there is evidence they ought not to. Others mistrust everybody until given good reason to trust a person. Both approaches have their pitfalls as documented by all manner of story-tellers since time immemorial. Experience and common sense count for a lot, but can be expensive to acquire even if one can (see RESPONSIBILITY). It is also no guarantee, witness the numbers of people who have lead highly prudent lives only to lose their hard-won life-savings to financial conmen. Trust is rather like knowledge, ultimately there can be no such thing since no one can be absolutely certain of anything (see BELIEFS). Yet since we have to keep our lives as simple as possible in order to conduct them at all, we have to treat at least some of our assumptions and beliefs as though they were facts we know, at the risk of getting them wrong, occasionally very wrong. And that includes trusting other people.
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UNEMPLOYMENT
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Just imagine the future that could happen should three technological problems be solved: a power source with a greater size-energy-weight ratio than a tankful of petrol, a compact lightweight exhaustless motor, and an artificial brain with at least the capability of our own. These are the three ingredients that would bring the same kind of revolution to robotics that we are still seeing with computers. And that in turn would give us, if we wanted it, a whole new race of slaves willing and able to do any work we did not wish to do ourselves. They would even repair each other, and perhaps us too. We could then create a paradise not too far different from those of most religions, since so many of our conflicts stem from lacks of resources at one level or another from the individual to (perhaps by then) the interplanetary.
It doesn't seem all that far away, indeed we may well find ourselves forced to build such a proposed paradise ourselves in order to survive in economic terms relative to those that have. We might literally have to abolish work in order to survive.
But such a world need not bring the same penalties with it as unemployment does today. Nobody need be deprived of anything, since the new robots would be able to create specialist versions of themselves dedicated to producing a particular product. The only material cost would be to the planet, which could be very severe if versions of this machine-paradise spread to all the billions of people on this world, even if the number of children began to drop as a consequence. It would take decades for populations to fall back to levels that don't threaten the planet.
For some people though there would be costs, heavy costs. Unlike so many of our other drives, the drive to do work does not appear to originate in a dedicated limbic emotion center. It appears to be wholly cultural, indeed it is a major pillar of most of our cultures, as well as of our religions and ideologies and of course our economies. But just because work is of cultural origin does not mean the drive is so easily discarded. For many people, perhaps most, it is as ingrained as if it was of limbic origin. Working hard and playing hard is the standard prescription for physical and mental health; it can bring a person great joy and satisfaction which may be impossible to replace (see DEPRESSION, INCENTIVE).
But depriving such people of their work would also incur other costs. It would leave them with much time on their hands with no means of filling it. And since their social life also usually centers around their work, that can also become somewhat restricted. In extreme cases these losses can have grave consequences. A retiree may suffer medical problems or even drop dead soon after he loses his work; an unemployed person is more likely to commit suicide, or take up a criminal career just as much for the `excitement' as for the extra income.
Imagine now the `paradise' I have just described with no work, but in which the various forms of euthanasia I have described in other essays are also practised. A significant proportion of the population may well opt for it at some point in their lives, compulsory counseling notwithstanding. This would create the odd situation in which those people who adhered to the work ethic would now be at the greatest disadvantage, a new kind of social evolution would come into being that favored all-day sunbathers, hang-glider pilots, netball players, and the plain lazy who are perfectly happy just to sit around doing nothing at all.
To most people in our current reality, such a possibility may seem so distinctly unpleasant that they feel moved to prevent any of it from happening, the technological advances or the euthanasia. They would not wish to see the too-easy lives of `decadent' people win out over those of hard-working, thrifty, decent souls. `What would happen if too many of those machines broke down, or were destroyed through terrorism?' some might say to frighten people off. `Or rose up and took over?'
As I said earlier, we may not have a choice if we wish to survive at all without being bought and sold by other economies on their way to their versions of `paradise'. Nor would banning such a future solve the problems of the then-present. For work that can be done by machines is no better than digging holes and filling them in again. While others have slaves, we would merely become our own.
Now would banning euthanasia make the fundamental problem go away, there would just be that many more sufferers. The standard solutions for retirement or unemployment or any other form of enforced inactivity still apply whether one is an individual or the entire human race: find what you want to do, and do it. Other people can usually only help up to a point, after that you are on your own. And if you cannot do that, nor live in paradise, you should be able to leave painlessly, pleasantly, finally. Life on the beach, soaring into the air, playing sport with one's friends, or just staring at a wall isn't going to suit everybody. Nor should it have to.
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WELFARE
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It seems to me that the idea of social welfare that most of the world's advanced nations use to protect their own poor and unemployed could be extended worldwide. Perhaps those goods and services sold via the Internet could be taxed at some small rate, perhaps via the UN, and the resulting funds transferred to developing countries. This would replace the ungainly customs duty most countries still try to extract from such items, but in recompense this tax would also replace their foreign aid donations, which can be unreliable at best anyway.
