Archive for the 'philosophy' Category

Page 2 of 2

Transhuman medicine

Published on August 15, 2007 in health, ideas, internet, philosophy, politics and science. 0 Comments

Follow-on from yesterday’s post led me to read today, at lunch-time, about Democratic Transhumanism, a disturbing name for a political label which I suspect I might actually like to adopt. The idea that we can just plain outsmart our own limitations is one very dear to me, one that seems self-evident to me from the shape of human technological history.

With this roiling about in my head, I take an end-of-day glance at ye-olde bucket-O-morons, Slashdot, and find a link to this article.

DNA vaccine could help MS sufferers: study
…
“The cause (of Multiple Sclerosis) is unknown, but evidence suggests the immune system of MS patients attacks the myelin that covers and protects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord.”
…
“(The Vaccine) incorporates the DNA sequence of myelin basic protein into cells, which then start to make the protein.“

Say what?!? If I understand this correctly, there’s a disease where sub-part X of body-part Y breaks down and goes away… so we engineer a vaccine which introduces DNA into body-part Y which enables it to re-grow sub-part X. HOLY FARK!

Needless to say, this strikes me as pretty frickin’ “transhuman”.

Motarbaik!

Published on July 11, 2007 in motorbike and philosophy. 0 Comments

I am now officially one of those foolish people who spurn two of the normal four wheels and all of the normal heavy steel armor which are so important to most drivers: I am now allowed to ride a motorbike as a learner!

Never mind that I have no helmet or boots, no actual motorbike, and am yet to obtain my actual physical learners permit, owing to bloodyminded vicroads beuraucratica.

I can happily recommend Motorcycle Motion as a great place to train for and sit your motorcycle learner’s permit tests.

As to why, there are a few of reasons:

I thought it might be fun
E laiks baiks! I look forward to going touring one day very much.
Money. It takes a lot more of the stuff for fuel, registration, maintenance, insurance and e-tag fees to keep this on the road:

…than it does for this:

…which is incidentally the same kind of cheap learner-legal bike I hope to soon buy off my brother.

Several people have expressed concern about the safety, or lack thereof, inherent in my doing this. I want to be very clear and very public in stating that my eyes are open. I know very well that motorcyclists are vastly more at risk than car drivers. I do not intend to take any chances, and will not be going anywhere without substantial safety gear. Nonetheless I know that what I am going to do is inherently unsafe. I’m ok with that.

More news will follow when I actually do some riding.

Punishment, Vengeance and concepts of justice

Published on April 27, 2007 in ideas and philosophy. 7 Comments

When I screw something up most spectacularly, my inclination is to feel that I should be punished, often disproportionately, and in any case not constructively. I have been led to understand that this relates to a common traumatic reaction: once persecuted, an individual becomes fixed in that role (typically in childhood) seeking out a new persecutor, and/or adopting the role of persecutor themselves in order to (re-en)act-out the same pattern again and again.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that it’s a screwed up behaviour in a case like this, but it leads me to thinking about the impulse to punish in a broader sense: Where does revenge come from? What does homo erectus stand to gain by hurting those who he perceives as having hurt him? It’s easy to rationalise that punishment is all about providing a deterrent, or about negative reinforcement and conditioning, but is that really what motivates us?

In the case of an animal, the obvious reason for seeking revenge is the prevention of further harm, i.e. that snake has killed one of my young, therefore I will kill it to prevent it from killing any more of my young. This is a good clear example, but it makes less sense in most cases: Unless the snake that ate your young seems likely to return, why seek vengeance on it specifically? Surely a better chance for survival is to be had in running away, or defending the remaining young against that and other potential snakes. If your aim is to eliminate the threat, why pick on that particular snake and not on its entire species?

I have seen cats take revenge, quite unmistakably. You wash the cat, then a little while later the perfectly house-trained cat soils your bedroom. You put the cat outside and refuse to let it back in, so the cat shreds (unerringly) your favourite plant.
The cat gains nothing from these behaviours, yet I strongly doubt that the cat is systematically eliminating the ongoing human threat to the dry fur and freedoms of all felines, either. Clearly, the cat is punishing us. Why?

