This is probably the last blog post I will be writing for some time. I don't know when I will write another, if ever. Maybe I'm just taking a break.
Warning:
Scattershot thoughts incoming.
Butthurt thoughts incoming as well. I know everybody hates it when I stuff write like this.
Background:
When I started this blog, it was when I first started thinking about stuff other than video games. There were some beliefs I quickly adopted and I spoke about them with passion. I did so because I had passion in the topics I covered. I cared about circumcision, I cared about religion, etc. Religion is a long, complicated topic. It takes a lot of thinking and writing to cover all the bases on that topic. I am proud that I wrote a book on religion. It began as a long blog post that got longer and longer until I wanted to make a series of blog posts. Then I decided to write a long document which ended up becoming a book.
Am I a pseudo-intellectual?
Again I have been charged as being a pseudo-intellectual. This time I want to end the discussion for good with this one last blog post.
First I want to say that I think intelligence is sexy. Some people care a lot about how they look, how many friends they have, etc. I think being smart is cool. I think knowing about stuff is cool, even if a lot of it is random stuff I'll never use in practice. Hell, fuck it. It would be cool if I could be on the same level as some of the great intellectuals today. I would like that. That would be cool.
It's hard to tell when you're simply not smart enough to get what's going on. I've observed this with friends I used to have: They would talk about religion like they knew more than I do even though we both know he hasn't thought about religion. Like ever. In his life. And I know it must be happening to me as well, on some level. There must be stuff I'm not getting because it exceeds my mental capacity. That's just life. So what do you want me to do? Stop writing about stuff because those topics appear to be out of my reach? Give up? Or is the fact that I let the public read/criticize my writing now arrogant?
My defense:
I am very up front about the fact that most of my ideas are from other people. I didn't invent all the ideas I had in the book one day and started typing away. In the opening section of my book I suggested thinking about the book as a compilation of ideas about religion from many people. Very rarely do I make up new ideas. I just take what I agree with and try to explain why I agree.
I am very hesitant about writing stuff nowadays because I know things are complicated as hell. Most of the stuff around religion is easy: Do you have evidence to back up your claims? Politics is about a lot of history and deciding which policy is the best. I only wrote about Islam/Middle East because Sam Harris brought it up and it's somewhat related to religion. I pointed out in the first paragraph that I don't know enough about this topic.
Even if my attempts at making sense of the Middle East or some other topic are feeble at best, it's still worth it to try. Over time I will learn more about a topic and look back at my old posts and think they are inadequate. That's good. That's called learning. When I look back at my earlier posts on the blog, there are parts I don't even agree with anymore. Would I have done it all again if I could? Yes. It's a process. And if you think there's a fatal flaw in my posts, please tell me about it. I really don't want to be that idiot that thinks what comes out of his mouth makes sense.
If you are reading this and you think I'm some moron who thinks he's smart, or you think what I write is just pure garbage, you don't have to read it, and you don't have to be in contact with me anymore. If you want to criticize what I write in a non-aggressive way, then so be it. Don't silently build up animosity towards me. I'm not trying to piss you off.
I am open to criticism. I used to think atheism is crap because they are too certain of themselves. I used to think promiscuity is immoral. I used to think that justice must be better than mercy. I used to think morality must be objective all the time. Over time I learn stuff and substance slowly builds up in what I am saying.
I was encouraged to write more because some people with intelligence and knowledge that I value said they thought my work was worth reading. People's attention spans are short, and if they're willing to read the long stuff I write, I take that as a big compliment. I write stuff because people tell me they like it. If they don't like it, I'll stop showing my stuff in public. It's that simple.
It would hurt me to know that what I write is crap because I feel like my content represents the extent of my intelligence. If I'm a dumbass, then I'm a dumbass. I want to take steps to not be a dumbass but I also don't want to come off as a dumbass that thinks he's a genius. And I can't be a genius, because even I'm doubting the level of my own content and I wrote the damned blog post.
I don't randomly bring up the fact that I wrote a book in a conversation. I don't want to go through the same conversation of 'Oh, you wrote a book?', which is a conversation about the fact that I wrote a book, not whatever is written in the book. However, I talk about my book on Facebook because Facebook is where I assemble almost all of my friends. I understand that Facebook is generally a site you use to talk about random crap like what you ate for dinner. That's great. But for me Facebook is my primary method of communication with people. It's how I share my thoughts. I write about whatever is on my mind.
Looking like a poser...
But how exactly do people want me to phrase it so I don't come off as a pseudo-intellectual? By acting like what I wrote is no big deal to me? By inserting language that make my tone of voice seem more casual? Some people are interested in sports. Some in gossip. Some in whatever. I'm interested in some other stuff. Why can't I write about it without coming off as a pseudo-intellectual? Can't I just write that I wrote a blog post about this, this, and this and that I'm proud of my work? No?
Nobody writes an entire fucking book for the sake of looking smart. Nobody writes a book to show other people they have 'intellectual interests'. I wrote the book because I am actually interested. At one point or the other, religion was all I thought about. At one point, I didn't know how to answer moral relativism and I honestly couldn't answer why I shouldn't kill people. That was fucking worrying.
Not every 'smart topic' interests me. Philosophy for the sake of it fucking bores me to death. Sam Harris might like reading about deontology or whatever the heck, but I'm not touching that stuff. I don't want to take philosophy class. Politics in general also bores me but parts of it are important when it comes to figuring out what's going on in the world.
If I write too little about hard topics, it looks like I know nothing yet I want to tell the world I am an expert at a topic. If I write too much, I'm trying too hard to impress people.
Why is it ok to want to look pretty, but not ok to want to look smart?
Curiosity about the world...
Joe Rogan hosts a podcast where he has conversations with lots of people. And often times I feel like Rogan doesn't really know what he's talking about or doesn't have the background necessary. But the podcast is still great because Rogan is always trying to being in smart people to have a chat. He can be the dumbest person in the world and I would still like what he is doing.
