October

It may seem obvious to some, but for me it is only obvious now that you cannot continue to increase resistance with each workout indefinitely. Eventually, the load becomes exceedingly high and you risk popping tendons, tearing muscles, etc.

Ouch again

Today's injury is the Levator Scapulae. I have finally recovered from a pulled rhomboid muscle, but by having too much weight on the lat pull down, I pulled a muscle in my neck.

http://www.exrx.net/Muscles/LevatorScapulae.html

Maybe I should concentrate on reps and time-under-tension rather than weight. To quote ezine, "The term "Time-under-tension" (TUT) is really hot..." (http://ezinearticles.com/?Bodybuilding:-Is-Time-Under-Tension-Important-for-Muscle-Growth?&id=367160)
When I can do 15 reps with a 4-second eccentric phase, then I will up the weight a bit.....

Maybe, frequency-in-gym without injury, with adequate intensity, with adequate rest, and with adequate nutrition are the keys.

Warm up, stetch, cool down

The key is to maintain intensity without getting delayed by injury. It is difficult for me to restrain myself from testing my strength, so I tend to put on too much weight and exert too intensely. This is good for building muscle, but can be bad for injury prevention.
So, in order of precedence, muscle growth is below injury prevention. You can't grow if you are injured. What are the best ways of avoiding injury while still exerting at an intensity that stimulates muscle growth? Warm up, stretch, and cool down.
I warm up, but I do not stretch much at the gym, and I rarely cool down. For me, I think it is critically important to stretch before high-intensity sets.

Workforce Boredom Index

The graduates most likely to be bored at work, according to profession

1 Administrative/secretarial
2 Manufacturing
3 Sales
4 Marketing/advertising
5 IT/telecommunications
6 Science research/development
7 Media
8 Law
9 Engineering
10 Banking/finance
11 Human resources
12 Accountancy
13 Hospitality/travel
14 Healthcare
15 Teaching

· Results from a new survey by the Training and Development Agency for Schools
Thursday July 27, 2006
EducationGuardian.co.uk

Non-mircrotrauma

Ouch.
Warm up sets are very important.
As is realigning or popping out-of-place joints, especially in the neck and back, before heavy sets.

Yesterday, although I warmed up with five minutes of rowing, I did not remember to stretch-pop my upper back into proper alignment before doing lat pull downs. As a result, I am extremely tender in my upper back/spine.

A great site for exercises (and diagnosing pain) is www.exrx.net. Based on the information here, my pain appears to be right where the rhomboid attaches to the C7 vertebrae.


image source: http://www.exrx.net/Muscles/Rhomboids.html

Trauma Plan

I have little faith in real life as a scientific laboratory that generates predictable, reliable results. Which is why, despite the plethora of training plans, I think the simplest is the best for me.

The simplest plan is to workout all major muscle groups every other day (or three days per week) with three sets of 10 to 12 reps.

Other approaches include HIT, HST, German Volume, and Periodization.
• HIT is basically always do reps to failure with loads that cause failure with less than 10 reps.
• HST is HIT with only one set.
• German volume is a bunch of set with high reps, but not going to failure.
• Periodization is a cyclic blend of these approaches.

There is also Beginners Luck - doing anything regularly will result in gains for a while.

There are lots of variable – percent of maximum load for a given number of reps, number of reps, number of sets, frequency, whether or not to go to failure, variations in variables, consistency in variables, rest after low intensity, rest after high intensity, rest after high volume, protein intake, caloric intake, timing of calories, etc.

Fundamentally, growth is hormonal. Weight training is a way to cause your hormones to be tweaked in such a way that muscle growth occurs. A partial list of hormonal variables include:
• Hepatocyte growth factor (HGF)
• Fibroblast growth factor (FGF)
• Insulin-like growth factor-I and –II (IGFs)
• Human growth hormone (HGH)
• Testosterone
• Myostatin inhibitors

With a gene that inhibits myostatin, you could be like this whippet:

Satellite Cells

When muscle cells undergo injury, quiescent satellite cells are released from beneath the basement membrane. They become activated and re-enter the cell cycle. These dividing cells are known as the "transit amplifying pool" before undergoing myogenic differentiation to form new (post-mitotic) myotubes. There is also evidence suggesting that these cells are capable of fusing with existing myofibres to facilitate growth and repair.

Text Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_cell
Image Source: http://www.sfn-manitoba.ca/profiles/anderson/muscles.jpg

Reform

Mountain biking has lost it's edge for me. I ride, I train, I enjoy it to some extent, but it is nothing new. After a couple years of riding pretty consistently and intensely, I am faster and stronger, but less excited. We won our division again in the Summer Solstice 24-hr race. I didn't really care and wasn't surprised. Nonetheless, it took me more than a week to feel fresh again.

Scratching my head and wondering, it occurred to me that I enjoy lifting weights but have been too embarrassed to be so vain as to bodybuild. The feeling I get from a workout is better than the feeling I get from spinning (my form of training during the week for mountain biking). I'd rather workout with weights than spin, and, like putting money in the bank, I should have something to show for it after a while.

This goes with a philosophy first expressed to me by Hector Zubiate, "When in doubt, go for the money." Many jobs and many workouts are very similar. There is a whole industry of self-help books feeding on this vagueness. Thousands of books claim to have the answer for finding just the right job for you - as if we were put on this Earth to do our part in the working economy.

Exercise should keep you healthy and be fun. Work should gain you money and be fun. Work should also have a long-term plan, as should exercise. My exercise plan, right now, is, like most things in my life, vague - as is my career plan...

My vague exercise plan is to follow a three-days per week, full body, routine. Each exercise is basic and compound (versus auxiliary and isolated) focusing on my quads, hams, back, chest, triceps, biceps, shoulders and abs.

To vary things up (although I have not done this yet) I will do three week cycles - 15 reps/set one week, 10 reps/set on the second week, and 5 reps/set on the third week. I am also supposed to start each week with 15 percent less than my 15, 10, or 5 rep maximum weights.

This is my third week of 8 to 10 reps per set. I find it hard to have enough faith in this little system to actually reduce my weights and vary the number of reps. I also do not really know what my 15, 10, and 5 rep maximums are for all of the various exercises. I should record this information, but I find this too pretentious... Get over it, eh?

Approximate 10 rep maximums:
Quads - leg press (400 pounds (max of machine))
- squat (it is a new exercise, so I am starting at 135 lbs - easy)
Hams - curls (140 lbs)
- dead lifts (new exercise, 135 lbs)
back - pull up (220 lbs)
- row (150 lbs)
chest - machine bench (250 lbs)
- free bench (205 lbs)
triceps - cable pull down (150 lbs (machine max))
- dips (have not done weighted dips yet)
biceps - curl (50 lbs dumb bells)
shoulders - inclined press (shoulders, triceps, chest?) (65 lbs dumb bells)
- lateral raises (easy 25 lbs - afraid of damaging shoulder)
Abs - machine crunch (180 lbs)

My Favorite Ways to Over-Train

1. Jump right in with full, maximum intensity training
2. Hit the gym after dinner, an hour or so before bed time
3. Dehydrate before, during and after working out
4. Rehydrate just before going to bed - wake up every hour for fluid exchange
5. Do not eat much after your workout
6. Go to bed on an empty stomach
7. Stay hungry throughout the day
8. Do physical labor in the heat on your rest days
9. Drink lots of coffee
10. Sleep less than 8 hours a night

Drink lots of coffee
Drink lots of coffee
Drink lots of coffee

Chastity

My favorite quote from Straw Dogs so far:

"Secularism is like chastity, a condition defined by what it denies." (p 126)

The point being that atheism/secularism is just another, more austere, spin on the Christian passion for truth.

This plays into my growing conviction that the truth, while intellectually challenging, is probably less profound that a game of chess or the matrix algebra used for computer graphics.

My new religion, for as long as the interest holds (there ain't much to it at this point), is summarized by an adolescent phrase I used 10 or 15 years ago, "Use your delusion." (This can be changed to "user delusion", "user illusion", etc. I probably took this from Guns and Roses.)

more of the same

The issues of the day concern morality, progress, purpose, and a philosophy of life.

I think it is a false myth that humans are moral. Moral are like laws – cultural constructions that depend on a stable society for enforcement. When the social stability degenerates, morals, like other luxuries, become things of a different time and place.

