Archive for category things to think about

Date: November 29th, 2011
Cate: matt's life, observations + conclusions + beliefs, things to think about

this has always been the title of this post

Over the years I’ve liked the concept of ‘belief’ less and less. Implications of religious belief in particular notwithstanding (another thing I’ve come to like less and less) I’m bothered by the idea that anyone would make decisions based not on the world as it is, but on the world as they see it. Which is likely more than a little hypocritical on my part, given what I’m ostensibly fated to write next: I’m almost certain I believe in Hard Determinism.

This isn’t predestination, it’s causal determinism, and it directly opposes the existence of free will. It probably also contradicts quantum stuff, though I’ve got to admit I’m not by any means well-versed in that realm. Here’s what I know:

The substructure of the universe regresses infinitely towards smaller and smaller components. Behind atoms we find electrons, and behind electrons quarks. Each layer unraveled reveals new secrets, but also new mysteries.

- Academician Prokhor Zakharov, “For I Have Tasted the Fruit” (Alpha Centauri, 1999)

So far as I know, this is true. Bigger things are made of smaller things – for that matter, big things are smaller things. I’m me, I’m human, I’m made of cells, which are made of chains of molecules, which are made of atoms stuck together, which are made of all sorts of other stuff – somehow all that stuff sticking together makes me, such as I am.

Now let’s think about pool tables.

A ball in motion on a pool table collides with another ball. The event involves well-known properties of matter, expressed in immaculate mathematical equations. Velocity of moving ball impacts stationary ball, transfers momentum, is left to come to rest while other ball moves in a trajectory determined by first ball’s motion. Every time ball A hits ball B, with those parameters in place, the same effect will result. There isn’t any uncertainty about it. It’d be silly to ‘believe’ that something else would occur. For another relevant quote:

Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.

― Richard Dawkins

Public verifiable evidence is simple enough to acquire in the case of our pool table – set up a robotic arm, place the balls precisely on the table, line up the shot in exactly the same way, and you’ll see the same thing happen over and over again. That’s science. It’s repeatable, it’s predictable, everything is accounted for.

I remember playing the ‘why’ game when I was a kid – keep repeating ‘why’ whenever an adult gives you an explanation, forcing them to delve ever deeper into progressively elementary explanations until they give up in frustration and invoke the ever-popular: ‘just because.’ That’s when the kid wins – when the adult has to admit they don’t know everything, which is of course a childish thing to feel the need to prove. However, it’s relevant to this topic, because it brings up an interesting question – what if the adult didn’t run out of explanations? We could ride that spiral of causality down into infinity.

But the implications. The pool balls always move the same way. Behind each effect we find a cause, and what caused that cause, and what caused that cause, and so on. Every event was precipitated by the conditions that heralded it. This isn’t predestination, as far as I can tell, in fact it can’t be, because god himself would be caught in the line of causes and effects.

This conclusion might sound hauntingly religious, though: everything happens for a reason, everything is fated to happen, everyone has a destiny, reality itself is a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I can’t see it any other way – my very impulse to sit down and write this was itself the product of causes so complex that I can’t conceive them, but their existence seems nearly undeniable. I can’t trace the exact sequence of shots in my own personal game of pool that’s led me to this point, but I know they’re there for me and my 4-dimensional experiences just as they’re there for the pool table and its 2-(maybe 3 if you’re feeing generous)-dimensional outcomes. All effects have causes, proceeded by effects, proceeded by causes, ad infinitum.

This has implications, of course. First of all, free will becomes an illusion. We can’t choose, because the factors that influence our choice are quantifiable, even if we don’t currently posses the means to do so. In our ignorance, we’ve taken inevitability and called it intention, ascribing choice where none exists. Which is of course a lie, because we were never capable of choosing what to call it in the first place.

While this might be the truth, I’ve got to admit that the conclusions I draw from it are somewhat of a cop-out, because it doesn’t change things for us. Morality is obviously completely invalid, as it requires free-will to assign responsibility to people for the choices they make. Try this: If I murder someone, I deserve to be murdered. In reality, if I murder someone I never had a choice; my substructure of the universe was always destined to interact with their substructure of the universe in such a way that the collection of tiny element known on our macro level as human life would cease to exist in that form – e.g. I would kill them. I was always going to kill them. So why punish me for killing them? The answer is so easy that it feels like cheating – because I was always going to be punished.

It sounds childish – in response to repeated ‘why’s, we’re simply replying, “because.” But it’s the right answer. It might not be a particularly useful answer, I suppose, but nothing else seems to make sense to me.

Date: September 12th, 2011
Cate: things to think about

macabre poetry

note to self – write a death poem. Check this out:

As the sound of drum calls for my life,
I turn my head where sun is about to set.
There is no inn on the way to underworld.
At whose house shall I sleep tonight?

- Seong Sam-mun

beautiful and extremely sad.

Date: July 23rd, 2011
Cate: observations + conclusions + beliefs, society + culture, things to think about

is the stability offered by accepting unfavorable/unfair/illegal working situations a worthwhile tradeoff for the instability but ease of concience offered by fucking shit up?

this will turn into a full blog post at some point, I’m pretty sure:

of course you don’t have the luxury of quitting and finding another job. of courseyou don’t have the resources to sue. if they’re truly purposefully taking advantage of you then they are counting on you thinking that way and therefore not calling them on it. they’re screwing you because they know they can get away with it, which is basically the worst kind of bullying.

you cannot in good conscience maintain a “that’s just how it works, no point doing anything about it” attitude in the face of this. of course that’s just how it works, that is how it will always work, until someone does something about it. and if you’re not willing to do anything about it, how can you expect anyone else to do anything either?

you don’t even have to play hero and stop them from screwing over everyone else, you only have to stop them from screwing over you – and if you’re not even willing to do that… you’ve got to wonder, is it even worth complaining about?

http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/ix9jo/til_pizza_delivery_is_considered_a_hazardous_job/c27fgpg?context=6

Date: May 4th, 2011
Cate: society + culture, things to think about

good at math, feels bad.

