A Passing Glimpse

By Robert Frost

I often see flowers from a passing car
That are gone before I can tell what they are.

I want to get out of the train and go back
To see what they were beside the track.

I name all the flowers I am sure they weren't;
Not fireweed loving where woods have burnt--

Not bluebells gracing a tunnel mouth--
Not lupine living on sand and drouth.

Was something brushed across my mind
That no one on earth will ever find?

Heaven gives its glimpses only to those
Not in position to look too close.

Obstacle 1: Happiness Negation

Centuries-old cultural conditioning has given us a nasty neurosis: the belief that happiness must be "earned". It can be "earned" only by enduring unpleasantness (eg work, pain, misery). But how do you know if you've endured enough unpleasantness to deserve happiness? Another unspoken game rule: "responsible adults" can never endure enough unpleasantness to truly deserve happiness.

Laid on top of the first neurosis is the idea that spending money will make you happy. This is toffee coating on a bad puritan apple. If you spend enough money to give you the (advertised) conditions for happiness, the neurosis emerges in the form of apparently random worries, guilt, "feeling shitty", etc. Worrying is the easiest and most popular way to negate happiness. (See sidebar interlude).

So: we never stop working, we never stop spending money, we're never really happy – ideal conditions, coincidentally, for a certain type of slave economy.

from http://www.anxietyculture.com/worry.htm

Will Hates

Posted recently, rebutted tonight, courtesy Scott Willis, my brother. Had to share. 

Joshua Willis

Hmm... The older generation speaking down to the younger generation, for a litany of more popular than real faults. Surely this has never happened before.

Scott Willis 

‎1 Why shouldn't life be fair? Currently it is not, but should we accept that and admit defeat? 2 Self esteem is the only thing that will protect your mental stability. 3 I made that at 19, why shouldn't others go for it? 4 I hardly ever see my boss, Tough? No. 5 Flipping burgers earns you what opportunity exactly? 6 Yeah sure, an individual act is not the fault of the parents on a legal basis, but our parents are a major factor in who we become. There is a certain type of liability in that. 7 People don't become boring because of bills, but because of lost vision and drive, a surrender to failure if you will. 8 Real life? Grades? When have the two been correlated? And what school is this? can I attend? I know of no such institution post-preschool. 9 Depends on what career you choose. Also, a sense of self and purpose is never to be underestimated, whether in a work setting, or outside it. 10 Sure, but I go to a coffee shop on my days off, so do the people on TV, but for them it also happens to be their job. Who really thinks this anyway? How many teenagers do you know think that they will not have to work?

Putting down people when they are at their most vulnerable, and least capable of defending themselves (ie: children/teenagers) is not helpful. Did it help you? I want to see an end to the whining about the oncoming generation. It is a recurrent theme that has had what effect exactly? Yeah, your generation is definitely more original than the one that came before... Whining never changed anything, or hasn't life taught you that yet? Life teaches difficult lessons by experience, not asinine lists. If young people have an idea of the way the world should be, they will make it so, or not. The problem is that to those kids for whom this input would actually be helpful, it is useless. For those who it would help, they already know. The scorn of our forebears when made a generality is destructive and unappreciated, it accomplishes what exactly?

Putting Bill Gates in the pic tells us that we can achieve a higher level of success than is realistic, while telling us on the chalkboard that we suck. Is that really a fair comparison? The reality is that it takes all kinds to make the world go round. Scorn, no matter who it is aimed at, is not a helpful attitude. Derision is merely one group of people belittling another. Are you really one of those? I refuse to be.

My generation outnumbers yours 2-1. What do you think we will tell YOU when you're old and expect us to pay for your medical care and social security if what you give us now is negativity? I'm pretty sure we'll be sympathetic... Trust us... After all, for the majority of Americans from your generation, there is no other choice. You're not good financial planners as a whole.

US Military bases in the Middle East

Notice anything? Perhaps a cluster? No one need be surprised if Iran is the next on the list. How the history books will scorn the US.

Plant Breeding Lab

I'm currently at my plant breeding job. I've spent the morning learning how to extract DNA and use the various lab tools involved, it's been fun. And easy. Working in a lab is mostly cerebral and minimally physical. It's a good way to spend a morning, almost like spending it organizing papers or whatnot. And, there's downtime. I've a half-hour break, essentially, and am 9 minutes away from working again. What an easy job! I hope I learn a lot about breeding. I'm going to have to start reading their plant breeding texts during downtime.

Hammer, By Fabio Morabito

I should have posted this long ago. It's eloquent and profound, and will change your thoughts on hammers as well as on life.

A hammer is at once the easiest of our tools and the most profound. No other tool fills the hand as much as a hammer does; none inspires the same degree of dedication to the job and such a total acceptance of the task. With hammer in hand, our body acquires its proper tension, a classic tension. Every statue ought to have a hammer, visible or invisible, like a second heart or a counterweight to offset the weight of the limbs. Wielding a hammer, we get rounded out, more integrated; it is exactly the one extra thing we need to feel ourselves permanent. Grabbed by the hand, obtuse, cyclopean, childlike with its weight and its feel, it gives us once again that sensation of freshness in a tool, a satisfying extension to our bodies, of an effort directed without waste or frustration. O first rate hammer! Willing brother! Few things are straightforward as you!

