Human Potential

Teenagers are famous for being acne ridden, rebellious, shallow, and angsty. These traits aren't particularly useful, but they do have a good reason to be angsty. Not only are their bodies going through weird changes, but their understanding of a non kid friendly world expands, and with that understanding comes some cold hard facts of reality.

However, possibly even bigger than that, their life potential is draining away faster than it ever did before. If you think about humans in terms of potential, the ones that have the most are undeveloped babies. Of course, they haven't realized any of it, but the possibilities are still open. Maybe they'll become a young Mozart, cranking out masterpieces before they reach puberty. Who knows? After all, they're still just a baby.

While the child grows up, the maximum realm of possibility contracts. Instead of being an endless sea of possibilities, the child trades some of those for a much smaller but a totally realized existence.  They no longer might be good at soccer, badminton, lacrosse, or tennis, but are simply good at a few or one or none of them.  There is nothing wrong with this process. It's all just part of growing up. The kids themselves don't have much agency over how things turn out, anyway. There is a tinge of guilt that better things could have been, but it's not really a big deal in the child's well being.

As children become teenagers, though, things change. The teen has much more agency in how they spend their time, and how they develop themselves. This creates opportunities but also responsibilities. If the teen has had high expectations on them in the past, then this increases the pressure to aim for the most optimal outcome, causing pain whenever it isn't achieved. And when things aren't going perfectly, it's easy for a teen to blame themselves.

Not only do the teens now have responsibility for their own fate, but adolescence is the period of one's life where possibilities slip away the fastest. Not doing well in science for a couple semesters means that they might never get into CalTech, which means they'll never become a renowned scholar in the field of robotic underwater basket weaving. If they neglect to try a sport that they later like, it turns out they will never have the chance to give it their all and join a college or professional team. For sports this pain can be especially sharp because there are pretty much no second chances to make it professionally.

To top it all off, teens lack any perspective on how much this shrunken possibility space really matters. While their possibilities are shrinking fast, they're not shrinking all the way down to bum-on-a-street-corner. Sure, a few select avenues will be closed off, but life is pretty long these days, and there is time for a few next chances.

In other words, in addition to all the other things teens have to be angsty about, such as parents, siblings, social issues, etc, they also have existential crises to deal with that are more or less legitimate concerns.

Yeah, I'm glad I'm not a teenager anymore.

Morality

Many people say that without fear of eternal damnation, there is no reason to be good to anyone. People would just go around stealing from each other, deceiving each other, and hurting each other. Atheists are considered about as trustworthy as rapists. After all, it's only human nature. If no one gets punished, why would anyone ever do the right thing?

If you look back at my axioms, I mention that I don't believe there are any supernatural powers or beings. It's a rather round about way of saying I don't believe in a god of any type. I didn't say "I don't believe in God" because I also don't believe I should be forced to assume that believing in a monotheistic God should be the default assumption.

At any rate, this puts me in the same level of trustworthiness as people who psychologically or physically abuse other people in order to forcibly smush their nasty bits into them.  Great.

However, I don't believe that fear of punishment is the only reason people Do the Right Thing. Human beings are social creatures, and caring for the group is a natural motivator. Of course there are exceptions, and it doesn't take many people doing wrong to wreck everything everyone else was working towards. Even so, I would bet most people would consider themselves trustworthy, even if they believe most other people are not.

On a personal level, not believing in some arbiter of good and evil makes me more likely to act justly, not less. If there's no all powerful entity around to clean up the mess, there's only people. And if I don't do my part to maintain our society, help my friends, or help my family, I'm leaving it to other people to pick up the slack. Leaving it up to other worldly beings abdicates my responsibility for the situation. I believe the true measure of honor is not what you do when people are watching, but what you do when no one is watching, when no one will blame you, and when you will never be caught. Doing the right thing out of fear is merely saving face, not true morality.

In my view, humanity is a tiny bit of the universe on a tiny speck of dust that could be destroyed at any time. It has no significance in the large scheme of things. But even if the rest of the universe doesn't care, that doesn't mean we shouldn't care. Our finite existence will one day come to an end. I believe we should make the best of it, and help each other fulfill ourselves as much as possible. Subscribing to basic morality the just the first step of doing that.

Being Wrong

One of the things about blogger is Google really wants you to track your blog views and aim to get more.  I guess to feed their hungry ad selling machine. My initial reaction to this was actually screwing me up a bit. I was becoming a bit more self conscious about random people reading it. After all, I'm going to be writing a bunch of stuff that's probably going to be wrong. That distracted me a bit from what I was trying to do.

Part of why I'm doing this is to refine my own thinking, and inevitably means being wrong. Thinking the wrong things, writing the wrong stuff. Realizing you're wrong is the first step in making yourself right. Being worried too much about other people laughing at your wrongness isn't helpful.

Hypothetical readers will also wonder why I don't just make the blog private, so no one will get to witness my wrongness. But I think that makes it too easy to cover up and run away from past mistakes. Not from other people noticing them, but from myself noticing them.

Idealism Meets Reality

Alright, so if it's so easy to get people to work together, why don't we all live in a perfect, harmonious society? Everyone knows that everyone is better off if the whole works together, but it's a lot better for a few is they make things a lot worse for others. A serf is going to have a hard time chasing his dreams of starting a medieval metal rock band when the local lord is forcing him to work day in and day out to farm the land or die in a war.

Also, the world puts limits on how much time a person has to pursue their own goals. Practicing sick shredding skills on a guitar is hard to do if you're accidentally starved to death. As any Adult will tell you, you need to work first and deal with your interests on the side. Nothing is more Adult than accepting that fate.