Such a notion might sound hopelessly idealistic. Yet one of the main reasons why the advanced countries became such was precisely because of their social welfare programs, or other social development programs. Teaching an entire population to read was not only virtuous, it enabled them to respond better to advertising so that they bought more products. This enriched their lives, the lives of the producers of those products, and of the society as a whole. And these programs were enabled by raising the taxation levels from two or three percent to nearer twenty or thirty, sometimes even beyond. Similar gains in the wealth of the entire planet could similarly be gained, both social and economic, if the people of the undeveloped world could take their place alongside the rest of us as willing contributors rather than unwilling ones.
But there are other contributions rich countries can make as well as money. The obvious ones are those that are already being made in some quantity such as know-how and technology, or more usually, the means whereby the recipients can develop their own to suit their particular conditions. Also, just as some rich countries solve their unemployment problems at least in part by setting up `green armies' to help solve environmental problems, perhaps international such armies could be set up to assist poorer countries in the same way. Others could be sent to help with food and supplies distribution, since that is so often more difficult to achieve effectively than finding those supplies in the first place.
To my mind, another real help would be to encourage the kind of social reforms described in my essay POVERTY, though that may not be realistic for the reasons outlines therein. Perhaps though, if the advanced countries could put them in place for themselves, they could then release more money for the whole world's poor, not just their own.
There are other challenges however which are just as important as redistribution of planetary wealth. So long as so many people believe that population limitation is `colonialist', or `against the will of God', the planet will either die or, as so often happens with God's Will, an extremely horrible `solution' will be imposed on us. Such Solutions are usually of a kind that all such believers can Retrospectively Justify as a Punishment, like a `plague' or an `armagedon'. Answering this challenge may prove a lot harder than just finding the money.
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YOUTH
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If you are a male, remember that sense of bursting with energy, that sense of invincibility, that odd urge to mark off and defend your `patch' when you were young? Back when you played league, joined a street gang, or became a bikie? And if you were a girl, didn't you find it irresistible to hang around young men like that, be seen out with the biggest and strongest of them? Those mad all-night parties, that dreadful having to go to college or earn a living (though it wasn't so bad, because the people were okay, except that dreadful twerp now, what was his name..?)
All those vital urges probably evolved back in the days when too many humans suddenly found themselves with too little territory and a very real prospect of starving to death. You wanted to make very sure that it wasn't going to be you. Or your wife, your mother, or your father, or your brothers and sisters, or your aunties, and uncles, and cousins, and friends... Those gentler proclivities, that of sharing and caring, were turned to harder causes, of attacking and defending as a group instead of as individuals, of sharing the fighting as well as what little food you had left. Of sharing the defense of your tribe's territory as well as hunting, gathering or scavenging within it. And the glory of it if you survived, the way you celebrated, the way everyone danced, the sadness of your losses, the burial of your dead.
But in between all those unavoidable, exciting (in retrospect) conflicts, were long interludes of peace, even tranquillity, where the defensive-aggressive talents were of little use. By their very their nature however they could not be switched off in case they were needed again in a hurry. So bodies continued to burst with energy, ready for a mayhem to expend them on. They could then come into conflict with the caring sharing emotions necessary to maintain the group's well-being in cases of illness or loss, or the time-consuming process of bringing up children into the ways of the group.
Natural selection appears to have modified our limbic systems so that it emphasizes the defensive-aggressive emotions only (usually) in juvenile males, and the sexual response to them in juvenile females. After reproduction and with middle age onset however, the brain state of both sexes appears to change so that the caring emotions then come to the fore to enable them to endure the responsibilities that go with reproduction. This then allows the best, if imperfect, compromise between the two equally necessary proclivities. It is as if our limbic systems contained a `timer' which monitors our age and alters the strength response of our various emotion centers accordingly to allow for such social function partitioning.
This timer, if it exists, also appears to define two other major ages of social partitioning, childhood and old age in both sexes. Childhood appears to be about learning how the world works as quickly as possible. Since learning by doing is likely to be lethal at an early age, learning by simulation, i.e. `play', is the next best thing. The limbic system serves this by emphasizing emotions we experience as `fun' `curiosity', `amiability' (to enable us to learn from other people). Old age, at the other end of the limbic timespan, appears to be a time that brings with it an urge to teach and inform one's other tribe members. That seems plausible since in primitive societies living to old age suggested one had skills that were worth passing on.
But different individuals can cross these boundaries at different times in their lives - or even fail to cross them at all, they simply `fail to mature'. Some people on the other hand may carry over major characteristics from each stage as they pass through them, such can produce anything from leadership to what may be perceived as `insanity'. Minor such persistences may contribute to anything from `character' and `personality' to `neuroticism' and `mental illness'. Other characteristics on the other hand may simply fail to develop at all; the caring component of middle age for instance. The afflicted can hurt many people in their aggression, perhaps even millions. Such may be why periods of peace can seldom last; if a society comes to contain too many `doves', `hawks' will soon gather for their feast.
But these four sets of time-released limbic emotion centers is only my simple notion. Shakespeare's seven ages of man may well have their limbic counterparts after all.
