A Tension in Contemporary Masculinity

I will be discussing heterosexual men and women.

To what degree men have had to be likable to women to get romantic or sexual partners has fluctuated throughout time, but to my knowledge right now that degree is higher than it's ever been before. Yadda yadda context, yadda yadda outliers. You get my drift.

And that’s fantastic. That’s a healthy development. Be deeply suspicious of anyone trying to affect society so as to make it easier for unlikable men to get sex or partnership. There’s a reason why things like the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 74 matter: prior to this banks could refuse to allow women to open bank accounts. If women are reliant on men for economic stability, for housing and medicine and access to financial systems, then their ability to be selective in their partners is substantially reduced. Consent becomes constrained if legal or social factors require them to prioritize things other than their preference when it comes to choosing partners.

Not that long ago, men could rely on their ability to provide economically (and other social factors) to make up for their lack in other areas: morals and hygiene and humor and looks and charm and intelligence.

Now women can have their own bank accounts and pay their own rent. So now women, to a greater degree than ever before (at least in the West broadly), can choose their partners based on preference.

The degree to which men have cheerfully adapted to this change varies. I would say most men, not having what you might call sociological insight, didn’t think about so much as accept it as the way things are. The wise among them are glad for the change. The weak chafe against it.

But there is a tension here, and it's one that can be present even for the kindest among men.

Men also want to be likable to men: and what makes one likable to men can be in opposition to what makes one likable to women.

Being overly concerned with one’s hygiene can get men mocked by men. At the same time, I have seen it happen numerous times that a girlfriend or wife plead with their partners to shower more often, or to wash their hands after using the restroom, or to brush their teeth more regularly.

A failure to be aggressive can get men mocked by men. But women frequently prefer men who are not aggressive in their day to day manner. I will say, however, that women do frequently desire a man who is theoretically capable of violence on their behalf even as they are not demonstratively aggressive on the regular.

Spending time on one’s appearance, one’s wardrobe and grooming, can get men mocked by men. But women frequently want a man who spends some effort on his appearance.

Being open with one’s emotions, being vulnerable, can get a man mocked by men. But women frequently prefer a man who is open with his emotions, who can be vulnerable (again, variation, heavens knows there are plenty of women who mock openly emotional men).

Let’s be honest: the guy at the gym with muscles the size of boulders is, if they’re doing it to be impressive to anyone, doing it to be impressive to other men.

And so we have tension. How shall we resolve it?

The foolish will attempt to change society back. Kindness by itself would, I hope, be enough for men to seek to improve the lives of women. Knowing humans, however, I will also mention that the current state of affairs is, despite what some might think, also much better for me. The benefits of feminism for men is an enormous topic, and beyond the scope of this piece.

So what else will we do?

I am hardly the first to point this out, but I would suggest that an embrace of healthier models for masculinity is a potential strategy. In the long term I would like to see a world where we no longer shackle ourselves to these categories, but in the meantime I think this is the trick.

Men who can be boisterous without being boorish.

Men who can get their hands dirty and also write poetry.

Men who can be protectors without being masters.

Look I dunno, just be like Brennan Lee Mulligan or the Green brothers or fucking Hasan Piker, I don’t fucking know. Don’t make me do all the work here.

On Pain

You could take everything I'll say here and mirror it to be “on happiness” but I'm in a mood so you'll have to do that work yourself.

Pain is fascinating.

Because we have preferences about it. Which is FUCKING INSANE.

Look you might not have done a bunch of reading on consciousness, but if I can highlight a point about it it's that it’s unexpected. So far there's basically zero reason we have to predict that it would have existed in our reality (consciousness that is, and pain is downstream of that).

We can easily imagine a reality without it. A world of rocks and volcanoes and waterfalls and no mind. No “what it is to be like x”.

I mean there's no reason evolution would have prioritized it. Or even how it could explain it. My brain and rocks are both made of quarks. Why my brain should, in the words of Tom Nagel, have some property of “there being something like what it is to be my brain”, is shocking at least and bewildering at most.

And even more specifically pain. You could imagine consciousness without pain. And neverthess pain is.

And I immediately hit a wall. What else is there to say of pain? It sucks? Why? We seek to avoid it? Why?

Maybe just because we do. Dreadfully simple, but perhaps all explanations end up either simple or silly or both.

Pain and happiness (oh, I guess maybe I'll bring up both myself, seems to be working out that way ).

Presumably magnets don't suffer when you press North Pole to North Pole, even as the physics resist it. (Fuck I hope not).

But we suffer. And we feel happiness. Does it stop at preference or are there more layers down? Do we dislike pain because of reasons beyond that dislike, or does it stop at the brute fact We Dislike Pain ?

And that quality is so unlike everything else. Things are red or fast or intelligent or spicy or unlikely or solid or transparent or numerous or antiquated or…..

Painful or pleasurable. And how different that is!

Welcome to the Game

“Welcome to the game.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Call me -unpronounceable- , I’m here to introduce you to The Game.”
”Who am I?”

“You’re going to be named Isaac.”
”I don’t get to choose?”
”No.”

“What kind of game is it?”

“Are you asking what genre reality is?”
”I guess?”

“I guess you might say it’s open world. But not because invisible walls prevent you from entering places so much as people will feel negatively about you being in certain places and they might physically remove you. There are combat mechanics, vehicle mechanics, romance mechanics, it’s basically all roleplaying, there are skills…. honestly even calling it a game is a bit of interpretation, albeit the subject of this current thought experiment.”

“What was that last bit?”
”Nevermind that.”
”Oooookkayyy…how do I unlock more areas?”
”Complicated. Money helps. You can buy access to a lot of places. If you’re fast you can evade people who might try and remove you. Or if you’re good at fighting. Or you can sneak in.”
”There are stealth components?”
”Very complicated ones.”
”Is there a manual?”
”Of sorts. All manuals are found in game. They come in many forms. Books. Lectures. Conversations. A lot of what you’ll learn will have to be through trial and error, experience.”
”How long is it?
”You won’t have time to read it all during your playthrough.”
”Because it’s that much to read or because the playthrough will be short?”
”Depends on your perspective.”
”How long would it take to get through it all?”
”Thousands of years.”
”And how low will the playthrough be?”
”Depends on a lot. Average for your server and your starting build is 70 - 80.”
”How am I expected to play a game where I could never even understand 1 percent of its mechanics?”
”Sorry.”
”Are you?”
”Sure.”
”Are there survival mechanics?”
”Extremely complicated ones. Not just hunger and thirst, but a specific diet. You’ll need to access medical attention regularly no matter how well you play. Different kinds of medical professional. And you’ll have to pay for it all. And you’ll be in pain and die if you neglect your medical care and bodily needs.”
”Pain?”
”You’ll hate it, trust me. Thirst and hunger too. No meters, no HUD. Sensation instead. You’ll like some of it, some of it you’ll be neutral towards, some of it you’ll do anything to avoid.”
”So I don’t have flawless control over the avatar?”
”No, you have a thing called willpower that’s an expendable resource. Honestly I’m simplifying, it’s actually really complicated. But there are factors that can cause your controls to begin to fail. Your inputs will be responded to late, or won’t be responded to at all.”
”You mentioned paying for medical care. There’s an economic system?”
”A really-”
”-complicated one, right. Will I be playing with other people, or will it all be npcs?”
”You don’t get to know.”
”You’re fucking with me.”
”Nope. I mean, like, they’re gonna behave mostly like you. So like probably? But I’m not actually allowed to tell you.”
”Are there admins keeping an eye on things?”
”You don’t get to know.”
”This this might not be being monitored?”
"I’m not telling.”
”Cooooool. Can I make complaints? Raise concerns? Give suggestions?”
”Sure. You can put any concerns you want into this bin over here.”
”Does someone go through them and read them?”
”You don’t get to know.”

“How many times do I get to play?”
”You don’t get to know.”
”So this might be my only time through? Is there some kinda post-game?”
”You don’t get to know.”

“Am I allowed to try and answer these questions?”
”Someone might try and stop you, or the answers might be impossible to find. But other than that, you can try all you like.”

“Anything else I should know?”
”I’m not allowed to suggest questions.”
”I guess it’s time to get started.”
”For what it’s worth, have a Good Game.”

Act I: Birth….

On Moral Luck

I have the sense the society I live in doesn’t take moral luck as seriously as perhaps would be sensible.

I’ve seen the term “moral luck” used in two distinct but related senses.

The first is the sense where someone does something, a particular action, and it comes down to luck how harmful that behavior turns out, with all the following consequences. Two people drive drunk, identical circumstances, one makes it home with no problems, the other hits someone and kills them. It would be strange to say that one is guiltier than the other, whatever that might mean. Clearly there’s more social animosity thrown on one than the other (have you ever driven on bad sleep? Or after being prescribed a new med that made you drowsy?).

The second sense is where how decent someone ends up being (whatever that means), or how good someone ends up being (whatever that means), isn’t up to them, at least to some degree. The idea is that who ends up a good or bad person, or virtuous or vicious, or whatever, is outside of the control of that person, or at least that that control is circumscribed or limited in some fashion.

Part of the issue of this discussion is that the language describing choice and free will is hopelessly complicated, potentially wrongheaded. Nearly everyone agrees that some choices are harder than others, I imagine most will grant that the same choice - to the degree that makes sense - might be more or less difficult for different people. Is this difficulty asymptotic? Can a choice get more and more difficult to make while never becoming impossible? Or does that difficulty cross a threshold where it might be reasonable to say that it wasn’t really a choice at all?

Consider alternate timelines, either as somehow real or as hypothetical could-have-beens. For any person, you could imagine a powerful being watching over them from the moment of their birth. This being could influence their lives in any number of ways. Pick them up and place them with any number of potential parents. Pick out the color of their nursery. Their name. The menu of the cafeteria of their college of choice. A traffic light turns green or red a quarter second earlier or later.

Do you think this being couldn’t engineer any number of situations for this person? Given sufficient intelligence and power, I imagine this powerful overlord could take a baby and make them a sinner or saint, murderer or hero, poor or rich, smart or stupid, bad or good, etc.

It’s worth remembering at this point that childhood lead exposure is strongly correlated with criminality.

Indeed, think about what it would mean to say otherwise. You think for any particular person, this was the only way they were going to end up? That no matter what possible presets were altered, they would end up in the same place every possible way? That the monsters are monsters in every possible version of the world? That the heroes are heroic in every possible universe?

And so, to those who end up good or bad, even if their choices played a part in who and what they are, can we say that they are good or bad in every timeline? If yes, then we’re engaging in some strangely confident essentialism I would say.

