While I appreciate phunwheel's post, I am going to have to respectfully disagree with his assertions. The way a man acts or reacts to a situation is entirely dependent upon his brain functions. This is indisputable scientific fact. The chemistry in the brain is what determines our thoughts, our emotions, and most importantly determines my body's movements.

Furthermore, the brain is constantly being inundated with different chemicals which trigger neurons telling us to breath, sending hunger pangs, or signs of danger. These chemicals can even function to make us feel love, and even spirituality, as researchers recently found that deeply meditative monks and those in deep prayer actually have the receptor which orients us in space blocked, thus leading to a feeling of "infiniteness" or out of body experiences.

If each receptor in the brain is what controls our thoughts, feelings and actions, and these receptors are triggered or blocked due to some previous stimuli, then how is it that humanity has free will? He is a slave to his own computational mind. Indeed, one could argue that the stimuli themselves may be controlled in such a way as to produce free will. But those stimuli are acting under the same natural laws and are produced by some other brain process or physical reaction somewhere, which itself was due to another stimuli which triggered those thoughts/actions before it. Onward, and onward, back to infinity.

It is argued that the fact that there are infinite different stimuli that you may be exposed to, and that at any time there are an infinite number of things which may stimulate you, tears down the idea of pre-determinism. However, this argument breaks down because our brain is not an infinitely capable computing machine. Our senses are limited. We cannot process an infinite amount of information at once, and we cannot sense everything, both physical and emotional, about any situation. Our brains are limited by a specific number of receptors, a specific speed at which it can compute, and a limited number of chemicals, each of which will trigger a predictable response in the brain. Suicide does not prove non-determinism. Rather, it shows that someone's brain chemicals have triggered a response in them that they no longer want to live. Their minds have observed some stimuli, and upon seeing the information presented, their brain triggers a number of neurons in the brain to make the person feel the need to kill himself, this decision then triggers the chemicals which produce the action of suicide itself to take place in the person. As sad as it is, suicide is no more a choice than death itself. It is simply a reaction to certain stimuli that forces the person to act in such a way that causes bodily harm, and we cannot tacitly accept this as choice.

Pre-determinism, Freedom and Suicide...

Some thoughts, been reading Sartre. I’m not talking about the theistic or non-theistic notion explicitly because I will simply disregard the theistic concept at the start. In a godless universe there is no god to predetermine or predestine things.

Everything we do, or say, all our actions, some people believe are pre-determined by some past or future chain of events. This is a somewhat true description of our actions but only to a small degree.

First of all, it is true that everything we do is a natural reaction to some stimuli as processed by the brain by millions of neurons firing off and internal drugs altering our bodily processes. So, if everything is a nervous reaction to some stimuli, we might as well believe that determinism exists. But, one thing we are leaving out here is that there are an infinite number of external stimuli that we could be exposed to, and if we can have a different reaction to each distinct stimulus then, it follows, there are an infinite number of ways in which we could act or react due to or to different stimuli.

When we accept this, the whole idea of determinism breaks down.  If there are an infinite number of unpredictable stimuli we could be subject to, and our actions are defined by our cranial reactions to the stimuli, there is no determinism. If we could live for a million years, we could do different things, perform distinct actions every day and not have an exact repeat of any incident.

This is the other thing that makes man free.

To reiterate what I said on a previous post - We are a collection of vibrating atoms amongst an infinite number of atoms and that is precisely why we are free, these vibrations don’t have any pre-determined settings, they are free to vibrate and react to other vibrations around them, producing random results. Once we realize that everything is us and we are everything and our actions are not defined by any set of universal absolutes then we are free to do anything.

Of course we have physical limitations on our actions, but that in itself does not have anything to do with the fact that in every situation we can make distinctly differing decisions, because in any situation we don’t want to be in or are seemingly out of options, we have at least one other option – suicide. The existence of the choice of suicide is very vital to human freedom and a huge blow to pre-determinism.

The simple existence of the choice of suicide at every point in time in anyone’s life proves that we always have another option, - we can escape any situation by suicide. If life was pre-determined and our life’s “pathways” were already laid down, we would not have this opportunity. And in a pre-determined universe, we couldn’t commit suicide and escape any situation until the death by suicide itself was determined or predicted by some external force or chain of events. In a pragmatic sense it is certainly true that most of the time when people commit suicide it is due to some chain of events – some bad things that happened in their life. But this does not take anything away from the fact that we have this choice at every point in time while we are alive. This demonstrates that we are free to choose even if under certain circumstances it does not appear so.

