Firstly, however, another tragedy that I have been paying much closer attention to is not a death but a diagnosis – that of Christopher Hitchens’ esophageal cancer (see interview from not too long afterward). Though Hitchens manages to anger even me from time to time, he has always been an inspiration – an assertive atheist, a brilliant journalist and someone who manages to be charming and funny at the same time as being contrarian. The outlook is grim for him as the type of cancer he has has a very low survival rate. In the interview, the interviewer asks him about the question of “why me” and Hitchens rightly says it is a silly question that one must “bat away”, essentially admitting that his mind would have made a stop at that question at one point. Meaning, even someone who recognizes that it is egocentric to think the universe is testing, punishing or sending a message to one just because one happens to be suffering or dying can’t help but at least begin to think so – at least in the West. Notice that Kon’s letter lacks even the brief mention of the question.

About his own state, it seems Kon sees his death not as a tragedy upon himself and despite being an important artist, he doesn’t necessarily seem to see it as a tragedy upon those close to him, but rather as him shirking his responsibilities to those close to him. He sees it as shameful that he dies before his parents and dies with work left unfinished (and his mother feels ashamed that she didn’t grant him a stronger body – I challenge you to read that part without choking up). This might seem strange to a Westerner. Clearly, it is not his fault that he got cancer. However, what is the self anyway? You are the product of many chemical happenings inside a dermal barrier as well as countless influences from outside. There is no true barrier between where you end and your environment ends. This means any ill effect which you had any part in bringing about must be a source of shame for you. That your son did something bad isn’t a mere taint to your family image but a reflection of you. How could the product of your upbringing not be? The Western view of separating individuals and precisely laying blame has its advantages but it also has its absurdities and has the infamous Achilles’ heel of free will or lack thereof.

Of course I’m making overly sweeping generalizations here. See this as me comparing two individuals, one being Japanese and one being English and that their respective attitudes are some reflection of their parent national cultures, though the true relationship may be much more complex and tortuous than I’m suggesting. Even when one is unusual, one’s habits are still liable to reflect the parent culture as a reaction to it and not a mere random deviation. Hitchens is anti-Christian which is a very different thing from being a non-Christian, as most Japanese (including, in all likeliness, Kon) are. Also, It’s difficult to directly compare someone’s reaction to imminent death to someone else’s reaction to a diagnosis that is quite likely to be deadly. Just the same, some things jump out and make me think.

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.

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。

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.

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.

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!

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?