Human Progress as a source for happiness

@Irina Your translation isnВґt perfect English, but it is perfectly understandable.

It is odd, this idea of the creating of people to suffer now so that unnecessary people of the future will have a better time, which of course they wonВґt. How much happier are you because someone suffered 5,000 years ago? Do not, perhaps, you envy him, even, for the difficulties and complications that you endure in a more crowded and modern world, that he did not?

Obviously, not making a person is the surest guarantee that he wonВґt suffer, and it isnВґt really that hard to do. And, of course, non-existent people donВґt miss anything like joy or hamburgers or whatever. So that is simple enough.

But assuming someone canВґt manage this simple reasoning of not making people, then I ask, if you could design the perfect life, what would it be?

Continual distraction? A lack of thinking? No activity? Not feeling pain when you just accidentally cut off your finger? Never sweating or working hard? Eating as much as you want? What would motivate a person to do anything if they did not suffer? How can one live without suffering?

Suffering is the primary motivator of action in people, acting to alleviate it, more precisely.

Heaven has to be the most boring place, since there would be no conflict, nothing to strive for, no reason to do anything.

Once someone understands that life fundamentally consists of working constantly to avoid pain and suffering (which will only be a temporary respite), and that even if temporarily reached then the suffering manifested as boredom or lack of purpose emerges (exemplified in the activities of the rich, whether it is ever-more daring sports activities, drug abuse, petty theft, never-ending beauty surgeries, continual marriage and divorce, running for public office with weird hair, etc.).

If, for instance, someone follows a somewhat popular philosophical path of attempting to eliminate all desire (evidenced in Buddhism, for example), and is actually successful, what then is worth doing? Where is the motivation to do anything? If even boredom is conquered, and only existence is achieved, to what end, then? Why exist at all? How is it that state much different than non-existence, save being a very poor and temporary imitation?

Kirk, are you suggesting that Buddha was a lethargic zombie ? You seem to subscribe to the idea of hedonic motivation (the idea that people are basically hedonists). I can somewhat understand its attractiveness, mainly due its simplicity and its intuitive appeal. And I also understand why its especially appealing to economists, psychologists, sociologists, politicians and so on. Because, if true, it would be easy to predict and also control human behaviour. Unfortunately this model is overly simplistic, maybe even outright wrong. To spare myself writing many lines, I just link to the most common objections against hedonism (applies to hedonic motivation as well):

http://www.iep.utm.edu/hedonism/#H5

I don’t deny that pleasure-pain do play a role in human behaviour and motivation. But is it the only one, even the most important one? I doubt it. At least I do plenty of stuff that don’t make much sense (yet I still do it), which certainly don’t increase pleasure, sometimes even create suffering. That’s why can’t subscribe to hedonism nor to (negative) Utilitarianism. They just pick some things out of what humans do, and create a behavioural theory, a moral imperative, even a theory about the meaning of life out of it.

You seem to think that Buddhists, Stoics and so on somewhat lacked of the insight about the role that pleasure and pain play in survival and motivation. Though I am certainly no expert in such matters, I read some stuff from them, and can assure that they are not that dumb as you seem to think. In their approach, they don’t want to eliminate unpleasant feelings, sensation and situations, but change the mental relation to them. For example in Mindfulness Meditation it’s the task to observe phenomena (mental, physical..) that occur, in a non-judgmental way, without aversion or clinging to it, just as they appear in the awareness, without mental or conceptional engagement. Stoics have other approaches to minimize suffering (or being bothered by it): through rational inquiry and contemplation (works better for me). Their goal is more equanimity, peace of mind undisturbed by (or despite of) unpleasant experiences, which is different from feeling good all the time and never experience any pain. My guess is, that the whole pleasure-pain thing becomes more unconscious, automatic, without overly mental engagement. But however, that’s also my goal: to rise above suffering. Will I become a potted plant or a p-zombie? Maybe. I don’t have much to lose anyway.

