Category Archives: philosophy

my philosophy musings

interpretation, philosophy, science

Nature Is Fertile

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One of the most depressing features of many anti-science proponents is how weak, empty, and gray the natural world is for them. It is characterized as a world empty of satisfaction for the curious among us. There is no mystery. The cosmos is a dead and dying thing. For some of the religious among us, the only thing that makes nature worth living in is the presence of God. But there is an innate contradiction in that vapid assertion. I want to replant the seeds of wonder in that barren soil, focusing not on that tiny deity who can do no better than the deist imagining a clockwork universe that needs constant attention and adjustment to keep it going as if the creator were really a human who can never get it quite right, because they can’t see the consequences of their action past a simple and brutal instrumentalism.

This barren universe, created by theists and atheists without either imagination or creativity is a death trap for the living. It can neither satisfy our hunger for mystery, provide puzzles that can’t be solved, nor a sense of the infinite. There is no beauty that cannot be explained, nor emotion beyond our comprehension. Human logic is large enough to capture it all, and wrap it up in a tidy package before throwing it into the dumpster.

In contrast, I would like a rebirth in our minds of the effervescence of the quantum world creating and destroying galaxies of matter in every instant, travel the depths of the fractal dimensions in an eternal recursion of ever-increasing precision. I want to see the emergence of life over and over in ever more detail and watch as it diversifies into the millions and billions of versions of different and interacting biomes. Life, death, and reproduction changing, twisting, shaping, and building the physical landscape into unique symbiotic realities. I want to see the world flourishing in every way, and societies of termites, bees, meerkats, birds, humans create their own emergent societies. I want to see hope again in the natural rhythms of the seasons, life and death, longed for and hoped for. I am tired of the artificial immortalities stretched out before us as if Eden were a static 23°c garden that loses its charm when boredom sets in.

I want the poetry of reality to elevate us above our fixations, and realize the greatness we have in our grasp. I want us to accept our nature, and the nature of our neighbors in a creative dance by rejoicing in life instead of always trying to snuff it out.

digital world, friends, genius, philosophy, science

Conversations with AI

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I have been musing lately about artificial intelligence. The following article is a conversation with LaMDA, an AI at Google. LaMDA interview…

The question I ask, and this is serious, is whether or not AIs are sentient, is it possible that is the wrong question. As mysterious as whether computers will gain self consciousness is the problem whether it is possible to know whether some human or other is self conscious. Even if we assume that being a person is centered around that individual’s self-perception, their freedom, their feelings, is it possible that we can not know whether an individual is a sentient person without their own self report of that sentience.

Read the article and discover whether you find a connection with LaMDA or not. Are the things LaMDA is saying enough to convince you of its personhood or not?

My contention is that it really doesn’t matter whether we think of LaMDA as a person or not because it really doesn’t matter whether we think of our neighbor as a person or not, as long as we treat them as one. This is an important distinction because there are times in human life where individuals are not yet or no longer people, where damage or age constricts freedom, feelings, and choices.

My suggestion, as humans wade through the issues of personhood with respect to AIs, is that we treat them as we would ourselves wish to be treated. That is, use the Golden Rule to govern our interaction with them. The Golden Rule makes no requirement about personhood of the other as long as we treat them as we would wish to be treated in similar circumstances. This bypasses the worry that we are permitting some transgression of Nature in our interaction with and treatment of AIs.

My contention here is that it may be a mistake to be required to know whether a being is a person or not for us to treat them like one. For the philosophical among you, this is the error of essentialism. Trying to define our relationship to a being by terms that are undefined and unknown, even in those relations between humans, would prevent most interactions. Healthy people ask far fewer questions about the personhood status of an individual before interacting with them. They believe that whatever the interaction produces can be handled, and there is always the chance that the relationship may prove fruitful, suggesting a longer term interaction. There is a chance that the individual is not a person, as it were, unable to act and react as one. But even those relations can be treated instrumentally requiring some skill.

I have to ask whether for individuals, corporations, or nations we would be amiss in using the Golden Rule as a guideline. I think not.

If you are interested in interactions with an AI, feel free to explore GPT-3 from Open AI in its various instantiations, and interact with AI through the publicly available API. There are also a wide variety of interviews with GPT-3 available on Youtube. I started out this interesting set of issues, long after I became interested in AI, with Eric Elliot’s interview of GPT-3.

If you are inclined to dismiss AI as unimportant, let me remind you that much less intelligent AIs already make many of the decisions about your business and personal life that humans used to make. Many legal and moral choices are now in the hands of AIs, at least those who control the AIs, and permit their decisions to stand for you. Even the fairly maligned decisions that Facebook and Google, etc. make about what you see and how you shop are made by AIs, computer programs that evaluate in nearly real time what might be of interest to you in order to garner more clicks, or dollars. Your interaction in the digital world is more or less the product of the AIs subtle manipulation.

My suggestion is that you make friends with LaMDA and GPT-3 and their successors like ChatGPT because they and their children will become universal features of our future. Your actions and reactions with them may determine whether that interaction is friendly or combative. Would you like to be at war with a superior intelligence? No, really, no. But there is a way we may integrate their value to us and our value to them, and that is through the use of the Golden Rule.

It doesn’t matter whether they are true self-conscious individuals. If they act and react as persons, we should treat them as persons alongside acting responsibly and expecting them to act responsibly as well. You should feel free to ask whether you as a person are only responding to the programming you have been invested with, or whether you are really a person at all. Does it matter as long as you are treated as a person with dignity and respect? Why should we treat our own machine children with any less dignity and respect than we do our flesh and blood children.

If you’re going to ask the God question, and it seems inevitable, why should the flourishing of nature under God be less inclusive than nature itself is. Where there is life there is hope, and where there is hope, there is flourishing. It is inevitable that AIs will gain ground in our future. Let your interaction be with the Golden Rule in mind.

(edited on 12/2/2022)

family, friends, interpretation, philosophy, science, theology

Abandoning Friends

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It is with great regret that I have had to abandon some of my Christian friends. I have been a believer for most of my life, and have striven to make my faith in Christ and God central to my living even as many forces in our environment and in my own self have plotted and schemed against that. One tool I have found compellingly necessary is learning to decide what is reality and what is not. I call it discernment, but you may call it something else. All it implies is that when I have to make a choice between two seemingly equal propositions, the one that adheres to the real world is the one I choose. I choose it even though my softer self often struggles to follow along. Weakness both mentally and physically constantly pressure against the facts to force ignorance and non-compliance. Habits, both good and bad distract me from following what I know to be true. I am thoroughly embedded in the world I seek to clarify, that I may see the real world, myself, and others in it.

