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.

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* 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.

Kurzweil's Cyber Friend

After the exciting news that Ray Kurzweil has joined Google, we have finally been treated to this tidbit about their plans together: the Cyber-Friend search engine which truly knows you, and knows how to give you exactly the information you want.
Now, I love Kurzweil and Google as much as the next guy, I want the singularity to happen and I definitely see the direction Kurzweil is trying to go here (and, to an extent, the direction Google is trying to go here), but it seems to me like this particular step in that direction is a bad one.

You see, there is this phenomenon called the echo-chamber effect. If you aren't familiar with it, the basic premise is this: suppose you're a communist. You read communist blogs, follow communist news websites, and network with other communists on facebook. Needless to say, you are therefore bombarded with confirmations of your communist ideas and opinions; should a dirty capitalist pig dare to defile your facebook wall with a capitalist article, picture or joke, they will surely be deleted. Moreover, should another capitalist show up on one of the communist blogs that you frequent, they will be immediately shot down by all the communists, reminding you immediately of the superiority of your views.

That capitalist pig, naturally, in his capitalist blogs, with his capitalist facebook friends, is as sure of his opinion as you are of yours, and cannot imagine how you can be so blind to the obvious capitalist truth.

That is unfortunate but understandable. People always seek similar people, for a variety of reasons, some of which are even sensible. Facebook got some flak for enhancing this approach, but it's really no different from any club, movement, or other gathering of people offline. Facebook is, at the end of the day, a social network. It has no overarching social responsibility. Every time you blame facebook for being full of people who fall prey to stupid "Repost this if you want Bill Gates to give you free ice cream" statuses, you must keep in mind that the only function facebook provides is to let those people, who would have believed the same nonsense even without facebook, be heard.

Google is not facebook.
You just need to look at the news items related to Google to see the difference. Getting sued for allowing companies to buy ads related to trademarked terms? Outrage over blocking certain content for certain countries? Google has, for a large chunk of the population, become the Portal to the Internet, if not the internet itself. Unless you're an academic, or journalist, or lawyer, who routinely searches for specific types of information in specific repositories, when you want to know something you simply Google it.

This brings us back to Kurzweil's vision of the search engine which learns what you like and what you're usually looking for.

Never mind the communist example from earlier. This time, let's pretend you're a person from an extremely religious background, and maybe the year is circa 2020. You have somehow heard of this "evolution" thing for the first time around the age of 25 and are absolutely shocked at this sacrilegious idea. It gnaws at your mind, that people would openly speak of such blasphemy. It can't possibly be true, can it? You must find out more...

So you go to Google, and you type "evolution", and you press the button. But the year is 2020. Google has been observing your searches for years, and it knows that you're always searching for religious stuff, and reading religious stuff. It knows you, to use Kurzweil's words, better than you know yourself.
Tell me, what sort of results do you think that you'd get from Googling "evolution" with that sort of background?

The thing about the echo chamber effect is that it really is what we want. Everybody wants to be surrounded by people who confirm your beliefs repeatedly and tell you that you're absolutely right, and that anyone thinking differently is insane, or immoral, or just stupid. And a Google that knows it and gives you what you want will make sure that whenever you're online (which, as the years progress, becomes increasingly synonymous with "all the time"), you will get nothing but an eternal echo chamber, where any diversity of thought is ignored with all the power that modern technology can provide.

According to Wikipedia, Ray Kurzweil himself enjoyed quite a diverse environment in his youth; personally, I always assumed that that was a big part of how he grew into such an exceptional person. I sincerely hope that his quest to bring the Singularity will take a different path from this flawed idea of giving the users of the internet exactly what they think they want.

A Parental Paradox

Lo and behold, all the idiots marching up and down the streets holding signs and chanting slogans have Made A Difference! The Israeli government has heard the plight of the Israeli parents and has opened eleventy-billion new kindergartens, free of charge (taxes aren't real money, as we all know), so parents can actually go to work without having to spend half their monthly salary on a real kindergarten.

This seems to have worked well for almost a few minutes.

