In the Facebook-page for Bertrand Russell that I founded a few years ago and still am an administrator of, there was discussion of how philosophers need to be open to all ideas. Bertrand Russell was open to new ideas all his life and was ready to change his views if new and compelling scientific evidence made it necessary.
However, I claim that the very basic and fundamental values of a person often remain quite constant. When I thought about Bertrand Russell, I found without straining myself much 12 ideas that I think Bertrand Russell did hold and value during the whole of his incredibly long life. After all, he died in the ripe age of 98 and as still very active on his last days also.

1. Solidarity of all humans and humanity.

"The only thing that will redeem mankind is co-operation."

in “Human Society in Ethics and Politics “(1954)

2. Opposition to war and violence in all forms.

"This idea of weapons of mass extermination is utterly horrible and is something which no one with one spark of humanity can tolerate. I will not pretend to obey a government which is organising a mass massacre of mankind."

in Speech in Birmingham, England encouraging civil disobedience in support of nuclear disarmament (1961)

3. Respect for truth.

“I cannot believe — and I say this with all the emphasis of which I am capable — that there can ever be any good excuse for refusing to face the evidence in favour of something unwelcome. It is not by delusion, however exalted, that mankind can prosper, but only by unswerving courage in the pursuit of truth."

in "The Pursuit of Truth" in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell (1993)

4. Opposition to dogma and dogmatism in all of its forms and especially religious dogmas.

“All definite knowledge — so I should contend — belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man’s Land, exposed to attack by both sides; this No Man’s Land is philosophy.“

in A History of Western Philosophy (1945)

5. Respect for real science.

“Most literary men is obsessed with the idea that science has not fulfilled its promises. They do not, of course, tell us what these promises were. This is an entire delusion, fostered by those writers and clergymen who do not wish their specialties to be thought of little value.”

in Marriage and Morals (1929) Ch. 2: Byronic Unhappiness

6. Advocating sexual liberation.

“Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young; the other tenth is physiological, and will occur in one way or another whatever the state of the law may be.”

in Marriage and Morals (1929) Ch. 8: The Taboo on Sex Knowledge

“Joy of life... depends upon a certain spontaneity in regard to sex. Where sex is repressed, only work remains, and a gospel of work for work's sake never produced any work worth doing.”

in Marriage and Morals (1929) Ch. 20: The Place of Sex Among Human Values

“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead."

in Marriage and Morals (1929) Ch. 19: Sex and Individual Well-Being

7. Strong distaste for the open, greedy capitalism.

“Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.”

in Sceptical Essays (1928) Ch. 13: Freedom in Society

“For my part, the thing I would wish to obtain from money would be leisure with security. But what the typical modern man desires to get with it is more money, with a view to ostentation, splendour, and the outshining of those who have hitherto been his equals.”

in Conquest of Happiness (1930) Ch. 3: Competition

“The businessman's religion and glory demand that he should make much money; therefore, like the Hindu widow, he suffers the torment gladly.”

in Conquest of Happiness (1930) Ch. 3: Competition

8.Opposition to nationalism and overdrawn patriotism.

“Patriots always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their country.”

In Has Man a Future? (1962)

9. Strong respect for liberalism and liberal ideas.

"The doctrine of liberalism is an attempt to escape from this endless oscillation. The essence of liberalism is an attempt to secure a social order not based on irrational dogma, and insuring stability without involving more restraints than are necessary for the preservation of the community."
in A History of Western Philosophy (1945) Introductory, p. xxi

11. Rejection of automatic authority by a position in hierarchy.

“As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles. “

in Outline of Intellectual Rubbish

12. Love of life and humanity.

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair..Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people..the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer. This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”

in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1967) Prologue: What I Have Lived For

Quotes from Wikiquote

Comments

History is a vast collection of simultaneous processes. One strand of history is the madness of Communist and Nazi totalitarian dreams. However, they have already lost the game to democratic systems.
Democracy has simply shown to be a superior system of government over all forms of totalitarianism. Even the Islamic world is slowly learning the lesson of open societies beating closed ones in the end. History has amply shown that the inner decay of closed totalitarian systems just is inevitable.
Even if China still is lingering under a vague totalitarian Communist ideology, it is no more a centrally-led totalitarian socialist economy either.

On the other hand, USA is in the name of 'security' closing its traditional open society. I fear that it will feel the immense harm of this policy in the end.
There are vast differences in experiences in different areas too. In Scandinavia, it is hard to understand the pain and sorrow that the countries which have endured under totalitarian regimes have gone through.

If we look, for example, just on the Scandinavian history and experience, the last century has been a century of steady progress and improvement in all parts and corners of the society.
Sweden for one has been at peace for over 200 years. This lucky country has not experienced inner violence of note either during all of this time.
The last hundred years have simply seen a rise in rational thinking and most of all doing things that has no parallel in history. What century would one characterize as more reasonable than 20th century? The 19th with a immense waves of its imperialism and chauvinism the 18th with absolute monarchies ruling the lands and waves?