The idea of social progress is another false myth. Like a workaholic, society becomes exhausted as it strives to reach higher levels. In a few regions certain indicators may seem to scream progress, however many less obvious aspects of these society are strung out, worn thin, and unsustainable. In most regions of the Earth, people are extremely poor, uneducated, and without health care. I see no reason to think these people will be better off in 50 years.

The purpose of every other animal on Earth is to reproduce. Humans, like a Windows operating system starting up, require a very long time to be ready to achieve this purpose. The reason it takes so long is also like a Windows operating system – we have too many applications built on archaic (and buggy) code, competing (inefficiently) for limited resources.

If we cannot honestly delude ourselves with pride in morality, social progress, or purpose, what can we use to fill this philosophical void? How do we come to terms with an increasingly undeniable amoral and nihilistic existence?

What should be the role of a philosophy of life? How should it affect our day-to-day living, our lifestyles, our careers, our general attitudes, our actions, and our life accomplishments? Does a philosophy of life need to be sustainable or universal applicable? Or is it simply a legalistic justification for what we feel?

I think philosophy is simply a justification. It is little more than an intellectual exercise. It may guide our behavior occasionally, but only rarely and weakly. Usually we guided more by a desire to be nice, agreeable, attractive, and accepted. Moreover, we tend to focus these desires on people we perceive to have social authority. When authorities come into conflict, people frequently die and morals, philosophies, etc are set aside. We are social animals, not philosophical animals.

Turtles

I had a theory about the nature of matter, the universe, and everything (TOE), but it turns out to be an extremely simplified, skeletal outline version of string theory. Did I read or hear about this theory, not really paying attention, but then suddenly declared it as my own - subconscious plagiarism? The gist of "my" idea is that forces are created by dimensional folds - a one dimensional line is folded to create a two dimensional triangle, which is folded to create a three dimensional shape, which is folded again to create a four dimensional shape, etc, etc. With each fold, the structure becomes stiffer and stiffer and the forces become larger and larger. These would correspond to gravity, electro-magnetism, weak nuclear, strong nuclear, etc.

This ties in with another idea that I somehow acquired. A point existing by itself is meaningless - it is only when the point interacts with another point that it becomes meaningful. Two points create a line - the interaction of two zero dimensional objects create a one dimensional object. Continuing this line of reasoning out to the universe, or to a tree falling in the forest when no one is around, is the universe meaningful if it does not interact with another universe? What would multiple universes look like (not multiple galaxies)? This would seem to require multiple realities. But how would different realities interact?

My pipe-dream answer is that consciousness, or self-awareness, is the interaction of multiple realities. The realities which interact to create consciousness are the realities that we perceive. If they did not create consciousness, then we would not perceive them. The non-interacting realities are as meaningless as a solitary point.
So, we could have infinite universes, or infinite realities, sort of like a probability cloud – overlapping and interacting to create pockets of high density consciousness.
What comes next? How do consciousnesses interact and what do they create – god? What then? How many turtles? Each turtle stands on the back of the next, all the way down… Call it infinite oneness, a self-referential loop, ?…

It is interesting that when you work backward along the chain of “logic”, each higher dimension gives meaning to the lower dimensions.

Pencil Test

The best test I could recommend for anyone considering a career as a structural engineer is: Write a twenty-five page essay on the physical characteristics of your pencil. Include tables, drawings, and formulas.

If you enjoy describing every possible usage scenario and the resultant stresses on your pencil, then structural engineering is the job for you.

Foggy Will

We like to think we have free will, but I don't think we do. Based on the amount of evidence and explanatory writings on this subject, I would like to think that this is a settled question, but it's not. So I ask myself, "Why do people still believe in free will?" Or, more generally, why do people have irrational beliefs or why do people believe something despite evidence to the contrary?

Many intelligent people hold to ideas which are irrational or contrary to evidence, so I will immediately discount the argument that complexity is the stumbling block.

Many of our so-called rational beliefs are actually so poorly understood they could be called irrational beliefs in the rational. Take for instance viruses. I do not know this for certain, but I think it is safe to say that most people would have a very difficult time explaining what a virus is or differentiating it from bacteria. Although we talk about viruses as if we were rational, modern people, but we might as well be talking of witchcraft for all we really know about how they work. My point is, rational or irrational, culture affects what we believe.

Culture is a very broad term. I think the most useful way defining culture for this context is the shared beliefs, customs, practices, and social behavior of a group. Or, in other words, culture is the way in which individuals identify themselves with a group. Beliefs are more of a means to belong to a group than an end in themselves. There is a slew of experimental evidence supporting this point, but I think it is enough to say that people typically avoid conflict with the group. (Although, as an aside, members of a group are irresistibly fascinated when conflict does erupt.)

My conclusion is that the acceptability of a belief is more important than the truth or rationality of a belief. The belief itself could be completely irrational, but if most of the people you like or feel friendly toward believe it, then you are likely to believe it too. Free will is a fairly abstract and complex topic, but penetration of its complexity is not really that difficult. In fact, many of the writings trying to support free will are complex. The priorities of many of our great philosophers who have dealt with this topic are less on the truth than on creating a legal defense to justify their beliefs.

To rephrase Nietzsche, philosophy is dead. Empirical science has taken its place. In particular, with respect to human nature and consciousness, evolutionary psychology is the new religion and Darwin is the god. One of the primary moral values of this religion is humility. Devotees of evolutionary psychology strive to fully recognize how similar we are to other animals and how many of our beliefs and tendencies are rooted in biology.

Professionalism Protectionism

Several of the podcasts I listen to have touched on the distinction between science and pseudoscience. The root motivation for this distinction is, I believe, to preserve the image and reputation of “scientists”. The problem of creating a distinction between “us” and “them” and "good" and "bad" is common to many, if not all, categories of people, but it is especially obvious with professionals.

This panicky protection of the power of the professional image interests me professionally and avocationally. I am an immigrant to Canada with an engineering degree the Professional Engineers of Ontario will not recognize, despite treaties and agreements between the Canadian and US accreditation boards. The Professional Engineers of Ontario want to protect their precious pretentious reputations from anyone who does not fall within their tightly drawn lines of distinction between the rest of us and Them.

While the preservation of the professional image is, on one hand, laughable, ridiculous, and infuriating, it is, on the other hand, perfectly understandable. Even when quality is not considered, if professional standards are not enforced, the service provided by the professional and the image associated with the profession become vague and diffuse. The identity of the profession weakens, and when the identity weakens, the power and prestige weakens. In the end, only the professions which protect their images continue to exist as defined entities.

The preservation of quality is another good reason for being eagerly exclusive. The benefits of clear engineering, accounting, or legal standards are fairly obvious but are more clouded for the medical or scientific professions. Science and medicine are rapidly growing and developing fields in which standards and regulations inhibit innovation, but without which, end up becoming filled with quackery. Professional snobbery provides an essential evolutionary pressure in weeding these out.

The popularization of science is where pseudo-science comes to play. Successful popularization of scientific ideas depends heavily on how entertaining the ideas are made to appear. The entertainment factor is the primary evolutionary pressure for the popularity of scientific ideas. Ideas which are not interesting, exciting, or easy to use to entertain friends are simply not going to last long or go very far. But when scientific concepts or discoveries are spiced up with too much of the entertainment factor, then they become pseudo-science. It is both ironic and appropriate that science podcasts, and the popular science authors they interview, are complaining about pseudo-science, since an outside observer probably would not see much distinction.

John Gray, Straw Dogs

I have been thinking about the problems with utopianism, the problems with ethics, the problems with economics, the problems with human nature, etc, etc... All rather pessimistic and cynical, but, I can't help believing, realistic. Although this is like saying a realistic definition of a car is four patches of rubber on a road...
In any case, I came across an interview with John Gray, an economist and philosopher who affirms and expands my cynicism to new levels. Here is a taste of his thoughts and style:

“ "I should liken Kant to a man at a ball, who all evening has been carrying on a love affair with a masked beauty in the vain hope of making a conquest, when at last she throws off her mask and reveals herself to be his wife." In Schopenhauer's fable the wife masquerading as an unknown beauty was Christianity. Today it is humanism.

What Schopenhauer wrote of Kant is no less true today. As commonly practiced, philosophy is the attempt to find good reasons for conventional beliefs. In Kant's time the creed of conventional people was Christian, now it is humanist. Nor are these two faiths so different from one another.

