I think advertisers are increasingly realizing that it pays to let people know what they catch of something is or give a reason why they have an incentive to act in your interest. I just saw some cash advance commercial (don’t want to name company to help them advertise) and the guy says “it’s a little expensive, but there’s no credit check and it’s cheaper than XXX.” This is somewhat related to the comment I made in my blog about Avatar – without seeing any major negative aspects of the Navi’s culture, I’m not left thinking “oh, how Idyllic” but rather “oh, there’s something evil lurking.”
Archive for the 'anthropology' Category
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100120/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_military_weapons_bible_passages
Wow. Vikings used to carve runes and such into their weapons to give it extra power. Look how far we’ve gone as a people. We now have much more hi-tech weapons to carve spiritual sayings in.
(note to friends: I meant to post this way earlier but hadn’t had time to edit it down. That’s why it refers to events way past. But the point is still fresh)
As is my fashion, I read a book on the plane. I read Time Machine on the way to Japan and King Hrolf Kraki’s saga on the way back. I have nothing to say about the latter except it would make an awesome series of movies with endless sequels and that modern literature lacks the sheer succinctness of poets of old. Of the Time Machine, well, what can I say, it was awesome, as expected. I also wonder why I didn’t read it earlier. It’s exactly the kind of book I would have read as a teenager, though I was much more into Asimov and Clark back then.
What made H.G. Wells such an awesome sci-fi writer (aside from those qualities that made him just plain old a good writer) was his ability to suspend disbelief by bringing heavy doses of real science into his stories while he makes his political commentary. My disbelief is not so easily suspended (one reason I seldom enjoy movies), so of course the SciFi I like is hard sci-fi, though I can appreciate the preposterous if it is at least internally consistent (e.g., if the way magic works makes sense and the world is as it would be were there magic; Lovecraft did this better than anyone else). His science isn’t the point of the novel. It isn’t to warn of an eventuality, but to make a separate point. It’s the good (for the time) science that draws you into the tale. Continue reading ‘Why do the Morlocks still Clothe the Eloi?’
僕がもうビジネスの学士学位を持ってて、もうコンピュータープログラマーです。もう生物学を勉強しています。学位が要らなそうで、夜の授業には忙しそうから友達がよく「なんで生物工学を学んでる？」と聞きます。このポーストで答えます。理由は以下です。
僕は大きい子供です。趣味が物を作ることです。プログラミングを習う理由はテレビゲームを作りたかったからです。仕事がプログラマーなのにまだプログラムを作るのが楽しいです。だから、発明家になりたいです。色んな能力を集めたら、いい有名な発明家になれると思います。実はプログラミング力と生物工学が合うと思います。特にメディカルデバイスには特に便利です。虫よりもちっちゃいロボットを人間の体に通って何か直すロボットなどを作りたいです。
暗い未来を防ぎたい理由もあります。だんだん地球の人口が増えています。それで、餓死が増えています。森とかが経ています。それが悪いことは悪いけど、科学技術の新法によって防げます。料理オタクだから、よく貧乏のアフリカの村を何か発明した生物工学で救済するイメージを見ます。人間が必要なビタミン１００％のトウモロコシを作りたいです。などなどなど。
最後に生物が確かに好きです。僕には水草が気持ち悪くないです。１週間に３回ぐらい、朝に森の中にジョッギングします。太っているアメリカ人にならないためだけじゃなくて、自然に親しむためです。僕は宗教的じゃないです。逆に無神論だけど、自然の経験がよく僕には宗教的です。教会より大きい杉、天使より多い鳥、神様よりずっと理解すれば理解するほど理解できない宇宙。
Here is a simpler argument for a notion I have I call “Naturalistic Animism,” which is a nod to Spinoza’s “Naturalistic Pantheism.” My earlier post was here. It’s also referred to in Bron Taylor’s writings on “Dark Green Religion,” meaning the idea itself isn’t my invention, though at one point I thought it might be.
There is no supernatural spark, no dual nature to make a thing have life rather than not. There also isn’t a specific definition of life that is universally accepted in the scientific community, though there are characteristics we can observe – many orders of magnitude more complex and organized than non-life, being able to maintain homeostasis and being able to reproduce and evolve. There are other, more specific chemical characteristics, but they may not be universal to all life, though they may be for all terrestrial life. In any event, what we have isn’t a strict definition, but some general characteristics that some non-life could be said to have, but just to a lesser degree. We know of entities such as prions and viruses, though their origins are with what we generally recognize to be life (bacterium or rogue DNA sequences that become parasitic). However, if we go back to the beginning of life (where things get more speculative, of course), there would have been non-life becoming more and more like life and then life becoming less and less like non-life.