Jim finds himself in the central square of a small South American town. Tied up against the wall are a row of twenty Indians, most terrified, a few defiant, in front of them several armed men in uniform. A heavy man in a sweat-stained khaki shirt turns out to be the captain in charge and, after a good deal of questioning of Jim which establishes that he got there by accident while on a botanical expedition, explains that the Indians are a random group of inhabitants who, after recent acts of protest against the government, are just about to be killed to remind other possible protestors of the advantages of not protesting. However, since Jim in an honoured visitor from another land, the captain is happy to offer him a guest’s privilege of killing one of the Indians himself.

If Jim accepts, then as a special mark of the occasion, the other Indians will be let off. Of course, if Jim refuses, then there is no special occasion, and Pedro here will do what he was about to do when Jim arrived, and kill them all. Jim, with some desperate recollection of schoolboy fiction, wonders whether if he got hold of a gun, he could hold the captain, Pedro and the rest of the soldiers to threat, but it is quite clear from the set-up that nothing of that kind is going to work: any attempt at that sort of thing will mean that all the Indians will be killed, and himself. The men against the wall, and the other villagers, understand the situation, and are obviously begging him to accept. What should he do?

Futility Closet: A Good Deed

The closest TV Trope I can find for this is the Cold Equation:

A spaceship has been damaged and is Almost Out Of Oxygen (or food or fuel). But then someone calculates that if they had one less crewmember, they just might make it back safely…

As a quick overview, the people in question don’t deserve to die, nevertheless it seems that their fate is certain, if you choose not to cooperate. However, if you play along and fire the shot, you net one life, even if it means committing murder en route. Which means the answer is simple – you save a life by accepting, so that’s what you should do – but that’s just the beginning of the implications.

The terrible thing is, it doesn’t even matter if you confer with the prisoners, because all of them but one will die anyway, and the captain hasn’t even offered you the chance to pick the survivor – for that matter, you don’t get to pick your target either. There’s no way to make this a better situation, is there?

Emotional torment, is what a situation like this is. It’s something to throw at a character in a story, not a person in real life. I don’t even like thinking about it.

Date: April 23rd, 2011
Cate: observations + conclusions + beliefs, society + culture, things to think about

Dying is the last thing I plan to do.

Either by design or thought
we are doomed to know our own end

- “The Fall Of The House Of Usher” by Lou Reed

Mortality is probably a good thing to cover in the Mortality Blog. Death is a fact of life (so far as we know) and it’s a pretty depressing one -- the boon of self-awareness comes with the bane of knowing we are all going to die.

(okay, bad video, yes. just pop it out and let it play in the background.)

Shatner’s song makes light of our common destiny, which I support -- because there’s really not much else you can do about it. You can sit around and fret about inevitability, or you can accept it and try to pack in as much living as possible before your time is up.

My beliefs, such as they are, are balanced on this tiny little pearl of truth (if you’ll pardon the flowery prose) -- that after you die, it’s over. It’s totally and completely over, you cease to exist, maybe everything else ceases to exist, but it’s a moot point, because even if reality continues without you, you’ll never know it, because you’ll be dead. And everything, and everyone dies.

This simple little fact drives the instinct to survive and procreate -- to try to spread out as much as possible before entropy catches up. If you truly feel that you’d rather be dead than alive, even in an extreme situation, there is something terribly and fundamentally wrong with you. Life, any life, any terrible life of pain and misery, is incalculably more valuable than the absence of life.

The idea that a life of torture is better than no life at all is probably a luxury that I can afford, having lived a life of comfort (likely mostly undeserved) thus far. It’s the only belief I hold strongly enough that I would consider imposing it on someone else. Which is why abortion, war, and capital punishment are all extremely uncomfortable issues to me -- existential angst bothers me like nothing else I’ve experienced, in a manner that seems profound and untouchable, impossible to deal with directly, better relegated to a deep dark corner of my mind that I rarely purposefully venture. We’re not talking Thanatophobia - I suspect I’m far too ‘well-adjusted’ to have any seriously irrational phobias. Still, just thinking about it causes anxiety, speeds up my heart, makes me grit my teeth, makes my thoughts swirl around and keeps me uncomfortable until I can come up with something else to distract myself.

Since there ain’t anything new under the sun, Ernest Becker has already described my outlook in Terror Management Theory. You can read the wikipedia article yourself I’m sure, but this first paragraph is exactly what we’re talking about:

Terror Management Theory (TMT), in social psychology, states that all human behavior is motivated by the fear of mortality. The theory purports to help explain human activity both at the individual and societal level. It is derived from anthropologist Ernest Becker‘s 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning work of nonfiction The Denial of Death, in which Becker argues all human action is taken to ignore or avoid the inevitability of death. The terror of absolute annihilation creates such a profound—albeit subconscious—anxiety in people (called cognitive dissonance) that they spend their lives attempting to make sense of it. On large scales, societies build symbols: laws, religious meaning systems, cultures, and belief systems to explain the significance of life, define what makes certain characteristics, skills, and talents extraordinary, reward others whom they find exemplify certain attributes, and punish or kill others who do not adhere to their cultural worldview. On an individual level, how well someone adheres to a cultural worldview is the same concept asself-esteem; people measure their own worth based on how well they live up to their culture’s expectations.

