ADDENDUM TO "THE PROBLEM WITH SCIENCE"

I suppose one of things I've realized, having reread what I wrote about that, is that science is merely one way of looking at the world, and it most certainly isn't the only way. Another way of looking at and understanding the world is experiential, and the purpose of that article isn't to claim that science is "wrong" or "useless", but more that it's insufficient because it has bootstrap problems that it's unable to deal with. These problems are built into the foundation of what science is. Looking at something scientifically is a useful way of looking at something, but it isn't the only or singular way of doing so. I just wanted to make clear that I'm not advocating eliminating science as a method of understanding; I'm merely making clear that the models and methods that science comes up with need to be looked at with the idea that we are merely seeing through structures, and science cannot provide an entire picture of anything, especially in psychology, where models for the how the mind or brain works doesn't really say anything about what is actually happening, but are merely a framework to help understand what is happening.

RIPPED JEANS SELL NOSTALGIA

Everyone remembers the fad, back in the day, of selling jeans pre-ripped, with holes and wrinkles and fake-looking fades in the front. I never really understand where that fad came from. Part of me believed (and still does, to a point) that the fad was just another creation of the fashion industry required to consistently create new products in order to maintain profit margins, to cause people to believe that they need to buy what's "new" so that they can throw out what's "old" (which is probably only a year old). This is called perceived obsolescence. However, I think there might be another layer to what was going on with that fad.

Whenever you buy a new anything, the object is merely that to you: an object. It has no value to you beyond what you paid for it. When you buy a computer, it's just a computer. It has no files, no programs, no background, nothing to show anyone that this belongs to a particular person. As you use an object, you imprint yourself on it, and the object becomes "yours." You imprint your particular trademark. Your clothes fit your better, they go through things with you, and you now have an emotional attachment to that particular object. There may be a stain from a particularly lovely evening. You might save poems or songs on your computer.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the appeal of pre-ripped jeans. Unfortunately for the companies, the rips themselves never offer any particular emotional attachment. You don't remember a particular experience associated with ripping the jeans. However, getting them pre-ripped gives you the feeling (I guess) that these are old, these are "yours." Instead of having to actually go through the experience that causes the jeans to rip, you are merely given them with the experience already tied to it, the idea being that the company can now sell emotional attachment right off the bat.

They're selling nostalgia. They're selling the object "pre-mine", not as in "before mine", but as in "already mine", like "pre-shrunk." I don't know if this has any merit. I think, personally, that buying pre-ripped jeans is a circumvention of having to actually have the experience and spend the time wearing them to get them to look that way. In a society where 99% percent of the shit that's sold is thrown out in 6 months, there's an incredible desire to get things NOW, instead of waiting for them to happen. People don't want to have to break in a pair of jeans; they want the jeans to fit them, to have the nostalgia associated with them right now.

It's unfortunate that they got away with this. The fad has since passed (I presume; I haven't seen much of them in a while), but the concept of selling things for now hasn't. People still want things and experiences without having to work for them, and as long as that desire exists, companies will cater to it. So for now, the ripped-jean fad has passed, but the concept that supported it hasn't, and iterations of the same concept will continue until we get out of our short-term mindset.

THE ILLOGIC OF HEALTH INSURANCE

As the election season continues to roll along its merry way (if you can call it merry...), I've noticed that both democratic candidates are proposing pseudo-socialized health care reforms. The basics of these plans tend to settle on the idea that if everyone had health insurance, they would be able to pay their health costs, and we would be able to help the poor and less fortunate. Their plans are "95% similar", and they argue about silly nonsense like whether we should include a mandate that everyone have health insurance. But what of the idea the health insurance for everyone will make people better off? Anyone who has health insurance can tell you, insurance companies SUCK. So why are they advocating health insurance? Because given the current situation in our health care system, giving everyone health insurance is an easier way to make sure everyone at least has some kind of access to treatment without completely revamping the entire system. However, the premise of health insurance, at least to me, doesn't make much sense to begin with.

Think about this: the basics concept of how business works is that it is in both parties' (the producer/company and the consumer) interest to complete the transaction. The company wants your money. You want the company's product. Pretty simple, huh? It's the foundation of capitalism. However, in health insurance, the incentives for the insurance company have been perverted. In this case, you give your money to a company who's BEST INTEREST is to NOT give you the coverage that you're paying for and need. They do this by classifying treatments as experimental, or looking for omissions on your insurance application, anything to deny you coverage. Basically, they do whatever it takes to make sure that you don't get what you need to survive. The incentives in the health care system is no longer to provide quality health care, but to make as much money for as few people as possible. Wonderful.