We cannot be free in a pre-determined universe. We are free and nothing is pre-determined – my actions today or tomorrow, what I say or do to you – I have the freedom to decide all these things. The concept of pre-determinism is not only false; it does not make sense in a free universe. 

Continuation...

As phunwheel presented, the idea of God was a necessary feature of ancient mankind's need to understand the world around him. He had no ability to grasp the vastness of the Universe, the things around him were all he knew, and it must have been made by somebody.

I would like to further posit that the idea of God is a necessary projection of mankind's inherent arrogance on the world around him. Those who believe in an interventionist God, the classical Judeo-Christian God who is always watching, judging, and persuading mankind in his journey have failed to truly grasp the size and scale of the Universe, and of their own bodies. When we consider that our planet is only one planet in our solar system, which is only one solar system in our galaxy, which is only one galaxy in our little corner of the visible universe: how could it be that the creator of so many millions of planets, suns, galaxies, and all organisms, particles, and energy that make up our universe be so concerned with our planet, our specific species, this particular mash of atoms, as to create US in his image? How is it that we are so important that he would speak to us in visions? That he would bear a son to forgive us of sins?

Ignoring all the obvious hypocrisies inherent in the Bible, along with the Bible's tendency to contradict scientific fact, it seems as if religion is born out of our arrogance. Out of our NEED to feel superior to the world around us...perhaps even our need to cope with our own insignificance. Why else would we need to prop ourselves up as being born in the image of gods? It seems even today, those with a tendency toward religious fervor are also those who tend to have a need to feel superior, above the heretic atheists, the heretic geneticists, the heretic muslims, and the heretic liberals. Once again we are brought back to this classical dichotomy of the infinite versus the infinitesimal. In the ancient world we could not find natural reasons to explain beauty, love, perception, evolution, space, and time: but as we move closer and closer to having complete descriptions of the cosmos, earth, and the universe, we must try to move away from that arrogance. We must realize our place in the universe, cope with it, and try to challenge it. This should be the goal of mankind, not to hold on to ancient perceptions of how we ought to act and where we came from. The thing that allowed the relatively weak body of man to triumph over the animal kingdom was his intellect, before we had created religion to stifle such endeavors.

As long as people are constantly concerned with converting unbelievers rather than poverty, with achieving afterlife rather than AIDs, with waging genocide on heretic Palestinians rather than human rights, religion has achieved to influence mankind through divisiveness while at the same time preaching unity and overarching love. The people must come to realize that the belief in a non-interventionist, non-judgmental God is just as crippling to the status quo as atheism. I am not calling for everyone to wage war on religion, to become militant atheists; no, I am simply asking that we move away from the idea that our species is so important to any sort of "creator" or "spirit" that we are made in his image, and are always being watched and judged by Him. I am calling for us to end the divisiveness of the sects of Christianity, of atheists vs. Christians, of Muslims vs. Jews, I'm calling for people to realize that the natural world is what we have to deal with, and instead of believing we are made in God's image, let us make ourselves gods by manipulating the world through the pursuit of science, philosophy, anthropology, history, and abstract thought.

Come on God, intervene already!

In ancient civilizations, or even earlier, say when we were hunter-gatherers. What did people do? Well, pretty much just the basic functions of life – Find shelter, Hunt for food and clothing (for the winter at least) and reproduce, take care of young, repeat. We had much smaller brains and didn’t really understand much of what was going on in the world, but we just kept living, much like a lot of smaller-brained or brainless organisms that inhabit the world. As our brains got bigger and larger, we started developing better cognitive abilities, and with it came the burden of trying to understand the world. 

Now naturally for anything to make sense early on, we needed to posit some sort of higher being for all the wonderful things in the world. Why do we eat? Where did all this huntable food come from? What’s inside our bodies? Magical fluids? What shape is the earth? We couldn’t even come to the point of asking say, is the earth flat or round? That was just a question out of question because we didn’t even know things that would lead us o asking the most basic facts we know and accept today.

So how could we find any meaning in the world?

Well, of course there just had to be a higher being- a creator- who created everything we could see, obviously. Because we didn’t have most of the tools of knowledge that we have today – math, physics, biology, etc. The only way we were able to make sense of anything, was to posit this creator – a pre-being, an infinite being, something that transcends space-time, is beyond anything – looking over us, giving us rain for good harvests, then punishing us with storms for disobeying, food so that we wouldn’t starve, water so that we would never go thirsty and so on.

