What is Love?

I got to watch the last half of Interstellar again the other day, and this time what stuck with me was the film's conception of love.

One thing that Scientists do better than almost anyone else is assume that they are qualified in realms that they are not. That sounds harsh but think about it: A scientist is bound to an empirical method and most of them don't bother to do much more than dabble in philosophical pursuits, the same way that most philosophers never do much serious study of the natural sciences. A philosopher, however, is never going to assume he's a qualified physicist, but the reverse is quite false. 

So we need to approach their presentation of love with some degree of skepticism. That said, their discussion is rather scientific. Why do we love? How did our capacity for love evolve? What selective advantage does love provide? 

Mathew Mcconaughey starts off the conversation saying it provides "social utility," preserves bonds and such, but is forced to concede that there is no social utility in loving people who have died. 

The conversation picks up again when Matt Damon's character says that our children are the last thing we see before we die. Why? Because that gives us a reason to stay alive. Up until this point, love is accepted to be more or less a sensible phenomenon in terms of natural selection. It provides incentives to stay alive and helps preserve a strong social structure. 

At this point it's only fair to object that science has overstepped its bounds. It's describing a feeling any mammal can have and equating that feeling with what a father feels for his lost children or a lover for her dead partner. 

But this is where Interstellar comes through: it acknowledges that love is altogether excessive, overstepping the bounds of any rational species bent on its own survival. 

What does it conclude? In as many words Interstellar makes the case that love is an artifact from a higher dimension. There is no explaining the existence of love as it is, and here I think we see a guess ventured by the screenwriters, many of whom were accomplished scientists. If it sounds like the typical cop out that ____ is simply something we can't yet understand with science that's because it is. But Interstellar presents love alongside the discovery of the nature of gravitational singularities and space-time travel, using the context of the film to demonstrate their point as best they can. 

At the end of the movie, Mcconaughey's character asks his daughter how she knew he would come back. She tells him, "Because my daddy promised me." This isn't meant to be a sentimental moment so much as a fact. Love in their vision provides an irrational yet accurate communication of nature in a way our lower dimensional species cannot understand. Love is a tool as far as the writer is concerned, but it is the most powerful tool we have as humans, transcending our own nature and the laws of natural selection. 

I'll get back to Tolkien in another day or two, but Christopher Nolan's films are always a good break, and worth an excessive number of re-watches. 

One Ring to Rule Them All

So as you no doubt noticed, after much deliberation, I changed the title of my blog. It's more in keeping with the material I like to cover. Future updates may be pending.

In light of this update let's return to Tolkien.

For those of you new to his work, he has a trilogy about a ring. Also Gandalf is a wizard, Elrond and Galdriel are elves, Boromir, Faramir and Aragorn are men of the line of Numenor, and Frodo is a Hobbit.

So the most crucial question the book presents is this: why does no-one listed above take the ring?

Boromir is the easiest place to start. He only needed the chance and he would have taken it.

What would he have done with it? He would have defeated Sauron. That much is certain.

And then what? Destroying the ring destroys Sauron, but destroying Sauron doesn't destroy the ring. From this fact we deduce that the ring is greater than Sauron.

How? Sauron made it. He gave it its power right? Well, no, not really. He had to learn the craft of ring making, and each of the great rings bestow power on a person that is not their own. All the other rings were forged by someone other than their bearers and given as gifts. These gifts then gave great power to the bearers. Galadriel, for example, preserves the immortality and mystery of Lothlorien, as Elrond does Rivendell.

So the One Ring is a perversion in that it was not made as a gift. It was designed for its maker, to make its maker all powerful.

Here arises a great Tolkienesque theme: power ruins stuff. If you want the power, the power has power over you. If you give into the desire for power, the power rules you.

Sauron has no control; the ring is in control of him. it is his master. Frodo doesn't want the power and what does Gollum (river person, possessed by ring, not too important here) call Frodo? The master of the precious.

This fact is part of Tolkein's motif of weak heroes. Hobbits don't want power. Men do. Dwarves want wealth but lust for power and avarice invariably tie themselves together; the dwarves are no exception. Elves and Wizards are a plane above such base desires, unless you're name is Sauruman, in which case you get to show everyone that wisdom doesn't immunize you to temptation.