@Irina I don't think they are dummies, but my experience has been that if you really break down motivation to its core, it's a pleasure/pain thing for almost everyone. If someone seeks good friends rather than a virtual machine experience, for instance, in the end they want to feel *better*. Not having friends or interesting or fulfilling activities that they consider real and viable makes people feel *bad*, and they want to avoid that.

Avoiding desire is meant to prevent the striving, the wars, the wanting, etc. and all that it entails. But really, I think almost all motivation is to avoid feeling bad, however layered that might be on Maslow's pyramid. Really, without discomfort at whatever level, I don't think people would do much. And how many people want to numb themselves from reality with heroin, or alcohol, or other drugs? They want to avoid the reality of their suffering, even if they can't easily identify it.

There are many religious orders that try to simplify the life with vows of poverty and the like, because they know that a lot of the bad in life comes from wanting, being unfulfilled, basically, because we know that the wanting never ends.

The whole seesaw of denial, wanting, taking, giving, being masked in as many ways to be complex motivations really seem to break down to avoiding pain and trying to maximize joy. Even the guy that gives a dollar to a homeless person doesn't do it to risk feeling bad about losing a dollar to help that person, but rather to feel good about himself and his own judgement of himself (pseudo self-esteem) as being a "good" person. To pass the beggar on the street without offering a tidbit of help that in the end won't do anything to change that person's situation long term) would haunt his day and make him feel "bad", and that would spoil his other pursuits of pain avoidance and joy seeking, and he won't have that.

BTW, our 200 year plan to insert a series of popes to edge the general population towards AN seems to be on track with this latest pushing the envelope just a bit more. We should all pat ourselves on the back for keeping the faith. Here's to success!

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/01/20/378559550/pope-francis-says-catholics-dont-need-to-breed-like-rabbits

Though I am not Irina, but since you responded to my comment: I think you have misinterpreted the desire-thing a bit. Though I am not a Buddhist (nor to I plan to become one), I haven’t meditated and stared against a wall in monastery for 50 years, so what do I know. But I think what they meant with desire is craving, to must have something, to need something and not so much having preferences. As far I can tell, Buddha thought a middle path: neither hedonism nor asceticism. I guess that even Buddhists have a preference of eating over hunger, but may well be able to cope with hunger too (without overly suffering from it). So having a preference is not same as to absolutely must have something. Having a preference leads to disappointment, trivial short-term suffering at best, if one doesn’t get what he wants. Furthermore I think when it comes to suffering, it’s a bad idea to blindly follow pleasure-plain stimuli, which doesn’t mean, never giving adhere to them. So gaining personal insight about what leads to suffering and what leads to well-being does play a role there. Furthermore, according to them, not only craving, but also ignorance and delusion leads to suffering. So also intellectual discourse and insight play a role for them. In summary, the main strategy for suffering (not only in Buddhism) is: eliminate unnecessary ones, and cope and accept unavoidable ones. But their main goal is not happiness in the usual feeling-good sense, but have and maintain a peace-of-mind that does not depend on circumstances or sensations. For me, at least some of their end-goals seem quite unrealistic and far-stretched, but nonetheless this insights and strategies can be helpful in reducing suffering.

I don’t deny that pleasure-pain do play role in motivation and behaviour. Yet I believe its not the only one. There are other things we do (maybe unconsciously or merely intellectually driven) that don’t get rewarded by pleasure or punished with pain. Good feelings are not the only things that drive us. I also doubt, just because some things make us feel good, others bad, that these feelings are always the main motivator (though they are certainly helpful). So I’d say hedonic motivation is an oversimplification which isn’t backed up by empirical evidence (at least with closer and critical examination), yet not totally wrong. Furthermore I can say that uncritical blind hedonism does not contribute to well-being. If feeling good is all that matters to someone, such persons often end up being miserable.

That’s good news. It’s hard to argue for AN with traditional Buddhists (with all that rebirth thing), but I think that at least Secular Buddhists should give AN at least a more serious consideration. I think they should not only be concerned with the suffering of those who find themselves alive, but also with those who are yet to come.