I raised this concern to my professor the other day, and she told me this: "Health insurance isn't entirely illogical. The concept of health insurance is this: everyone pays monthly to a company, and the company takes on the distributed risk that if anyone of the customers get sick, they have a pool of money, so to speak, to draw on to pay for it, and the customers pay this company to manage this pool of money."

I seized on the term distributed risk. Setting aside the inherent inefficiencies of government (especially ours), doesn't this sound EXACTLY like something the government should be doing for all its citizens? We all put our money into a pool (through taxes), and the government takes money from this pool to give to its citizens to pay for their health care. The risk that one citizen will get sick is distributed to everyone, so that one person doesn't have to carry the burden. At least with this system, because the system is run by a government that is supposed to work in the interest of its citizens, it will for their interest. In a system where the citizens actually paid attention to what their government is actually doing, the citizens would make sure the government manages the system fairly and efficiently.

There is also evidence to show that countries with socialized health care spend more time and money on preventative medicine (you know, to make sure you don't get sick to begin with; saves the country a lot of money). Does anyone remember learning about nutrition in health class in high school? I don't. We learned about the food pyramid, I think (and does anyone know how fucked that thing is? I'm still flabbergasted they managed to sell that to the American public. It's a nutrition system designed by people who have an interest in selling you more wheat! That's why the Atkins diet works well. Grain isn't healthy for you!), but really, we're never taught how to take care of ourselves. I think if we were to stop and think about what a health care system would look like without having to deal with legacy systems and political power, it most certainly wouldn't look like this. I also don't think continuing with the basic foundations of the health care system and merely laying "universal health insurance" over top of it is going to solve the problem. Health care is not one of those things people take advantage of (i.e. fleece for their own benefit without actually needing it), and I do believe a system could be designed without some of the conceptual flaws of a socialized system. It's just a matter of getting the powers-that-be to realize they're trading the welfare of this country for their own personal wealth. I hope if we lay a theoretical foundation for socialized health care, we can realize that it's merely a matter of designing a system that actually works to make people healthier, because clearly our current system does not.

HOW TO WIN AN ARGUMENT
or Can we defend values?

Note: This writing comes off very pedantic, like I'm standing on high and telling you "this is how you should do things." I am aware of that, and I don't mean for it to come off as such, but I'm still trying to "find my voice," so to speak, so this is how I'm writing now. I'm sure at some point in the future I will revisit this topic, and it will be written better than it currently is. The idea is there, I'm saying what I want to say, just not how I want to say it. My apologies. - Nimh

Whenever you start an argument about something, listen very carefully to the way the individual constructs their argument, or in life generally, listen to what they're saying. When people say anything, hidden under the surface of what they're saying are going to be several underlying assumptions. An argument is constructed overlying several assumptions that are implicit in the statement, and the key to breaking down an argument (or understand what someone is ACTUALLY saying) is to understand what their assumptions are, and then decide for yourself whether those assumptions are valid or not. For example, regarding homosexuality:

Homosexuality is wrong because it is unnatural.

There are several assumptions implicit in this statement. First, that homosexuality is unnatural. A first step of response may be to argue about what defines "natural." You could point that homosexuality occurs in nature, and that animals engage in it all the time. There was an article I read recently about penguins at a zoo being engaged in a homosexual relationship. Second, that if it is natural, it is right. We could then ask if they would throw out all the technology they have because it is unnatural, assuming we'd define "natural" to mean something that would exclude technology and homosexuality. Lastly, you could then ask if it making it wrong means you shouldn't do it (although that assumption isn't implicit in the statement). You might be able to conjure up a few scenarios where no one gets hurt by doing what both of you agree is "wrong."

I want to go back to the second assumption (if it is natural, it is right, and vice versa). This is the underlying value in the statement. The first assumption is merely the result of a definition. It's rather objective, once you've defined your terms. However, once you move past that, you move into the rather shaky area of arguing values. How does one defend or attack values?

Well, if you're God-fearing, or your opponent is God-fearing, the argument is over. My belief is that there is no "all-seeing eye" that dictates its values to us and tells us how to live. People who believe that or claim that are misguided, in my humble opinion, and by doing so, they aren't taking the time to sit and decide for themselves what is really important. The only thing I believe we can claim is that the universe values all things equally. This idea is rather Buddhist in nature, but I'm not a Buddhist, nor do I really know that much about it. This is from my own experience. But where do you build a moral basis from that?

