A Riff on Modern Capitalism

During most of human evolution, we lived by hunting and gathering.  Our daily activities were focused almost entirely on getting enough food to survive today and tomorrow.  Around 10 thousand years ago, we started replacing hunting and gathering with agriculture and animal husbandry.  Along the way, we no doubt began engaging in trading and bartering.  But the pursuit of today's bread and meat remained the central part of our daily existence.  By now, in industrial and post-industrial society, the actual production of food has become an activity which most people in developed - and increasingly in developing -  societies do not directly participate.  Instead, we earn our daily bread - and much else we now find essential for "modern life" - through buying and selling, earning and spending.

Production is now just one small part of the process of sustaining human life and society in the modern world.  People must buy and must be encouraged to buy.  Advertising is essential in this process so we get bombarded constantly with it.  All of life can seem built around being incessantly offered opportunities to spend our money.  If people stop buying - perhaps because they cannot earn - then selling becomes difficult, production may falter and more people end up not earning.

As production becomes more remote from the actual consumption processes - buying/selling, earning/spending - that feed us, space has grown for some to profit mightily from satisfying and creating needs.  This is not always bad.  The Internet and iDevices vastly open space for human interaction and productivity.  But the space for profit has become quite big and indeed can be thought of as a kind of petri dish for growth of a "tumor" - the mythical "job creator" - in the middle of the human enterprise.

The problem is how to even conceptualize a way of organizing our society around some other way of life.  We can't really all return to hunting and gathering.  Making and trading also cannot sustain our seven billion.  For each according to his needs and from each according to her ability would rely even more on an "invisible hand" than our current capitalist system as no mere human hand could sort out all our needs and capabilities. 

For now there seems no good answer other than trying to reduce the size of the tumor.

Human Nature and National Character

How one sees “human nature” probably reveals a lot about one's self. The range of views is broad. Some may deny there is such a thing, seeing human beings at birth as blank slates. Some may see humans as intrinsically good and others as essentially evil and still others everything in between.

However, it must be that human beings are by nature social. Our species had to evolve this way to survive. But beyond being just “social,” human beings all want to love and be loved. Yes, perhaps there are those born with some failed wiring who we call psychopaths. In the normal case, we are born wanting to be immersed in warm relationships with others, quite apart from sex. This suggests that by nature, most of us are born being “good” people, eager to talk and listen, eager to learn and share, eager to exercise our minds and bodies while exploring our world. This is what it means to be homo sapiens.

Nurture takes us from this starting point and either allows us to grow strong and mature as self-confident, wise and kind beings or it tears us down. We either develop as secure and open egos with positive character traits – honesty, compassion, loyalty, inquisitiveness – or we become encased in what Freud called reaction formations, negative character traits formed as defensive mechanisms against the bad things that we suffer as we age. Few of us are saints or outright devils. Most of us come out somewhere in between and some shine even when surrounded with sorrow and want. By nature we are good. Departures from this owe mostly to the inequalities and inadequacies of our social organizations.

National character is analogous to individual character. The humans that make up any language, ethnic or social group start out and grow as we all do. But they are confronted by the “character traits” built up over history and many of these traits are collective reaction formations, expressing those events – real or as imagined – that have defined that history. Nations are departures from a common human inheritance and nature. But they are also real. And it seems that few of us are ready to live without them.

Possibilianism

That nothing exist is the logically more stable state of being. Nothing needs anything further and ought to be unchangingly nothing. That there be something requires a departure from nothing, requires explanation. I.e., nothing should be being.

But we are, and the universe is. We don't know anything about what preceded the Big Bang, what dark matter and dark energy are and mean, what consciousness is, where it comes from, or where it may go. It may be that we will never know. It may be that as St Thomas Aquinas suggested, when reason can take us no further, that is the finger pointing to God. In any case, we know too little to rule out what science cannot explain and too much to believe much of what we take for certain.

An adherent of possibilianism is called a possibilian. The possibilian perspective is distinguished from agnosticism in that it consists of an active exploration of novel possibilities and an emphasis on the necessity of holding multiple positions at once if there is no available data to privilege one over the others. Possibilianism reflects the scientific temperament of creativity, testing, and tolerance for multiple ideas.

Eternal

To be eternal is to exist no where, in no time.