One must go the Greece of 200-300 BC before one finds reasonable thinking in the form to which we are used in the 20th century. However, all other parts of the earth were still under the veil of supernatural and mystical thinking. A successful version of Christianity soon engulfed also the Roman Empire.
This event did wipe out rational thinking from Europe for about 1500-1700 years, depending if you count the few first lonely voices of Enlightenment as real forces of change.

I am afraid that many people are missing the forest for the trees, when they see the last century just as the century of rise of largely irrational ideologies like Nazism and Communism or of the fully irrational fundamentalist Islam.
On the contrary, the big picture is a general rise in reasonable and rational thinking during the last century. Of course, the big flow of history has been at times been even greatly disturbed by sudden currents of irrationalism.
One of them was the quite unexpected and unforeseen rise to power of an obscure populist party in Germany in the 30's. However, this disturbance of general trend was completely wiped out by more rational and reasonable forces in less than 20 years after the rise to power of Nazi-party in Germany.

The rise of Communism was not a wholly irrational phenomena as the rise of the NSDAP can well be labeled to be. This is most of all because they had a much stronger ideological base. They could lean on their new kind of secular religion, which among other things rejected private ownership and property. Communism also had a quite different staying power than the Nazis. It did after all cling to power for over 70 years.
However, during the last couple of decades the Russian Communist theocracy just did keep up a papier-mâché facade of Communism. This facade did often hide away a personal quest for power and sources of corruption.

This empty facade did not need any violent push to fall. A main problem soon was that Communist totalitarianism had to exist in the more and more rationally working new world. This is the world of computers and most of all a world of the new and often rationally working networks that also bind intellectuals in a quite new way.

It is clear to any objective observer that the systems of government that are based on irrational beliefs find it more and more difficult to stay in power in the interconnected modern world.
They need to cling to power in a world where it is becoming more and more difficult to control the flow of information. Controlling the flow of information has after all always been extremely important for all totalitarian systems.
The democratic forms of government have slowly won more ground. This has happened decade after decade and simultaneously all over the world. Of course, there still are large patches of land under the control of belief-systems that are basically just whims of human imagination. However, the current global trend towards democracy is extremely clear.

The continued existence of totalitarian systems does not mean that the general universal sum and the outlook of our times or our zeitgeist or “spirit of time” would not be more rational than ever in the human history.
I must point out that I am not talking about the ‘Zeitgeist-movement’ at all, but about a concept that was created by philosophers like Johann Gottfried Herder and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. A change in Zeitgeist is a change in how people and society generally do see things.
Of course, a single look at the current Republican candidates for the US presidency can eat away ones hope for an even more rational future. On the other hand, it is quite certain that none of these Christian warriors will be the next US president.

I must also point out that I am not talking about any kind of inevitable moral progress. This is the case, even if the rise and spread of humanistic thinking on a global level can well be counted as a form of moral progress also.
Accepting of the humanistic way of thinking often leads alto to seeing and accepting the real diversity of our world. This idea often just makes people act more kindly towards people of other races, ideologies, and even competing religions.

However, this is not an inevitable historical process, but a thing that just has already happened around us for reasons that we can only guess. This development can also happen just because more people than in the past find the humanistic and human way of doing things appealing.
The humanistic general attitude is not spread by evangelists or missionaries but through things like novels, theaters and the silver screen.

A well-established and scientifically provable progress in general human conditions is an established fact. It has been achieved by use of technology, science, and advances in medicine.
Exceptions to this global trend are naturally countries that are ravaged by inner or outer conflicts. Excluded are also those countries, which do not want to control the growth of their population. However, generally the disturbances that are created by conflict just slow down the general progress for the duration of the conflict.

Comments

It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking, when, for instance, the man is not able to live wisely, though he lives honorably and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life."

- Epicurus (the 5th Epicurean Principal Doctrine)

Religions were created to fill an existing vacuum in the minds of the people. All principal world religions were created at a time when humans did know next to nothing about their environment, world or the universe.
In the then prevailing state of total ignorance things could still be explained away in an extremely coarse way. Often it was done by simply making up stories that sounded plausible in some way. Unfortunately, these stories simply do not hold up to closer examination anymore.

The need for such simplistic explanations has simply vanished with the rise of the science. We do now have quite satisfactory explanations for the structure and workings of the whole universe. We do not need those old stories which nomads told to each other on the evenings to pass the time away anymore.
During the past couple hundreds of years, the Christian European state churches have been wise enough to bow away always when new information has been discovered. However, at first also the western churches did all of their power in a try to stop the tidal rise of science and the rise of real, accurate information with it.

Eventually western churches had to give away under pressure when findings of the science changed the societies around them irreparably. Churches lifted their arms in despair and surrendered quietly at the onslaught of victorious science.

Also, the European Lutheran churches were transformed enormously in the process. They are not real users of secular power anymore, but they have been changed into quite toothless caretakers of rituals and soothers of minds.
The seekers of real scientific information do not need to fear for their life or liberty in the nations where this tamed version of Christianity hold sway, as their predecessors feared just a few hundred years ago.
Religion has no real role anymore in the Western Europe in explaining the workings of the universe anymore. People who try to do so will be treated as maniacs in most parts of Western Europe. Science has simply replaced religion in this respect.