Consider: imagine as perfect a society as could be (whatever that means). Imagine a society absolutely maximized for producing good individuals. Are there more good people in that society than in our own? If yes, then its perhaps worth thinking about whomst among us would-be-good-if-not-for-X. If no, then it seems we think the fundamental Being of humans is the same across all possibilities, which would plausibly take the wind out of any effort for improving the rate at which society produces good people. If we think the effort to improve society’s ability to produce morally good humans is worthwhile we must accept that the lack of success of such efforts would result in fewer good humans.

For any of us, if we are good, would we be good absent the efforts of others?

I recommend graciousness. Not passive acceptance of harmful behavior, but rather an enlightened perspective that separates a person from their behavior.

Broken Men in a Small Town

They filed into the Wendy’s, one or two graciously holding the door for the others.

Sun browned, smashed fingers, torn joints, well fed but malnourished.

Happy enough. But, maybe it’s just my imagination, holding onto something so very hard. Hope? Or this moment? Or just happiness itself? The moment of shade and sitting down?

Some of them will make it out ok I imagine. Others will be chewed up by the System, their broken bodies left by the wayside, their value extracted, their worth - from the bosses perspective - expended. Maybe they’ll get disability.

Lied to I have to guess. “Sufficient effort guarantees you’ll be ‘ok’”. Or maybe they know the game and they’re playing it as best they can, I dunno.

So many people who put the work in, still left behind, still hungry and sick and poor.

Mind you, I’m not one for saying you need to earn your happiness or your safety or your medicine or your food.

Not just the men of course, though these five or six are what inspired this piece. Humans. Giving it their all, their bodies, their lives. And maybe to bosses who also did something similar in turn, to some degree, for some time. And maybe those bosses are forking cash over to people who did the same?

Would it be more or less comforting to know those at the top of the pyramid are suffering like the rest of us? Would I get some schadenfreude or be driven mad to know the presidents and the CEOs are as miserable as everyone else?

Bit of both perhaps.

Being Human

To speak of life. Life as a human. Being human. 

So tremendously difficult. Language. Words to talk about the World. Like trying to throw a lasso around a hurricane. 

Too big. Too deep. Too varied. 

To speak of being human. 

Genocides and ice cream.

Transcendent love and hemorrhoids. 

Final goodbyes and tax documents.

Up and down and all around. 

Is it beautiful? Is it madness? Is it Truth? Is it necessary? Is it cruel? Is it a joke? Can we overcome it? Would we even like the outcome if we did? 

None of us chose to be here. 

Good and evil. Useless I think. An opportunity to puff ourselves up. 

Impulse. Drive. Direction. Chaos and order. 

And I must - must I? - maintain the humility to say that perhaps I know nothing about anything. How could I? 33 years amongst the millennia of us? 

Sensation. Qualia. To feel. To experience. What, if anything, would exist without it? Nothing we’d know of certainly. Nothing we’d care about. 

The two halves of our universe: the feeling and the unfeeling. The experiential and everything else. 

I’m running out of steam to write. The premature ejaculation of the creative. I thought I had so much to say. 

What is a Request?

I find it difficult to express what, precisely, most people are getting at when they use the word “request”. I am tempted to say that a request is simply the making known of a desire, perhaps specifically making it known to one who could fulfill that desire. However, the sentence “I wanted to let you know I want X, but this isn’t me asking for it” seems to make a kind of sense to me.

There is a general, subtle, expectation of certain behaviors towards others within our social circles. How much is expected, and of who, is extraordinarily complicated, and far beyond the scope of this essay. Nevertheless, suffice it to say that your friends will get upset with you if you refuse to grant a certain baseline level of requests, within limits. Correspondingly, your friends will get upset with you if you ask of them too much, or too frequently. The closest analogy I can think of is a term like “social debt”. This is, admittedly, a poor analogy, and one that is likely tainted by my cultural inculcation in the cult of capitalism. Nevertheless, with the acknowledgement that it is a deeply imperfect turn of phrase, we’ll run with it.

So, it seems to me that, within the context of the English language, and I cannot speak for anything more than that, most usages of the term “request” seem to be indicating a kind of linguistic ritual whereby the speaker 1. makes known a desire to someone who, theoretically, can fulfill that desire, and 2. cashes in some amount of social debt, or takes upon themselves some degree of social debt.

Being Less Wrong Requires a Certain Kind of Courage

I will be a little loose with my language here.

I sometimes wonder if any philosopher has had a wise thought yet.

Regardless of ones religious inclinations, atheist or Christian or Buddhist or what have you, it seems that we have to conclude that at least one religion is false. Imagine an old man, a cleric of that religion, who has dedicated his life to his faith. He had spent countless years in service, made innumerable sacrifices, and all for nought. If he is to be less wrong he must be willing to admit the terrible truth that he has wasted his life. He has to be brave enough to face the fact that his life has been dedicated to foolishness. I suppose we could make similar analogies when we consider scientists who spent their lives trying to prove false ideas.

What if that's us? What if that's our species? What if we haven't even begun to learn? What we're philosophical toddlers?

And I'm not saying we are. I don't have any good reasons to think one way or another. But if we are too frightened to consider the possibility, we'll never know. Perhaps wisdom requires us to entertain the possibility.

And if you fear you have wasted your life, don't sweat it. Maybe we all have, or none of us have, or there's no such thing. I certainly don't think less of you.

The Vertigo of Realizing Your Life is Your Life

There's a sensation that sometimes suddenly seizes me, although I think I can manufacture it to some degree, when I am struck by the reality of “Oh yeah, this is my life. I live here. In this body. My parents are so and so. My spouse is this person. I look like this and I breathe and I was born and I will die.” And the sensation can be disorienting, can cause a kind of inward sense of unbalance.

It's as if, in the process of living my life, I get so immersed in the minute by minute of living that I lose the summed perspective of being-who/what-I-am. And when it strikes me it sometimes feels foreign. As if I had forgotten who I was and somehow I was expecting something else. I wonder if my brain knows it's a brain?

Is Determinism Weirder than the Alternative?

If determinism is the case, than everything that has happened since the universe began was inexorably set in motion the moment the universe began to exist. Or perhaps, if we want to zoom out, everything that has ever happened are the only things that could have happened. Reality is what it is, and was always going to be, and always will be. A entity with the right qualities could observe the big bang and, based on that snapshot of the first moment of the universe, infer correctly every winning lottery number ever.

What often gets glossed over is this implies that the Taco Bell Doritos Locos Taco is an inevitable aspect of reality. Physics plus the presets of the big bang initiated a domino chain that, billions of years later, was always going to lead to the Taco Bell Doritos Locos Taco. If the presets of the big bang also could not have been other than what they were, then our universe is -by its nature - the kind of universe has Taco Bell Doritos Locos Tacos in it.

Of course, if things could have been other than what they are, then Taco Bell Doritos Locos didn't have to exist, but we happened to end up in the reality were they do. Of all possible iterations of the world I could live in, the one I in fact find myself in has Taco Bell Doritos Locos Tacos.

Both of these seem very strange in different ways.

The Internet and the Jury of the Mind

I hope you'll forgive some loose language and a certain amount of literary flourish here.

I was reflecting today on the psychological differences between my contemporary self and my younger selves. One factor that drew my attention was that, for some time now, I often don't feel entirely in one place. When I was younger my mind was settled inside the room I was in, or the general vicinity. I recall how much easier it was to forget that someone was mad at me, or upset with me, or that I had done something embarrassing, because once I got away from them physically it became much easier to distance myself mentally. Out of sight, out of mind was much more automatic back then.

But for quite some time now, beginning I don't know when, and plausibly shifting in nature and intensity over time, I have had a jury in my head. Sometimes it feels like the whole human species is in there, all who have ever been and ever will be, moment by moment judging my thoughts and behaviors and inclinations.

I suspect that a contributing factor to this, although likely not the only one, is the rise of the internet broadly and social media specifically. I often liken social media sites to cities, with our profiles being the apartments. Or one could liken the whole of the internet to a massive city, some of it glittering and bright and some of it covered in a foot of the most rancid, putrescent slime you can imagine. It baffles me how casual people are about letting children wander aimlessly about this city without an adult accompanying them, but that's a different post. The point is, and I am hardly the first to make this observation, that we sort of all live in these cities. We live here and there. In the real world other people are separated by distance. We can't always see each other or talk to each other. But the internet allows us to, digitally, always be close to each other. I can talk to anyone at any time on social media. My phone is a window into a massive apartment block where none of us ever really leave our apartments and the walls are thin enough that we hear a lot of what's going on with each other.

This lack of distance creates, in me at least, a kind of sense of the immediacy of the presence of other people. The connectedness is wonderful, in some senses, but it always sort of means that I'm spread out. I'm here and there. I'm in Canada watching the wildfires, I'm in Congress watching bills be voted on, I'm at the houses of innumerable people on Twitter (sorry X) all arguing with them, I'm at the Sistine Chapel and Stonehenge and Machu Picchu, I'm at school with John and Hank Green, I'm at a sketch comedy show with the cast of Dropout. I'm in so many places I'm barely in my living room at all. It is an amazing power to be in all these places and witness all these things. However, the consistency of it, day in and day out, makes me feel like Bilbo, “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”

I'm doing it right now too. I'm imagining talking to all of you. I'm imagine sitting in a room with you saying all these things. But you’re not here.

Obviously “disconnect from internet sometimes” is hardly groundbreaking as an idea, but I'm having more clarity on exactly why that might be a good idea.

Epicurus Trilemma: Electric Boogaloo

If an omnipotent being attempts to make a creature or entity happy and safe, is it possible that that attempt could fail? 

In the event an omnipotent being did everything it could to make a creature or entity happy and safe, is it possible that that creature or entity ends up not safe and/or not happy? 

If an an entity or creature is not happy or is not safe, can we assume that an omnipotent being is not trying to make that creature happy or safe? 

Potential objection: creatures can choose to not be happy, and an omnipotent being might allow for creatures to choose to be unhappy, even if that entity is doing everything possible other than overriding their free will in order to make that creature or entity happy.

Counter: this leaves the safety aspect untouched. Why should a child ever be in danger of a tornado if an omnipotent being who is trying to keep them safe exists?

Counter: why should any particular action necessarily lead to unhappiness? There seems to be no necessary causal reaction between, say, engaging in same sex sexual activity, and unhappiness. One could imagine a world where this was not the case, and so for it to be the case in any universe would seem deliberate. Why would a being trying to optimize happiness make a universe where so many things lead to unhappiness?

Unless: you don't think same sex sexual activity causes unhappiness in a natural way, built into our reality’s physics, but rather that God deliberate and supernaturally inflicts suffering on those who participate in such behavior? But then, it would seem hard to maintain the idea then that God is always acting to maintain our happiness or safety.