I've always been interested in random stuff. Why is the sky blue? How does a fire extinguisher work? What is morality? What is good and what is bad? WTF is going on in the Middle East? And I look up answers and I forget them and I try to learn them again because on some level, it matters to me. And I talk about random science crap with my co-worker because I find it interesting. I was delighted to be able to tell him why people on the ISS are weightless. The answer was mindblowing. It was a Vsauce moment. And I had to share it. They are fucking FALLING. INDEFINITELY. That is tripping balls level of craziness. And when my co-worker asked me a question I can't answer, like how airplanes fly, it means I need to look that up on the internet and talk about it the next day. Nobody is 'too stupid' for any of my ideas. We just need to sit down and have an honest conversation.
Arrogance
On some level, everybody is arrogant. We put too much emphasis on our own opinions and we act like we are right by default. I see this all the time with politics. I don't use big words. I don't pretend to have read books I never read. My goal is to explain what I believe as simply as possible, even if it looks like I am failing epic-ly.
Am I arrogant sometimes? Yes. And I openly acknowledge that is a flaw that I have. I even wrote about it in the past. When I get too arrogant I need to get back down to earth and I do that by watching what Neil deGrasse Tyson says or what Sam Harris says.
And I will continue to work on my own character like I work on my book. When I die really hope I could tell myself that I was a decent human being. Or that I tried to be.
And I know I have a long ass way to go. Ask me any random question about history and I probably can't answer you because I forgot or never knew the answer. I can't do math. I listen to debates and podcasts during work because I want to up my level.
So. Some people think I am a pseudo-intellectual that chases topics which are far beyond what I am capable of, that I'm an arrogant poser. Fine. I just won't write my thoughts out to anybody else anymore. Other people don't have to read my thoughts anymore. I'll just post about my other random hobbies.
Conclusion
I'm trying to know more and be a better person.
And I can't even say I'm doing my best.
But I'm trying. I'm trying to know more so my amateur talk about Islam and the Middle East or whatever will become better. What mistakes I make, I make in public and I don't hide it.
Perhaps I wrestle with topics beyond my reach. At least I'm trying.
Can you say the same?
Everything is so complicated now and it takes so long to get anywhere and say anything worth anything.
I'm just tired of stuff. I'm taking a break from this blog. I hope if and when I return, I come back with renewed interest in the world and twice as much knowledge as I do now.
Some blog posts are long. Some are not. If one is too long for you, then read a little bit each time you want to. It is also in your power to skip topics that don't interest you. However, do so at your own peril because I've already stated my current position on a variety of topics in this blog post, including morality. What I write from here on out are my own opinions in addition to being Sam Harris' opinions, and where we disagree I will point them out.
If you don't know Sam Harris, you probably should. Some would call him an author, public atheist, public intellectual, philosopher, and a PHD in neuroscience. Originally I knew him from his debates about religion, and there are pieces of his debates that I actually find to be the most well-worded response to a particular point. He's thought about and talked about more than just religion though. It feels like, to me anyway, that nowadays any discussion between two rational, intelligent people about the issues of our day are atheist, it's pretty much a given. I've already written and thought about religion on its own for long enough now. Time to set it down for now. Let me discuss and write about some of Sam Harris' beliefs in things other than religion. Here, I cover 5 topics that Harris has talked about: Free will, life, AI, morality, and Islam. One major topic I am not addressing here is Sam Harris and his defense of Israel.
Free Will
Sam Harris argues that there is no free will. Everything we are aware of, from our intentions, impulses, to our impulses to resist those impulses, are preceded by events in the nervous system which we are not aware of and didn't create. The state of your brain is not the product of events you were responsible. You didn't pick your parents, genes, or pick the way your interaction with other people sculpted the micro-structures in the brain to get the brain you currently have, or all the charges that are going in your brain right now, or how many synapses you have in your brain. Yet, your neuro-physiology is going to produce every next thought or intention you have.
Through neuro-imaging devices we already know, when telling the subject to pick between left or right, whether the person will pick left or right before the subject himself even knows whether he will pick left or right. That ability to predict will only be more fine-grained in the future. If I can predict what you will do before you know what you will do, the basis for free will seems to be on shakier ground. If what you will do can be predicted, you are not free to do anything apart from what was predicted.
The experiments done essentially gave the subject a very easy to read clock with letters or numbers constantly changing. The person can take as long as he wants to decide to go left or right, and as soon as he feels he has decided on which way to go, he looks at the letter/number displayed and tells the people conducting the test what it was. It is not clear exactly which study Sam Harris was talking about but he claims that the notion of going left or right actually builds up, and we can tell about 5-7 seconds before the person thinks he has decided whether the person will go left or right. That depends on how long the guy spends deciding, of course. You couldn't have been subconsciously deciding to go left or right for 5-7 seconds before you realized it if you only took 1 second from hearing the instructions to picking left or right. Anyways, the idea is that with such a long interval of 5-7 seconds before the person figures out whether to go left or right, the subject is less likely to have made a mistake that negatively impacts the result of the experiment.
It can be argued that having our actions be predicted is akin to watching a movie, in that the person was still free to make a choice, we're just watching it as it unfolds before or after the fact. This is the argument made by Matt Dillahunty (another public atheist). This argument is more simply put as: If there is currently free will and all of a sudden I gain the superpower to see the future, then aren't you arguing that we won't have free will because our thoughts and actions can be predicted? Daniel Dennett (yet another public atheist) would say in this case we do have free will. Sam Harris would say that we do not, because we are essentially robots acting based upon whatever variables we were subjected to, and the idea that we choose our fate is simply an illusion, and a very persuasive illusion at that. If you were predicted to have done something, you were not free to not have done otherwise. There is some leeway here in figuring out when something is or isn't free will because it's hard enough as it is to even define it.
