"You see this goblet?" asks Achaan Chaa, the Thai meditation master.
"For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it.
It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in
beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it.
But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over
or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and
shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’
When I understand that the glass is already broken,
every moment with it is precious."
Oh, come on, folks. The DFW piece is ignorant whining. Some problems:
1. The great many people who live "unexamined lives" tend to be much happier: conservatives are happier than liberals, people in the Midwest are happier than people on the coasts, etc.
2. The default settings are really, really good. You should be extremely skeptical whenever anybody tries to sell you that everyone is born "wrong" and needs to be "fixed" (circumcision, original sin, chiropractic adjustments for all children, etc.). (Vaccination and water fluoridation are the only exceptions I know of, and those are supported by actual science.)
3. Same with anyone saying, "If you don't do this one thing, your whole life is going to be HORRRRRRIBLE!!!"
4. Standard religions most certainly do eat people alive: the people who desperately obsess about them the way his (mostly imaginary) targets obsess about money, power, etc.
5. The real message of the article is the style, and what it says, sentence after sentence, is: "The older, wiser fish knows that life is crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap. And BTW, you know I'm the older, wiser fish, because I'm such a soul-sapping drag. Oh, and BTW, I'm the older, wiser fish, and you're not, and if you can't see that, that only proves what a naïve little twit you are. One day, all you goddamned self-centered little successful optimistic goddamned twits will all be sorry!!!"
> or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital,
Yes, you can choose what your mind does, but this is simply playing make-believe. No self-respecting mind is going to eat this for more then 10 minutes. Changing your thinking works, but it has to be a bit more subtle (and complicated) then this.
I don't think thought is all that uniform across humanity. I don't walk around with a little voice yammering about all of life’s petty annoyances.
Back in school I was diagnosed as exceptionally gifted / learning disabled. So I am probably an extreme outlier, but I don't think of myself as the voice in my head. The voice is stuck with language which is this huge, unwieldy instrument, that's far too slow to be interesting. If feels like there are separate machines that can preplan how to move my body, solve math problems, play a video game, etc. Still composing this sentence feels more like remembering the words that best fit the idea, while scrabbling to find the next word to fill out the logical sequence.
Anyway, the best analogy for who I am might be the entity that decides which ideas are terrible and which ones are reasonable enough to keep. But, I don’t hear other people talking about themselves like this, so I wonder if there is all that much commonality. When there are so many ways solve a programming problem why assume that everyone is wired up the same way. Considering all the crazy people out there and how people can function with significant brain damage, there is probably a wide range of internal landscapes even among normal seeming people.
PS: Consider how many different ways people you know react to alcohol a simple drug and then consider love as a huge cascade of chemical responses. Do you really think all of humanity reacts the same way internally?
Marvin Minsky wrote a couple of books on the subject - the link is the fist chapter to one of them (The Emotion Machine and Society of Mind). They're pretty much what you're saying.
Really? Because I've "eaten" it for quite a while, and it's been pretty effective. I tell myself that people being rude or jerks have a reason for what they're doing, and while I show a backbone when things get too harsh, for the most part I give them room to breathe. Result: Far fewer pointless fights, far less negativity.
One of the reasons I gave up blogging is that it caused me to use up topics that deserved more work on little, quickly written blog posts. That's why I wasn't in a hurry to republish this.
God damn ... I remember reading that piece years ago and thinking to myself, "Man, DFW really knows what's up. Deep down, he's really got it together. There's a lot of fucked up shit in this world, and he's looked at it head on, and come to grips with it, and has the bravery and strength to move on."
And then he killed himself. The world is such a strange place.
This is easy to say now, but doesn't the piece come off as a suicide note? "I have been miserable my whole life, and the best solution I've come up with is to browbeat myself with an impossible standard of humility. Ecch."
The man was one of the greatest writers (the greatest? Seriously, if anyone knows a better or comparable writer of non-fiction I'd like to read him or her) of modern times but he also suffered from serious mental illness that overwhelmed him for the years. His death was not rational, as much as his writing sometimes make it seem like it.
Graham's Razor: If you have to choose between two theories, prefer the one that doesn't center on you.. (With apologies to Mr. Occam.)
BTW, I think the last line might be better phrased as "See indifference." The ubiquity of causation requires that much/most of the word isn't random. It just doesn't give a damn about us. "Seeing indifference", and how to get past it, is probably also a good starting point for new businesses pondering their marketing plan.
