MORE ON DETERMINISM

The following is a response I entered on the Pantheism website in response to Ronhorgan's comment:

Ronhorgan said: The problem with the hot potato is that free will is both true and false. As a young man I could not escape the absolute truth that I was wholly predetermined; a very cheerless place to live.

My response was: I had the opposite experience. The exact moment that I decided in late-middle life that I was a robot, I was filled with an immediate sense of elation, and a paradoxical thought lept into my mind, I have never felt so free. As a youth I tried to believe in a sort of Freudian determinism, but all his explanations for human behavior (also Jung's explanations) seemed endlessly ambiguous and unsatisfying answers to what human consciousness labels cruelty and deceit. Actually no human act is cruel or deceitful; they are emotional labels consciousness, instructed by emotion, applies to the human brain doing its thing. A greater consciousness, an emotionless deterministic robot, observing from afar, would only see actions and not the emotions. It would be able to see how certain actions lead to certain results. It would even be able to quantify the results of the actions it observes. The funny thing is that good science is that distant and robotic observer. And evolutionary psychology is now putting human behavior under the microscope and it can quantify human behavior. For example, it reveals that the degree of kinship has a statistical correlation to the degree of favoritism that one human shows to another. Stuff like that.

When I began to read the works of evolutionary psychologists, every problem I had understanding human history disappeared. My understanding was complete, and I would never have to moan again, "Why O why, Lord?" The Lord is in there because consciousness brought with it dualism. As soon as the brain's auditory functions became complex enough to be multi-layered and recursive, there appeared in nature the brain speaking to itself and the brain directing the body's movements. The brain thinks and the brain that thinks (i.e. overhears its auditory bits rumbling along) has assigned God (the unknown and a concomitant conscious moral system) as an explanation for why the body is doing what it does. In a way, saying that Adam and Eve ate the apple is as good as any explanation for why one human animal harms another human animal as any other. The cause of the harm is buried in the purely physical body and is determined by electro/chemical activities which defy conscious control. Thus the label evil arises from a fairy tale.

Memories (synaptic memories of actions) are stored with emotions and emotions are also the trigger mechanisms for directing human behavior. Thus any act of the body has a memory in the synaptic patterns which are connected to the emotional captain of the ship. The emotional captain of the ship is separate from the rationalizing function of the brain which tries to explain and excuse every action that it has no control over except to rationalize and explain its behavior to itself and to its fellow chimps in the human network. Thinking is as deterministic as action is. Emotions, memories and thoughts swirl around each other, continuously stimulated by input from the environment. A certain emotion will stimulate a certain memory and vice versa.

An input from the environment will trigger an emotion which raises up memories of an action and an impulse to do that action, but that impulse to action (or thought) is then modulated by other emotions labeled as shame or guilt which are attached to other memories of past actions and events and results. Eventually, through that mixture of memory and their attached emotions an action is triggered by whichever chemical mixture wins the competition to act (or not act). From an array of potential actions one action has the chemical strength to cause the action to happen. The strength of an action is determined by the emotional (chemical) power that releases the action. Thus one man in a bar fight breaks a bottle and drives the shards of that bottle into his antagonist's face while another never goes beyond using his fists. His drive (emotional power) to do harm by his actions is modulated by other emotions (chemical determinants) that restrain his acts. The resolutions of his entire brain with all its emotions and memories just can't generate the emotional/chemical response that makes for a killing.

As usual, I wrote far more than I intended, but every avenue down which I follow determinism is endlessly fascinating. Writing about paradoxical stuff like conscious control as opposed to determinism constantly tantalizes me and causes words to flow.

MORE BATTLING IN THE COLUMBIAN, VANCOUVER, WA

“There is an old saying that: ‘Politics is like a dysfunctional marriage--every fight is really about something else...’ This applies to the travel to Spain by Michelle et al, the Mosque Cultural Center in Manhattan, along with the old standby ‘wedge issues’ like ‘Guns, God and Gays’.”

Thank you, MJT. While we get sucked into the daily nit picking, certain truths stand unaccounted for. Step back everybody and get the big picture.