As already mentioned, our thoughts seem to come out of nowhere for us subjectively. They are still caused by events you didn't cause like genetics. Even if you believe in a soul, you didn't pick your soul. As I write this sentence, how I ended up getting to this sentence in this way is still a mystery to me. When I fail to get to the end of the sentence, miss a word or type a typo, I don't know why. Even when you do write correctly or speak correctly, it's also a surprise. Why did I pick this word and not that?
It's like being asked to randomly come up with the name of a city off the top of your head. You're not going to think about every single city you know and decide on which city to pick, neither will you know why one city popped into your head instead of another. And your decision on which city to pick is reliant on many, many factors which are out of your control. The decision to pick whatever city you want and say it out loud is as value-free, pressure-free, and simple decision you will probably have to make in your life. You're not overwhelmed by complex biases and arguments and counterarguments and emotions which compromise your thinking, yet doing something as simple as picking a city seems to make free will and our ability to be the only true author of our thoughts seem hazy and uncertain.
Adding randomness doesn't mean you get free will. Electrons as far as we know act in a random/probabilistic manner. If anything, free will is reduced because on a fundamental level, the building blocks of your body is bound by physics which is random and sure as heck not caused by you.
EvilTim1911 among the Youtube comments described the situation succinctly: People understand they don't have full control of their brain structure or the molecules swirling around. However, the illusion of free will is so strong that even after people have accepted all of the factors that go to prove there is no free will, they still refuse to accept the sum of those factors.
So what does this mean, practically speaking? It doesn't mean that if we want a black belt in martial arts we can just sit there and wait for it to happen because we're destined to get it. Training and work ethic are still just as important as ever. Your decision to train, or to wait it out, or to train on some days and randomly not train on another, and your effort/desire to train are not really in your control but they still matter in figuring out what will happen next.
The argument is that it does change our ideas of good and evil in important ways. If somebody had the same exact situation you have - identical genes, environment, experiences, all those things - that person would make the same choices you make. When we look at good and evil, we assume that people are totally responsible for their actions. This idea that we have free will is part of the foundation for why we feel punishment or vengeance makes sense. Our justice system in America depends on this idea that there is free will.
We know that if you get the right tumor in the right circumstance, you will turn into a murderer that cannot control your actions. In a sense, this is what lack of free will means: Criminals are malfunctioning people. They got dealt the wrong genetics, the wrong parents, the wrong environment, the wrong micro-influences that turned them into what they are today. Just imagine the son of a terrorist living in a group of religious extremist. Odds are, that child will be screwed up as he gets older. But you take that child and put them in a different environment or change their brain or their genes, that person would be different and perhaps not a killer.
This doesn't mean punishment is not valid. Locking up murderers keeps them off the streets (and hopefully... will let the murderer reflect and regret their actions, so they can be fixed). The idea is to fix people instead of punishing them since it makes no sense to punish people because they deserve pain due to people not having free will. This idea of vengeance now makes no sense at all, all it does it produce more pain in the world. In a way it validates a higher level of compassion. Feel bad for criminals, because they got dealt a messed up life. Whether it be a tumor in the brain, being born into a family of religious loonies, or having a horrible set of environment and influences and micro-influences, they are victims. A tumor is just a more extreme case of physical causality. That doesn't mean you shouldn't defend yourself if you come in contact with one of these crazy people, however.
Meditation/Life
'The key to happiness is low expectations.'
On life and being happy, Sam Harris echoes a philosophy similar to that of Eckhart Tolle but the ideas existed far before him. I am going to quote part of his speech because I think the way he presented it was very well done:
I want to speak to you today about death. Most of us try our best not to think about death. But all of us knows that we're just a doctor's visit away from being starkly reminded of our own mortality. I'm sure many of you know somebody who has experienced this. You must know how uncanny it is to be thrown out of the normal course of your life, and just be given the full time job of not dying. The one thing people tend to realize at moments like this is that they wasted a lot of time when life was normal. It's not just they spent too much time working or compulsively checking email. It's that they cared about the wrong things. They regret what they cared about. Their attention was bound up by petty concerns... year after year when life was normal.
And this is a paradox of course, because we all know this epiphany is coming. Don't you know this is coming? Don't you know that you'll look back on the kinds of things that captured your attention and you'll ask, what was I thinking? You know this, and if you're like most people, you'll spend most of the time in your life, tacitly presuming you will live forever. It's like watching a bad movie for the fourth time. These things only make sense in light of eternity. There better be a heaven if we're going waste our time like this. There ways to really live in the present moment. What is the alternative? It is always now. However much you may feel the need to plan for the future or mitigate risks, the reality of your life is now. This may sound tripe, but it's the truth. And we spend most of our life repudiating it, overlooking it. The horror is that we succeed. We manage to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment because we are continually hoping to become happy in the future, and the future never arrives. We're always anticipating what is coming next. We're always trying to solve a problem. It's possibly to simply drop your problem, if only for a moment, and enjoy whatever is true of your life in the present.
The interesting part about Sam Harris is that unlike most of the other scientifically driven, atheist debaters, Sam Harris also focuses on the importance of the subjective experience. He even wrote a book about it called 'Waking Up: A guide to spirituality without religion'. I don't have the time to read it right now but I will check it out in the future. He is also a supporter of meditation, specifically mindfulness meditation, where the person just focuses only on whatever their senses are picking up in the present moment. I'm not any sort of expert on meditation and I've never meditated before, but it seems to be kind of accepted in the mainstream now, at least this type of meditation. We're not chanting hymns and praying to a god. Meditation doesn't have to be religious. The idea here is that our minds are constantly going, thinking about stuff, having conversations with ourselves, planning for the future, etc, and we never get a chance to truly unplug and just focus on the world right now. Even when we try to just sit there, our mind constantly wanders and think about random things.
Sam's the only guy out there debating religion while also talking about meditation, he's tried some drugs like MDMA (which he says he doesn't recommend that everybody do however), and he likes boxing. It just feels like he breaks the mold of the rational guy who talks about logic and evidence all day.