Conclusion: I can think of no reason why there should be danger and unhappiness for humans if an omnipotent being is trying to keep us safe and happy. Unless somehow you think a greater good (good for who?) is preserved by the possibility of danger and unhappiness. But I have heard no argument to suggest that children dying from tornadoes is necessary for a greater good, or why we would live in a universe where so much leads to unhappiness. Even if we wanted to maintain a universe where deliberately standing in fire causes suffering, this doesn't go far to explain most of the Christian religion’s insistence on suffering as the consequences for many behaviors.

Note: there are some who seem to suggest that ungodliness or spiritually rejecting God necessarily results in unhappiness or pain. However it seems trivially true to say that anyone, no matter how much they reject God, who does heroin is happy for at least as long as the high lasts, so we have established that it is not logically impossible for someone to reject God and be happy for at least a time. So, if an atheist suffers strictly due to their atheism that would seem to be a quality of reality that God decided on.

End of the day: the world has a lot of suffering in it. If God is trying to prevent or alleviate suffering, then the Christian has to somehow argue that this is the best an omnipotent being could do (unlikely) OR that God's efforts to alleviate any more suffering than he already is would somehow cost us something we wouldn't be willing to give up OR that God has motivations other than our happiness and well-being that he is prioritizing.

Words are Tools for Putting Thoughts into Peoples' Heads.

Title gets the point across.

Theodicy, the Bare Bones

Theodicy. We want to know why suffering exists, why it persists.

Classically this issue has been phrased as something like "If God is all good and all powerful, why does suffering exist?". The so-called Epicurus Trilemma is:

1. If God is unable to prevent evil, then he is not all-powerful.

2. If God is not willing to prevent evil, then he is not all-good.

3. If God is both willing and able to prevent evil, then why does evil exist?

I will rework this slightly as "If God is all loving and all powerful, why is there suffering?".

To properly engage with this we will need to ask, what is love? Or, more helpfully, within the context of Abrahamic theology and holy text, how is the term "love" used? Except of course, that's an English word, so when these texts use words like ἀγάπη (1 John 4:8), what function is that term serving? Is this term being used in any sense close to how we might use the term "love"?

I think it might be useful to ask a very specific question:

Does God ever do anything that is contrary to what is best for anyone (maximizes their happiness)? Or, does God ever do anything where it is the case that it would have been better for someone, in the long run, if God had not done that thing?

Running alongside side this we might reasonably also ask: is there ever some action that God could take that that would be of benefit to someone (maximizes their happiness)- without harming another - that God does not do? Or is there ever some harm God could prevent to someone that God does not prevent?

When I say that my parents love me, I am communicating, among other factors, that they strive to act in ways that benefit me and strive to avoid acting in ways that harm me (strive to enhance my happiness and decrease my suffering). If someone has no consideration with respect to avoiding behaviors harmful to me, and if they care not about benefiting me, I am not likely to say that this person loves me. And I think this is a very common limiter that most people would place on their usage of the term "love".

So, does God love me, or you, or anyone? You could object that this is not what is meant by love in Christian scripture, or what is meant by ἀγάπη. But it is worth mentioning that, if this is the case, I would call if fair then to say that God does not love humans in any sense even remotely similar to our common usage of the term. I would go so far as to say that in English it would make sense to abandon the phrasing "God loves us" and form some new term to get the job done.

If you wish to maintain that God loves us, and that this is reasonably close to our common usage of the word, then you run into what I think is the central issue of theodicy: it appears to be straightforwardly the case that an omnipotent God could prevent most, if not all, of the harm we humans suffer. Correspondingly, there appears to be much benefit such a God could provide that we do not enjoy. To simplify things, we can ignore examples of humans harming each other (even though I think these are still huge problems that simple appeals to free will don't solve), and just focus on a single example, such as bone cancer, a favorite example of Stephen Fry.

Let's do a little proof.

Premise 1. Bone cancer exists.

Premise 2. God could cure all existing cases of bone cancer and prevent any new cases.

Premise 3. It would reduce harm in humans for God to cure bone cancer and prevent it.

Premise 4. God acts at all times to minimize harm in humans.

Therefore

Conclusion: God has cured all bone cancer and prevents all future cases.

BUT, bone cancer exists and new cases continue to form.

So, if the premises follow through to the conclusion, we have a problem. Premise 1 feels pretty unassailable. Premise 2 seems to be in line with typical Christian theology, although there might be some folks who would go after that one. Premise 4 can't be done away with without trying to insist that God's love for humans is very unlike our typical usage of the term (as discussed above). It seems that the only remaining option would be to go after 3, unless you want to bite the bullet of going after 4.

If one wants to go after 3 you have to somehow argue that bone cancer is good for humans, or at least that God curing and preventing it would be bad for us. You would have to argue that, somehow in the long run, our happiness would be reduced if God were to cure and prevent bone cancer. Someone might also want to discuss the possibility of God selecting among humans: possibly God acts to enhance the happiness of some at the cost of the happiness of others.

Notably, it seems as though some Christians already dismiss 4. It would seem very hard for 5 point Calvinists to maintain that God does everything that could be done to minimize harm to all humans or that He does everything that could be done to maximize the happiness of all humans. To some degree I believe this is why Thomas Talbott ended up embracing universal reconciliation: if the Calvinists believe that a human's final destiny is entirely up to God's decision, without human activity or decisions having any effect, AND God wants to maximize human happiness, THEN God would send everybody to heaven.

At any rate, I suppose one might attempt a response with something to the effect that there are motivations God has that overpower His love, or take priority above it: righteousness or some other factor. If “all loving” were to mean that every act of love that can be taken is taken, and “all righteous” were to mean that every act of righteousness that can be taken is taken and that there are some situations where the loving thing and the righteous thing are mutually exclusive then it could be the case that one could not be all loving and all righteous. Which would be an interesting take.

I think that's everything I have to say.

Transgender Issues, an Analytic Philosophical Perspective

I would like to make an attempt at a philosophical discussion of transgender issues from an analytic perspective. I can’t pretend that I’m overwhelmingly familiar with Butler, but she seems to be coming at this from a continental perspective, so perhaps it will be helpful to someone to get an analytic take. 

I have to wonder how much of this actually is a logical issue, rather than a social or religious one. I have some suspicions that many folk who would consider themselves broadly “anti-trans”, or what have you, actually understand conceptually where trans people are coming from, but have objections to the moral or social ramifications of what trans acceptance would suggest. Nevertheless, I am confident some anti-trans sentiment comes from an honest misunderstanding of trans issues. I believe that some folk, few though they may be, genuinely believe that transgender people pose some kind of threat to reason itself or something. Perhaps I can assuage your fears?

To begin with, I should mention that trans folk, almost universally, use the words “man” and “woman” in a very different way than conservative Christians might. Think of file names for word documents: you can attach any label you like to a word document and it doesn’t affect the document. You could imagine different documents with the same name, or two identical documents with different names. It’s not hard to imagine the same sound or glyph having very different meanings in different languages. In fact, it’s easy to manufacture: behold my new language where the glyphs “dog” mean what English speakers recognize as “spoon”, so that I would use a dog to eat cereal.

You might object that this is semantics, and I would agree: trans people in fact are differing in their semantics, that’s the point.

I suppose there may be a trans woman who might use the term “woman” to indicate something like “person who can become pregnant”, and I suppose it would be fair to tell this person that their own usage of “woman” would exclude themselves, but this seems like a kind of strawman, since I’ve never heard of this happening.

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And now I will digress into a larger discussion of how language works. Feel free to skip this bit, but please don’t. 

I think Wittgenstein was right when he wrote in Philosophical Investigations, " For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word "meaning" it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language." In this sense we might prefer function or usage over meaning.

Which is to say: for any pattern of ink or gesture of hands or acoustic vibrations, we can use that however we want within our language. The nuances and complexities of all this are beyond the scope of this paper, but mentioning this in brief is essential. Ask yourself, what is the meaning of the word “damn” in the context of someone shouting that word after hitting their thumb with a hammer? Does it have anything to do with perdition in a direct sense? Or consider the idea of someone saying “shit” after discovering their car has been broken into. Consider the differences between saying “I apologize” and “I am sorry” (performativists have interesting things to say here.) Anyway, onwards. 

Matt Walsh has famously asked: “What is a woman?” I won’t pretend to have seen his documentary, but I wonder if he really appreciates the complexity of the question he’s asked. The question “what is a woman?” is part of a larger set of questions, the set of questions that ask, “What is X?” So we might ask “what is a cat?”, “what is God?”, “what is the best restaurant in town?”, “what is life?”. These questions touch on issues of ontology and epistemology and linguistics and probably many more disciplines and subjects that I’m forgetting to mention. To properly understand these questions, and how to answer them, we have to establish some background first.

Addendum 1, 4/27/23:

As a brief opener I might point out that questions of the type “What is X?” are plausibly a kind of elliptical sentence as Wittgenstein would use the phrase. Consider that, presumably, questions are asked of someone. Except, sometimes not so much it might appear. Consider speaking with a scientist who might utter phrases like “What is dark matter?” or “Science seeks to answer the question: how did life begin on earth?” Who are these questions asked of? On the other hand, if one asks of a coworker “Where is the stapler?”, this definitely seems to be directed at someone in particular. I think it’s possible that even though all these utterances have the grammatical structure of a question, they are quite different in function. The former questions are a kind of way of saying “We’re all trying to figure out what dark matter is.” or perhaps “We would like to know how life began on earth.” (so the question would really be a kind of statement perhaps), whereas the latter example is interrogatory. It’s not entirely clear to me in which sense Walsh is asking “What is a woman?”, but if it is a question meant to be asked of someone than what he’s really getting at is “How do you use the term “woman”?” It’s somewhat like as if I would ask of a Spanish speaker “¿Qué es un gato?” (God I hope Google translated that right) and they pointed at what I tend to call a cat. “Gato” is performing the same function in their language as “Cat” does in mine.

End addendum.

Philosophy and linguistics are inextricably linked. One might fairly suggest that philosophy is about ideas. But if an idea is to be communicated – possibly if it’s to be meaningful at all – it has to be expressed in language. This is part of why defining our terms is so important when we do philosophy: subtle differences in meaning in our premises can result in quite different conclusions. Awareness of language, of what’s really going on under the hood of language, is necessary to do philosophy. 