Unfortunately, situation is not as rosy in other parts of the world; especially in the United States and the Islamic world. The fundamentalist movements in the USA and Islamic world are desperately trying to hold back the scientific explanations of the world. They cling to explanations of the universe that are quite universally found to be simply outdated and utterly false.

Of course, there still remains the hard part or the role of religions as a source of moral guidance. This task is not as easy to dismiss, as is their role as sources of information.
A sad fact is that we have largely forsaken other sources of moral guidance, especially philosophy. For example Epicurean and Stoic moral philosophies are, in fact, clearly superior to the Christian one in their clarity and exactness. They do cover the whole scale of human existence in a way that is quite unknown in Christianity.

Epicureanism and Stoicism were the last and most developed schools of philosophy to emerge before the rise of Christianity. This is important as after the rise of Christianity it took over thousand years before people in the Western Europe could shake off the corruptive influence of supernatural explanations.
Sadly, Epicureanism and Stoicism and other moral competing philosophies are quite unreservedly forgotten now. Even majority of people now honestly think that religions can be the only sources of moral guidance.

People may even think that they are just not current enough because they are so old. They do not necessarily notice that the core teachings of Christianity are over 2000 years old.
However, the basic human nature has not changed much during this time. In fact, the Greek and Roman societies where Epicureanism and Stoicism did flourish were much more like our own than the backward Palestine where Christianity was created.

Natural justice is a pledge of reciprocal benefit, to prevent one man from harming or being harmed by another."

- Epicurus (the 31th Epicurean Principal Doctrine)

Comments

I did finish just a few hours ago Alain De Botton's latest book "Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion" and I feel a strong urge to comment on the debate that is raging just now over this book in the free-thinking world.
Many debaters seem to have missed the fact that Alain De Botton bluntly rejects all of the supernatural teachings and dogmas of all religions and sees them as just man-made things just like all other ideologies are.
On the other hand, he does not have the need to ridicule and laugh at other people's ideas. He rejects all of their teachings but looks at their practices with a curious eye.

So, Alain De Botton is out to learn from the practical side of the religions. How having a good-looking building of one's own helps to build a feeling of community? How singing together soothing songs with other people helps to calm a person?
Many atheists seem simply to be freaked out by the very idea that atheists also could build their own communities. They seem to be even more freaked out by an idea that atheists could learn from the practical side of how things are run in the religious world, even if atheists do not share any common dogmas or superstitions. Of course, only time can tell if such communities will ever be born, anyway.

I personally think that secular and humanist Epicurean or Stoic communities is a much more realistic goal. People with a common philosophy would share at least some basic values from the outset. I fear that atheism could be too weak a glue for forming real communities that would resemble the religious ones.
Many of the vocal atheists seem to be fiercely individualist people. I fear that starting a community of them would be like herding a flock of cats.
However, there can be more of the free-thinking people in the future, who long also for the closeness and security offered by a community that would feel like the religious ones. It can also be expected that with time more group-oriented persons will shun religions.

Of course those atheists who don't like the idea of an atheist community can hate and curse the community-building ones as much as they like in the future also.
All too many atheists do seem to forget one of the basic principles of free-thinking; all free-thinkers or atheists do not need to think alike!

However, at t this stage I’d like to give Alain De Botton a change to defend himself against the fierce attackers, who clearly often have not even seen the book.
I will present you with a collection of quotes from “Religion for Atheists” that I hope will clarify Alain De Botton’s way of thinking.

Locked away in our private cocoons, our chief way of imagining what other people are like has become the media, and as a consequence, we naturally expect that all strangers will be murderers, swindlers or paedophiles – which reinforce our impulse to trust only those individuals who have been vetted for us by pre-existing family and class networks.”

For all the large-scale political solutions which have been proposed to salve ethnic conflict, there are few more effective way to promote tolerance between suspicious neighbors than to force them to eat supper together. Many religions are aware that the moments around the ingestion of foods propitious to moral education.”

We run away from our victims and act with strange rudeness towards them, not bothered by what we did, but because what we did makes us feel uncomfortable with an unmanageable intensity. Our victims hence have to suffer not only the original hurt, but also the subsequent coldness we display towards them on account of our tormented consciences.”

The abhorrence of crude moralism has banished talk of morality from the public sphere. The impulse to question the behavior of others trembles before the likely answer; who are you to tell me what to do?

In a world obsessed with freedom there are few voices left that even dare to exhort us to act well.”

We have grown sick from being left to do as we please without sufficient wisdom to exploit our liberty.”

It seems clear that the origins of religious ethics lay in the pragmatic need of the earliest communities to control their members tendencies towards violence and to foster in them contrary habits of harmony and forgiveness. Religious codes began as cautionary precepts, which were projected into to the sky and reflected back on earth…”

We had to pretend that morality came from the heavens in order to insulate it from our own prevarications and frailties.”