Artificial Intelligence
Once upon a time, men built the smartest machine ever built and asked, 'Is there a god?'. The machine replied, 'There is now'.
First of all, let me recommend you a video by CGP Grey called 'Humans Need Not Apply'. Please watch it if you have the time. This blog post will assume you haven't and a few ideas will be restated, but this section is not a simple re-hashing of what the video says.
First, let's just talk about AI that is somewhat close to our reach today. I'm not talking about robots having consciousness, just better automation.
There is no law in the universe that says we will all find work after every technological advancement. Likewise, there isn't a law that says technology makes more better jobs for horses, but when you replace horses with humans, people think it sounds about right. The machines we have were mechanical muscles, built to do hard labor, with abilities far beyond our own in terms of strength and durability. Human labor is not in as much demand. Likewise with the dawn of general AI, human intelligence will be less in demand. As CGP Grey states, machines get better in a way biology can't match.
Eventually the cost of producing a machine will be close to its raw materials and operating it will be far cheaper than humans. We will need humans to repair broken machines for now, but the amount of humans required for such a job is much smaller. The net effect is that jobs are simply lost. In a capitalist society, a few men will control many machines and gain incredible wealth while the rest of humanity are free to starve. Just the incoming automation powered by non-general AI is enough to cause worry. You may think we've been here before, but perhaps we haven't.
Imagine a tireless machine that is cost effective in more than one situation and can learn things by watching you do it. Today we watch and laugh at machines as they fail basic tasks. In the future they may be laughing at us. Machines are cheaper to operate than humans, and while today doing general labor they are extremely slow and not ready for prime-time, they one day will be. And what then?
Do you know about DARPA? It stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, headed by the United States' Department of Defense. The original challenge was for cars to drive a track. Every car failed in hilarious ways. Fast forward ten years and now it is believed that self-driving cars will drive better than humans can. Now we've moved onto rescue robots. South Korea won the challenge and the prize money. The robots had to go through various rescue situations, walking over uneven ground and piloting a car. Two out of eight challenges in the competition were unknown to the participants ahead of time, and these robots are not remote controlled. The American robot had an arm broken but continued on like nothing happened, completing the challenge.
When you think of Google's self-driving cars, we think of lives saved. We think it is the future, because it is. Human drivers kill 40,000 people each year in the US alone. Self-driving cars don't get sleepy or text while driving. Eventually it will be more costly to drive manually than it is to purchase a self-driving car due to insurance costs. Transportation jobs are what, 3 million jobs in the US? In the whole world, that's maybe about 70 million people. Those jobs are gone. Just in the news today, I read that cabdrivers are slashing the tires of Uber drivers in France. Now imagine if all of their jobs are just gone. I'm reminded of a quote from Deus Ex: Human Revolution (a game set in a dystopic future featuring human augmentation), in which the owner of a huge human augmentation firm, David Sarif, says: "They cannot stop us. They cannot stop the future". Unions will not win. Efficiency always wins. Jobs will be slashed for the sake of efficiency for the bottom line. How are we going to replace them? You can't just say 'we'll find a way' this time because AI has the ability to replace jobs on a scale beyond what humanity has ever seen. Inevitably the lowest income jobs will begin to shrink and people will have to rely on their smarts but how are you going to get that when these poor people just lost all of their jobs? I'm not going to continue to list examples like the car example here because you should have already watched the video.
And now we get onto the scarier and more hypothetical part of the topic.
Elon Musk a while back said that AI is like 'summoning the demon'. Sam Harris and Elon Musk both got their ideas primarily from a book by Nick Bostrom called 'Superintelligence'. We're talking about general AI, AI that is able to improvise and do everything we can. The best chess AI in the world cannot write a book or figure out how to build robots, because these AI are not general AI. Imagine if we have AI that can make rapid, recursive self-improvement. This AI could reprogram itself to be smarter and iterate very quickly 24 hours a day on millions of computers. This is what Elon Musk is fearing.
Sam Harris recalls the time when he managed to talk his way into a conference held in San Juan, where the speakers there were the people closest to this kind of work. This conference was not shown to the public, but he talks about how the people in the conference were worried and hoped we could somehow pull the breaks on the development of AI even though that's hopeless.
We will surely continue to make better computers. We already know that mere matter can create intelligence, like humans. We can learn new concepts and employ them in unfamiliar context. It is possible that a machine can do the same. Computers already have superhuman memory and abilities to calculate. They also have access to most of the knowledge amassed by humans. Machines are able to work continuously and on a scale beyond humans. The road to a true general AI is far longer and harder than the layman thinks, and progress is very slow at the start and the rate of increase in improvements will increase and by the time they get to the level of a human, they will quickly overshadow us. That is what I believe, anyways.
A super intelligent machine could be capable of waging of terrestrial and cyber nature on a never-before-seen scale. How would China and Russia feel if America developed such a machine? Even if machines acted perfectly rationally, humans might not in response to such technology.
This is also assuming that machines will always obey our commands. (Who gets to make them anyways?) If machines are capable of ever-increasing improvements and it overshadows humans, who is to say that a machine that overwrites its own code already will obey us when it can already see the past, present, and future better than us? These could be extremes which we've never observed before and cannot predict.
If we achieve general AI, we probably need to give it values similar to our own, and somebody has to decide what those values actually are. General AI could acquire its own values or develop new and dangerous goals by accident or on purpose. Despite this, not developing general AI also has a cost. There are many problems in the world that need solving and if only we could have a much smarter entity to help us, perhaps they will be gone.
Here is an opposing viewpoint from a commenter on Youtube named ThirdEyeDesignz:
Evil is a human construct, and machine AI is different than human intelligence. It's natural to fear the unknown. The perception that machine AI will turn on us is largely a human projection. The main driver of human motivation is emotion. The main driver of machine motivation is protocol. I can almost guarantee that a hyper intelligent machine would see violence as unintelligent and unproductive. The reasons humans have emotion is because of millions of years of evolution. Robots have the luxury of skipping all that. It doesn't need emotions to survive, and we know that, so why would be give them the capacity to experience emotion? If robots turn on us it because we want them to. Ephemeralization is smarter than growth, and assume a hyper intelligent AI would understand this. Also, in my view, violence is a product of a lack of intelligence and problem solving skills, not an abundance of it. There's no reason to fear AI. Instead we should fear what certain interest groups may do with it.