It's important to recognize what level of strictness, as it were, we’re operating on when we do philosophy. At some level of strictness we talk of nominalist and realist approaches. Briefly, and I’m leaving out a lot, these are approaches to universals, or, perhaps one could say, approaches to categorization, and whether those categories exist in the world or only in the mind or in language. I am a nominalist. The basic idea of being a nominalist is that I deny the existence of true universals. I do in fact think almost all categories exist in the mind and in the language, but not in the world-without-us. In the strict sense I don’t think men or women exist, but I also don’t think cats or tables or musicians exist either. Indeed, recall that a cat evolved from a non-cat: where exactly did the switchover happen? It’s arbitrary. Math related categories might be an exception to this: cubes might meaningfully exist for example. Although I have a physicist friend who points out that atoms don't technically have a strict boundary edge, so whether or not a cube could actually exist in the world isn't clear to me. I saw a video once where Hank Green said electrons are a true category, and he would know better than me. For the most part, however, definitions fall apart when you look close enough. Some fall apart almost immediately and some are a bit more durable until you really zoom in. 

Of course, this level of strictness isn’t necessary, or helpful, for most day-to-day conversation. The level of tolerable ambiguity in language varies greatly depending on context. Suppose there is a box with a sphere, a pyramid, and an almost-perfect-cube. But the cube-like-object has a small nick in it, which technically means it’s not a cube (hence “cube-like”). Nevertheless, if I say to someone “hand me the cube from that box” they will likely do-the-thing-I-wanted-them-to-do.  We can examine a statement in the context of its effects.. I say, “Hand me the cube”, and you in fact do the thing I wanted you to do. The fact that it really isn’t a cube hardly matters. A robot might come back and protest “there is no cube.” Sometimes fuzziness in language is helpful. Contextually, just the opposite might be the case: when a surgeon gives orders to their assistants I imagine a large degree of precision in language is really quite important.

It will be helpful at this point for us to examine the mechanics of a particular instance of “This entity is X”. Let’s take a look at what happens when someone says, “I am a weightlifter.” Now, as with most self-descriptors it allows for a generous degree of vagueness. How many times must one lift weights to be a weightlifter? How much do you need to bench? Etc etc. But we use terms like "weightlifter" as a shorthand in conversation in order to convey a condensed amount of generalized information. Consider the mechanics of what happens when someone says to you "I am a weightlifter". Suppose you're on a date with someone and they say to you "I am a weightlifter". What happens next? Well, my brain would engage in a bunch of background processing, heavily weighted by context and life experience, and then generate a number of impressions and probabilistic beliefs. I might have the impression that "It's quite likely this person has lifted weights in the last week", "It's nearly certain this person has lifted weights in the last month", "This person likely owns protein powder", "This person likely has a gym membership." Now of course my date could spell all that out using hyper specific language "I have lifted weights six times in the last week", "I own protein powder", etc, but that would be tedious. So we rely on semi-vague descriptors to allow for efficient conversation. We use terms, with varying levels of vagueness, to front load a lot of information for conversation purposes. As the conversation continues, or as more conversations occur, increasingly specific information may be shared.

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Returning more specifically to philosophically examining being transgender…

As a brief aside, I will be using the terms “self-describe” and “self-descriptor” rather than the terms “identify” or “identity” for clarity’s sake. Many attempts I’ve seen to establish what one means by “identity” or “identify” are so nebulous that I feel using these terms detracts from my ability to communicate these ideas (as stated above, a certain degree of nebulousness isn’t always a problem, but in this case I think it might). When I think of the term “identify” it brings into my mind the notion of a botanist identifying plant samples. They would assess these samples for the presence or absence of certain traits and then, based on that, categorize these samples. Some usages for “identify”, in the sense of “I identify as X” follow that usage, but some do not. Therefore, I feel that using the terms “self-describe” and “self-descriptors” will be more helpful.

Now that we have that out of the way, we can turn our attention more specifically to the question: “What is a woman?” We will answer this question from three different lenses of analysis: 1. When is it rational for a person to declare that someone or something is X?, 2. What usage of a word grants the most utility from a social perspective?, and 3. Within a sample population, what does the typical usage for a word look like?


Starting with the first question: when is someone being rational in asserting that someone or something is X (where X is any category: woman, doctor, nocturnal, liquid)? And I answer: so long as the speaker’s usage of that word actually applies to the entity, they are being rational (whether or not their usage is useful or helpful). If someone says, “Dogs are cats”, and what they mean by cat is what I would mean by “mammal”, they are being rational in that usage. If someone asserts that they are a woman, they are being rational so long as their usage for the word “woman” actually applies to them. There may be, somewhere in the wide world, a trans woman whose usage of the word woman means “someone who can get pregnant”, and, barring interesting edge cases, you would be fair to pointing out to this person that their own usage of the word “woman” would exclude themselves. But I have never heard of this happening. There may be a variety of usages for the word “woman” among trans women, but this is fine: there is considerable variety in usages for many words: artist, athlete, hero, beautiful, good, etc.

Moving onto the second question: what usage of a word grants the most utility from a social perspective? Just because an individual is being rational in their usage of a word, that doesn’t mean that there is benefit to the widespread usage of the word in that way. The utility gained from using a word a particular way will vary greatly depending on context, both on the individual level and the society level. Someone might be rational in asserting “a dog is a carburetor”, if by carburetor they mean what I mean by “mammal”, but we get quite a lot of social benefit in collectively using the term carburetor in a specific sense. This is particularly true for the population of people called mechanics. (As a brief defensive aside, if someone objects with something like “If we had highly non-standardized usages for all words then language would fall apart”, I agree, but if someone just pierces their ears and lip they’ll be ok, while if they pierce every available inch of skin they’ll be in trouble.) In some cases we want to employ limiting factors: what should exclude an entity from being described with a word. How strict our limiters are depends on the utility we get out of those limiters. I think society gains an enormous amount of utility from using very strict limiters in the case of who we call a “surgeon.” One limiter, not the only one I’m sure, is that if you haven’t finished medical school I think it entirely fair to not refer to you as a surgeon, despite any protests you might have to the contrary. In other cases, more gentle limiters make sense. I would only call someone a skydiver if they had in fact jumped out of a plane at some point, but I’m not terribly interested in insisting on a certain number of jumps. In other cases, only the loosest of limiters make sense to employ. Much gatekeeping occurs around the concept of fandom, and this seems unhealthy and unproductive to me. If one were to say that they were a fan of Stranger Things, I would likely only grant that descriptor if they had seen at least one episode of Stranger Things (my apologies Vaush).. Anything past that is unproductive gatekeeping.

With this lens I believe the real issue comes into focus. I mentioned earlier that I think many folks actually understand trans people  just fine, they just object to the consequences of trans acceptance. This might stem from a belief that strict gender roles are necessary for human flourishing, or beliefs about the ontological or metaphysical nature of sex/gender. A full assessment of the question “what limiters, if any, are helpful for the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman?” would require an entire other paper. We could also ask “when should we grant the self-descriptor ‘man’ or ‘woman’”? My own take is simply that gender roles are destructive and should be done away with, and that we should grant these self-descriptors to anyone who wishes to use them. I trust trans men and trans women to be rational in calling themselves men and women because I trust their own usages of those terms apply to themselves. I would also say that these self-descriptors should be respected when it comes to social categorization and organization: that society is better if trans folk can use which bathrooms they wish, etc. But a full utilitarian breakdown of all these issues would be extensive, so that will have to be another paper..

Note that I am not necessarily saying it is the case that “A woman is someone who self-describes as a woman” in the causative sense. For some trans women, I have no idea the numbers, their personal usage of the word “woman” won’t be “A woman is someone who self-describes as a woman”. It might be that, and I have no objection to it, but it isn’t necessary in order to respect their self-descriptors. We are discussing “when will we, as a society, apply the term” and my answer is “Whenever anybody would like to have the term applied to them.”. If we extend our discussion of terms “male” and “female” things get even more complicated, more complicated than I can discuss here. 

Finally, we might ask: within the population of trans women and trans men what are some commonalities with respect to their usage of the words “woman” and “man”? Well, as mentioned before, there is a huge variety of usages, but frequent with overlap. This isn’t a problem in the slightest, of course. Think of the enormous variety of experience in what is meant by self-describing as an "athlete". Or consider the debates that could erupt if one asks what is a “sport” or “art” or “Christian”?  We perhaps could form some generalized indicator of what is meant, on average, by athlete, but failing to adhere to that generalized concept doesn't necessarily mean one isn't an athlete (although, as I said before, I suspect it’s most accurate to say there are no athletes in the strictest sense).

So, can we say anything at all? I suspect we can. I don’t want to speak for trans people, and I am willing to be corrected, but I have a sense that there are few phrasings that would be generally acceptable to a decent chunk of the trans population.

For some their usage of “man” and “woman” seems to be something like: “With respect to the cultural and social concept of “man” and “woman”, consisting of a loosely defined and shifting assemblage of factors, including but not limited too, aesthetics, behavior, pronouns, how one holds oneself, how one addresses others, social roles, etc, it is the case that when I call myself a “man” or “woman” what I am indicating by that is that I prefer, or feel most comfortable or happy, living mostly in accordance with the established social category of “man” or “woman””.

Or perhaps. consider the example of the weightlifter.  The terms “man” and “woman” are sometimes used in that sense. It would be tedious for someone to spell out "I like wearing dresses and I like knitting and I also like monster trucks and I like hunting and here are another thousand facts about me and I'm masculine in these ways and feminine in these ways". If gender (gender roles, social expectations of experience, social expectations of behavior) is a spectrum (or perhaps it’s what Wittgenstein would call a cluster concept, consider the idea of what a “game” is), it implies that, at some level of strictness, that there are no men or women so much as there are people who are - with respect to any number of traits - more or less masculine or feminine. But saying "I am a man" or "I am a woman" front loads a lot of that and provides a kind of a general "here is how to think of me on an immediate level but while allowing a lot of nuance and variability." Notably, it isn’t a problem if this isn’t how any particular person uses the terms “man” or “woman”, as mentioned above I advocate for no limiters on the terms. But it can be helpful to say what someone might often mean by those terms within a population. I could imagine for some trans men they would say that what they mean when they self describe as a man is “With respect to the loose collection of factors that comprise the Western concept of “man” I am closer to that than the Western concept of “man”, or something like this.

If this seems at all strange, recall the frequency with which we see phrasings of the kind “You’re not a man unless you can change a tire” or “You’re not a real man unless you can do x, y, z.”, none of which have anything to do with physiology. If you interrogated the folks who say such things they would likely protest that what they were getting at was how men are supposed to behave, rather than how they inevitably do, but such phrasings are part and parcel of the cultural archetype of man that some trans men may be responding to. As much as folks might protest and try and emphasize simple factors like “penis or vagina” or “XX or XY”, it’s undeniable that, culturally, we have larger symbolic and thematic ideas of what it means to be a “man’ or ‘woman” beyond physiology. 