We will never discover cast-iron rules of good conduct which will answer every question that might arise about how human beings can live peacefully and well together. However, a lack of absolute agreement on the good life should not in itself be enough to disqualify us from investigating and promoting the theoretical notion of such a life.”

“We simply will not care for very long about the higher values when all we are given to convince us of their worth is an occasional reminder in a modestly selling, largely ignored book of essays by a so-called philosopher, while in the city beyond, the superlative talents of the globe’s advertising agencies perform their phantasmagorical alchemy and set our every sensory fibre alight in the name of a new kind of cleaning product or savory snack.”

“If we tend to think so often about lemon-scented floor polish or cracked black pepper crisps, but relatively little about endurance or justice, the fault is not merely or own. It is also that these cardinal virtues are not generally in a position to become clients of Young & Rubicam.”

“We are unwilling to consider secular culture religiously enough, in other words, as a source of guidance.”

No existing mainstream secular institution has a declared interest in teaching us the art of living. To draw an analogy from the history of science, the ethical field is at the stage of amateurs tinkering with chemicals in garden sheds rather than that of professionals conducting experiments in research laboratories.”

Alain de Botton in “Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion"

PS. I dearly would hope that there could be a cut and paste in Kindle for PC, as I just had to type these quotes by hand, even if I had the very same text in the same computer.

You can now watch this little review also on YouTube with some video-extras...

Comments

The idea of a ‘mind’ is a useful concept as such. It allows us to discuss an extremely complex collection of mental and physical phenomena going on in the brain as if there would be just only one single issue of a 'mind'. In the end we are talking about the products of incredibly varied and complex brain-processes when we discuss any area of human behavior.

Of course, the birth of an idea of a single indivisible ‘mind’ is caused by the fact that there is always the conscious 'me' on the very topmost level. This conscious 'me' processes the finished end-product of all of the incredible activity that going on under the hood in a human brain all the time.
Between the conscious or the ‘me’-part of the brain and the immensely diverse and highly active subconscious part, there is a web of complex gate-keepers. They keep out from the conscious part the multitude of continous routine-processes that are always going on beneath in the subconscious part of the brain. (See http://eagleman.com/eagleman-blog/135-the-mystery-of-expertise-full)

Without all this gate-keeping that is going on without a single pause for the duration of our life, the conscious part of the brain would be overwhelmed in seconds. Millions of years of human evolution have decided which is the right level of information that we need in the conscious level, and which information can be left to the subconscious part of the brain to deal with. This naturally varies incredibly at different situations.
Some of these processes keep our body alive. They do it by detecting when our body needs things like oxygen, water or food. Some of the follow our mental state. Some of them follow what happens around us. These are things that the brains of all living creatures share, as they are necessary base to stay alive if you are a mollusk or a human.

On the other hand, comparing the human brain to a simple computer is also utter reductionism in the other direction. We have not been able to produce computers that could even challenge the immense complexity and most of all immense flexibility of the human brain.

A human brain is not a computer, but one can say that it consists of hundreds or thousands of immensely effective parallel processors. They are constantly activated and de-activated on ad-hoc -basis to solve the current problems and tasks.
All these processors have unlimited parallel access to nearly endless amounts of working memory and nearly as endless amount the storage space for their results.

According to recent figures human brain has also around 100 billion neurons. The real secret of the brain is that all of these neurons are perpetually establishing and breaking connections, known as synapses, with other neurons and creating continually new networks.
In the end, it was the subconscious part of my brain that did come up with the idea that I should write this little essay. I did not control this original though-process on a conscious level. However, I did finally analyze the idea on the conscious level and decided to write it out here.

It is easy to understand how the early people could not understand the workings of this subconscious part of the brain at all. It is also easy to see how they could have seen as these ideas and thoughts as they would be coming from somewhere outside themselves.
In fact, many of them clearly thought that their ideas were coming from some kind of 'deity' or 'spirit'. If you look at oldest literature armed with this idea, you very soon see what I mean.

The same phenomena do explain also the amazingly common ideas among believers that they are constantly in touch with their chosen deity, and this ‘divine voice’ also guides their lives in many ways.
However, I’m afraid that instead of any divine voice, they are listening to the subconscious part of their own brain. As it does process things in its own pace and answers can surface even quite unexpectedly.

Again; the idea of a ‘mind’ was invented to simplify handling of a phenomena that was all too complex for the early people to comprehend at all.
They just could not even imagine how there could be a vast number of parallel processes going on in every living brain in every single second. All they knew of and understood was the final output that reaches the conscious part of the brain, which can be even extremely restricted at times.

We have inherited from tens of thousands of generations of our ancestors a vast number of reflexes, models of behavior and trains of thought that affect our life every single second we live. There is also a extremely complex collection of social brain-processes that fire up in the brain when we mix with our fellow humans. There is always a biological base for these things also, but these processes are also changed by evolution of the human culture.
However, we are not normally aware of their presence on a conscious level. They just inevitably change the way we see our environment and most of how we see all different social situations.