So do Gandalf, Aragorn, Faramir and Galadriel want the ring? Yes, all of them want it, but they recognize the power that the ring of power has over them, and it terrifies them. They do their best to avoid thinking how quickly they could end the evil in the East because they know it is just a whisper from the ring justifying them in taking control. They recognize what Boromir doesn't until it's almost too late. The evil in the book is not Sauron. The ring would far rather have a powerful wizard or elf-queen or Numenorian King as its plaything instead of a broken disembodied sorcerer. Sauron isn't the lord of the rings. Recall the line: "One ring to rule them all." The trilogy's title is about the ruling ring, not Sauron.

So it is foolish to risk losing the ring by sending it into Mordor, when the council has within it wise and powerful leaders capable of wielding the ring and restoring peace to the world. But the council in The Fellowship has no such leaders there. They have three types of people: those who know they cannot wield the ring, those who do not want the ring and know they must wield it, and those who think they can wield the ring. The decision they make hinges on this fact: it would be better for the ring to go to Sauron than it would be for Gandalf or Elrond to take it.

Last thought, what if the ring was given as a gift? It's offered to Galadriel, much as the ring she bears was given. She knows that if she doesn't take it, either the ring will be destroyed and her ring will lose its lord and its power and her kingdom will fade, or else the ring will empower a master opposed to her and she will be destroyed. She knows that of all living beings she above all others, even Elrond or Saruman or Gandalf after his return, has the best claim on the ring and the best chance of resisting its power.

But she doesn't take it.

If you made it to the end I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. I'm going to go start reading the Return of the King, and I'm sure something new will come up for tomorrow. Farewell, until our next meeting!

The more you know

It's amazing how much we think we know.

I was just thinking about the Malaysian Airline Plane that went missing some months ago now. It is such a strange idea to us that we can't find a crashed plane that CNN actually had people come in explaining the plausibility of Extraterrestrials and spontaneous black holes.

Seriously people? We couldn't even predict the winner of our own election. Many well educated people still don't believe we're primates, or that climate change exists, and I'm guessing over half the world thinks the planet is flat. This isn't to shame anyone or claim any superiority for knowing or not knowing something, it's just so say that everyone, myself obviously included, has huge knowledge gaps that will never be filled while we walk this planet.

The Malaysian Airlines story reminds me of Life of Pi. The verifiable facts of the story are that a ship went down and a teenage boy washed up on the coast of mexico around a year later. The ship had meerkat bones in it as well.

Pi also explained how every year zoo animals are lost and never found again. All this goes to show that there are so many things we will never learn even if we look, and far more that we will never think to look for, be they tigers smart enough to not want to be recaptured from a north-american wood or planes wrecked and sunk too quickly for radar to locate.

The sad part is we will never know how arrogant we sound talking about we think we know or what we ought to know until we actually know it, but until then, the least we can do is attribute the disappearance of a small airliner in the middle of the ocean to something other than a cosmic anomaly that in most circumstances would collapse the whole solar system along with the airplane.

We are beings that can't function well without some degree of certainty, but that doesn't mean our senses or our brains have earned that certainty. It's healthy to have some deep doubts about your world driven into your brain, whether you get those doubts there by re watching the Matrix, looking at an optical illusion, or taking a Quantum Mechanics class.

In the meantime may your brain keep seeing as pleasant a world as it can manage to see.

Catch 22

Do they train Special Forces in CPR?

Stupid question; of course they train special forces in CPR.

The Government spends a large amount of money training special forces to kill people, and they also train them in detail how to save someone's life when they are legally dead.

It's generally accepted that when you're dealing with war, the understanding of people has to change. This is why it's so important to have an absolute need for war.

Some people think these conditions can never be met, and even without having been traumatized by violence, I can see the sense in such a belief.

For this discussion, lets assume the conditions have been met. What changes?

Humans in war are no longer moral agents. They can and must be treated as means to an end.

But what about the spec operator who just shot five hostiles and dragged his buddy into the back of building? He's going to try to save his life.

Situations like that are why I don't feel comfortable with even a base treatment of utilitarianism in war. It seems necessary, but it feels impossible. That is not how humans are. You can think for a dozen lifetimes about the morality of a situation and forget it all the instant you're there.

I'll admit when I started this post with the question I had no idea how stuck I'd get in so little time. Fact is I rightly feel out of my depth. It's tempting to try and run a different angle with the post, but I think no matter where the discussion goes, if I'm being honest with myself, I get stuck.

War makes no sense.

2016 Election

I'm not about to get political, but it would be a missed opportunity to not write about the election at some point.