We might be running into some degree of “beetle in a box” type issues (thanks again Wittgenstein). Some trans folk may be experiencing some kind of qualia I simply have no access to. I might just not be able to understand exactly what a trans man is getting at when he insists “I am a man”. It might be a little like trying to describe color to someone born blind. But I think it’s safe to trust trans people when they are relating their inner worlds to us. At a minimum, it’s simply undeniably that there appears to be percentage of the human population that necessarily - for their own happiness and wellbeing - must differ in some factors (perhaps many) from the cultural script assigned to them on account of what kind of genitals they were born with. Trans people have existed across time and and cultures, and many cultures have developed some kind of third (fourth, fifth, etc) gender scripts for them. I could mention muxe in Mexico, bakla in the Philippines, hijra in the Indian Subcontinent, femminiello in Neapolitan culture (Western!), or two-spirit people in indigenous American cultures (which itself is an umbrella term). The idea that trans people are some kind of contemporary Western invention is deeply ahistorical.

At this point it feels pertinent to bring up the concept of sexual dysphoria, humans who feel distress, often considerable, as a result of the kind of body they have, particularly with respect to sexual characteristics. Among such individuals, medical intervention, such as puberty blockers and HRT, seems to be the only reliable way to provide psychological relief. I’m sure this is wildly inaccurate in a strict sense, but the notion of “the brain expecting a different kind of body” might be helpful as a starting point to understand this. Many trans people will not experience this, but many will, and sexual dysphoria (sexual because it strictly is referring to sexed characteristics rather than gender roles or expectations) is necessary to discuss to fully elaborate on a philosophical take on trans issues. For many trans people their own usage of “man” or “woman” as it applies to themselves may conceptually involve the kind of body they feel most psychologically comfortable with. In the context of a society without gender roles, there would arguably be no trans people with respect to gender (because there would be no gender in the sociological sense, gender being arguably just an amalgamation of gender roles), but there plausibly would still be individuals who, for whatever reason, experience psychological distress as a result of their sexed characteristics. 

This may sound somewhat nebulous, but in fairness, all definitions (or almost all at a minimum) fall apart at closest examination. Hence, nominalism. Some folk use the term “woman” to reference something like “adult female human”, but that also falls apart at closest examination. We have to ask “what’s a female”? And this might seem relatively straightforward at first, but precisely what do we mean by “female”? We can’t mean “the ability to become pregnant”, unless people born infertile are excluded from being women. This could also exclude post menopausal women from being women.  We can’t mean “people who are shorter and less hairy than men” , because some men are short and quite hairless, while some women are tall and more hirsute. We could mean “those who produce the gametes called ovum”, but this could exclude folks who have been through menopause or those who weren’t born with functional reproductive organs. You could go with “those who lack a Y chromosome”, but then you have individuals with androgen insensitivity syndrome, who can be born with a vulva while having XY chromosomes, so then you have to bite the bullet and accept that some men are born with vulvas. Indeed, intersex conditions conceptually provide a number of issues for the attempt to equate “woman” with “adult human female” or “man” with “adult human male”. 

I’m not sure I know how to end this. I feel that I’ve said what needs to be said.

Succesful Terminal Hedonism

Jill and Braxus were on the main deck of the Comet class starship Opportunity, eyes glued to the viewscreen. Braxus, a trexian with characteristically pastel blue skin, black eyes, and sharp teeth, sat in the pilot’s chair, manipulating instruments slightly from time to time. Jill, a thirty-three year old human female with black curly hair, leaned against the far bulkhead and tried to keep up with what was happening on the screen. She zippered her jacket up as high as it went and stuffed her hands into her pockets. It was always a little too cold for her on the Opportunity. It had been six months since she pulled Braxus from the wreckage of their shuttle in the parking lot of a Taco Bell, six months since she’d said “fuck it” and left Earth with Braxus to see the rest of the galaxy. Since then they had bounced from riftgate to riftgate, keeping a low profile. It was deeply illegal for Braxus to land on a planet that hadn’t developed system-to-system travel, and the trexian authorities would, to quote Braxus, “pull my snert out through my mouth without washing their hands first” if they caught them. Jill only learned that Braxus was a low-level criminal a few days after they departed Earth. She briefly considered demanding to be returned, but…. they were in fucking space! Last week she saw a star go supernova. Yesterday she had walked among mushroom stalks thirty feet tall. For the first time since she was eighteen Jill felt some excitement, some real visceral joy in her gut. Danger or not, Jill couldn’t imagine returning home now.

A series of beeps emanated from the viewscreen as a planet was displayed. In sharp resolution Jill could see the dark grey world, bluish clouds swaying across its surface. A series of indicators relayed information to Braxus. The trexian studied the readout closely for a moment before sucking in a breath between pursed lips. Their eye ridges glowed a faint pink, betraying their excitement.

”Well well well, “Braxus muttered, “haven’t seen one-a these in a long while, huh.”

For some reason the translator chip nestled just below the skin of Jill’s right ear gave Braxus something of a guttural cockney accent to her, and she hadn’t gotten around to asking them why that might be.

“You haven’t seen what in a long while?” Jill asked.

Braxus pivoted the chair around to look at Jill and gestured to the screen behind them.

“What you are seeing, dear ignorant human, is an example of one of the twelve recognized ends of sentient species.”

“Twelve known ends?” Jill asked, eyes flipping back and forth between the screen and Braxus’s grin, or what passed for a grin. Braxus reveled a little too much in rubbing her nose in her ignorance, but Jill could put up with a bit of douchebagery in exchange for more information.

”Yeah, twelve of um. Twelve recognized official ends. From time to time o’ course you’ll get a one-off, but the recognized ends are the most common by far.” Braxus spun the chair back around and began manipulating the controls again, but kept talking the whole time. “I knew a species wot’ voluntarily extincted itself. I knew another species, the vespits, they went and got their whole planet shoved sideways into a neighboring universe. Then there were the doogs, holy shit, they went and- “

Jill had gotten used to Braxus dancing around the point and knew she needed to keep them on target.

“Which of the twelve ends did this planet end up with? “ she said, cutting him off.

“Wa? Oh right. Well, dear ignorant human, you are looking a planet wot’ went down the path of Sucessful Terminal Hedonism. Not too many species take that particular road. No no, not a popular one, far as the ends go. Hardly any folk enticed by that path, no no. Barely anyone- “

“What is Successful Terminal Hedonism?” Jill said, flatly, again cutting Braxus off.

“Right right, well. So, across the known galaxy sentient species have asked themselves “What, ultimately, do we want? Why all this busyness with the whole being alive thing, right? And the answer is pretty much always something like happiness.”

Braxus spun in their chair again to face Jill, eye ridges flaring pink again. They leaned back with their fingers behind their head, adopting what might be called a philosophical pose.

“O course, you can argue about whatchu mean bout happiness. Species got all kinds of words that kind of all fall under the category of happiness. Fullfillment, peace, enlightenment snafyut, treglus….” Jill stopped listening as closely as Braxus started listing a string of words the translator chip couldn’t handle. She took the opportunity to stare more closely at the planet’s surface, which was clearer now as the ship approached. She had never seen a more organized planet. Even from orbital distance she could tell that this entire planet had been built over, a patterned complex of black and grey metal crisscrossing the globe. If the planet hadn’t come to an end, as Braxus had put it, she would have expected it to have lights shining up from the surface, but the planet was dark.

“…felztrup, yeetgri, and a few others I can’t remember. Anyway, we can be a little vague about what we mean by happiness. BUT!,” and here they stabbed a finger into the air, “Whatever sensation or emotion you land on, all of that ultimately boils down to whatever kind of nervous system you happen to have. They all look real different, but all of them are responsible for our conscious perception of the world, right? So, that should mean, that with the right tech, right, you could just interface with your nervous system and take the direct route: cause yourself to just feel the sensation or emotion you want to feel right?”

Jill frowned and looked back and Braxus, objections already forming in her mind.

“What, so that’d be like if humans just attached something to our brains and we could push a button and just… feel happy? Isn’t that basically like a really fancy drug?”

Braxus nodded sagely.

“It is in fact, exactly like a fancy drug.” Braxus spun around yet again and began manipulating the instruments, beginning the process of lowering the craft through the atmosphere.

“The trick is of course, that most drugs have nasty side-effects and you got to manufacture them and so on, but direct stimulation tends to be cheaper and have fewer side-effects. So, once you got that technology it doesn’t take long for someone of the species to say: ‘Hey, doesn’t this technology sort of just….skip ahead to the point of everything anyway? I mean we play games and eat food and we fuck, or whatever that species does to make more of itself, and have professions and…. all of that just seems to be a way of getting happiness, right? But this tech lets us just get happiness instantly, reliably, and way easier and cheaper? So why doesn’t everyone just wire themselves up and take a seat and enjoy?”

Jill didn’t like were this story was going. She felt a subtle kind of unease over what she thought Braxus was telling her.

“Wait wait, just, sit down and push a button and be happy? Isn’t that like, incredibly unfulfilling? And what about excitement? The feeling of something new? How can you get that just sitting down in one place, hooked up to a machine?”

Braxus shook their head.

“You’re not quite gettin it, dear ignorant human. Excitement is a feeling. The sensation of newness? Peace? Sexual pleasure? Fulfillment? Religious ecstasy? All feelings, all mediated by your nervous system, and all reliably reproducible by technology.”

Jill shook her head harder, and her brow furrowed in resistance.

“But you wouldn’t do anything. That’s fucking awful.”

Braxus shot back, “If the point of the doing is the feeling you get, then you don’t need the doing, right?”

"Fuck that.” Jill said, “It’s not the same and you know it.”

Braxus shrugged again and began carefully manipulating the controls for atmospheric descent. dipping into the very outer edge of the atmosphere. The air outside rumbled against the outer shell of the craft. They glanced briefly behind themselves and said, “Not necessarily sayin I disagree with you mind, just giving you the idea.”

“Anyway,” Braxus continued, “that tech by itself won’t get you Successful Terminal Hedonism. After all, if everyone on the planet is hooked up to a happiness machine, who is going to do all the work? Who produces food and fuel? Who takes care of sick people? Who maintains the machines and keeps the power running? Answer: AI and robots, which is actually the trickier tech to make. This is why another one of the Twelve Ends is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Unsuccessful Terminal Hedonism.”