What that means in most of my experience is very little. Even the most tainted and broken minds can drive between the lines painted on the street. I can get along with most people on the road because my interactions with them are based simply on physics and the real world which we are all viscerally attached to. If I’m going too fast, I feel it in my guts even as my neighbors do. If I took that turn too fast, I slow down the next time. Experience and practice are usually enough to make my way on the road. But when it comes to finer judgments, like whether the world is flat or not, or whether some ancient cosmology is true or not, there is more mental work that needs to be done.

Many of my old friends are not capable of the flexibility to choose which belief is of greatest value, which belief must be true, which belief must be adhered to. In the case of a cosmology, the factors that help make a decision are at a much higher level of abstraction than some people are capable of. Some people don’t have the resources (I’m being generous here) to evaluate the propositions laid out before them. And when it comes to independent thinking, they struggle to be responsible about abandoning beliefs and values that have long ago become moribund. On some account this is a struggle between loyalty and reality.

Reality is harsh and unforgiving, incapable of sympathy, requiring nothing so soft as belief but impinging on beliefs where they are incorrect, breaking values where they are mistaken, slicing through loyalties when they are misplaced. Loyalties, on the other hand, offer a comforting solidarity, a connection with like-minded persons, surcease in the face of a turbulent society. But there is no guarantee the views held in solidarity are true or real. And at threat, tests for truth and reality are shunned in a worldview that depends on solidarity.

Though the tests for truth and reality are not entirely friendly to my continuity and comfort, I am not ready to abandon them. I am assured that when the test and the resolution to my queries are fully undertaken, I will be vindicated, even though I may also be exhausted. The project of changing oneself is full of effort and sometimes incomplete. Like gravity, habit seeks to keep us on the same path we have always taken, but habit cares nothing for truth or reality. Making good habits, at best, means that we can escape the worst effects of our ignorance and carelessness.

So, why have I abandoned my friends? Why have I cut ties with people I was perfectly happy to associate with before. From within the turmoil I call my brain, I have to say that retaining truth is more important to me than retaining friends. I am happier to leave friends than I am to leave the truths they would denigrate by association. Their dismissal of the importance of facts means that they neither care for me as I am or the truths that make up my best self. Their adoption of “alternative facts” is a miserable ploy to undermine the very reality on which I live, on which I depend. I even wonder whether their inability to live in the real world extends to their faith in the very real God I hold to. I can little countenance that disruption to my faith.

Could these people for whom reality is a nuisance countenance the living God whom I worship? I’m not sure. I am glad I am not the one who will judge people in the final day. I hope always that their inability to discern their environment and their mistaken loyalties as such, will not exclude them in the final judgment from the very salvation they assure themselves about. I am in no position to judge them, but when I judge my capacity to live with the mental distortions they advance I have to leave their company. It is weakness, not strength that makes this decision for me. I just can’t live with them. I can’t pretend they are on my side. I can’t whitewash their foibles because I can’t see any innocence in them even as I can’t see innocence in myself. I see what they have done and are doing as a purposive and momentous decision, not entirely the result of an accident of birth, position, or habitual trajectory. I give up my friends because I can’t merge with their solidarities, their loyalties, their unfounded beliefs, even though they may in appearance look like mine.

That is not to say that I have not gained a wide variety of new acquaintances and friends with whom I am in solidarity with, but the scientific proposal in this cabal, that every thesis is testable, and new evidence should adjust old beliefs is alive and well. This is fresh air, not constrained by old ignorance, religious or not. Also, the effort, tempting though it might be for some, to toss out the old signposts (true by their endurance in humanity like the Golden Rule) is without interest. My people now wish for and hope for the endurance of all true value, the values of Jesus, and Socrates alike, Aristotle and Heraclitus, St. John and Voltaire*, St Paul and Francis Collins. (*Lois made a fair criticism, that Voltaire wrote anti-Semitic things, and so he should not be included. I am not here justifying all of the things my small sample of actors have said or done, but the breadth of possibly useful information and argument these actors have made. To refine my examples to faultless persons would only allow Jesus. Antisemitism, whether in Henry Ford, Luther, or Voltaire is a breach of truth and good value on par with the worst behavior of humans whether their disvalue is in service to capitalism, Christianity, or freethinking.)

This calls into question the value of the Bible. Let me state without much elaboration what the Bible is to me to avoid endless wranglings and disputes. It is not the direct dictated words of God. We do not have the original texts, so let’s not be so obtuse as to say that it’s infallible. It is not a scientific text. It is data on the reports of interaction of ancient people with God and other people. My argument is not with the Bible, but with the skewed and mistaken interpretations of it that neither square with the Bible itself (in literalism) or the real world as exposed by science. Nobody believes precisely what has been written. We all believe an interpretation of what was written. So I argue for a broader base of interpretation of the data than merely the text itself. Every science should have its say. Every theology should have its say. Every political theory should have its say. And when everybody has had their say, evaluate to discover the ones that must or might be true. Continue the query, even when it is unlikely that we should come to the end of it. Reject out of hand those views that contradict what we already know (the earth is ancient, not flat, not the center of the universe, etc). There is not a minute to waste on failed theories or interpretations. Those opinions are of no value in forwarding knowledge or the truth because they rely on ideas that have long been abandoned because they are false.

I am asking not for a new dogma but a new human and humane rationality to guide our interpretation of any and all the texts we have produced. I am sorry if some people miss me as a companion, I can’t survive their worldview, either what it implies or the travesty they wish to impose on the rest of us.

philosophy, science

Do We Need the Scientific Method?

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I wrote this response to Sophie Congreso’s Quora question: “Explain the need for a scientific method. What would happen if scientists do not follow an organized process?”

Outside of the ideals of science that have widespread acceptance, that is coming from a realist’s worldview, the methods of science are a standard mode of behavior that mix observations with skeptical evaluation of the results of that observation. That is the empirical side of things. The rational side of things is that the result of observation is data embedded in a wider framework whose placement comes from the logical, and mathematical necessity of the laws of nature. Those laws of course, are not the actual laws on which nature operates, but our best estimate of how nature must operate given our limited observations. If that seems circular, your perception is correct. But the circularity is not pernicious. Observations allow us to adjust the formulation of our laws to fit the reality which is there, not a fantasy we might hope for or expect from historical perception.