Oops, put the wrong @, sorry!

For me, one can move up the chain of complication with talk of higher levels of meaning, etc. for why people do what they do, but generally bacteria and the like move toward things that keep them alive and away from things that don't. People are the same, though they pretty it up with rituals, uniforms, and pressure with organizations such as churches and schools,

It is interesting to me all of the work, regardless of what unsupportable belief system is used, such as Buddhism and rebirth (total guesswork with that, for instance), that goes into trying to manage living!

Having to practice being mindful, or being OK with hunger or pain or depression, or changing perceptions of events so that they are less "troubling". If life were so great, why would anyone have to work so hard to try to endure it?

And, ultimately, what do Buddhism do that needs doing anyway (not to pick on them specifically, just an example)? Usually to minimize distraction and concentrate on minimizing desire (or whatever you want to call it) they disengage from the hustle and bustle of the world, or take an observer's view of it.

Growing a garden, being a vegetarian, sweeping up, meditating, conversing, exercising, all to what end? A lot of denial, work, etc. to just get through the day.

If you examine Daoism, or any belief system of this type, you will see a complex set of concepts and procedures etc. that attempt to describe and proscribe ways to exist that are somehow "better". Some even say that to have a child is to bind oneself to the circle of life, making it difficult to transcend. Or like with the Shakers, de-emphasizing procreation, which is a good thing for the wrong reasons, IMO.

Nevertheless, most babies when leaving the womb cry instead of laugh, that should be all the hint you need about what is to come for the child in the end.

Irina,

Being the slow kid in the class I may have missed the part where you mentioned the actual name of the person whose works you were translating! Using Google Translate I came across (as in 'found', not 'jizzed upon') Mikhail Artsybashev. It's not a name I'm familiar with. Is this who we are dealing with here or was Artsybashev commenting on someone else's work? Sorry for the dumbness. I blame the proximity of Kirk and hope you don't hold it against me.

During my teen years I read a lot of Isaac Asimov's books. In one of them he wrote about future space travel and colonisation of other planets. Back then I wasn't disturbed by such ideas, but that's a conversation for another day.

Asimov mused that due to the vast distances involved it would take a lot of progressive looking individuals who, for several generations, would live selflessly on board ships before reaching habitable worlds. These theoretical people would live and die without ever feeling the sun on their skin or setting foot on terra firma. I dismissed such notions as being absurd and would never happen - even if the technology was there, people would never willingly agree to it. Fast forward to the jaded and world weary Dick (lol) of today and I now realise that for the vast majority of people it's already like this nightmare scenario right here on Earth. It's not selflessness (more on this towards the end of my rant) which is the driving force, but powerlessness. Freedom as an ideal will forever remain just that. For most people slavery, monotony and boredom are the most prominent facts of life. Sure, they can walk out of doors and dance about in horse shit if it amuses them, but only for a short while before the necessity of earning a 'living' rears its ugly head again and the proletariat must fall in line. Whenever they have five minutes respite from this drudgery, visions of exotic other countries and fabulous luxury are slapped in their faces by way of television, magazines and now the internet. Talk about adding insult to injury! The restrictions and claustrophobia of our starbound travellers are alive and well right now in the daily lives of ordinary people and the only saving grace, perverse as it may be, is that most folk are too fucking stupid to realise they're caught in a trap. So long as the rat gets a little bit of cheese at the end of the maze, it'll keep on walking... and procreating.

Kirk comments, volume 1:

Yes and no. Much like I discussed with Katerina a few weeks ago in the comments about the psychology of animals, I am of the opinion that in many respects our 'advanced' brains are a curse rather than a blessing and will expound more upon this when I get around to the Buddhism portion of the conversation.