On top of all this we slowly build an individual psyche. It is always different from that of anybody else who has ever lived. This psyche is a molded by all good, bad and irrelevant things that happen to us.
Of course, this individuality rests on a very strong base of inherited traits and features. However, our individual life-experiences will always produce a different end-result for every single human. Let me repeat: explaining all this with a concept of ‘mind’ is simply reductionism at its worst.
There are also inherited traits and brain-processes that different cultures have learned to use to reach new ends. For example, the brain functions that handle speech have according to some theories been developed further by development of music, which still touches the raw emotion-systems in the brain through this channel.

Language itself was developed to use these brain-processes when one species of the great apes learned to use sounds in dramatically new functions. The fact that several people can with the use of language share the contents of their brain with other people is unique to humans.
As far as we currently know, the human species is the only one that has developed a complex enough language to convey even the most abstract contents of their brain to other members of their species.

The invention of language did also change the way how humans themselves think that they use their brain. They normally see just the end-result which is formulated as language. The very basic processing of raw information happens as it happens in other animals, also without language. We just are not aware of these underlying processes, because they now feed their results in the form of language to the conscious part of the brain.

Subconscious part of the mind does not work independent of you, as it IS you. It holds all of your experiences, hopes, dreams and ideas. Subconsciousness stores our life and uses it as a tool to inspect and analyze all of new things that we encounter. The results of this process are then processed in the conscious mind.
The conscious part of our mind, however, makes all the decisions. On the other hand, in very fast situations we must rely on the gut-reaction or the results of only pre-processed information that has not been checked in the conscious part of the mind. This is one of the reasons why fast decisions are so often faulty.

The slow conscious processing of data on a conscious level does give better results in many cases. The The subconscious part moves more on the level of emotions, feelings and using old examples for new action. Conscious part of the mind adds reasoning and rational analysis to the picture. The development of language-using machinery into our mind has given us the possibility for logic and rational reasoning.
These qualities are of course also the things that made possible all human inventions. This development of a language-based conscious mind is the very basic thing that separated humans from other animals. It also gave humans this tremendous advantage over all other animals that we now enjoy.

Human brain was already a very complex organ at the time when we parted ways with the other great apes. However, mainly the development of language has created an incredible explosion in the complexity in the ways of how human brain can work.
No other species has undergone such a transformation as the birth of language did cause in human species. However, under all this complexity there is still the third species of chimpanzee. They just try to control also their natural impulses and emotions with this newly perfected brain of theirs.
The human brain started really diverging from the brain of a dog or a cat with the birth of language. It becomes possible nearly immortalize some contents of the brain with the invention of writing.

Only the birth of language made it possible also to develop abstract ideas like the ‘mind'. The development of the human brain has been a process that has taken an incredibly long time. The development of the first nerve cell was naturally the very first step that was followed by the development of the nervous system and finally the first precursors of brain.
An extremely hard question is at which point of evolution did animals become fully conscious of themselves. Most of all it is hard define at which point of human evolution did humans develop something that can be called a 'mind’ as this idea is commonly now understood. Even amoeba knows where it ends and other amoeba starts.
There still is no definite answer to this question, as the whole thing depends on how you define ‘mind’ and many traditionalists are prone to claim that only humans can have a ‘mind’.

Lions make conscious decisions when they choose a suitable prey from a flock of antelopes. A lion looks for certain signals that may make some of the prey easier targets than other. Then it makes a conscious decision that is based on the information it has obtained, just like humans do. The difference is that this decision is made without expressing it in language in lions.
The big step that humans did take was not development of a ‘mind’, but just the new ability to express its existence through the use of language.

It has been established without doubt that all mammals do share a very similar basic brain-structure with humans. It is quite certain that they all also have a very similar vast collections of brain-processes that is called ‘mind’ in humans for reasons of simplicity and tradition. The only real difference is that other mammals just can’t express themselves in a language that we could at least yet interpret.

On a little lighter note, I personally believe in ‘minds’ that exist outside the brain. I have hundreds and hundreds of them stacked on shelves of my book-case. The invention of writing made it possible to preserve some of the contents of a human brain permanently.
Every book is a little window to the contents of the brain of its writer. Some of course tell very little of the true thought of the writer, but some great books can act as true gates to another human mind.
When I press these little buttons to produce symbols on this screen to be transported over the vast oceans to my friends in Philippines or America, I am, in fact, extending my brain to reach other people. Boggles the mind, sometimes.

The study of how the human brain works has seen a fantastic rise in knowledge. We know immensely more of every single facet and function of the brain than we did 50 or even ten years ago.
Neurobiology, neurology and all other fields of research of the brain and mind have advanced in bounds and leaps. We have seen an amazing rise in understanding how our brain works in a very few years with the coming of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and other techniques.

Added 31.1.2012; Julian Baggini must have been reading this blog......

Similar rise in understanding is sadly lacking in philosophy. It femains all too often often stuck in the old trenches that were dug ages ago. So, if you want to know and understand more how human brain or ‘mind’ works, you nowadays won't find help in philosophy at all, but in science.
One of the main reasons for this apparent lack of development is the strange ancient belief in immortality of some kind of 'soul' or 'mind'. This idea has made also many philosophers supportive to ideas that would make it possible to retain this ancient belief.

