Weltanschaung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Author: Anthony Garner

  • A Meditation on Death

    A Meditation on Death

    To witness death is a right of passage which comes to most if not all of us.  It is a sobering and undoubtedly sad experience but not, perhaps, without its redemption.  To suffer death comes, in the end, to us all.

    As children to witness death can be at its worst. God knows what it must be like for the child soldiers of Africa or the victims of genocide.

    In the last 70 years in Western Europe death for most of us has often been a more peaceful affair.  It is still deeply moving. It still provokes intense thought and wonder. It can often entail grief and great sadness.  But at least death in the West, whether from disease or old age, has mostly been decoupled from the senseless brutality of meaningless violence.

    For the scientist, birth is a coming together of atoms in a collection which results in consciousness. Death is the mere redistribution of those atoms back to where they came from – the world and universe all around us.

    For the religious there can be comfort in death – the existence of an immortal soul, the promise of a resurrection or a heaven. When Marx referred to religion as opiate he was in some senses very accurate. It can give comfort and strength in the extreme to the true believer.

    To the rest of us it is perhaps down to developing our own philosophy – our own view of how and why conscious life comes and goes. Or perhaps for some of us the realisation that there is no “why” just “how”.

    And the “how” can itself give a comfort and great beauty – the sheer wonder of the natural world. The endless cycles of birth and rebirth, of the planets round a sun, of the beauty of the seasons.  Of the birth and death of planets and suns and galaxies. The endless dance. The coming and going of the very universe itself.

    To have lived a good life is all that matters in the end.  A life where, if you did not manage to achieve great good, you at least did no great harm. A life where you gave and received love.  A life of the little things. The joy of children, the wisdom of later life.  The beauty you saw around you and the contribution you made to the dance.

  • We are all so Sinful

    We are all so Sinful

    If there is one thing I can not stand it is a clergyman (in that mournful oh so serious and pious voice) telling us we are all so sinful and not worthy to so much as lick the ground on which (-” insert relevant deity” -) walks.

    I don’t know what the right word is really. Unctuous perhaps. Goody Two Shoes. I’m a Christian and you are not coz you are SO sinful and bad. Uriah Heep from David Copperfield:  his cloying humility, obsequiousness, and insincerity.  Mr Obadiah Slope from Barchester Towers. Well to be fair the hushed whisper of the pious is probably actually pretty sincere in many cases.

    Nonetheless I deeply resent being told I am sinful and there is no health in me.  I didn’t ask to be born and I struggle along in a world so ghastly that their god must have been either incompetent or malignant or perhaps both when he threw it all together.

    I can’t help it that there are countless billions without food or shelter or countless other billions ripping each other’s throats out and removing each other’s bodily extremities for fun.  It just ain’t my fault; I don’t want it to happen, I feel very sad indeed for said countless billions but I’m damned if I’m going to be accused of being sinful.  I’m not. Well, mostly not anyway….

    If anyone is sinful it is the clergyman’s absurd deity for messing it all up in the first place. And since he is apparently omnipotent and omniscient he must also be a pretty rotten cad for doing absolutely bug**r all about all this over the 500m years when he first decided to let us evolve.

    Yes, I love the architecture, the art and the music. It really does do something ineffable for me. But preferably without the sermon thanks.

  • Racism

    Racism

    Racism is most often and probably correctly thought of as a modern phenomenon.  It is not that it has not existed in ages past – simply that it is now criminalised and socially unacceptable.  We live in an age of political correctness.

    While not acceptable, racism is nonetheless explicable and must be seen in context.  It must be viewed in an historical and anthropological framework if we are to make any sense of it.

    We tend to think of racism as black versus white hatred, we tend to think in terms of skin colour and ethnicity.

    Racism was a normal and everyday occurence in the not so distant past. In the days of empire terms such as “wog”, “slope” and “nigger” were commonplace and in the 19th century well through to the 20th white western europeans and americans would routinely look down on and despise people they considered as mere savages.

    But it was always a two way street. The “looked down upon” would often feel mutual hatred and loathing of the white colonialists.  Not without cause perhaps.