Morality - Relative or Objective?
Nothing is right or wrong, but thinking it makes it so. - William Shakespeare
Some people are moral relativists. These people feel that we cannot tell what is right or wrong because morality is based solely upon opinions. Therefore, rape may be good or bad, there is no universal truth which shows rape is immoral. In short, there is no objective morality. Nobody can be 'correct' in their opinion of what is moral and what isn't. Some ask a question even more fundamental. It gets to the point where we arrive at a philosophical discussion that is completely removed from our day to day experiences. Some call this 'mental masturbation'.
What is good? How can you logically prove to me that suffering in the pit of despair is bad and well-being is good? Well-being is good because we deemed it so, just like how we assigned a meaning to what the word 'good' means. This means morality is relative on some fundamental level but I think this type of thinking is too fundamental and theoretical to be useful to society. Nothing can ever be proven with absolute certainty, morality is relative, blah blah blah. What matters with certainty is that people are certain enough of something to act based on their beliefs. What matters with morality is that human beings in general have many things in common and we can decide as a society what is good and what is bad.
We know the field of medicine and health is a scientific pursuit. We cannot easily describe exactly what being healthy means. We know it has something to do with not vomiting constantly. We know that sometimes strength is more important than flexibility, sometimes the other way around, and sometimes we need to make compromises in one for the other. There are ranges of answers that make sense and ranges of answers that don't make sense. What if one oddball person feels that constantly vomiting is best for optimal health and happiness? Then we have to figure out if that's truly the case. Maybe the person is deceiving himself. Maybe the person doesn't understand why everybody else prefers not to vomit and he needs to think about it more. Let's suppose the person can prove he will get a longer lifespan and more enjoyment out of life if he constantly vomits. Then, the person should constantly vomit. However, that is not a valid alternate view of medicine that is useful in any way to the rest of humanity. In the interest of making a society that works and promoting well-being and happiness, we should see constantly vomiting as a bad thing and try to avoid it.
Sam Harris takes this analogy one step further. He thinks that just as the field of medicine is a scientific pursuit, the field of morality can also be a scientific pursuit. He came up with the idea of the 'Moral Landscape', which is the name of his book about this topic. The peaks of the landscape correspond with the peak of human flourishing and well-being and happiness and the valleys as the depths of human suffering. Sam asks us to imagine 'the greatest possible misery for everyone'. This is where everybody suffers for the most they possibly can for as long as they possibly can. Morality is here to move us away from that towards the peaks of human happiness. There may be multiple peaks and multiple valleys and sometimes we may have to go down the landscape before we can go back up, and higher.
The common notion is that science tells us what is and morality tells us what we ought to do. Sam Harris argues that the same idea could be used to attack medicine. Medicine as a field assumes that we care about health. Morality as a field assumes we can about happiness and human suffering. And, all of science assumes we care about reason and evidence.
There's still no answer to why we should value happiness and human suffering in the first place. I defended this myself earlier on by saying that this is required to build human civilization but that just assumes that's a good thing. In the end, moral relativism is true, just not in a way that matters. If you disagree that we should care about human suffering, you will be outcasted, and if you act against the public's interest in happiness and avoiding suffering you will be stopped. Refer back to the case of the hypothetical person who wants to vomit continuously.
Back to Sam Harris though.
I still have problems with Sam Harris' position however. At least right now and in the foreseeable future, science won't be able to tell us what will bring about more happiness apart from what we already know. There is no way to make an objective metric for happiness and well-being. Just the brain scans we have today are insufficient. A lot of conflicts we have in the world are shades of grey and when you appeal to just brain scans for well-being and therefore morality, I just have to ask, how exactly are you going to solve these conflicts through brain scans alone? What about when freedom collides with happiness of the self and others, or person versus tribe, or a myriad of other things? Yes, reason and evidence and honest discussion is the way forward, not iron-age texts people read as the ultimate guide to the world. But this notion that science is important doesn't really address these issues, even if Sam Harris points out that our experiences of happiness and suffering are dependent upon matter which we are made of which can be studied. In principle, that is true but practically speaking it is not. I think if technology is good enough, we will invent machines that forces the brain into a never ending high, like that of cocaine - just incredible happiness, where we do nothing all day but sit there and enjoy the machine. Is that really objectively the best outcome?
Intentions still matter, of course. Why I do something tells you what I probably want to do in the future. This is Utilitarianism with a twist.
Some people think we are not in any position to attack the way women are treated in the Middle-East because of moral relativism. This is not relevant as an argument because the only way for this argument to have any weight is for it to apply to any matter regarding morality - and I bet the person making that argument wouldn't want to be that woman in the Middle East. You can't selectively use moral relativism to justify something because it's convenient.
The scare of course, is that people are too sure that their ideas of morality are objectively true and foist it upon others. Sam Harris thinks we can objectively arrive at a conclusion but I think we cannot. I do think reason and evidence is the way to do it. Sam Harris doesn't understand why people think the idea of a scientific basis for morality is frightening, because we do the same for medicine. My response is, you just have to look at history. Still, the idea that we don't know everything about morality doesn't mean we therefore don't know anything and any action is just as moral as the other.