Depression or SADness or just Discontent?

Published on April 26, 2007 in health, ideas, philosophy and whine. 1 Comment

Several people who I have paid to make such observations have told me at different times that I suffer from varying degrees of depression, sometimes. This often makes sense to me: Sometimes I am clearly irrational about life, and react with unwarranted negativity to perfectly reasonable, unremarkable situations. It also makes sense to me that this kind of feeling can be remedied by the right kind of therapy: There are drugs to simply lift the brain chemistry a bit. There is psychological therapy to dig up and understand the roots of these feelings, buried or denied so deeply that the connection between cause and effect is invisible to us without a patient helper to shed some light on it.

Then there’s my old companion: Seasonal Affective Disorder, a syndrome with the perfect acronym. I can minimise it with a light on a timer switch to fake the dawn every day, but never wholly eradicate it.

Susan Ivanova: It’s just that I’ve always had trouble waking up when it is dark outside.
Commander Jeffrey David Sinclair: Commander, we’re on a space station. It is always dark outside.
Susan Ivanova: [forlornly] I know… I know…

Someone once remarked to me that the crises in people’s lives always seem to strike in one of three places:

At the start of Winter, when the horrible realization sets in, that one is going to be cooped up with negligible natural light for the next three months, wearing heavy clothes and waiting for the next cold virus to come along.
At the end of Winter when the horrible revelation strikes, that one has been cooped up with negligible natural light for the last three months, wearing heavy clothes and waiting for the next cold virus to come along.
At Christmas, when it starts getting too hot to sleep at night, and light well into prime-time.

The thing that troubles me today though is: how do I tell when the problem is ‘real’? Talk to enough psychologists for long enough and it becomes clear that everyone is in denial about something. We’re all hiding from one truth or another, even if it’s just acknowledging the need to trim your toenails. That being the case, who am I to say “I’m miserable for no reason”? How can I really know? Sure, sometimes discontent is obvious: if your dog just died, it is probably premature to diagnose ‘chronic depression’. If the answer isn’t obvious though, how can you be sure you’re not just hiding it from yourself?

Then again, inventing reasons to fear the unknown and unknowable is also referred to as ‘paranoia’. Very few people living in this brave new millenium need any more of that in their lives…

Caffeine-induced megalomania

Published on March 9, 2007 in Megalomania, philosophy and work. 2 Comments

Oh god I love caffeine! Welcome back into my life O wonder drug.

This post finds me half an hour after my second coffee of the day, a very fine cappuccino courtesy of the Food Inc. at the bottom of the tower. At this point I am still talking waaay to fast and feeling deliciously omnipotent. I have just come from a meeting in which I introduced the two managers who control my job and who hadn’t ever properly met before to each other. It rocked. In another 25 minutes I will be running off to another meeting (at which I am at risk of being fed more coffee!) with a guy who has been the intermittent bane of my existance and one of the aforementioned managers. In the interim I have to read a dense five-page project plan and work out how I feel about it so that I can speak coherently and lucidly about it in the meeting. Nonetheless, I am pausing to write this blog post (insanely quickly and with minimal quality control) because caffiene has made me ALL POWERFUL and I am quite confident that I can do ANYTHING in fifteen minutes or LESS! I know that a crash will likely follow the boom, but right now I DON’T CARE!

Making people

Published on February 19, 2007 in food, ideas and philosophy. 2 Comments

No, not cloning, not Frankenstein, no virtual avatars, no advanced robotics or AI. Not just procreation, either. Parenting.
This is an odd topic for me to write on, being as I am, not a parent.

Oh, I can claim a little experience here and there participating in the parenting of other people’s children. Most people can: parenting is hard work, and anyone who can bear it will probably get roped in as stand-in laborers at some stage in their lives. I can also claim the same naive expertise that leads nearly everyone to feel that they can make expert commentary on teaching: I have been a child.

So why am I writing about this? Are we thinking about it, you ask? Of course we are: everyone thinks about the idea of being a parent from time to time, even people whose avowed plan is never to do so. That we might be thinking about it is no indication of anything, and if it was, do you think I’d announce it on my blog?!?