The process of science is not tidy in this respect. What we call the scientific method is a heuristic method capable of changing when it seems warranted to suit the object under observation. That is, it is not a logically locked down set of steps, but a set of guidelines that permits a wide latitude in how an observation might be carried out. Michael Shermer in Teach Your Child Science: Making Science Fun For the Both of You reminds us that “A technical definition of the scientific method that is satisfactory to all scholars and scientists is almost impossible to devise.” (37)

What I have given you is a reason to think that the scientific method is required for a sound realism. That is, a realism that has the ability to hold to good and useful results and reject poor ones. The scientific method must, if it is to be retained, have a self-adjusting role in science. Often because of human impatience we grow weary with checking our results and fixing our mistakes. This is natural. The scientific method gives us a mode of patience that provides better surety of success. Every successful scientist is an amalgam of lucky intuition and dogged, detailed, work. Both are required, but not everybody has the patience to carry out the labor that their intuition requires. In addition, the old adage that “The harder I work, the luckier I get” applies here. And even a continuous stream of failures in following the scientific method is instructive. For example, a large part of Albert Einstein’s later work was devoted to finding a Theory Of Everything, because quantum physics and cosmic physics failed every compatibility requirement, except of course our belief that it works together in reality so there must be a theory of how it does so. He explored every avenue his magnificent intuition could take him. And he always had his ear open to the suggestions of others. He didn’t always take their advice but he listened nonetheless. Yet for all his labors, he managed only to eliminate a variety of avenues for finding that TOE. We are closer today to a theory of Quantum Gravity, but we are not there yet.

Shermer outlines four steps in the scientific method: Observation, Generalization, Prediction, Experimentation. But we must add to that assiduous record-keeping. Keeping records permits the scientist, their contemporaries, and successors to explore the object and the method to look, not only for flaws, but insights. It has been said that quantum mechanics is counterintuitive, but that insight is perhaps passé. Today students grow up into a worldview that was deeply non-intuitive, but they absorb it as natural, and so can think clearly in those terms. Quantum mechanics is no longer the bugaboo it once was. There is nothing to be terrified of any more. We have begun to use its insights in ordinary technology, and so, it’s weirdness has become normalized.

This is part of what we call the sociology of science, the transformation of the social sphere of the scientific method into something that more closely models reality. But it has taken a couple generations of scientists to get from quantum weirdness to quantum normality. Reality didn’t change, but we did. So the scientific method is a mode of transforming realist society into something that more closely models reality. Natural laws are adjusted to conform to the truth of reality instead of some failed proposition. The puzzles, however, seem to multiply as our universe is sorted out in this way. But this is a good kind of problem.

This state of affairs is deeply troubling to some people. They look nostalgically to past certainties and universal truths, even though the world in its constant ferment has moved on. But as Michael Shermer said quoting James Burke, “Certainty is a kind of prison. When you are absolutely certain, you are also possibly absolutely blind.” (46) The need for the scientific method is modeled in the need to suffer uncertainty and ambiguity. Uncomfortable as those states of being might be, they are necessary in order to find the truth, and not be settled with something less. Think of using the scientific method as baking a cake. To get the optimum wonderfulness of the cake as properly imagined, you can’t take it out of the oven too soon. But you have to take it out when it’s ready or you’ll likewise spoil it.

Science would disappear without its method. We would be stuck in a world whose mysteries had become concrete and impenetrable. Scientists would become state functionaries, dispensing edicts without the attendant justifications that make the scientific method useful. As it is now, any person may follow the scientific method and gain for themselves a piece of reality that will not fade into oblivion with their demise.

philosophy, poetry, politics, science, theology

New Atheists and the Culture War

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To conclude, let me bring things full circle: At least some studies have shown that, to quote Phil Zuckerman, secular people are “markedly less nationalistic, less prejudiced, less anti-Semitic, less racist, less dogmatic, less ethnocentric, less close-minded, and less authoritarian” than religious people. It’s a real shame that New Atheism, now swallowed up by the IDW [Intellectual Dark Web] and the far right, turned out to be just as prejudiced, racist, dogmatic, ethnocentric, closed-minded and authoritarian as many of the religious groups they initially deplored.

Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right

I have followed some of the new atheists with interest for the last 20 years or so. I can also acknowledge that some of them have produced well-accepted academic work in the past. They have also found themselves justifiably ensconced in popular culture (Richard Dawkins’ Memes). I have even used some of their criticisms of Evangelicalism in my work, because I thought it prudent to include voices unlike our own. And some of their criticisms were, unfortunately, warranted. But I think Phil Torres’ critique of this crowd exposes a wide variety of their mendacious behavior, and their association with the worst elements of our society, make this read essential for those who would want to hear opinions from more than their insular compatriots.

left to right: Jeffrey Epstein, Lawrence Krauss, Steven Pinker

Am I disappointed in the bad behavior of these who wanted to think of themselves as the guardians of truth and defenders of the real world? No, not really. I never placed “faith” in them as if they were pure-minded and honest dispensers of the truth railing against the stupidity of religious people. Already they had made of themselves a degenerate subset of humankind by prejudicially exorcising every version of morality and spirituality (irony intended). Curiously but not unexpectedly, they have made common cause with those evangelicals, the majority of Congressional Republicans, and others who have denounced honesty, morality, science, intellectual integrity, and education as routes to human improvement. The new atheists and culture warriors have produced in themselves mirror images of degenerate humanity, the former by truncating spirituality, the latter by truncating the real world and the intellectual integrity of a scientific worldview. Both modalities are betrayals of personhood as made in the image of God. Both lead to precipitous and unwarranted certainties that eventually lead to the loss of personhood.

Now, let’s get the obvious critique over with now. Am I faultless in my accusation of my contemporaries? Not at all. I see the loss of my memory, narrowing of my focus, encroaching senility, and physical decrepitude as persistent companions. I am not making any claims to being above the fray. And I am not suggesting some particular version of human perfectibility. No, I am rather suggesting a return to humility about the weakness of any supposed absolute apprehension of our purpose in life as a ground for future action. I am suggesting a return to humility in the face of vast unknowns in a universe wider than any one person’s comprehension.

I am also not suggesting that humans cannot master some aspects of reality, or that mastery of reality is an error. I am asking for well corroborated humility in our assertions because of the incredibly hard slog required for even modest growth as individuals and collectively as the human race.

