Posts Tagged beliefs

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: 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.

  1. “But what if it’s killing the mother?”
  2. “But what if it’s a rape baby?”
  3. “But what if it’d be kinder to put it out of its misery?”
  4. “But what if it has little prospect for any kind of meaningful life?”
  5. “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 22nd, 2009
Cate: matt's life, society + culture, things to think about

Masculinity FAIL

Okay, so the whole point of the Mortality Blog is that I have less then 80 years to live, and I think there’s a few things that I’ve run up against in my life that might be good for other people to see my thoughts on.

That said – how do I put this? I experienced an intriguing conflict of interests today. It’s a pretty stellar example of something that I’ve really only had the privilege of being exposed to a few times – a girl more or less explicitly asking me to sleep with her. In this case, it was someone attractive, someone smart and funny and cute and all that, but a girl nonetheless – and despite being comfortable in my relative lack of interest in that sort of thing, I realized that I felt bad, in a ‘I’m letting someone down’ sort of ‘not meeting expectations’ sort of way. Which is total bullshit – how many times have I protested that responsibility can only be accepted, not assigned, and that I feel that I’m under no circumstances obligated to follow cultural conventions regarding romance?

And yet – not saying, “Yes!” felt bad. In my head, I know that it wouldn’t have gone well – it would’ve just been disappointing to both of us. And yet there’s this sort of distinctly masculine cultural responsibility that I found myself aware of, where a guy is supposed to sleep with a girl especially if she really wants it. And I was failing at that duty.

It’s times like this that make some of my gay friend’s humorous accusations that I’m a straight man with a penis fetish seem just a little bit accurate – there are plenty of girls with whom I would gladly flirt if only there wasn’t this more or less inescapable reality of a vagina laying in wait. It seemed like a lot to explain to this particular girl, considering my general reluctance to bring this sort of thing up due to my cultural obligation aversion, but it was striking – how many times do I actually have reason to momentarily regret my sexual tastes? Not very often.

Anyway, it seemed interesting, and like I said, if anyone feels like taking a peek into my head, this is the sort of stuff that tumbles around like a wet load of clothes in a dryer.