I’m thinking, and writing, about parenting right at this moment because I just read a neat article in The Age about cooking with bones (and fat, and skin, and stuff) which repeatedly raised the concern that knowledge of basic home-cooking might be dying off in today’s children, failing to be handed down. This subject is not new to me, as anyone who’s met my father would know. His cooking skill and knowledge is unquestionably vast, but his capabilities as a teacher (see, it was relevant!) are lamentably scant, at least when the student is one of his own family. Nonetheless, I count myself a credible cook, and this is due in no small part to having watched and listened and occasionally been taught, in my childhood, by a great chef.

Reading this article gave me pause to think: what if parenting is seen as an art along the lines of the pride of skill of a good tradesman in each piece of his or her best work? i.e. the pride of a parent might also be about the joy of craft, and the knowledge that here is something which will bear testament to one’s commitment, knowledge, experience and passion, long after one is dead. Mind you, I can immediately see the gaping chasm of a problem with this thought: parents don’t get to choose what their children turn into. Yes, I have seen Dead Poets Society. (If you haven’t, buy a box of tissues and go rent it, now).

The thing I’m getting at, I think, is knowledge-poverty. Not information-poverty: that is unlikely to be a problem for any future generation of humans. This article talked about skills like knowing how to make a stock. Sure, you can look this up on the ‘net, but if I hadn’t given you a link, would you have? And now that you have, if you’ve never made a stock before, are you going to learn? Would it be easier if I showed you? How about if I showed you how, repeatedly, and fed you numerous tasty meals based on it?

That kind of labour is synonymous with craft in my mind: you do it over and over again until it’s second nature. Sometimes you get it wrong. Eventually it’s just a technique, like tying your shoes, or reading an analog clock.

The passage of time

Published on January 5, 2007 in ideas, philosophy, whine and work. 0 Comments

Time in an office environment seems to pass in two distinct modes, each of them strangely unlike the manner in which time passes anywhere else:

A) Time screams past in great leaps and bounds. This can be exemplified by the deep-hack-mode effect where one gets so far into a task that the outside world disappears, just after lunch for example, and reappears only when the task is complete, in a dark, silent office at 8:00pm, for example.
This can also happen in an exponential way: the snowballing deadline-crisis, where seemingly brief, simple tasks swell to fill unaccountably large amounts of time, and the working day shrinks incrementally until a very slight lateness becomes a vast and insurmountable slippage.

B) Time opens out like ones sense of space when driving out of a deep canyon into the open desert. The space of time between the present and an hour hence seems like a desolate unending trek to rival Sam and Frodo marching into Mordor. Seemingly solid, satisfying tasks melt like butter on a hot day and slip through ones fingers, either because they are blocked, or because they suddenly become trivial, and are done before you can blink. Tedious, frustrating tasks with no clearly defined goal or conclusion are abundant, but they do not satisfy, nor fulfil. All your favourite time-wasting blogs are mysteriously bereft of new posts for what seems like eternity. RSS feeds trickle to a stop and run dry. Google suddenly only returns places you’ve been before. A feeling of temporal agoraphobia sets in, leaving you feeling stranded and exposed, far from cover and visible to high, wheeling predators. There is nowhere to hide, and 5:00pm is impossibly far away.

It’s times like the latter, much too early on a Friday afternoon, when there’s nothing else left to do but turn to your own blog and blather.

Then, just as you’re about to post your blatherings, for all the world to see, the screen goes blue. Not the familiar blue of the blue-screen-of-death, but an unnerving pale sky-blue. Your computer responds to keystrokes, mouse-clicks, and even jabs at the power button with indifferent beeps. Eventually you manage to shut it down, and then to restart it, cursing all the while at the lost work. Time seems narrow again for a little while: your computer is too slow! It takes too damn long to boot! But then it’s booted, and once again there’s nothing to do but finish that blather.

Someone is trying to tell me something. I just wish I knew what it was…

Why I love E

Published on December 19, 2006 in love and philosophy. 3 Comments

No, not MDMA, E!

DoctorGypsyBikerPirateWitch, Keeper of the Toes, etc.
I don’t post enough unreservedly positive things on this blog, and I don’t say enough about the most wonderful person in my life. That’s partly because I’m needlessly reserved, and partly because I strive to keep a veneer of anonymity over E where she appears in this blog.