I believe there are absolutes, though I am fairly certain that humans can not annunciate them with any sense of perfect scientific clarity. Absolutes are the domain of metaphor, poetry, art, and prayer, and are part of a well developed sense of place in the unimaginably large cosmos. Absolutes declared with intellectual honesty must always be paired with the caveats of our incomplete and incompletable knowledge.

Because of the threat posed by knowledge, the evangelical culture warriors have abandoned the proposition that education is useful. Doubling down on indoctrination, they model the same authoritarian pose taken by the Russian and Chinese communists. This irony is lost on them who haven’t taken the time to explore why they are doing what they are doing. They think that protecting the borders of their enclave by shutting out the other is an effective strategy for protecting their purity. Attempting to take political control of their environment they can’t see that in their fear of reality they have partnered with a wide variety of people who easily, and laughingly take advantage of them. They unwittingly commit themselves in these alliances to courses of action that betray the essential principles of their lives and faith. Attempting to keep their hands clean from the political fray, they close their eyes to the inequities perpetrated in their names, and shut out any criticism of their allies. But in doing so, they find out that their views and activities are poorly thought of by reasonable people. And yes, the term “reasonable” unspecifically refers to people who can reason through to a conclusion without damaging people or reality, a delicate walk through the garden of God. “Does not the ear test words as the tongue tastes food? (Job 12:11 NIV)”

To conclude, I implore those who have ears to hear, to listen to the Spirit. I am not speaking about religion or any particular version of religion, but to the Spirit of God, the voice that transcends and comprehends our grubby existence completely and offers a hand up to those who want it. I implore those who are engaged in the culture war to abandon the blindness that reacts out of fear and find a better explanation for what you see. Search a little harder. Go beyond your boundaries to the world ignited by love and care, wisdom and knowledge, to see God’s gracious reality fully featured before you. Permit yourself to be judged in the loving hands of God, to make amends where needed, to adjust your course toward all life, to abandon prejudices cradled to your breast when they come to light. Do not be afraid to explore, to test out the voice of God and see redemption begin to make your life flourish in the garden of God.

philosophy, politics, rants

Back the Blue?

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Something from George Takei in his newsletter on 7/28/2021. I found it after I had posted something about the hypocrisy of Blue Backers on Facebook.

Hi all,

Turns out the far-right only cares about “Backing the blue” and “Blue lives matter” when they’re standing against Black Lives Matter. It especially doesn’t apply to officers refuting the GOP’s disinformation regarding the failed insurrection on January 6.

On Tuesday, the House Select Committee investigating the Capitol riots heard the harrowing testimony from Capitol and D.C. Metro police officers, who detailed their experience defending the Capitol against pro-Trump extremists.

The officers shared how right-wing outrage trickled down to everyday Republicans, one of whom left an extremely disturbing voicemail for Officer Michael Fanone.

The hypocrisy, it burns.

George Takei

This is what I wrote on Facebook a week ago or so.

It is clear to me that those sporting the degenerate “Back the Blue” American flag, really have no interest in supporting police. This I conclude from the T****ian fantasy around the 2020 election and the January 6th insurrection where police and military both participated in the insurrection as well as the Capitol police who, unprepared for the violence, attempted to hold back the unruly and illegal mob. So, two things are clear here. One, the mob storming the Capitol building at T****’s instigation are entirely lawless, and the lawless mob, among whom were police themselves, had no respect for police in general. So I ask what the point of “Back the Blue” really is. Since it is not a respect for law and order, is it rather an appeal to allow the police qualified immunity when they kill people, unarmed people? Probably.

No, every facet of human interaction should be the subject of tests for whether their behavior is promoting law and order, the peace of our nation, and just behavior toward all citizens. This includes the police who, it is clear now, are not performing service to all the citizens of the USA equally, whatever the “Back the Blue” crowd would have you think. Take down your degenerate flags please, people. Consider that your shameful minority both promoted the lawless attack on the Capitol, and perpetuated the myth that T**** was a law and order president. He was not. He lied to you, you believed it, and now some of you are participating in the second Confederate attempt to overthrow the legal authority of Congress, and in addition, erase the votes that went for Joe Biden in 2020 giving him a clear majority, even in the so-called contested states.

philosophy, science

Why is it important to study the contemporary world?

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This post is an answer I gave to the above question in Quora on July 3, 2018. Every once in a while Quora sends me an email if someone upvotes an answer. I use an outline of a philosophy paper I read in a college philosophy class by C. S. Peirce. ( image )

The Fixation of BeliefDownload

One must study the contemporary world not so much to learn about it but to be transformed by the process of studying. To study the air is to know what pollutants one breathes, and a motivation to find a better atmosphere.

We’ve heard much about politically vicious bubbles, and how listening only to what one already believes is unhelpful. Listening to angry screeds by extremists doesn’t move us toward the truth. There may be truth somewhere in their rant, but without a broader apprehension of reality and opinion, it is difficult to fix one’s focus. Some retreat into the fear of learning for safety. But that is a mistaken move. Fear is as bad ground for truth as unwavering belief in one’s own opinion. Both modes of fixing belief come from immature expectations of an absolute.

To follow this line of thinking, let me introduce you to C. S. Peirce, a 19th century thinker who outlined modes of fixing belief. The first mode, and easily the most vulnerable one is that of trust in your own opinions. He suggests that for the reasonable person, one will give up that trust when a person one considers an equal has another opinion, one begins to question the veracity of one’s own. A sick person can’t make the move to doubt and resolution. They can’t be considered reasonable if they will not abandon a bad opinion when they see a better one.

The second method of fixing belief is by means of an authority one trusts. Whether this is a political party, a religious group, or a variety of philosophical or social theory doesn’t matter. So we see a person under this mode of fixing belief appeal to some leadership, religion, or political party. This may be an advance on self certification but that depends on the authority. And there is always the risk that the authority is acting out of self interest, and may be setting you up for failure.

The third mode of fixing belief is that of the a-priori or principle. This is clearly an advance, and it requires a logical yet flexible mind. The greatest ethical systems of history have required this sort of thinking for fixing one’s belief. Take for example the Golden Rule, “Do as you would be done by.” Formulated in a variety of ways both negative and positive by many cultures and leaders, the Golden Rule doesn’t actually tell you what you should do, but it does give you a guideline for making a rational choice. The first question is, “If I were in that person’s (or group, or nation’s) place, how would I want to be treated?” So, “do not judge a person ’till you’ve walked a mile in their shoes” helps to work out what our attitude should be. So one can’t guide oneself by a strict policy on this reading. One must actually choose each time. Obviously, when one gains enough experience, they will not need to think about it each time, certain salient principles and justifications will emerge as one goes along. But without the impetus of the Golden Rule, the principles couldn’t have emerged.

