Review: Iron Man 3

I have to confess that I did not like Iron Man 3. It wasn't bad. It wasn't horrible. It was okay. But it was mediocre, and they could have done better. The original Iron Man movie was a breakout success because it was clever, honest, exciting, and unexpected. In Iron Man 3, the director and screenwriters went to great lengths to give surprise after surprise. But none of the surprises were particularly important or meaningful. Iron Man was a movie about the War on Terror and the military industrial complex. Iron Man 3 was a movie about nothing, which worked for Seinfeld but not for this movie.  With the script that they used, they easily could have sent a political message about the media's fear-mongering, similar to the first Iron Man movie's message about war-mongering. But they chose not to.

Also, SPOILER ALERT, I hate it when movies are based on books or comic books and the adaptation is not true to the original. I loved Joss Whedon's The Avengers because Loki was Loki and Thanos of Titan was Thanos of Titan. In Iron Man 3, the Mandarin is NOT the Mandarin. The movie's producers thought too much. If they had just kept it simple and turned the comic books into a movie, if they had been true to the source, it would have been far better.

In a special installment of my blog, I plan to break my own rule of monthly posting, and post twice in May 2013. The second post will be my review of the new Star Trek movie, which you can expect a few days after it comes out. I am looking forward to it!

What I'm Working On Right Now

I recently read an article in the KDP Amazon.com newsletter about how indie writers should blog about their works in progress, so I am blogging about the two books I am writing right now. It's been about a year since I published "Rob Seablue and the Eye of Tantalus," and it has not been a commercial success, and it was recently rejected by the Libertarian Futurist Society in their nomination for finalists for their awards. I am taking this as an indication that my fiction writing needs technical improvement, so I am now trying my hand at writing nonfiction books. Unlike my fiction, many of my nonfiction articles in Liberty Magazine have been quite popular, so apparently my nonfiction is better than my fiction. I am writing two nonfiction books right now.

The first nonfiction book is a combination of a policy paper outlining the libertarian positions on various issues, combined with a new theoretical justification of libertarianism which draws upon politics, economics and the law to show a new principle as a basis for liberty. The principle of liberty that I present in the book is more simple than Rothbardianism or Randianism, but in a sense it is also more elegant and less grandiose, and my hope is that it will appeal to a wide audience and bring in people who might not agree with Rothbard or Rand. I don't want to say what are the details of the theory of liberty that I expound in this blog post, since I think I should save that for the release date when the book comes out. I expect to finish this book this summer and publish it before the end of 2013. The book looks like it will be about 150 pages long (although for e-books in e-readers page count is less predicable than paper books).

The second nonfiction book is a treatise of pure philosophical epistemology. In this book, I make the case for the ability of science to achieve something that can be properly called "knowledge." I offer my argument for why science is capable of proving that God does not exist. And I offer a new, detailed theory of how reason and perception work as a theoretical foundation for the scientific method and experimental verification. This book should also be done by this summer. It looks to be about 200 pages long.

As a concluding note, my practice has become to post a blog post on a monthly basis, and I am now declaring monthly posting to be the new official policy for this blog. So I promise to post something each month, and you should come back once every month to see what's new. Thank you for reading this!

Fairness and Equality, Libertarian-style

I recently had a vigorous, healthy (i.e. mean and nasty) debate in a Libertarian discussion group on social media. I argued that rich children have an unfair advantage over poor children because poor children are trapped in failing public schools, and rich children can attend good private schools. The two people I was debating (one of whom was nice but foolish, the other absolutely vicious) could not think past the mistaken idea that I was saying it is unfair because the rich have more money and can afford to send their children to private schools, and poor people can't, which is NOT my argument. My argument was the libertarian argument that the government uses VIOLENT FORCE to compel poor children to attend the failing public schools, because of our rotten socialized k-12 public education system and compulsory attendance. Because the government uses this force against poor children, but not rich children, it is UNFAIR for the poor children, and the law is treating rich children differently from poor children, and giving them preferential treatment. I was making a libertarian argument against government and for the privatizing of primary school, yet the dim, dull people I argued with somehow could not get it around their brains that I was not making a Marxist/Socialist argument to outlaw private schools. Very frustrating, but, obviously, political dialogue is a good and vital element of a functioning democracy.

