What You Should be Thinking as You Fill Out Your Paperwork at the Doctor’s Office

When you arrive at the doctor's office to check in with the receptionist, you are often handed a small pack of paperwork to fill out. Until that moment, you have probably been focused on your own ailment or your own medical worries. Luckily, for most of us--most of the time--our own health concerns will more or less resolve and life will more or less go on.

For all of us, however, that typical pack of doctor office paperwork contains a magic page that has the power to boost our happiness through the roof, if only we employ the correct frame of gratitude.  I'm referring to the page that looks something like this:

This page gives us the opportunity to breathe a cosmic sigh of relief that we do not have most of those ailments on that list.  That's how I try to see it as I check off all most of those boxes with a "no." Thank goodness I don't have most of those medical problems. And this is merely the beginning of what I'm proposing as a journey of gratitude.

Instead of thinking about my own health problem, instead of being frustrated that my own body is not operating perfectly, the above page is a reminder that my body is an extraordinarily complex adaptive system--lots of little parts have self-organized into something so complicated that it seems miraculous. No humans could possibly make a tongue or an eye or a liver as high functioning or as elegant as the natural versions.

Imagine that humans in the distant future worked very hard and came much closer to making a reasonably functioning robotic human. Then imagine their supervisors sending down a new work order to make sure that this robot is also sentient.  Imaging the groaning you would hear from the engineering team! Then imagine that the supervisors send down another new work order to make sure that this artificial human could also repair itself if it became damaged!  Imaging louder groaning, especially when the supervisors remind the team that this self-repair must respond to hundreds of millions of microscopic threats and do it as well as the human immune system. 

Then imagine that the supervisors send down yet another work order advising the team that they must design their human so that it runs on almost anything that it puts in its mouth.  Even louder groaning.  Mutiny is threatened.

Finally, thousands of years later, when millions more engineers (and their great great great great grand-engineers) have successfully created a passable artificial human, the supervisors call down with one more new request:  Make sure that these artificial humans can create tiny artificial humans the size of a pinpoint that will grow, within the body of one of the robots, into large artificial humans who become wise through their interactions with any of dozens of environments.  Then imagine all the engineers quitting their jobs.

At the doctor's office, our question should not be "Why doesn't my body work perfectly?"  We shouldn't even complain that we sometimes have one or more of those ailments on the long checklist handed to us by the doctor's receptionist. A better question is "How is it possible that the actions of countless individual molecules self-organize into trillions of cells that result in emergent coordinated macroscopic behaviors such as the ability to walk into a doctor's office?"  Even more simply, the first question should always be "How is it possible that human bodies work at all, ever?"

Answer not forthcoming.

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Taking a Moment to Survey this Project of Dangerous Intersection

I recently received an email from a new reader ("Greg") who expressed appreciation for some of the articles he has read at Dangerous Intersection. I decided to share my response to his letter (see the bottom of this post).

This website has been important for me as a tool for me for trying to understand the world around me. It has not been entirely successful, of course, and never will be. The world is a inherently confusing moving target, making the quest to understand an ongoing project. It is also a complex adaptive system that demands multi-layer analysis. It's a big onion that requires exploration involving constant reframings based on both reductionism and emergence. Further complicating things, the tools we can use for understanding, spoken and written language, can only scratched the surface of our world. I have been increasingly expressing my frustration with this mismatch between our language and our quest for understanding by focusing on the "meaning of meaning." It's not that we can't make progress, but we often have to be satisfied (if we are honest) with what Nietzsche refers to in this "five fingers" reference:

Just beyond experience!-- Even great spirits have only their five fingers breadth of experience - just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.

--from Nietzsche's Daybreak, s. 564, R.J. Hollingdale transl

Greg's email served as another reminder to me (this has become a constant topic for me) of the intersection between group dynamics and truth. I would bet that I've written about this intersection on dozens of occasions here at this website, The problem being illustrated by Solomon Asch's classic social science experiment.

Greg, thanks for your email, and welcome to this website. I look forward to your comments, especially when you disagree!

Thanks for reaching out. It delights me when I receive letters like yours. My site started off almost like a personal journal about 15 years ago and I often write about topics as my own personal effort to figure things out rather than to tell other people how to think.  It's also been a good tool for me to help me remember and organize my thoughts. Otherwise, information pores into my head and then seems to leak right back out.

It has long been my belief that Group labels (e.g. "Christian") disguise the fact that within each labeled group there are millions of disparate people, some of them having very little in common with the others, even though it seems like they are all homogenous when you see them together in the pews on Sunday.  In other words, I don't think there's any alternative – we all have to figure it out ourselves in the end.  Good luck to you in your own personal project, and good for you to recognize that there's no substitute for hard work when it comes to figuring out anything important.  Let me know when you finish your book. And yes, that would be good to have a cup of coffee someday once the vaccine starts doing its work in a big way.