In a nutshell, the problem is this: in these free kindergartens you get approximately two adults for about 35 toddlers. I'm devoutly childfree, granted, but I can see how this might be considered sub-optimal by some. Having hung out with plenty of young elitist parents in my last job, I'm under the impression that what the relatively rich consider to be a good kindergarten would have a ratio of 1:4 (or even 1:3), whereas 1:17 is considered to be somewhere between "emotionally scarring" and "criminally negligent".

I was going to show some serious calculations with serious demographic data, but bugger that; the above ratios are quite enough to demonstrate this point:
The belief that there must be one kindergarten teacher for every 4 children means that you must quadruple the number of people working in this profession. And when you have to quadruple the amount of workers in a difficult and unrewarding (not to mention unproductive) profession, I'd say you have a national problem.

Worse yet, you then add insult to injury by demanding that the people working in this profession don't get paid properly; after all, at 1 kindergarten teachers per 4 children and 2 parents per child, this means if you want the kindergarten teacher to have an average salary, the average parent would have to pay 1/8 of his or her salary every month. More, in fact, because a kindergarten needs to pay out of that same money for everything they have, from the building to the food. And even more, because those who make a lot of money already pay large sums to keep their children at the 1:4 ratio and safely away from this sort of discussion. I'll be nice and call it 1/7 then.

And of course, few parents settle for one kid these days. Have your firstborn accidentally followed by a pair of twins and that's more than 40% of your monthly salary automatically spent faster than you can say "social welfare". Does it even matter whether this 40% is in the form of taxes or just money you have to spend?

This will never work. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Less adult supervision for kids or higher costs for kindergartens, you have no choice but to pick one and make the best out of it.

Basic Rights

So there you are, sitting at the train station, when you happen to overhear this guy talking on his cellphone. It seems like he's about to buy insurance against... I don't know, stubbing his toe on alien spacecraft or something equally stupid. Whatever it is, it's perfectly obvious to you at that moment that this person is about to waste his money, and... oh no, he's about to give the insurance salesperson his credit card details!

Naturally, without wasting a moment, you punch him in the face, grab his cellphone and throw it under an incoming train. Disaster averted, you grin proudly at the man you just saved, expecting some form of eternal gratitude. He seems a bit reluctant about it, but you're convinced that as soon as he realizes what a favor you just did him he'll lovingly embrace you and thank you for saving his money.

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Today someone found a 56 years old man who hanged himself in his apartment and for some reason two separate teams of paramedics rushed to the scene. When the second team got there, the first team told them something along the lines of "Don't bother trying to resuscitate him, he's already in rigor mortis". The second team decided to ignore it, and after 7 stressful minutes without breathing or pulse, got the man back to life. They are, apparently, considered heroes for it.

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Look, I realize that some people might be insane and decide to hurt themselves for some reason which us sane people might consider ridiculous. That's not even the point.
You wouldn't assume control over someone's money to forcibly prevent him from making a financial mistake that might ruin the rest of his life, would you? Forget the silly insurance example up there, suppose you caught someone in the middle of sending his bank account details to that good old Nigerian prince, would you tackle the guy and actually physically force him not to do it?
I sincerely hope that every single person reading these lines replied with "Dude, no, it's HIS money and he can do with it what he will".

So why is it that when it comes to someone's life instead of money, suddenly their most basic rights are forfeit?

A person's life is their own. For good or bad, the decision must be theirs. It doesn't matter if you think you're so much smarter than them that you know, absolutely know, that things will be fine in another few years and this person will be glad to be alive. Hell, it doesn't matter even if you know for a fact that whatever this person is going through is purely temporary. It's still their choice.

What if it were the other way? You find this guy who's so absolutely depressed, suffering from various illnesses, lost his job, his wife ran away with the kids and the dog, maybe he even gave his bank account to a Nigerian prince and all his life savings are now gone. This person, you can clearly see, is miserable and doomed. Does that give you the right to kill him just because you think that would be doing him a favor?

With all due respect to people who want to "help" other people, this sometimes involves too much arrogance. You don't necessarily know what's better for other people. And even if you do know, you can't just take control over another person. You just can't. It's the most basic of human rights.