How convenient that there’s an all-powerful all-knowing invisible being who can save you from death; or that you’ll be re-incarnated after you die in this life and live another; or that you’ll ascend to godhood and get virgins or whatever. Yeah, so much for religion. This is why it will take an act of god (or something) to make me a believer -- otherwise, Occam’s Razor leaves me with Atheism, because I can’t see religious belief as anything other than “The terror of absolute annihilation,” and I can’t help feeling that I’m more willing to face reality than religion’s advocates. There is no god to save us from death. It is terrifying, yes.

The value of human life in general is an easy transitive relation to make, empathy making it simple enough to jump from “I don’t want to die,” to “they don’t want to die,” and “I don’t want them to die.” Survival instinct extends in an inverse pyramid from self, to family, to friends, to peers, etc. On a very basic level, I don’t want anyone to die, and it seems so simple and easy to me that I can’t help being a little baffled by people who disagree, and justify murder.

If life is the essential element, then to deprive someone of life is the most vicious and terrible act you can commit, an expression of the darkest part of humanity: a life of self-awareness and free will, including the choice to erase another person from existence. If the prospect of my own mortality is my deepest fear, the idea that my death could be a result of another person’s action is buried directly above -- and if a man can kill another man, he can kill me. So when we start talking about whether murders and rapists and traitors deserve the death penalty, or how young a person can be and still be aborted with impunity… it scares me. Since the fear of death is already there, that slippery slope leads straight from strangers to peers to friends to family to myself, and when I’m lying in bed at night in the dark and I can’t stop thinking about that last moment of consciousness…

One sees one’s own death
one sees one committing murder or atrocious violent acts

- “The City In The Sea / Shadow” by Lou Reed

So that’s awful. I mean, there are other things that worry me, but this is the only one that really matters -- I’m worried that we still don’t put enough importance on the value of human life. I’m afraid of dying, and I’m afraid that other people aren’t as worried about it as I am, when it’s the only thing anyone should really be worried about.

Date: April 11th, 2011
Cate: drama, society + culture, things to think about

LOL DILBURT TROLD U!!!

(foreword – yeah it’s like a week or two old. I’m working my way through a backlog.)

Dilbert is funny sometimes, but that’s beside the point – I’m far too lazy to try to analyze the comic itself for insight into the author’s views on gender. Esepcially when Scott Adams has thoughtfully provided this writeup: I’m a what?

Let me preface all this by saying that while it’s an issue that ostensibly effects me, there’s so much drama surrounding the whole issue that it’s hard for me to do anything more than peer down at the fracas with an amused grin. Often I suspect that the proponents of each side aren’t entirely motivated by the desire to enact social change or to push forward human rights – they’re more interested in doing that weird human “if you’re not with us you’re against us” thing, where you draw a line in the sand and smugly instruct everyone else to pick which side of your false dichotomy they’re going to stand on. There are totally legit problems that are tangled up in the whole ‘who has more problems, men or women?’ debate, but man, all that drama. It’s such a turn off.

And yet… here I stand, gazing long into an abyss.

Nick Nadel over at guyspeak.com wasn’t particularly impressed with the Scott Adams blog post. He grabs this quote:

The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.

…and has this to say in response:

Anyway, Dilbert creator Scott Adams drew controversy this week when he compared women to children and the mentally handicapped in a blog post about equal rights in the workplace.

…

All anyone–be they male, female, or dog who can somehow walk on two legs–wants is a fair shake. It’s guys like you who give us all a bad name and poison intelligent discourse with your misogynist, inflammatory rhetoric. Stick to what you know, Scott– writing puns and drawing adorably wry cartoon dogs wearing nerd glasses.

So far, it looks like “Mr. Dilbert” says something insensitive, and “Chic Geek” condescends to call him out on it. Nick pointedly ignores the last paragraph of Scott’s original post:

I realize I might take some heat for lumping women, children and the mentally handicapped in the same group. So I want to be perfectly clear. I’m not saying women are similar to either group. I’m saying that a man’s best strategy for dealing with each group is disturbingly similar. If he’s smart, he takes the path of least resistance most of the time, which involves considering the emotional realities of other people. A man only digs in for a good fight on the few issues that matter to him, and for which he has some chance of winning. This is a strategy that men are uniquely suited for because, on average, we genuinely don’t care about 90% of what is happening around us.

Kind of weird, right? Nick says that Scott “compared women and children to the mentally handicapped,” while Scott says, “I want to be perfectly clear. I’m not saying women are similar to either group.” Let’s be fair – Scott isn’t saying that women are mentally handicapped, or that they’re like children. He’s saying that their are common elements in the way that those three groups are treated. You could easily argue (oh so easily) that it’s poor phrasing on Scott’s part, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

My parents had a turn of phrase when arguing with me back when I was a kid – I hated it at the time, but I eventually learned its value: “You’re not trying to understand, you’re trying not to understand.” In other words, one side is deliberately mis-interpreting the other side’s statements in order to falsely justify continued contention where none should exist. Nick should probably take note, because he’s not wrong in criticizing Scott – but come on, “inflammatory rhetoric?” You’ve clearly got your own problems in that regard. (self-aware self-insert – as I suspect I do as well.)

