Whether Systems

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less travelled by,
and that has made all the difference.

A myriad of diverging roads I might choose to take at this juncture. I could go on about how no three lines of verse have been more misinterpreted. I could go on about Heidegger's holzwege and wegmarken. I could go on about how the tidal tug of poetry has waxed and waned in my own life. I could go on about event ontology or on how we tell our stories ages and ages after-the-fact. But, knowing how way leads on to way, I choose to go on about choice.

Much noise has lately been made about choice. Some scientists have revived the old, old story that free will is an illusion.* They advance the claim that choice is mechanistic, having material (natural) and environmental (cultural) causes: genetics and electro-chemistry, memetics and socio-psychology. The lay of the land have raised alarum, concerned that science now threatens to profane the sacred. Before we jump, let us step back. Is this not precisely what science does? The heavens, the earth, invisible forces, life--all once-sacred, all prodded and probed, analyzed and demythologized by the sciences. Should it alarm us that, in the fullness of time, science should turn its prods and probes on our inner lives, our souls, the holies of holies?

The final frontier, intentional consciousness itself, the consciousness which makes scientific inquiry possible, is the mother of all dynamic systems.^ If a butterfly flapping its wings can change weather patterns on the other side of the globe, consider the multitude of factors which contribute to the whether patterns of human choice, the engine of (r)evolution on so many planes. The equation has so many variables and relations it is beyond comprehension. For equations of this type uncertainty is the rule. Even with first-person, first-hand experience of our own lives, we cannot predict all of our choices all of the time. From time to time our choices surprise even us.

A majority of our deeds we do on auto-pilot. We do not memorialize these in stories. We do not pretend these have made all the difference. For some reason we would not feel quite so violated were scientists to account for these deeds mechanistically. For that is how we remember (and forget) them. At some point all of us have been intoxicated with strange brews or drunk with love or rage, and we have made choices we otherwise would not have made. At some point all of us have lived through seasons of mania or phobia or depression or disinhibition and found ourselves led as it were to behave out of character. In many cases we would welcome scientific excuses for choices we made while "not ourselves." Why not when we feel especially courageous or passionate, ambitious or inspired?

It is when we feel most authentically ourselves that we take life by the horns, that we the man the helm and pilot manually, intentionally, deliberately, considering the possible. We pause before a full closet to deliberate what to wear, before a full menu to consider what to order, before a fork in the road to determine which to take. This is particularly true of long-willed projections, like when we choose our homes, our life-partners, our careers, our ideological affiliations. In short it is when we use our imaginations that we feel most autonomous, most irreducibly ourselves.

What is it about imagination that we find so sacred, so inviolable, so irreducible? Why do we find scientific description of our whether systems such a serious threat? If human imagination turns out to be an illusion--an effect of our common physiology owing to our common ancestry--it is an illusion universal to all humans, scientists included; and no amount of description is going to cause it magically to disappear. It is this universal function which drives scientific inquiry itself.

Has any amount of methodological demythologizing ever impoverished human experience? Has it enriched? Has scientific description diminished the splendor of a sunrise? The majesty of a waterfall? The awe of a thunderbolt? The ecstasy of sex? The wonder of childbirth? What threat does it pose to the sublimity of love? The glory of achievement? The thrill of exploration? The autonomy of choice? When we, ages and ages hence, shall be telling this, will it be with a sigh or with a laugh?

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately... and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

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* In particular, proponents of cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology, assisted by emergent and generative philosophy, suggest that we experience an illusion of free will due to the generation of infinite behaviors from the interaction of finite, deterministic set of rules and parameters. Thus the unpredictability of the emerging behavior from deterministic processes leads to a perception of free will, even though free will as an ontological entity does not exist.
^ Philosophers have observed how a limited set of chess pieces with a limited set of rules moving on a board with limited set of spaces can produce a limitless set of possible games. This is equally true of the much larger set of linguistic signs with its much larger set of syntactic rules. Speaking and playing chess are but two of a truly enormous set of games humans choose to play.

Memorabilia

Had Socrates not been executed, he would not have been the Socrates we remember. Question is, had Socrates not been executed, would we remember him at all?

The Religion of the Beef Steers

Today humans rule the earth. We have effectively subjugated all other species with which we have contact, and our dominion continues to expand. Our lordship is particularly evident over domestic animals. In the West we have a unique relationship with cattle, sheep, and goats, species which evolved and herded for centuries before human's (s)elected them for domestication. The dynamic which exists between the modern beef steer and his human master is of particular interest for our exercise. For the following statements let us imagine ourselves in the hooves of a modern beef calf dwelling in a more or less humane modern beef farm. Let us agree to call the cattleman "El." From the point of view of the calves, what can be predicated truly and accurately of this relationship?