Life and non-life, then, are of the same substance and type, differing only in degree. This is an important realization as it may turn out, for example, that universes are subject to a crude form of evolution, with more stable universes such as ours becoming more common in time (this notion is known as the hard anthropic principle). Certainly, entities that are inherently more stable persist and those that don’t, don’t. Who knows what whacky particles were there at the big bang for just a few gazillionths of a second? This is so obvious, it’s hardly worth mentioning except for the fact that this basic property of matter is the first step it always must take towards becoming life. The universe weeds out the unstable. Evolvability evolves and when it reaches a certain threshold, what we all agree to be life then begins. This is when an entity can create copies of itself with unprecedented accuracy, though it only gets better at doing this as time goes on.
Now, we like to think there is something special about life and that, all other considerations being equal, it should deserve consideration. It seems we live in a world like what Zoroaster described, except we know that in the end it is instead the wicked Ahriman who prevails – our universe is doomed to a thermodynamic death where no life is possible. The fact that I just depressed you with that analogy means that you, too, see value in life! Even if we humans become extinct, we hope that life on our planet or somewhere else can at least give birth to some other beings that can contemplate the universe and be depressed by it.
The problem we run into is that the laws of physics tell us that life isn’t anything special (well, it kind of is, but only in the sense that humans are special – we’re simply more intelligent, more social – the “spark” is a difference in degree!). This basic notion is what is called hylozoism (everything is alive or life and non-life are indistinguishable – this term is a doozy and it’s really only defined in a few writings, most of which seem to be attacking the notion). Reality is however the fuck it wants to be, but how we describe reality is up to us, so long as we’re not misleading or lying to ourselves (like religion tends to, almost without exception). Whether we say that life is nothing or whether we elevate the non-life to the status of living – animism – is a spiritual, not scientific question and I make the claim that it is not deception to say that the universe is alive or that it is at least filled with proto-life and pseudo-life everywhere. I would almost go as far to say that it is an enlightening idea that will let us see intuitively what will one day be known concretely about the universe.
Spirituality through nature. It’s not just for dirty hippies, weirdoes and head hunters.
Strange! Humans Glow in Visible Light – Yahoo! News
Looking at the last few paragraphs – isn’t it so Japanese to look for problems by looking at the light coming from bodies? We Westerners, informed by perverted notions such as Luther’s that the soul and the body are seperate entities, the latter just happening to contain the former, always want to look at the individual parts.
Nature Vs. Culture
The solid green is magic(k), the solid blue is taboo. Society sometimes derives oughts from ises, so the blue shape approximates the green shape [poorly]. Man copies and is inspired by nature, but we refer to breaking a norm and doing something impossible both as “breaking laws” though they are quite, quite different concepts.
Here is an idea that I’ve been swirling around in my head for awhile. I feel that it isn’t quite cooked up yet, but has great potential. But let me know what you think! And be brutal, but don’t be dumb (unless you are dumb, in which case you can’t help it and I’ll allow it).
Spinoza layed outa quasi-religious, yet non-supernatural (one could say, Atheistic) system called naturalistic pantheism. Naturalistic pantheism approaches spirituality through nature from a Judeo-Christian starting point (the way I see it; his audience was Christian). Spinoza begins with the all-powerful God of the Hebrews and ends with an all-powerful, consisting of all things, logical, unthinking “God” (you can just call “him” the universe if you want).
Spinoza’s views have been very influential. Albert Einstein, Arne Næss (founder of the deep ecology movement), Steven Hawkings and countless philosophers have been influenced by Spinoza’s naturalistic pantheism. It has been used as a way to understand human behavior and the universe. Our brains aren’t general-purpose calculators, so there is power in phrases such as “I want to read God’s thoughts.”
I propose a biocentric spirituality that is to animism what Spinoza’s views are to pantheism and deism.
The way is to look at the nature of life itself, which leads us to realize that more things are living than those that have DNA, are carbon-based or eat and shit. I do not speak of extraterrestrials (though I do hope I can meet an alien, even if it’s single-celled, in my lifetime, so long as it’s not murderous), but to a wall that astrobiologists constantly run into.