Over the past 200 years, philosophy has shaken off Christian faith. It has not given up Christianity's cardinal error – the belief that humans are radically different from all other animals.

Philosophy has been a masked ball in which a religious image of humankind is renewed in the guise of humanist ideas of progress and enlightenment. Even philosophy's greatest unmaskers have ended up as figures in the masquerade. Removing the masks from our animal faces is a task that has hardly begun.

Other animals are born, seek mates, forage for food and die. That is all. But we humans – we think – are different. We are persons, whose actions are the results of their choices. Other animals pass their lives unawares, but we are conscious. Our image of ourselves is formed from our ingrained belief that consciousness, selfhood and free will are what define us as human beings, and raise us above all other creatures.

In our more detached moments, we admit that this view of ourselves is flawed. Our lives are more like fragmentary dreams than the enactments of conscious selves. We control very little of what we most care about; many of our most fateful decisions are made unbeknownst to ourselves. Yet we insist that mankind can achieve what we cannot: conscious mastery of its existence. This is the creed of those who have given up an irrational belief in God for an irrational faith in mankind.

But what if we give up the empty hopes of Christianity and humanism? Once we switch off the soundtrack – the babble of God and immortality, progress and humanity – what sense can we make of our lives?
”
— John Gray, Straw Dogs

Ranting, panting

Ethics are the intersection of logic and empathy. If there is a flaw in either the logic or the empathy, then the ethics are flawed. Considering the fact that we are highly prone to flaws and biases in both logic and empathy, there is strong grounds to question the utility of ethics.

How reliable is our sense of logic? In truth, most people do not use it. When we do, we need to stop (and think). We spell it out, write it down, talk it over, but eventually just resort to force. If we can't figure something out, we get frustrated and angry. It takes people years to figure out simple algebra, many people have math anxiety, and professional debaters, scholars, and politicians regularly defend positions which are logically indefensible (yet they win!) So, it is safe to say, I think, that we humans are not too great at logic - our logic is unreliable, at best.

How great is our empathy? Humans are fairly unique in having the ability to see things from the perspective of others. Evolutionarily, this ability has developed fairly recently. We have a much longer history of forcing our perspective on others, or of simply using others, regardless of their perspective, for our benefits. Looking at the record of human events, we fail in the empathy department. From bombing foreigners, to immigration police, to racism, to womens rights, to failing to sacrifice luxurious living for a few pennies of medicine for children, we fail. The small degree of empathy we do have is reserved for those in our immediate social circle or is a carefully cultivated garden of compassion growing from delicate social and economic conditions.

Rather than trying to simplify things to ethical rules which can be codified into enforceable laws, we should remain skeptical and agnostic. As appealing as it may be to some, there is not one set of rules for universal hapiness and salvation. No matter how much we justify, threaten, build idealogical frameworks, and claim that it is for the greater good, the fact remains that ethical rules are simplistic, unreliable, impose a set of values, and are dangerous tools for social manipulation.

Ethical Smethical

I was listening to an interview with Peter Singer, a Professor of Bioethics at Princeton. He is best known for his book Animal Liberation, which helped start the animal liberation movement. From my understanding, his philosophy is to apply ethics as fully as possible. This got me thinking about the ultimate value and motivation for ethics.

What are ethics? How are they different from values or morals or cultural preferences? How much do ethics really affect our daily lives in comparison with biological needs, impulses, culture, etc? Are ethics essentially a set of rules for optimizing something we value?

Singer believe in utilitarianism - optimizing the greatest happiness, least suffering state of sentient beings. This might work if we all had the same values, but we are humans - we strive for different values. We strive to differentiate ourselves from different groups - especially when young and trying to establish ourselves socially. This is the fundamental flaw in following ethics too far: ethics are based on sets of values which are not universal.

Singer puts a high value on sentient life - life that is conscious and aware. This includes non-human animals, which leads to the conclusion that it is wrong to harm or to kill animals. If animals are somewhat aware, then it is somewhat wrong to kill them. I have to admit that it strikes me as somewhat wrong that ten billion animals are processed (killed) each year in the meat industry, but I am sure that many people less moved by this statistic. In fact, I currently place more value on the athletic benefits of eating meat than on the suffering and death the meat industry creates. Others place more value on the taste of chicken or steak.

Why should we care about ethics? One reason is that how we live affects our self-image and our self-esteem. Living in accordance with our ethics makes us feel good about ourselves, but if we are just trying to feel good, then ethical living may compete with whatever we are compelled to sacrifice. Another reason to care about ethics is that it gives us something to talk and debate about. It provides a venue to differentiate ourselves from less-ethical, "weaker" thinkers, etc. But I think the real reason is that it gives people justification for imposing their values on others. It leads to many of the same evils as fundamentalist religiosity - exclusionary, us-versus-them, smug thinking.

So, are ethics, at best, misguided and, at worst, evil?

Mutterings of unscrupulousness

"I understand what you are saying, but it makes me uncomfortable. Your thoughts are disturbing. Your moral second-guessing and cost-benefit analyzes are akin to rationalizing about how pointless it is to stop if you hit a homeless person on the street.

"The fact that you could so freely consider these possibilities makes me feel that you are morally unreliable… You would probably be dishonest and deceitful if it was to your advantage. If you offered me your friendship, I would wonder what was in it for you. I get the feeling that if I ever needed your help for something, then you would simply ignore any feelings of loyalty you might have and just do whatever suited you best.

"You cannot be trustworthy and calculating at the same time..."

...

“You just don’t get it!”

If you could see things from my point of view, you would understand. Other people see things from my point of view, so there must be something wrong with you. In fact, if you don't get this, then I don't think I can trust you at all.

Ineffectualism

I'm an adrenaline junky. If a book is boring, I don't finish it. If an idea is not interesting or relevant to what I am thinking about, I am not interested in it. But, I am interested in a lot of different ideas... for a short while, until the next big idea splashes across my brain, flooding my senses with novelty and expectation.

I have recently amped up my intake of ideas. My brain is positively percolating with unprocessed, unrefined connections, similarities, metaphors and potential fields of exciting study I will soon forget about. As soon as I buy into one idea, a better or different idea washes it away. The amount of information available through books, web pages, and podcasts is far more than I can consume, much less digest.

Oops, I just found a new podcast, "Facts, Ethics, and Policy Guiding Neuroscience Today." Gotta go.

The Sanctamonious Animal

"The ethic of divinity pertains to a sense of exalted purity and holiness, which is opposed to a sense of contamination and defilement." (Steven Pinker, The Blank State, p 271)

Feces is bad - kills people (cholera)
A little bit of bacterial or viral contamination is all that is necessary to lead to sickness or death. This fact has sculpted our genetic expression.

As Dan Gardener states in Risk, we tend to polarize uncertainty into high-risk, low-benefit (Bad) or low-risk, high-benefit (Good).

In a form of ethical insurance, we are willing to pay an avoidance premium to reduce our risk...

From politics to religion to entertainment (hero, villain), polarization seems to resonate.

On human tragedy

Is feeling sad good enough for the 102,000 dead in Burma, or the 8500 who just died in an earthquake in China, or the 200,000 who have died in Darfur, or the 81 who died in Lebanon, or the 20 people who died from tornadoes in the Midwest yesterday, or the 42,000 Americans who died in car accidents last year?
Or how about the 1,000,000 people who die every year from malaria?

Photographs of bodies floating in flood water seem very grave, and they are... It makes me feel gravely concerned and sad... and somewhat defensive. I don't mean to belittle these deaths, but I am irrationally annoyed by the obligation to feel badly.

56,000,000 people die every year - many of them die from violence or disease. Obviously, it is pointless to feel badly for all of these people. But it seems that reading about the most sensationalistic of these deaths is part of life. While the less tragic or concentrated deaths don't make it to our headlines, the more tragic do and give us material about which to have apalled conversations about the tragedy of it all.

Why do these headlines provoke an annoyed reaction from me? It maybe because there is nothing significant I can do about the situations. On the one hand, I feel that these tragedies should be made known, but on the other hand I feel my understanding of the situations is extremely shallow and superficial.

Like my understanding, my sympathy is also shallow and superficial. "Wow, that's incredible... Hmm... wow...", I say, slowly shaking my head.

Mirror Mirror

The brain is a funny thing. It makes me laugh.

Some brain researchers think that mirror neurons hold the key to how we derive meaning from language. I will make the spectacularly speculative leap that they also hold the key to the origins of religion.