• El fashioned us an all things in our world (the farm) for his own pleasure and glory.
• As we find ourselves here, we owe our very existence to El.
• El cares about us.
• El provides for us (feed, shelter, community) and protects us (from disease, predation, etc.)
• For all of our intents and purposes, El is all-knowing.
• For all of our intents and purposes, El is all-powerful.
• El's will is, for all of our intents and purposes, inviolable.
• It is forbidden and perilous to attempt to violate El's will.
• El has a plan for each of us in the herd.
• The meaning of our lives is comprehensible only in relation to El's plan.
• El regulates and schedules our lives with fastidious detail in accordance with his plan.
• The purpose of my life is to serve El.
• There is a day of reckoning in our future in which El will evaluate each of us according to his pre-ordained plan and sentence us--sending some to eternal darkness and sending a select few, whom he hand chooses as those who accord with his secret design, to a well-watered green pasture with an endless supply of virgins.

Superorganic

Superorganic consideration has broadened the horizons and expanded the polysemies of biology in the past several decades. Perhaps the next revolution will involve trans-specific superorganic contemplation, although it is unclear now how discrete that would appear from present symbiotic or biospherical or eco-systematic formulations.

By most definitions homo sapiens qualifies as a superorganism. "A superorganism is an organism consisting of many organisms. This is usually meant to be a social unit of eusocial animals, where division of labor is highly specialized and where individuals are not able to survive by themselves for extended periods of time."* The concept of survival in the preceding definition need not be warped excessively to apply to superorganic human survival. "Survival" can be taken in the straight-forward biological sense of maintaining individual bio-functions. Human bio-functions are far more complex than bio-functions of "lower" life forms--including physiological, psychological, sociological, rational, etc. When human bio-function is understood as a whole it is quite clear that individual humans cannot survive by themselves for extended periods of time without serious damage to their bio-functions--especially where they lack the tools of the colony.

Take it as a fact, take it as a useful metaphor, it does not matter. What matters is the unique light the superorganic lens sheds on our place within humanity. In the superorganic whole, what is the eusocial role that we humanists collectively play? If humankind were a human body, what organ would we wish to be? What is the role that each of us, individually plays? If humankind were a human body, what kind of cell would you want to be?

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* Wikipedia, "Superorganism"

Zoon Politikon

"Humans are, by nature, political beasts." ~ Aristotle

As political beasts but also beasts with political beliefs, we humans all have an interest to delimit the exercise of political powers. To do this we could embark on a project of examining every political issue and policy, past, present, and hypothetical, plotting them each, one by one, inside or outside the circle of "the good." The task of identifying and plotting the set of all points inside or outside of the circumference of any circle is an exhaustive and ultimately exhausting chore. It is far more elegant to describe the circle itself, the set of points equidistant from a discrete center, and the area of that circle, πr².

To discern the center and to discern radiation from the center, this is the aim of political philosophy.

First Principles

Somewhere somebody extends his hand to his neighbor. That somebody buries his hand somewhere in the earth. These are the first and only necessary planes of contact for the generation of wisdom and wealth. Stand up, stand under, stand out, upright man!

Reflexive

Reflection is both the passive act of self-recognition in some foreign surface and the active passion of seeking likenesses of oneself in the world.

Tuning In

Between vox populi and vox dei, a voice that sings.

Becoming Nietzsche's Children

"Innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy 'Yea' unto life"

One of the most pressing issues for modern day post-theists is overcoming the misconception that we believe in nothing. We say "No" to the supernatural, "No" to the beyond, "No" to supreme being, "No" to dogma, "No" to absolutes, "No" to authoritative canons, "No" to ecclesiastical hierarchies, "No" to metaphysics. These "No's" have been the vertebrae making up the backbone of post-theist manifestos from the beginning. These are the growls of Nietzsche's lions, baring teeth, dragon-ringers, roaring "holy 'Nay's'" in the face of Thou-Shalt.

"Why hath the preying lion still to become the child?" "What can the child do that even the lion could not?" To create new values, to utter the holy "Yea" unto life.

This "holy 'yea' unto life" is our post-theist gospel, our good news. We are homo. We are sapiens. We proclaim salvation from the gods and their priests. We announce empowerment: a self-propelled cycle of human transformation. We preach eschatology, a new day of unprecedented opportunity. We tell a holy story, a noble myth: beginning, middle, and end. From singularity, manifold diversity. From inert, lively exuberance. From simplicity, unbridled imagination. Our story has a moral: love, cooperation, beauty, abundance, celebration. The spiritual history of children who were once lions who were once camels is a long and venerable one, replete with heroes, martyrs, fathers & mothers, artistically creating subjects all.

With a holy "Yea" we post-theists, the world's outcasts, may win a world of our own.