bang

The big bang to be specific.  One of my favorite questions in philosophy considers the big bang: what happened before the big bang?  What was there?  What did the universe look like?  Was there one speck of matter?  Something about the scale and the absolute unattainable nature of the answer appeals to me.  In a recent over-pint chat, a friend brought up an answer to this question that I particularly enjoyed.  Before leaking his (stolen) view, we should look at some of the quirks of the question in general.

Usually when someone asks how the universe began, people answer “the big bang.”  Even the precocious little 4th and 5th graders I teach unhesitatingly answer.  Some 13.7 billion years ago something BIG happened.  A hugely concentrated clump of matter/energy spawned some quarks and stuff in some ridiculously small amount of time.  Yup, I took physics.  Luckily I don’t even really need to know what happened to think about the meaty philosophical chunks inherent in the beginning of the universe.

It appears as though we have a couple of options to consider when looking at the stretch of time before the big bang.  Either there was something…or there was nothing.  If there was something we have two further options to break it into: this something caused the big bang or there just happened to be something there…chilling.  Our intuitions give support to the claim that something had to have caused the big bang.  Just by looking around and reasoning I’m pretty confident in saying that nothing in this world happens without a cause.  Think about it.  Can you come up with a counterexample?  It’s tough.  The big bang shouldn’t violate this rule, something must have been there to cause it.  Who knows what this looked like: more matter, a giant watermelon, God?  The point is that there was something.  But that something can’t violate our rule either.  Something must have caused it.  And something must have caused it, and so on.  Forever.  Can something ever actually come from nothing?  Can anything exist forever?  Neither of these options is particularly attractive.

I hadn’t truly entertained the other option: nothing existed.  Before chatting with a physicist I was fairly convinced that everything had a cause and that causes happened in a linear fashion.  My brain tells my leg to move, my leg moves, a soccer ball comes into contact with my leg, and the ball sails wide of the goal.  Connections appear from one moment to the next.  But these causations only work in our 4-dimensional world.  Time is linear for us and that’s the only way we can perceive things.  Here’s where it gets really wacky.  The big bang is an expansion of dimensions; not only space but time as well.  Our universe almost instantly transforms from a 1-dimensional place to a 4-dimensional place.  In other words, my favorite question may not even be accurate.  Time didn’t exist before the big bang…nothing did.  (Credits to Stephen Hawking for the idea and Mckay for explaining it to me)

desire

People constantly talk about what they want, what they need, and usually how far these two desires fall from what actually takes place.   To quote the prophet Jagger: “you can’t always get what you want,” I’m sure you know the rest.  In what sense do we fail to acquire that which we want?  And in what sense can we never fail to do exactly what we want?  Before I get into the difference between those two questions, let’s talk about free will for a bit.

What do I mean when I say that I have free will?  Frequently, Americans refer to the USofA as the land of the free.  But that freedom refers particularly to the law.  We are free to act as we wish…mostly.  Free will means the ability to choose any option available.  The weight of the word available is important, I can’t simply choose to be the president but I can choose between strawberry and chocolate ice cream.  I can also choose between following the law or not.  Even when someone forces me to do something (e.g. by holding a gun to my head) I could act otherwise.  Without free will our lives seem awfully contrived.  If we can’t choose our actions everything we do depends upon something else.  We play out an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine.

For the sake of simplification I’m going to assume we have absolute free will.  That means that we truly choose in every single decision we face.  Now we can really look at what it means to “get what we want,” or not.  Whenever we choose to do something there’s a reason behind our decision.  Even if I really wanted to stay home and build a bike today I went to work so that I could make a few dollars and keep affording macchiatos and pbrs.  Since I made the decision to go to work I did exactly what I wanted.  Sure, in the moment I might long for something else, but I can’t act against the thing I actually want.

Let’s get more extreme.  If someone holds a gun to my head and forces me to do something unpleasant I still choose which option to pursue.  It is entirely within my capacity to ignore the person’s request and be shot.  But, most of us wouldn’t particularly enjoy being shot and we choose to do whatever the gunman wants.  I take into account the particulars of my situation and act based on those.  I choose the action most appealing and in my ability to choose I do exactly what I want.