First let me explain what mirror neurons are.
When we see someone doing something, regions of our brain which are normally responsible for the doing become active despite the fact that we do not actually do what we see the other person doing. For example, if I see you smile, regions of my brain that control my ability to smile become active, even if I do not actually smile.
In language, what is said is reenacted by the mirror neurons. Talking about smiling causes regions of my brain that control my ability to smile to become active, even if I do not actually smile.
Apparently our ability to understand a sentence is affected by the compatibility of our emotional states with the emotional content of the sentence.

Next, let me make the leap from mirror neurons to our almost irresistible tendency for personification - "representing abstractions or inanimate objects with human qualities, including physical, emotional, and spiritual; the application of human attributes or abilities to nonhuman entities."

I contend that the attribution of sentient, humanizing traits to nature is a centrally human way of understanding the world because, as seems to be the case with language, it is the only way we can meaningfully understand the world. When we take away the personification, the sense of meaningfulness weakens... When choosing between a highly meaningful (personified) sense of meaning and a dry, de-humanized sense of meaning, I think it is safe to say that the personified meaning will have more appeal.

The only new idea here is the role that mirror neurons play in our understanding of the world. This additional de-humanizing, reductionistic bit of data, I think, adds new weight to an old argument.

Copy and Paste

Growth Fetish
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (couldn't have said it better myself)

Growth Fetish is a book about economics and politics by the Australian liberal political theorist Clive Hamilton. Published in 2002, it became a best-seller in Australia, a very unusual feat for what is normally considered a very dry subject. The book has been the subject of much controversy, and has managed to infuriate commentators on both the left and right.

The thesis of the book is that the policies of unfettered capitalism pursued by the west for the last 50 years has largely failed, since the underlying purpose of the creation of wealth is happiness, and Hamilton contends that people in general are no happier now than 50 years ago, despite the huge increase in personal wealth. In fact, he suggests that the reverse is true. He states that the pursuit of growth has become a fetish, in that it is seen as a universal magic cure for all of society's ills. Hamilton also proposes that the pursuit of growth has been at a tremendous cost in terms of the environment, erosion of democracy, and the values of society as a whole, as well as not delivering the hoped for increases in personal happiness. One result is that we, as a society, have become obsessed with materialism and consumerism. Hamilton's catchphrase "People buy things they don't want, with money they don't have, to impress people they don't like" [1] neatly sums up his philosophy on consumerism.

Hamilton proposes that where a society has developed to the point at which the majority of people live reasonably comfortably, the pursuit of growth is pointless and should be curtailed. The surplus wealth could then be diverted into the essential infrastructure and to other nations that have not reached this level of wealth. Hamilton adapted the term Eudemonism to denote a political and economic model that does not depend on ever increasing and ultimately unsustainable levels of growth, but instead (page 212) "promotes the full realisation of human potential through ... proper appreciation of the sources of wellbeing", among which he identifies social relationships, job satisfaction, religious belief for some, and above all a sense of meaning and purpose.

Hamilton relates the fetish for growth to a "development mentality", and to a neoliberal "instrumental value theory [which] maintains that, while humans are valuable in and of themselves, the non-human world is valuable only insofar as it contributes to the wellbeing of humans" (page 191). To this he contrasts the stance of the "transpersonal ecology" described by Warwick Fox: this is "centred on the notion that only the ego-involved, contracted self can imagine itself to be distinct from the natural world and that expansion of the self beyond the boundaries of the personal necessarily means that one's awareness, and ground of concern, extends to the natural world" (page 194).

Clive Hamilton is the former Executive Director of the Australia Institute, an independent think-tank which is widely regarded as one of the very few viable left-leaning research centres in the country. Hamilton resigned from the Australia Institute in 2007. Growth Fetish itself reflects many of the findings from the AI's report Overconsumption in Australia, which found that 62 per cent of Australians believe they cannot afford everything they need, even though in real terms their incomes have never been higher. The report also found that 83 per cent of people felt that society was "too materialistic", with too much emphasis on money and things, instead of what really matters. The Institute is also researching the growing phenomenon of downshifting, which Hamilton feels may be a response to the growth fetish, laying the foundation for a post-growth society.

This Modern Product

My focus these last few days is on consumerism. I am coming to believe it is the primary motive force in modern life, yet most of us are only peripherally aware of it as a term over-used by dooms-day sensationalists. I believe we have morphed into a society with clearly consumerist values, and I believe the metamorphosis is a perfectly natural consequence of real life in our modern world.

In the most mundane, non-sensationalistic terms, consumerism refers to economic policies based on the belief that the free choice of consumers should dictate the economic structure of a society. The problem with this belief is the assumption of free choice, especially with regards to children born and raised in social environments saturated with highly sophisticated marketing forces in virtually all aspects of their lives. In this situation, corporations, rather than consumers, dictate the economic structure of a society. In other words, corporations dictate the emotional undercurrents which determine the decision making choices of individuals. These emotional undercurrents, essentially, are what we value – in fact, they are our values. Our values, in this modern life, are increasingly indistinguishable from the needs of corporate profits.

Why rehash old topics which have been around since before the time of Karl Marx? We have heard these arguments before. People have been aware of the evils of consumerism for over a hundred years, yet it has done nothing to prevent the continued shift to an increasingly corporately dictated lifestyle. The knowledge and wisdom of the few, it seems, is useless. Movements created by a small group of committed individuals quickly become subject to the limitations of marketing... Many of the same problems with marketing products also apply to marketing ideas. Simplistically, in competition to reach broader audiences, ideas need to become more easily and quickly understood or accepted. It is ridiculous to try to understand a product, so marketers appeal to emotions. Emotional marketing works – it bypasses understanding and goes straight for acceptance. The same applies for ideas – they quickly become products that are quickly and easily emotionally accepted, or they are displaced by ideas that are...

Consumerism is an old idea that is a product passed along and communicated in an emotional current with very little urgency or newness. Along with a thousand other ideas and concepts, the emotional currents which carry it are displaced in our minds by the much more powerful emotional currents of our cars, our homes, our finances, etc. But the actual subject matter of consumerism is the nature of the emotional currents which drive our decisions and choices regarding these more pressing concerns. For example, we feel the need to buy a newer or nicer car because they are everywhere around us. We feel the need to buy new computers, or technological gadgets, because they too are everywhere around us. We feel the need to eat fast food, or packaged food, because it is so easy, quick and available. Everywhere around us are faster, better, nicer, newer, easier, sexier products. As soon as we buy these products, a new generation of products grabs our attention... And everyone – from federal government policy makers, to corporate shareholders, to your next door neighbor – has a vested interest in your continued and increasing consumption, because the entire economy – from your job, to government social programs, to the price of gasoline - is designed for growth and consumerism.


If you have time, please read this article. I found it very interesting.
The Fastest Growing Religion
http://consumerism.ca/thefastestgrowingreligion.htm

Consumer Technology

My attention span is short and my time to write is even shorter. My topic of rant today is, once again, the woes of society and the perils of freedom. Specifically, we need an education system focused on critical thinking rather than the usage of technology.

My focus is on the public education system because the education system is an area of major influence on peoples’ lives which is in the governments’ control.
I juxtapose critical thinking with learning technology skills because the former is displaced by the later by our economically oriented educational policies, and the former is clearly more important for making rational, sustainable choices.
I have written before about why and how our current education system is economically focused, but I would also like to show how this has ingrained consumer values in our culture.

Without an adequate understanding of logic, of human nature, or of the history of societal change, we are ill equipped to handle the responsibility of freedom. To recite hackneyed rhetoric, freedom requires responsibility, maturity, and understanding. In a society that prides itself on freedom, special attention must be placed on the education of the people that equips them to make well-informed, mature decisions. Without an adequate education which teaches people to think critically and makes people vigilant of the tendencies and tactics of people in power to concentrate their power, we cannot assume the people will make reasonable decisions.

A loosely regulated, free-market system is probably the best economic option we have, but it is not without serious shortcoming that our education system should make us clearly aware of. If we are not aware of the shortcomings, we become victims of the shortcomings.