Allow me to indulge in cliche for the following announcement: “but wait, there’s more!”

Reading through Scott Adam’ original post in its entirety, here’s what I take away: after running out his “laundry list” of ways in which society treats men and women differently (including positive and negative benefits for both sexes) he counsels his male readers to “Get over it, you bunch of pussies.”

Which is an insensitive thing to say if you’re trying to have a rational discussion on a serious subject, obviously. So why’d he say it?

First, what if he’s being delibrately insensitive? He could be…

He’s using hyperbole to communicate (with a bit of self-aware humor) how little he cares for his male reader’s opinion on the matter, or
He’s making fun of the concept of separating ’human rights’ into ‘men’s rights’ and ‘women’s rights’ by ironically emasculating the portion of his male readership that think this way, or
He’s acknowledging the form of address that said male readers stereotypically respond to (the punchline is machismo) and using it to tell them to essentially do the right thing for the wrong reason, albeit a reason they may have less trouble accepting. In other words, he’s telling them not to cause drama over men’s rights versus women’s rights, because that’s just the way women are and there’s no use arguing over it.
ALSO – he could be trolling.

Second, maybe he doesn’t realize he’s being insensitive? Rather then reasonably exploring this alternative, I’m going to be lazy and give him the benefit of the doubt: his use of a sexist slur is likely deliberate, deployed intentionally for one of the reasons above.

He goes on a bit along the same lines, chiding this sect of male readers (who might, on further reflection, actually be strawmen?) for… maybe… ignoring male privilege? Honestly it gets a little rambling at that point, and I want to skip ahead to the follow up, where he triumphantly says:

You guys! He was kidding the whole time! Can you believe how much drama he caused? omg u fel 4 it? roflmao wut is wrong with ppl? Seriously though,

I thought it would be funny to embrace the Men’s Rights viewpoint in the beginning of the piece and get those guys all lathered up before dismissing their entire membership as a “bunch of pussies.”

I actually find it super interesting that he calls out that point as sort of the crux of the post, because I see it the same way – the questionable phrasing of “women, children, and the mentally handicapped” is worthy of an editorial note, but “you bunch of pussies” is what’s actually interesting, because it’s the point in the original entry where I first start to wonder whether all is as it seems.

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I was enjoying all of the negative attention on Twitter and wondered how I could keep it going. So I left some comments on several Feminist blogs, mostly questioning the reading comprehension of people who believed I had insulted them. That kept things frothy for about a day.

Let’s review a bit – trolling is by nature insensitive, and it’s directed towards vulnerable people who’ll take the bait and react – you’re causing drama in which you have no personal investment, for its own sake – and while ars gratia artis is not an unworthy goal (and neither are double negatives, apparently) there’s always the inescapable fact that you’re making things worse, at the very least, you’re not making them any better. You can sit back and crow U MAD but under the drama (as I mentioned earlier) there are real issues worthy of attention and reasonable discussion, which you’ve now derailed. So there’s that.

Scott Adams already knows this, apparently:

To the men who were offended by my mocking of Men’s Rights, you’re still a big bunch of pussies. But your criticisms of the legal system are worthy of attention. Even Feminists agree on that point.

… so why would he do it? Well,

A few weeks ago I asked readers of this blog to suggest a topic they would like to see me write about. The topic that got the most up votes, by a landslide, was something called Men’s Rights. Obviously the fix was in. Activists had mobilized their minions to trick me into giving their cause some free publicity.

So the “misogynist, inflammatory rhetoric” was intended to cleverly foil the vote-fixing Men’s Rights ~~people~~ men. That’s the secret of haunted hill. It was trolling the whole time! (And he would’ve got away with it if it weren’t for blah blah blah.)

This is the part where I wonder aloud if I’m missing the point – what’s everyone so up-in-arms about? I’m learning, though – the point is miscommunication, and insensitivity.

Do you want drama? Because this is how you get drama. (I’d link to the Archer episode but FOX has DMCA’d all the easily accessible clips.)

(postscript – Nick’s article was published days after Scott’s updated reply was posted – which means instead of just taking the troll bait like all the posters before him, Nick was actually told it was bait to begin with, and ran with it anyway. I realize you’ve got deadlines, but come on. the whole story is interesting, at least take the time to read up on it.)

Date: March 18th, 2011
Cate: matt's life, observations + conclusions + beliefs, society + culture, things to think about

my experiences with being governed

Should I be worried that as a citizen of a representative democracy, I don’t notice any difference between representatives? And I mean real, discernible differences that have a significant impact (positive or negative) on my life – I’d settle for a trivial impact, even.

All the changes in my life over the past 5 or 6 years have arisen from decisions that I’ve made - opportunities that I’ve taken advantage of, limbs I’ve gone out on, risks I’ve mitigated, mistakes I’ve made, people I’ve met, things I’ve read, etc. But ‘people I’ve voted for’ doesn’t fit in that list. I try to do the ‘right thing,’ research who I’m voting for, make sure I’m making an informed decision, but lately I’ve started to become curious whether it matters. I’m tempted to choose what I vote for randomly, the next election season.

