I’m going to try something a little different in this episode which marks the 12th anniversary of Phedippidations: I’m going to answer some questions. These aren’t just any questions, these are deeply philosophical questions that you should ask yourself.
The answers reveal your inner philosophical stance. The way you perceive the phenomenon of life and the experience of everything. It’s not just about how you feel, but it’s what you believe and the strength of the validity of your belief.
I am someone who has undergone a major and significant shift in the way I perceive my own existence and the rules which govern the universe. I’m not proclaiming my superiority of understanding here…I’m not saying that I’m right and that everyone else is wrong, although: there may be a few examples of that: Global Warming is real for example, just sayin’.
But for anyone who has been listening to me for the past 12 years, you’ve known me as a different person. Physically, spiritually, politically and intellectually: I am not the Steve Runner who took to this microphone on July 4th of 2005. I’m a whole different animal, I can assure you…and while I cannot objectively tell you that I’m better than that goofy little podcaster who asked you to listen to his “thoughts, opinions, observations and rambling diatribes” I am the entity that he evolved into: for better of worse.
The same can be said of you of course. Where were you and what were you doing, thinking and believing in back in the summer of 2005? I’m betting you were different in many ways. That’s okay: rest assured that 12 years from now we’ll both be different still. That’s how this game is played.
So, to once again quote the great Bob Dylan: “let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late”.
Question One: Is it worse to fail at something or never attempt it in the first place?
Question One: Is it worse to fail at something or never attempt it in the first place?
I think this depends on two things: the potential impact and the risk of any action. Notice that I didn’t mention anything about “reward”…I understand the statistics of gambling…I have a 401k and stock in my company…so every day I’m tossing the dice, playing the lottery, taking a chance…but as much as I probably should be: I don’t think about the reward, and I don’t follow the state of the economy all that much.
Failure is sometimes an option. In my career as a IT manager, I’ve had a number of employees who messed up, broke things, caused outages, mayhem, and horrendously failed in their attempts to do something right. These failures were painful, but they learned a great deal from the failure.
Many years ago I was working at WCCO radio in Minneapolis…it was the last day that we were scheduled to be onsite, working at the studio, when I did something incredibly dumb: I powered off a Novell Network File Server while it was undergoing a Comprehensive Surface Analysis of it’s hard drive. This was a very bad, time consuming failure on my part…and it meant that we had to spend the weekend in Minneapolis to fix the problem. Anger, sadness, and frustration ensued: BUT, I never did that again: ever.
Of course, this is different than failing at an attempt: but the point is the same: we learn from our failures.
I am wired to be opposed to risk, but I do feel that it is worse to never attempt something for fear of failure as long as you consider “what’s the worst that could happen”?
Question Two: If you could choose just one thing to change about the world, what would it be?
Question Two: If you could choose just one thing to change about the world, what would it be?
I thought alot about this, and I’m kinda conflicted about my answer: but let me say it anyway and I’ll defend it in a tempered manner.
If I could choose just one thing to change about the world: it would be the human propensity to believe in things for which there is no quantifiable, repeatable, well explained and physically understood: evidence.
So, I want to be careful about this, because my intent is not to offend anyone. I spent most of my life as a practicing, devout Roman Catholic…so I understand and sympathize with belief in the supernatural.
And I don’t think that all belief in things for which there is no evidence is always a bad thing: I see no harm if you believe in ghosts or extraterrestrial aliens. There may be unique cases where some people are harmed by faith in such things, but I can’t think of any.
Religion, for all the evil it’s caused in the world is also the underlying cause for human advancement and knowledge. All things considered would we have been better without it? I think so.
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. (To such heights of evil are men driven by religion.) that’s a quote from the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, and the evidence for his claim is substantial throughout history.
I’m going to read something to you by Christopher Hitchens from his book “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”. I’m a fan of Hitch’s writing, but I don’t agree with him on everything, but in this passage he made a good case:
“The level of intensity fluctuates according to time and place, but it can be stated as a truth that religion does not, and in the long run cannot, be content with its own marvelous claims and sublime assurances.