This belief is, of course, an old one. According to some anthropologists it is based on the fact that the memory of a dead person persists in our mind as if he would be still alive in our minds. On the other hand, the written word has made it possible to preserve the contents of the human mind and make it 'immortal'.
On the other hand, if you believe in a thing like immortal soul, you need to first renounce evolution. If you believe that a 'soul' is a purely human property, you need to believe that humans have existed always just as they are, or you end up in trouble.

The very first mammals were rat-sized four-legged creatures. Did they have a 'soul' that was reborn in other little mammals? If you resolve that hurdle, in the end you need to go all the way and to decide if also the first one-cell creatures also had a 'soul', or was just the idea of a ‘soul’ developed with the birth of the spoken language?
The answer is inevitably the latter. The idea of a ‘soul’ is a similar attempt to simplify a complex issue as the idea of a ‘mind’ is.

One thought still; the idea of reincarnation was quite natural one in the times when there was no idea of genes and genetics. Suddenly there just was this spitting image of the demised uncle as the new nephew.
Nobody knew how different features pass differently and can jump over generations and so on. The idea of reincarnation was just an easy way out of a problem. The sorry fact is that the less you know about biology, the easier it is to retain these ancient beliefs, and the more you know, the more difficult it becomes.

However, in fields like biology and scientific research of the brain and human cognition there are things that we can be even extremely certain of. Of course, we learn more all the time. This new knowledge will inevitably always change also the existing ideas that are stored in the brain.
During the whole recent explosion in our knowledge of how the human mind works, there has never been presented new scientific ideas or findings that would in any way support the alleged separateness of the ‘mind’ and brain.

On the contrary, it has become possible to explain processes and features that were quite in-explainable a few decades ago. In fact, we start to understand now how all of the main function of the brain like emotions, thoughts, reflexes are created and handled in the brain.
There still are these old belief-systems whose followers want so dearly to believe that an invisible part of a human does not die at the death of his body. They are ready desperately to grab any idea that would allow them to retain their belief in that mind is somehow separate from the brain.
However, no reliable evidence of any such thing has ever been presented. When the brain dies permanently, your brain and your ‘mind’ do cease to function and in practice cease to exist, even if your body is kept going artificially.

PS. This little essay is based largely on work done by Steven Pinker. However, there are also dozens of lectures, articles and books by many other people working in the field of studying of the human mind that have had an influence.

(This piece was extended and totally refurbished at 22th of January, 2012)

Comments

One of the most fascinating phenomenas in economic downturns is that many people really can still be lead to believe that the unwillingness of unemployed to work is causing the numbers of unemployed to swell.
Of course, the right-wing conservatives are here just out to change the real source of blame from non-working economy and enterprises to those who are laid off and unemployed, who are the real victims of every economic downturn.

However, it is fantastic always to see how any person could fall for this kind of trickery, but there really are people who fall for this.
It is just pure and utter idiocy to claim that in slumping economy all the people who are currently unemployed would find jobs if they just would want. There just not are such jobs anywhere. However, it seems for many too hard to get this simple fact.

Turning the issue of unemployment upside down, to something that is wholly caused by the people who do not want jobs, is just utter idiocy. Of course, there are also many lazy people. However the great majority of people who get laid off in all economic downturns cannot simply be made of lazy people, as they get employed again when things get better and there are job-openings again.

There are qualities in the human mind which do make this black magic possible. We have a tendency to think about individual issues through real-world examples. As the human mind is restricted in its capacity we also tend to see issues though just one kind of example at a time.
When a social conservative tells us about all of lazy people who do not just want to work, we can easily create a mental image of neighbors lazy nephew why just lives in a sofa watching tv and playing video-games.
When it is fed with enough vigor, this mental image can push all other possible images concerning the same issue from our minds. We are not given the opportunity to replace it, for example, with the image of hard-working welder who was laid off after 25 years in the job, because his job was transferred to China, which just could be much more typical case.

However, the most difficult part here is the secret envy. A big part of working people are employed in jobs that give them no real satisfaction, just money. Its extremely natural that they envy people who don’t have to follow time-schedules that hang on as a heavy burden on them.
On the other hand, when people are taught from day one of their lives that work is the only valuable thing in life, they often cannot admit the burden that work places on them even for themselves. This kind of ambivalence can then find an outlet in the hatred of those who do not currently have work at all and who are also free of this burden.

The most fantastic thing is how some people seem to live in a completely history-less environment, where there is no past or future; just the present. They judge people only on the basis of what they are just now.
They just don’t realize that, for example, the majority of the nine percent of the work force of the United States who are just now unemployed are not unemployed because they would not want to work, but because nobody wants to employ them.
If somebody needs to be punished, would we rather not want to punish the employers who will rather hire people in China and India than in their home country?

If unemployment rises because people do not want to work, how could one explain that it always goes down when new jobs are created in the economy? Why in earth people would be lazy only in the economic downturns.
Western societies have sailed through unscathed the last 70 years, when they have supported their more unfortunate members when they have gone through a bit tougher times. Times will so often get better and most of all so many people can and will eventually change.