    In 1986 I was living in Tokyo and had a white English male friend who had a local Japanese girlfriend.  Her parents considered my friend “white trash” – racism always cuts both ways. In the East we were “gweilo” (“foreign devil” ) and “gaijin” ( “outside person”, “alien”, “Non-Japanese”).  Both term have a history of racially deprecatory use.  We were (and probably still are) called “roundeyes” (a derogatory, ethnic slur).

    Today’s Guardian Reader would not of course see the argument, but racism occurs when tribe meets tribe. Especially when one tribe is seen as the invader.

    Racism in current Britain is explicable by a feeling of panic amongst the locals that their territory and way of life is being taken over.  Tribalism, territorial rights, fear of the outsider: it is all perfectly explicable.  Again and as usual it is Darwinian, a perceived (or perhaps real) struggle for survival.

    What is not at all easy is how to manage or overcome it. As I have argued elsewhere, nobody “owns” planet earth.  Land ownership is an absurdity when you think about it: why should a single owner or “nation” have the right to exclude anybody from any section of spaceship earth? We all need air to breathe and land upon which to build shelter and grow our crops.

    We live on a grossly overcrowded planet and population control (voluntary!) might help. But it would not cure narrow tribalism. That will only be cured by education and understanding and the eradication of vast gaps between rich and poor. A more equal and understanding society may emerge if our economies become more aimed towards co-operation and mutual help rather than aggressive asset accumulation and greed.

    Above all it would be nice to eradicate hatred and violence from the dictionary. But don’t hold your breath; and we are all, collectively, to blame.

  • The Existence of Evil

    The Existence of Evil

    Evil cannot exist without consciousness and free will.

    Imagine a universe without consciousness. Our own universe by way of example but with no life forms with the gift of consciousness. There would be great violence of course: supernovae, asteroids pummeling planets, volcanoes, tsunamis….and Big Bangs.

    But none of that would affect any “body”. None of that violence would be evil since evil must surely show intentionality. And if there were no conscious entity in the universe there could be no intentionality.  No one who deliberately does horrible things to another. And inert matter can not perpetrate or suffer an evil act: however violent a physical reaction may be, if it has no intention of causing harm to a conscious entity which can experience that harm, then evil can not occur.

    Equally there must be conscious beings whose subjective experiences are those of pain and suffering, physical or mental, for evil to exist.  There must surely exist a victim, a subject for an evil to act upon..

    The question becomes a great deal more complex when one factors in the existence (or not) of free will.

    Leaving aside the endless religious nonsense which has clouded the subject for millennia, the question of free will boils down, ultimately, to physics.

    Most physicists are determinists of one sort of another.  Steven Hawkins was convinced humanity are mere robots with no free will. Chemical scum as another enthusiastic optimist called us.

    Strict determinism means that physical cause and effect govern everything from the orbit of the earth round the sun to wars and human history. Using such laws, physicists believe they have traced back our origins back to the singularity of the big bang and forward to the big whimper, the petering out of energy and matter. Atom hits atom in endless Newtonian cause and effect and in such a world free will is an illusion.

    We may believe we have decided to cosh our neighbour over the head with a steel mace but in fact we had no choice in the matter.  Our atoms did it.

    To add to the confusion many physicists also claim that time is an illusion. Without time there can be no change. Without change what evil act or thought could arise?

    So there you have it. Or rather you don’t. The existence of evil is not a simple question..

  • Anger – an Evolutionary Curse

    Anger – an Evolutionary Curse

    Anger is an invention of the selfish gene, an evolutionary tool for the survival of the fittest.  Strength, fitness and anger – what better to equip the human genome to survive and prosper in the hideous brutality of nature.

    Anger is an emotion, a subjective experience, a “quale” and something which any student of consciousness must by definition take an interest in.

    I have noticed increasing anger and bitterness in myself over the past few years; it has become very noticeably expressed in my writing. But better “expressed” than “repressed”.

    While it sometimes seems to me that my anger has external causes at a deeper level I know that it does not. I have no reason to be angry or bitter. Born into a prosperous, upper middle class British family and expensively educated by famous names I was given everything a child could expect.

    And my inglorious career began at one of the City of London’s best known institutions and was continued at one of Basel’s.

    And yet there was always anger. I like to think the anger was not and is not my fault and yet I know I must not shirk all responsibility.

