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

This mini-essay was expanded upon in my e-book The Apple of Knowledge. If this interests you, please take a look at my book.

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!

The below post was incorporated into my e-book The Apple of Knowledge. If this interests you, please consider buying my book.

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

This blog post has found a new home in my book The Apple of Knowledge. If you enjoy it, please buy my book!

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.

The Movies of 2012

My favorite movies of 2012:

1. Atlas Shrugged. They really did this one right. I am surprised that it was not more popular at the box office. A must-see for objectivists and libertarians. Don't bother to see Part One though, it was not nearly as good. Atlas Shrugged Part Two stands by itself, and was very impressive.

2. The Avengers. The first truly incredible 3-D action movie. As a lifelong Buffy fan, it was nice to have another chance to see Joss Whedon work his magic. I wonder how long it will be before all movies and TV shows are in 3-D. Probably only a matter of time.

3. Batman. Surprisingly this movie had a very libertarian, anti-socialism message in the end, and it was a fun film with great action and some unexpected twists. Implausible at times, but well thought out and good execution by good actors.

4. Skyfall. Finally, the producers have decided to return James Bond to what made the classic 007 films great. Enough of all that new stuff, the last two Bond movies were horrible! This one was better, and may have saved the franchise. Implausible, but fun.

What I am looking forward to seeing: The Hobbit. Need I say more? Although I wish they would have done the entire novel as one 9 hour-long movie. I would have watched it from start to finish.

What I have no interest in seeking: Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part Two. I absolutely LOVED the original Twilight movie, but each sequel was worse than the one before. Breaking Dawn Part One was sheer propaganda for the pro-life movement, with the whole Bella's baby thing. I have no problem with a movie having a message, but there has to actually be some sort of entertainment injected into the movie to carry you along with the ideas. By the way, on the subject of Twilight, Twilight is Pride and Prejudice with vampires, and New Moon is Romeo and Juliet with vampires. Well-written and clever, but these are plots borrowed from the classics, these were not original inventions. Also it seems somehow dishonest to make a movie franchise based around hot teenage guys and then build it as a message about the wrongness of sex before marriage. The message isn't  necessarily bad, it's just inconsistent and self-contradictory with the appeal of the movies.

Religion as Myth and Mental Illness

This blog post was refined and published in my e-book The Apple of Knowledge, which gives a far broader analysis of science vs. religion.

Christians and Muslims, please turn away. It’s about to get ugly. Jews and atheists, keep reading: you don’t believe in Hell, so there’s really no downside to being exposed to my heresy.

Let me begin by disclosing that I am an atheist. My theory of religion is that religion is a mixture of mythology and psychological defects arising from “design flaws” in the human brain. I can explain the myth part of religion very simply: ancient humans circa 10,000 BC to 1500 AD did not have science, but they needed theories to explain the natural phenomena they observed, so they dreamed up gods and supernatural forces to explain lightning, fire, death, etc. The mental illness side of religion is the more interesting aspect, which I will discuss here.

What is a “mental illness”? Let me begin with two foundational premises. First, humans are animals. Second, the mind is the brain. If the brain’s purpose as an organ in the body is to think, then we can define “mental illness” as a physical malfunction of the brain which interferes with the brain’s ability to think properly.

My basic idea is that religion is a type of mental illness, not as extreme as insanity or delusions or schizophrenia, but lacking in sanity and based upon brain malfunctions. It should be clear that religion, in itself, would be defined as a “mental illness” by most psychiatrists if not for the fact that billions of people believe in religion and that makes it socially acceptable and immune from criticism. If someone came up to you on the street and said to you that God has spoken to them, your natural reaction would be to think that this person is completely insane. But for some reason when a book written 2000 years ago says that God spoke to people it is regarded as truth and not as evidence that the Bible’s authors had mental health problems.

It is perfectly understandable that so many people believe in God. I believe that the human brain has evolved several “design flaws,” problems with how the brain works which make it easy for human beings to believe in religion. A list of these mental illness vulnerabilities follows:

1. Confirmation bias. Brains have “confirmation bias” of thinking that something might happen, and then when it happens they think it is supernatural because there was a chance it wouldn’t happen, or else they notice when what they expect happens and don’t notice when what they expect doesn’t happen so they believe in the supernatural. Thus when a person has a religious belief they tend to feel that their experiences confirm their beliefs, but when they have an experience which would refute their belief they simply ignore it. For example, when a believer wins the lottery they think God gave them good luck, but if the very next day this same person’s best friend gets sick and dies they won’t notice it as it reflects upon the existence of a supposedly omnipotent loving God. Another example of confirmation bias: you have a feeling that something will happen and then it does happen, you think you predicted the future, but you do not notice the ten other times today that you felt something was going to happen and it did not happen.

2. Subjectivism, and prayer as a reaction to helplessness. Ayn Rand had a theory which she called “primacy of consciousness,” which is really subjectivism, the feeling that brains have that thoughts, beliefs, and feelings, can alter reality supernaturally without any physical activity or physical causation. The brain knows that what it perceives is real, so some brains incorrectly infer that reality is coming from perception, when in fact perceptions and beliefs are coming from physical reality. This explains the belief in the power of prayer. When the brain is totally helpless it turns to prayer as the only thing it can do, and then when the person who prays is somehow saved they credit the prayer and believe in the supernatural. The people who survive disasters and who prayed to God and were saved then become fanatical believers who tell everyone else to pray, but nobody ever hears from all the people who had emergencies and prayed and their prayers were not answered and they died. When people think that subjectivism is true they think their beliefs and feelings can change reality so when they are helpless they pray. I think the brain actually has a design flaw which makes the mind try to get control of the situation in situations where the person is totally helpless instead of simply accepting one's helplessness.