Philosophical (or really, any) arguments seems to bottom out at some difference of an underlying assumption. For example, I had an argument regarding sex and abortion, and our argument bottomed out, conceptually, how much personal responsibility a person should take for something occurring that has a very low percentage of happening, or how far into the future someone should be responsible for their decisions? Any decision to do anything has to be built up some from underlying assumptions, and lays the foundation for your entire life philosophy. So if we assume that the universe has no values, where do we begin? To truly begin, you need to identify your underlying assumptions of "how the world works", and set them aside. They may be useful later, but to start off, you need to eliminate them so you can look at them from an outside perspective, scrutinizing them, and truly deciding for yourself which are important and why.

But before that, how do we build a method for dealing with morality? We have to start somewhere, and build up. This is the problem I came upon and stumbled over several times before deciding what suits me. To give an example of what I mean by building a morality, I'll explain the thought process that went through my head as I tried to build my own.

When I began, I had a few things that I believed that I needed to be consistent. I believe, for example, that our fundamental relationship with the natural world is failing/flawed. So the next step was to figure out why. What is going on in our morality that would make what we're doing to the environment wrong?

I started with the idea that we're exploiting the natural world for our own benefit without benefiting the natural world at the same time. Whenever anything in the natural world works within its environment, it achieves a natural equilibrium with the surrounding habitat. (Yes, this sounds like The Matrix. Agent Smith is the man. Deal with it.) The species as a whole does its part to maintain itself, and the environment naturally corrects when things get out of balance. We've reached a point where we've so exploited the natural world that the natural world cannot self-correct. We are taking without giving back to the world around us. It was this realization that began to form the basis for my morality: anything that happens has to be mutually beneficial for those involved.

Obviously, anyone else can look at the natural world and pull a completely different morality from it. I feel comfortable with this idea because almost merely because I feel its a valid deduction, given what I see about our relationship to nature. However, that is the underlying assumption I use to try and build my morality.

By deciding on one underlying assumption upon which to build a morality, I hope to make what I feel is moral internally consistent, so I'm not unfairly applying different ideas to different situations, but ultimately, underlying all of it, I have to look at what is beneficial for those involved, and that's what I would like to choose as "right." What is "right" is really only relevant to the underlying assumptions of your world, your reality.

Most arguments will bottom out at certain assumptions, like my other assumption that people are responsible long-term for the results of their actions. The only way to really undermine these assumptions is to draw out their implications through analogy or "reductio ad absurdum." Or maybe try and get at other ideas and thoughts that they have, and point out internal contradictions. These are all rather weak techniques unfortunately, and if the person you're arguing with has pondered his or her set of ideas, you may find yourself hitting a brick wall. However, the initial idea of breaking down what assumptions they're working with and deciding if they make sense is the best way to proceed when making an argument.

(As an aside, as you're trying to break down an argument to its fundamental assumptions, give away as little of your own position and assumptions as possible. The less your opponent has to work with, the better position you are in. You can also seek to redefine the debate so that you're working with material that suits your argument. These are both useful debate tactics. However, the purpose of this was to ponder what underlying assumptions are useful or "true", in some sense of the word, and to talk about how I built my morality.)

THE PROBLEM WITH SCIENCE

This is something that has been bouncing around my head for a while now. As a person who's grown more spiritually, I feel that using science as the sole basis for one's knowledge seems narrow, and I've been trying to put my finger on exactly what it is that science lacks, so I am going to attempt to do that here. But first, I have to introduce some terms.

We generally interact with our world through mental structures or constructs. How we identify and interact with people, places, things, and ideas are through amorphous concepts of what the thing is. For example, I'm sitting here drinking a cup of milk from a cup. The only way I know what I'm actually interacting with is through the idea of what a cup actually is and what it is supposed to do. I know the cup is supposed to hold a liquid so that I may consume it. The cup is green and round. It is a plastic. It is a product of society.

Unfortunately, by adding all these "tags" to the cup (it's use, it's shape, it's color), it prevents me from actually interacting with the cup as it actually is. I'm not actually interacting, in my mind, with the cup itself, only with the idea of the cup. I am interacting with the mental construct of what the cup is and means to me.