I love the tension between these two ideas. The universe must be organized in a way that supports your existence, because, well, you exist. But your existence is just a fluke, made possible by the fact that the universe is what it is. The universe wasn't created for your convenience.
It's probably not a coincidence that Mr. Graham revisited this essay after having his first child; there's nothing quite like parenthood for ejecting you from the center of your own universe.
I don't think it's a joke. You have no choice but to overgeneralize from experience. If you limited yourself to only what you can support by direct observation, you would be catatonic or dead.
For example, I figured everyone would continue to write one-line responses, making this thread continue in its pleasing diagonal venture across the page. Guess I was wrong.
Heh, it did me too. I charged into the abyss all alone, eager to demolish my self. And ... succeeded. It very nearly turned out badly. When I say guidance, all I mean is someone who has been there and can pull you back if necessary. An extended "trip sitter", although this doesn't involve drugs.
It's a very nuanced and often misunderstood concept. Leaning too far to either side (hyper-reification of and attachment to the material world on one side, and Śūnyatā ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Śūnyatā ) -- the emptiness or lack of "thingness" of all concepts -- on the other, lead each to their own problems. Of course, you can get so wrapped up in the observance of walking that line that it becomes a problem, too, which is sort of where Zen steps in with the simple and the absurd.
It all adds up to normality, like you said. I like that.
Precisely. Emptiness as practiced by a lone determined fool. See niece/nephew of your comment. I did it through disciplined meditation on emptiness and compassion in turns, and a sort of retreat from the world, as I had a little money put away and few expenses. It was wonderful for a while. I felt very happy. I literally felt that I'd dismantled everything that I thought I was. I no longer knew what I liked or disliked. It was very difficult to have an opinion about anything. I certainly wasn't hacking. I moved through the world in a sort of wide eyed daze (probably due to over-oxygenation :) It felt like I got maybe a quarter of the way to wherever it was I was going, although I have no way of knowing.
But life demands, and I stopped my practice and dove back into it with little thought, and that's when things got bad. I had no drive, no motivations, and didn't have a clue who I was anymore. But I also wasn't meditating, which can serve as preventative medicine against the effects of these things in the "real world". I felt kind of clueless and naked, like an amnesiac dumped in the middle of a big city.
Well, anyway, long story short, you'd be surprised how powerful these ancient techniques can be, and you'd be wise to seek guidance from someone experienced before you go dismantling yourself all willy-nilly :). I'm doing wonderfully now, though. And I'm not currently practicing.
One advice to anybody who hasn't spent much time thinking about these things deeply before. Don't do this alone. Have somebody with whom you can discuss (not on computer). Your mind can become like a shifting sand and you won't have any sort of hold to understand the world. Which can be extremely disconcerting.
You have a world view that you have acquired/formed based on certain assumptions that you may have never questioned. Once you start questioning them, you won't stop at any assumption, and you go into a sort of mental abyss, especially, if you have never believed in God.
One consolation is that however hopeless it may feel when you go there, you'll probably come out and get back to your usual self.
Really simplistic answer, but should get you started: there is no single definable thing that is identifiably "you". If you lost a foot, would you still be you? At what point does the food you eat become a part of you? If you lost your memories, or changed your mind about something you believe deeply, or if you go to sleep, do you stop being you?
How many of the tags you use to idendify yourself are actually group membership tags... e.g. pythonista, founder, etc.?
How many of the activities you do only make sense in the context of people (productive member of society stuff)? Even more, how many of the things you do are because of the consequences for or from others (feed your family, help your friends, do something recognized as really cool)?
Where "me" stops and society begins is always a bit fuzzy.
"Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth." - Alan W. Watts
How do I know who I am? When I try a new food, what are my criteria for deciding whether or not I like it? If I wish to be a better person, why am I not already that better person?
"They have a saying in Chicago Mr. Bond "Once is
happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's
enemy action." Auric Goldfinger to James Bond in Ian
Fleming's "Goldfinger"
I think people who pursue startups see the world as revolving around them.
In any case, I would like to know about tech examples of this:
So if you want to discover things that have been overlooked till now, one really good place to look is in our blind spot: in our natural, naive belief that it's all about us. And expect to encounter ferocious opposition if you do.
No, it turns out, we're not even the protagonists: we're just the latest model vehicle our genes have constructed to travel around in.
PG: Did you write this on etherpad? Can you share that link? I wanted to get a look at how this essay was shaped, specifically the above mentioned sentence. Thanks!