The Philosophy of Science

The Philosophy of Science. Many famous philosophers have sought to take the approach and methods of science and translate science into philosophy to create a truly scientific philosophy. These thinkers include Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, and Quine. I argue that each failed, for the reasons below:

Hume seemed to think that because scientific theories are always capable of being disproved by new empirical evidence, that skepticism was the scientific attitude. He ignored the fact that science, when theories have been proven and experimentally verified, seeks to provide us some degree of knowledge. We can know that the sun will come up tomorrow, because of the scientific postulates of astronomy, which science has empirically verified. Whereas Hume claimed we cannot know that the sun will rise tomorrow. Hume’s rejection of faith was rational, but his rejection of knowledge based on analysis of the physical world, was irrational.

Kant argued that science can achieve certainty and universality only because the mind imposes scientific laws upon the subjective experience of reality. His basic argument was that subjectivism is the justification for scientific knowledge. This is, of course, completely backwards. The scientific attitude is that the mind revolves around the physical world. Kant’s view, that the physical world revolves around the mind, is a religious idea, that faith and belief can alter reality. And any intelligent academic generally recognizes that Kant’s actual purpose was to protect religion from the rise of science. Science achieves knowledge that hydrogen and oxygen can combine to form water, for example, from an examination of the molecules and atoms, which are things in themselves in physical reality. The scientific mind learns from reality, it does not impose its subjective beliefs onto sensory experience.

Wittgenstein sought to apply the principles of mathematics into philosophy, specifically in the form of formal symbolic logic. My favorite argument against him applies a theory called the Chinese Room, originally developed by Searle. If someone in a room is given Chinese words, and a computer software program to process them, then he could put together Chinese sentences, but if he doesn't speak Chinese then he will have no idea what any of it means. The argument is that symbolic logic can reach conclusions, but if you don’t know what the symbols mean, if you don’t know what the words in a language refer to in reality, the objective physical objects in reality to which the symbols refer, then the language, and logic, are meaningless computer programs, devoid of actual meanings relevant to human experience. For example, “sun” is not actually a word, it is a star in the sky.

Quine argued that the philosophical equivalent of scientific experiments, in which theories are experimentally verified using empirical data, is thought experiments, in which a person “tests” a theory by analyzing whether the theory matches the person’s “intuitions,” which are teased out by thinking about the thought experiment. This idea has been widely accepted in academic philosophy. The obvious flaw is that, whereas empirical data comes from objective physical reality, intuitions come from internal subjective feelings, and therefore a thought experiment is nothing like a real scientific experiment. Quine shares the Kantian fault.

The truly scientific approach to philosophy, would be to take philosophical ideas, and actually design real scientific experiments to try to test their truth or falsehood. I call this approach “experimental philosophy.” For example, if you think that sensory experience revolves around the mind, and subjectivism and solipsism are true, then test your belief. Pick up a piece of hot metal, and see whether your mind can impose a phenomena, the experience of the feeling of ice, upon the noumena, the thing in itself which you are holding in your hand. If the iron burns you and your mind could not control it, this scientifically proves, or at least lends credence to the idea, that sensory experience comes from objective physical reality, and not from your mind. On the other hand, if your mind can make you experience a feeling of ice, then your mind is creating your sensory experiences. The Kantian might reply that the structure of the mind could not be controlled by a desire to feel ice, but when we speak of “the mind,” we generally mean something that can be influenced by our feelings, desires, thoughts and beliefs.

The Veil of Ignorance

The Veil of Ignorance

by Russell Hasan

            DECIDE, God said to us. CHOOSE YOUR STYLE OF CIVILIZATION. I WILL RESHAPE THE WORLD BASED UPON YOUR CHOICE. KNOW THAT EACH OF YOU WILL BE BORN INTO ONE OF THESE SEVEN LIVES; WHICH ONE, I WILL NOT SAY…

            We seven souls stared down into a vast chasm of star-scarred space-time, looking far off into the distance at a small blue-green planet orbiting a raging fireball; we were standing in a circle, our feet sunk ankle-deep into the mists of eternity. Highlighted for us to see with special clarity were seven of the fetuses taking shape within wombs of females of the ape-like dominant species on this planet, the seven bodies that we souls were going to be placed into by God: one, the daughter of a drunken wife-beating mechanic; another the son of a Senator and a wealthy heiress; yet another a son gestating within a teenage crack-addicted prostitute; still another, the yet-to-be-born child of a lower-middle-class used car salesman and his violin-playing wife. Four of the lives were white, two dark-skinned and one mixed; three were boys and four were girls. Some were looked upon as joyous blessings by their parents as their bodies grew within the womb, others were viewed with frustration and anger, still others were a source of mixed hope and fear.