The economic growth ideology of the Western nations has created a consumer culture with consumer values which are at odds with sustainable cultural values ranging from conservation to intellectualism. Consumer ideology is deeply rooted in our western societies. It is an integral part of our identities, our self-esteems, and our purposes in life. We build our individual identities on brand names, on cleanliness, on newness, on trendyness, on the kinds of cars we drive, on the clothes we wear, on the technological gadgets we own, and the music we listen to. If we do not buy ourselves nice, new things, then we feel shabby. If we have an old car, then we feel poor and low class. If we have slightly worn clothes, then we feel shabby. If we do not have the latest gadgets, then we feel boring and old-fashioned. If we do not have enough money to buy all of these things, then we feel like something is wrong with us. If we make less money than our peers, then we feel less capable and inferior.

There are natural tendencies in human nature that make us particularly vulnerable to consumerism. Marketing science continues to find new ways to play our emotions and urges to buy more of everything. The admirable efficiency of capitalism unfortunately applies to marketing as well. We are born and raised in an environment of marketing influences that pushes us to (and beyond) the limits of our abilities to consume. We have very little, if any, educational preparation to resist these influences.

A technology focused education system not only does nothing to prepare us to resist marketing influences, it actually promotes marketing-sensitive values. Technology is focused on newness. Newness requires new consumers, new markets, and more consumption. A high-tech society is a high-consumption society. For new technology to be developed there must be a consumer demand. We are taught to value technological advancements. We are taught to embrace, without question the value of consumer electronics – of newer, faster, better technology.

How Education Policies Promote Anti-Intellectualism

The stated objective of the U.S. Department of Education is “to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness.” In regards to higher education,

“America’s institutions of higher education have long been engines of innovation, helping the nation to achieve a level of economic prosperity experienced by few other countries throughout history. The dynamics of rapid technological change over time have required greater levels of education to sustain the global competitiveness of the American economy. As a result, an increasing proportion of Americans have enrolled in and completed a program of postsecondary education in order to secure high-quality employment in competitive industries.”

Put simply, the purpose of the education system is for economic growth. Through government incentives, standardized testing, grants, subsidies, alumni fees, and enrollment, the result of our national educational goal is that universities are increasingly focused on degree programs that generate economic growth.

Degrees that promote economic growth tend to be applied rather than theoretical. Applied science and economics such as engineering and business tend not to prioritize philosophical, humanitarian, outside-of-the-market thinking. In other words, they do not promote intellectualism.

More people than ever before are university educated. This is made possible by readily available student loans. These loans enable relatively poor people to afford an advanced education with future earnings potential. A competitive economy forces students to be keenly aware of the financial return of their choice of degree program. There is a distinct and necessary choice between monetary and intellectual degrees. It is very expensive to get a degree – too much so, for most, to play around with intellectual degrees. The economics of education push students into business and engineering and away from arts and humanities. Most students go to institutions of higher education to make more money, and with tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debts, they can afford to do nothing else.

Fortunately for them, a university degree generally does result in higher earning. So, there are millions of educated workers out there with applied degrees, high earnings, high debts, and low exposure to any of the great philosophical or humanitarian thinkers.

How is this different from times before student loans programs? Wouldn’t these people be even less educated and open to philosophical thought without their university educations? Possibly… but two things are for certain: liberal arts colleges across the nation are shrinking, and the programs that do continue to exist are becoming highly packaged, superficial survey courses that do more to bore the students than to inspire them.

Why are liberal arts colleges shrinking? Because their funding decreases as their relative importance decreases. Staff and programs are cut back to fit smaller budgets, and courses are made to cover more topics in less of time with larger class sizes. The courses become superficial reviews of well-know, easy-to-teach topics. They are boring to the students and less interesting to teach. A feedback cycle ensues that further weakens the programs.

Our education policies are aimed at economic growth. Unfortunately intellectualism is an opportunity cost of economic growth. Our policies promote applied degrees which push out intellectual degrees. Not only are relatively fewer graduates intellectually trained, but the quality of their training is being watered down. Economic incentives designed to encourage students to obtain higher education turn education into an economic vehicle. As education becomes more economically focused, non-economic aspects of education fall out of focus.

Dismal science

Aside from the rise in meat consumption and agricultural competition between food and biofuel cash-crops causing grain prices to rise far beyond what billions of people across the world can afford, I have other dismal thoughts...

I believe there is a fundamental conflict between economic reality and economic idealism. Assume the ideal is to have a progressively growing world economy with lower and lower rates of poverty. My apoptosis idea here is that poverty is a necessary result of economic growth.

Simply put, absolute wealth grows but relative wealth, for a select few, grows faster than absolute wealth. A relative increase in the wealth of one region necessitates a relative decrease in wealth in other regions.

What is the difference between absolute and relative wealth? Absolute wealth comes from increases in productivity or technology which creates more or better quality goods and services. Relative wealth is the difference, or disparity, in absolute wealth between regions or individuals.

Increases in absolute wealth require improvements in productivity or technology. These improvements do not occur simultaneously all across the world. They occur regionally. The result is that the regions with the improvements get richer and all the rest get poorer.

According to standard economic theories this is not so bad – it creates impetus for the poorer regions to make improvements or to move to other sectors of the economy. But the problem is, as relative wealth increases for one region, the relative advantage of that region to create more wealth also increases. This sets up an unstable condition in which the first region to get a step ahead runs away with the lions share of the worlds wealth. This process continues on smaller and smaller scales, concentrating the worlds wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is, I believe, a natural result of economic reality.

Allow me to illustrate.
Assume a starting point in which all regions of the earth are perfectly equal in wealth and resources.
Assume there is an equal, yet random probability of increasing productivity in some sector of the economy for each region.
Assume an increase in wealth increases the probability of increased productivity. (This is a key point. Wealth allows for capital investment, for better tools, for better resources, more insurance, better training, etc.)

If region X randomly increases its productivity of something such as corn, the price of corn in region X would typically go down, assuming demand stays the same. If there is some degree of free trade, other regions will buy from X and the global price of corn will also go down. Corn producers in region Y must now sell their corn for less and/or have a lower market share. Region Y will become poorer.

The increased wealth of region X allows an increase in the probability of greater increases in productivity. Every gain in region X results in region Y becoming even poorer. If region Y cannot increase productivity, it must give up corn production because it will eventually cost more to produce than they can sell it for.

With the comparative advantage theory, region Y would switch from corn to some other market sector in which they are less disadvantaged. Unfortunately region Y may not have this flexibility.

Compound this with the following facts:
wealth creates demand (our economy requires expansion – supply and demand must be more or less equal, increased productivity increases supply, so demand must also increase)
Supply-Demand increases causes inflation – makes poor poorer
Wealth requires specialization, education, time, etc – leads to lower birth rates
Higher birth rates in poor countries from reduced infant mortality due to better medicine -> more people -> lower productivity (units output per person)
Real-world economics leads naturally to situations where regions fall so far behind the rest of the world that they can not catch up through normal economic means.

Straws and frogs

In my last post, I just pasted some data on the federal budget. My point was that the numbers speak for themselves – mostly the 54% part. To say that the priorities of the US government are out of whack would be to oversimplify the situation. I don’t think any one person is to blame. I think the problem is systemic. It is part of the economic and political structure of our representative democracy.

If you think of dollars as votes and what people really care about, then we are getting what we want. Our representatives are doing their best to get money into the districts of their voters. If you want better education, then you ask them for more money. If you want better health care, then you ask them for more money. If you want more jobs and a larger corporate tax base, then you ask them for more money. Each district is sucking hard through the straw of their representative for more money. With all this sucking the biggest straws get the most juice.

What are the biggest straws? The ones that seem most reasonable, responsible, and sensible – jobs. Everywhere across America, cities are vying with one another for big businesses to set up shop in their tax regions. Our congressional representatives are doing the same – trying to get money for industries in their home towns. They are especially keen for companies and industries that are going to provide a lot of jobs.

Unfortunately, it seems that the more a straw is used, the easier the flow becomes. From another perspective, this is the same as saying that the rich get richer. The rich do get richer. That is a fact. People who have money have the power to make more money. And the way they make more money is to invest it in people and companies and industries that are going to make them more money. They set up an infrastructure for make more money, and they make their straws bigger.

The fundamental, common interest of the people of America is money. It is a nation ruled by money. It is ruled by money in the same way that the rest of the world is ruled by money. The sad consequence of this fact is that if you do not have money, then you have no rule. You have no vote. No representation. Taxation without representation is a natural consequence of the capitalistic economic system.