Thanks to advances in food production and industrialization, the basic needs of humans are now easily met. However, our political and economic institutions haven't caught up to that fact yet.

Small Dreams

Still, even if you subscribe to the idea that there are people who are naturally inclined to Do Things rather than laze about all day, you still have to wonder how anything gets done. After all, most things worth doing require more than one person. The pharaohs of Egypt didn't haul rocks into giant geometric shapes themselves, did they?

Maybe not[1], but people are really good at getting their goals to interleave in such a way that everyone can get a little of what they want. Basic econ tells us that as long as 2 people aren't identical, they can derive some benefit from trading.  Every new person is a potential asset. So even though the pharaoh's tomb doesn't really benefit anyone, it still got built. Great things were achieved despite the fact that the pharaoh was probably the only one who wanted it.


[1] I dunno, maybe they did! Were you there?

What's the Point, Then?

Going off of what I wrote previously about freedom choice, there are a lot of ways to feel about that. If everyone individually decides the purpose of things, how can there be a society? How do we prevent people from just believing the point of existence is to eat ice cream until you die of diabetes?

One response to that is it doesn't matter how anyone feels about that freedom, it is inescapable that it exists. Gravity pulls things do the ground. Is that fair? Is that good? In the end, it doesn't matter, we just have to deal with it. So too do we have to deal with our freedom.

Another way to look at it is to say that if humanity has come this far with those ground rules, those ground rules can't be so terrible after all. When human beings first developed thought, there were no concepts of good or evil, of society, of great works. Those first humans could have just gone on eating their boogers and sleeping all day. But somehow, thousands of years later, we know that didn't happen. (At least not forever.)

And maybe you, my hypothetical straw man reader, think other people, if given the choice, would spend all day eating ice cream. And maybe some would. But you wouldn't. Maybe for a couple days that might be fun, but eventually you'd get bored of that and move on to something else. And, as human beings, we almost universally respect and aspire to be people who Do Things. We might say that we wish we could just spend our days partying or sleeping or eating, but I bet there are enough people out there willing to go out there and realize their own purpose. After all, if not, how did we even get to modern society in the first place?

Nihilism

Boring

Looking at my axioms, it seems like they would naturally lead to a pretty boring outlook on life. Nothing ever changes, there are no higher powers, and there's no point to anything.  Ok, fine, if you put it that way, it does sound really boring.

However, I don't see it that way. First of all, if you have faith that the universal will spontaneously combust tomorrow or won't tear itself apart at any instant, that gives you some leeway to affect your own future.

Secondly, the lack of any external or unknown supernatural intervention means that you are free do things you believe you should do without having to worry about some unknowable force messing up your plans.

Lastly, if nothing has a set purpose, if you assign another purpose to an action or item, you are not "wrong", since there is nothing to contradict.

In other words, I believe people have the freedom to make of their existence what they see fit. I believe this is a miracle of human existence. The ability to ascribe, defy, and fulfill purpose in otherwise simple air vibrations (sound), inert objects (paintings and sculptures), physical manifestations (uh, things...happening..?), and even the fleeting abstract whims of the mind and be satisfied with that is an unappreciated gift to human beings.

Some may behold my axioms and despair, but I disagree with their nihilism. The very blank slate nature of our existence is the greatest freedom we could ask for.

Axioms

Axioms

From what I remember of geometry, an axiom is a fact that is asserted rather than proven. It serves as a basis from which the rest of the ideas are proven from. Math is often interesting because even though the number of axioms on which it is based is fairly small, the ramifications of those axioms are still not understood and are still being explored.

In the future, if some of these happen to be proven false, I'll have to revisit a lot of what I write later, but I'm pretty sure I'm not going to change my mind on these. (Famous last words...)

1. Natural laws are immutable and observable. That means they will never change and it is logically possible to test them.
2. There is no such thing as a supernatural entity or effect. Powers or beings that cannot be observed and tested cannot be presumed to exist.
3. Nothing has an intrinsic purpose.

A reader (in the case of this blog, a purely hypothetical reader) may note that this is a pretty short list, and some or all of those points are pretty boring. How could someone develop a theory of Theory of Life from that?

Well, like I said before, even a small number of axioms can have complex interactions. Since this is all about touchy feely philosophy, my interpretation of what these things mean is probably more important than the axioms themselves.

Also, I might later find out that I've painted myself into a corner, and everything I ever thought was a lie. While I might feel like a piece of worthless poo for a while, at least I'll learn that I was full of logical excrement.

Lightly Angsty

What is this?

You know the story, or maybe you were the story: at some point, in the dark depths of adolescence, a young nascent thinker ponders the deeper questions of the universe. Why they here? How does the world really work? What should they do? Who are they? Wrapped up in existential dread, they worry relentlessly about the future and what it means to be. Maybe they even write emphatic essays or diaries or blogs. They become the epitome of angst. Raw, soul crushing, depressing, pimply angst.

Then they graduate school, and end up busy with college or a job, and start thinking in more practical terms. How can I make money with my degree in underwater basket weaving? Should I move so I can get a better job? How did I get so fat?

They either get over all those difficult philosophical questions that troubled them in youth, or find good enough answers that let them move on.  The angst fades away. Being angsty is soooo pubescent.

Honestly, though, that half baked child philosopher deserves some credit.  Just because the answers they came up with are ill informed and naive doesn't make the questions they were asking any less relevant to the later self proclaimed adult. Of course, all the moody low burning pain of growing up is something no one wants to relive, giving a little thought to how a person views the world can give them valuable insight into who they really are and what they've become.

In short, the point of this blog is to recover some of my worry about what the universe truly is and my place in it that I felt in earlier, much crappier days. Just a little hint of angst to keep myself honest.