            This decision of how to structure our society is perhaps the most important decision that we will ever make. I knew roughly what I wanted the world to look like, but I hoped that the other souls would agree so that we could reach a consensus….

            “I think that it is only fair,” one of the other souls said, “once we are all born into our lives down below, for us to pool our assets and wealth and divide it up evenly among us… just as everyone should form a collective and pool everything among everyone on that planet. Let us destroy property. Since none of us knows which of the lives we will be born into, this would take some wealth away from those of us lucky enough to be born into the rich families… but some of us will be born into want and poverty, and this way we will all have a guarantee, right now, prior to the accidents of birth, of a fair share of money to live off of, so that we will no longer need to be afraid of an unfortunate birth. That way we can proceed into our new lives with confidence and vigor, rather than panicking about the possibility of the curse of bad luck.”

            “But how can we truly be free if there is no property?” I asked. His vision was the precise opposite of the society that I intended to advocate for. “I will do the work that I do, and it will produce wealth, and that wealth will be mine, if there is ownership. I want the freedom to choose to be successful. If there is no property, if everything is shared, then what is to stop you all from taking the money that I make, and giving me nothing for it in return? That doesn’t seem right. That doesn’t seem fair.”

The other souls all looked at me, some with shock and others with placid annoyance; a few of the other souls nodded their heads in agreement with me. I was the youngest among the souls, baked in God’s oven a mere sixteen trillion years ago. The soul who had spoken first, a very, very, very old soul, gave me a stern gaze, as if to say that I would be forgiven for my foolishness but only if I learned his wisdom quickly.

            “Your success will only be the result of the luck and circumstances that you were born into,” the old soul said. “Therefore there is no such thing as a right to the money that you make. You have no right to it, it was a gift that was given to you… and we are entitled to our fair share of your profits.”

            “A gift?” I asked incredulously. “But I have looked at this blue world of oceans and clouds, and the ape-things do work in order to build their towers of stone and glass and to slaughter their meat, they do work to build the mighty metal ships that sail them across the sky. It seems that I will be expected to work, and if I am assiduous and industrious then I will deserve to own the gold coins that people will pay me for my cleverness. Surely I am correct?”

The older soul laughed at my words, and a few of the other souls arced their lips up in smiles of sympathetic humor. “No, surely you are wrong. You cannot possibly know that you will be able to succeed. After all, you might be born into poverty or illness or be born into a stupid body. If you are prosperous then it will be because you inherited your wealth, or, if not, because you were born into a body with strong muscles or a smart brain, because you had good DNA, or because you were lucky enough to have loving, nurturing parents who raised you to feel pride and self-esteem. But only a few of those  seven lives are blessed; the others are doomed to torture and misery, and you should not condemn the unlucky souls to such agony. After all, you yourself might be born into the worst of all of the lives, raised by a pimp and a prostitute on the mean crime-filled streets of the ghetto, where a bullet in your head is both a constant possibility and something to look forward to as a blissful escape from a nightmare reality. Would you risk everything to play the game of luck and bet that you will be born into good fortune, will you cling to your lack of wisdom, or will you embrace the light and concede to our plan for the elimination of fear and poverty? Equality is not something that is merely noble, it is also eminently practical as a way for you to be safe from bad luck.”

“Luck?” I asked, and a note of indignant anger crept into my voice. “No, not luck! I know that I will succeed or die trying, and I am not going to let any of the pain, agony, or misfortune down on that beautiful, miraculous blue world prevent me from accomplishing my destiny. I will choose to be a success… and I will not yield to you who would steal that accomplishment away from me. You are thieves and I will not obey you!”

“Young fool, you’ll ruin everything for me!” the older soul snarled. “For us, I mean! For us!”