We can still complain about not getting that we want.  Often our decisions are limited such that we have to opt for a somewhat unappealing choice.  It isn’t any fun…but hey.  Think of how little fun life would be if we didn’t belive in our free will.

punishment

When I think about punishment I always wonder whether it is justified.  In other words what makes a particular punishment justified?  I can lay out four necessary conditions (although I’m not sure they are sufficient):

1) Whatever action took place must have caused harm.  We often say that the action was wrong, but usually some harm took place.  If someone breaks the law without directly harming anyone we can assume that the law is in place to prevent harm (Laws are perfect).

2) The action must have been voluntary.  I shouldn’t be punished for something that I had no control over.  Obviously this condition gets messy.  What about manslaughter?  What about what I do when I’m drunk?  For now let’s ignore those complications.

3) The actor must have knowledge of the violation.  Thinking about children clarifies this condition.  We often don’t punish children when they act wrongly, and we avoid punishing them strictly due to the fact that they are naive.  Naive, but not ignorant.  If you should know something but don’t, you are still liable to be punished.

and 4) The punishment must be appropriate.  You wouldn’t put someone to death for jaywalking (would you ever, maybe I’ll write about that later) you would probably just fine them.

There’s a quick sketch of just punishment.  Look at the action, evaluate each of the conditions, and decide on the appropriate punishment.  What other complications are there?

On NPR the other day I heard a story about the impact of non-manned machines in modern warfare.  There are something like 12,000 airborne drones in use by the American military and even more ground units.  On the face of things, the development of machines to fight in place of warm bodies makes sense: fewer deaths, less money spent on medical care, etc.  It’s easy to see that the issue isn’t quite so simple, but there is one particular ethical quagmire that mechanical wars bring up.  No matter how precisely programmed and executed a machine will err.  Something will go awry and a missile that was supposed to take out a bunker misses by 300 yards and takes out 20 civilians instead.

Something went wrong, and many people were hurt.  Who do we punish?  Obviously we don’t take the machine out back and give it a talking to.  That wouldn’t accomplish the goal of punishment (another question…just what is the goal of punishment?) and furthermore we fail to comply with condition 2 of our list: the machine has no volition.  Do we punish the supervising officer?  I’m afraid that we again fail to satisfy condition 2.  Did the general really opt to kill those civilians?  Maybe he was acting negligently and something like manslaughter comes into mind.  Then we fail condition 4.  The punishment in no way aligns with the severity of the wrong.  What about the inventor?  I can hardly entertain that idea: we didn’t even think of punishing Einstein simply because his work was essential to producing the atomic bomb.  What do we do?

I’m stuck.  I think we honestly lose our capacity to adequately account for our actions if we carry out war with machines.  And that scares me.  We are already willing to throw away lives in the name of war, what won’t we be willing to do when the lives are taken out of the picture.  The other question that naturally comes to mind surrounds punishment in and of itself: we often assume that punishment is a good thing, but how exactly do we justify punishment at all?

being

After a hiatus of an unnecessary number of months, I am back among the gainfully employed.  I work with children.  Really, really, smart little buggers.  I’ve been doing math and (more importantly) philosophy with 4th and 5th graders.  At first, I scoffed at the idea that these small beings could even follow the “deep” ideas I was about to throw at them.  I seriously underestimated them.  The first day had me in front of 5 students, winging an introduction to philosophy.  Despite my apprehension, they seemed perfectly able to comprehend my bungled definitions of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and logic.  In fact, they were excited and poised to spring at whatever question I threw at them.  So, I decided to start with one of the most basic epistemological questions: how do we know that anything is real or true?  And so it began.

The most basic answer is that we can’t, á la The Matrix.  We honestly cannot know that what we perceive is real.  Our minds exude a significant amount of power.  Think about the last time you daydreamed (or dreamed) and became utterly lost in your imagination.  That sort of vision could be the only thing we perceive.  The real world could look entirely different and somehow our preceptors trick us.  Wow.  That’s kind of scary.  To think that your brain could have fabricated everything around you.  Well, my 4th and 5th graders accepted their fate with open arms.  Then they shocked me.

The next logical question is whether or not we can prove that anything exists.  The students looked at me blankly for a second then one, a 5th grade boy, shyly piped up,

“Well, I know that I exist.”