For me, Dawkins had a similar effect but on a different topic. I'm younger than pg, so maybe I grew up with the idea that we are just another species on its way.
What I did get snapped into was understanding 2 things about evolution by natural selection:
1) It is an abstract principle. It exists very comfortably outside of genetics or even biology in a very similar way to numbers existing outside of apples and oranges.
2) It is creation. That is, it has abilities so similar to what we call creativity that it can very plausibly be called creativity.
Just defining and demonstrating memes along with his description of some classroom experiment drawing boats brought those two things home. After that, I got why biologists are so in love with evolution.
Biology happens to utilise this powerful principle. Happens to. There may be many such powerful principles out there without a flagship product. Undiscovered.
More recommendations of books that can change our thinking, please...
In the tradition of Darwin and Dawkins, I heartily recommend Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Pinker's always worth reading, and for me this is his best. Broader and deeper than his more linguistic work.
Following along the Dawkins theme from the essay: Dennett (Freedom Evolves, or others) takes the implications very far. I suppose there's nothing that will cause a little mental revolution, but it's definitely "consciousness raising".
I think your question actually demonstrates a principle behind this essay. Paradigm shifts come from discarding assumptions. Often, this is embodied as correcting the question instead of the answer.
To me, the most convincing atheist argument has always been some variation of Russell's teapot.
Accepting Russell's argument (which I think is very hard not to without challenging knowledge generally) you cease to ask that question. Just because religion happens to usually come before atheism doesn't mean that atheism needs to prove itself. The burden of proof is on the theist because of the nature of the claim.
There is no need to prove that gods do not exist to be an atheist.
To take your argument one step further, I think a believer/atheist is a relic from the middle ages. Why is it so important to declare a lack of a belief in a particular variety of diety? Only because the one version was historically popular and so just not believing that one notion was enough to be a belief system.
Now that we're not burning or crushing people for disavowing the state church we don't need to define the belief system solely on that criteria anymore.
Suppose you firmly believed the answer to the simulation argument was that we are indeed living in a simulation. Who runs the code? By any reasonable definition of god you have some; they may be petty, or foreign, or unknowable but you've got gods all the same. Yes they are not Christian gods, so in that sense the person is still a-Christian-theist but does that still have meaning.
Or suppose the earth was seeded with amino acids by a traveling and functionally immortal alien race who monitor earth by ansible and adjust things for the better every now and again when people ask them too. Athiest? Well sort of.
The claim that there are no simulation masters, no alien races, no omniscient AI spy satellites, no ... is certainly possible, but it seems like we're back to thinking that we humans are special and the center of the universe.
This is partly just a matter of verbal semantics but I think just deciding to be not Christian/Muslim/Jewish/etc. often leads to theological laziness about other possibilities, and as atheism becomes more commonplace (it's hard to imagine that it won't) maybe it won't be enough to just join the camp and call it good.
The claim that there are no simulation masters, no alien races, no omniscient AI spy satellites, no ... is certainly possible, but it seems like we're back to thinking that we humans are special and the center of the universe.
Perhaps the point is easier to see if you consider "no alien races" in isolation -- the lack of intelligent extraterrestrial life seems to lead directly to the notion that we humans are special (i.e., the most intelligent form of life in the entire Universe). On the other hand, the question of whether there are any intelligent civilizations within a distance such that contact could be established without both such civilizations inventing travel at relativistic speeds (if only one is near-light speed, maybe the other one ages and dies before being reached) may provide an "out". I'm not sure whether we can actually beat aging by driving toward each other at, say, 0.9c each relative to our home planets; it's been a while since I did time dilation in physics.
But here, there are two different ways to apply the article.
1) Don't be human centric, so there is likely to be another alien race that "created" us in some sense.
2) Consider randomness, so accept the possibility that there no intelligence behind our existence and instead a random collision of particles (or something) created us (or created the beginnings of life on earth).
I think he is merely referring to the assertive nature of this part of essay:
No, it turns out, humans are not created by God in his own image; they're just one species among many, descended not merely from apes, but from microorganisms.
> No, it turns out, humans are not created by God in his own image
Counterpoint: God could be described as the "master programmer". A supreme being would be capable of designing an evolutionary system which would evolve beings who are capable of contemplating the existence of God himself.
Well, of course a supreme being "would be capable of" making a world very much like this one. Or, for that matter, any other sort of world. (So any argument that begins "a supreme being could make a world like this" isn't actually bringing in any facts about the world.)