“This isn’t about safety from fear, is it?” I said, as horror dawned on me. “You know that we will forge our own destinies by our choices, which come from us, our souls, and not the situations which we inherit. You just want to be lazy and let me do all the work while I carry you on my shoulders! You know that if everything is pooled then you can take without giving! Isn’t that right? Isn’t it?”

“No!” the old soul screamed. “Don’t listen to him! Look into your hearts and listen to your inner voice, and listen to your fear! Only with my plan can your fear of failure be eliminated! Only with socialism can we all achieve true safety! We must make the brave decision, the one that takes our weakness into account!”

WHAT HAVE YOU DECIDED? God asked us.

“We choose socialism—”

“No!” I interrupted. “We have not yet reached an agreement!”

I HAVE NO PATIENCE FOR WAITING UNTIL YOUR BICKERING ENDS. I AM SENDING ALL OF YOU DOWN TO EARTH RIGHT NOW. YOU CAN MAKE YOUR DECISION ONCE YOU HAVE ASSUMED THE FLESH, AND THEN FIGHT TO SEE YOUR CHOICE REALIZED.

So I was born into a human life, and now I must fight to make freedom a reality, and to make something of the life that I have been given. And I stand by what I said, because, ironically, the body that I was born into is….

The Philosopher's Stone

The Philosopher’s Stone

by Russell Hasan

            “Here I was, sleeping in a comfortable mattress I made using my Philosopher’s Stone, sleeping off a hangover from a delicious beef stew and two exquisite bottles of Pinot Noir I conjured up, and then you come and rudely toss me from bed and point a sword of fire at my throat. Good gods, man, have you no decency?”

            “Be silent, heretic! People died to make your accursed Philosopher’s Stone. Now tell me where you’ve hidden the Stone, infidel!”

            “That’s just a myth, you know. We don’t make the Stones from human blood. We distill them from dragon scales and fairy nectar. No one is harmed by the fun that we have. Not that I would expect a Councilman like you to know what fun is, Count D’Imir.”

            “I am wise to your wiles, Patrickus. You Alchemist scum tell lies about how the Stones are made; deceit is merely another entry in your long list of sins. You Alchemists used the powers of your Stones to live lives of luxury and you refused to share them with the rest of the Nation. Didn’t your mother ever teach you to that it’s nice to share?”

            “My mother taught me not to be ashamed of the fact that I’m alive or to feel guilt when I enjoy pleasures. And she taught me not to be afraid of filth like you.”

            “Watch your tongue, sinner! You would let a town of villagers starve while you washed your tongue with Stone-made rum. Fortunately we of the Ruling Council have taken the Stones away from you, liberating them and putting them to use for the good of society. Now tell me where your Philosopher’s Stone is.”

            “So I surrender my Stone and you let me go? Is that it? Or is it merely a quick death that you’re promising?”

            “I made no promises, Patrickus. Give me the Stone and then we will see how merciful my mood is.”

            “Never. Kill me if you want to, D’Imir. I won’t tell you where the Stone is.”

            “Fool! I too have a Philosopher’s Stone, the one that I took from your old Alchemy teacher Albertus before I killed him. I have become adept at using the Stone’s magic to torture, and you will scream in agony and beg for death if you do not yield your secrets to me. The glory of our Nation demands that the Council have all the Stones, and you will not be allowed to thwart our will!”

            “I have grown tired, Count D’Imir. Ever since your Ruling Council came to power we Alchemists have been outlawed and hunted like foxes by you and your hounds. I want only the sweet release of oblivion, rather than to continue fighting for a hopeless cause. All I care about is enjoying a really satisfying sin, and you’ve made the world, how shall I phrase it, sinfully boring. I would be willing to tell you where my Stone is, provided that you grant me certain conditions.”

            “The Stone for a clean, painless death? I can agree to that.”

            “No, I want that and something else also. I want to know the truth. The Philosopher’s Stones brought wealth to everyone in the Nation; we made giant ears of corn and gigantic potatoes and stalks of broccoli as big as trees, and we sold what we made to the villagers at very reasonable prices. Then you and your Council cronies come and declare war on us in the name of the people, and persuade our own soldiers to join you. Why? I understand the envy that motivated the Nation’s peasants, but what of the Council? You don’t care about using the Stones for the good of all, isn’t that true? You just want the Stones so that you can do magic, so that you can grow more powerful. You called yourselves selfless but you are really insanely greedy for power. Am I right? I just want to hear the truth from your own lips, and then I will yield.”

