Axiomatic Civic Responsibility

I’m looking at the “protesters” in Michigan and ruminating on the nature of civil disobedience versus civic aphasia. By that latter term I mean a condition wherein a blank space exists within the psyché where one would expect an appropriate recognition of responsible behavior ought to live.  A condition which seems to allow certain people to feel empowered to simply ignore—or fail to recognize—the point at which a reflexive rejection of authority should yield to a recognition of community responsibility.  That moment when the impulse to challenge, dismiss, or simply ignore what one is being told enlarges to the point of defiance and what ordinarily would be a responsible acceptance of correct behavior in the face of a public duty. It could be about anything from recycling to voting regularly to paying taxes to obeying directives meant to protect entire populations.

Fairly basic exercises in logic should suffice to define the difference between legitimate civil disobedience and civic aphasia. Questions like: “Who does this serve?” And if the answer is anything other than the community at large, discussion should occur to determine the next step.  The protesters in Michigan probably asked, if they asked at all, a related question that falls short of useful answer:  “How does this serve me?”  Depending on how much information they have in the first place, the answer to that question will be of limited utility, especially in cases of public health.

Another way to look at the difference is this:  is the action taken to defend privilege or to extend it? And to whom?

One factor involved in the current expression of misplaced disobedience has to do with weighing consequences. The governor of the state issues a lockdown in order to stem the rate of infection, person to person. It will last a limited time. When the emergency is over (and it will be over), what rights have been lost except a presumed right to be free of any restraint on personal whim?

There is no right to be free of inconvenience.  At best, we have a right to try to avoid it, diminish it, work around it.  Certainly be angry at it.  But there is no law, no agency, no institution that can enforce a freedom from inconvenience.  For one, it could never be made universal.  For another, “inconvenience” is a rather vague definition which is dependent on context.

And then there is the fact that some inconveniences simply have to be accepted and managed.

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Read more about the article Why Flu Shots Rarely Match the Current Flu, and Why You Should Get One

Why Flu Shots Rarely Match the Current Flu, and Why You Should Get One

As any science guy recognizes, evolution is a fact of life. If an environment is inhospitable to a population, that population dwindles and another prevails. Flu shots are designed every year to prevent the premier emerging strains that are likely to become dangerous, either through virulence in the body, or…

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The Catastrophic Story-Telling Failure of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”

When they stop celebrating “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” I’ll pause my efforts to reframe this story as having one of the worst endings in the history of story-telling.

Just when the Whos of the Who Village almost learned an extremely important lesson, just when they were having an epiphany that all of that Christmas kitsch and all those baubles actually corrupted the holiday and distracted from the meaning of the celebration, that’s when the Grinch got three times more evil that day.

A proper way to end the story would be for the Grinch to confidently dump all of that glittery tinselly crap into the abyss high above the village. He would then triumphantly ride down into the Who Village to be welcomed as a hero. They would sing odes praising the Grinch for conducting his dramatic intervention. They would deeply embrace the idea that Christmas would proceed in a more pristine and sincere form because the materialistic cravings--those jingtinglers, whohoopers and glumbloopas--had been exorcised from the process. The Whos might even celebrate that the Grinch was channeling the Jesus who drove the money-changers out of the temple. Instead of singing the “Twelve Days or Christmas,” the Whos would compose a new carol called “O Little Town Where Less is More.”

The actual story ending is a sad one, however. Because the Grinch allowed schmaltzy emotion to prevail over principle, he decided that Christmas should NOT become like traditional Thanksgiving (before the concept of Black Friday). He decided that the celebration needed thousands of materialistic distractions after all. The Whos, glitch-addicts that they were, put up no resistance. The story ending consisted of a lesson almost learned. No denouement here—that metaphorical sleigh just couldn’t quite get over the crest of the hill. This kind of almost-story could inspire a remake of “A Christmas Story” where Scrooge almost learned his lesson. In that revised ending, post-nightmare Scrooge would march back to the Cratchit house and spray paint anti-Cratchit graffiti on the walls.

Damn. The story of the Grinch was almost such a great story. See you next year for more of the same.