A few minutes ago I blethered on about the majority of the human race being like worker ants with very little time to think about their situation. The problem with having free time and an ability to see things clearly is that it makes reality very difficult to face from day to day. The people of yesteryear - and less philosophically minded people of today - were spared this predicament, as day to day survival was a lot tougher. Saying that, I do not envy them not having modern conveniences. I wouldn't want to live in a time without anaesthetics. I wouldn't want to live without the internet or high speed travel or memory foam mattresses or hardcore po.... heh, heh. Moving swiftly along....

Agreed... to an extent. Thought experiments can be useful, but I don't know how fruitful supposition can be in this example. As it is impossible to live without suffering, I can't posit what I'd be like in a state of 'no suffering'. Idleness may become the order of the day. Personally speaking, I don't think I'd ever become a full on couch potato. All animals, including us, have an innate playfulness and curiosity, which I cannot with certainty say is always borne out of boredom and stagnation.

I'm going to try to go into all of these questions in more detail once I've replied to theMeme and your other posts. I think it's very interesting and to keep everyone interested in reading further I'll really put the cat amongst the pigeons by saying that I think there may be a glimmer of truth in religion...... Is everyone okay? Nobody fainted? I hope so because the only one I'll consider giving mouth-to-mouth to is Irina. lol

theMeme comments, volume 1:

I'd say we *are* basically hedonists. As you point out later, to say that we are *only* hedonists may be over-simplification, but I'd still guess that the vast majority of our actions outside of mere survival, when analysed down to their root, can be reduced to the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. That's not to deny the complexity of our species and such concepts as 'meaning' and 'value', as well as some others, *may* exist outside of the pleasure/pain binary... but for me, the jury is still out. They may ultimately be reduced to pleasure and pain as well and the conclusion reached in your link that 'the future of hedonism seems bleak' in turn seems spurious. The objections raised were to my mind rather weak. However, I am somewhat surprised that Kirk is arguing so fervently against you on this issue, especially in light of his stance on free will vs determinism. I'd have thought that someone who considers the possibility of spontaneous action, i.e. unconnected (or even disconnected) from prior experience, would be more open to life having other motivating factors outside of the two primary ones.

Hmm, I'm not so sure. As someone involved in the financial markets, I can tell you that price charts are recorded histories of mass psychology in action. We've spoken about pleasure and pain. In trading and investing circles it's referred to as greed vs fear and you can see in the charts these emotions documented in the buying and selling that goes on. There are many papers on cycle theory and the chart patterns which manifest over and over again. It's pretty much undisputed and even a novice to the markets can see the evidence in the charts with only minimal instruction. Human behaviour IS habitual (Good book which ties in with this subject: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Extraordinary-Popular-Delusions-Wordsworth-Reference/dp/1853263494/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1443482079&sr=8-1&keywords=Extraordinary+Popular+Delusions+and+the+Madness+of+Crowds ). But here's the kicker - it's only obvious in retrospect. The devil is in the details and trying to predict in the here and now is quite a different story. If it were so easy then either everyone would be rich or no market would exist because everyone would know what everyone else was going to do in advance. So all in all, I believe it to be a non-sequitur that if hedonic motivation were true that human behaviour would be easy to predict and control.

Through gritted teeth I will repeat that there might possibly exist some other motivation, but when you doubt that it is the most important then I must firmly disagree with you. Tell me something more important?

Although I too am against the crystalisation of people's actions into narrow systems of thought, I still have to say that as a general rule of thumb, hedonism rules the day. Also, just because you do things which seem random and perhaps counter productive towards your own happiness does not mean that there isn't a deep seated hedonistic reason for doing them. I've endured going shopping with ex-girlfriends and female family members. There's nothing more deleterious to a man's wellbeing than having to stand there as a woman tries on the 400th pair of shoes in a single afternoon, but I've done it and more than once! Did I have a whale of a time on any of these occasions? No effing way! I'd rather have set fire to my pubic hair and put out the blaze with a hammer than go through hell of that nature, but did it I did. If analysed, the motivation for these exhibits of superhuman courage and fortitude was no doubt as simple as preferring to suffer in retail hell than to upset my loved ones. I'm not saying the reasons for all of your actions can be accounted for so easily, I'm just pointing out that oftentimes a hedonistic base is still there behind an apparently contradictory facade.