            “You are cynical and oh so inaccurate. While we only pay lip service to the Nation and care not for the villagers, we do nothing for our own glory, we care nothing for our own power. Our goal is not to use the Stones to become gods, but rather to give the Stones to a god. Once we have gathered all of the Philosopher’s Stones we will have enough magical energy to open the Portal of Olympus and to call forth the god whom we serve. Once he arrives we will we deliver the stones to him, and he will reward our loyalty.”

            “But all the gods are long dead, aren’t they? They all died in the Pantheon Wars.”

“Not so. The greatest one, the one whom Death himself could not kill, has returned. The Council serves him, the greatest of the Pantheon of Elders. The Cult that has long slept and lived only in nightmares has been reawakened. And we will know everlasting life while the people of the Nation taste fatality.”

“It’s the Cult of Death you speak of! So, the Ruling Council is a front for Saturn, the God-King of the Undead! I expected something horrible, but not this. The legends say that the Cult of Death’s plan is to massacre humankind and resurrect us as zombies to be your slaves. Is that true? How could we have been so blind?”

“I don’t know. We left clues for you to see. We sent out preachers who preached that enjoyment of physical pleasures was a sin and that self-abnegation was the path to eternal life—a doctrine which anyone who bothered to read the ancient texts would have recognized as the gospel of the Cult of Death. Saturn showed us how to twist the peasants’ compassion for their fellow men into a feeling that their own desires are dirty and sinful. We help the Nation’s people to be very selfless, in the name of helping their brothers they surrender everything to us, and we will give them exactly what they do not want, exactly what will give them no guilty pleasure at all. Their bodies sin, so we will kill them and give them the blessing of release from the flesh. They believe that the body is a prison for the soul, so we will do the merciful thing and set their souls free to journey bravely into the afterlife, and we will take the bodies they leave behind and animate them as zombies. Our teachings made the peasants miserable, so that they became insanely jealous of anyone who was happy—and, of course, you Alchemists with your Philosopher’s Stones are generally quite cheerful. Is it any wonder, then, that we turned the Nation against you?”

“A ghastly plan, D’Imir. You want to kill us all—and yet the people believe that you are their champion. I never paid any attention to what the preachers were saying; I just assumed that everyone would appreciate the prosperity that the Stones would bring to our Nation.”

“You should have understood, Patrickus. After all, you Alchemists were the main power in the Nation before we came along, and power inevitably corrupts. Don’t think that I believe your pretense of being so naïve and innocent. You are upset because you no longer rule the Nation and we do, but you might as well accept the inevitable. Soon this Nation will consist entirely of our zombie slaves and Saturn will rise to rule humanity once again. But enough chatter. I gave you what you wanted, I was frank and honest. Now, before you die, you know the truth, that you and the Alchemists never had a chance against my omnipotent Master. So tell me, where have you hidden the Stone? You swore an oath, and I will force you to answer!”

“The Stone is all around you, D’Imir. I gave it to my friend Muzickus, who used it to create an illusion of the Floating Fish Inn of Hamtown, which you entered, never bothering to cast a sight of truth spell while you hunted, and then stormed into my lodging room and captured me and used your spells to bind me and point this flaming sword at my throat. The Stone is in these walls; this room is a cage.”

“A trap? Impossible! You are not smart enough!”

“We, Muzickus and I, aimed a Mirror of Memories at you, and we recorded your whole little confession. It’s a shame that idiots like you are so proud of how vicious you are, Count D’Imir, otherwise you wouldn’t be brash enough to brag about your Cult. Now, if we can make it past the Council’s army and reach the Tower of Sages, we can use the Crystal Orb and broadcast your confession to the world, and the people of this Nation will rise up and dethrone the frauds who claimed that it was a sin to live well and that the interests of the people demanded war against the Alchemists.”

“I will never let you! Prepare to die!”

“Muzickus, my friend?”

“No, stop it, stop! Help! Saturn, save me! You Alchemist sons of….”

“Phase one of your plan has succeeded, Patrickus. The Cult of Death has developed a weakness. Life still has a slim but glittering hope.”

“Indeed, Muzickus. Now, onto phase two. To the Tower!”

December 2012 is Brain Month on my Blog!