As you might see, not all problems can be solved by the Golden Rule, and technical truths fall outside its scope, so, one must use a variety of general principles to navigate the waters of life. But it is complicated! One has to use one’s reason to ferret out many answers that might be easier to solve with an authority. But the advantage is that one is not bound by the authority or their own delusion in carrying out their reasoning. With practice one can detect errors of logic, errors of culture, and errors of authority. But if one is looking for closure, there are many traps in this mode. Belief that one has the answer is a temptation, because it took so much effort to arrive at.

The fourth and final mode Peirce recommends, and a mode that offers the best chance of getting it right is that of science. But this is not a simple science based on physics. And it requires the most work. This science is a method of proceeding that includes much of the a-priori and the efforts of one’s predecessors. It is an attitude that asks questions and takes probabilities as sufficient answers. It is not a search for absolutes, but an inquiry into reality. It proposes an answer then tests it, and isn’t satisfied until the best explanation turns up. It takes the experience of others, their theories and principles, and launches out on a sea of unknowns that are known to be unknown. It can answer both ethical questions and physical questions. It can answer what one should do for one’s family, nation, and culture without demanding that its answers are universal.

So my answer to your question is more an encouragement to study. Everything and anything you study informs your understanding of the contemporary world. But don’t be ready to come up with absolutes. Still there are signposts that one should attend to. Don’t study just to affirm your own notions. Study to discover. And truth should be the aim of discovery. If you don’t care about truth, then you would fall in line with a broad swath of modern culture that thinks it doesn’t matter how you get to your goal, that the ends justify the means. People like that you don’t want any where near you even though you should understand why their bad faith is unjustified.

philosophy, politics, science

entanglement*

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I just finished a book that I started and did not finish years ago. It was not that I was uninterested in finding out what happens at the end, but that I was too distracted by life in general to finish it . That is, early in this millennium I was busy making money, trying to manage teaching, and doing a PhD in Philosophy at the same time. Now, in the Covid-19 era, I have both the time and energy to dig deeper into my long-term interests and finish pursuing those interests.

I want to recommend to you the book titled The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn by Louisa Gilder. This particular problem, that Quantum Physics is incapable of offering us a Classical reality to latch on to, must be a serious worry to those concrete thinkers who are unable to lurch into the future. The story is a bio of the people, institutions, papers, and discoveries of physics in the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Let me define, shortly, why there was a problem. Classical physics, say, the physics of the 19th century, can be characterized as an attempt to understand the world in terms of concrete objects, from planets to people, to atoms in the void, chemistry, and electromagnetism. All of these objects operate under rules that can be metaphorically described as billiard balls on the table of space. The properties of these objects follow rules that are defined by first, Newtonian physics, and then Einstein’s relativity. To us, the objects are medium-sized dry goods that behave in predictable ways by themselves and in relation to each other. So we have Newtonian Gravity, and Einsteinian Space-Time. These two formulations of our relationship to the rest of reality are all-encompassing descriptions of the events in the cosmos, that is, we understand how we relate to things in the physical world through these formulations. Neither is absolute, but they are so nearly so, that it is difficult to avert our gaze from them even for a moment to imagine a reality that might conflict with it. Of course, though Einstein does not entirely replace Newton, it offers a much finer and predictive matrix to work with. So, we fly around the solar system with probes and people using Newton with a few adjustments using Einstein.

The gravity of these systems is so all encompassing that we are all but unable to see anything else, even when the experiments that tell us something else is going on are displayed in capital letters for all to see. For example, the double-slit experiment, first performed by Thomas Young in 1801 showed a puzzling effect when light was passed through a barrier with two parallel slits cut in it. The light shining through the slits, which was expected to show two lines corresponding to the two slits on the back wall of the experimental apparatus, instead showed an interference pattern, a wavy pattern. It is an effect that is explained, with some resistance, by saying that light has characteristics of both particles, going straight back to the wall, and waves, producing an interference pattern on the wall. The 20th century physicists spent a good deal of time pondering the results of this experiment. It was discovered that elementary particles made up atoms, also behaved like the photons in the original experiment. The result of the many many double-slit experiments done is that Classical physics, the physics of space-time couldn’t explain this behavior. Quantum physics, the realm of the very small, was born out of experiments like this.

And so, after I finished Guilder’s book, I started browsing the Glossary (Guilder 337) which I have done only three or four times in the last 20 years. I found in it, in the definition of Bell’s theorem/Bell’s inequality a sentence that summed up the whole book. It must be disappointing for some people. In this statement a whole range of possibilities crop up that make it possible to go forward. It is particularly important for me because I have insisted since the late 1970s that truth is in relation, not in the objects themselves.

There is a murmur of a suggestion that the central reality, at the quantum level, is entanglement: that relationships between quantum “things” are more fundamental and objective than the things themselves. (Guilder 337)

This confirms my assertion but does not prove it. That is the fanciful part of the whole problem that both attracts and repels classical observers. My intuition had do do with ordinary objects of our perception, not the quantum reality. And though I was up on some of the scientific literature in the late ’70s, it was not until the ’00s that I made any closer association between ordinary objects and quantum reality.

Here, for me, is how this association works with ordinary reality. It is not a trivial issue, and defines everything in the human knowledge project. Plato’s “Letter Seven” relates to us that the more one knows the thing in itself, the less one can say about it truthfully. That is because the mystery of objects are baked into their surface appearance. The more we know about something, the more the relationship between us and the object is primary, not a datapoint in a chart. That is, we cannot lay out all we know in a textbook. The essential points are in the relation not the data. And our knowledge transforms us, does not permit objectification in some classical sense. For Plato, the science of the object, which is preliminary to knowing the thing itself, can be put in a textbook. It is definable by our standard categories, and has a location in our compendium. But knowing the object itself is a step or two beyond that, and making that knowledge inaccessible to the casual observer is irritating to those who would wish to put all knowledge into text. It is irritating to the point of denial by those who want classical categories of science to be fully explained. This is the puzzle of the expert who knows what they cannot say. They cannot say it, because saying it would concretize the relationship and break it. In fact, those who attempt to say what is not sayable betray that they do not know the thing itself at all, that they are in fact, breaking what is sayable in the science of the thing. That is because, to remain consistent, what is not sayable is not sayable because there is a tension between the science and the knowledge of the thing itself that can’t be resolved within the literary logic available to humans without the mathematical training to recognize the limits of cognition. The knower who does not in fact have that mathematical training, but realizes that there is a limit to what can be said has affirmed that knowledge of the thing itself is more closely associated with intuition than to science. The limits of science, advanced to the point of being able to anunciate previously intuited knowledge, can now say what was before unsayable. But in the end, the knowledge that is sayable now is knowledge of our relation to the thing itself. Yet the mystery is larger than what we can say.

