fixer upper

new mythology: God is the creator, but s/he is not all-knowing or all-powerful. That would be a logical impossibility (Church/Turing, etc). He creates us as best he can, and it takes all he's got. Our responsibility to him is to improve ourselves... to build on his inspired but flawed work. He was an artist, a tortured soul; perhaps a flame that burned brightly and burnt out? Think Galois meets Janis Joplin... Charlie Parker crossed with Alan Turing.

Anyway, he's either dead, incapacitated, or otherwise engaged, so now we are on our own. We must take up the mantle; this world is a fixer-upper. Get to work!

Better Religion Through Science

The problem of social interaction from an engineering perspective boils down to the tension between individual and collective good. Even the definition of these terms is up for debate; it's been seriously proposed that the agent of evolution is the gene itself, and the phenotype (body, brain, etc) is just a 'lumbering robot designed to carry around the genes'. At the other extreme, it can be argued that the species is the fundamental unit of change. In reality, all of these levels of competition and cooperation are operative simultaneously (though they may work at vastly different time scales).

The appropriate field of study for the interaction of independent agents is game theory; but its application to humans and other living &/or sentient beings is complicated because of this issue of what exactly constitutes an agent in the game. So the first job is really to decide what we're talking about in terms of who we are, and what we wish to accomplish during 'our' existence (single human lifespan; history of the tribe/group; lifetime of the species...)

What I've been wondering is whether there really could be some sort of nerdy, mathematical/logical approach to living, that would help people get through their lives with minimum pain and maximum satisfaction. Obviously there are thousands of self-help books, from the Bibble onward. But none of them seem grounded in the scientific method; they're basically appealing to emotional, hand-waving arguments about what may or may not make you feel good about yourself.

Two non-recent writers who tackled these subjects from a rational perspective were Machiavelli and Kant. They represent the two poles of behavior towards each other that we often have to decide between. The Prisoner's Dilemma game encapsulates these behavior models, terming them "defector" and "cooperator" (see wikipedia entry on "Prisoner's Dilemma", particularly section on iterated game).

The short version of things is this: the best scenario for an agent (whether gene, individual, or species), is to be a defector in a world of cooperators. But of course other rational agents will act on the same logic; so a world of agents who make rational decisions, without any sort of repercussions for defection, will suck mightily.

Note that as agents begin to cooperate, they aggregate their interests, and effectively become the next agent up in the heirarchy. When genes cooperate, we get cells; when cells cooperate, we get multi-celled organisms; when organisms cooperate, we get tribes and society.

What will happen when societies finally start cooperating?

Bullet points to live by

* Nothing is sacred

* No one is divine

* Ethical behavior is a field of research

* Group identity is bogus

* The world doesn't have to be a living hellhole

America, the new Microsoft

The rest of the world hates America in exactly the same way, and for almost precisely the same reasons, that all my geek friends and I hate Microsoft. It's hard to point at one thing precisely and say, "this is where they went over the line". It's more an accumulation of petty incidents of take-no-prisoners gamesmanship, opportunism, arm-twisting, and taking every little unfair advantage when the ref isn't looking, seasoned with a sickly sprinkling of hypocritical lip-service to sportsmanship and fair play.

It's that last part that really gets people's goats.

what it is to be a...

Read some interesting stuff by Benny Morris (Israeli 'new historian'; http://www.logosjournal.com/morris.htm). He believes that the early Israelis were guilty of ethnic cleansing and forced migration; but that it was a necessary evil for the formation of Israel. Basically, he takes the attitude that all states have been founded on such acts (some would say crimes); and why shouldn't the Jews have a state? By implication, the Arab states were formed through massacres, atrocities, ethnic /religious terror, etc., even if it all happened too long ago to have verifiable proof. It had to have happened, even though in general the victor writes the history, so the record is inconclusive. Nations are like laws and sausages; you don't want to see how they're made.

hmm... so two wrongs make how many rights? But this is the way of history. He's right about that. Doesn't really make it morally defensible; just 'reasonable' in some sense. (Was Hitler being reasonable when he forced the Jews into ghettos, before the death camps? Morris threads a fine line between forced emigration and murder/genocide; he concludes that the latter is reprehensible and morally indefensible (whew!), but the former is a sometimes necessary evil of war [obviously this begs the question of whether the war itself is justified; I hope he delves into that question in his books..]. Yet he states there is clear proof of at least a few hundred murdered Palestinians, massacred to scare the rest into leaving.) This is scary stuff.

And of course the 'cleansed' don't take it lightly. And why should they? It is their homes, their lives, their honor being trampled. As the Jews once were; and now the Palestinians. Whether or not they brought it on with their own aggression; whether this is karmic payback for past crimes (obvious point: anti-semites accuse Jews of past crimes. The cycle goes on and on...) -- no matter what the justification, it is inevitable that the direct recipients of this sort of treatment see it as an unforgivable crime.

All this gives me a new sense of where religious conviction comes from. Not the religious part, per se, but the association of religion with a people, a community, a sense of tribe. The rituals, the clothes, the traditions -- these must continue, in order to spite the enemies who would have them supressed. Even the religious belief itself, becomes merely a token -- a symbol of our right to believe, worship, act, behave, and *be* what we are, who we are; and a big FUCK YOU to anyone who tells us to be otherwise, for the sake of peace; for the better good, we should lay down our past. But to us (Jews, Christians, Moslems, Tibetans, Serbians, African Americans, Fighting Irish...) that is really just saying, give up who you are because you have lost the fight. Cry Uncle; admit defeat.

Well, human nature doesn't work like that. Generally, our strategy is to be the poison pill. We will never give you the satisfaction of an easy victory march. The response is to dig in one's heels; to emphasize, rather than ameliorate, the differences that stick in your craw. Who are you, the imperialist, rich one, powerful one, one who believes in your divine right? So we will continue to worship our God who annoys you; wear our clothes which mark us as different; behave in ways that you find socially abhorrent. The last thing I will do in this stance is change my ways, or question my beliefs; because, even if there were rational reasons to do so, I cannot give you the satisfaction of appearing victorious. That would be to give up my dignity, my individuality (as a people); my right to be me. And, for anyone with a gram of self respect, that is non-negotiable.

No wonder the world is so fucked up.