Kirk comments, volume 2:

Well said, Kirk. I agree and you have done a better job than I did of untangling the deceptive knot of outward charity and goodness that people display. That's not to say that ALL coin tossers are guilt ridden or motivated out of sef-aggrandisement, or even if either of these IS the motivation behind his or her actions, that they're still not better than smugly self aware penny pinchers. Whether or not one knows that their compulsion is derived out of self satisfaction, social activism and charitable acts still benefit the recipients of the 'good will', and should not be dismissed.

theMeme comments, volume 2:

Regarding Buddhism:

I agree to the first part and agree in theory, but not practice to the second part.

There's actually quite a good book which touches on this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Anti-Natalism-Rejectionist-Philosophy-Buddhism-Benatar-ebook/dp/B00J7UQAAI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1443475151&sr=8-1&keywords=from+buddhism+to+benatar

And it is a tenet of some Buddhist sects that the human race will eventually come to an end when people have finally unshackled themselves from desire, i.e. nobody wants to hump anymore and so no more babies. Clearly we are not living in this time period as evidenced by the fact that Irina still exists. With her wandering about the joint and looking the ways she does, there's zero chance of asexuality in the male gender. Sorry big, bald, Buddha boy, my bouncy buddy!

Kirk comments, volume 3:

I'm not an apologist for Buddhism (or any other religion, although you've all still to stay tuned for my religious rant, so no getting up to go pee pee just yet... I said SIT!), but stripped of all the mythology and obvious BS, there's something to be said for the psychological insight behind it. Firstly, Buddha acknowledged two vitally important things:

1. Life is a predicament.

2. Life contains suffering.

As self-identified antinatalists, I think it is pretty uncontroversial to say that we are in agreement with both of these viewpoints, yes? So life is NOT considered such a good thing to them. If it was then they would not be trying to escape the chain of 'rebirths'. You could of course argue that this is just a devious ploy and shows you how sneaky Eastern religions are in comparison with their lumbering Abrahamic cousins, in that on the surface they claim life is bad, while still promising the super duper, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory style golden ticket as a reward in the end.

Where we differ mostly is in our approaches for (at least) reducing or (at best) ending suffering. Buddhists think it's through meditation and enlightenment and antinatalists through non-procreation. As Buddhists are mostly celibate (not all are. Gotta love religion. ), the non-procreation part is pretty much a given. It's at this point we go our separate ways, because they have their elaborate systems, rituals and ceremonies, while we have farting, looking at cats and bitching... not necessarily in that order.

Exactly, and where you've ended is where I'll begin my spiel on my personal 'philosophy' of religion...

I'll start by saying that this is nothing more than a personal theory (common vernacular definition rather than scientific), that I have nothing at all empirically to back up my views and that they should be read in the manner you read Garfield and Dilbert in the Sunday papers. If I didn't know you all so well you could call this initial disclaimer as my 'get out of jail free' card. lol

From having read the so called holy books of most of the main religions, as well as many offshoots and even new agey/occult literature, I am of the mind that 99.99% of it is utter crap - sometimes intentionally evil, most often unintentionally hilarious. Only 99.99% you gasp in collective disbelief? Yes. I think there exists a 0.1% possibility that there is SOME basis in truth; specifically that the human consciousness we manifest is an evolutionary glitch and that there is a more 'holistic' (a word I hate, but cannot think of a more appropriate one right now) way of operating and this has been present in rare individuals throughout history - Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, etc, right up to present day........ with the exception of Muhammad, who I still think was nothing more than a goat fucking, war mongering, plagiarising, kiddy fiddling bastard with a shitty beard.

Hold on! No rolling your eyes just yet. Please, I urge you to save your scorn and derision for the very end.