Don't think so? Yeah I don't really believe it's an important opportunity either. Sometimes a situation is so ridiculous it doesn't even count as comedic anymore.

That said, I read a comment that rubbed me wrong today:

"If this election hasn't made you deeply and profusely ashamed to be an American, you might be part of the problem that got us here."

For now let's forget that the quote has an author and tear the idea to shreds!

First off, 'profusely' should have been 'profoundly.' Second, too many adverbs.

More importantly, the quote is forgetting our nation. The primary system was designed without today's massive amounts of participation in mind, and thus we still see primaries held by caucus, closed primaries and the like.

It's easy to forget that we barely even have a 200 year history. The amount of progress we've seen in that time period is astronomical to most people with some sense of historical perspective. But we shouldn't be surprised that the process by which we elect our highest officials is slow to evolve. Quick and easy change is a formula for radicalization and disaster, two things to keep away from the process by which we choose the most powerful people in the modern world. It is not safe to have an easy means to reform the election process.

The primaries don't hold up to the pressures of modern voting, as is also the case for the electoral college. We the people are ready for a less restrained system, but the process of implementing that system is not easy. Should we be surprised by that? of course not. Should we be disappointed? Perhaps. Ashamed? No.

If you look at the election process we did not select these people as a nation, and given the system we are not altogether accountable for not selecting someone else. The above quote is trying to express frustration at the idea of having to vote for one of two terrible options. But it is irresponsible and uninformed. We were victims of a system that let them be elected with less than a tenth of the nation's approval, and that tenth only picked a candidate from a short list of options. That may not sound like a great system, and it is not, but a government forever stands at the brink of chaos and tyranny; an electoral system well behind the times is a small price to pay for staying steady on that balance.

Moreover, we have a government designed to limit the power of any fool that happens to be elected into office. That is the true genius of American politics we all seem to be forgetting. Trump or Clinton would in reality be very hard pressed to do even a quarter of the damage that even a half-hearted nay sayer would predict. Granted we've spent an unfortunate amount of tax dollars on over a years worth of campaigning, but that in itself constitutes only a small flaw in the system.

There are a million and one reforms that need to be implemented in the election process from limiting corporations' power in candidates policies to having open primaries to abolishing the electoral college, but the fact that such changes take decades to implement is no reason to be ashamed of America, let alone to be ashamed to be American.

We are human, and anything we build will be flawed, and more often than not all the way to the core. The fact that America still stands today on much the same ideals it was founded on is, as I've said before, amazing. The fact that two tyrannical narcissistic prigs will have no chance at destroying it, no matter how big the media makes them look, is amazing.

Here's the fun bit:

Profusely ashamed to be American? the nerve! Part of the problem that got us here? I sure am! I'm American. I'll be profusely ashamed to be American when we make Eugenics a national program. I'll be profusely ashamed to be American when we're sending dissidents to Siberia. I'll be profusely ashamed to be American when I'm not allowed to say that I'm profusely ashamed to be American.

This election doesn't change the principles America stands for. Do we think the UK has a different set of core principles just because they have a new prime minister or because the queen makes a grumpy face? No! America is more than its leaders, in fact it will only have the person elected today in office for the next four years! The fact that someone could be ashamed of their whole national identity for the sake of those four years is embarrassing.

Let's wrap this up with some adjectives. Thinking that this election should make you regret being American is melodramatic, shameful, and shortsighted. It's buying into all the hype you're criticizing. It is sad, and I can only hope that tomorrow morning you can find American pride in your heart.

Also it'll be fun when this is over. Hope your candidate won! (unless I didn't vote for them ;)

Happy poll watching!

Your Future Sucks: a brief overview of everything

So today I got to attend a talk by one Dr. Mark Regenerus titled the Economics of dating. 

I don't imagine sociologists agree on much but I think they can agree that the environment for romantic relationships has changed drastically since the origin of effective contraception, and that the emphases in romantic relationships have changed as a result. 

The most telling point he made wasn't that marriage wasn't seen as inevitable and necessary anymore. That's obvious and rather uninteresting. It was that we don't see our long term romantic relationships as opportunities to improve ourselves through the suffering such a relationship will invariably cause. 

Today we see most forms of discomfort in a relationship as unnatural and unhealthy. If things aren't going smoothly it's quite possibly time to move on. Most people don't have such an extreme outlook, particularly towards the person we plan on settling down with, but I doubt any of us really have the traditional outlook towards long term commitment. 