Here's an interesting thought that Sam Harris pointed out in his book. We know that the importance of organisms depend on the possible experiences the organism has, particularly the organism's ability to experience happiness and sadness. Humans can think about and enjoy and suffer so many more things than ants, therefore we are more important than ants. We have some serviceable intuitions about this. This is why we can crush a bug without too much remorse but killing a dog feels more cruel and inhumane. What I am saying is that one human is more important than one of any other animal on the planet. Once we're dealing with one human versus many, many animals it becomes foggier. For example, Sam Harris feels that he cannot justify eating meat. Now, suppose there exists an organism that looks at us the same way we look at ants. This organism has a much greater range of experiences and knows, suffers, and enjoys more than we can ever imagine. Then this organism is more important than us. It's disconcerting but as far as I can tell, true.
I leave you with a video by Dean Leysen. I poked him about this topic two years ago and I am just now finally able to come to a solidified stance and write down my thoughts coherently. Agree or disagree I think it's worth a watch.
Islam, Middle East, American Imperialism, and Criticism
Democracy was supposed to champion free speech, and yet the simple rules of table decorum could clamp down on the rights their forefathers had fought and died for. - E.A. Bucchianeri
This is definitely the most touchy subject out of all the subjects here and this is a subject I really cannot fully cover or even comprehend in the space of this part of the blog post or the time it takes to write this blog post. Still, I feel like I could offer some decent level of commentary.
Sam Harris attributes the violence in the Middle East as primarily religious. I think the majority of flak Sam Harris takes is from this one issue, surprisingly enough. Everybody discussing the situation knows that Islam is false but that's not where the controversy lies. I'm talking about some pretty serious grief here. There is a lunatic or two plagiarizing people yelling at him, Ben Affleck raging on Bill Maher's show, Reza Aslan and Sam Harris being major rivals with respect to religion, and Salon allowing people to post shitty articles about him. I might sound like I'm defending Sam Harris from every criticism he gets, but going on Salon and calling people 'douchebags' doesn't fly in terms of journalism. You can't just label everybody an Islamophobe and be done with it.
This was discussed in an interview with TYT's Cenk Uygur and Sam Harris. Sam feels that people who are obviously defaming and misrepresenting his views should not get air time on his show. He talks about the Salon and how he contacted the administrators of Salon asking them to take down the defamatory articles about him. The admins responded by saying 'This is the Salon, we welcome all opinions, why don't you write an article defending your position?' To which Sam Harris responds: 'So first you take away my credibility by allowing these untrue articles to be published, and now you want to rob me of my time, to write for you for free explaining how I'm not an Islamophobe and sexist and racist for free?' It is so much harder to defend yourself from accusations of racism, for example, that it is to attack somebody, so defending yourself with multiple defamation of character from multiple people is very hard to clean up.
And some of his critics are batshit insane, like CJ Werleman, a serial plagiarist and actual all-around douchebag. People have short attention spans. So if you have a TYT video where a guy comes on and misrepresents the view of another person, even if the victim comes onto the show later on to defend himself, the damage is by no means undone because the chances that people will watch both videos is very slim. Sam Harris talks a while about how political correctness has run amok in our discussions in America. Online journalists get paid based on the amount of clicks they get, not the merit of their content. Social media forces people to write in short sentences, summarizing viewpoints into less than 150 characters. The fact that people try to have a conversation on Twitter blows my mind.
We're talking about Reza Aslan, who called Sam Harris a genocidal, fascist maniac. These guys are fucking INSANE. But for the most part we are talking about secular public figures attack Sam Harris on this issue, using ridiculous language with a large following.
I keep talking about the criticism Sam Harris is facing because as he mentioned later on, it touches on other issues apart from the actual problems in the Middle East: Retarded journalism, deliberate misrepresentation of views, and extreme political correctness. If you say that we want freedom of speech and of religion, people agree, but when you say that the Muslim world in the Middle East lack those things, people get angry. A famous discussion on Bill Maher's show was between Ben Affleck and Sam Harris. For some reason, Ben Affleck just had this incredible animosity against Sam Harris from the get go, it was kind of strange to watch. He has temper problems. I don't understand why people can't just calm down and talk about stuff like a normal human being.
Islam is not a race. It's actually spread all over the world, so it's not even close to being any one race. Islam is a set of beliefs. There are of course, people who blatantly hate Muslims and think attacking your random Muslim down the street is a good idea. The opposite is also true, there are also loonies that believe radical Muslims are just victims of American imperialism and the terrorism from ISIS for example is simply a product of our own making and therefore, our fault.
Now, if I am scared by every Muslim I meet, then there would be something wrong with me. But I'm not. I live in America and the chance of meeting a radical Muslim that is actually willing to attack me physically is pretty low. I feel safe here. Criticizing Islam is like criticizing Communism, yet nobody will call anybody else a racist for criticizing Communism, Criticizing the view of some people is not intolerance towards all Muslims.
Skavau on reddit points out:
The problem here is that people think there are simply two types of Muslims:
"Moderate" and "Extremist" with a big dividing line that neatly separates their beliefs and their values. The "Moderates" are supposedly liberal, cosmopolitan, secular, etc whereas all the "Extremists" are all theocrats, reactionaries, nihilists etc. No such division has ever been apparent to me.
A worrying chunk of Muslims, even in the West do hold ugly and outdated views on Homosexuals, Apostates and hold incredible contempt and hatred towards people who even criticise Islam.
Another point brought up by TheDebatheist: We've all come across a few nice, polite Muslims at one point or another. Then you see horrific acts in the news, and you draw this line between moderate and extremist Muslim and simply proclaim that Islam does not impact a person's ability to be a good person. This is a blase, lazy, and naive approach to look at the problem. Few people realize what's actually taught in the Q'uran. We need to look at core beliefs in the doctrine. There are seemingly tolerant and progressive religious people that, when push comes to shove and they're given anonymity to express their beliefs, reveal intolerant beliefs. Tearing at Islam is like tearing at Democrats, Republicans, etc. It really is possible to hate the idea and not the person.
According to various polls, we have some interesting beliefs by Muslims throughout the world. 78% of Muslims thought that the publishers of the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed should be prosecuted, for example. (Note that this figure only applies to British Muslims.) Here is a link to a large study from Pew with a lot of polls about the beliefs of Muslims:
In there it states that 86% of Malaysian Muslims and 72% of Indonesian Muslims support Sharia Law. While those Muslims probably mostly have a watered down idea of what Sharia Law could be, it shows that these people don't believe in separation of church and state.
