Protecting Our Children

This filth has been filling our movies, shows, magazines, and even the internet, for far too long. You used to have to watch it privately and quietly in the middle of the night on some TV channel that had nothing better to show, or go out and purchase some printed materials where everyone could see you and judge your tastes. But now it has become so ubiquitous that not only is it accessible for free in huge amounts on the internet, or on TV at any time of the day, but commercials run rampant with it and mainstream books are sickeningly full of it, making the whole thing practically inescapable!

Sure, some people would argue that there is nothing wrong with it, that it is merely a basic biological function of humans, the mere documentation of a natural phenomenon, nothing to be ashamed of. And, of course, in its own way it teaches us important things that all adults need to know, but which schools seem unwilling to properly teach us. But I say no, these flimsy excuses only try to hide the disgusting truth, that this horrible thing is destroying our society!

The fact that it deliberately engenders terrible and sinful lust in its viewers is, I hope, undeniable; after all, it is carefully built to incite these exact emotions. The subjects prepared to exacting specifications; the lighting, just so, to optimally show their exciting shapes and shades. Or, just as bad, graphic descriptions in textual media paint such a vivid picture that we might as well be sitting in the same room. One can hardly refrain from drooling at the mere idea, and often cannot think of anything else until their urges are, temporarily, sated.

But an even greater problem is how all of these enticing views and descriptions create and perpetuate an unrealistic standard, which cannot possibly be met by any of your real life interactions. These fictitious accounts, performed by talented professionals with skill beyond any of us average Joes, meticulously captured on film and often edited further to make them even more alluring, are unlikely to be matched by you or anyone you know due to lack of skill, practice, equipment. All of this results in an endless void of unrealistic expectations, never to be filled, always leaving us wanting.

How many people have asked their spouses to do something they've seen in one of these shows, only to be met with a scornful look and, should they be willing to try, crushing disappointment at the amateur results? How many inexperienced teenagers have had their expectations built by such things they have seen online, and grew up thinking that this is how the real world is and should be?

And that, of course, leads to the most dangerous part: people, especially underage, seeing these shows and trying to mimic them at home. A young and impressionable viewer might well try to perform something they've seen on TV, without properly understanding the significance of their actions or the inherent dangers. Such experiments may well result in people harming themselves, or the people they love, and possibly leaving them scarred for the rest of their lives.

I say we have to stop it here. Get rid of this abominable phenomenon while we can, before it's too late. So I urge you to say no to cooking shows, to books full of sensational descriptions of feasts, to pictures of heavenly foodstuffs in commercials or on random websites. At the very least, if you insist on displaying such content, hide it behind a NSFH warning (Not Safe For the Hungry) and make it accessible only for responsible adults over the age of 18.

So for the sake of our children, please, say no to culinography!

My Immortal Soul

I find it very hard to believe in the supernatural.

It's worth it, however, to define what I mean when I say "supernatural", which seems to be different from what most people mean.

What is it that, in most people's opinions, qualifies ghosts or telekinesis as supernatural? Nothing about such phenomena is above nature. Surely ghosts obey some natural rules; most people would agree that they look a certain way, behave a certain way, and are incapable of performing certain things, for example interacting with physical objects. If a ghost tried to pick up a pencil, you could predict the outcome: its hand would pass through the pencil.

As far as I'm concerned, it is the existence of these rules that defines "nature". Nature is the whole universe and everything in it, and it is all subject to various natural laws, be it Newton's third law or "ghosts cannot pick up pencils". This, in turn, means that nature is, theoretically, completely predictable; we can perfectly predict the result of a collision of two particles, or the presence of a particle in a magnetic field, and so on. And since these laws encompass everything in existence, obviously nothing we see is supernatural.

Now, in light of this, let us examine the following chain of events: I, while walking in the street, see an acquaintance, and wave at him. We can break it down like so:

1. Photons from the sun hit my friend and are reflected in my direction.
2. The photons go into my eyes, and the visual information is transmitted to my brain.
3. My brain performs some miraculous image processing, facial recognition, and data retrieval, reaching the conclusion that this is an acquaintance of mine.
4. ???
5. My brain sends some signals down to my muscles.
6. Certain muscles contract, moving various parts of my hand in some directions.
7. I wave.

Some of these steps are fairly understandable. We know how muscles work, we understand the function of the human eye, and we are certainly on our way towards understanding how the brain does some of what it does. But what about step 4? Why, in a nutshell, do I wave?

The automatic answer is that I choose to wave. I could also choose not to wave. Something within the black box that is step 4 has decided that I, whatever "I" means, want to wave. It has taken all the information from the eyes, it has scanned my memory for familiar faces, it has consulted a vast database of experience to find the socially acceptable thing to do when recognizing an acquaintance in the street, it has considered my mood, and has reached the conclusion that I want to wave.

You could, of course, narrow down each of those steps, break it down to the smallest parts, end up with a list of hundreds of steps describing all of the most basic physical, biological or chemical interactions that make up this simple event. You could break step 4 into many smaller steps as well, but somewhere you would still end up with one step, let us name it Step X, that deals with whether or not I actually want to wave. Which brings us to the big question:

Is the mechanism behind Step X natural?

If Step X is natural, then it obeys natural laws, and is a direct result of the chain of events that precedes it. Given the exact circumstances, we could calculate the outcome. Or, in other words, free will is impossible because it is all predetermined, and determinism must be true.

If Step X is not natural, then its mechanism is above and outside nature; it exists somewhere outside the physical universe and can reach into it and affect it without being subject to its laws. I am no great theologian, but it seems to me that such a mechanism, the entity that performs this step, can be safely referred to as a soul.

That's it, more or less, that's my conclusion. Either the universe is deterministic and we are all meaty machines, or we have an actual supernatural soul. 

Not such a bad choice, actually.

---

* One argument I have heard against this conclusion is that a third option exists, and that is randomness, i.e. not all natural laws are predictable. I do not accept it, because I don't believe in a random nature and have never heard of any laws that even claim to be random, and never mind the fact that proving randomness is literally impossible. But be that as it may, it may still be viewed as a sort of determinism, in that our reactions are governed by the quirks of quantum mechanics rather than any sort of free will, so I guess the final conclusion should be phrased as: if free will exists, then souls exist.