I’m not complaining that my vote doesn’t count, it’s something more profound than that: that we’ve gone from an ostensibly dumb conservative republican president to a conversely smart liberal democrat president, and I can’t tell what’s different. We’ve still got soldiers in the middle east, and don’t-ask-don’t-tell might be repealed, but I’m not a soldier, you know? I’m not saying I don’t have opinions on those subjects, but they’re all in abstract, because none of it effects me. Financial crises? I’m doing about as well as ever. National disasters and civil unrest in those other countries somewhere across the sea, where I don’t know anybody and will never have to deal with their problems.

This might sound like bragging, or possibly uncaring, but it’s really not either – it’s complaining. If anything it sounds stupid, even to myself, when I wish that something drastic would happen, a touchstone I could look at and say, “X impacted Y, because I voted for Z.” What if we completely cut ties with middle eastern oil suppliers, and gas price quadrupled overnight? That’d be something. What if suddenly homosexuality was made illegal? What if the draft was reinstated? What if marijuana was legalized? Something big, something to be up in arms about. Something I’d feel good about dropping everything else to either fight or defend.

Short for a blog post, maybe, but the list of ways that my government impacts my life is shorter. I feel like that’s a problem.

Date: March 12th, 2011
Cate: observations + conclusions + beliefs, society + culture, things to think about
1 msg

obligatory dead baby joke

foreword: Hey, look at all those fallacies fly! Look upon my rhetoric and despair! In my defense, I’m talking about the way it makes me feel, though, and this is a blog post; so the only person I’m really arguing with is a strawman who doesn’t mind it when I use throw around appeals to emotion. My prose wanders into unfair territory only because I like stringing words together and this is something I feel strongly about.

I don’t like abortion. Here’s why: abortion is murder, and murder is reprehensible. I could probably put together some syllogisms for this if you’d like, but if you’re into that sort of thing you could just as easily do it yourself. Onward to explanations.

Maybe I should do the mortality post first? Spoiler alert – the reason this is the ‘Mortality Blog’ is that I’m making a (perhaps futile) attempt to deal with my fear of dying by treating the subject a little more casually.

Anyway, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone that the idea of people dying makes me uncomfortable. Wouldn’t I be a psychopath if I didn’t care whether other people lived or died? Maybe I care too much? Are there some people that just need to die?

Again, maybe I should do the post on the worthwhileness of human life first.

In the meantime, I have the following insight to offer: my problem with abortion stems from my deep-rooted problems with people dying, let alone people being killed. Which brings us to the point of contention - have you already figured it out? – how old do you have to be before you’re considered a person?

Okay, okay, that was a loaded question, no fair. Knowing about logical fallacies makes it okay to deliberately use them as an attempt to interject humor into an otherwise fairly humorless conversation. Somewhere between a twinkle in your parents’ eye and a certificate of live birth, a person appears. The question is, at what point does it stop being an ‘it’ and start being a human being?

In the beginning, we’ve got some sex cells, a genome half’n'half cocktail, with daddy’s sperm on one hand, and mommy’s eggs on the other. Are the separate sex cells people yet? I don’t think so. The chances that a petri dish full of sperm will ever develop into a human being has to be awfully close to 0%. It’s probably fair to say human life begins a little further down the line.

Let’s move on to other more exciting words – penetration, ejaculation! Thousands of joyous sperms wriggle their way towards fertilization. They’re on their way, the egg is waiting at the other end of the obstacle course. But is it soup yet? That’s getting trickier, because if you just wait, there’s a chance that the alpha tadpole will cross the finish line, the touchdown will be converted, and any number of sports metaphors I’m probably doing a terrible job of pretending I understand will set things on the right track for birth, 9 months later. Personally, the fact that the sex cells are still separate makes me think that this isn’t yet a human. It’s two halves of a whole, which will likely hook up, but it’s not necessarily going to happen. It’s a chance of a chance of a chance. At this point, spermacidal lube and whatnot is still in play, and maybe none of the swimmers will make it to the other end of the pool. Sports metaphors are nothing but glibness, coming from me.

Fertilization. My college dropout education and terrible memory for trivia (also a quick look at wikipedia’s article on the topic) tells me that at the moment of fertilization, the sperm merges with the egg, and boom, you’ve got a nice neat set of human DNA (well, ideally, anyway.)

(I’m going to take a moment here to point out that ‘Ooplasm‘ is another – and in my opinion, superior – term for ‘Ovum.’ Thanks, wikipedia!)

So now we’ve got one cell, made up of leftover bits of gamete, containing a brand new strand of DNA, freshly spliced together from mom and dad’s contributions. It’s an embyro!

And as far as I can tell, an embyro is getting much closer to being a human. There’s really only one more ‘right place at the right time’ consideration: implantation. The brave little potential person floats back downstream, passing all the disappointed-looking sperm who didn’t make the grade, and is looking to latch onto the uterus to keep things moving in the right direction. En route, it busies itself mitosis-ing, so we’ve got multiple human cells at that point, each possessing a copy of that person’s own unique DNA.

This is where I feel like we’re entering the territory of ‘life.’ Once the little guy has latched onto the wall of the uterus, it takes a few weeks to go from embryo to fetus. At some point it stops being ‘the brave little bundle of human cells’ and starts being ‘the brave little bundle of human cells that could,‘ or maybe even ‘the brave little human that is.’ Which is why I don’t have any problems with contraceptives – the morning after pill stops that brave little bundle of cells from even bundling, or hopefully from making it to implantation.

But once you’ve got a little embryo latched onto the insides of you, I think you’ve got a life in your hands. That life could’ve come into being through terrible circumstances, it could be a love child or a hate child, it could be an accident or the fulfillment of hopes, it could be a blessing or a curse, but it’s still a life. It’s a human. If you let it alone, it’ll grow up as big as you are. Days after being born, it’ll grab your finger and smile at you. If you give it a few years it’ll even try to start talking to you. It’s gone from ‘potential’ to ‘person.’