Since long before I was born, people complained about the futility of voting. One vote is insignificant when the total number of votes are in the millions. The truth is: it is insignificant. Especially when you are simply voting for a representative that is simply a pawn for a system of governance and economics which is systemically flawed. If you want a voice, then you must do so with money.

I am not saying anything new here. I am simply pointing out the obvious. Everyone knows, or should know, about this problem. But sometimes we blind ourselves to realities when those realities are incongruent with what we are comfortable with.

If you put a frog in boiling water, it will hop out. If you put a frog in cool water and then slowly turn up the temperature, then the frog will remain there until it boils to death. This is universally analogous to almost all problems we face in which we have no perceived control. Not because we are unable to detect the threat, but because we refuse to detect it.

What is the point? What can we do? Why get angry and learn about the issues when our opinions have zero impact? Why get angry about the weather, or poverty, or a war on the other side of the world?

In the case of the over use of our tax dollars on military spending, what can I do? Assuming I have a clear understanding of the real consequences or negative effects of this use of money, and I feel strongly that something should be done, then I should donate to lobbying groups such as http://www.sensiblepriorities.org/, http://www.fpif.org/, or http://www.ips-dc.org/ .

But what about other issues? Who can afford to donate significant amounts to several groups? People with money can, and people with money do, donate to multiply lobbying groups. We are back to where we started.

At this point, I can choose between two or three conclusions:
1) We are trapped in a system in which we have no control
2) This analysis is somehow flawed
3) The problem, like the temperature of the frogs’ bath, is not really that bad

Budget of the United States

(image from http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2009/overview.html)

Budget of the United States Government Fiscal Year 2009

Total Outlays (Federal Funds): $2,650 billion

MILITARY: 54% and $1,449 billion

NON-MILITARY: 46% and $1,210 billion





Current Military
$965 billion:
• Military Personnel $129 billion
• Operation & Maint. $241 billion
• Procurement $143 billion
• Research & Dev. $79 billion
• Construction $15 billion
• Family Housing $3 billion
• DoD misc. $4 billion
• Retired Pay $70 billion
• DoE nuclear weapons $17 billion
• NASA (50%) $9 billion
• International Security $9 billion
• Homeland Secur. (military) $35 billion
• State Dept. (partial) $6 billion
• other military (non-DoD) $5 billion
• "Global War on Terror" $200 billion [We added $162 billion to the last item to supplement the Budget's grossly underestimated $38 billion in "allowances" to be spent in 2009 for the "War on Terror," which includes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan]
Past Military,
$484 billion:
• Veterans' Benefits $94 billion
• Interest on national debt (80%) created by military spending, $390 billion
Human Resources
$789 billion:
• Health/Human Services
• Soc. Sec. Administration
• Education Dept.
• Food/Nutrition programs
• Housing & Urban Dev.
• Labor Dept.
• other human resources.
General Government
$304 billion:
• Interest on debt (20%)
• Treasury
• Government personnel
• Justice Dept.
• State Dept.
• Homeland Security (15%)
• International Affairs
• NASA (50%)
• Judicial
• Legislative
• other general govt.
Physical Resources
$117 billion:
• Agriculture
• Interior
• Transportation
• Homeland Security (15%)
• HUD
• Commerce
• Energy (non-military)
• Environmental Protection
• Nat. Science Fdtn.
• Army Corps Engineers
• Fed. Comm. Commission
• other physical resources

Children and Ethics

I had been working on the idea that morality is somehow a product of runaway sexual selection. I no long think that it is, directly...

1. Morality is not distinctly human.
2. Very little of the cerebral cortex is used for morality, planning, or judgement.

The linguistic expression of morality or ethics is distinctly human. Talking about what people should or should not do, or social rules, or gossip about the status and reputation of various people is probably one of the original uses of language.
To a large extent, our language, and the memes in our language, determine our morals and ethics. Ethics are social constructs, like language, conveyed by other people in our social environment. Particular versions of morality, like language, vary from culture to culture. There are common elements, or universal ethics, which are analogous to universal grammar.

I think, though, that human morality is not only more fully articulated that other species, but that it is more developed. There are two main reasons for this, I think:

1. Articulation highlighted deficits in morality which made them more of a romantic liability.
2. The extremely long and difficult childhood of humans highlighted the necessity of parental morality for child survival.

One theory, which I agree with, is that runaway sexual selection was the main driver for our species' explosion of language abilities.
The idea of plasticity, taking the same basic genetic material but expressing the genes differently, coupled with the influence of sexual selection could explain the extremely rapid development of language abilities.

Our linguistic abilities, however, causes a long an difficult childhood for humans. The size and capacity of the human brain is due in large part to its postnatal development. The newborn brain of all other species develops almost entirely within the womb. A new born chimp has a brain averaging 350 cc. That of an adult chimp averages 450 cc. A newborn human brain also averages 350 cc. But an adult human brain averages 1400 cc, a postnatal increase of 300%.

The challenges of raising children are well-known. It is difficult, exhausting, exasperating work, but it is generally thought of as one of the greatest joys and rewards of life.

Not only are children challenging to raise, but our ethics are also deeply affected by in-group/out-group classification. By the rules of universal ethics, killing other humans is wrong, except when the other human is your enemy. Death of 10 people is worse than the death of one person (assuming the correct scenario), except if that one person is your child.

An additional, related speculation, is that cognitive dissonance played a strong role in our image of God.
1. Men woe women through language
2. Women evaluate men through their language
3. Language is tied up with Morals
4. Morals are tied up with child-rearing
5. Men like to think of themselves as in-control
6. Men realize, deep down, that women have a great deal of control over the moral expression of men
7. Men need to reconcile this emotional conflict
8. Men attribute the Moral Law to God, a man, rather than women.

Born stubborn

People don't like to admit when they are wrong. People don't like to acknowledge things that conflict with what they feel or what feels comfortable. If thinking about something makes us uncomfortable, we'd rather not think about it. I don't like to be told I need to do something even when I know I need to do it. It grates me; makes me annoyed. I'm not doing it. I know I should be doing it. I'd rather not think about it.

Would you call this stubbornness or procrastination, or something in between?
If you consider our pride in our self-control, in not being controlled, in being intelligent, in being someone others respect, then it is easy to see the conflict that arises when we do something stupid or when someone tells us what to do. It is easier and more comfortable to maintain our self-image than to accept the truth.

So, people do stupid things and refuse to admit that they are wrong because they are stubborn. Who cares?

What does being wrong mean? Instead of talking about factual rights and wrongs, consider gradients in more nebulous things that are not clearly right and wrong, but better and worse, or preferable and more difficult… Things like cultural values, religions, driving skills, etc.

If you find yourself in a particular state of race, culture, religion, you will probably have a hard time believing that everyone else is equal, even though they are different. Most people find reason to justify why their particular state is preferable. Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance, and have collected evidence to support this theory…

Example 1
One is the reaction of a religious group whose prophecy fails to come true. Research (ibid., at p. 22 ff.) has shown that if a group predicts, say, the end of the world, and at the appointed time the world does not end, the group responds to this failure of the prophecy by suggesting that their activity warded off the anticipated apocalypse, and begins to proselytize on the grounds that theirs is the effective belief system for warding off such disaster. One might have thought that failure of the prophecy would suggest that the group could not predict. But such an interpretation would produce dissonance with the group's strongest beliefs. On the other hand, the interpretation that they had successfully warded off the disaster does not produce such dissonance with their belief system.

Example 2
Research has shown that people exhibit greater liking of an organization that subjects them to severe initiation than to one that subjects them only to a mild initiation. This result can be explained by cognitive dissonance theory. There is conflict between the negative affect that the person experiences in response to the initiation, since the person has chosen to go through the initiation to gain entrance to the organization. This conflict produces discomfort and tension. The person can resolve this tension by justifying the initiation as "worth it" because of the positive things he or she will gain from the benefits of membership. The more effort put into the justification process, the more attachment the person has to the organization. The more difficult the initiation; the greater the need for justification; and thus the stronger the commitment to the organization.

Interesting, eh?
So, science is showing that people are stubborn and become more stubborn the more you back them into a corner.

Hmm… Why? Why are we stubborn?
I refuse to stop at “just because.”