I can barely contain my excitement and ask, “How are you sure?”

“Um…well…” my excitement wanes as he spends some time forming his answer “I am having these thoughts, and I know that I’m having them, and without me they couldn’t exist so I know that at least I must exist.”

Why is that such a big deal?  I’m sure everyone has heard the quote “I think therefore, I am.”  Descartes wrote that phrase in 1637.  Without going into too much detail Descartes completely erased his pre-conceived notions of truth.  He started from scratch, and the first True conclusion he arrived upon was that he existed.  And he used essentially the same line of thinking that my 5th grader employed.  Give that kid a Ph.D.  He’s my hero.

With that anecdote out of the way, let’s philosophize for a second.  Discovering that all of our perceptions could be lies is disconcerting to say the least, but it need not propel us into a hopeless existence.  It would be easy to apply the following train of thought: 1) I don’t know that anything I do is real and  2) Even if my actions are real I cannot be certain of their outcome so 3) why bother doing anything at all?  Well, even if we can’t know our perceptions are True, does it matter?  While they may not be True in an absolute sense, i.e. as accurate representations of the world they are still true in one really important way.  We respond to them: we react to things that happen and then those things cause other things to happen in a logical fashion (usually).  In other words, these perceptions are all we have to work with, so let’s make the most of them.

zombies!

Well, my computer died recently…and is now resurrected.  That meant my blog died for a bit but lives again!  In lieu of all the re-birthings, I think zombies appropriately capture my thoughts.

I have not so recently become aware of the fact that our society slightly obsesses over zombies, the undead, or just about anything that eats brains.  Zombies have some key characteristics in pop culture representations.  They usually can’t think or learn, they eat brains, they often subscribe to intense mob mentality, they eat brains, they can infect other people, they fall apart, they eat brains, and you can only dispose of them by destroying their brain stem.  Wow, zombies sound awesome.  Why do we love them?  Spurred by the success of Night of the Living Dead (released way back in 1968 ) zombies have taken off.  Sure, we shoot them in video games, dress up like them for halloween, and scream our heads off at them during the latest zombie thriller.  What else have they got to offer?

Me too my dear reader...me too.

Apparently they are also funny.  Shaun of the Dead and Fido have proven that (I haven’t actually seen Fido, I just really want to).  Then there’s the music video for Thriller.  While not necessarily meant to be funny I think it comes across that way.  The only really sure thing is that zombies fill some sort of important cultural niche.  What is it?  Why have they become a focus?

Zombies must represent something else: they stand in for something that our culture can’t verbalize.  The first thing that comes to mind is that zombies represent us.  Or at least what we could become.  As we become more and more focused on material goods (brains) we lose ourselves and become vapid shells of our former selves. Naw…that seems too easy.

Zombies could simply represent our fear of the future.  The things we do now slowly lead to an awful apocolypse that ruins everything.  Movies that play a similar theme engage, even enamour us.  We can’t seem to look away from our eminent demise: it’s like watching that car crash, you want to look away but just can’t.  I’m not sure that’s it though, that seems a little too heavy, even for America.

I guess what I really want to know is whether zombies can represent anything good about our society.  Can there be a positive aspect of our obsession with them?  It’s pretty easy to think of ways that zombies reflect many negative parts of us, but I don’t think that gives us enough credit.  Having been dead once and coming back to some sort of life is one of the essential zombie features.  Can we see any sort of hope in this, no matter how small?

Think of our economy.  Even though I’m pretty sure I hate the fact, we just agreed (through our reps) to pay wall street 750 billion dollars.  I assume this type of action intends to ressurect the market.  The idea of zombies gives us a chance.  Sure, it may come back as a disfigured hull of itself, but its back.  And hey, maybe it wasn’t so great when it started anyway.

god=tubes

I have to dedicate this next post to my friend will freeby-fresh.  The idea is really his.  I just want to talk about it.  Will claims that the internet represents the closest approximation to god we will ever see.  Yup: internet=yhwh/allah/god/jesus/the buddha/etc.  Yes, I know that will and I are blasphemous and will probably end up in hell, but what exactly does it mean to call something god?