If I were to change my mind about abortion, that would be one area to look at: when does it stop being an ‘it’ and start being a person. However, you might agree with me on this point, but disagree on the degree to which I take the next one – killing people is wrong.

It’s a topic for another blog post, which is on my to-do list. But for the time being, let me say that I’m of the opinion that killing people isn’t a good thing. Yes there are nearly 7 billion of us, and that might double sometime in the next century, but human life isn’t cheapened by being common or easily obtained. Somewhere at the root of this feeling is the idea that if a person could turn out to be me, could turn out to be you, then who knows who else might turn up. And we’ll never know, if that person gets killed off early.

… and now, the problems.

I’m not unaware of the ‘but what if’s floating around my opinion. I apologize for the intentional double-negative, but like I said earlier, humor in a relatively humorless situation.

“But what if it’s killing the mother?”
“But what if it’s a rape baby?”
“But what if it’d be kinder to put it out of its misery?”
“But what if it has little prospect for any kind of meaningful life?”
“But what if the process of bringing a baby to term will completely derail the life of the unwilling mother?”

I’m just coming up with these off the top of my head, and they’re horrible. They’re absolutely awful questions, the kind that make people cross their arms and huff, “I don’t want to play this game anymore,” during a particularly insensitive round of ‘would you rather?’

#1 – According to Matt Lohkamp, self-defense is a totally okay reason to kill someone. Murder is no less horrific in this case, but I’d be comfortable giving the murderer a nice tight hug and murmuring, “It’s going to be okay. You did the right thing.” If complications from pregnancy are going to kill the mother, she should be able to choose to kill her unborn child to save her own life. Fuck that’s a terrible thing to have to decide.

#2 – Self-defense isn’t going to work for children conceived of rape. The Futility Closet‘s ‘Duet‘ post today is actually what prompted me to write about this particular subject – it pulls a quote from Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion.” It’s not a perfect comparison, I know. But it makes you think. It makes me think, I guess, if nothing else. If you find yourself responsible for the life of another human being, entirely against your will, what should you do? What if the disgust and nearly indescribable trauma of the act of rape itself taints the normal baby-bonding emotions, to the point where you’re disturbed by your own child? Is it okay to kill the child?

Again, fuck that’s a terrible thing to have to decide. It’s such a terrible thing that attempting to imagine my way through what it’d be like to find myself in that situation makes me extremely uncomfortable, and I’m going to admit I haven’t come up with an answer I feel great about. Maybe there is no ‘good’ answer. I do, however, feel comfortable supposing that the answer you arrive at depends on context. Sometimes some people are going to choose to abort the child, other times other people are going to choose to keep it. Maybe only very rarely will the latter case be seen. But what if, what if?

At best, I think I can say that this isn’t necessarily a question of life-or-death (as opposed to #1) – it’s a question of easy-or-uneasy. You’re choosing whether your own quality of life is more important than the actual life of your unborn child. It’s terrible! It’s a terrible decision! It’s a decision no one should have to make, yes, but I’m pretty sure that’s the choice at hand. Should you kill your child so that your own life is easier to live? Let me repeat one last time: fuck that’s a terrible thing to have to decide. If anyone has any insight to offer on this particular point, I could probably use some.

#3 – This overlaps with another subject I should probably consider for the future: euthanization, suicide, that idea that death is ever preferable to life. Oh that’s a sick idea. That rubs me in completely the wrong way. The idea that the bleakness of death would ever be a nice change from the harshness of life just… it wrenches at me, physically. This is so much shitty stuff to deal with in this topic, geez.

Given relative certainty that the life in question will never make it to birth… I would be very close to giving it a ‘maybe.’ A horrible birth-defect that would barely allow the child to live past the first month? “….mmmmmmmaybe,” Matt mused, teeth clenched, face contorted by an elaborate grimace. Let’s enter the world of my imagination for a moment: I am a fetus, and some terrible twist of fate has left me missing most of my head, and all the important things my little head is supposed to contain. Gross. But since this is imagination land, I know then what I know now – that a brief life of pain and misery is preferable to a non-existent life.

But that’s how I feel personally, now, barely a quarter of the way through my own lifetime. So maybe it’s not fair for me to assume that someone else would feel the same as me – and yet, I don’t have any frame of reference for any other outlook apart from: survival is of supreme importance, and a terrible life is always better than a lack-thereof. The trauma of dealing with your child dying naturally, possibly in extreme pain after a heartrendingly brief and tortured existence… you’ve got to weigh that against sending your child to oblivion. Again, it’s not life-and-death, it’s picking between an easier life and a harder life. Personally, I’d like to think I’d pick the harder life, if it meant giving someone else even a short-and-sour taste of life before they met oblivion.

#4 & #5 I have less sympathy for. We’re moving farther and farther outside of the question of ‘a life barely worth living’ and close to “It’s not fair!” ala The Labyrinth. It’s easy for me to sit here with my lack of a uterus and relatively low chance of being raped, let alone impregnated, and say, “well ideally…” – and maybe that’s a hint as to why abortion rolls further towards being a ‘women’s issue’ rather than a ‘human issue,’ but still. If you have to choose between college and a baby, between prosperity and a baby, between peace of mind and a baby… it hurts to think that someone would be selfish enough to choose murder to make their lives easier, and it scares me, because it makes me wonder how far they’d be willing to take that.