I believe that the whole edifice of organised religion is nonsense and the very fact that we have so many different varieties, denominations, and denominations of denominations, is testament to how divisive and skewed the phenomenon of thought really is. I also believe that the pre-eminent figures from history, due to the time in which they lived, would not have had the necessary vocabulary required in order to express intelligbly how they were operating, and were stultified into using the idioms of the day. Idioms which have been interpreted, reinterpreted, used, abused, distorted, garbled and mangled into the sorry heaps of shit that today go by the names of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Shintoism, Buddhism, et al.

Am I giving credence to theistic or deistic gods? No! Not for a minute am I claiming anything of the sort. Nor am I giving a thumbs up to all the miracles and Clark Kent claptrap. What I am 'possibly' considering is that the subject-object mechanism in which consciousness currently functions is an aberration, that the constant chatter inside our heads is nothing more than a feedback loop or 'stuck record' and that thought itself is responsible for the majority of suffering on this planet.

"Whoa! Whoa!", I hear you cry in collective protest. "How can you be so against thought, Dicky Wicky, when you're using thought (badly) right now to talk dirty about it??"

I'm not denying that thought has its place. Without it we'd be little more than potatoes (I'd be a hot potato, Kirk would be mashed) and it is evident that it is thanks to thought that language and every material comfort we possess exists. We couldn't communicate without thought, however rudimentary.

But thought has also cut the world up into nations, religions, castes, tribes, communities, political parties, football teams, families, gangs, etc, etc. Thought tells us 'war is bad' and yet it hasn't stopped war from occurring. Rather, it has invented more and more devastating ways of destroying others. Thought gives power to animalistic desire and can plague our nights and days. Thought gives us the ability to dwell on past pain and fearful of it's future recurrence. Thought is the ever present drum beating inside our heads - an inescapable tormentor, never allowing us to have peace, even for a second.

More fundamental than all of this, thought has created the idea of a central, permanent 'thinker' who thinks thoughts. Descartes famously said, "I think, therefore I am", but where would 'he' reside if he stopped thinking? 'You' make the resolution on New Year's Day to stop eating so many cakes, so who is the person in 'your' body who is rifling through the cupboards half an hour later, licking the shelves in desperate search for a crumb? When you say, "I got hungry", or, "I was weak", a division is made in the sentence between the first person pronoun and the adjective, as if the state and the experiencer were separate entities. The reality is that the experiencer IS the experience. This is why I always laugh at self help gurus who tell you to use willpower to overcome stuff. Who is the person 'willing' if not one fragmentary thought trying to dominate another fragmentary thought? Is the Dick O'Brick of today the same as the Dick of five years old? Of fifteen? Will he (speaking now in the third person, just to spice things up a bit!) be the same as the fifty year old Dick? Hell, is the Dick of five minutes ago the Dick of right now?!?! So if there are no permanent Dicks (lol) then how can there be a Heaven? Which Dick is going there... or more likely, which Dick is going to Hell?

Whew, that was a helluva lotta dicks.

Outside of all my jokes, I seriously think somewhere in our evolutionary path a mental schism took place and the ego was born. I also think that with a little introspection the idea of a permanent self can plainly be seen as illusory. The problem here is when I use the words 'can be seen', the 'person' seeing it is also splitting themselves into the observer and the observed - so 'seeing' in this case is still a fragmentary and incomplete process. I believe that the aforementioned religious colossi may have seen (somehow) in a complete fashion and somehow or other broken the defective psychological machinery that plagues the rest of us. The late physicist David Bohm was sympathetic to this line of thinking and compared the moment of insight or enlightenment to the mental energy that must have been present in an Einstein or Archimedes during periods of intense concentration. The 'Eureka' moment being when all pre-existing knowledge (i.e. thought) about a subject stops of its own accord and it is at that moment a quantum leap is made from the silence.

... Or I could just be talking bollocks - a possibility I'm more than willing to concede in advance.