3. The blank slate problem. The brain is born empty and is essentially programmed like a computer by what it is taught from ages 1 to 15. Young children have no knowledge or experience and most often they simply believe what they are taught. And as adults the human brain tends to simply go with what it already believes instead of questioning beliefs or using critical thinking directed in upon itself. This is why most people believe in the religion they were raised on and were taught by their parents. If there was one true religion then you would expect everyone to believe in the same religion, and if people reached religion is a result of thought then one would expect various religions to overlap geographically. The fact that each region has one majority religion (e.g. Christianity in Europe and the USA, Islam in the Middle East, Hinduism in India) is what you would expect if religious beliefs come from what parents teach to their children. It is rare for a belief to come as the result of what a person reasons independently instead of what you are taught and indoctrinated in. This is because of a design flaw in the human brain which causes brains to soak up beliefs that they are fed as young children instead of thinking critically from a young age.

4. Conformity and obedience to authority. When I took Psychology 101 in college I was taught that it was well established by scientific experiments that the human brain has two tendencies: the obedience to authority and conformity tendencies, which are wired into the human brain. Humans will take orders from a perceived authority figure which they would not take from normal people. And an individual will tend to say that he believes things which parallel the beliefs of the group that he/she is a member of, in defiance of his/her own independent perceptions. So religions get people to say they believe in them because everyone else believes and people tend to conform to the beliefs of the group. If atheism were popular then everyone would be an atheist, but because religion is popular everyone is a believer. Also religion creates authority figures, and the human brain has a tendency to obey.

5. The stress reaction. It is well established that the emotion centers in the human brain react to fear and panic by shutting down the thinking centers in the brain and giving energy to the “fight or flight” response which is accompanied by fear and panic in the emotional parts of the brain. This design flaw in the human brain makes people behave stupidly and irrationally in crisis situations, which makes people tend to seek help from the supernatural to save them instead of calmly, rationally figuring out how to solve the problem.

6. Habits. The subconscious mind parts of the brain tend to develop habits, and the argument can be made that the human brain can be conditioned, like a dog or a bird, to repeat the same behavior if it has been given a reward repeatedly for performing that behavior in the past. This conditioning and subconscious repetition tends to embed traditions in human behavior, which would not exist if decisions were always made as a result of reasoning.

7. Hallucinations. Most people erroneously believe that they see with their eyes. That is not how the brain works. The eyes send neural signals to the vision centers in the brain, and the vision centers in the brain are what actually forms visual perceptions which are “seen” by the mind, really, by the conscious mind which I believe is the frontal cerebral cortex or perhaps the entire frontal lobe. Thus, when the brain chemicals malfunction or the neurons malfunction and misfire and there is an imbalance in neurotransmitter chemicals, it is very possible for the brain to believe that it is “seeing” something which simply does not exist. And these hallucinations are influenced by the ideas which are already in the mind, so if your brain malfunctions you might think that you are hearing God speak to you or seeing spirits which look like your religious beliefs. The brain plays tricks on the mind, and this is probably what happens to ancient “prophets” who thought God was speaking to them. I do not believe that the possibility of hallucination makes it impossible to achieve certainty and knowledge, and hallucination is not an excuse for philosophical doubt and skepticism. But we humans do need to be aware that our brains are vulnerable to design flaws, and also that the people we trust, and the groups we follow and go along with, are all of them vulnerable to human brain design flaws.

8. Problems in the different parts of the brain communicating with each other, i.e. a flaw in the evolution of interneurons. This takes many forms: 

A. Confusion regarding who hears your thoughts: you hear your own thoughts and think God is listening to you. This is a brain malfunction. You also talk to yourself in your thoughts and think you are talking to God, which is part of the origin of prayer. Prayer is talking to yourself in your thoughts and hearing yourself think, and a brain malfunction and the lack of an evolved set of neurons within the brain for the brain to see its own activity permits the mind to think that it is talking to God and that God is listening, the mind sees someone listening but the neurons don’t make the connection that the thing which is listening is also the thing that is thinking. As a matter of neuroscience it is well established that the center in the brain which speaks and forms words is not in precisely the same location in the brain as the center which hears and interprets words. I believe that religious mental illness can arise when these different hearing and speaking centers in the brain do not communicate properly with each other and when the brain does not pay attention to its own thinking and fails to pay attention to its listening to its own thoughts and is not properly self-aware of its own thinking, in other words if the brain does not know that it thinks to itself then it believes that it is speaking to God.

B. The visual parts of the brain when they hallucinate send signals to the frontal cortex/conscious mind and you see the hallucination but your brain does not tell you that it is a creation of the imagination and not from the sensory receptors in the eyes, this is a design flaw in communication between the eyes and the brain and between the different parts of the brain, which would not exist if the neurons had evolved better.

C. The ability to “will” or wish, of the conscious mind to send signals to the brain stem or motor cortex (which control the muscles and move the body) desiring things to happen, and the brain perceives no difference between sending a signal to the muscles to move the hand, which it can do, and sending out signals to cast a magic spell to make it rain, i.e. to “wish/will” it to rain, which it cannot do. If the frontal cerebral cortex received accurate signals from the brain stem and motor cortex to see where its signals went and what they did then this would simply not exist.

In conclusion, if religion comes from brain malfunctions then it is highly debatable whether people are “to blame” for mistaken religious beliefs, since the physical matter of the brain is to blame, and conscious choice plays a minimal role. People are not weak and stupid, they are merely human, all too human. Perhaps religion will remain in the human species until the human brain takes its next steps of evolutionary progress. Perhaps wars between Christians and Muslims will lead to nuclear war and our total extinction before that evolution can happen. These are merely idle speculations. However, from a biological, scientific point of view, there is an adequate explanation of religion purely from physical causes and with no reference to the actual real existence of God or anything supernatural.