I have worked very hard to articulate my own views regarding religion and they have evolved over the years. You might find my series of articles on this topic relevant to your own endeavor. I title these articles "mending fences," and you can find the first of the sequence (of five articles) here: https://dangerousintersection.org/2010/07/11/mending-fences-with-believers-and-moving-on-part-i/

If you choose to take the time to read through these five articles, I would very much be interested in hearing what you think about them.  I don't often see my approach expressed by other people, although more recently I have been increasingly influenced by the writings of David Sloan Wilson, on the coupled topic of religion and evolution.
Again, thanks for reaching out!
Erich

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Glenn Greenwald Warns of the Domestic War on Terrorism

Here are the opening paragraphs of Glenn Greenwald's latest article, "The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming":

The last two weeks have ushered in a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting “terrorism” that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly twenty years ago. This trend shows no sign of receding as we move farther from the January 6 Capitol riot. The opposite is true: it is intensifying.

We have witnessed an orgy of censorship from Silicon Valley monopolies with calls for far more aggressive speech policing, a visibly militarized Washington, D.C. featuring a non-ironically named “Green Zone,” vows from the incoming president and his key allies for a new anti-domestic terrorism bill, and frequent accusations of “sedition,” treason,” and “terrorism” against members of Congress and citizens. This is all driven by a radical expansion of the meaning of “incitement to violence.” It is accompanied by viral-on-social-media pleas that one work with the FBI to turn in one’s fellow citizens (See Something, Say Something!) and demands for a new system of domestic surveillance.

Underlying all of this are immediate insinuations that anyone questioning any of this must, by virtue of these doubts, harbor sympathy for the Terrorists and their neo-Nazi, white supremacist ideology. Liberals have spent so many years now in a tight alliance with neocons and the CIA that they are making the 2002 version of John Ashcroft look like the President of the (old-school) ACLU . . .

An entire book could — and probably should — be written on why all of this is so concerning. For the moment, two points are vital to emphasize.

First, much of the alarmism and fear-mongering is being driven by a deliberate distortion of what it means for speech to “incite violence.” . . .

To illustrate this point, I have often cited the crucial and brilliantly reasoned Supreme Court free speech ruling in Claiborne v. NAACP. In the 1960s and 1970s, the State of Mississippi tried to hold local NAACP leaders liable on the ground that their fiery speeches urging a boycott of white-owned stores “incited” their followers to burn down stores and violently attack patrons who did not honor the protest. The state’s argument was that the NAACP leaders knew that they were metaphorically pouring gasoline on a fire with their inflammatory rhetoric to rile up and angry crowds.

But the Supreme Court rejected that argument, explaining that free speech will die if people are held responsible not for their own violent acts but for those committed by others who heard them speak and were motivated to commit crimes in the name of that cause (emphasis added)

. . .

And that is directly relevant to the second point. Continuing to process Washington debates of this sort primarily through the prism of “Democrat v. Republican” or even “left v. right” is a sure ticket to the destruction of core rights. There are times when powers of repression and censorship are aimed more at the left and times when they are aimed more at the right, but it is neither inherently a left-wing nor a right-wing tactic. It is a ruling class tactic, and it will be deployed against anyone perceived to be a dissident to ruling class interests and orthodoxies no matter where on the ideological spectrum they reside.

The last several months of politician-and-journalist-demanded Silicon Valley censorship has targeted the right, but prior to that and simultaneously it has often targeted those perceived as on the left. The government has frequently declared right-wing domestic groups “terrorists,” while in the 1960s and 1970s it was left-wing groups devoted to anti-war activism which bore that designation. In 2011, British police designated the London version of Occupy Wall Street a “terrorist” group. In the 1980s, the African National Congress was so designated. “Terrorism” is an amorphous term that was created, and will always be used, to outlaw formidable dissent no matter its source or ideology.

If you identify as a conservative and continue to believe that your prime enemies are ordinary leftists, or you identify as a leftist and believe your prime enemies are Republican citizens, you will fall perfectly into the trap set for you. Namely, you will ignore your real enemies, the ones who actually wield power at your expense: ruling class elites, who really do not care about “right v. left” and most definitely do not care about “Republican v. Democrat” — as evidenced by the fact that they fund both parties — but instead care only about one thing: stability, or preservation of the prevailing neoliberal order.

Unlike so many ordinary citizens addicted to trivial partisan warfare, these ruling class elites know who their real enemies are: anyone who steps outside the limits and rules of the game they have crafted and who seeks to disrupt the system that preserves their prerogatives and status. The one who put this best was probably Barack Obama when he was president, when he observed — correctly — that the perceived warfare between establishment Democratic and Republican elites was mostly theater, and on the question of what they actually believe, they’re both “fighting inside the 40 yard line” together

Greenwald then links to this video of Barack Obama.

This point can't be over-emphasized, but I fear that this point is invisible to the tens of millions of Americans who are convinced that U.S. politics can best be understood as a tribal pursuit between the "Left" and the "Right."  They are deeply trapped in an illusory matrix that has the viscosity of fundamentalist religion. Greenwald's articles are mostly only for subscribers, but this one is open to the public.

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Public Twitter, Public Google, etc

Eric Weinstein lays it out succinctly for you, no matter what your political persuasion. These entities need to be regulated or we need to create public equivalents. If only we could trust our politicians to step in and protect free speech across the board . . .

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