At any rate, even if the founders of the major religions did go through some kind of psyche shattering process and their ensuing words were given the Chinese whispers treatment over the centuries, it doesn't matter a damn and has no bearing on the existential problems concerning our existence. Why? Because having a quieter, more blissful mind is no more admirable in my book to being an asshole who simply doesn't give a damn or someone with dementia who is incapable of remembering anything. It wouldn't take away the suffering of others (and of animals), all it would do is prevent the 'enlightened one' from having sleepless nights worrying about the state of the world. In a perverse way it would make the 'selfless' person more 'selfish' than the rest of us, even if inadvertently so. It might make them more in keeping with the workings of the rest of the natural world, but us defective egoists have no desire to be more efficient pawns in evolution's mindless game. Sorry, but whatever way you play it, no heaven, nirvana, paradise, samadhi can compare or compete with total non-existence. Nothing is as pure and good and whole and holy.

Amen.

P.S.

The audiobook version of this written diarrhoea is available from all good retailers. ::biggrin:

@Ricardo Ladrillo I could either write a lot or a little and end up at the same place. The small variations on our takes, including @TheMeme, on thinking about thinking, true underlying motivations, etc. etc. all roll up into a snake that eats itself in the end.

The very fact that we have to contemplate contemplating, go on a diet, have three laws of robotics, decide whether to shoot someone who is about to kill you, ruminate on whether to secretly unplug grandma from the soul sucking pain creating machine and drugs the hospital has their money vacuum connected to, and more, just makes non-existence so obviously the answer, as you state. And if it were everyone's individual choice to deal with all of it, then so be it. But someone chooses *for* us, puts us in a no-win situation, and that is wrong and nonsensical.

Making people, to use Sarah Perry phraseology, really makes no sense to do if you care one iota about the state of a person. To quote some video I saw some time ago, "you know it's wrong, don't do it."

After all of my thinking, there are really only two areas that I still have an interest in answering to any real degree.

One is the free will question, and with modern quantum physics, multi-verse theory that my professor Dr. Wheeler was a proponent of and with whom I had several private talks with about it, beyond his excellent lectures and exams, I think the current complexity theory that is bandied about these days has to be considered as a possible answer to the dominoes-all-falling type approach that determinists represent as the only possible option for the freewill debate. But do I feel like I know? No I do not, and maybe I can't help but feel that way.

In the end, though, it doesn't really seem to make a difference whether I am a free-willed agent of some sort or not, because for all intent and purposes the result is *exactly* the same, if you think about it, or even if you don't.

The other is how to spread the meme of AN. Since I see people generally as the bugs that they are, and I mean that in the best possible way, it "bugs" me that I really don't understand the complex lies that people are able to tell themselves to justify their actions. So trying to determine how to open people's eyes to what seems obvious to me is a real conundrum.

Dear Irina,

I read your translations of the notes. But whose notes are they? Be safe. Raul
 

Off topic here a bit, but really not sure where to post stuff as a topic, etc. so whatever, if you want to move it, Irina, or delete it…

I knew these people, they visited the house I lived in during college and sometimes I ate dinner with them or had discussions with one or more of them after dinner. If you are not familiar with the work O'Hair did as the head of the American Atheists, based in Austin, TX, you can read up on her. She could be a bit caustic in her older age, but after having so much prejudice against her for being an atheist during the mid-last-century, I don't blame her. As a woman, too, she had to fight constantly to have her voice be recognized.

This past Monday should be 20 years in which she and her son Jon and granddaughter Robin were kidnapped, murdered in a cheap motel very near where I currently live in San Antonio, and cut into little pieces and buried, get this, on a ranch in the Hill Country that I had looked at buying in the late 90s. When they discovered the bodies, I was amazed at how close I had been to them without knowing about it at the time.

Anyway, she helped pave with way with a lawsuit and exposure to try and prevent religiosity from dominating those who chose not to be religious, whether in the workplace, home, or in public. Reading this may be interesting to you atheists out there…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madalyn_Murray_O%27Hair