It is amazing to hear time after time from social conservatives how people are what they are and we should never hope for the better. In western nations millions of people deemed to be unsocial scum have changed their lives. They have married have kids and jobs, even if they have gone through tough spots at some point of their lives.
Leaving people in trouble without the possibility to survive without retorting to crime at rough times would be just plain idiocy and extremely bad policy for society.

PS.

“Our nation needs to stop doing for people what they can and should do for themselves. Self reliance means, if anyone will not work, neither should he eat.”

- right-wing US presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann.

Dear reader, how does this sound to you? In fact, when read literally, it would mean that losing your job could become a death sentence, as you die if you are not given any food. Do you think that it would be just fair to kill off all lazy people? One is lead to think also what kind of panels would do the judging? It would of course be interesting to know, how long would you need to be without work before you would be left to die without food?

Comments

For me, the greatest military and political leaders are those who have won battles and wars with cunning and strategy or who have avoided war altogether, but most of all those who have had the bravery not to go on fighting lost wars, but who have had the guts to seek peace at the right moment.
On the other end of this spectrum are the villainous military leaders, who will not accept defeat and who will fight to the last of their supporters.

The latest example of this hideous group of people is of course Moammar Qaddafi, who was given ample opportunities to retire to foreign shores to spend the rest of his life in exile. However, he declined and in the end caused the needless destruction of large areas of his home country and also of his own home town, Sirte.
I don’t know why many people have trouble in recognizing the extremely plain evilness of not giving up of an armed combat in those cases when it has been clearly already lost.

The answer is of course part of the perverse logic of the war, where most of the normal values that humans hold dear in everyday life are reversed.
In matters concerning war foolhardiness is praised, stupid, unneeded deaths in the act of bravado are hold in high esteem, and all too often even acts of stubbornly seeking the death in pointless and unneeded last stands are admired as acts of great courage.
This thinking is so deeply embedded in our society that I think that many of the people reading this have trouble understanding that there would be anything wrong with it.

However, the military or political leaders who refuse to give up a clearly lost cause do all too often immense damage to their own home countries and cause immense suffering and pain to their fellow countrymen, even if also needless blood is spilled on the other side too.
Hitler is, of course, an all too easily picked candidate to this group, but the Japanese leadership which let the American firebomb all of their major cities to ashes without blinking an eye, is of course a major war criminal in this respect. If we go further in the history of the human race, for example the horrid and utter destruction of large areas of Central Europe in 30 Years War was a direct result of either side being unable to accept defeat and accept any kind of compromise.

A much harder thing to accept for many is that the real reason why the Vietnamese people had to live through over 15 years of horrid, continious warfare that did cost the lives of between one or three million people was because the Communist leaders of North Vietnam saw any kind of loss of life as acceptable, if they just could reach their political goals.
A group of leaders who will lead several million of their fellow countrymen to their deaths just to gain more political power and reach a Utopian economic goal just cannot be seen to have done anything praiseworthy.
Admiring the stubbornness of the Vietnamese leaders is like admiring a father who lets his family starve to death over a long fight over grazing rights, just to show that he was right.

In a similar vein, it is a fact of life that Afghanistan has never been really subdued by an another state, but admiring the Afghan leaders for their unwillingness to ever to seek peace or any kind of compromise with their adversaries is extremely odd thing to do.
It has been even said that in the recent wars in Afghanistan the Afghans have been somehow 'morally superior'. However, I think that the stubbornness and inability of their leaders to seek peace on any reasonable terms does not make them morally superior in any way.
It just tells about the inability of these leaders to make compromises because of an ideology that they have adopted.

In fact, a moral view of the Afghan conflict would be to say that to inflict tens of years of continuous war on one of the poorest nation on earth is a highly immoral act to do.
Of course, this poverty is also one of the central reasons why this war has been going on for so long. If the Afghan society would have been more economically developed, the disruption that is caused by a war would have made its continuation very difficult after a certain point,

However, in a poor agrarian society all new possibilities for living on war and the money lavishly given by foreign donors and gotten from the drug trade did offset the immense hardships that were inevitably brought about by war.
The Afghan nation as a whole has not benefited and will never benefit in any way from these wars, even if the religious and tribal leaders have grown their power and stature even immensely.

At the same time, there is a whole generation now who does see that the normal way to earn a mans living is to trade in drugs and blow other people up. It is terrifying even toimagine in what kind of moral void the tens of thousands young men do live, who have never seen anything other than war in their whole lives.
They have all too often nothing else but their misogynist, repressive and morally corrupt local Jihadist version of Islam to turn to. If someone claims that this ideology is morally more advanced than, in fact, any other religion-based moral system humans have invented, he does simply not know what he is talking about.

In the end, nations do not win wars because they are somehow morally more advanced than others or most of all because they would be carriers of a truer ideology. Nations who start wars want to subdue other nations to their will in some respect or they simple want to have something that the other nation is not willing to give them voluntarily.
A feeling of moral superiority can of course help the war effort even greatly, and at modern times the party that has been attacked often has a definite edge over the attacker in this respect.