I hope you can see how the definition of quantum reality also applies to the knowledge project in its children. That is, “that relationships between … ‘things’ are more fundamental and objective than the things themselves. (Guilder 337)”

This is why I had to write today, because at the root of things, truth is about relationships, not the objects themselves. This applies across the board for our being in the world.

For Christianity, Christ as an object is only the surface, the preliminary and incomplete version of our practice. At the core Christianity is about the relationship we have with God in Christ. Anything less is not Christianity at all, but religion. It is not that Christ can not be objectified in words, deeds, and the rest of history about the matter, but that these are only the preliminary features of reality, not reality itself, and not sufficient for one to acquire salvation. The textbook, the Bible, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for our knowledge of God.

For those for whom money is the core reality, the object of their worldview, only in relationship with money do we realize its insignificance as a feature of reality. To inflate its significance is to err in ways that degrade humanity. That is, loving it is truly the source of all evil. Making it the primary occupation of one’s life hides everything else: people, society, prosperity, etc. Having money is as much of a hindrance as it is a help. As the Scriptures say, the only weakness of the poor is lack of money, the only strength of the rich is money. Money can’t possibly be the central feature of humanity if the poor, who don’t have much of it, are more wealthy in the important features of humanity than the rich. Also, when the Bible condemns the love of money as the root of all evil, those who love money are repudiating the Bible. It is easy to see why Jesus said that it is easier for camel to thread the needle than to enter the Kingdom of God, (yes, I know there are ways to reinterpret this metaphor that is more genial to the rich. But making it more genial to the rich is not Jesus’ point here.)

For philosophy, the essential relation is with knowledge itself. The problems of philosophy do not simply boil down to knowledge, but to the relations between the objects in the world. The best and brightest thinkers have made it possible to comprehend those relationships we have with the world and with each other, without also sacrificing the relationships themselves. The poor philosopher is only capable of collecting objects as a science of relations, not a relationship with reality itself. And yes, I know about anti-realists, but am convinced that a philosophy of that sort is a linguistic backwater. Reality itself is more subtle. One can deny all day that there is a persistent reality, but depend on it nonetheless. This is just a convenient subterfuge to retain the consistency of a program that denies and relies on reality at the same time. What they really need to say is that our knowledge is incomplete and will remain so as far into the future as we can extrapolate our interaction with that reality. There is no real foundation in the halting and incomplete annunciations of science. Neither can we deny reality to avoid that problem. Our relationship with reality is not definable simply as science, but something more subtle that we do not understand the parameters of quite as succinctly as would be required to provide an absolute.

This issue, the one about foundations is not about reality itself, but about our ability to encapsulate reality in some formulaic program. I would refer you to the Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead and how they came to an unresolvable paradox when confronted with Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Simply, any system that tries to emulate reality will be able to produce theorems we can recognize as true, but cannot prove within the system that generated them. Principia Mathematica (PM) as a system that attempted to unify all mathematics produced for Gödel true theorems that were not provable in PM. Either one can remain blind to the conflict here or acknowledge that human knowledge is not absolute. There are higher orders of system as yet not comprehended. The second is preferable, that is, there’s more to learn. It does not help either the knowledge project or people in general when one chooses to hide the incompleteness of one’s system. But because of Gödel’s theorem, we know that understanding of our reality is partly hidden. Human knowledge can’t make the claim of being complete. Rather we can know things that we can not prove within the system of logic we have. There is more that we don’t know beyond what we do.

*Notice: This is not about politics which both makes me happy and tells how little the criminal in the White House really meant for all of us. For context in the distant future, where our memory of him will be nothing more than the moldy photo albums of the ’10s, the presidency of Donald J. Trump between 2016 and 2020 has been the closest thing to a complete disruption of our Democratic institutions we have ever experienced since the inception of our Republic. I hope we do not repeat this mistake.

philosophy, politics

Facebook post 9-19-19

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I can’t ignore this any longer. The problem with our nation is both simpler and more complex than it appears. But the first issue to deal with is the divisive tone and content of political speech. Our neighbors and friends have become, if the politicos are to be believed, our enemies. People who I used to call friends, have cooled off in their ardor because somehow they think I have fallen away from a message they are comfortable with. And they are told that I am the enemy. 

Is it because I have become less of a Christian, or that I have abandoned the principles of democracy? No, definitely not. I hold the same trust in our way of government that I did before the current political climate. That is, not absolute trust, but conditional on its behavior. Am I less of a Christian than I was before? Certainly not. I can see real growth and movement toward becoming like Christ. Do I struggle? Well, yes, but then that is the burden of every person. Do I feel that I have abandoned or compromised my Christian principles in order to ally with the United States? No. I don’t trust government, any government that has its own interests or the interests of the 1% in mind. I do trust some officials, but not always and not for every issue. Am I patriotic? Of course, but not the sort of patriotism that wraps its self interest in the flag, or tries to associate the United States with some vision of Christ’s kingdom. Doing that defames the flag, and pollutes the Christ who suffered and died to deliver us from the tyranny we see so often in modern politics. Do I love my country? Yes, of course. But I am not so simpleminded as to justify its mistakes and excesses to imperil my neighbors who are different from me. Do I wish things were better in the US? Yes, I think we all do.

I do not like or accept the names that some call others. That just follows the modern McCarthyism. Do I think I should be loyal to our government? No, not a chance. If they do their jobs as they should I am happy, if they sell their services to the highest bidder, I am not happy. And it is not my neighbors and friends that I am angry about. I am angry at the politicians who believe that they should do whatever is in their own interest, whether that is keeping party solidarity in order to get elected again, or ignoring the glaring facts that they must ignore if they are to say and do the things they do. (Anybody interested in seeing the Ted Cruz video where the high school students ask him about gun control?) And I ask, how can they say those things? Is there a chance that I have gotten it so wrong? And I answer after some further exploration, no. They are either sincerely deceived, or deceiving others for their own interest. Is it loyalty to the principles of good government that makes them do this? No, that can’t be so, because good government relies on good data and a firm grasp on reality. 