What party has been against minimum wage increases, the 40 hour week, sick leave, paid vacations, OSHA, unions, Labor and Industry protections, social security, equal pay for women, mine safety, subsidizing public transport and unemployment insurance? What party since 1930 has labeled as Socialism every benefit aimed toward the welfare of the average wage earner? On its other face, what party since 1980 has backed every change that has allowed the wealthiest Americans to become so wealthy it’s like the 1920s again when 85% of American wealth was in the hands of 15% of the American populace? What party’s policies have shrunk the income of the middle class and created the current huge gap between America’s richest and America’s poorest while seeing the wealthiest earn obscene bonuses that they then protect with lowered taxes and minimal inheritance taxes? What party has helped create a class of citizen whose inherited power, wealth and prestige equals the sort of inherited power and privilege that our founding fathers found disgusting in Great Britain?

If you’re a wage worker and you vote for the Republican/Tea Party, you will have betrayed your class.

The sad thing is that I like Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin is actually a woman of the people, but, like her Southern brethren, she is as uninformed as a boulder at the bottom of the Salton Sea, dumb as a post, blind as a mole.

DOWN WITH THE BURKHA AND VEIL!

To spread freedom and democracy as widely as possible, America will need to become extremely feminist in its leanings; the way toward a truly worldwide celebration of liberty leads through the veiled and burkha-clad women of the world. It begins at home in America with making certain that the government loses all control over the feminine reproductive system. A woman's abortion rights are inalienable civil rights.

When we've proven that we really believe that a person (a woman) has complete control over their own bodies, then who knows what ideas might occur to a woman living behind an imposed veil or within the voluminous and smothering burkha. Those crazy, suppressed and fearful Moslem men sense that their greatest fear of American freedom is in how we treat our women as valuable and free people. That's what Islam fears in America, and, to tell the truth, what, also, fundamentalist Christians also fear in their own country—women who can decide for themselves how to deal with their own sexuality.

POLITICS AS USUAL

DeeLittle left a comment on your wall:

RE YOUR REPLY:

before the gvt decided to step in, our country took care of the poor. right here in vancouver, on 78th where there's a community garden...that used to be the 'poor farm' where people who couldn't support themselves, lived & farmed there. the ymca/ywca, catholic missions, people give

ing their neighbors food and helping them get back on their feet....

this country's people help those who cannot help themselves.

the problem isn't 'can't help', the problem is 'won't help' themselves.

do you believe the country owes these people? or is it the duty of their families?

Dear DeeLittle,

Your reply came through garbled. I respect that you cared to reply also and I hear your concerns.

As a young man I met many men of the Depression Era working in machine shops with me. Two informed me that they were married but did not live with their wives anymore. In order to qualify, during the Depression, for welfare, a woman needed to show that she had no husband present in the house. These two men both had departed their homes and hoboed around the nation taking whatever work was available so that their families could eat. By the time the Depression was over, their marriages were in tatters. They’d grown apart. One of these men was an alcoholic by the time I met him. The other was just an old man batching it and still getting by. So the past is not necessarily a model for the present.

Also private charity which you seem to favor has at least two drawbacks. When charity is connected with religious organizations, the charity often comes with proselytizing. Proselytizing to broken people takes unfair advantage of those wounded people. Second, private charity has never, in the history of mankind, been able to meet the real needs of those who for one reason or another have not effectively competed with their fellow humans in the free market system.

As to families taking up the burden: I think you’ll find that the reason many people are failing to compete is the result of them not having substantial family resources or support. To ask families to care for people that they have already not supported with emotional or financial resources will not meet the demand. The working poor rarely have the resources to get their children into educational levels sufficient for them to compete with the children of the rich whose education is paid for by their parents. The rich, though they sometimes also fail, always get a boost up that their poorer neighbors do not get.

Finally, the real issue is whether or not free market capitalism needs poverty for it to exist. Can the free market provide enough jobs with adequate pay so that workers can earn enough to take care of their families, educate them, meet their health needs and retire without poverty? I see no place in the world, past or present, where free markets supply all the jobs necessary to creating such a plentiful nation. So poverty seems to be a natural result of free market economies. Even though communism is a failed experiment, it was obvious that the financial gap between the rich and the poor there, at the end of the Soviet experiment, was not as great as it is in America so a planned economy also has at least that strength.