It must seek to interfere with the lives of nonbelievers, or heretics, or adherents of other faiths. It may speak about the bliss of the next world, but it wants power in this one. This is only to be expected. It is, after all, wholly man-made. And it does not have the confidence in its own various preachings even to allow coexistence between different faiths.”
It is my contention that this is the problem with some, if not most, religions: they seek to interfere with the lives of those who believe differently, and that interference most often leads to violence and pain.
But it’s not just religion that causes pain in the world: ignorance is much worse.
One need only consider the suffering caused by antivaxers, practitioners of homeopathy, cupping, psychic surgery, colloidal silver…just to name a few. And what about the cost and negative impact of such things as dowsing, astrology, repressed memory therapy and faith healing?
If you want a good place to start on understanding the misery caused by woo, I highly recommend the website whatstheharm.net.
If I could choose just one thing to change about the world, it would be that we live in a world of reason and critical thinking.
Question Three: To what extent do you shape your own destiny, and how much is down to fate?
Going by the common definition of the words where Destiny is “the events that will necessarily happen to a particular person or thing in the future” and fate is “ the development of events beyond a person's control, regarded as determined by a supernatural power.”
I believe in destiny, but reject the existence of fate. If I jump off a bridge, it is not fate which will cause me to fall…it’s gravity. If I sit outside during a rainstorm, it is not fate which will cause me to get wet: it’s the combination of absorption, precipitation and the chemical properties of H20. For every effect, there is a cause…and it’s not magic.
We have the ability to shape our own destiny, for better or worse. Choices we can and will make through our lives that will lead to a future experience that can sometimes be predicted, but more often than not: hits us by surprise.
I shape my own destiny; nothing that has ever, or will ever happen to me is because of fate. Fate is always and everywhere a weak excuse. Maybe Shakespeare said it best when he wrote: “It is not in the stars to hold our destiny, but in ourselves”
Question Four: What is the difference between living and being alive?
Question Four: What is the difference between living and being alive?
My mother, Loretta, has taught me alot through the years. I should have listened to her more often than I did, but there were some things she taught me that I took to heart: especially this: “Live a deliberate and authentic life”.
Of course Henry David Thoreau challenges us to be authentic by engaging with the world around us.
My first encounter with Thoreau, was with “Walden or Life in the Woods”, and the passage that grabbed me by the gut, blew my mind and me hyperventilate for a few revealing minutes…the paragraph that made me want to know this man better, and learn from him how to live a deliberate and authentic life, was this one:
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
That to me explains the difference between living and being alive.
Question Five: What happens after we die?
Question Five: What happens after we die?
I’ll answer that question only after you answer the following questions for me first:
What happens when you blow out a candle?
What happens when an ice cube melts?
What happens when a song ends?
See you may have answers to those questions that make sense to you; and that’s great. So, why would anyone think it strange if I answered the question: what happens after we die with the same answer.
Life, and everything that we describe and perceive as life: is a process.
The candle burns, the ice cube radiates cold, the song vibrates our eardrums and we live our lives. These are all processes, things that happen to matter in the course of their existence. There’s nothing magical or special about them, no matter how hard you wish.
When the candle is extinguished, when the ice cube melts and when the song is over: the process is concluded.
And that’s what happens when we die. It’s not a good or a bad thing: it’s just the way of the Universe: everything has a beginning and end.
I think Hitch put it best in a debate that he engaged in back in February of 2011 at the Wadsworth Theater in Los Angeles.
So after we die, the process ends. Life is short, but it should be long enough.
Question Six: Does nature shape our personalities more than nurture?
Question Six: Does nature shape our personalities more than nurture?
This is one of those questions that dates back to the late 1600’s when the English philosopher and physician John Lock proposed his tabula rasa or “blank slate” idea that nurture was the prevailing shaper of personality.