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Donald Hoffman’s version of the Matrix: Things might be Extremely Different than they Seem

I enthusiastically recommend this podcast featuring Donald Hoffman. Sam Harris and (his wife) Annaka sound, in equal parts, skeptical and intrigued, which makes for some deeply engaging conversation. Hoffman's thesis might challenge almost everything you think.  Hoffman argues that evolution has not honed us to have veridical perception (seeing things as they really are). Rather, natural selection has privileged evolutionary fitness to prevail over veridicality. This topic dovetails nicely with Andy Clark's theory of predictive processing, in which Andy portrays perception as a "controlled hallucination."

The first hour is free for non-subscribers. Here's the promo for the podcast:

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast Sam and Annaka Harris speak with Donald Hoffman about his book The Case Against Reality. They discuss how evolution has failed to select for true perceptions of the world, his “interface theory” of perception, the primacy of math and logic, how space and time cannot be fundamental, the threat of epistemological skepticism, causality as a useful fiction, the hard problem of consciousness, agency, free will, panpsychism, a mathematics of conscious agents, philosophical idealism, death, psychedelics, the relationship between consciousness and mathematics, and many other topics.

Donald Hoffman is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of more than 90 scientific papers and his writing has appeared in Scientific American, Edge.org, The Atlantic, WIRED, and Quanta. In 2015, he gave a mind-bending TED Talk titled, “Do we see reality as it is?”


This teaser for this podcast is not mere hype.



An obvious example for illustrating Hoffman's thesis is color. We don't perceive wavelengths, much less the quantum physics even deeper down. To perceive these things would be too expensive (in terms of bandwidth) for rough and ready biological processors like human brains and bodies, and we don't need to fully understand the physics of the process in order to make use of color (or sounds or pain or shapes). For most of us, most of the time, we are trapped in the Matrix.

It is critical to note that there is NO COLOR in the objects "out there." Wavelengths of light are not colored. Color is something that is created only by the interaction between whatever is out there and our ability to engage with the world because it increases biological fitness. Here's the kicker . . . for Hoffman, everything is like color.  We don't need to understand the electronics and physics of the "objects" on our computer desktops in order to make excellent use off them.  Similarly, we often make excellent use of the things that we seem to encounter in the world, but it is entirely consistent with this observation that we don't deeply understand these things or we barely understand them.  A similar concern provoked Immanual Kant to divide the world into phenomena (how things appear to us) and noumena (things as they are in themselves).

The bottom line is that things might be incredibly useful to us as creatures trying to survive day-to-day, even when our understanding of these things is extremely lacking or even false. Useful trumps veridically-true to those of us who are often merely trying to survive to the next day. We human animals are happy to satisfice, even though we often conflate our hacked-up understandings of things with veridical truth.

In Paragraph 121 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche also pointed out that things that are untrue can often be useful:

Life is not an argument. We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we are able to live--by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith no one could endure living! But that does not prove them. Life is not an argument; the conditions of life might include error

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Need to Up My Game on Photoshop

I've dabbled with Photoshop over the years, but I have decided to (as Stephen Covey suggested) "sharpen the saw."  In other words, I want to incorporate new tools so that I can get things done better and more efficiently when I use Photoshop.  Shane Parrish of Farnham Street would identify this as "Compounding," which is a really cool concept, especially when applied to things other than earning interest on money.

And what a better time to learn tips on using photoshop than modern times, when you can attend Youtube University or pay a bit from many other online instructors?  I've already incorporated one change when compositing, something I should have done years ago: Instead of trimming a the top image with the eraser tool, I've started making use of layer masks.  That, and use of the "x" key to switch colors from black to white (black conceals, white reveals), has made it a joy to display only what I want on the top layer.  Whenever you make a mistake, it's non-destructive and hitting the "x" key lets you bring back what you accidentally took away.  What you'll see below is an image I created using the layer mask to display precisely what I wanted in my own body (I'm the guy on top).   I'll paste in the FB commentary so you can experience the joke too:

Last night I spotted my buddy Eddie White at the Southside YMCA. Eddie is active duty U.S. Army and I think his military exercise routine requires him to bench press a house. I was happy to serve as his weight-lifting partner.





My body looks pretty tidy, but it took a long time (about 45 min) to get it looking good. I kept zooming in deep to make the cuts precisely and I was using a mouse. My next step in my education is to learn to use the Wacom Intuos Wireless Graphics Drawing Tablet that I just purchased. There's going to be a learning curve, but I've seen a lot of testimonials from people who learn it and love it so much that you couldn't take it back unless you pried it out of their cold dead hands. So that's my next step in my education, my quest to do more than simply "dabble" with Photoshop.

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