Okay, this blog is not supposed to be focused upon the philosophical question of the mind-brain identity. Next month I am going to start posting on entirely different topics. But permit me one last mind-brain blog post. . . .

How do we know that the mind is the brain? Three reasons:

1. Brain damage. Science has learned, from over 100 years of experience, that brain damage to a specific section of the brain corresponds to a failure in a specific function of the mind. For example, there is a part of the brain which once damaged causes the mind to cease to recognize faces, so a person can see the face of a loved one and not know who they are, and be unable to remember faces. This strongly suggests that the mind is composed of the collection of mental functions of each part of the human brain.

2. Drug effects. Drugs such as alcohol and marijuana have a specific effect upon the mind. These are physical substances which alter the brain. This is what we would expect if the mind is the brain. If the mind were a soul then we would not expect drugs to alter or control it.

3. Sleep, etc. If the mind was a disembodied soul then we would expect it to remain awake while the brain sleeps, not to be controlled by bodily urges such as hunger, etc.

The counterargument is people's anecdotes of out of body experiences and spiritual experiences, but this is adequately explained by hallucinations and wishful thinking.

One last note: I strongly believe that evolution not only changed the human brain, it also added new things on top of the old ones while leaving the old parts relatively unchanged. Thus I think the neocortex is the distinctly human reasoning part of the brain, while the older brain structures remain much as they were in our animal ancestors. This is why the conscious mind can focus and concentrate, but the older parts of the brain have a remarkably short attention span and are easily distracted: back one million years ago the brain needed to quickly react to new stimuli to survive (e.g. by fighting or running away from predators and dangers), whereas in modern man the need to mentally concentrate is key to survival (e.g. learning and developing technology). A lot of people underachieve their intellectual potential by not engaging the distinctly human reasoning part of their brain and instead let the animal part of their brain do most of their cognitive activity, which explains all the people who have short attention spans and do nothing but watch TV and eat potato chips in their spare time, instead of reading great books and thinking deep thoughts. That last part, however, is just my opinion, and is conceptually distinct from the brain-mind identity hypothesis.

Brains vs. Souls, and Brain Management

There is a popular Philosophy 101/Philosophy of Mind argument that looks at the data from brains which have had the corpus collosum, which connects the brain's right and left hemispheres together, severed. Severing the corpus collosum was an old remedy for seizures which is no longer used, but the data remains. These brains had minds where one part of the mind did not know what another part of the mind was seeing. For example, the left eye would look at an apple but the mouth would say "I don't see an apple." The Analytic philosophers' argument is that a "person" or a "mind" is one whole being, and therefore the self cannot be identical with the brain. I draw precisely the opposite conclusion: it is scientifically undeniable that the mind is the brain, and therefore cognitive neuroscience must conclude that the mind/brain has many different parts, which work together in a healthy brain but which can become separated by physical or psychological dysfunction. Based upon reading about it and personal observations, I believe the brain has several distinct parts, which most people would recognize. The consciousness or "upper brain" is probably the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex, possibly only the neocortex section. The consciousness is aware of reality and uses conscious reasoning. The "lower brain" or subconscious mind is probably many different structures, probably including both the other lobes of the cerebral cortex and structures in the middle of the brain including the amygdalae and basil ganglia. The lower brain uses subconscious reasoning, has emotional reactions such as lust or sadness, and also implements behavioral conditioning through feelings of reward and punishment. The "bottom brain" or unconscious mind controls bodily functions like digestion, and is invisible to the conscious mind.

I think that evolution intended for the conscious mind to "manage" the subconscious mind and to make a deliberate effort for the brain to function properly and for the different parts to work as a whole. The lower brain has a naturally short attention span and gets easily distracted by sensory stimuli or thinking about sex, and has the attention span of a fish--maybe 30 seconds before something distracts it. Concentration and focus come from the upper brain. The lower brain also has a natural tendency to be irrational, and I believe that evolution intended the upper brain to impose rationality upon the lower brain. Cognitive neuroscience indicates that the brain often functions by having biological impulses and urges which can be suppressed and inhibited by the action of the brain, and I think that the consciousness acts by controlling the lower brain and directing the brain's tendencies into a rational plan. Performing a task uses the entire brain, with the bottom brain interfacing with and moving the body, the lower brain using the habits conditioned from experience, and the upper brain paying attention and thinking about the task.

