Personal afterlife

I tend to suspect the Hindus and Buddhists are closer to reality when it comes to an afterlife than the Western teachings.   My main problem with the western view is that it is all or nothing -- one fewer sin and it's heaven; one less and its hell -- forever.  Makes no sense at all.

Of course being reborn doesn't do one much good either -- you are dead -- the new baby has to deal with your bad karma or is lucky if it is good.

The thing is, we are sentient -- we are minds.  The mind is not the brain or any other part of our body, but somehow a product of our life -- largely our brain.  This is something science cannot answer.  They can point out that certain regions of the brain or certain chemicals lead to certain mental experiences, but what is the link?  That is the "hard problem." 

So the universe is space/time, energy, mind.  Not much mind in whatever manifestation of existence we are in, as far as we can tell with today's knowledge, but just as we really cannot pin down the nature of space/time nor the nature of energy (we can measure them and make predictions a lot of the time, but we have no hint of their essence) I would say as much about mind.

There is little in this speculation, though, that would lead us to think there is a personal afterlife.

Pantheism

I have pretty much the same problems with a pantheistic concept of God as with any other, and really don't see much difference.  The ideas of omniscience and omnipotence to my mind already imply a sort of pantheism -- God is everywhere as the book of Jonah tried to show.  My complaints about suffering remain the same.

Now if what is being talked about is not a god (the word pantheism implies a god but words don't have to mean what they are derived from) but instead a generalized force of ethics and sentience and awareness that we partake of, and maybe rejoin at some point as the Transcendentalists had it, then pantheism is a flavor of atheism.   Forces are not gods -- gods are beings with personality and objectives and emotions and all that.  As I have said, this reminds me of Taoism, except there no attempt is made to understand it all.

Pantheism as a theist notion carries the same problems as other theist notions such as the need for evidence that is not produced, the problem of suffering, the absence of any discernible presence of such a being in either history or physics, and so on.

Religions persist in spite of modern knowledge

Yes mankind would be better off without religion, but that is not likely.  Religions have tricks to keep themselves going, and those with the best tricks last longest.  If only people could see the tricks involved in ideas like faith and loyalty when applied to myths, but once one has been indoctrinated (usually as a child), only some have the personality traits enabling them to escape, and indoctrination is a form of addiction, not easy to break from and very easy to find excuses for not wanting to break from.  

Why don't gays die out?

A comment on this gay business: my understanding is that at least for male homosexuals the tendency is inherited in the female line, perhaps even on the Y chromosome (although of course the idea of a gay gene is too simple).  If that is the case, even if gay men don't reproduce, it would have no effect.

I would agree that strictly gay men almost certainly don't have babies, unless they do it medically, and most won't.  That may be evidence that a "strictly" gay man is much more rare than imagined.

Another possibility is that gayness provides some unrelated survival benefit, such as better survival rates in the womb and in childhood, and maybe even in finding a wife.  For gay women, it has been so long that men dominate that they just go ahead and have babies, until recently at least.  

Sources of knowledge

I think maybe we can imagine four ways of obtaining knowledge.  First is to be born with it (evolution supplying us or something like that.  Problem is evolution is only interested in propagating our genes so the information we are born with may have survival value but not much else, and to a large extent this will be things we know but don't know we know.

Then there is standard deduction -- starting with things we already know and deducing further knowledge from it.  The problems here are well known -- the logic may be wrong or the things we "already know" may be wrong.

Then there is induction.  If we see something happen over and over with no counter-examples, we infer that it is a rule of the universe.  Of course this is what science does, but we all do it too.  It has the standard problem that it may be we just haven't yet found the counter-examples.  It is collections of such rules about a related subject that scientists call "theory."

Finally there is the way most of us get our knowledge -- by getting it from an authority on the subject.  Experts know more than we do so when we want to know something we go to them.  I think in this general category there is also getting special revelations from supernatural beings or from ancient writings.  This makes clear the problem with this method of learning -- we have to chose our experts carefully.

Is Hitler in Hell?

You don't and can't pretend to know the full story of anyone, no matter how evil, even the icon of evil, Adolph Hitler. He had a childhood, he grew up in a certain culture, he had certain genes. All these things gave him beliefs on which he acted sincerely and devotedly. He was certainly not the only anti-Semite of his times, and we are all people of our times. Sincerity and devotion often lead to great harms in the world.

It can also be argued that he was mentally disturbed in certain ways. We do not criminally punish the insane.

I am an atheist, so don't have the problem of a god dispensing justice and weighing our soul and if it is just a little too evil we go to Hell otherwise we go to Heaven (and the vast majority of people no doubt are very much on the edge).