But I’m going to have to agree with the outcome of a 2014 survey of scientists who argued that nature and nurture influence one another constantly through a close feedback loop, as observed with self-domestication for example.
The biological and environmental aspects that we are born into and raised, influence us in a lumpy, surreal, immeasurable fashion.
Question Seven: How did the universe begin?
Question Seven: How did the universe begin?
With a bang…well, that’s probably not the right word for it…think of it as a “wicked fast expansion”, The thing about the beginning of the Universe that is extremely difficult for any of us to understand, is that it wasn’t just the beginning of “stuff”, it was the beginning of width, height and depth…and, to make it even more confusing: time. Don’t forget about time.
Before the “big bang” there was no time. It’s hard to imagine such a timeless nothing non-thing because as creatures composed of atoms which had their start in the heart of exploding stars, we’ve always experienced the phenomenon of time…and even if you try really, really hard: you cannot imagine (I know you think you can) but you cannot imagine a universe without time. So, don’t bother: get past that and you’ll do okay.
Science has proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, that there is no such thing as a “first cause”.
I like the way that Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist and director of the Arizona State University “Origins” project, put it, in his book “A Universe From Nothing - Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing”. It’s a great book, and one that I highly recommend: but it’s not for the faint of mathematics…while Krauss does a great job of explaining, in common speak, some complicated lines of evidence, it can be somewhat mind-blowing. He writes that
“We have discovered that all signs suggest a universe that could and plausibly did arise from a deeper nothing - involving the absence of space itself - and which may one day return to nothing via processes that may not only be comprehensible but also processes that do not require any external control or direction”.
Think about that for a minute. Let that sink in. 13.799 billion years ago, plus or minus 0.021 billion years; everything that ever was or will be came into existence. Note that I didn’t say it was created or designed: because it wasn’t.
There’s a famous story about an scientist giving a lecture about the origins of the universe. A woman in the audience stands up and says that she believes that the world is help up by a gigantic turtle, who is held up by another turtle and so on and so on. When the scientist asks: well, what are all the turtles standing on, she answers “Turtles, all the way down”.
The question I like to ask creationists is this: “If The Flying Spaghetti Monster created create the universe, who created the Flying Spaghetti Monster?”
Krauss agrees with me, he writes:
“Turtles all the way down? I don’t believe so. But the turtles are appealing because science is changing the playing field in ways that make people uncomfortable. Of course, that is one of the purposes of science (one might have said “natural philosophy” in Socratic times). Lack of comfort means we are on the threshold of new insights. Surely, invoking “God” to avoid difficult questions of “how” is merely intellectually lazy. After all, if there were no potential for creation, then God couldn’t have created anything. It would be semantic hocus-pocus to assert that the potentially infinite regression is avoided because God exists outside nature and, therefore, the “potential” for existence itself is not a part of the nothingness from which existence arose.”
I think I’ll leave it there. How did the Universe begin? From nothing to everything very, very quickly.
Question Eight: If everything evolved from amoebas, how does the world still have amoebas?
Question Eight: If everything evolved from amoebas, how does the world still have amoebas?
It boggles the mind that there are modern humans in this world who not only believe that the world is only 10,000 years old instead of the 4.54 billions years old that we know it is, based on overwhelming evidence…but they also believe that humans were created by an invisible flying spaghetti monster in the sky.
Evolution is the change in heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations.
It is NOT a theory in the everyday sense where we draw conclusions based on fragmentary or inconclusive evidence, and it is not a theory in the sense of having a speculative hunch about something.
Evolution is a comprehensive explanation supported by a vast body of evidence. It is so well established as fact that no new evidence is likely to alter the theory.
For the record, and this needs to be stated because it drives me insane when someone raises this question: everything is NOT evolved from amoebas. Everything is evolved from bacteria, specifically prokaryotes…a simple single celled organism that lacks all that good stuff like a membrane bound nucleus or mitochondria.