How do we define life? When going to other planets in search for life (what life chauvanists we are), all we know to look for is something carbon-based (since carbon bonds with, like, everything) and that’s based on water (high specific heat capacity, low freezing point, high melting point, our understanding of pH is based on it, hydrogen stops oxygenation, etc…). However, the truly fascinating thing about astrobiology is that distant lifeforms can be stranger than we ever imagined. That leads us to propose more generic ideas of what life is, but depeding on how we word it, we can exclude things like virii and prions or include things like entire ecosystems or social movements (in extremely broad cases).
I would say something is living if it has an ability to maintain homeostasis in a chaotic environment and adapt (even if the individual can’t, if it can reproduce, then that counts as adapting since even simple asexual reproduction allows a slow sort of evolution). But just as a multicellular organism is made up not only of countless cells, but also a symbiosis of bacterium in the case of animals (you’ve probably heard this before, but bacterial cells outnumber human cells in your body 10 to 1 – that’s probably the main way you keep bad guys out most of the time), an ecosystem containing individual species can itself be a lifeform (please see Lovelock’s work.. this idea isn’t as crazy as it sounds). When we get broad like this, it might seem silly, but it’s just because of what you’ve been taught.
I would accept a broad definition of life, but then lay down an important dividing line – if the lifeform exists within a specific substance and has a clear boundary, within which only it maintains homeostatis, then I say it is a true lifeform (examples: ladybugs, whales, acetobacter). If it exists throughout time and place and has no definite boundary, then it is a spirit (examples: the Earth’s ecosphere, various ecosystems, religious movements).
What Hegel calls a gheist, what Smith calls the invisible hand, what Lovelock calls Gaia, what Jung calls an archetype, these are all spirits. ‘Wait’, you might say, ‘these are radically different concepts, you nit-wit!’ Ah, but cyanobacteria is a very different concept from a flying snake. So there. I know there are holes in this idea and maybe something essential is missing that would improve it greatly. So, have at it, folks!
これは日本のアイヌのことの番組である。アナウンサーは英語で調べてるけど、会見はだいたい日本語である。
日本人さん、アイヌのことどう思っていますか？
When looking at decent with modification over time, we often see structures that began serving one purpose being changed to serve another purpose (as well, or instead; the important thing is the structure can outlive it’s original purpose) In this way, highly complex structures can evolve that simply could not have, were nature more single-minded. An examples of this is how the jaw of primitive synapsids slowly was repurposed into the inner ear bone, giving mammals much more sophisticated hearing than any other vertebrate [1]. Evolutionary psychology is a field that looks at the evolutionary/adaptive significance of behaviors. I would say that there is a weakness in this science as it doesn’t consider the aspects of evolution that are random, or side effects to other evolutionary change. Here, I present an example of how evolutionary psychology can be extended into looking at the mechanisms of mental evolution, by seeing behaviors as structures.
Let’s analyze grieving over the dead as an example. Evolutionary psychology as it stands today will tell us (correctly) that there is clear adaptive significance in having a painful emotion associated with a loved one dying. Those who feel sorrow at the loss of a loved one will go through much greater ends to prevent said loss, passing on their gene through kin selection. But wait, how did such a complex behavior come to be in the first place? The disservice evolutionary psychology does is in often stopping here, which is almost understandable since most psychologists aren’t biologists and vice versa (and I’m neither, just a biologist-in-study and a fake psychologist). It’s also understandable, sadly, because the mind doesn’t fossilize. Harking back to the days of structural psychology, evolutionary psychologists could (and should) investigate what this emotion is exactly made up of. Which structures exactly were extended or repurposed.
Humans are paedmorphic due to neoteny [2], which is to say that our species differentiated from our ape-like ancestors in large part through retarded development. Many of what were once juvenile characteristics in our tree-climbing ancestors (and still are in our tree-climbing relatives), are retained into adulthood in our species. This is generally speaking, naturally. I won’t go into the different theories about how humans became paedomorphic. All we need to know is that some selective pressure made our species increasingly paedomorphic by slowing down development. So, some childhood behavioral characteristics also carry over to adulthood, such as play behavior, something that doesn’t tend to last to adulthood in non-human animals, at least not with the strength it does in our species. As Desmond Morris points out [3], much of what we think of as “work” is really play. Think about the hilarity of this sentence: “I work in the entertainment industry.”