    As heart it’s mostly about nature and nurture but you certainly have some freedom to alter your own behaviour (unless you believe in strict determinism, which of course is not without its adherents).

    Why does this post belong in “Science”? Because I am devoting much of my time to studying consciousness and have come to believe that humanity can and will be saved from brutality and misery by science and science alone. I want to be a part of that scientific endeavour, even if at a philosophical level only.

    I know that anger and bitterness should be controlled; it is destructive and pointless in the modern age. It belongs to animals and cavemen.

    If I could choose not to be angry I would.  And I believe one day that choice will be possible and easily achieved. In the meantime it requires steely self control and awareness and even then can only be partly contained in some of us.

  • Sibling Bitterness

    Sibling Bitterness

    Why is it that siblings often fall out in such a bitter fashion on the death of parents? Is it a petty dispute over the will? Or is it something deeper?

    For many years a given family of siblings may rally round their parents. As children and adolescents this is usually a matter of physical or economic necessity – unlike most of the animal kingdom human children take many years to fledge.

    As young and middle aged adults the sibling relationship may trog along quite reasonably although at this stage tensions may start to appear as the siblings develop their own relationships and bear their own children.

    The novelty of the newborn and the pleasure they give to the grandparents may heal and unify any rifts which appear in the family unity at this stage. Novelty and young children are a fine glue and many species have evolved to find attraction in the faces and gamboling antics of the young.

    But as life wears on cracks appear in the sibling relationships. Cracks may also appear in the individual lives of the siblings. Their own marital relationships may be problematic. Their children will give them the normal worries of any parent. They will face career difficulties, financial problems, health scares. None of these need necessarily destroy the original family bonding.

    But then the siblings’ parents age to the extent that they, the parents, reach a second childhood and become a burden rather than a support.  Siblings worry and squabble over what to do about the aged and now infirm parents: will their money see them through, who will look after them, will the family home have to be sold?

    By now petty jealousies and rivalries may well have developed between the siblings.  One sibling may envy the life of another, the possessions, the health, the happiness or whatever.  The storm clouds form.

    Inevitably one sibling will play a bigger role in the care of the aged parents than the others. In a well balanced and loving family this may end well – that sibling might be praised and offered just reward for some years of sacrifice and difficulty.

    In other families the eventual death  of the parents leads not to a celebration of lives well lived but to a bitter and vicious squabble over the will.

    A sister (one of five siblings) and her husband and children spend seven long years catering to the every need of a mother with increasingly severe dementia and an increasingly crippled and mentally frail father.  There was no cash to pay them for the full time job, so they were promised reward on death.

    And on the death of the last parent all hell breaks loose.  Two of the siblings accuse the carer of theft – undocumented and totally spurious. The motive for the accusations remains unclear but some long seated jealousy or sibling rivalry seems certain. A third sibling gets involved in purchasing a part of the parental home while the caring family retain the other part in recompense for their effort.

    And boom! Suddenly even that sibling turns on the carer when it comes to “negotiating” financial and physical details of the property division.

    The original parents were not easy people. A father with lifelong depression or bi-polar disorder, a mother who struggled with insecurity, a waspish tongue and, perhaps, fear.  Certainly it was not an easy life for them with five children to raise.

    A life of dispute, back biting, jealousy and unpleasantness trickles down through the generations. Is it genetics or life’s circumstances? Nature or nurture? Who knows.

    How glorious to be a human.

     

  • The Salesman

    The Salesman

    Is the “salesman” grubby and embarrassing by definition?  Are they all oily, bumptious and crooked? From the seller of second hand cars to to those who peddle rugs are they all tarred with the same brush? Insincere and self important, is the salesman is out to short change you?  Are they all name dropping two faced asses?

    No, I don’t think they are but when you come across a bumptious fool and one of the bad ones, get out of his way swiftly, run quietly home and lock the door.

    Both characters were fairly harmless by comparison with some examples one may have to deal with.  Salesmen and charlatans (all too often interchangeable terms it seems) have been with us down the ages.

    One could forgive them if they were merely trying to do an honest day’s work (and most of them surely are).  But sometimes you are plagued by a salesman who is so truly awful he gives the entire “profession” a dirty name.