But here’s the bottom line of my morality. If capitalism will always create a class of citizen who is in poverty, isn’t it the responsibility of those who are most benefiting from the capitalistic system to make sure that they share some of their wealth with those who must be at the bottom in order for the whole system to operate efficiently?

The conservative argument always seems to me to adhere to the Social Darwinian belief that those who can’t compete must sink into the mire and live there unredeemed and unaided. I agree that life is not and never has been fair, but as a citizen, I’m willing to tax myself in order to create a semblance of humanity within the free market system. So many of the rich (lucky to be born into wealth and into good genes and with reasonable intelligence) who benefit from free market economies seem to think that the world owes them this living and that they have no responsibility to return anything to the system that was so rigged as to make them rich while it impoverishes the other.

WASHINGTON STATE MATH FAILURE RATE IS 42%

The following are my remarks to the Comments Section in the Columbian newspaper following the story about Washington State's math failure rates:

Mathematics requires logical and rational mental skills. We live in a nation in which a large percentage of us still believe that the supernatural and irrational Genesis tales make up a true story. In fact there's an interesting correlation between the percentage of Americans who believe that Genesis is a true story and the percentage who aren't logical enough to pass a simple math test.

If you want a real explanation for our modern problems, study what neuroscience is revealing about human brain function. We are living with a consciousness that evolved between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago to meet the needs of small tribes of hunter-gatherers, living in a Neolithic culture. Their math skills were simple counting skills and their intuitions were adapted to aid them in living together in SMALL communities. They were good at hunting, fishing and gathering and in working together in small social units. When farming arrived, larger communities came into being and new social skills were needed. We're still trying to catch up to cultural change, to bring our brains up to speed with the fast-changing technical culture we live in. Change only gets faster. Those who are falling behind are frightened and, thus, angry.

A sign that one's brain is adaptable enough to live in a modern, technological culture is its ability to think logically and rationally and that will be reflected in mathematical test scores. Not that intuition is no longer needed (intuition is NOT logical nor rational). Intuition evolved from our living within cultures. It’s our brain’s adapted tool by which we evaluate one another and decide who to trust or not to trust in our daily lives. Good intuitive skills are needful to survival, but logic’s mathematical skills are becoming really necessary to being able to adapt to modern requirements.

THE DEBATE GOES ON: HOW CONSCIOUS IS HUMAN CHOICE?

These conversations go on on the World Pantheism Movement website:

Jim,
Perhaps I ought to admit that I completely understand any human beings desire to say that writing a symphony is many orders higher than my little vacuuming machine, but if you take the day by day composition of a symphony (and I've written four, yes, unpublished novels, plus many other false starts, long projects, plus ten or so volumes of poetry, TV scripts, several big near misses but no cigars) and break it down minute by minute as the hours pile up each day, each decision that is constructing that novel (or symphony) is a feeling by feeling, irrational, process of words coming forth "out of nowhere" that arise from an intense concentration on the job at hand. As far as the bird metaphor, I'm sticking to the facts that the bird is "making decisions" that guide his flight path just as surely as a man walking down a street is making decisions about every twist and turn of his journey. It's when we do our journey while distracted and arrive at our destination with no memory of how we got there that we understand that our decisions are exactly like the bird's. Here's a poem of mine that has been published in a reputable literary magazine from which I'll build a further case for the supremacy of feeling over consciousness as the director of human behavior:

MEMORY OF ALL THE RELIGION I'LL EVER NEED

Back to the wind, I held it
And tied to it a knotted tail.
Spring, and all that wind was with me.
Muddy feet that made me clearly dirty,
I was a thing of earth who sought the sky.
Then I ran and let it go and let it out,
And felt it lift to take the wind. Whipping
Madly in a rush, it sought a surface far above me
Until I lost control of it and it flew itself,
And what I held was something in the wind,
A line that curved to nothingness.