My hypotheses are:
A) Self-preservation – we’re biased in favor of ourselves and take better care of ourselves rather than wasting our energies and resources on people better or more deserving than us.
B) Necessary energy – things which are challenging take more energy and need more commitment. Raising a kid, for example, requires a heavily biased commitment, or “deactivation energy”.
C) Invested energy – changing your mind all the time does not help to get anything done. If you’ve already committed time and energy to something, then it usually is better to stick with it than to give up.
D) Social cohesion and loyalty – being loyal to a group is usually better and safer than changing groups or taking off on your own…

Dark and wet

Not to be sensationalistic, but there are many dark truths within the very structure of our economic system.

For one, the economy requires constant expansion and continual increases in consumption. Consumption requires a market. The market is people, with 24 hours a day to consume. This may sound like a lot, but how many toys can you play with? How many services can you use? We have many more things now than ever before, but even now it has reached a saturation point. Competition for our wants and needs is fierce. Those who succeed do so usually through extreme marketing and luck. We can spend more on certain things, but there is a limit on how many different things we can consume.

Two, marketing is to our sense of contentment as nicotine is to our health. Marketing plays on our primal senses, on our self esteem, on our competitive natures, on our identities, on whatever emotional lever they can dream up to make it seem that we need or want something. This is not healthy. I think an interesting parallel can be made between consumers of self-help books, watching tv, and general consumption. The people most likely to buy a self help book are the ones who have done so in the last six weeks; people who watch tv watch a lot of it: more than 22 hours per week on average; the average unsecured consumer debt in the US is around $25,000. Should I throw in obesity as another parallel? The point is, we already consume to an unhealthy degree and an increase consumption is essential to our economy. We must consume more, or the economy will fail.

What alternatives do we have?

What does a failed economy mean?

What is the worst that could happen?

Why does the economy need to expand? Recession, interest rates, consumer

What does expansion really mean? New markets niches, more consumption

But really, there is no real evidence, right? No reason to care – after all, what can we do? If we don't consume, we'll feel like we are missing out on all the latest toys and gadgets. And if enough of us don't consume (this is less likely than everyone going vegetarian) there will be an recession and we'll all lose our jobs.

Besides, global warming will cause a rise in the sea levels which will have a much more dramatic effect on our economies as coastal cities like New York, San Francisco, Bejing, Shaghai, etc, are majorly affected by flooding.

The best thing to do is have a good time while I can and gradually reorient my career toward dike and levy building, because the western economy will soon be as saturated as its coastlines and there ain't anything I can do about it.

Short Wind

The issue before me this morning is what difference does it make that reality is a product of consciousness? Rather than get into a long winded explanation of why this is so, I'd like to focus on the implications.

First, if reality has a property which is analogous to density, does there need to be an ultimate density? Phrased in this way, the obvious answer is no. There are variations in density, but although black holes theoretically do exist, there is not an obvious requirement for them to exist. It follows that there does not need to be an ultimate reality or, consequent to this, an ultimate consciousness.

Second, assuming that reality increases as consciousness increases, does this create an obligation to increase our consciousness? Or to decrease it, for that matter? To be obliged is to be indebted because of some favor or service. Is reality a favor or service? I don't see any reason to think so.

Pod Ideas

I have a 45 minute drive to work and a 45 minute drive from work. I have plenty of time to listen to podcasts of debates, interviews, talks, etc... Here are a few moderately controversial topics.

Economic Disparity
Health and mortality are strongly affected by poverty and income disparity
Low social status seems to cause a slew of health effects
Heart disease, obesity, early mortality
Adjusting mortality rates for income disparity in the US has a greater affect than curing all cancers
Perceived ability to control one's life is a deeper and more fundamental factor
Relative control (relative to those in your society)
Skills such as reading, writing, speaking, and socializing seem to increase the sense of perceived control
Happiness indexes correlate inversely with the size of the gap between rich and poor
Japan and France, despite heavy smoking, fatty foods, and/or drinking have low and falling rates of heart disease and cancer
High status non-human animals forced into a low status position showed the same health effects as low status animals (shows that status affects health rather than health affecting status)

Effects of Affirmative Action
Unprepared students in tough academic environments have a very high attrition rate – they are self-ejected out of future study
Diversity can be good and bad
Educational and enlightening for some
Stressful and discouraging for others
All girls schools
African-American schools
Social stigma
Study of employer responses in which 50% of resumes were assigned distinctly black names and 50% were assigned distinctly white names showed that education and employment history were almost completely insignificant

Global warming/ Climate change
What is the evidence that it is happening?
Ice cap melts
CO2 levels
Computer modeling
Can or will we do anything about it?
We will play lip-service, but we probably cannot actually have any effect
What do the experts estimate our capacity is to affect things at this point?
Should we try to help affected communities (coastal regions)?
Assuming climate change is occurring, wouldn't our money be better spent preparing for it rather than trying (futilely) to avoid it?

The US as Global Peacekeeper
The US has the most money/ largest economy
Effect of expense to US economy?
Opportunity cost for other programs (eg effective, reform oriented international aid)
Ingraining and further entrenching the military industrial complex (politically influential companies supplying military goods and services)
Has the highest military expenditures
The US is already playing this role by default, but can it, or should it, continue to do so?
The US is already over-extended
Unpopular in US for regions unrelated to US interests
Unpopular in rest of world for unilateral arrogance
Will further incite unrest and reactionary extremists
US lacks regional knowledge and diplomatic ties
The rise of China as a super-power will complicate any unilateral efforts by the US

Illegal Immigration
one side feels that stricter immigration enforcement is necessary
the other side feels that the laws need to be adapted to the reality of the situation
Numbers for how many illegals are living in the US today range from 7 to 20 million per year, but it is hard to say because they are undocumented.
In favor of stricter enforcement
Uncontrolled competition for low-skill jobs hurts the unskilled population
Having laws that are not enforced undermines the power of law
The drain on social services outweighs any benefit to the economy
Illegals create a criminal society
In favor of changing laws
Current laws are not enforceable
Current laws are inhumane
Current laws are against our economic interests
A disproportionate amount of money goes to protecting against illegal South or Central American immigration under the guise of Homeland Security – when no terrorist has been South or Central American – terrorist came through Canadian border by normal, legal means
Surveys show the percent of people who believe
immigrants are a burden because they take jobs and housing grew from 38 percent to 52 percent.
immigrants "strengthen the US with their hard work and talents" dropped from 50 percent to 41 percent.
"the growing number of newcomers from other countries threaten traditional American customs and values" has grown from 40 percent to 48 percent.
newcomers "strengthen American society" has dropped from 50 percent to 45 percent.

Aid to Africa
Does the current system do more harm than good?
What has been accomplished?
What failures or complications have arisen?
What reforms are needed?
Economy (banking system and fair trade), legal system, media,
Right to private property protected and enforced by law

Russia's Assertion of Power
Poisonings and murders of politicians and reporters
Human rights abuses – Chechnya
"If you are detained in Chechnya, you face a real and immediate risk of torture. And there is little chance that your torturer will be held accountable.", said Holly Cartner, Director Europe and Central Asia division of HRW
They are building modern nuclear submarines
They are opposing the US on many fronts, most notably in supplying Iran with nuclear technology

Democratization
Is it hypocritical to impose democracy by force?
Is democracy suitable for all cultures?
What do we mean by "democracy"?
a: government by the people; especially : rule of the majority b: a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections
Life, liberty and justice for all through an enforceable legal system

Real Threats in the 21st Century
Disease – global epidemics (pandemics)
Nuclear weapons – more and more countries are acquiring nuclear weaponry
Terrorism
Climate change – rising sea levels causing economic and social stress
What is the global sensitivity to changes in the coastal economies?
Political Simplicity
Complex topics are hard to sell
"Let's kick some ass!" inspires more pride and nationalism than, "Let's continue negotiations"
Sense of international dominance is preferred to being a lackluster political player
Simple solutions frequently do not solve the fundamental problems and actually aggravate them

Problems with Democracy
How much time is required to make an informed decision?
How many people actually take time to research issues?
How does intelligence, as measured, for example, by IQ, influence decision making and voting?
Should "Get out the vote" campaigns be banned?
Encourages uninformed voters to pass their ballots
Increases the influence of sound-bite media messages

Normalcy

A thought reoccurred to me regarding bimodal versus normal distributions of personality traits... a little research show that personality traits are normally distributed.

Using the big 5 traits regarding our approach to work (C), our sociability (E), our tact (A), our reaction to stress (N), and our interests (O), and assuming you could be normal (+- σ), moderately exceptional (+- 2σ), or extraordinary (+- 3σ) for any combination of these traits, I did a quick analysis to determine the probability of being normal for various combinations.