Without delving in the arguments of spinoza, descartes, augustine, hume, or any other number of philosophers, we can focus on a few key ingredients to the perfect god recipe.  Omniscience, omnipresence. and omnipotence seem like wonderful candidates to start with.  All of the montheistic religions I think of focus, at the very least, on these three characteristics.  Now let’s look at the internets.

They know everything.  They really do.  The amount of information easily accessible on the webospheres scares me a little bit.  Certainly no one person could ever know as much, and only an amalgam of massive proportions could even approach omniscience.  The internet doesn’t have all the answers, nor can it ever.  But wikipedia entries blossom every day and the tubes can only get closer to complete knowledge of the world.

It’s always there.  With iphones, satellite technology, and a few cities getting wi-fi’d, we can connect to the internet anywhere.  Well, almost anywhere.  I think the internet imparts omnipresence in another way (at least in the western world).  We talk about them everyday, half of the stories I tell come from the internets, we blog, we have facebook, our lives focus on them.  Independent of whether you think this is a sad realization or simply the way things are going to be, I think it is apparent the the tubes constantly present themselves.

And now the big one: omnipotence.  I hate to say it, but I may cop out.  I don’t think omnipotence is possible, it’s an inherent paradox.  I’m sure many people have heard the argument, but I’ll repeat it just to make sure we’re on the same page.  Imagine an all-powerful being, she can do anything.  There’s no puzzle too hard, no rock too heavy.  But could she create a puzzle that she couldn’t solve, or build a rock that she couldn’t lift?  If she can create such a thing, she isn’t all-powerful because she can’t solve it.  If she can’t creat such a thing then she isn’t all-powerful at all.  I’ll fight you if you disagree (not really…i just like saying that).

Alright, the internets approach both omniscience and omnipresence.  Two of the most important defining characteristics of god.  Even if they will never be perfect, they might just be the best we’ve got.  Praise the blogotubes!

fashion

Well, given the fact that I’m a self-declared hipster, fashion had to come in at some point.  I’m addicted.  It’s honestly a bit pathetic; even my bike indicates my fashion sense.  Look at it.  Blue, white, simple, sex.  Today I cames across an article titled “Skin-tight jeans back in fashion.”  Ok.  I like skinny jeans, they look cute on me and others.  Then I checked the date: this article came out a week ago, September 17th, 2008.  Unfortunately this means that my first thought was “who the hell is just jumping on the skinny jean train?”  I’ve had a pair for years and I felt a bit behind the times.  Alright, aside from my narcissistic and somewhat disturbing explanations of my own fashion knowledge, I began to wonder about the article.  Why was I so astounded and what did it meant that these skinny jeans had come back in the first place (even if the article was about 7 years late)?

Fashion’s a silly thing.  We all know how it can be.  Bell bottoms were big in…well…the ’70s.  Then in the ’90s we had “flares:” bell bottoms with a new name.  Loads (if not all) articles have a similar story.  There definitely seems to be something artificial about the whole deal.  Most people don’t make their own clothes, we buy them from some store who got them from some designer who thought that people like us would want to buy them.  And we do.  Does this mean the industry merely tells us what to like…and we eat it up?

I’m not sure it’s that simple.  Think about friends you have that are truly fashionable, or have a sense of style, or look great all the time.  We complement them, find their outfits lovely, and often ask where they got a certain piece in order to obtain it for ourselves.  While we recognize that there may be something contrived in the way designers companies manufacture fashions, most of us can’t help but enjoy them.  There’s a slight tension here.  But I like it.

I think there’s something important about recognizing when other people create something that many enjoy.  Music, art, literature…all of these categories contain a similar process.  Granted, there are people in each who simply create, without focusing on what most people will think.  This happens in fashion too.  Even though not all of us can own a Warhol or a Lichtenstein (oh how I dream…) we can obtain a velvet painting of a wolve or a unique print from a local print maker.  The same goes with fashion.  I don’t have anything made by Dolce and Gabanna, but more importantly I’m willing to wade through The Da Vinci Codes of the fashion world in order to continue to enjoy aesthetically thoughtful outfits.

satire

A couple of months before I graduated college our newspaper published an article that got them in some trouble.  The headline declared “Indians have taken over the President’s office” or something similar.  The article proceeded to articulate the ways we would have to adapt to the diverse presence of the Indians on campus.  There were some stereotypical jokes: a scalping, a pow-wow, and silly names like chief pom pom pom, but the article also made an important point.  The way the college addressed diversity issues floundered when considered in a critical light.