However, in the end all wars are won by the nations which are more capable or enduring in the battlefield. Short wars seem to be won by parties who can muster more powerful or technically advanced forces to the battlefield.
On the other hand, long wars seem to be won by those or who can make their followers endure longest the hardships and suffering that are inevitably brought about by the war. If we put it more bluntly, they are won by the party who does care less for the true well-being of their own countrymen.

PS. This piece was heavily influenced by Steven Pinker and his fine book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes" that I am currently reading.

Comments

I am about the delve into a thorny issue that has been topmost in my mind for a while, but on which I have not dared to venture. It is about how art can distort reality. I know that just uttering this sentence will send many or even most of my readers on their hind legs, as saying a thing like this just is blasphemy for very many people.
The problem is that a thing like this will cause a defense mechanism to be activated. If one is a friend of art and culture, it so easily happens that all critique of art is unconsciously seen as an attack on ones basic values.
The sorry result of this can also be that any real analysis of the critique itself becomes impossible. Still, I will boldly try to convey my ideas even is a thorny issue that can so easily backfire.

The worst form of lying is the telling of just one side of a complex story. This is at its worst in fiction, when a successful novel can transform the view of a whole generation on an issue.
The writer does not need to lie consciously, he or she just needs to omit mention even the possibility that there are other very different ways to see the issue at hand. In such a case, the writer is not lying, but the result can be a complete distortion of reality.
I know that I am not saying anything very original here, as anybody can see this thing happening all around them all the time. However, it is strange how rarely this issue comes up in public discussions.

I think that there is an subconscious process going on. The danger could be that this would work both ways; also those works of art that support my own pet ideas and ideologies would be scrutinized if looking at the factual trustworthiness of works of art would be more common. I suspect that this is one of the hidden reasons why there is so little talk about this area.
Is it also so that the 'freedom of artist' creates so strong protective cover around their works that people do not dare dispute the one-sidenedness of so many works in the fear of stepping on the artistic freedom of other people?

I think that first and foremost we need to preserve the freedom for all people to write or paint or film just whatever they would ever want. However, I also think it should be balanced with the strong will to point out the factual falsehoods and one-sidenedness also in the fields like literature, cinema or theatre.
I must again and again stress that all artists must always have the freedom to create whatever they want. I don’t want to mess with that very basic right at all. I just want to remind that all works of art are always subjective windows to the world.
The more different windows one does take the pain to look out to the world, the more complete our view of the world will be. We just need to remember that we can see only a small slice of the world out of a single window.

Admittedly, great art is rarely born out of 'on the other hand and on the other hand' -thinking. It is just too bad that reality is built in that way and all great art will inevitably distort reality; the more forceful and more poignant art is, the greater also the distortion can be.
I think that this eternal problem will never be solved. In fact, it does not need to be ‘solved’, as in practice people just need to be aware that art is not life, but all to often just life with its true complexity and vagueness taken away.

Art imitates life. However, to make interesting (and most of all sellable) art you so often need make life more interesting, more straightforward and more uniform than it really is. The very simple act of following the conventions of an art-form will very often distort the view of reality that is in the end presented, even if you real aim could be just telling your story as faithfully as you can.
For me personally, however, the real problem are the artists who have a hidden agenda, that they will never admit aloud. It pains to see stories whose real purpose can be seen from page one, but the writer never admits it.
I have no trouble with art that has a real purpose and an agenda, when the purpose and agenda of a work are clearly to be seen, the problem for me are just the stealthy ones.
For me at least, best art is born out of a wish to change people or society in some way, or just to drive an important point home. This need and will just need to be visible, as the distortion of reality that is involved then also becomes more clear.

There is still one more danger. There is the danger that a great artist is seen to have powers and wisdom that he or she does not and, in fact, cannot ever have. A vague enough and multi-layered enough way of saying things can make people believe that you have found answers also to questions for which, in reality, you just cannot have any kind of real answers.
The very skillful use of language can hide away the fact that the answers are just opinions, guesses and shots in the dark. An artist can have exceptionally good opinions and he can make wonderful guesses, but it is too easy to foreget that they are still just opinions and guesses, even when they are extremely skillfully expressed.
People love certainty and the danger is that a great artist can offer certainty also in areas where none can ever exist. I know that many people find this comforting, but there is the danger of making the reality conform to these imagined answers.

The Stochastic Motivational Analysis that I have spoken before in this blog may help even in analyzing the works of art that we meet. Basically you just need to try answer these questions:

1. What kind of personal ideological connections the artist has to the issues at hand?
2. Why is an artist interested in just in the one idea he or she is presenting?
3. Why does the artist want us have just that piece of information, but not some others?
4. Do the institutions or country that the artist identifies with have some kind of special relationship with the issue? Can this relationship affect his or her ideas on it?
5. Can financial considerations be a reason why an artist is bringing just this idea up at this very moment?
6. Is the artist just following some current, popular trend?

Comments