As it turns out,

15% of us will be normal for all 5 traits, but only 0.3% of us will be outside of the norm for all 5 traits.

Most of us have one or two moderate to exceptional traits for each of the 5 factors: O, C, E, A, and N

In conclusion, we're all mostly normal, but most of us are not completely normal.

Fascinating, eh?

Wherein lies happiness?

My philosophy is that if a Zen Buddhist is not happy and a narcissistic westerner is, then let me be a narcissistic westerner.

So, the question becomes, "Wherein lies happiness?"

On a practical, realistic level, happiness is an emotional state. We cannot stay perpetually happy, but we can make happiness more frequent and attainable by increasing our self-worth and by being more active/extroverted.

The western flaw of narcissism is the practice of increasing self-worth through economic possession. Not everyone does this, but at least 50% of westerners do - they buy things for two predominant reasons: to feel the joy of possession, and to obtain status points in a group.

Other forms of improving self-worth include mental, artistic, spiritual, and physical competition.

These are all competition based - we are valuable and deserving because we are better than others.

If you suck, you can always create your own category and win - such as Mountain Bikers Over 200-Pounds, or spiritual leader of your own religion.

The second method of happiness (being more active/extroverted) has confirmation from several independent sources - active/extroverted people are happier than reserved/introverted people.

A more specific attack on Buddhism is the pointlessness of trying to make a supernova from a light bulb: it is the wrong tool for the job. The human brain cannot attain enlightenment.

Enlightenment is a vague concept, but for my purpose, I will define it as an extremely high level of intellectual and emotional understanding. More moderate forms of these two ingredients also are required for general consciousness - we cannot say something is conscious unless it has some degree of intellectual and emotional capacity.

Reality requires and is defined by consciousness. A universe without consciousness is meaningless and therefore not real. Events that do not affect my consciousness are not meaningful and therefore not real. Practically speaking, an entire physical universe needs to exist for my specific consciousness to exist within my physical body - the physics, the chemistry, the gravity, the biological evolution, etc, etc. Put another way, the degree to which something must be a certain way so that my consciousness exists is the degree to which that thing is real.

The problem is, our brains are the product of evolution. It's purpose is not enlightenment, it is reproduction. It is an appendage that falls into the same category as peacock feathers, bright plumage, and other appendages of sexual selection. There is no benefit to the enormous tail feathers of a peacock except that it attracts mates. It is sexy to peahens. The same is true for intelligence - beyond the power of a coyote brain, more power is pointless. Larger brains actually make us more vulnerable - larger head on infants cause birthing problems, the long development phase of the brain makes childhood very dangerous, and the complexity of the brain makes more room for errors. Nonetheless, men and women around the world prefer mates who have a good sense of humor and are enjoyable to be around. Being entertaining requires intelligence, and entertaining is sexy. Misfiring intelligence, however, is boring.

So, my point here is that we have evolved to be entertainers - to show off our worth through our intellectual abilities. Athletic intelligence included...

The entertainment industry is pushing the envelope of technology. Pornography was one of the hardest thrusters into the depths cyberspace. Video games drive the increases in computing power. People watch, on average 20+ hours of tv per week - that is half a work week... And that is just TV as an entertainment industry...

My grand conclusion here is that our biological craving for entertainment is the driving factor for the development of technology and, eventually, artificial life. Artificial life is the next phase of reality.

Soap Box

There is pretty strong evidence that being low on the social hierarchyis bad for your health, but what does this really mean? What is thesocial hierarchy for humans, and what kinds of health effects?
The health effects are easier to answer, I think, because I just heardabout the data – pretty much everything to do with stress: heartdisease, high cholesterol, obesity, nervous disorders, and, as itturns out, violence, impulsivity, recklessness, etc.
Social hierarchy exists pretty clearly for rats, dogs, birds, monkeys,apes, and humans, but what makes for a high status person? I've saidsome of this already, but I'll repeat myself, for lack of editingskills or conscientiousness…Intelligence and education, do – people with phDs live longer (4years), healthier lives than average.Income and wealth – adjusting mortality for income is more significantthan adjusting mortality for all cancers.Relative Income/wealth – Japanese and French people smoke, drink, andeat high fats foods, but have remarkably low rates of heart diseaseand cancer. They also have the lowest gaps between the rich and thepoor.Control over one's environment – city bus drivers have strictschedules and very little control, and they are rife with illnessesand absenteeism (sick days).
A lot of self-help books focus on leadership, making money, takingcontrol of your life, etc. These things make us feel good. Why?Because we live in a socially competitive, hierarchical society – wefeel better when we our sense of social status rises, eg when we feelwe have potential, when we perform well, or when people we like orrespect like us.Neurolinguistic programming – fake it until you are what you are faking.Positive thinking – your words determine who you are and how youperceive yourself and your situation.Self esteem - confidence and satisfaction in oneself – (this is theheaven, the nirvana, the holy-holy of my spin on secularhumanitarianism. )
Self-esteem does not have much to do with actual competence. It's allperceived and relative. This may be morally wrong, but isstructurally correct. So, if you can grow your self-image into afunctional delusion of greatness, you will be happy.
So, how do you fake it until you make it? How do you act until youare? Steal from the actors –Using the Method, an actor recalls emotions or reactions from his orher own life and uses them to identify with the character beingportrayed.Using Stanislavski's 'system', the actor analyzes deeply themotivations and emotions of the character in order to personify him orher with psychological realism and emotional authenticity.
Who is your audience? Yourself, the god/super-ego within you, peoplearound you? Who do you get the best feedback from – who matters themost in terms of feeling good about them feeling good about you?I am a celebrity – a delusional one with imaginary fans, but rockstar, a cultural icon, royalty, sick, schizophrenic, deranged, happilystuffed shirted, showing off for no body and everybody.
I'm on a soap box. It's time to get off.

Manifest

Greetings! I hope you're feeling well.

This blog is basically about existential angst.
I'm alive. I'm me. I supposedly have choice and the ability to direct my life. But I am not really all here. I am vaguely here, but more like the stereotypical concept of a monkey than of a free-choice human. I am tapping away at a laptop, blogging my thoughts because it is hip and trendy. I am a product of my culture and society. My thoughts, options, and self-direction are distilled from society around me. What free choice do I have? I don't really know, but I think about it through the lens and filters of ideas that have made their way into my head.

The point is not self-determination. The point is enjoying life. At least this should be the point, I think, but I am not really sure. Somebody said it or I read it somewhere. When it comes down to it, though, what I really care about is not being grouchy, not feeling depressed, feeling positive, being happy, feeling good about myself, enjoying the people I am around, laughing, having a good time, and all the other trees that make up the forest. To this end, I've gathered a couple of ideas on the philosophy and science of happiness.

To begin with, I am moderately interested in psychology, like a few billion other people. One idea from evolutionary psychology that deeply orients my thinking is that most of the characteristics we consider distinctly human - language, art, morality, strategic intelligence - are runaway sexual selection characteristics. That is, like peacock feathers, antlers, bizarre colorations and behaviors in monkeys, birds, and a hundred other species, there is no other purpose for these characteristics other than for mating. The runaway process takes a minor variation and blows it up into something major.
Cavewomen found artistry sexy and, boom, humans are bizarrely artistic. Like bauer birds.
I could go on, or you could read The Mating Mind by Geoffry Miller. These are all his ideas, and, I guess, a few dozen other evolutionary psychology theorists.

The second point, related to the first, is that a slew of physical and mental health problems are related to social hierarchy. (Big Ideas - Sick minds or sick society?) People, rats, monkeys, dogs, and just about every halfway intelligent animal that lives in a group is affected by social hierarchy. Those at the bottom of the hierarchy are more stressed and less healthy than those near the top.
I just heard about a study showing that mortality rates adjusted for the effect of income were more significant than adjusting for all cancers. That is, low income kills more people than cancer. In the US at least.
Everyone equally poor makes for a happier and healthier society than having a large gap between the rich and the poor.

So, as it relates to me, or to anyone wanting to be happy... Be intelligent, artistic, moral, have a rich and versatile language, and be high up on the social hierarchy. That's it! There you have it, the real, scientific secrets to happiness. Be better than everyone else and be well liked and you will probably be happy.