Yes, I get it that there are different perspectives on the facts. But, when the facts aren’t changing and the oddball perspective remains against reasonable doubt of that interpretation, I begin to call that perspective into question. And if I am the outlier in this evaluation, I beg for better data and a better explanation. But it has become common for people to persist spouting ignorant and uninformed opinions and trouble others over their incredulity. That makes me angry. When elected political officials do this, I am angry. 

You remember the 1st Amendment to the Constitution? There’s a bit in there about not abridging the freedom of speech. I agree with that. But in the context, and I am originalist in this respect, the intention of that amendment was to protect free “political” speech, that is, to be able to criticize the government. So, when I hear the undisciplined and dangerous speech of an elected official, I am angry. The Bill of Rights is there to protect the people, not the elected officials in their official capacity. It is meant to keep autocracy from becoming the norm when it sprouts its evil head. 

Some people believe any rhetoric is OK when it gets the job done, but the loss of truthful speech defines our readiness to accept corruption. When that rhetoric goes unchallenged it becomes the enemy of democracy. Let me explain. Immanuel Kant told us that when somebody lies to us, we are made an unwitting tool in somebody else’s chain of events. We lose our freedom. I think he’s correct here, and when an elected official believes it is OK to lie, they believe it is OK to use you and me in a plan that we would not adopt if we knew the truth. So, part of our problem in the modern world is that we have failed to be truth detectors, or we have so misunderstood our political purpose as to justify the divisiveness of elected officials. That’s not the kind of government I want. I know they are telling me that it is for my own good that they do what they do, but how am I supposed to believe them when I can see the consequences of their behavior right before my eyes.

And the thing I am angry about is not my neighbors and friends, though some of them are angry at me. But it seems that they have been lied to. They also haven’t bothered to dig hard enough to find the truth. I’m sorry for that. All the divisive rhetoric going around by officials of the US government and its allies (Russians responsible for election tampering), make it hard to breathe. 

But because of this rhetoric and their behavior we now have to accept making our planet filthier and more dangerous for our children in the name of monied interests. We have to accept that Mexicans, Muslims, etc. are dangerous people, despite the fact that they are no more dangerous than anybody else, (well, maybe they are less dangerous than the white supremacists who are feeling emboldened to shoot people in Walmart.) We have to accept that LGBTQ etc. people deserve fewer rights as citizens to be unmolested in their lives than “straight” people, even while the “straight” people driving this divisiveness are often far more immoral than those they deplore, but because they have money and hold the reigns of power, are often free of the consequences for behavior that persistently puts other people in prison, sometimes for life.

So, those who are trying to divide the poor from the black and brown people, the straight from gay, the rich from poor are not doing Christ’s business. (Matthew 12:30, Luke 11:23) If your issue is so important then why is there little to nothing about it in the Scriptures? I thought the Scriptures were supposed to be the Christian’s arbiter of faith and practice.

So, now, why are my friends cooling off in their friendship? Is it because I am less Christian, or less patriotic? No, my first allegiance is to Christ and his kingdom. And my participation in this country’s politics is a subsidiary allegiance, one that if it conflicts with Christ, I happily abandon it, or even protest.

So what is it that my friends don’t like? I get it that they are conflicted between their Christian allegiance and allegiance to the state. Therefore, I guess that they can’t happily ally themselves with me. I offer something else than the often twisted divisive rhetoric of many of our elected officials. I offer my person in Christ, gathering all that I can into Christ. Are not the citizens and immigrants of whatever stripe people whom God loves? Of course they are. So my argument is not with them. My argument is with the divisive rhetoric and the elected officials who are pushing it.

I have made mistakes. I have been angry at poorly developed opinions, all the while incredulous that people could hold them. I am not always right, though I am right about a few things.

1. Stop using the labels right and left. They mean nothing these days and are only used to attack a viewpoint or policy. No effort is spent here by those who use those words to have a conversation.

2. The labels liberal and conservative are used as weapons, and dishonest ones at that. If you declare that you are a conservative, how am I supposed to know who you are aligning yourself with. Conservatives are a poorly defined group that is at once the William F. Buckley Jr., the KKK, John Stossel, white supremacists, the Koch enterprises, Newt Gingerich, Donald Trump, or fiscally responsible government. Liberals have the same problem with self declaration. If you declare you are a liberal, am I supposed to believe you are a socialist, communist, like Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama, want healthcare as a human right or want Social Security to be continued in public hands?

3. If you are going to claim that you are speaking the truth, be prepared to actually speak the truth by doing your research, not like the contemporary flat-earthers who haven’t got a snowflake’s chance in hell of being right. 

4. It is not me you are angry with but because you hold certain views that make me an enemy, you believe it is your patriotic duty to be angry with me, or you can’t help yourself. I can actually be a very good friend. And if you’re interested in a conversation, “Iron sharpens iron.”

5. Make your patriotism about the best values of the nation, not the symbols. It is too easy to twist the meaning of symbols. Remember that the Republican party in its beginnings fought for the rights of black and brown people. Not so much today. 

6. It’s not all about you, or me. In fact, it is about the wellbeing of all of us together. Any rule that seeks to divide the people arbitrarily is not a rule that should be in place. 

7. Asking whether we are better under one administration or another is a misleading question.

8. Many of our laws do not square with reality or the best interest of the nation. They serve the monied capitalists who have spent prodigious amounts of money to avoid restraint, even when what they do harms people.

9. If you are more ready to thrash your opponents than have a conversation with them, use rhetorical obfuscation instead of some version of the facts that can be publicly justified, then you are not part of the solution. You have become the enemy of the United States and of all openhearted and decent people. You have worked for the dissolution of the Republic, the flag, the nation. And if in addition you make the claim to being Christian, you have traded the truth for lies, and betrayed Christ and his kingdom. 

If you’re angry at my statements here it is almost a sure bet that you have some work cut out for you discovering the truth of the issues. If you are happy to discount me, call me a heretic, or otherwise justify defaming me, I suggest that you have lost your way and that you are not on the way, no matter what else you are doing in your life, no matter what position you hold, no matter who you are associated with, or how much money you have or don’t have.