If you could arbitrarily deprive others of their basic rights for their alleged good, where would you draw the line? If you're allowed to "save" someone's life when they made it perfectly clear that they don't want it, what else are you allowed to save?
Should people be allowed to spend their money in a sub-optimal way? Suppose I want this nice chair I found in a catalogue, but you, being smarter than me, know I might be just as happy with another chair that costs 10% less. Are you , a random person, allowed to forcibly take my money and spend it on the second chair?

Maybe the government should also tell people which job to work at, which house to live in, what food to eat, what to do in their spare time, whom to marry, so long as it's for their own good. It's scientifically proven that you can't trust people to choose their own spouses (e.g. domestic violence), perhaps it's time for the lawmakers to intervene.

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The absolutely worst part here is that the analogy between life and money just doesn't cut it in this particular case. This guy up there had no pulse for at least 7 minutes while he was being resuscitated, and who knows how long before that. That's 7 minutes without circulation, without oxygen reaching his brain. This isn't "saving" someone and giving him a second chance for a bright future; this is taking a person who was already miserable enough to choose death over life, denying him this choice, and probably adding severe brain damage to his list of troubles.

You know, while some people who survive their suicide attempts eventually try again, I have never heard of a single person who successfully committed suicide and then regretted it. I think I'd give them the benefit of doubt before choosing to violate their most basic human rights by forcing life upon those who don't want it.

God's Will

Let's suppose, for just one moment, that all them people who believe in some sort of organized religion have a point. Since there are several big religions, and each of them has approximately three billion different sects, let's give this benefit of doubt just to a few common points that Judaism, Christianity and Islam can probably generally agree about:

1. God exists.
2. God wants us to do certain things, and not do certain other things.
3. God has supernatural control over natural events.

Now, the disagreements between different religions/ sects are mostly about the fine details of point #2, but they all agree that the point itself is valid: some things are commandments, others are sins, etc. Having accepted these basic assumptions, I believe I have a solution to these disagreements.

Let's take a random question that may have religious significance, for example, am I allowed to eat pork? Jews and Muslims would tell me that God wants me not to, whereas Christians would tell me that God doesn't mind it. In order to settle this disagreement, I suggest that we go directly to the highest authority.

I simply decide to submit myself wholly to God's will, instead of the various people who claim to be his representatives, and let Him answer this question - whatever He tells me personally, I shall do.
So I toss a coin.
If God can create the entire universe and perform all the fascinating miracles that the bible is full of... and if God is so loving and merciful and we are all His children...and if He watches us every hour of every day... surely He can make the effort of making the coin fall on the right side for the sake of giving us this invaluable knowledge, no?

Wrong Way To Die

Every now and then you hear about someone (often young, male and Asian) found dead after spending too many days in a row playing some computer game (often by Blizzard Entertainment). Shortly afterwards, humans, being humans, start with a healthy mix of "video games kill" and "why didn't anyone save him" and the general "oh how terrible".

Common causes of death around the globe feature mostly cancer, heart disease, car accidents, and other terrible illnesses. Now, I can't speak for everyone here, but if I had to choose one of the following options...

1. A horrible slow death of some disease, full of agonizing pain and ever deteriorating systems.
2. A quicker albeit painful and frightening death from a car accident or a faster disease.
3. A quick, calm, peaceful death, while doing something that I love doing.

... well, whoever asks me that question would have to wait a long time until I could stop laughing in his face.

Besides, based on my ample experience in the fields of not-eating and not-sleeping, I find it impossible to believe that anyone could go that long without food, drink or sleep, and without feeling that something bad is happening. Ergo, it should be viewed not as some sort of accident, like some people say, but as a suicide, and even next to other forms of suicides it's still the best way to go, both for the happy "victim" and for the people who don't have to clean his guts/ brain/ blood from the floor. 

I'd go on about why suicide is no more terrible than a person's decision to harm himself in another way (e.g. smoking, drinking, gambling, enrolling in a university, etc.) but I'll probably have an entire post about that. So let's just leave it with the headline "Today an Asian man chose to end his life in a much more pleasant way than nature originally intended".