The instinct of an infant towards attachment to the parent is the precursor to attachments to others that lasts to adulthood in our species. This behavior was selected for obvious reasons – for a child, to lose contact is to lose safety. Through the random process side-effect evolution, childhood attachments lasts until adulthood. Whatever the initial reason for structural neoteny (some say it was actually to get larger brains in the first place [2]), the side-effects of delayed maturation remains. If these attachments were maladaptive, they would be selected out. Random evolution isn’t like “the restaurant decided I’m going to have the soup of the day.” It is more like, “I might have the soup of the day. It’s the first thing on my mind because the waiter mentioned it.” So, something else not only kept adulthood attachments, but something strengthened it further. A behavior was repurposed (since the parent is no longer important in an adult’s life for survival). That thing was the selective pressures for grieving I just talked about above. The attachments that go into the pair bond, something that has become even more important since human infancy and adolescence lasts so long, also owe their origin to this same structure
So, evolutionary psychology shouldn’t be limited to looking at adaptive significance of behavior, but can also, drawing from the more mad-scientist aspect of nature, look at the randomness and how existing emotions can be repurposed in much the same way physical structures are in change over time. This would mean that symbolic looks at psychology like Freud may have some truth to them. The problem is that they are often 1% of the story since it is absurd to think introspection can truly reveal the workings of the subconscious (that would require Freud’s preposterous theory that civilization pushed our conscience below the surface – a notion that evolutionary psychology handily rejects – to be true).
Anyway, just an idea. What do y’all think?
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synapsid#Characteristics yes, I cite Wikipedia. Gotta problem w/ that, bitch?
2: Ontogeny and Phylogeny, by Stephen Jay Gould See particularly the last chapter, though early chapters are rife with examples of people overdoing analogies to [largely incorrect] biological theories, such as Haeckle’s recapitulation
3: The Naked Female, by Desmond Morris
Open Source » Blog Archive » Dan Ariely: Confronting Irrationality
Here’s a good talk on radio open source (an island of interestingness in a vast sea of trying to make a routine election sound like an earth-shaking event – it’s not, people!!!) Ariely talks about how we should take into account limits of human rationality when deciding public policy and dealing with disputes. This is a pretty obvious idea, yet no one seems to be willing to accept it. Why? Is it creepy to think of our brains as somehow flawed? His analogy of how we make mittens for hands prone to cold to how we should adjust policy to how brains really work (not outmoded models about how they work) is quite apt.
This science of studying human irrationality (psychology, heh), combined with recent advances in game theory, represent a new frontier in bringing about positive social change. Social philosophies are no longer bounded to primitive psychology and sociology that is just-almost-right-but-not-quite. Marx’s logic was quite sound, but he missed important points about human nature. Now that we are understanding more and more where people make solid decisions and where they don’t, and we have models for how games are played rationally with competing interests, we can develop theories of history that are for once accurate! We can harness the same forces that make Americans obese and put them to positive use (like making Americans thin).
The flip side is that these sciences also represent new frontiers in controlling people. It’s no secret that businesses use consumer irrationality to derive profit (supersize for 50 cents.. you don’t really want all that extra food and yet…) and missionaries utilize the fact that a vast distance between carrot and stick convinces absolutely, even without a shred of evidence for the carrot nor the stick (there I go knocking on missionaries again. I’m on a roll!) and so on… People are pretty immune to these things once the trick is discovered, but I can’t help but fear for what will happen when the tyrannical entities of the world (like the “People’s” Republic of China) become all the more sophisticated…
I humbly propose this doctrine for everyone, religious or not, to follow:
No physical misdeed can have a metaphysical justification
First, the argument:
The certitude of a premise is of course logically significant. Therefore, the unknowability of a divine source of morality is ethically significant. This is fairly obvious, yet too many individuals and organizations do not act upon it. MostMany religious systems involve morality and a basis for that morality that is unknowable. Now, this doctrine I have here is insufficient because in reality these myths are invented post ex-facto and therefore the true origins of the morals must be sufficiently researched. However, this snappy phrase is a good starting point to suggest a wide range of ideas… Also, it may be used if one is to give religious systems the benefit of the doubt that the supernatural they invoke is the source of the morality, if it is a fact.
Anyway, this has always been one of my primary arguments against missionaries. They are doing something that would be beneficial if their dogma was correct, but neutral (best case scenario) to terrible if their premise is wrong. Many religious organizations might have come to this realization themselves… See this interfaith conference on the issue. It would just be awesome if those Mormon missionaries in Japan stopped preaching Mormonism and started preaching the gospel of “eat brown rice! it’ll cure your constipation.”
This is the end of “God and Morality Week”, a straight-jacket premise that I got bored with the second day. Tomorrow’s post will be another idea I have that just so happens to be a good argument against missionaries. How is that for a segue?
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