This amazing woman has come into my life in the last few years, and stood by me through a lot of crazy stuff, some good, much bad. What you need to know about E is that she is a carer, not just a doctor, but someone who gives her measured, diligent, considerate care to all things and people in her life. Through her care I have grown as a person to an extent that has not happened since high school, and in ways which would simply not have been possible without her. E is full of mischief, evil, cunning and dark humour that will always make me laugh, however dark the hour. She is brilliant and wise rather than clever as I once aspired to be. Practical and insightful, she guides me back towards reality when I tilt at windmills.

That is why I love her.

Enough now. Apologies to single or embittered readers who find this post induces nausea.

All readers of my blog need to be aware that E has a nifty blog too!

There is no need to mention butt-mushrooms or tomato snakes in this post. Hence, they will remain omitted.

Solipsism, Uniqueness and Purpose

Published on October 25, 2006 in mobile, philosophy and review. 0 Comments

Sitting here listening to the elaborate, baroque, beautiful madness of Jethro Tull’s “Baker Street Muse”, an epic track that is so metaphorical and cryptic as to make “Thick as a Brick” seem banal and explicit.In a solipsist world, if I go to a different school and never see you again, have I therefore deleted you from existence? Is that murder? What about meeting a new friend for the first time? Is that conception, birth?
Think of the people one meets at conventions, for example, how fleeting their lives, like clouds of unique, complex mayflies. Wow. Solipsism sucks. :-/

For the solipsist, choosing one’s friends is an evolutionary process, much more directly than for the rest of us.

The most obvious intuitive argument against solipsism, to me at any rate, is to observe that I’m just not that imaginative or creative, and neither is anyone else I can think of.

This line of reasoning is weakened however if I consider the question: how unique am I? To what extent does my life resemble a purposeful act of creation, and to what extent is it just generically random? What features have I that are so singular that my creator could not have arrived at this particular combination by simply rolling enough dice?

It makes me think that far from being demoralized and soulless, an intelligent android might find limitless joy in its mass-produced form: it knows it is a product of Design, made to fulfill a Purpose by one or more Creators. It can meet with these Creators, ask them to clarify the details of its Purpose, and be answered unambiguously. Lucky robot.

The themes in this post have come to me over several days, BTW: I was listening to Tull on Monday, thinking about the evolution of choosing your friends yesterday on my way home, and having strange broodings about purpose and uniqueness this morning on the train.

Time and Perception

Published on October 12, 2006 in ideas and philosophy. 4 Comments

I have this very abstract idea. The analogy is this:

The Sun does not actually move around me, rise and set. Rather it is the
surface I am standing on which revolves.
Time does not actually pass inexorably from the future into the past.
Rather it is the present where I reside which moves.

If I can leave the surface of the earth, why can I not leave the surface
of the present?

Memory is just imagining with some inference: I can see the vague
impression that the past has left on the present. From that I infer both
the past and the future.

To leave the surface of the earth, I must overcome gravity, a force which
is accepted by my animal mind as absolute, but which is really just an
arbitrary vector of limited power and scope.

What force constrains me to the surface of the present? How do I overcome
it?

To overcome gravity even temporarily and fly is an exhilarating experience
which provides new perspectives and greater freedom (and danger) than is
to be found on the ground. To break completely free of gravity and enter
orbit or even move off into deep space is to enter an utterly unfamiliar
world where much that we take for granted is absent or changed. Even
surviving away from the Earth is a fantastically difficult proposition.

What is it like to overcome the force which holds us in the present? Is it
dangerous? What happens if we become completely detached from the present?
Where could we then go? How limited would the perspectives of those mired
in the present then seem?

There is a lot of thought given and material written on the subject of
life on other worlds; whether it exists, what it could/would be like,
whether we can communicate with it, and why we haven’t met any yet, in a
universe which produced us and our world, why isn’t there anyone else?

What about other ‘presents’? If there is a present ‘plane’ to which we are
stuck, why can’t there be more than one? What might we find on other
presents? Should we expect to have heard from other presents?