Braxus’s fingers danced across a control pad and a screen next to where Jill was standing came to life. The screen showed a city, broken and dirty beyond anything Jill had ever seen. Scattered around the street were humanoid figures with two small eyestalks protruding from their heads, all of them unmoving and horribly emaciated, skin parched and drawn in. Almost all of them had some kind of device strapped to their waists, cables threading from the grey box on their waists to the base of their skulls, where the cables were burrowed into their flesh. No obvious injuries were on most of them. It looks like they had simply laid down and waited to die. The buildings nearby were burned out and smashed. Here and there was a different scene, scenes of conflict. The image on the screen changed and Jill saw one of the creatures with no device that appeared to be clutching the cables of one of the devices in their hand, as if they had ripped the cable off of another of their kind. This body had the back of it’s head caved in, as if hit with a rock.

“What the fuck am I looking at Braxus?” Jill asked, her face ashen in the glow of the viewscreen.

"You are looking at Relto-5, home of a sentient species called the frevs.” Braxus said. “An example of Unsuccessful Terminal Hedonism. See, if you develop the happiness tech, but a species fails to control its use, this is what you get. Imagine if, on your primitive planet, a drug appeared on the street that was functionally reusable, had little to no physical side-effects, and could make you feel better than you ever had before at the push of a button. Strek, you could even customize the things. A button for an orgasm, a button for feeling excitement, a button for tranquility, on and on. What do you think might happen?”

Jill didn’t want to think about it, but she could hardly deny the possibility: “Well, I suppose it’s possible that we’d be fucked as a species. I could imagine people buying one of these boxes and immediately giving up on everything. If the thing only took as much juice as a cellphone you’d just need a working outlet every day or so. Folks would stop going to work, stop seeing their friends, stop eating, stop doing anything.”

Braxus nodded, “You got it human. Relto-5 fell apart. Sure enough, a huge number of them refused to use the devices. Early on there was even an attack on the factory that made the tech. The company that made the tech just said that if the devices were used responsibly, in a limited fashion, they were fine to use.”

“Yeah, like anyone is going to use an automatic happiness button responsibly,” Jill muttered.

"Precisely, human,” Braxus said. “Anyway, ten years after the tech was introduced it all came to a head. Bit by bit the population had decided to try the tech. Most folks were suspicious at first, and plenty of folks only used the tech sparingly in the beginning. But that didn’t last long. More and more folks gave up on everything, stopped living. Society can hardly run if a third of all people are basically useless, can it? Not enough doctors and nurses, not enough teachers, not enough manufacturing, not enough farmers. Crime went through the roof as people who couldn’t afford the tech stole them or did what they had to to get one. The things broke from time to time, and you can’t imagine what a person would do to get that feeling back. Plenty of times cops broke into a house only the find the owner murdered, with the murderer sitting right next to the body, plugged in and smiling and motionless. They left them plugged in most of the time, easier than having them try to claw you apart in their effort to get hooked back up.”

The images on the screen kept changing, showing new scenes from the dead world. Jill didn’t want to see anymore fields of dead people, but she couldn’t look away.

“Finally,” Braxus said, “It all fell apart. Their governments crumbled as their leaders started hooking themselves up. The worse things got, the less food there was, the less medicine, the more tempting it was to hook yourself up. Within fifty years of the commercial release of the tech, every frev on the planet was dead. Unsuccessful Terminal Hedonism, yeah? Now, then, this planet on the other hand.”

Braxus killed the display of Relto-5 and gestured back at the dark planet on the main viewscreen.
”They pulled it off. Did it organized like. See that’s not really a dead planet, there are at least 10 billion sentients still alive down there I’d say. Having a hard time translating their language, and I don’t have much to go on. Here, listen.”

Braxus pushed a button and suddenly a noise issued from the bridge’s audio system. It took Jill a moment to recognize this as speech, the speaker took no pauses or breathes, but rather uttered an unbroken stream of syllables. Their voices were much higher pitched than a human.

”What’s it say?” she asked.

”Difficult to tell exactly”, Braxus replied, “But the gist is a message to any visitors. Their species appears to be called the sultoon. They’re asking to be left alone. Looks like they all plugged themselves in about….. 10,000 of your earth years ago.:

”Wait, the same people? All that time”, she interjected. “Yeah, looks like,” Braxus said, glancing again at the information on the screen, “Could be they have long natural lifespans, but my guess is tech again, artificially keeping them young, or keeping them alive long past when they’d otherwise die, which ain’t quite the same thing o’course. It was all planned, see, down to the last detail. They developed AI to run the machines, mine the mines, run the powerplants, and look after the sultoon. Then, on the same day, one big event, everyone reports to their designated area and they all get plugged in. Been there ever since. So long as they can keep getting power one way or another I reckon they’ll stay that way until their sun expands.”

The dread and wrongness Jill was feeling deepened into horror as she contemplated this. She was about to say something when the monitor beeped urgently.

“Oh, and a warning,” Braxus said, “looks like they’ve got autonomous defense systems in case anyone tries to fuck with them."

Braxus spun around a grin, gleam in their ebon eyes.

”Wanna go down and take a closer look, yeah?”

Jill stared at them for a moment, incredulous. “Didn’t you just say they had auto defenses?”

Braxus waved breezily, “Well yeah, but they aint nothing I can’t get through. Come on, it’ll be interestin.”

Jill nearly refused. She desperately didn’t want to see this planet close up. Everything about what she was faced with sat very wrong with her. She knew instinctively that if she saw those sentients down there, saw what they’d done to themselves, she’d never be able to get away from that image. But she’d feel like a coward if she didn’t see for herself. She nodded grimly, “Ok, lets do it. “

*********

Roughly an hour later the Opportunity landed in what resembled a city square. Scorch marks crisscrossed the hull where Braxus had been less than successful in dodging the planet’s surface-to-orbit lasers. Jill staggered out of the ship on wobbly legs and promptly threw up. Braxus followed behind moments later, apologetic.

”Ah shit, Jill, oh fuck, can I get you anything? What helps humans?”

In between retches Jill managed to speak, “What the fuck was that Brax? I hit the fucking ceiling of the fucking bridge when you rolled, why didn’t you tell me to strap in first?”

"I didn’t think it would be that bad, strek me, their tech is old as fuck. I figured the cloaker would do the trick, and the jammers if not that. Didn’t streking think I’d actually have to dodge shit.”

”Fuck.” - retch - “You.”

After a few minutes Jill was able to stand and take in her surroundings. It was dark, the only lights were from the ship. She removed a small flashlight from her jacket and clicked it on. In the circle of light she saw thick cables running alongside streets and up the sides of buildings. It was upsettingly quiet, and Jill couldn’t help but break the silence. “Well, we know what we’re really here to see, so let’s fucking see it.”

Braxus nodded. “Careful human, I’m mostly sure I shook their attention by the time I landed but we could be snert deep in killbots in ten minutes if we’re not quiet. The detonator flares probably fooled them into thinking we were vaporized, and I put us down far away enough from any life signals that I’m thinking they’re not looking where we are, but we gotta watch our step, yeah?”

Jill nodded and killed the flashlight. Braxus handed her low light goggles and slipped on a pair themself. She activated the goggles and suddenly it seemed as if a bright sun was shining down on the area. On the older architecture she could see decoration, color, aesthetics, but the more recent, relatively speaking, the structures, the more austere they became. Braxus and Jill made their way away from the ship, towards where Braxus detected life signs, stepping as quietly as they could. They remained entirely silent, gesturing when they needed to communicate. It didn’t take long for Braxus to point to a particular building, a black metallic rectangular cuboid. It took Braxus a moment to figure out how to open the door, being unfamiliar with sultoon tech and physiology, but eventually the door slid sideway, revealing a pitch black entryway.

The trexian and the human crept inside and glanced upwards. The entire building was one room, the size of what Jill would think of as a large warehouse. Packed in as tightly as they could fit were row upon row of glass pods, stacked one upon each other in a metal frame. Hiding as well as they could, Braxus and Jill watched small hovering robots, kept aloft by some kind of antigrav, float among the pods. All of them were engaged in some kind of work, different tools extending from their frames to make repairs and adjustments.

Jill tapped her goggles, zooming her vision in to get a better look at the inhabitants of the pods. When she finally got a clear look at them a sensation of awful numbness took her over.

The sultoon were quadrupedal, symmetrical in every direction from a top down view. Four legs supported a mostly cylindrical body, with four grasping appendages higher up. Jill couldn’t quite figure out what their sensory organs were. Even as alien as their forms were to her, she knew she wasn’t seeing them as they once had been. Their bodies were utterly atrophied, skin and muscles hanging loosely from their skeletal systems. They moved slightly in their pods, suspended in a bluish liquid. Cables and tubes ran into their bodies. Thousands of them, looking at nothing, making slight noises of what Jill took to be pleasure, or whatever their species’ equivalent was. Braxus whispered to Jill, their mouth right next to her ear.

”Yeah, alive way past their natural lifespans. Look closely at their bodies, see the incisions?”

Jill had to zoom her vision in even more to see them, but sure enough, each and every sultoon was crisscrossed with extremely thin healed wounds. As she scanned the rows of pods, she spotted where the cuts came from. In one of the pods, an opening appeared, revealing that the liquid was part of a connected series of tubes. Two small robots swam into the pod, towing a fleshy lump behind them. As Jill watched, the two robots extended grasping arms and small blades, and they began performing some kind of surgery on the sultoon. As they cut, the sultoon didn’t respond. In a matter of minutes, they had extracted some organ and replaced it with the lump they had brought with them, efficiently stitching the flesh together with barely a hint of any damage.

”See,” Braxus muttered, “all automated, all nice and efficient. Old organs go bad, replace them with new ones. Somewhere on this planet they got big old organ farms, guarantee.”

Jill felt like vomiting again. She suddenly couldn’t be in this place anymore. She swiftly turned to leave.

She moved too quickly, and her hand caught a piece of loose debris as she turned. With a shocking clang it fell against the floor.

”Fuck, run!” Braxus shouted.

The hovering robots spun as one and trained their sensors on the two interlopers, moving with frightening speed. Jill and Braxus sprinted towards the door. Lines of searing light leapt from the pursuing machines, cutting through metal and stone like it wasn’t there, barely missing the fleeing pair.

As they fled the formerly silent city erupted with buzzing menace, as long dormant bots sprang from their docking stations in response to the intruders. All attempt at stealth was left behind as Jill and Braxus haphazardly rushed towards the Opportunity, knocking discarded ancient machinery out of their way in their attempt to stay ahead of flying death.

A few heartbeats later they rounded a corner and saw the comforting sight of the ship.

”Silprey doth kairi!” Braxus shouted, the programmed command word for an emergency exit. The ship simultaneously opened the doors, began takeoff preparations, and activated its own autonomous slug launchers. A trio of sultoon bots appeared only to be perforated with three precise shots from the ship.

The sentients fled into the safety of the ship, Braxus immediately throwing themself into the pilot’s chair.

”Definitely strap in this time, ok?” they screamed over the sound of the the battle raging outside.