I think that’s all I have to say on the subject at the moment – that kind of sums up where I’ve found myself after a few years of contemplation. I’ll definitely take another post to delve deeper into mortality, and survival, because that feeds into this. There is of course one other rather obvious omission from all this – the issue of legality. I’m still not sure how I feel about that, which means in the meantime, I’d rather it was legal, so that other people can sort it out for themselves. I’m not ruling out a future point at which I might reach the conclusion that abortion should be illegal in certain situations – I certainly don’t think that’s impossible, or even unreasonable. I think that there must be such a thing as a ‘frivolous abortion,’ though I don’t want to consider outlier data until I’ve dealt with the more common reasons behind it.

tl;dr: murder is wrong, abortion is murder, therefore abortion is wrong.

Date: March 10th, 2011
Cate: matt's life, observations + conclusions + beliefs, society + culture, technology + design, things to think about

stuff to talk about

So… what, I only ever post to the mortality blog when I have a particularly interesting dream, or when someone dies? Is that really worth paying for a domain name?

The mortality blog is meant to record things that might otherwise disappear when I die, let’s be frank. I’m not sure where it all fits, how to get it all out, but it seems important that it be accessible, somewhere, in case someone finds it interesting. In my own totally biased opinion, I’m an intriguing and complicated person. But how much of that matters to anyone who isn’t Matt Lohkamp?

Some of the stuff that might otherwise end up here probably shows up on Facebook. Which is cool, because it almost serves a different purpose – Facebook posts reach a very specific audience of friends and family and coworkers and classmates, who are generally people I feel I can relate to well-enough to discuss sensitive issues. Whereas the mortality blog is public. I mean, no one reads it, but they could if they wanted to – is that significant, that anyone could read my blog but no one does, while only a couple hundred people can read stuff I post on facebook, and a couple dozen actually do?

Well maybe I’ll roll a bunch of topic ideation into the end of this blog post along with a well-intentioned but completely unrealistic resolution to write here more often.

We could talk about money: how much money I make, how much I should be making, the way I decide how much to charge clients, etc. We could also talk about how the practice of tipping makes me uncomfortable.
We could talk about procrastination, a favorite subject, and why I spend my downtime wishing I had something more important to do, only to find myself getting distracted by the most insignificant things when I actually have something more important I should be focusing on.
We could talk about sexuality, because I can’t help having that running through my head every other day of the week.
We could talk about my extremely preliminary attempts to wade into… I don’t know, feminism, privilege, rape culture, whatever all that stuff is; and why I’m even interested in it.
… or on a broader subject, we could look at how I look at things – my approach to new subjects, to sorting out how I feel about things, how I measure the extent to which other people’s feelings figure into my own opinions, etc.
We could talk about life and death, since I’m scared to death of my own mortality (and everyone else’s) and yet can’t seem to help thinking about it sometimes. We could talk about abortion and the death penalty, if we wanted to talk about controversial stuff.
We could talk about video games and computer games, because I have all kinds of experience with that stuff.
We could talk about music. I like lots of different kinds of music – I mean, mostly a few kinds, but the exceptions to the rules are heinous exceptions, and I do take perverse delight in appreciating art that other people ridicule or revile.
Maybe I could do some thinking about the relationship between morality and legality – are they mutually exclusive? Are there issues that are primarily the domain of one or the other? Regardless of how I feel about abortion, gay marriage, and monopolies, should there be laws that address them, either to protect or prohibit?
The extreme degree of disconnect I feel with our government. How is the office of the president of the united states important if nothing he does directly effects me? Same question, senators and governors and mayors. After all the effort of ‘doing the right thing’ and educating myself and voting, does milk cost any less? Does gas? Can I roll through a stop sign with impunity when it’s clear no one is coming? Does anything that our elected officials do actually impact my life? That might be a good thing to write about, yes.
My interest in places like 4chan? I mean yes, perverse appreciate for ridiculed and reviled art, disdain for taboo. Maybe those things would be good to think about.

… that’s some stuff. Oh, and maybe,

why I still haven’t upgraded this blog’s wordpress engine to 3.1, and how funny it is that I call myself a web developer who is good with wordpress.

well I feel better. Maybe sometime in a couple months I’ll actually make another post. I wouldn’t hold my breath (because I’d likely asphyxiate, though I’m pretty good at holding my breath for a long time.)

Date: July 1st, 2010
Cate: matt's life, things to think about

keeping up

I say I’m trying to stop wasting time on the internet, by which I mean wandering Wikipedia, or ED, or TVTropes, or 4chan, or CollegeHumor, or any of those sites that I could easily spend an indefinite amount of time perusing. I say I’m trying to find something more worthwhile to occupy my time – that if I’m going to be an insomniac, or whatever, I’m at least going to use those waking hours to better myself.

Well, Wikipedia and TVTropes probably alright fit that requirement, but not the others. And I still spend time on them, though I have been reading more lately, and it feels good. It feels like the old days, when I would read an installment of Redwall or Pern cover-to-cover, curled up on the carpet, surrounded by my quilt, propping myself up on pillow, enduring decidedly uncomfortable postures in the interest of continuing the story. It occurs to me that perhaps associating hard surfaces on which to recline with intellectual (and perhaps a bit devious, given the early hour of my supposed bedtime) pleasure lead me to my professed prefresence for harder bedding now, in my 20′s. Other people preach the virtue of the box spring, the space-age memory foam pillow top mattress, they search for their ‘sleep number.’ I flop down on my futon, not to firm and not too squishy, settling into the canyon that my body has gradually pressed into the material, slightly form-fitting as I roll back and forth, starting out on my chest, then my side, then my other side, then my back – but usually waking on my back or chest, rarely on my side. I seem to settle on one or the other sometime during the night.