The human brain has a design flaw in that the consciousness naturally thinks of itself as a nonphysical "soul" and sees the lower brain as the "body." I dispute such a view of the mind. The consciousness is a part of the brain, and the mind is a physical object in reality, a "res extensa" to discredit Descartes using his own terms. The consciousness as brain does not mean that there is no such thing as free will. As stated, the brain can modify and influence itself by its internal cognitive processes, and the conscious mind can make decisions which control the lower brain. But the lower brain can also have physical malfunctions which impose irrationality upon the consciousness, which is how I would characterize mental illness. The self is not ethically responsible for mental illness which has an entirely physical origin, although it is the task of the upper brain to impose rationality upon the self, and it is also probably possible for a brain to freely choose to behave in an insane manner. Free will is "top-down" causation wherein the upper brain controls the brain's behavior, whereas mental illness is a type of "bottom-up" causation wherein physiological factors influence or control the conscious mind's thinking. Obviously this would be difficult to scientifically inspect using contemporary methods, but could be inferred from first person introspection. This is not so much a scientific postulate as it is a theory which could be called philosophy of mind/philosophy of science presenting a foundation for cognitive neuroscience.

Rob Seablue Book Promo Video

Please enjoy my new book promo video. Hope you like it! Also, the camera did not add 10 lbs, it added more like 100 lbs. I am not quite this chunky in real life.

Post-Genetics and Marriage

Post-Genetics and Marriage

by Russell Hasan

There is a theory which I call “post-genetics.” I don’t know whether I fully believe in it, but it is an interesting theory, and it explains a lot about human behavior. The theory states that most human behavior can be understood as an expression of the urge of living organisms to cause their genetic material to continue to exist. In my Liberty Magazine essay “Playing the Race Card” (http://www.libertyunbound.com/node/698) I presented how this theory explains racism. The members of each race tend to share more genetic material with each other than with members of other races (from interbreeding due to the isolation of the various races from each other in ancient times), and therefore the members of a race are urged by their genetics to promote that race over rival races. That is the genetics theory. The post-genetics theory represents my idea that human beings have evolved minds which now demand different behavior from mindless DNA, and the evolution of minds shifts the dynamics of human civilization away from a pure drive to perpetuate genetic material and towards a paradigm of individual ethical achievements. For example, racism is wrong because what matters is people’s individual identities and personal choices and not what race they are a member of, so defining people by their racial DNA ignores what really matters: individual minds and choices.

In this essay I want to elaborate my theory of post-genetics and show how it can be used to interpret various phenomena of human civilization, including marriage and the abortion debate. First I will present a general overview of genetics theory. The genetics theory holds that each individual exists only to procreate and ensure the survival of the species, each human exists only to compete with others in order to spread their genetic material so that the best genes disseminate and the species is made stronger. Human beings realize their purpose only through the survival of the species.

Genetics is a cynical but scientific explanation for several human behaviors. Why do parents love their children? So that the young of the species will be protected until they reach sexual maturity and can reproduce. Why are children cute? So that they will be protected. Why do people watch sports? Because it encourages physical fitness, which increases the health of the species. Why have women historically been politically and socially dominated by men? Because the female of the species is designed to produce and nurture the offspring, in the womb and through the production of breast milk, which requires that the male protect the female during the gestation in the womb and during the rearing of the young children, and this puts the male in a position to patronize the female. Why do men and women marry? Because it is the most efficient way to create and nurture offspring. Why are people obsessed with having sex? Because more sex produces more offspring, increasing our chances of survival. Why is sex pleasurable? To motivate people to procreate. Why do the most attractive and successful people find lovers more easily? Because mating with the members of the species with the most desirable traits encourages those traits to be more widely expressed among future generations. Why do men like women with large breasts, and why do women like athletic men? Because they want those qualities for their offspring, and breasts produce breast milk, and men use their strength to provide the food while the woman bears the child and lactates.

One of the main principles of genetics theory is that the purpose of sex is procreation for the survival of the species to produce as many young as possible, and young with the best DNA possible, and love and dating and marriage are merely social institutions designed to promote this genetic purpose. First, the behavior of teenagers, listening to “cool” music and dressing in “cool” clothes etc., is behavior designed to attract a mate, like a bird preening its feathers and chirping a love song.