    He will claim that black is white, he will lie until he is blue in the face. He will be so full of bullshit and sheer arrogant nonsense that even he has difficulty taking himself seriously.  He will take a few terms of art pertaining to professions in which he has never qualified, mix them all up in meaningless, mangled sentences and try to convince you he is right and you are wrong.

    All the while dropping names of the great and the good to whom he has recently paid homage (or, in his dreams, they to him perhaps).

    The most important things in his life will be trips in private jets, helicopters and yachts and he will worship famous names be they politicians or “bizniss men”, showbiz or royalty.  He will bask in reflected glory.

    If that were all he did he might be forgiven.  But he can be out to swindle and put down all around him.

    The vast majority of salesmen do a good job and an honest day’s work.  But if you come across the sort of fool I have been describing, then run and don’t look back. Whatever else you may do, do not engage him in conversation.

  • Why Write a Blog

    Why Write a Blog

    I write because I enjoy writing and to educate myself.  It helps my own understanding of my cranky pet subjects as I try to convey my enthusiasms to my non-existent audience.

    It is highly probable that I will never make a cent out of it but then I find commerce, salesmen and “busy-ness” so indescribably sordid I’m not sure I care. Especially at my age.  Sure, it would be nice to generate some revenue – nothing wrong with that. But advertising and aggressively pushing product is somehow so utterly vulgar and distasteful.

    So I have taken a different course.  If there are books or films I have read and enjoyed I feel no guilt or embarrassment about adding a link to Amazon.com but I certainly don’t want to promote any old tat or to cover my blog with vulgar and thoroughly irritating commerce.

    Equally I feel pretty ambivalent on choosing content for an “audience”:  I will write exactly what I want to write, no more no less. If anybody wants to read it, fine. If they do not – well that’s equally fine. I do not imagine there are hordes of the faithful wishing to hear my cranky and often rather obscure or bad tempered thoughts.

    Self education and self awareness are an important part of it for me. I have been searching for answers to difficult questions my entire life and those answers will come, if at all, by a relentless and dedicated search for truths.

    I am aware that I very often get carried away by what I can only describe as mysticism.  I get carried away by a feeling of awe when I finally understand harmony, or meditate on a mountain or in a lonely Norman Church.

    But my awe is not a religious one. Yes, in a broad sense it is certainly spiritual but not in the sense of some religious nutter or new age fanatic. I would indeed love to hear the voice of god but my god is a very different one. Awe and wonder are to be found in excess in the natural physical world and I believe the universe is strange and wonderful enough without the need to imagine forces any more mysterious than we can discover by rational scientific enquiry.

    Those forces are numinous enough and it is my strongly held conviction that conscious beings will eventually achieve powers and knowledge which would make them godlike anyway.

    So yes, I am writing about subjects which interest me and its largely “scientific” enquiry by an ignorant laymen into the wonders of the universe.  If that sounds arrogant and intolerant – well it probably is. At heart I’m a grumpy old hermit who has lost any desire to “fit in” with what most people would call “normality”.

     

  • A Secular Epiphany

    A Secular Epiphany

    A Beautiful Question

    Epiphany is usually thought of as the appearance or utterance of a deity to an earthbound mortal but it can equally be a secular phenomena, where one is suddenly struck by some extreme beauty, truth or revelation.

    The beautiful illumination above from Liber Scivias shows Hildegard of Bingen receiving a vision, dictating to her scribe and sketching on a wax tablet.  A classic religious revelation or epiphany.

    We modern Brits in 21st Century London don’t tend to get many religious epiphanies these days but secular epiphanies can inspire equal awe. The illustration below shows Archimede’s Eureka moment: a secular epiphany.  My morning was graced by such a moment; I know how he felt.

    Let me explain. I am engaged in research into the nature of consciousness and have been particularly taken by the approach of the Qualia Research Institute.

    Their hypothesis is that qualia (subjective, conscious experiences such as pleasure or anxiety) can be formalised.  That such experiences can be categorised, precisely described, mapped and explained. In particular they are looking at the pain/pleasure valence and believe that pleasure is caused by harmony or symmetry in the state of the brain. Pain is caused by the opposite: dissonance.  They intend to quantify qualia and believe qualia have mathematical isomorphisms.  It’s all part of our homeostatic control mechanism.

