metonymy4u

In our litigious culture, the pragmatic solutions to problems are often overlooked or undervalued. Pragmatism asks us to understand how event B often follows and is correlated to event A. Factors that influence A will then often influence B without any extra muss or fuss. For example, abortions are often the natural consequence of unwanted pregnancies. Eliminate the latter and there will be no longer any need to for the supreme court to adjudicate the former. Arguments over marriage are often the consequence of ignorance of the fact that any group of people, regardless of age, gender, race, religion or ethnicity, can learn to create nurturing, healthy environments. Again, eliminate the ignorance and the supreme court becomes irrelevant. Actually, in all these matters they already are irrelevant, they just haven’t figured that out yet. Because no matter what habits of hatred, violence, greed, sloth, ignorance or gluttony they promulgate, people will survive and thrive. It cannot be that 9 stupid humans living their isolated lives in one puny city can so dominate an entire planet of sentient beings. Annoy and gadfly us how they will, they cannot govern us.

When Kant described his idea of the categorical imperative, I believe he was trying to make the world safer for both prudence and duty. The idea here is to understand that sometimes when we talk about morality we mean prudence and sometimes we mean something else more akin to “ought.” The goal is not to separate these two domains as part of essentially distinct spheres of reality, but to enrich human vocabulary by exploring a dialectic of speech. I believe Kant wanted to make us more pragmatic, and more compassionate. I cannot justify that perspective on his writings any more than I can justify my belief in cause and effect or stimulus and response. It’s just where I start from when I read his work. If you happen to start somewhere else and reach other conclusions, then that’s all that can be said about that, as well.

Many of the most entrenched problems of thought can be referred to this question: what is life? And how does it fit into a universe of non-life? How do bodies, composed of inanimate matter, suddenly wake up and think? One traditional solution has been to postulate a life force that is linked with our inanimate corporeal shell for a time, but which outlasts it. Plato explored this idea as it was handed down to him by the Pythagoreans of Classical Greece. We, however, can now look at it from another perspective. The perspective of modern physics. The 2nd law of thermodynamics says that the order of an isolated system never increases, but always decreases. This is the law of entropy, or randomness. The problem with this model, is that there are no isolated systems. All we can really talk about are systems that we are aware of. When we look at it this way, from a more global perspective, there are indeed systems in which order is increasing. In fact, this is the definition of life. Molecules that tend to replicate themselves with few variations from generation to generation (that strengthen order and weaken entropy) are the basis of the continuity of living cells. And we know that in some systems these molecules are preserved, at least for a time.

True, the “system” requires the input of energy to maintain order. But remember our assertion that there are no truly isolated systems. So, the point here is not to posit some non-material life force that sets the whole process in motion and call it God, but rather simply to observe that the universe contains such local systems within its more global system. What this means is that the universe is not wholly governed by the laws of entropy. Some regions of the universe exhibit an anti-entropy feature. Life is a feature of such systems, which are wholly and completely a part of the material world.

So it seems that life is a feature of non-life. The two are actually one and the same. While the distinction pragmatically does help solve certain problems like how to care for our young, survive predation or build homes and till the earth, it does not help us solve problems like the question of freedom and thought. These are problems that must be addressed by collapsing the traditional dialectic. And affirming that the universe is not in fact an in-animate place. Life then becomes less of an anomaly, less of a mystery, to be sure. And some may not like that. Probably, I would have been burned at the stake for suggesting it a mere 500 years ago. But that can make no difference to those of us who live in time. And entropy does seem to measure that, at least.

Recently I learned of a phenomenon called “bitcoins.” Bitcoins are a form of currency issued not by a bank or government, but by a computer program. Basically how it works is that in order to obtain bitcoins, the requesting agent (computer being operated by a person) has to solve a very complex numerical algorithm. Once the algorithm is solved, bitcoins are issued to the solving computer, which can then be stored and used as currency. Of course, like all currency, it’s only worth what people believe it is worth. That is, it can only be used as a medium of exchange if others will accept it as a medium of exchange. And as with all currencies, including “official” currencies like the dollar or the yen, its value is a direct measure of the perceptions of the world community. And guess what? As perceptions of bitcoin legitimacy have increased, more and more companies are willing to accept bitcoin as payment for goods or services, and the relative value of a bitcoin has increased. At first I was tempted to think about bitcoins as a fundamental paradigm shift brought about by the internet and computing technology. A private individual issuing, through a COMPUTER PROGRAM, perfectly legal currency that can now be used to store real world value? Wow! But then I realized that, functionally speaking, bitcoins have been around for years. We just called them by different names: personal checks, stocks, bonds, bank loans, insurance policies, etc., etc. All of these are instruments of value, issued by no government, often carrying no guarantees, and, as we’ve recently learned, subject to very little regulation or oversight. What I think I find most disturbing about bitcoins, however, is the extent to which the moral bankruptcy of currency is so blatantly displayed. You are exchanging a real world investment of computing power and energy for the solution to a numbers game. World-wide the energy that goes into solving the algorithm that is required to obtain a bitcoin is measured in carbon emissions and human labor. Bitcoin computers are currently eating up about $150,000 per day in energy costs. Is this fundamentally different than the energy that goes into junk bonds, hedge funds, credit card debt, or insecure home mortgages? No probably not. But it does point up for me the degree to which our culture has realized the extreme down side of a market economy: value can be based on something that has absolutely no concrete benefits to any living humans. When value becomes merely and solely a measure of perception, then I think we are all in trouble.

With each shooting and bombing we ask ourselves, “how could this happen?” And yet it is clear that this is the wrong question. The appropriate question is, “given the conditions under which we live, in which real needs are neglected and in which the system only responds with vigorous and visible actions when something this horrendous happens, why isn’t this sort of thing happening more often?” Our so-called social justice system is so far divorced from the realities of behavior and learning that it is analogous to a bunch of scientists trying to get a rocket into orbit through the use of their collective psychokinetic levitation powers. What we don’t seem to understand is that “outrage” tends draw attention to whatever it is directed at. If outrage follows physical violence, then violence will tend to be reinforced. But what would things be like if we were just as outraged by the daily violence of economic rape, the neglect of education, the poverty of social injustice? What would the world be like if every time a child was found to be suffering from malnutrition and bank fraud, the FBI were called in to investigate, and the mayor of every major city put their staff on high alert to seek out similar crimes in progress in their very own communities? A people are defined by what they find outrageous. What do we find most outrageous?

in our judgmental world, i admire the courage of speech.