Civilizations in the Goldilocks Zone

A "Goldilocks" planet is a one that would be neither too hot nor too cold to support life. This is the catchy term science has given to describe those hypothetical planets orbiting stars in the "comfort zone" that would permit liquid water and perhaps life such as we might recognize.

Perhaps one can talk of intelligent life and civilizations in an analogous fashion. Intelligent life would arise from creatures with the potential for intelligence as man arose from more primitive primates. In some of these cases, while creatures might arise with a degree of intelligence they would not progress far or they would evolve much more slowly. Perhaps their environment would be relatively undemanding with conditions allowing the species to flourish without elaborating itself into large civilizations that then enter a cultural/technological evolution of their own. These might be termed "Garden of Eden" species. They might never leave their own planet or solar system and could be stable for very long periods of time.

At the other extreme, there might be intelligent species that evolve very quickly - perhaps to keep up with a more dynamic environment or perhaps out of some dynamic internal to its unique cultural/intellectual makeup. These civilization would tend to be unstable and the most extreme of them would grow beyond the ability of their planet to support them. These civilizations would suffer catastrophic declines and perhaps extinction. They might never survive long enough to go beyond their own atmosphere.

In between these two ends of the spectrum, civilizations would evolve at a fair pace, perhaps suffering precipitous events but eventually settling down to a sustainable level of dynamic evolution and change. These civilizations would be the Goldilocks ones in which the rate of change is neither too slow nor too fast for their intellectual, social, cultural, economic and political systems to keep up with. They might be the ones to go as far afield into the universe as physics and their own culture allows.

It would be nice to think that the human species of Earth is in that Goldilocks zone. But it is too early to say and the 21st Century may decide the issue.

Bits of Consciousness

It seems that all the minutia of our mental activity - our mind - is governed strictly by physical matter and biology. It must be so, consciousness is pure awareness and without content. (That mental activity is physically-based suggests that higher processing speeds are possible.)

Conscious is analog, not digital, not quantized. However, physical reality, including time, is quantized.

In the beginning was awareness. That without end is without meaning.

Language and the Soul

Language – the ability to create and exchange meaning between individuals – is what makes us human and different from all other of earth's creatures. Without the ability to use words and grammar, we would not be able to think, plan and act. Thus its evolutionary value. Through language – and with the help of that other great discovery, control over fire – we have conquered the world and subdued nature. It was the bite of the apple that got us tossed out of Nature's Garden to make or break our own.

Think about thinking without words. Not really possible. Without words we might be able to store and recollect images – as we do in dreams – but we could not give them meaning, nor relate one to the other. We might be able to put images together into sequences – for example, how to shape an ax head from a piece of stone – but we could not pass that knowledge to anyone else except by showing. Teaching that way can work but is very inefficient. Perhaps this is why the technology of the Neanderthals changed so little over tens of thousands of years. Images could also be painted on cave walls or drawn in the sand. This would be a bit more efficient. But with language, what we learn can be codified and passed around and on. Knowledge explodes.

We are not the only animals that can communicate with each other. Apes, dogs, whales, ants and others do it through various means. But we are the only animal with words and grammars. Grammar allows words to become veritable skyscrapers of meaning. With language we can develop society, culture, technology, and history.

But think too about what language does for us. It allows each of us to become an individual self. Without words, we remain prisoners of our instincts and reflexes. We can only react to the outside, input determines output. After millions of years of evolution, the early hominids were very clever reactors. But to become an individual cable of rising above simply reacting to inputs, we must be able to think, to tell ourselves – to construct – stories of who we are, what we do and how we do it. We are what we can say we are. With language we move from being an “it” to being an “I.”

Everything modern science tells us leads to the conclusion that our mind is based on our brain and our brain on physiology. Yet we are also conscious, and that science cannot explain. It may be consciousness that provides the space for using language. Where does the next word that you will say come from? Who or what process is behind the curtain stringing our narratives together? Where exactly does it take place? Within our consciousness, we somehow generate our self using language. Then we somehow cross the boundary into the physical and our thoughts emerge from our mind and radiate outward through our brains into action, including speaking.

Perhaps we can call this something within a soul, with no judgement about where that might come from? And what might become of this soul when the body that provides it the mechanisms of perception, thought and language is no more?