Now let’s consider homosexuality. Why are gays hated and persecuted? It must be because gay sex does not produce children, which results in fewer human young, which decreases the species’ chances of survival from an evolutionary perspective. Therefore genetics urges the species to destroy homosexuality. This can be confirmed by looking at the social institutions of marriage and contraception. The Christian church, which denies the truth of biological evolution, is, ironically, the main enforcer of genetics and its mandates. If the purpose of sex is merely procreation and the production of children, then condoms violate this purpose and should be outlawed. Then there is marriage, which the church dictates must be between a man and a woman. Why? Obviously so that marriage will produce children. Marriage evolved so that a woman could only have sex with one man so that the man could know for certain that the woman’s babies came from the husband’s DNA, so that protecting his children would promote his DNA. In ancient times, say from 20,000 BC to 5000 BC, the woman needed a man to protect her while she was burdened by a fetus in the womb, so the males evolved to be stronger than the females, and this is the origin of the social custom of male domination of women. Later, somewhere around 5000 BC (the precise years are inexact, and best left to historians to debate), marriage became a way to tie families together, when family and clan were the central organization of society. Why was the joining together of two family clans by marriage such a big deal? Because the marriage of a son of one family and a daughter of another family united their DNA in the children of the marriage, so their DNA was tied together and therefore the purpose of the two families was united in their purpose of promoting their DNA.

If this is genetics, then what is post-genetics? Post-genetics says that, while the purpose of sex from an evolutionary perspective was the creation of babies for the survival of the species, the purpose of sex for minds is not the same thing as the purpose of sex for genetics. Therefore the evolution of the mind, which is probably the frontal lobe of the human brain and which has evolved relatively recently, has drastically transformed human behavior. The purpose of sex for minds is firstly for pleasure and enjoyment, and secondly as an expression of love and affection. This represents a huge change in human evolutionary purpose, and a lot of the “culture war” between social liberals and social conservatives is explained by the war between humans as minds fighting for sex as pleasure on the one side, and humans as DNA fighting for sex as procreation on the other side. If the purpose of sex is pleasure, then condoms to prevent fertilization make perfect sense, and homosexuality also makes sense, and premarital sex makes sense, and a lot that is socially liberal makes sense. And if those things are okay, and the perpetuation of DNA is no longer paramount, then gay marriage also makes a lot more sense, since the married couple would not have an imperative to procreate their DNA.

Marriage for love is a modern invention. History had marriage for family connections, not for love. We are still coping with this evolution. Generally, religion is almost always the genetics view because religion is the embodiment of tradition, and tradition dates back to the era when only genetics existed and post-genetics did not exist because the conscious mind had not yet evolved. So genetics vs. post-genetics is tradition vs. evolution, entirely as a result of the structure of the history of human evolution.

Let me then briefly apply this interpretation to the pro-choice vs. pro-life debate. Obviously the people who are pro-life are not advocates of their position for any of the reasons that they say. If killing all life were evil then Christians would not eat meat which comes from killed animals. Also, there is the classic Rothbard argument that even though a parasite depends on the host for life nobody says it is evil to kill parasitic animals, and a baby which is forced upon a mother against her will has no right to exploit the mother’s body even if the fetus really is a human life. In other words, if a fetus has all the rights of adult human beings, but no more, then abortion would be okay, because an adult human cannot enslave the body of another human being. So we must look to genetics to understand the motives of pro-lifers. And the motive is obvious. Genetics views the role of women as to produce children, so anything that frees the female womb from the production of children is an enemy. Abortion enables women to shrug off their purpose of birthing children, which then frees their minds up for mental pursuits, like pursuing a career. So genetics wants women to be merely wombs for childbirth, and post-genetics views the female purpose as individual personal achievement, such as by pursuing a career. This explains the pro-choice vs. pro-life fight, and the participants in the battle are where the theory expects them to be, with social liberals fighting for post-genetics, and social conservatives fighting for genetics.

The post-genetics theory explains a lot about human existence. But the theory has flaws, and I am not sure whether I completely believe in my own theory. Post-genetics has great explanative power, but it feels a bit cynical as an explanation for people’s choices. Does the theory of post-genetics make you feel like you understand things better? Please leave a comment with your thoughts!