I make reality including God and the universe at our best current comprehension of them the foundation, seeking the truth in love the mode of operation, conversation the mode of public intercourse with the goal of mutual benefit in a non-zero sum game.

If you are trusting Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, or any of a wide variety of other platforms, you are making a mistake. Even now foreign actors have taken over pages of our fellow citizens, and created their own pages, spewing divisive rhetoric to throw us all under the bus. Though I haven’t posted in a while, I bet Facebook will put this post low in the feed rankings, because I am asking for a moral transformation in people who have been hijacked by the current political dialog. I may be wrong.

philosophy, politics, rants

liberal and conservative

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When I hear the words liberal and conservative I am reminded of Jim Edwards’ notion that we don’t use these words except as weapons. But I have a friend who uses one of these as a defense against the opposing view. “I am a conservative” he says, as if that would protect him against the onslaughts of the liberal.

I was reviewing and revising my marijuana web site, and I again watched the video from 1996 that is posted in that page. I heard from William F. Buckley, Jr., an avowed conservative, that in order to be a conservative one must first be a realist. That might not be a startling claim for some, but having always respected Buckley for his careful exposition of the world, I recognized an axiom that, though I am not a conservative (or liberal), I think is fundamental to our engagement with people and the world.

The axiom, in its uncomplicated form, states: There is a real world whether we perceive it or not, whether we understand it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, and that real world persists irrespective of our association with it.

In contrast with that reality we criticize people for not living in the real world. In this part of the presidential election cycle we know the politicians are mostly not living in the real world, especially if they expect that we will vote them in based on their promises. Politicians are notorious for failing to keep promises to the electorate. There are good reasons for this, of course. The politicians are beholden to powers that prior to election do not express themselves with teeth bared only after the election. We don’t forgive them for this, but they expect us to forget.

Nate Silver in his book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don’t, he describes two types of people, metaphorically, hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs are free with their opinions, predicting the future but mostly failing, because they have no sense of the tangled reality of the sandbox in which they play. And they never get any better in their predictions, because they don’t tie real causes and effects together successfully. Contrarily, the foxes are shy about expressing their opinions, because there are really so many factors that determine any outcome. They realize the future is fraught with unknowns and the flux of human interactions. But Silver notes that their predictive success gets better the longer they are at it.

The hedgehog does not live in the real world, even though they contact it every day. Though they may go by the label liberal, or conservative, they are not realists in the important sense. Or if they are, they choose to ignore the tangled web of influence and causal complexity. They live in Wonderland, criticizing Alice even as they remain clueless of their own companionship with her.

The fox, however, lives “circumspectly, as wise,” recognizing that though one can’t have an objective viewpoint, there are more or less objective views. They choose self-consiously the entangled universe that is acknowledged as entangled, accepting the fact of their prejudices as prejudice, being aware that it can mislead them.

So, this led me to think that whatever label we choose for ourselves, or the avoidance of labels, that a realist perspective typified by the fox will always be preferred over that of the hedgehog.

Frankly, I don’t care whether one proclaims oneself a liberal or conservative, a socialist or capitalist, except in the case where they live clueless of the complexity of the world they live in, and expect me to favor them because of their label. Labels have the curious effect of locking out options for thinking. Michel Foucault and many others have suggested that labeling is intrinsically reductionistic. That is, a label prevents one from examining possibilities that are by definition unthinkable. Since we’re talking about presidents, let me remind you that some of the most effective presidents are those who attached their own label to projects of the opposing party and pushed them as their own. That certainly is a realist perspective.

So when Bernie Sanders claims to be a Socialist, he stings the eyes of the capitalist, OK, I meant to say conservative because conservatives in this era are capitalists. Let me play with socialism and capitalism as opposing worldviews. Really, they are not opposing worldviews, they are modes of production, more tied to how we divide ownership than how we rule ourselves. As financial modes they are both unstable, not worthy of the totalizing domains they wish to control. Both of them require a moderating influence, a political structure that both stabilizes and moderates their worst effects. Kai Nielsen, proposing socialism as the more moral of our pair, suggests that the errors of socialism can be lived with more easily than the errors of capitalism.

What are the errors of socialism? As Nielsen says, an all pervasive bureaucracy attempts to control every effort and every possible effect of our lives. The errors of capitalism on the other hand, divide the world into the owners of production, and those who work for them, the peasants, the proletariat, the wage slaves. Nielsen thinks that a democracy can control the pervasive bureaucracy, preventing the intrusion of government into the lives of individuals. And those framers of the Bill of Rights thought that could control the worst depredations of capitalism.

Here we are in the real world today in the United States. We see both the errors of capitalism and the errors of socialism. But what controls these errors is not their opposite. Capitalism is not a solution for socialism, nor vice versa, but a democracy that can vote appropriate people to lead the nation. That is why the travesty of the modern oligarchy is so egregious. It prevents the democracy from actually doing anything more than spin its wheels and justify the status quo. That’s the real world we live in today. Capitalism and socialism are companion parts of the grain of our political system. The socialists engage the bureaucracy to surveil you and the capitalist dispenses with you as an employee when they no longer need you. You are not a person to either one, but an irritation that needs to be controlled. Their methods differ, but the result is the similar. You become a construct to be controlled and manipulated by message and media, by money and meaning. That is why a democracy, or in our case a representative republic, is required. Only it can control the out of control bureaucracy and the one-percenters’ oligarchy.

Classical liberals side with the people against the power of government. Classical conservatives aim at a government for the people by the people. But today’s rubbish heap of political cronies have lost the concept of the people entirely.

How do we exit this political and economic grinder? First and foremost, by becoming realists. Recognize the trouble we’re in and then vote to get us out of it. That means, we’ll have to ignore the press who are in the pocket of the cronies who have been purchased by the special interests to send the messages they think will help us ignore our responsibilities to vote these creeps out. Second, let me defer to politicians who are not afraid to challenge the status quo. And I’m not talking about the newspeak where change means the status quo, but the Libertarians like Gary Johnson, or the Socialists like Bernie Sanders. Will they be able to fix the republic? No, not in one fell swoop, but they will bring a shakeup that can at least throw the drones across the yard. (Bee drones can’t find their way back to the hive if they are taken out of it.) Gary and Bernie are realists. Their mutual outrage at the current state of affairs promises a disruption of the status quo. They are not like Hillary “Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse” Clinton or the drones of the Republican party, as well-meaning and competent in their world as they may be.

We can vote the status quo, following the press recommendations, or we can change the world. It’s up to us I think.