Not needing to be told twice, Jill sat in the co-pilots chair and began buckling herself in. She had barely gotten the last of the safety belts in place before her stomach dropped as the ship shot into the sky. The bots where left behind immediately, but Jill could guess what was about to happen next.

Violet lasers the width of telephone poles suddenly arced across the sky, seeking to cut the Opportunity out of the air. Braxus wrenched the controls and the ship spun into a maneuver that insulted physics. Almost every laser missed the hull by a few inches, save for one that blasted a scar across a more heavily armored section of the ship. A few ass clenching moments later, the Opportunity blasted out of the outer atmosphere and into the safety of empty space.

The crew of two remained perfectly silent for several minutes, Jill breathing heavily and Braxus allowing their oxygen membranes to do their work.

”Hey Braxus?” Jill said.

”Yeah Jill?”

”Don’t let me ever try that tech, ok?”

”I promise.”

What's Judgement Anyway?

Folks throw the words “judgement” and “judging” around a lot, most typically in the context of “judging people”. In American culture this is largely due to the Christian requirement to abstain from judging others. Indeed, within the Christian religion escape from the judgement of God is contingent on one personally abstaining from judging others (parallel to the idea that God will only forgive the sins of those who forgive the wrongs committed against them, whatever forgiveness is).

But I’m frequently uncertain as to exactly how the word is used.

I might know how someone is using the term. In a legal sense I get it: to declare someone guilty or innocent (taken care of by juries in many systems), or else to pass down a sentence.

I would know what you meant if you used it in the sense of “assess, rate, compare”, as in judging a sports competition or comparing restaurants.

I would know what you mean if you used it in the sense of “to assess what something is, or what category it belongs to”, in the sense of saying “I judge that to be an elm tree” or, perhaps “In my judgement you have a cold”, or, perhaps, “Against my better judgement I’ll allow it [meaning, ‘in my judgement this is a bad idea but I’ll allow it anyway’]”. This is perhaps conceptually related to the idea of judging in a legal sense: “To assess whether or not a crime was committed”, “To determine what an appropriate sentence would be”.

I would know what you mean if you used it in the sense of referring to a kind of reasoning faculty, or perhaps if you used it to refer to something like “insight”, in the sense of “she has good judgement” or “use your best judgement”. This is related to the idea discussed in the previous paragraph.

So far I’ve only mentioned the easier to describe usages for “judgement”. There are other ways the word is used, typically referring to certain emotional phenomena, perhaps by analogy we might speak of a spectrum of human emotion and part of that spectrum might be what is often referred to as “judging someone”, or else if we think of human emotional experiences as cross-connected nodes, where we can group certain connected nodes into sets (these will overlap), perhaps one of those sets we might describe as “judging others” (is this a good analogy? I’m not convinced). I’ll describe what I experience that I tend to describe as “judgement”, but of course my internal experience may vary considerably from yours.

Perhaps: a kind of disposition towards someone, a dislike of them based on their behavior, an aversion to them, anger towards them.

Perhaps: a kind of disposition towards someone, thinking myself superior or better than them, perhaps as a person or with respect to some particular attribute. But what’s “superior as a person” mean in this context? It’s strange, I’m tempted to say it doesn’t mean anything, that “superior” has to refer to to some measurable quality (between two runners, the superior runner is the one who more reliably wins races), but there is something else there, something difficult to pin down. Runners have a goal, and hammers a purpose (we might speak of one hammer being a better hammer, a superior hammer), and so I know what “superior” means there, but humans have only the goals given by themselves or by others, and humans have only the purposes they give themselves or are given to them by others. And so I know what it means to be a “superior employee” - a purpose given to someone by someone else - but I don’t know what it means to be a superior person. And yet, I have some idea of what I mean when I say “I feel superior to someone, I feel like I am better than someone”, and it feels like it goes beyond a simple belief of “I am better at running than someone” or even, although it is sometimes a related belief, “My behavior/character is , on average, less harmful than someone else’s behavior/character”. But what is this feeling? Is it related to the idea of being superior in a measurable way? I wonder if it’s something like the notion of a social hierarchy? Perhaps the feeling of “being better than someone as a person” is some emotional/psychological sense of our position in a, perhaps unspoken, social hierarchy. Perhaps the feeling of “being better than someone” in a moral sense is some emotional/psychological sense of our position in the moral/spiritual/divine hierarchy? Within cultures a variety of things can affect social status: etiquette, speech, dress, wealth, fame, family, nobility, titles, caste systems, adhering to social norms, etc. Of course, in contexts where superiority is closely tied to some measurable quality there will be overlap between the idea of, for example, “being the superior writer” and “being superior with respect to social hierarchy”. I wonder how closely related contemporary human notions/realities of social hierarchy are to non-human animal social hierarchies? At any rate, I have some idea of what some are getting at when they use the word “judging” in the context of “feeling superior to someone”.

It might have hints of “I would have done otherwise had it been me”, when we speak of judging someone for their actions.

That’s all the ways of using “judgement” or “judging” I can think of.

What are the effects of each of these? Do I want these effects?

In a legal sense, to declare someone innocent or guilty, or else to pass down a sentence: I mean, I want a legal system, and this feels like a pretty integral part of that. So yeah, this is fine in and of itself. Obviously there are more or less harmful kinds of legal systems.

In the sense of “assess, rate, compare”: again, by itself, not a harmful thing. There are potentially harmful iterations I suppose. Also pretty inevitable human activity.

In the sense of “to assess what something is, or what category it belongs to”, same answer as above. Also pretty inevitable human activity.

In the sense of “insight” or “use good judgement”: This is a thing which exists, so my opinion on it is pretty irrelevant. Developing insight and refining one’s judgement is a helpful thing, more of that please.

In the sense of “a kind of disposition towards someone, a dislike of them based on their behavior, an aversion to them, anger towards them”: humans seem to naturally do this, and it’s not an easy thing to rid oneself of, nor is it even necessarily possible for everyone in all cases. Probably less of this kind of judgement is helpful, both individually and socially. Generally, I am against humans disliking one another. However, demanding that people who have been wronged by someone not dislike the harm-doer is unreasonable: it may not even be possible for that person to do as you demand. Also, I wonder if in certain cases this kind of judgement might be socially helpful? I’m not super sure about the net effects of social ostracization of people, depending on circumstances. Like, I get it if people don’t want to be around people who do particularly heinous things, and maybe that can be a deterrent for others who might also do heinous things? But, on the other hand, if this ostracization ends up being permanent, does that take away a potential incentive for reformation? If someone has the sense that they will never, as it where, be reaccepted by the community, might they give up seeking character reformation? Maybe it’s sometimes sensible for serious harm-doers to be permanently ostracized from the community wherein they performed their heinous act while also allowing for them to, eventually at least, join and be accepted by a different community? And is maybe a broad social agreement that a Stalin or a Hitler are Bad Guys helpful to prevent other people from going down that path? Also, if someone is being mistreated by someone and their attempt at enlightened dispassion towards them is making them more vulnerable to being mistreated then I’m going to be in favor of them just disliking the person who is mistreating them. I’ll support the idea of having a positive disposition towards someone who has wronged you, but only if this doesn’t come at the expense of other, more immediately necessary, goals. There are those rare few who are able to truly embrace a kind of patient universal love for all humans, and I’m always going to be glad for that and think it’s good that there be more of that, but I also understand that this isn’t a reasonable ask in most situations.

Maybe there are sensible differences to discuss with respect to how we treat those who mistreat us vs those who mistreat others?

In general, I expect that the more developed one’s insight is, the broader one’s perspective, and the more they understand the causes of human behavior, the more this kind of judgement will diminish in that person. To some degree this kind of judgement may be fueled by irrationality, as in when it is connected to the idea of “I would have done otherwise had it been me”. This is irrational if only because there is no way to know that, and it might even be irrational in a more fundamental sense. We can imagine the idea of “if I had been in your place, but with all the factors that make me me, I would not have behaved as you behaved”, but this is only possible to imagine in the context of some major time/space rule breaking. If you where them, you would be all of them: their genetics rather than yours, their upbringing rather than yours, their experiences rather than yours, their brain rather than yours. And in that context, does it even make sense to ask if you would do otherwise? Why would you? Would you even be you? In this last example we are imagining that “you” could be taken out of your body and put into someone else’s, but this is to suppose some kind of “soul”. But maybe what I am is the mind of this body. Perhaps “I” am generated by this body? Perhaps the idea of me being you makes as much sense as the sound of flute being the sound of another flute. Maybe “I” an an event, something this body is experiencing/doing?

Or maybe not, who knows? I haven’t a clue how consciousness works, and so far as I can tell neither does anyone else.

In the sense of “feeling superior with respect to some measurable quality”: it’s fine to have a clearheaded perception of yourself and your traits. But bear in mind how hard it is to be clearheaded about such things. And don’t be an asshole. And keep in mind all the background stuff that lets people be good at stuff: opportunities and genetics and environment and randomness. And remember other people are better at other stuff.

In the sense of “feeling that one’s behavior/character is less harmful than someone else’s”: basically the same answer as the previous paragraph, minus the bit about remembering how other people are better at other stuff, since I don’t think one can defend their bad behavior by pointing out that they’re a good cook. Although maybe there’s something to be said about…. having more or less beneficial/harmful behavior in different ways? Think of someone who’s very apt to give their money to those in need, but also gossips a lot.

In the sense of “feeling superior in a social sense, having a sense of being higher on the social ladder”: fuck this nonsense. It’s pretty ingrained in us, so it’ll take some doing to disentangle ourselves from this awful phenomenon, but the more we let go of social hierarchy the better off we’ll all be.

In the sense of “feeling superior in a moral sense, having a sense of being higher on the moral/divine ladder”: again, fuck this nonsense. This is even worse in my opinion. Get over yourself, read up on the concept of moral luck, read up on the underlying causes of human behavior, google the lead-crime hypothesis, etc.

What's Forgiveness Anyway?

Folks throw the word “forgive” around a lot. In some contexts I know what that could mean. To forgive a debt, for example. I get that: “to no longer maintain a legal expectation of someone forking money over”. But then folks use it in a moral or emotional sense and I’m less certain what we’re talking about.

If someone meant by “forgive” something like “to cease being angry about something done to you"”, I would understand what that meant. But that’s not exactly something that’s necessarily in someone’s control, anymore than “feeling pain’ is in someone’s control when accidentally touching a hot stove. It might be somewhat in someone’s control in the long-term I suppose, but you could never guarantee that this would be possible.

If someone meant by “forgive” something like “letting go of something someone did to you, not thinking about it anymore, not ruminating on it, moving past it”, then I might know what they meant by that. But, as above, that’s not 100 percent within someone’s control.