Science has taken this "interacting with structures" idea and turned it into an art form. Science doesn't study things. It studies ideas of things. Again, for example, let's say I was a scientist studying frogs in the amazon. I would study that frog and I would learn all sorts of information about the frog: mating habits, diet, predators, etc. I could tell you its taxonomy (scientific classification system). However, I never actually get at the heart of what the frog is. I'm not studying the frog; I'm studying the idea of the frog. The very fact that science has developed a classification system for every living thing, then works as if this classification system is somehow naturally arising or the best way to work is evidence of what I mean.

If I want to know more about a person, I would interact with him or her as they actually are, setting aside what I think I know about that person, about men or women, about people, or about living things at all. Once you start interacting with that person as something other than what it actually is, you've created for yourself a block, a barrier, a structure that you now have to work through to interact with that person, and you now no longer interacting with them as they actually are; you are interacting with what you think they are.

The scientist isn't dealing with the frog as it is. It is dealing with the frog as a species in the subset of the genus of... This is not to say this isn't a useful construct with which to deal with the world. Our minds aren't entirely capable of dealing with everything on an individual level, but if we are to say our entire basis of knowledge about things is through the self-created structures, then we are interacting with nothing but ideas. We never interact with the substance itself that actually exists!

Science cannot deal with substance. It is not structured to deal with substance. It can only deal with ideas of substance, and that can be useful for navigating certain things. It helps break things down into smaller, more manageable parts, but the first thing you have to understand as you break them down is that the way you choose to break them down is entirely a structure and a product of your own way of thinking, NOT a naturally arising way to look at things. Science could have chosen to organize its taxonomy completely different, and our understanding of the world would have come out to be radically different.

Deciding that we could understand the world solely through breaking it down into its component parts is like believing we could understand a person by breaking down and studying each of his or her organs, and breaking down their personality into component parts, and breaking down their experiences into component parts, and categorizing all these things. Think about it: you would gain an understanding of the idea of what that person is, but you would never truly KNOW or UNDERSTAND that person until you've interacted with them, and worked with them on their level.

I think that's what I've been trying to put my finger on. I was questioning our "understanding" of evolution once, and I was told "Understanding of the components of a system give rise to understanding of the system as a whole". I don't believe that's necessarily true, and I think it takes interaction with a system as a whole, on it's own terms, to truly understand it.

P.S. I am not a creationist. I just think our current understanding of how evolution actually occurred (if it occurred as it did) is oversimplified, given the magnitude of what actually transpired.

ADDENDUM: There is another thing I wanted to quickly touch upon as well, regarding science. Science rests upon the idea that there are subjects and objects that can be separated from one another. It is based on the idea that you can study something without involved yourself in the existence of the thing your studying. This is a false dualism. There can be no object without a subject. There is nothing to study if there is no person studying it. Certain larger things, the idea that you can remove the subject is more plausible, and more useful, but when it comes to studying behavior of anything (which a large portion of science is), the only way we can interact with the behavior of something is through the way we see things. This ties into what I said earlier about interacting through structures. The structures that exist only exist in the minds of the subject doing the observing. The object does not exist the same way to everyone, and the only way the object can be observed is through the mind of the subject. The object and the subject are one, and the idea that you can separate the subject from the object is false.

THE BEGINNING

Today, I bought a pocket notebook. I've found, lately, that I see a few thoughts that I tend to churn over and over in my mind, and I thought it might be helpful for my mental health to write some of these down. I've been jotting down, in short quips, some of the things that my mind seems to find interesting. At the end (or the middle, as the case may be) of the day, I will sit down and write about one of the ideas.

The experience is meant to meditative in essence. I hoping to help clear my mind of the thoughts that distract me from enjoying the moment I am currently existing in. I haven't been keeping up with the seated meditation, and I can feel the difference in the way I think. I've felt very scatter-brained lately, and the hope is that by getting the thoughts out of my mind and onto paper, and later typed up, they will bother my mind less and I can enjoy my present time more.

I hope I can stick with this idea. There are quite a few things I've said I wanted to do and never did. I've stuck with (generally) meditation and evening workout, although both have suffered since I got to Italy. I do need to make an active effort to keep all the ideas I have in constant rotation.

Why do good ideas fade? Do we just lose energy? Motivation? Desire? Do we just forget? I meant to do quite a few things this afternoon, and I just completely lost track of time, and almost got to class quite late. Settling in has just been a mess, but it's getting back into being a fun mess. I hope this goes well.