It acts like and epic poem; it’s bilious, goatish and eagle like. The force of a juicy anger has been attached to a wooden handle and has been left to ferment and toughen there. That’s the way we get hammers- from a slow drip-drip of rage, which finally forms a scab at the end of the handle, an amalgam of wrath. Just shape that and polish it, and your hammer is ready to go.

Passivity and power co-exist in a hammer. In fact, a hammer works by surprise, by nasty surprise, and its bruising strength is indebted not so much to its force as to its laconic delivery. It doesn’t affirm; it skewers. All of a hammer’s rage, slowly absorbed by the handle, slowly fermented, slowly assimilated, is expressed in one sharp bang! There’s no time for anything else. A man who hammers, it would seem, combines in the hammer head the best of himself and his forefathers. The man himself, as a particular individual, is symbolized by the handle, which determines the willingness and direction of the blow, but the impact itself is entirely indebted to his past, a past heavy with the weight of the dead. A horde of dead are packed into every hammer blow, your own dead, all that has been distilled in times before yours, everything tough that preceded you, and it’s that toughness you hammer with, along with all your dead kin, whose purpose is to serve the living as a final hardness, as their sharpened steel, their armor plating. Anyone who tries to live without the dead, without a family tree, is barely alive and won’t last long.

Thus a hammer never says anything that hasn’t been said before; no novel emotion ever changes its tone. The dead always produce the same response. Their productions get weaker with the passing of time, vast areas of memory crumble away, and their vocabulary gets smaller until at last it is reduced to a single syllable, hard and obdurate.

Upon reaching the kingdom of the dead, every dead person loses definition and his faltering voice is erased by the voices of others. Every hammer blow is like that, flowing lava of voices that has been reduced to one sole syllable. Every hammer blow raises to the surface our lowest depths, which are often close to a petrified inertia, their connections with here-and-now shrunk to a few dreams, a few pangs of conscience, a few blows from a hammer. That’s why the hammer blows of one man are vastly different from those of another; they glue together parts that are peculiar to the individual, matters that defy translation. Maybe at some point, in the farthest distance, they do touch each other and mingle, but even so they retain their separateness. Only the most sensitive of instruments could sort out those crude banging’s into all their strata of voices that have been lost in the passage of time. But it would be a hellish instrument. We’d hear the warm of our dead speaking one by one, in a terrifying whirlwind of sound.

We have to bring the dead together and confuse them, to stop them frightening us, so that they’ll let us live. We have to amalgamate them, squash them together, rub out their features and voices, until they linger on only as a choir, a far-distant clay pit, a half shadow. That’s the reason behind the invention of the hammer, its unified force. With a single blow it binds us to our dead and at the same time plunges them deep into the past. It buries them, gets them out from under our feet. When we talk to the dead through a hammer, we liberate ourselves from them. We can then go forward. The hammer flattens out, opens up a pathway, crushes down bumps in the road, levels off the track, heads toward tomorrow. A hammer is a prow, no more no less. But like every prow, it leaves behind a large wake, a choir of voices that are out dead kin, re-echoing in every blow. To move ahead is to move toward the dead. In every blow those who went before and those who are coming after, our yesterdays and our tomorrows, our liberty and our origins touch each other and fuse. In every blow we are nailed to the earth, redefined in a burst of bright flame, as if we were statues, not wholly alive, not wholly here, mildly classic and forever.

Answer to Pascal's Wager

This was written for my philosophy class, Knowledge and Reality, in November 2011.

Blaise Pascal, in his famous wager on the belief in God, gave credibility to the reasoning of a man pursuant of eternal happiness. However, in the centuries that followed the publication of Pensées, where the wager was explained, many philosophers have offered critiques of his reasoning. I have compiled some of these critiques and will organize these by asking some fundamental questions about Pascal’s Wager, of his argument’s validity and soundness. Of first concern however, is the actual wager.

The Wager explained

Pascal’s Wager is a common argument for belief in the existence of God. It is simply stated as the combination of two choices, one of belief in God and the other of possible afterlives. Pascal argues from his cultural heritage of Christianity, so the deity he speaks of is the Christian one and the afterlives he speaks of are also Christian. Pascal argues that, since reason cannot give a sure answer to the question of the existence of God, we are left with only the possibility of God existing and of God not existing. Since we cannot know anything about the probability of either outcome, we must give equal chance to both – a 50% chance to each. He further argues that if God exists, then there is a choice between believing and not believing, and the corresponding infinitely happy or infinitely unhappy afterlives. He describes the possible outcomes of our belief in God and of God’s actual existence, describing four possible situations which are as follows:

1. God exists and you believe in him and you are eternally happy in Heaven, 
2. God exists and you don’t believe in him and you are eternally unhappy in Hell, 
3. God does not exist but you do believe, and you lose some happiness to be gained in this life by unbelief but gained nothing in eternity, and 
4. God do not exist and you do not believe, in which case you’ve gained some happiness through a life of unbelief and lost nothing in eternity. 