Make no mistake: I see that Islam is believed by people of many different countries, each geographical area having somewhat similar ideas about a variety of topics compared to Muslims from another area. For example, according to the link I posted on page 92, about 83% of Muslims in southeastern Europe believe that women should have the right to decide whether to wear a veil. ~73% in central Asia, 78% in south Asia, ~52% in the Middle East, and ~36% in sub-Saharan Africa. Flip to the next page: About 47% of Muslims in SE Europe believe a wife should always obey her husband. And every other location averages about 80%. Now please note that these are estimates of percentage of people who believe a certain thing in each country, and I'm just averaging the data here. I'm not doing a head count and adjusting my numbers based upon the population of each country in question. But you get the point.
When Sam Harris said that 'Islam is all fringe', this is what he is saying: An unexpectedly high percentage of people claim to have these weird beliefs when they answer polls in anonymity. Many Muslims condemn ISIS, but they themselves hold beliefs that are troubling. You can't base your idea of what Muslims are all like based upon your own experiences with a few Muslims you personally know, you have to look at the data. The argument made about people who leave their country to join ISIS is that these are crazy men looking for glory. Sam Harris feels that this is not likely. What would drive somebody to leave their country to decapitate workers and journalists? I'm a little more iffy on this myself. I think it's very plausible to join ISIS and not have to go out and decapitate people, but then again, I really doubt the life of an ISIS member is all that pleasant to begin with. But once again, then again, people join gangs know thing this.
Post-show on Real Time with Bill Maher, Sam Harris and the others continue to duke it out on the issue. Kristof mentions that the popular hashtag #NotInOurName was a movement to attack extreme Muslims. The response was that burning of the Koran on the show would lead to riots and possible credible threats of death, yet ISIS goes out and crucifies people, buries children alive, and rapes and tortures women by the thousands in the name of Islam, and the response is a few small demonstrations in Europe and a hashtag.
It is true that in the American media we are more sensitive to Muslims committing acts of terror compared to Christians doing the same thing, probably because most people in America are Christians and Muslims seem foreign and ISIS is a large group of terrorists that don't have a direct counterpart in the Christian world today. This is why I think a more statistical approach to acts of terror helps us put everything in perspective, so we can just appeal to numbers instead of emotions. There seems to only be coverage about the brutal killings of ISIS, little on the actual numbers relative to other statistics, and no coverage about other Muslims who have risen up to speak against ISIS. I think it would do far more good than harm to prop these Muslims up and give them a microphone so they can condemn any version of Islam that is harmful to others. But the fact that those who speak up on Islam do so boldly because they risk their lives points back to the fact that such an act shouldn't even be dangerous to begin with. Still, let secularists and moderate Muslim leaders shame people away from Muslim extremism... if that is possible. One last thing on this topic: terrorists inside the US may have killed more than terrorists outside the US, but there's a difference there. The terrorists inside US do more damage because they're already inside the US. If we're just going to look at deaths in America, then ISIS is pretty good. But they're not good because they're wreaking havoc elsewhere. We're on higher alert for ISIS because they are a stronger enemy.
On the other side of the coin, there are people who are so mired by political correctness, they complain about the content of the cartoons from the Danish cartoonist as if somehow that justifies the taking of his life. If you don't want to offend others and cause your own death, just don't post cartoons against Islam! No, that's the wrong way to go about it. We should defend the right to free speech and every single newspaper on earth ought to broadcast the cartoon to show that we do not cower to religious intimidation. Thankfully, the general public easily understands that what was done was wrong, full stop. Yet, we have Barack Obama claiming that ISIS is not tied to Islam because 'no religion condones the killing of innocents'. My mind is blown. I thought the Left is supposed to stand firmly on the issue of civil rights and societal freedoms? It seems a lot of the Left are now not only silent on Islam, but defending it.
It is true that religion can be so wishy washy when adopted by some people, where it can essentially be used to justify anything. But I am saying that religion is a factor in the problems brewing in the Middle East. Imagine if we can have an honest dialogue about the logical fallacies of Islam and its less palatable views. Even the terrorists who use Islam as a cover without actually believing in it now have no other cover and the terrorists that were terrorists because of religious ideology are now against the terrorists who simply want to kill people. If only we could, as I said, have an honest dialogue with more devout and kooky Muslims and they could be swayed by reason and evidence, the world would be a better place. If there is no religion, all of a sudden ISIS would have more enemies, and whoever opposed ISIS before now oppose ISIS with even greater fervor.
Cenk Uygur would argue that the fringe beliefs of Muslims stem from American imperialism, that in the past America has killed many civilians and committed acts of war for only our interests. And this lack of trust makes dialogue harder and drivers those Muslims to feel powerless and resort to extreme beliefs in religion, to conquer to feel mighty against the Americans. And honestly, I do buy into his argument as well.
In fact, I think Cenk and Sam both have good points. Neither of them are completely right. I think Sam Harris is right that there is a worryingly high number of Muslims to say they believe in Sharia Law, for example. But I also think America has done things to aggravate Muslims and just people in general. Sam Harris looks at American interference as a positive every time and I disagree. I think Cenk puts too little emphasis on the impact of religion on terrorism and I think Sam over emphasizes it.
Ok, so let me expand on Sam Harris' ideas about American interference. He believes that America has good intentions when entering conflicts. If George Bush had the perfect weapon that can wipe out terrorists with zero collateral damage, he would use it to take out the terrorists and turn the Middle East into something akin to Nebraska. Intentions matter because it tells us what we are likely to do in the future. This is the root of the disagreement between Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky. Noam, in case you didn't know, is another public intellectual that has written countless books. He has a very negative view about American interference and proves his case through body count.