That is to say that most of us are failing deep down to acknowledge the other person is a dysfunctional and broken human being just like we are. 

Up until recently marriage was something necessary for both parties to function. A man needed children and a woman needed a stable home. This is a bit of an over generalization, but  there was a consistent theme in all past marriages: you either ignored or looked past or suffered through or, when possible, confronted eachother's shortcomings, simply because you had to. 

Today we don't have to. Whether that's progress or regress is your decision to make, but whatever the case is, it never helps in the long run to forget how human you and the person you love are. 

It's also worth noting that the foundations for all of these thought processes come from a 50-something decades married sociology professor, not from the not-quite-even-adult who's writing the post. I have justification for sounding far more qualified than I am in reality. 

So my key takeaway: marriage has always been about suffering and making it through. That hasn't changed today, it's just a hell of a lot easier to get out when things start looking like hell. 

And I never did discover why the talk was called "Economics of Dating."

A Crash Course in Diving Bells!

Someone tells you to dive down 50 feet underwater, grab a breath of air from a diving bell and then come back to the surface, exhaling constantly and never moving faster upwards than the bubbles leaving your body.

Sounds difficult right? It is, but it's not impossible.

In fact, with a few days of training its quite doable.

Diving 50 feet only takes a couple of seconds. Take one deep breath, exhale, take another deeper breath and then leap in. Open your eyes after the initial impact with the water and stay relaxed. Your face mask covers your nose so you haven't accidentally inhaled any water. The dive tank you're in has even lighting so you have no trouble seeing the bottom, or the fresh air pocket under the clear dome of the diving bell. You can see the air filtration system driving clean oxygen into the diving bell.

You've already started kicking, calm but powerful, and you're at the bottom before you know it. You may feel an onset of panic from the excess CO2 in your blood telling your body to breathe, and you might also forget yourself and glance upwards, and suddenly realize how narrow the tank is and how far underwater you are.

But even if you mess up and do this, you will still have enough presence of mind to get yourself under the diving bell; besides there's an instructor drifting beside the bell ready to grab you and guide you to the bell if your panic gets the better of you.

Once you're inside you take several deep breaths. You probably aren't even gasping for air, given how shallow the dive was. You're dry from the shoulders up, and before you can think how claustrophobic the bell is you catch the instructor's signal that it's time to go back up.

The bell is deep underwater, under a significant amount of pressure. In fact, the air in the bell is three times as dense as the air you filled your lungs with earlier. As you leave the bell you have over twice the amount of breathable air in your lungs as a the most fit endurance runner would have in his own while sprinting at sea level.

I didn't mention the mask at first, but I also neglected to mention the slender stainless steel pole running down the tank. You grab onto it now, and start letting out your breath steadily. dragging your body upwards along it you can keep pace with the bubbles you let out. This time when you reach the surface you are still exhaling rather than trying to drag air into your starving lungs.

The point of all this is that we love to make skill sets seem unattainable. This is often true for when we obtain a new skill and want to make our hard work appear even more rigorous, but more often, we make challenges insurmountable in our own mind.

This is basic psychology. All animals try to minimize effort just to survive, and there's nothing wrong with that, unless we want to try something new. Then our brain shoots a dozen reasons at us explaining why we shouldn't bother. This is true for everyone, not just the unmotivated.

When I described the challenge at first I didn't even include that you would get a face mask to cover your nose and let you see underwater, nor did I include that this was in a well staffed and climate controlled professional dive tank.

Between over reporting the difficulty of a task, failing to note the details that make the task feasible, and our tendency to make new endevours more difficult in our own mind, it is so easy to fall into the trap of doing nothing.

None of this means the task isn't challenging. It's just not challenging in the way it appears. Remember how you never moved upwards faster than your bubbles. Think about it. You have about three times as much air in your lungs as you could hold at the surface. If you swam straight up, your lungs would rupture. Of course your instructors would have explained all the risks in detail, demonstrating why you need to follow the procedure outlined above. Additionally, if you ever start moving upwards too fast they are trained to forcibly drag you back down into the bell to keep you from damaging yourself.

The point of trying something new isn't just to show that you can do it. It's so that you can learn, add new skills to your repertoire, and gain confidence.

Before you started you just saw one more challenge; someone out there could do but you would never be able to try. Now you know you can do it, you know how to do it, and you understand the real risks and benefits in a way you never would have otherwise.