Pascal goes on to defend his view against possible criticism. He says the choice is unavoidable, and must be made. There is no middle or other ground, there is only belief and unbelief. He exhorts the reader to believe because the consequences of disbelief have the potential to be so terrible and the consequences of belief have the potential to be so great.

Pascal concludes by saying that if one is naturally and through reason an opponent to belief, one should put all effort into belief. He says that the heart should be the source of belief, since reason cannot help us decide. He reiterates that reason cannot answer the question of belief, and that the heart should answer it using faith. Thus, Pascal lays out a claim that since we cannot know by reason, we should know by faith.

Is Pascal’s argument Valid and Sound?

Several answers have been given to Pascal’s argument over the centuries, most of which have attacked it’s soundness. Now, for an argument to be sound, the conclusion must follow from the premises and the premises must be true. Pascal’s argument is this:

1. God exists or does not exist,
2. You must believe either that God exists or that he does not,
3. The benefits of belief and being right outweigh the benefits of disbelief and being right, so
4. Therefore, believe that he exists – the potential for reward is infinitely greater. 

Does the conclusion follow from the premises? I believe so. But is this argument sound? Are the premises and conclusion true? Let us examine each premise.

Criticism has been made of the first premise, that God exists or does not. Pascal assumes that there can be only one god and that that god is the Christian one. He is really saying “if there is a god, it’s the Christian monotheistic one.” It is possible, however, that the Christian god does not exist but some other single deity does. It is also possible that multiple gods exist. Another of Pascal’s assumptions is that God and the afterlife are inseparably linked. However, there could be a god and no afterlife, and vice-versa. These seem to go together, but lacking any evidence of the supernatural, we cannot know.

The second premise is that we must make a choice. This is harder to question, but there is one situation, at least, where we may draw questions. Pascal, in this premise, is speaking to those who are conscious enough to know there is a choice. What is to be said of babies, who do not have the ability to consider this question? What is to be said of those ignorant of the idea of god? There do exist human beings who cannot make a choice, whether due to their ignorance of it or their inability to process it.

The third premise is that our choice should be made by a weighing of the benefits of each outcome This is, in my mind, near impossible to attack. Pascal argues that we cannot know one way or another that god exists, leaving us without an angle to work with. There is no knowledge possible, only belief. Therefore, we must choose whatever alternative is best. Pascal exhorts us to reason with our hearts rather than our logic, because the usual, logical approach to philosophical questions is useless here.

Now what can be said about the conclusion? If the premises are unknowable, can the conclusion remain sound? It is not so. Pascal’s Wager is a very good way of explaining the merits of belief if only one faith is concerned – the Christian faith. But we face a more complicated decision. There is more than one god to choose to believe in, and belief in any one god makes belief in another impossible. Should the god most likely to exist be chosen? How are the religions to be judged for potential universal truth? Should the god who offers the happiest afterlife be chosen? How are we to know what will make us most happy? These questions touch on our hopeless ignorance on the possibility of a god’s existence as well as on our ignorance of the potential deity’s attributes.

Is manufactured belief better than none at all?

Robert Green Ingersol wrote another critical reply in Some Reasons Why (1881). He said “Belief is not a voluntary thing. A man believes or disbelieves in spite of himself, they tell us that to believe is the safe way; but I say, the safe way is to be honest. Nothing can be safer than that.” He promotes the idea that humans cannot change their minds to believe a thing they think unbelievable, and that it is better to be honest than dishonest, even for the sake of eternal personal gain. Extrapolated from here is the belief that a just god would more reward honesty than dishonesty, even if the dishonesty promoted belief. Pascal answers this to some extent by saying that one should, given the possible outcomes, pretend to believe and strive to believe, and by striving to believe, to eventually convince oneself. I have actually seen this in practice, at a church. In this church, I was told that one could know the truth by studying the truth, and that this was more effective a method than any method which studied falsehood. They likened this argument to the experience of a bank teller, who, after handling thousands of real, legitimate bills, could easily spot a counterfeit. By focusing on truth, they shunned alternatives and put blinders on their minds, seeing only what agreed with their values. The faith they had was great in direct proportion to their blindness to anything critical of their faith, and they succeeded in convincing themselves of the existence of God and Heaven. In this way they used Pascal’s method of creating genuine belief and were entirely honest in believing their belief to be true. They made no false claims, but they did fail to fully utilize their intelligence and so limited their ability to find truth.

We have explored Pascal’s Wager and the several answers which have been made to it. Some have indicated that the choice to believe in God or not to believe in God is a false dichotomy, that there is another option of multiple gods existing, not just one or none. Another criticism is that God and an afterlife do not need to coexist – there could be one without the other. These criticisms address the truth of Pascal’s premises and indicate more possibilities than Pascal anticipated. We have found that his argument, though valid, is not sound.