I do, however, think we have an afterlife, or at least suspect it, given considerations of the likelihood of our being in an illusionary world rather than a real one, and when we die we go up a level to greater reality. This is a probabilistic argument recently expressed in some popular movies (where it is called virtual reality), rather stupid ones, but it seems probable, and would present a chance for what Asians call karma to do its thing -- when you do harmful things you make yourself slightly more evil, and vice versa, and this gets reflected in the more real existence to come. There is no judgment involved -- it is all rather automatic or even mechanical, and came into existence through people like us (but more advanced and probably better and smarter) creating sub-realities. Maybe it has always existed.

The good life

I think you could say I'm a philosopher.  Probably not a very good one, at least by modern notions of what this takes, and certainly not very original, since I've had the repeated experience of finding my best ideas and insights have always been thought of before.

I think it is because I'm interested most of all in what is a good life.  This is not easy -- it is not happiness, nor comfort, nor respect, nor ethical ("right") behavior.  It is none of these and it is all of these.  One can argue that each of these require all the others, that one cannot be happy nor comfortable nor respected nor doing the right things if one doesn't have the others too.

Nor of course, in these terms, is a good life possible.  It can only be approximated, or approached, maybe closely if one is a living paragon of cheerfulness, good health, high position and moral rectitude, but what do we do if we aren't?

I think we all think about these things, and when we are lacking we try to do better, or at least make excuses.  A poor man can be proud of his poverty, especially if life offers him no better chance, and a stupid person (they exist by the droves) can look down on intelligence and make himself feel better watching mindless entertainments.

Who is to say either is a better life?

Still, I think the greatest joys are of a more refined sort -- thinking about the great questions, seeing what others thought, trying to figure out what they meant by a lot of what they said (after all they are famous and great philosophers so what they said has to mean something).

Similarly, I now know that being healthy and vigorous and all that has a lot to do with one's joy in life, one's respect, and so on.  However I will leave it up for the most part to the doctors, just being reasonably informed and a bit skeptical is as far as I go, as well as doing what the doctor tells me to do.

There are many other joys -- art, music, and so on, and then there are circus performances.  One chooses what one enjoys, although I'm a bit of a snob and if something is boring or not really funny or just blood for its own sake, I would rather not.

Respect is an interesting thing, and we all want it.  There are a million ways to get it and a million people judging us all the time.  Some say we should ignore this -- that it is what we think of ourselves and not what others think of us that is important.  They should read Confucius.

Of course the prime mover in all this is Socrates, as we get him from Plato.  The most important thing in life is to do what is right.  The thing is Socrates did not know what is right and I won't pretend I have anything on him.  All Socrates really knew is that what most people think is right is wrong, or, at least not defensible.  We see this today too -- people who would let others suffer and die rather than let them immigrate, or even just people who don't want to let others immigrate because they are different.  Men who think men are better than women and vice versa.  People who say things like lying or stealing or an abortion or whatever, regardless of the circumstances, are wrong.  I could go on and on.

Still sometimes (fortunately usually just in theoretical scenarios), there are cases where the right and wrong of something stumps me.  I've already posted about this a few time, so just a brief summary -- first, there is never an absolute right or wrong.  Second, one must consider harms and helps.  Third, one must not use sentient beings as means to ends.  Fourth, one must apply mindful compassion (not just, "Is this compassionate," but do I understand why it is or is not compassionate, not just how I feel.

Of course no doubt I get it wrong all the time, and I then must deal with my mistakes as honestly and rightly as I can.

More about personal immortality without God

From the feedback I'm getting people must think I've gone off the deep end, and maybe I have, but it seems to me, with modern inflationary theory and so on, that the universe and all of existence must be either infinite or so damn big we will never know the difference.  Indeed, our present cosmos originating from our own personal big bang may have been infinite for all we know -- all we have access to is the part from which the light has had time to reach us, and we know what really was there was many, many orders of magnitude more, if not unending.  In all that, there are bound to be gazillions of "virtual" existences out there doing all sorts of things, so that the probability that we are in one becomes a virtual certainty.

I don't much credit claims of evidence for this sort of thing -- it's like claims for flying saucers -- if they are that smart and want to stay out of sight, subject over.

A word about the religionists response, for which, frankly, I have no respect.  This is not a last ditch conversion hidden in science jargon.  It is just common sense given what we know.  There need be no deity doing this.  Just smart people like us taking care of ourselves and our existence.  It may be true that they would seem like deities to us, but seeming like a deity doesn't make one a deity.