A better question -- because it gives some opportunity for applying actual information about the world -- is "If a supreme being were making a world, would we expect it to look like this one, or very different?". The answer to that depends on what sort of supreme being you have in mind, of course.
I'm not really trying to convince anyone, just showing how for many people the process of changing their mind about God involved the principle outlined in the essay and demonstrated in these comments.
According to Russell (with whom I agree) The fallacy lies in the question, a common place for blind spots to hide.
Who said "proved"? If you change the question to "So there's good reason to think the human race wasn't created by God in his image as described in the book of Genesis?", though, I'm sure PG would be happy to answer yes.
The reality is quite the opposite. The history of ides is not a history of gradually discarding the assumption that it's all about us - rather, it's a history of building up and defending the assumption that it's all about us. Why? Because if there is no God, there is no ultimate being which we are accountable to. Although evolution doesn't have to lead to the conclusion that there is no God, we happily assume it does---because then we can all be our own gods, making up our own rules. Sure, we might not think the sun revolves around our world any more, but we are selfish in many many other (more subtle) ways.
Thats not really accurate. There is a difference between believing its "all about us" and believing "we can do whatever we want." They are in many ways counter to each other.
If what we do doesn't have any meaning (i.e. if no one is watching) then we might as well do anything we want. By discarding the idea of god, its true that we do tend to place ourselves as the highest beings in existence, but that doesn't mean we put ourselves at the center, we just discard the idea that there is a center.
Ok, agreed - discarding the centre doesn't necessitate that we put ourselves in that spot. What I would argue though is that by our human nature have a strong tenancy to put ourselves in the centre. We're not always blatantly selfish (or proud), but if we really look at ourselves, we're pretty good at it in lots of small ways.
> Although evolution doesn't have to lead to the conclusion that there is no God, we happily assume it does---because then we can all be our own gods, making up our own rules.
That's insulting, and (more importantly) it doesn't seem to have any factual backing. Got evidence? Because I don't know a single formerly-religious-person for whom that sort of thing was even a consideration.
And come on, everybody makes up their moral rules or inherits them from their community, or usually some combination of both. Some of them attribute the results to God, but the difference is minimal.
When something bad happens most of the times its the situation/randomness that is the cause, when something good happens most of the time it is caused by a person.
Humans are the vehicles of anti-randomness, we make patterns.
Conversely, if you have to choose between two theories, prefer the one that doesn't center on you.
This is exactly my primary article of faith in life. (By faith I mean the stuff I fill the missing gaps in my knowledge with in order to make actionable decisions.)
Nay:
See randomness.
1. I'm not sure what this even means. How does one learn to see randomness and just what are they seeing when they see it?
2. It's not the positive version of "stop inserting yourself in the chain of causality". (Is there even a positive way to say "stop doing that thing you're doing"?)
"See randomness" has been a favorite proverb of mine ever since I read it. I also tend to use it when evaluating systems / situations from a risk management perspective (eg. raising kids).
While this makes perfect sense from an intellectual standpoint, pragmatically speaking it won't help you much in day to day life.
Self-centrism, while no doubt obstructive in the search for a cure to cancer can be quite useful when say, asking for a raise or deciding whether to ask that girl out.
I find it quite useful, when unsure about something, to assume the option that is most beneficial to you.
This positive self-centrism could also come in quite handy when starting a startup.
So - if evolution does not have a purpose - let's make it our mission, as human beings, to seek for truth in life and for life in a world more resilient to the randomness of the universe.
Good point and I agree with his general sentiment. In fact, to throw in a political molotov, I wish the "see outside your self" was viewed by those who oppose the whole health care thing in the U.S. I'm in Australia but we tend to loosely follow a "veil of ignorance (wiki it if unfamiliar)" approach to this kind of stuff.
Quite to the contrary, life/living is about fighting entropy (or second law of thermodynamics), "randomness".
This leads to the most famous and one of the most controversial elements of the [a] play. Adam cannot understand what the purpose of his existence is if mankind's future is so bleak. The last line is spoken by God: "Mondottam, ember, küzdj és bízva bízzál!" ("I have told you, Man: fight on, and trust!") Depending on the interpretation, this can either be seen cynically as the words of a capricious deity, or else pointing to a "hope beyond all hope," that God has a purpose for all things which man may not necessarily comprehend. This is markedly different from Paradise Lost, where the Christian hope is explicitly spelled out.