If someone meant by “forgive” something like “to not seek retaliation, to not seek revenge”, I might know what that would mean. It’s important to parse the difference between this and “to seek for the harm-causer to be stopped (for example by legal means), to seek for the harm-causer to be reformed”. Notably someone might seek these goals while also desiring retaliation. In a legal context, they might want the criminal justice system to stop this person out of consideration for other potential victims while also getting emotional satisfaction from seeing the perpetrator locked up.

If someone meant by “forgive” something like “to come to a place where the victim cares about the harm-causer, to come to a place where the victim loves the harm-causer” I might know what that would mean. Although, as above, this is not necessarily entirely within the control of the victim.

Beyond this I don’t really understand in what other manner the word “forgiveness” is used.

Now, turning to what is perhaps the more important question: what are the effects of each of these and is is something that I want or you want or we want?

With respect to my first suggestion: anger typically stops or inhibits someone from experiencing positive emotions such as happiness, peace, joy, excitement, pleasure, etc. It also tends to dull the reasoning faculties. If someone has the choice, less angry is usually the better choice, especially over the long term. But, again, this isn’t entirely up to the victim. If someone wronged can stop being angry over the wrong done to them then I would recommend that, but I think it’s not great to demand that they do this.

My response to the idea of “letting go of something someone did to you, not thinking about it anymore, not ruminating on it, moving past it” then my response is pretty similar: probably optimal if you can pull it off, but there’s no guarantees that can happen.

My response to the idea of “to not seek retaliation, to not seek revenge” , yeah that’s probably for the best, both individually and socially. When it comes to crimes it’s not an optimal society if everyone is individually seeking revenge for crimes committed against them: humane character reformation through the state apparatus is a much more socially healthy way to deal with that. And for not-crimes it’s still probably a better world without folks seeking revenge for wrongs done to them. Wisdom will be needed to separate examples of revenge from examples of self-defense, and I won’t pretend it will always be easy to parse that.

My response to “seeking to prevent the harm-causer from harming others, seeking character reformation for the harm-causer” yeah, that’s pretty much always going to be socially helpful, and criminals undergoing behavioral reformation is, at least in the context of a criminal justice system that embraces restorative justice, probably a good thing. Some people I want locked up, and I bet that’s the case with you as well. In a non-criminal sense it’s also desirable that steps be taken to prevent someone in the habit of harming people from doing that, and it’s also desirable to pursue avenues that encourage folks with harmful behavioral patterns to amend their behavior.

My response to the idea of “to come to a place where the victim cares about the harm-causer, to come to a place where the victim loves the harm-causer” is: the effect of a victim loving/caring about the harm-causer can often be bad for the victim because their love/caring can be exploited by the harm-causer, allowing for further abuse (this will depend somewhat on how one is using the word “love”). Sometimes people can have it within themselves to care about someone deeply while also maintaining an ironclad insistence on not being poorly treated and insisting that the beloved doesn’t treat others poorly, which is socially and personally helpful. More compassion and love is socially helpful, and often personally helpful, potentially at least, but this compassion and love cannot detract from the social need for behavioral reformation In short: if loving or caring about the harm-causer can be accomplished without sacrificing other, more immediately necessary, goods, then it’s likely helpful both individually and socially. However, the manner in which I tend to use the word “love” would include the notion that “to love someone means to want them to behave in non-harmful ways”, which suggests to me that a lot of how this all plays out depends on how one is using the term “love”.

A Letter to my Young Self

I am turning 30 later this week, which has put me in a reflective mood. I thought a nice way to process some of my emotions surrounding this birthday would be to write a letter of advice to my younger self, at no particular age.

————————————————————————-

Hello there! I hope this letter finds you well. I felt it appropriate to pass along some pieces of advice I think might be useful to you. I’ll divide these into categories as best I can, but there’s going to be some inevitable overlap. I’m not sure when this letter will find you, hopefully early on. Here goes.


On romantic relationships

You are going to be interested in girls pretty early on. From a very young age you are going to experience a crushingly strong desire to have a girlfriend. As the years go by, should everything remain the same, that desire isn’t going to be satisfied until college. This will be very difficult for you, and, should this come to pass, you are going to emotionally struggle with it. Part of this will be a genuine desire for companionship, some of it will be due to sexual urges, and some of it will be a desire for the social acceptance that a romantic relationship signifies. In your mind, getting a girlfriend will be the ultimate indicator that you’re “ok”, which is a pretty formless emotion comprised of a lot of factors, but you know what I mean I think.

To my knowledge, there are two main reasons why you will struggle with romantic relationships and securing yourself a girlfriend. The first issue is this: you are under the impression that the trick to getting a girl to like you is to be impressive. I’m not….exactly sure why that happened. Something something media, something something movies implying male hero protagonists deserve sex (or at least that it is the inevitable outcome of acting heroically), something something toxic masculinity. I dunno. The point is, you have it in your head that girls date men they are impressed by. And that….has some degree of truth to it I suppose. Certainly being able to impress a girl can help land a first date, and it can serve (but is not always necessary for) as an initial catalyst for a girl noticing you. However, you will severely miscalculate the degree to which impressiveness is a factor in securing and maintaining a romantic relationship., and your attempts to be impressive will most often end up just being off-putting. What you actually need to be able to do is to relate to girls. Talk with them. Find shared interests. You will not find a girlfriend just based on how many push-ups you can do. Don’t treat opportunities to talk with girls as opportunities to impress. Just talk and make friends and see where it goes.

However, this approach is going to be complicated by a secondary factor, which is this: you are going to end up kind of thinking about women as if they’re sort of a different species then you. You’re going to absorb so much “Men are from mars, Women are from Venus” type stuff that you’re going to be trained to see women as incomprehensible, alien, and driven by emotions and instincts that are so different from yours that your man-brain could never hope to find common ground. This is all bullshit. This isn’t to say there aren’t any differences whatsoever, there are. But these differences are going to so over-emphasized, by culture and media and religion, that it’s possibly not surprising you had a hard time relating to girls. Just….they’re people ok? Humans, doing human stuff. They got baby teeth that fall out, they got birthdays, they got bills to pay, they have heartbreak and joy and loneliness, just like you do. Treat them like people and you’ll do fine. Treat them as the same kind of thing as yourself.

Note: How one conceives of impressiveness will have an effect on how one engages with the above passages. As a young man I thought of impressiveness largely in terms of athletic prowess, intelligence, and rhetorical skill. I suppose you could imagine a scenario in which someone says of their significant other “I was impressed by how good of a listener they were” or “I was impressed by the kindness they displayed” or even “I was impressed by how much we connected.”, which feels a bit different.

On balance, and avoiding extremes

You will have a tendency to go to extremes. You will have an enormously black and white view of the world, breaking as many things as possibly into binaries of good and bad. Your thinking will follow the lines of: “If X is good, then more X is always good. By extension, less X is always bad.” This kind of thinking is going to wreck you. On some level you’re going to feel that balance is…inauthentic somehow? Or that it’s a manifestation of relativism or something? Well, also you have OCD and depressive tendencies. Yeah, sorry, probably should have told you that earlier on. Sorry about that. At any rate, the OCD and depression have, as a symptom ( maybe cause?) that you see the world in black and white. This way of thinking is going to cause you to have a bad time, and I recommend disengaging from it as soon as possible.

Consider your physical health. In many ways maintaining your health relies on you maintaining a balance between two extremes. It’s bad for you to be too hot or too cold. You can have too much Vitamin A or too little. In fact, probably most of the factors relating to your health rely on a balance. Now, there are certain factors relating to health that more closely resemble a binary, or at least a situation where moving the slider in a particular direction is always better than the other direction. While there are all kinds of nutrients you need, you don’t need lead at all. The ideal amount of lead in your system is 0, and the further from 0 you get the worse it is.

These two paradigms, finding a balance between extremes and adhering as close as possible to an extreme, mirror the ways you have to interact with the world. Time and wisdom and experience will help you figure out when to apply each paradigm. For example, there is a tension in the human life between spontaneity and order, between flexibility and rigidity, between impulse and discipline. Your life can be too spontaneous, devoid of schedule and routine and order. Your life can be too rigid, with no room for the inherent randomness of life and none of the joy of newness and change. Find a balance. Where that balance is will change throughout your life, and it may look differently for different people. On the other hand, consider the emotion/impulse of cruelty. Everyone has a bit of cruelty in them, but there really is no need for it. The ideal amount of cruelty in a person is none at all. You don’t have to strike a balance between cruelty and kindness (although you may have to find a balance in the compassion you extend to others and the care you extend to yourself, which is quite different). Don’t be afraid of balance.

On school and your education

Your life is going to go a lot better if you take your education more seriously. People are going to be telling you to take school seriously all your life, and most of that isn’t going to land. Part of this is because they’re going to try to motivate you by telling you about the importance of getting a good job. However, you don’t have any bills to pay, you haven’t a clue what a 401(k) is, and you’re blissfully ignorant of “the struggle.” It is impossible for you to be motivated by what is, to you, a far off and unrelatable experience. Don’t get me wrong, doing well in school can absolutely help you financially down the line, but that’s not the only reason to take schooling seriously.

It’s going to be difficult for you to internalize the gift you’ve been given. The education you’re being given for free is something kings would have paid fortunes to give to their children. You have the opportunity to read more literature, know more about the physical nature of the world around you, gain more insight into mathematics and history and art and so much more, then even the most prestigious scholars of just about every past century. it’s an incalculable gift, and it’s only the weird brain glitch humans have, where we think things are less valuable depending on how many other people have them, that’s stopping you from realizing this.

Look, knowledge is sacred. Knowing about the world, being able to have perspective on it, having a depth of understanding, is one of the greatest abilities humans possess. Education can elevate your mind in incredible ways, can help you see meaning and beauty and joy and cleverness in everything you see. Don’t squander this gift.

A Brain Scan Thought Experiment

You’re sitting down with an apparatus connected to your head. On a screen on the nearby wall you are watching a live feed of your brain activity. In some fashion, displayed on the screen, is the encoded information for all of your conscious experiences, including the experience of looking at the information on the screen.

So, included in the code is the experience of looking at the code, which means….the code has the code itself encoded inside it? And in that second layer of code would also be the code for the experience of seeing the code. And so on.

How far down would this go?

I have a feeling this experiment might not actually work out the way I think it will, but at the moment I can’t spot the error.

Somehow the lag in the feed would be factored into this. Because it would take a bit of time for the machine to pull data from your nervous system and then display it. So…you’d be seeing an encoded version of….what you just saw a moment ago I guess. I think the experiment still works, even taking this into account.