Anyway, the reason the world still has amoebas is the same reason the world still has chimpanzees…so here’s the answer, and I want any of you who doubt the validity of evolution to listen to be very carefully because what I’m about to say explains this perfectly and you have no reasonable response to the argument.
Evolution is not linear.
When amoebas or chimpanzees had children, they didn’t have just one…and each one through time adapted to their surroundings and often split into different species across generations.
So, humans did not evolve from monkeys…BUT we both share a common ancestor from which both evolved around 25 million years ago.
More recently, chimpanzees and humans share between 98% to 99% of DNA…so it’s likely that we had a common ancestor only about 6 million years ago.
The world still has amoebas because amoebas are a successful organism that have stood the test of time. They’ve survived, and through the over 4 billion year since they first wriggled around on the planet their offspring have mutated and evolved into creatures great and small.
Question Nine: Is there a purpose to life?
Question Nine: Is there a purpose to life?
Yes and no. You’re not going to like this, but in the short term: the purpose of life is nothing more than to begat life. That doesn’t mean that our only purpose is to pollinate and multiply, but it does mean we are responsible for ensuring the comfort, safety and longevity of the generation of flora and fauna that is born and grows after our own births. The universe is unfolding as it should. Carl Sagan was right when he wrote “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
We are so fooled by our own consciousness…a process we don’t yet fully understand, that we feel superior and special in the universe. Here’s a newsflash for you everybody, and I’m sorry to burst your bubble but: WE ARE NOT SPECIAL. We are simple bipedal mammals who have evolved from simple bacteria over a period of only a third of the age of the universe…and yes, we’re still evolving. If our species doesn’t continue to destroy the only planet we have ever known, homo sapiens will, through natural selection…evolve into something else…I’m guessing smaller, hairless, balls of goo…but I could be wrong about that.
So yeah, we have a purpose…but also: NO we don’t.
Welcome to the dichotomy of existence.
Now, this is Steve Nihilist speaking, so take what I’m about to say with a grain of nothing: but life is just a process…it’s like rusting, or baking…it’s something that happens to stuff. You, me, every living thing are just a bunch of stuff…and we are fortunate enough to experience the process of life.
I like it, how about you?
But is there a purpose? I once believed that there was, but now…I’m not so sure. That doesn’t mean that I won’t live a life of compassion and caring. That doesn’t mean that I won’t live a life without morals or respecting others…but it would be silly of me to assume that everything we see…all of the beauty and splendor of the universe, is here for us. It’s not. And we’re just here: we’re just an insignificant collection of atoms stuck together to experience something called consciousness: and it feels special: but, then: we would feel that way.
It’s okay. That we have no purpose, or maybe we do…doesn’t matter. Enjoy yourself. Life is good.
Finally, I will leave you with question number 10: and this is one I’m posing for myself because while it may not be a critical philosophical question, I think it is important…at least it is to me.
Question Ten: Do my puppies love me?
Here’s what we know about dogs and love: Canines have similar brain structures that produce emotions in homo sapiens. They have the same hormones and experience the same chemical changes that humans experience during emotional states…and that includes the hormone oxytocin, which is the love and affection yielding hormone.
There are scientific studies that show that the mind of a dog is equivalent to a 2 year old human child. We know, for example, that dogs dream. I have seen and heard a deeply sleeping Eva wave her tail, shake her paws and howl at, what I suspect to be a bunny, in her dreams.
So, yes…Indy and Eva love me. Whether it’s complex and thoughtful as the way I love them doesn’t matter in the least. Both Science and my own observations of their behavior confirm this.
We have many questions of a deeply philosophical nature to consider during our brief experience of life. For some, we have definitive answers whereas others may always elude us. The fact that we can ask and ponder these questions is one of the reasons this life is so great: especially the time in which we find ourselves….13.7 billion years after the universe’s beginning and ten thousand sexdecillion years, that a 1 followed by one hundred zeros…before it’s heat death…and that’s plenty of time for an intelligent being to evolve who might answer a few more of these questions than we can.
I find comfort in that.