The college had been expousing the virtues of diversity for some time (well, after two guys showed up at a party in blackface…oops).  But the things the administration put in motion to enhance diversity/understanding/tolerance/buzzword seemed contrived.  We canceled a day of classes, a handful of students attended various talks on diversity issues, and then suddenly we have done something.  Turn this symposium into an annual event that speaks to all facets of diversity, not just racism, and we’ve really done something.  The article lambasted the fact that the college just waved their hand at diversity without enacting any real policy to elicit change.  So why did someone want the editors-in-cheif to be fired?

The article mocked Native American culture and made light of the history of the college; in short some (read: one) students deemed the article offensive.  The argument boiled down to the claim that the line between offense and satire had been crossed, by leaps and bounds.  Since I don’t have the article on hand I don’t see any point in talking about whether it offended or did its job.  I do see two interesting things to talk about here: 1) satire, by nature, is offensive and 2) given that fact why should we even continue to look at it.

A Modest Proposal and Candide quickly come to mind as examples of good satire.  If you have read either I think you will agree that they are offensive.  Swift talks about eating babies (and in the 16th century nonetheless) and Voltaire volleys attacks on religion, the military, and the state.  Satire must offend.  A piece of satire must draw you in and then shock you so much that you realize that the author must be joking.  In order to incur such intense shock the revelation must be offensive in some way.  Swift uses a visceral response, Voltaire uses a more patriotic one.  But the movement is the same, at some point I get so turned off I have to arrive at the conclusion that the author means something else.

If satire always has to be offensive, why read it and write it?  People generally avoid being offended, we teach our children to try not to offend, and get punished when we do offend someone.  Satire always attacks an issue from somewhere else.  If I present the most logical argument possible, certain reactions will take place.  The insertion of humor in satire allows for a whole new set of reations.  This new perspective often uniquely reveals the best way to prove one’s point and appeal to the most people.  Satire accesses an avenue that no other style can quite acheive.

beauty

In the last few days I’ve found myself reading poetry.  I really like the stuff.  There is something that a poem captures that other forms of art, written or not, just simply cannot grasp.  Often I can’t see that thing, I don’t really get the meaning; but I still love the work.  In other words I find myself caught in the beauty of the words on the page.  A number of questions came to my mind when I considered what made me find a specific poem beautiful, or for that matter find any particular thing beautiful.  What makes something beautiful?  How can we know that something will be beautiful to anyone else?  Does beauty exist (as Plato argues) as a form itself, does it reside intrinsically in the things we interact with or do we create and recreate the concept as we go?

I don’t plan on answering any of these questions to any degree, but how would we start?  Consider the things we consistently find beautiful: people, paintings, writing, nature, music, tastes, color, etc.  For example I find Brad Pitt and Natalie Portman extremely beautiful (unique…I know).  My friend Will Squires exudes beauty in a richer, more whole sense.  The lightning storms I’ve seen beauty me (yup…so intense I had to make it a verb).  Certain shades of blue are so incredible I want to paint everything I see.  Deep, honest laughter is one of the most beautiful things a person can do.  So what.  Those are just pretty to me.  How can we unite these things, connect them so that a concrete notion of beauty falls out?

I want to know about BEAUTY.  What is Beautiful (capital B) to everyone?  Is there anything that transcendent?  More importantly, beauty sinks itself in a mire of circular definitions.  Consider the concept of pain.  Can we define pain without refering to the effects?  Can we define beauty without refering to the fact that we are attracted to beautiful things?

Such combined perfection of form and charm of colouring as affords keen pleasure to the sense of sight.  OED

Right.  The definitions I think of boil down to the fact that something beautiful pleases us in an aesthetic sense.  This definition seems woefully inept, obvious, and missing something that allows us to actually categorize that which is beatiful before we see it.  I may have a hard time reaching such a goal, but I work hard.  Oh, beauty.  You truly are a harsh mistress.