And making music just doesn’t see the same as it used to be. It’s refreshing to sit down at my new piano and play with chords, but I can sense that a lot of the practiced agility of my teenage years has fled – I just don’t think that way anymore. I could learn to again, no doubt, but it’s not an undertaken I’ve seen fit to pursue yet. I’ve considered it. I wonder whether acquiring long forgotten copies of elementary learning materials, for casual perusal, might help me ramp back up to where I was in highschool – looking eagerly over a piece of sheet music, subconsciously testing the fingerings against my palm, pretending to already catch a glimpse of the melody, when in fact that level of sheet-music reading was beyond me. I remember my fingers flipping over eachother like gymnasts, showing off in front of a crowd of peers and elders, seated beside a similarly talented performer, each of us playing our part, barely paying attention to the way the music must sound, totally focused on getting it right. Was that naive? Was it rote repetition, disciplined conversion of the body’s natural instinctive movement into measured machinery, clicking finger after finger as the notes flew up and down the staff, and behind my eyes, where I’d half memorized it already? Was it the thrill of the performance? Will I ever occupy that same space? Would I like to?

Music I miss in a kind of abstract way – I remember my joy in it, but there is no music-shaped-hole in my soul, so to speak. More and more, though, I feel flickers of literary ideas, small sparks dancing in my peripheral vision, characters, plotlines, nebbishes, attributes and elements. Magic blurs with programming, memory with fantasy, and I wonder (as if it matters) what would a story say about me? Is it all about me? I wonder whether authors who are successful breath life into their characters because they care about them – because to them, they are all real, the plot is a real problem, the consequences are something to be concerned about. I don’t think I make that connection with the protagonists I’ve thus-far devised, all my past efforts have been something more akin to flights of fancy, the pleasure of imagining ‘if it were like this, I would choose that,’ perhaps hoping to instruct everyone who reads it; ‘this is who I am.’

There are so many moths in my bedroom (abrupt changes of subject are attractive sometimes) and I wonder where they all come from – is there a thriving moth colony beneath the back deck, which sends these mostly sedentary members out as scouts, or settlers, or perhaps pariahs, banished from the land of the moths into the perpetual twilight of my bedroom, startled by the occasional bright lights, hiding for hours behind shelves before dive-bombing my glowing monitors when they are the room’s only light source? (was that really all one sentence?) They migrate in waves, and their presence creates a hidden-picture-like situation – earlier, I caught all three gathered around the exhaust fan on my computer tower, perhaps staring into the flickering blue LEDs. I tried to nab them with a clear glass and a stiff paper envelope, but they escaped, scattering – and now as I glance around, I see one by one lamp, another by another, and a third dissimilarly positioned low down on the outside wall, apparently uninterested in maintaining proximity to the electric lights. Now that I’ve marked their locations, I think I’ll take a quick break to relocate them, releasing them (as has been my habit with spiders as well) into the near-outdoors-ness of the attached garage. BRB.

Aside from a few tiny little fruit fly type things, or maybe an immature mosquito, I think that leaves me with my room insect-free – I need to be more careful about putting up the screen on the window when it’s nice and summery. Still, it makes me think, in the vein of life imitating art, that there’s a certain as-yet-unnamed character in a certain as-yet-unwritten story of mine that shares his life with insects in a bit of metaphor that I’ve yet to puzzle out. The bug bite boy, with spiders in his room, always finding a new little itchy bump or two somewhere on his skin, inflamed and un-poppable, unlike the occasion zit his adolescence has brought him. And yet despite the continued campaign of annoyance he’s suffered at the hands of the insects, he hasn’t developed a phobia, or a vendetta, or anything – he wonders at it. Why is he bitten? Am I that boy? I’ve been stung and bitten many times, sometimes covered in mosquito bites, sometimes the victm of a single terrible insect encounter – pre-pubescent summer camp memories include sitting on a bee-infested log and getting stung in the butt, while later as a teenager my scrotum somehow became the target of the big jaws of a large black ant – I screamed, my breath coming in gasps, panicked despite the lack of danger or even real pain, but scared at such a small unstoppable intruder’s unexpected appearance in such a delicate and private place – I hurriedly flicked it off, but this only detached its body, leaving its head stuck to my skin. Nightmarish. There are always spiders, Daddy Long Legs or beefier varieties with more impressive mandibles, working cobwebs into the corners of my bedroom. Did this insect omnipresence beget the bug bite boy?

Unlike a particular childhood friend, I’ve never been particularly bothered by spiders, or bugs in general – I only ask that they stay away from me. I don’t want them walking on me if I (or they) can help it, and I don’t want them in my way, partially, I have to admit, because I don’t want to inadvertently kill them. Is it hypocritical to use an empty glass to catch-and-release moths and mosquitohawks and at the same time continue to chow down on red meat? Empathy for bugs, but not for cows? It’s interesting to contemplate for a moment, but doesn’t really bother me. Maybe I’m too at peace with the way I am, but a little paradox is alright if it keeps me comfortable.

Mortality Blogexpiration date: 8.7.2086

Archive for category things to think about