This is, of course, ridiculous. But if I lived back in the day, even sometime in the recent past, I may have believed those things because there was never any evidence of anything else or any other natural processes that could create new life forms. (I have a lot of respect for early atheists because they rejected the religious institutions and the concept of god even before we knew what alternative to creationism there was, we didn't know shit about evolution).

The idea of an interventionist creator-god is not only ridiculous but if we just look at the way the world is and the way humans behave, we can pretty much tell that if there is this interventionist god then he isn’t doing a good job or any work at all.

You cannot explain complex seemingly improbable things (humans, animals, plants) by positing a creator. Who created the creator? No one can explain the improbable by creating an even more improbable being. Because if everything in the universe is the creation of a higher being, then where is that higher being, on another plane of reality? If so, couldn’t there just be an infinite number of gods existing in different levels, modes and planes of consciousness? If there are infinite gods, why even bother worshipping one? And if there is a god existing outside the physical universe, as I said, on another level, then how is this god intervening in any way with reality if he is outside of the physical world we know as reality?

 These are unimportant questions and they don’t even need answers because god does not exist.

Accept what’s true.

Even if it’s disappointing and makes you sad, and makes life seem a little less meaningful (or more meaningful for some).

The non-existence of god is a huge tragedy.

But (un)fortunately for us, this tragedy is real.

There is no god.

Everything...

Consider a building, or a human, or a panda, or anything.. 

If we break anything down all these things to their most basic unit – it’s just a bunch of atoms. Well, we can break that down to sub-atomic particles, but let’s just consider the atom. Everything is ultimately made of atoms – just a collection of vibrating atoms. Everything – buildings, humans, animals, chairs, cheeseburgers or anything else –all made up of the same thing.

This simple truth tells us that regardless of whether or not we are connected to everything else on some plane of consciousness, we’re all connected in the physical world. We are just a bunch of atoms in an infinite pool of atoms.

How we perceive anything in the world depends on our relationship to that particular thing - living or non-living. I like my guitar because I can create music with it. That is what relates me to the guitar. I like my friends because I can talk to them, do things with them, because they’re satisfying me in some way. And I perceive them as good because we have that particular relationship.  So one should agree that our perception of others (people or objects) is based on our relationship to the other.

As humans we have a certain fondness for other humans based on the fact that we are made up of the same flesh and blood or that we belong to the same species.

Once we extend this to all our relationships, we recognize our relationship to all the others - our relationship to the world, to animals, or anything else. So then, what separates us on any level? 

Nothing.

Once we realize this, how can we not care about the earth, how can we not care about animals? How can we not care about other people in the world?

For example, we have this notion of geographical location separating us - I’m from Bangladesh, you’re from the UK, this guy’s from Egypt – somehow that makes us different. Borders are arbitrary human constructs that shouldn’t separate us or bring us together. Just one of the many things humans created to feed the discontinuous mind. The sense of patriotism we may feel towards a country should be redirected towards the earth and the universe. We’re all the same and once we realize our relationship to the others, there is nothing separating us.

We have to realize that Natural constructs are not discrete, everything is continuous, the human mind finds it useful to categorize things to remember things, organize acquired knowledge, etc. but this discreteness of things does not extend to who we are as a species or our place in the universe  (more on the continuum of species and the tyranny of the discontinuous mind– read The Salamander’s Tale by Richard Dawkins – it’s only 5 pages and amazing). On a universal scale, humans are the same as ants or any other micro or macro organism, we’re tiny and insignificant.

In our purpose to find an ultimate or higher meaning, we have separated ourselves from everything. We have all accepted that just being on top of the food chain on earth equates to universal importance and significance. We’ve even gone so far and created an economic system that’s based on the same pyramid scheme we see in the food chain and a theological idea of a god watching and judging our species specifically because we're THAT significant. But false belief has no meaning.

There is no you or me, or this dog or that guy, we’re all the same. And once we realize this we’re free to exist, free just like the atoms in space floating into infinity. Free - because we just exist in a giant pool of atoms as a smaller collection of atoms. We can just be, and we are everything we ever wanted to be or could be.

 But this doesn’t mean we stop doing everything, stop pursue of more knowledge or anything, we are free and our relationship to everything that is not us, makes us free. So we invest our energy into enriching these relationships. Our relationship to the world by being friendlier to the environment, our relationship to another person by some altruistic act, our relationship to animals by being less cruel to them. 

We are free and we should choose to be. Once we perceive things based on our true symbiotic relationships we are what we want to be or could have been or could be, we are everything and everything is us.