Good and bad of religion

It is easy for a relatively intelligent person who has not undergone indoctrination to see that all "faith" (not just religious faith) is mistaken and generally wrong and often harmful. One can have opinions if they are based on valid and repeated experience, even opinions that approach belief, but never should one allow actual belief, where one has made an emotional commitment to something.

Religions make a virtue of faith, but this is seriously wrong. It is in fact a vice -- an easy way to excuse believing things one would like to believe even though there is insufficient evidence. One should only have opinions (where one can readily change one's mind without experiencing guilt or fear) when the evidence warrants it.

All that said, I do not oppose religion completely. Many of the things religions do are good. The present Pope, for example (as opposed to some of his unfortunate predecessors) seems to have a relatively open mind and is a preacher of love and tolerance and downplays doctrine. The same can be said of the Dalai Lama. Many Muslim clerics preach the same message, although unfortunately it seems most do not and many are sources of hate and intolerance. Any religion that teaches that it alone is true is likely to be this way -- in fact such a teaching makes a religion more a force for harm than for good.

Kidney Infection and thoughts of death, part 2

Continued from previous post

I'm an atheist, and a rather dogmatic one.  There is not only no reason to believe in God or gods, but there are good reasons not to.  No proofs, of course, but when one is talking about rational, thought-out views, there is no proof.  That is for those who want to believe and use faith as an excuse.

However, I do think we survive death, as individuals.  This is but one life in a long series of lives in an uncountable number of universes.

There is and can be no evidence for this.  Recovered memories are logically either frauds or wishful thinking.  So is deja vu.  The previous lives would not be in any way connected with this universe.

It is just logical.  We have to live in layer after lawyer of false universes -- illusions that we invent for ourselves to give us life after life after life.  Of course for the most part, or maybe for many parts, we have no memory, as that is what makes them interesting and helpful.

The idea is in some ways ancient and some ways quite modern, and there are many variations on the theme. I tend to prefer to keep it simple. We live a life, gain its experiences (the whole point of living), then die, unplug the machine, and then spend some time in whatever live this is and then go off and plug ourselves into another machine. (Of course the machine bit is all metaphor). So, it is possible to be an atheist and nevertheless thing we live after death.

Kidney infection and thoughts of death

I recently had a kidney infection, involving loss of bladder control, inability to move without tremendous effort (and needing to be carried about), and a good deal of metal depression and confusion.

When one's kidneys are not doing their job, poisons they should filter out of the blood accumulate and all sorts of things manifest.

Now I'm only 72, and I don't consider that old.  It is long in the tooth, to be sure, but I don't think I even begin to look my age, except of course my beard is grey (salt and pepper).  I had figured I was good for at least another couple decades.

Well that changed my mind.  Modern medicine saved me and with a few antibiotics and anti-inflammatories and I don't know what all, I was up and about in a day.  I have however had a setback and we did it all a second time.  Makes me wonder, of course.  (Continued next post).

We believe in causation

We believe in causation -- that is, that everything that happens has a cause, or to put it the negative way, nothing that happens can happen without a cause. People this is just a belief. In our world it seems to be the case, but we can't prove it. All sorts of things happen that are mysteries to us. We assume they had a cause but maybe they didn't.

We do know, at least the scientists know and we are wise to accept their long-held consensus, that at the atomic and sub-atomic level this is not quite the case. Given a single uranium atom, we know that at some point it will decay, but without cause. It will just happen. We can't say it is random either because if we have a large collection of uranium atoms, we can predict very exactly how many will decay each second -- just not which ones.

 

The city-state or polis as the ideal form of government

I've been meaning to post something about political philosophy (defined as speculation on what makes for the best government).  Today I would like to promote the city-state.

A city-state, or "polis" from the Greek, but I would like to use a regular English plural (polises) constitutes a central city, close-by other cities and suburbs, and the surrounding countryside.

There are two problems with this form of organization, neither of which would exist if designed right.  The first is that they constantly war with each other (actually not so -- history records the wars and so presents a distorted view of almost continuous warfare, but actually the polis is generally not aggressive.

The other problem is more serious -- empire builders and egoistic Napoleons come along and ruin it.  This is why they are so few.

But look at Singapore and Hong Kong (although sadly in the second case the imperialists are slowly destroying it).

If the whole world were to consist of nothing but such entities, and if they were all set up as functional republics (who almost never go to war with each other -- it is the tyrants of the world where you see invasions and so on), the governments, being far closer to the public, and being such that practically everyone knows the leaders, is just bound to result in better government.