I think Noam is more right than Sam is. Intentions matter, correct. But the talk about a hypothetical 'perfect weapon' is just a mental exercise because such a weapon will never exist. Collateral damage is accepted by those going to war but there are different ways to minimize them. Pulling out the drones and bombing whoever you think is bad might be a bad idea. Every regime on the planet thinks they are the good guys. The Nazis thought they were the good guys, they just had extreme and immoral beliefs. Body count matters because it's an objective and track-able criteria and it directly relates to the harm that we are doing abroad. Sure, if ISIS had nukes they would screw up the world many times worse than America, but they don't. ISIS is still weak, so they make their point through graphic killings. America is strong, and they have bigger guns, so when they fire, more people die, good or bad. Just repeating that 'America has good intentions' doesn't cut with when there are people lying on the floor. If I drove drunk and didn't intend to kill people and I do, are my good intentions good enough to get me out of trouble? There is more than one way to engage the enemy and we can't just plead ignorance about our collateral damage. Here I feel that Sam Harris is unreasonably supportive of the idea of American exceptionalism when he says that America has more 'moral wealth'.
It's not to say that we shouldn't ever intervene with foreign affairs. Do we just let ISIS run around unopposed so they can get stronger? On the other hand, America's foreign policy isn't based on morality, it's based on self interest. We turn a blind eye on people who we find useful, and we arm them, until they become more trouble than they are worth. I'm not going to expand upon this point because I don't think I'm ready to talk about this issue with any level of competence. Perhaps I will pick this subject back up in the future.
And a derail of the current topic here... Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky never debated publicly because they couldn't manage to get along. Noam was a worse offender than Sam, but still. So now we end up with a lot of armchair experts making points on Youtube comments which neither Sam nor Noam will address, which is a tragedy. We have lost an important debate over the fact that people can't get along.
Anyways: The question is, what the hell do we do in terms of policy? This is why I don't get into politics: I don't think I am qualified. There is so much history and small details and such which can be relevant to making a decision in terms of policy. Figuring out that some shit has gone wrong is easy. Figuring out how to solve it is hard.
So, what exactly are you going to do? Sam Harris in his interview with Cenk Uygur mentions a few things. One of them is to be smart with your profiling at the airport. He argues that in trying to appear politically correct, we are endangering lives. We have 10 dollars' worth of attention to spend on checking out and vetting each person that goes onto a plane. Are you going to check a lady in flip flops on the phone talking to their husband about their trip from Arizona? Probably not. There are many cues that arouse suspicion and we shouldn't forcibly give everybody the same security simply because it appears fair. Cenk argued that this will just contribute further to us vs them mentality between Muslims and other Americans, causing frustration, doing more harm than good. I want to say that the people who would react as Cenk feared behave irrationally, so screw what they think. But then again, suicide bombers themselves are irrational. So, I don't know. But I think it is an interesting idea.
Sam Harris also talks about torture. He argues that torture not working because the subject makes up stuff is a PC myth. He argues that in bad enough circumstances, we must stoop lower to get the job done. As far as I know, torture is shaping up to be as good of a source intel as NSA's mass surveillance program. Doesn't work. When did it ever work on these extreme Muslims? They came in knowing the consequences of getting captured. Some of they were ready to kill themselves. These are not normal people who would bow down against pressure readily. And when you get the wrong guy you're bound to get wrong info because the guy doesn't know the right info, like the guy we tortured into saying Iraq had nuclear weapons. ISIS is not THAT big of a threat to the world right now, at least for first world countries. Clearly the US doesn't care about what happens to others in the Middle East except when it affects us (eg, our oil getting affected, or terrorists entering America), otherwise we would be doing a very length campaign to wipe out the ISIS entirely, like a holy crusade. In terms of Americans that died from ISIS, it's very little. ISIS is a tough enemy to defeat but the casualties are still very far away. So, I feel that torture isn't even warranted because we're not even in desperate times. Cenk Uygur further argues that torture once again, causes the us vs them mentality. Sam Harris asks us what we should do if a man has the information needed to save many people and we have them in custody. Again, the question is, how do we know such a case will ever occur in actuality, instead of only inside a mental exercise?
Sam Harris also talks about nuclear weapons. Here I think Sam Harris is being contrarian for no good reason. He argues that having nuclear weapons by default means we have a first strike policy. Yes, theoretically. If we knew somebody was going to nuke us ahead of time, nuking them is on the table, ok, yes. So what? How is that relevant to fixing ISIS? Are you going to try to nuclear bomb ISIS into submission? Because, ISIS is clearly not just one target sitting in one city. And of course, there are a lot of implications in the use of nuclear weapons. What is the point of even bringing up this point?
And finally, Sam Harris argues that there are doctrinal differences in Islam compared to Christianity or Judaism that causes the differences in violence today. For example, the Bible is a long-winded and contradictory book without a clear message whereas the Koran is much shorter. Christians have tools Muslims do not, like the idea of Jesus coming down to save us from our sins, leading people to dismiss the Old Testament laws as relevant today, thinking we should just wait around for Jesus to come back and save us all. Every time the Koran lists 'kill the infidels', that increases the belief that the Koran is advocating and commanding us to actually kill the infidels. Neither Christianity nor Judaism has a straight doctrine of holy war. Mohammed was a conquering war lord while Jesus was a stoner hippie half of the time. I've yet to read the Koran, but the core of that argument might be a factor. We're not scared of Jainists coming in and killing everybody for a good reason: Murderer makes absolutely no sense in that religion, and the more radical a Jainist, the less harmful he or she is. Specific beliefs have specific consequences or so Sam would argue. If you were going to try to intimidate radical Muslims with nuclear weapons in a game a chicken, you will never win because those people actually believe there is paradise after death. But Christianity has also been very bad in the past. Is the Koran really that much worse than the Bible? I haven't made up my mind about this yet.
I would like to credit Sam Harris as I have used many of his quotes, ideas, and articles on his blog.