    They recommend Franc Wilczek’s book A Beautiful Question :

    A Nobel laureate and friend of Tegmark, Wilczek asks the question, “Does the world embody beautiful ideas?” and proceeds to explore how looking for beauty & symmetry in the laws of nature has been an extraordinarily successful strategy for physicists. Core takeaway: the Symmetry Theory of Valence is a reasonable extrapolation from the past trajectory of physics.

    I dutifully bought the book and was stunned by the lucidity of a chapter headed “Pythagoras II: Number and Harmony”.

    I have been engaged in classical choral music since childhood and have tried in vain to gain an academic intuition of harmony as well as an understanding of WHY music gives me such intense pleasure.

    Suddenly this morning all appeared to be revealed. It was a Eureka moment.

    The book explains the physical processes involved in the production, transmission and reception of harmonic sound and then ventures an explanation as to why such notes sound so good together.

    The brain receives a repetitive pattern which is predictable and easy to interpret: accurate prediction is essential for human survival.  Success in prediction of the repeating vibrations of the harmony has to be rewarded by the higher functions of the brain as pleasure so that the lower operative brain functions know they have got the task right.

    Discordance and dissonance is not repetitive and predictive and is thus discouraged with a feedback of pain or displeasure.  Its an evolutionary argument: the familiar selfish genes.

    And thus argues the Qualia Research Institute: pain is dissonance and disharmony in brain patterns; pleasure is harmony and symmetry in the brain.

    It’s a theory.  But the intuitive “rightness” struck a sweet chord in my mammalian brain. I was being rewarded for getting something right perhaps.

    So, a secular epiphany. An enjoyable and profound revelation, or thus it seemed.

     

     

     

  • New Age Quackery?

    New Age Quackery?

    The New Age movement is a range of spiritual beliefs and superstitions.  Quite often practitioners take a pinch of science and concoct a pseudoscience of fantastical absurdity.  Sadly, practitioners often include one time scientists.

    Such characters have abandoned the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses in favour of quasi religious dogma and ranting mumbo jumbo.  They borrow catch phrases from quantum mechanics or cosmology and twist them into farcical support for their own deluded and untestable product.

    You come across New Agers everywhere and I suspect they consist of the gullible on the one hand and salesmen on the other.  Of course it is always possible that the salesman is a true believer in his own magic but one has to assume that this may be the exception?

    I was watching a video supposedly on consciousness – a lecture given by a man billed as a leading physicist – John Hagelin.  I enjoyed his lucid explanation of physics for the non-scientist but began smelling a rat when he started to compare string theory to meditative trance.  One apparently represents the most basic level of nature and the other (he said) the mind; and apparently they are equivalent.  The guy sounded rather eccentric and on further investigation it turned out he was deeply involved in Transcendental Meditation.

    According to Wikipedia:

    In his book, Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and The Search for Unity In Physical Law (2007), the physicist Peter Woit wrote that identification of a unified field of consciousness with a unified field of superstring theory was wishful thinking, and that “virtually every theoretical physicist in the world rejects all of this as nonsense and the work of a crackpot”.

    But there again maybe Mr Hagelin (a) is correct and / or (b) firmly believes and practices what he preaches.

    Deepak Chopra was once a qualified medical doctor but decided instead to push new age videos, books and pseudo religious jargon.  Worthy scientist Richard Dawkins has said that Chopra uses “quantum jargon as plausible-sounding hocus pocus”.  He is placed by oncologist David Gorski among the “quacks”, “cranks” and “purveyors of woo”, and described as “arrogantly obstinate”.

    Discussing this with a rational, well educated and pleasant electro mechanical engineer this morning brought forth a different view.  My friend believes that there is a place for New Age “belief” because of the paucity of what is on offer elsewhere from medicine or traditional religion. In his view, such quackery makes a lot of people happy and is therefore excusable and beneficial. If I understood him correctly.

    So I guess the argument is that New Age quackery is a harmless placebo which can actually make some people’s lives better. And if it does improves live then I am glad of that. Personally it irritates me to death (as do its awful salesmen) but in a vale of tears perhaps any handkerchief ought to be welcomed.