Of course institutions are needed to keep tyrants out of power (legitimate power-sharing checks and balances) and somehow the existing nations need to be broken into smaller units.  That last one is a mouthful -- getting the cities set up as independent and then keeping them so.

I suppose (of course I do it occurs to me) that states like Sparta must be prevented, so some sort of international body chosen by the cities and maintaining basic laws and with resources to enforce them, would therefore be unavoidable.

Freedom of religion

I think the promotion of freedom of religion is a good thing in general, but with laws preventing any disturbance of the peace, any violence, and preventing child indoctrination, which is, from my own experience I know, one of the worst forms of child abuse. It puts young people with smarts and the ability to see the real world as it is through many years of fear and doubt and guilt until they either throw if all off or give in and become milk toast for the preacher's income.

Religion, however, should also not have special protection. It should be wrapped up with freedom of opinion and belief as only one aspect of this broader ideal.

Free prostitution and the Golden Rule

That the Golden Rule and things like that came from men is okay with me. It is less than perfect, but good enough for a guide 99 percent of the time. It also has a practicality to it, in that doing good things for people tends to lead to their doing good things for us.

I don't think for a moment these things come from God, as if they did we would have to follow them much more closely than anyone does in reality. Think about it -- if we must do to others what we would like them to do to us, we would give away or merchandise if we were a merchant, lend to anyone without interest if we were a bank, never send anyone to prison or even arrest them if we were a policeman, and even give our services freely if we were a prostitute.

God's laws (which for this reason don't exist) require strict adherence. We can bend man's laws to fit with reality.

 

The best religion

The best religion of course does not exist. The rest is ego and the beliefs are based almost entirely on how we were raised.

That said, in my fantasy (not that I think it is real), the best religion would incorporate these notions"

1. There would be God or a god. We need this out of our submission instincts, and much better than submitting to some idol or ideology or leader or whatever (representation of this god with icons is even better). We leave to the theologians the debates about infinity and so on.

2. For the most part this god does not interfere via stuff like miracles. This shows favoritism, or whim or something silly, and is a noose for the superstitious to hang themselves. True there is suffering, but we must have problems or we would not have problems to solve.

3. This is not, however, a god of suffering. He needs and wants nothing from us except our well being. Martyrs and killing for him is not wanted and counter to his nature. Neither does he need monks and priests and others who separate themselves off from the rest of us as somehow more holy. Nor does he give special messages to special people. That would be a travesty of his universality.

4. He neither needs nor wants glory or worship or service. He is above that sort of petty human thinking. The way to serve this god, if one must, is to do good things and help others and create beauty (music, buildings, gardens, etc.).

5. In the end we can trust our souls or spirits are well cared for, but speculation as to how is, at this level of our existence, only something we can speculate about.

 

Unhappy -- kinda -- childhood

I see I have had autobiographical notes here and there in this blog, but not about my childhood.  Interesting.  I use to count the days of my life from age twenty, thinking that if I were now fifty, and I lived beyond ninety,, then I had lived less than half my life.  The years of childhood didn't even count.

And I guess they don't.  I have few childhood memories, and the ones I do are morose or bitter or empty or meaningless or plodding, certainly not happy.  Of course this is not relevant, we can overcome such dull upbringing, but I think I need to write a bit more.

My mom was a little over-protective, and told us over and over to the point that she drove us nuts, how much she loved it, but then she would go into a temper and hysterics over trivialities and I at least thought it was all words.  I now know she had serious medical problems involving a woman's organs and that this involves emotions, and while she seemed horrid she was also loving.  At any rate while I endured a lot of verbal abuse, there was never anything physical and I had not fear.

My father loved my mom and I always had the suspicion he had us to please her, because she wanted babies, but we didn't stay babies.

Being gay I was always a bit effeminate, but my dad, wise in this by intuition I'm sure, gently steered me away from that and I generally acted normal.  Yes, I was "sis" during my junior high schools, but I also excelled in school and this was envied, so I managed and wrote down the slurs as envy.  I was also physically big, and for an effeminate kid that is a huge offset.

What I always had was my intellectual "smarts"-- the kind that gets good grades -- straight A grades.  I never got elected to anything but was still valedictorian and got all kinds of scholarships and all that junk, and a big deal was made it at graduation and my class gave me a standing ovation.  Afterward I remember so clear I was milling about getting congrats and things and my dad walks up and says, time to go, you had enough of this.  I guess my ego was a bit out of line an it was showing so my dad did what he had to do, but did he have to do it that way?

Anyway that summer I took the train for Harvard and only went back a few times over the years.  It is interesting that for various reasons I never went to either of my parents' funerals.