Da Phunky Phish

With all the hubub about the Phish reunion on the internet recently, I felt compelled to make a post about the boys. Firstly, I'd like to say that I'm really excited about the reunion. I know a lot of people aren't out of control excited, and that it seems like some don't expect that much out of the "reunion". I think though, that there is a dynamic part of the phanbase that is really excited to hear what they have to say, after 5 years apart. Where are they gonna take their songs? Is Trey gonna fire it out like 93-95, are they gonna bust out the funk of of the late 90's, the space of post hiatus? Well, I have said it many times, but I hope they take a totally new turn. Hopefully in the past 5 years they have each grown as musicians in their own way. Phish is, after all, a melting pot of all things good in music, so hopefully each member can bring a new dynamic and they can melt it into something totally different.

That being said, I also hope they practice. Their compositions are very complex and I hope they can still pull off a sick YEM, Bowie, or Slave. Who knows...will we get a Fluffhead? One of my favorite compositions is Reba. The song itself is a goofy tale of a woman mixing all sorts of strange ingredients into a pot and then taking to sell to the butcher, at the "Store-O". The upbeat ridiculousness of the song starkly ends and brings about a new, wild composition of various themes and fuges changing time signatures over and over, before melding into a groovy mixolydian jam which makes the listener float through the waves of Mike Gordon's bass thumps stewing with Fishman's wild snare and climactic cymbals. A few Reba's especially stand out to me and deserve specific discussion.

The Halloween Reba's all hold a special place in my heart. They played Reba on Halloween in 94, 95, 96 and 98 and really, as cliche as Halloween Phish may be, each deserve their own place in Reba history. Each one captures the mood perfectly, and each jam has some of the best and most classic Reba peaks of all time.

The 94 Reba Jam section starts with trey playing a strange effect against mike's funky base, and begins soothing, but aggressive. Trey is laying back from the beginning, but forcing his voice to the forefront, while page drapes the jam with perfect keystrokes. The jam picks up and falls repeatedly into beautiful strokes of Reba highs and lows.

The 98 Reba Jam begins with one of my all time favorite melodies during a Reba Jam, with trey hitting one bad note, and then returning with a little melody that he expounds upon throughout the context of the jam.

I can talk about Reba forever, but I suggest you check some of these out for youself. You can download some great shows on www.phishows.com and www.nugs.net free stash. Enjoy Phish!

I really don't know what's better...

Sham Wow

Amish Fireplace

Barack Obama Gold Plate

In these tough economic times, it's tough to decide which of these late night infomercial product is best for me, the consumer, to blow my cash on. I mean, on my budget I can't just go around at 2 AM in drunken stupor blowing coke off a hooker's ass and calling every 1-800-Buy-Shit number that comes on the TV to acquire more gardening supplies from the angry, excessively hairy fat man that screams at me between episodes of Cops...anymore.

But seriously, how am I to decide? Well, I'll try to act like any Econ 101's textbook consumer and be rational about this.

The Amish Electric Fireplace seems like a great addition to any home. It's cozy, it will keep you warm, and it was built by people who don't even use electricity. As quaint as that may seem, I don't know that I want a bunch of people who still ride on horseback telling me how I ought to be decorating my home. Besides, with the economy the way it is, I might not even have a home soon enough. What do you expect me to do with my electric fireplace then? Sure, I can take it to my camp out behind the liquorstore and hide it in my dumpster with all the belongings that used to matter to me....but where do you expect me to plug it in?

So the Fireplace is out. But, with the falling value of the dollar the Barack Obama Gold Plate may seem like a good investment. I mean, gold is a commodity that's been around for years, and retains value. Sure, someday you may have to send it off to Cash4Gold.com, and let them literally melt the president's face into a yellow sea of cash for half of market value, but if our economy hasn't bounced back by the time he's leaving office, maybe you wouldn't feel so bad about that after all. But, with the beginnings of World War III breaking out in the Middle East, I don't know how much protection you, the consumer, is going to get from a commemorative plate.

So let's trash the plate, but you know what I bet could protect me through a terrorist attack? A ShamWow! Yes, that's right. The ShamWow is now able to be worn as a heat resistant cloak in the case of a bomb explosion, and acts as a radiation suit so you get get through the nuclear aftermath safe, sound...and unbelievably dry. Just apply the ShamWow to any approaching radioactive sludge, and it hold 20X it's own weight in uranium. That's right, 50% of the uranium will come up without even applying pressure. The government could blanket the US in ShamWows right now and save us all from ever having to worry about biological warfare, because ShamWow will suck up any infectious disease it touches. Besides that, it's really great for doing my dishes.