For one full windy afternoon, I watched it
Whip and twist at nothing I could see.
All control I had was in the knotted tale
I'd been sure to fasten to it
To hold it straight and true into the wind.
And then that wind became a calm,
And it began to flutter down and
Down, to lay my line along the earth.
END

"Muddy feet that made me clearly dirty, I was a thing of earth who sought the sky... Whipping madly in a rush, it sought a surface far above me... And what I held was something in the wind... A line that curved to nothingness." How well I recall to this day the skin-tingling elation with which those words, sans any meaning other than a sort of music that came with them, arrived into my consciousness out of nowhere. The choices were being made for me.... By Whom? By What?

In retrospect, you'd think that this poem with its very clear metaphor of kite flying is a conscious and rational process of putting together a creative work about the search for God that ends in atheism, but that ain't so. The title which eventually encapsulated what I imagine the poem is about came long after the basic lines were on the page. As an afterthought, that search is what the poem seems to be about, but there was nothing conscious or willful about the trip from the first words that spilled out of my unconscious onto the page. At first the writing flowed from a feeling about kite flying, a memory loaded with emotion about childhood, and a descriptive process, words tumbling after words, filled with elation but no sense of where it was going to land. At the time, I was still not the atheist that I am now, so the ending was a delightful surprise to me when it arose from the sky down into my awareness.

Later, too, I realized, another flash of insight, that if one describes something in the material world with enough accuracy and emotional force, that material description comes to "feel like" a comparable intellectual process, i.e. kite flying and searching for God. A canoe trip that ends with falling off the end of the world into existentialism. A combat flight that ends up with being shot down and finding a grape arbor from which one selects a grape and eats it like a sip from a chalice of blood.

The interesting thing about good poetry is that it's a discovery, a discovery of a poet's inner landscape that was hidden from him until a metaphor, firmly lodged in the material world, tugged out the flow of words that become the poem. A good poem is as much a delight of discovery to the reader as it is to the poet who created it. The more conscious the poetic process, usually, the worse the poetry. Even the polishing that goes on is an unconscious process. On rereading and rewriting, the poet goes over the work dozens if not hundreds of times and, in each reading, new words and arrangements of words suggest new directions and set off more feelings of correctness. The final "choice" of each word is based on a "sense of rightness" that is not logical or reasonable. It's an emotional choice. The writing of a poem is a purely emotional process during which the words come out of nowhere (usually triggered by an emotion laden metaphor that came out of nowhere, stimulated by something in the landscape, inner or outer). Unbidden, the words scramble out of the unconscious to pass swiftly across the screen of consciousness, unbidden and blindly scurrying to join the other words that call to them to come join their brothers already on the page.

My understanding of the poetic and novel-writing process is, in my declining years, further proven to me by the fact that the level of concentration from which arose my best poetry has fallen off. I haven't written a successful poem in years because the unconscious connections can't be called upon without the missing intense emotional concentration. Some of that may also be due to my emphasis on rational forms like working algebra problems. It's no accident, either, that many poets in the past have refused counseling because they were afraid it would harm their art by making them more conscious of the artistic process. Some of them ended in suicide. You might put Hemingway in that camp to name but one. The healthier I become, the more difficult to contact my muse which probably was a very nasty muse, something like the one that plagued Ernest Dowson. And, again, I did not have the courage to pursue that particular muse any farther, but wonder of wonders, the less emotional my approach to writing, the more I am able, far beyond anything I've ever experienced before, to explain and describe rational processes that escaped me before, yet, as always, the words flow out of nowhere and tell me what I'm thinking, rather than the other way around.

I hope all concerned will understand that the preceding arguments are ON TOPIC and have everything to do with my belief that when it comes to decision-making (specially at those higher creative levels that some of my friends on this site cite as proof that man is more free than I imagine he/she is) humankind is making the decisions first in the unconscious and the rationality comes afterwards. Even mathematicians say there are proofs more beautiful than others. I agree with that as a further proof of my argument. What is beauty other than a most personal emotional response to a woman, a book or a painting, a mathematical proof? Afterward, we try to justify our choices, but the choices are emotional and determined beforehand by the entire synaptic landscape of hidden connections beneath the rational world.

James Doerfel said:

I have no problem classifying both birds and humans as eukaryotes, nor calling the organ housed by a bird skull and the organ housed by the human skull both “brains,” nor placing human intelligence and bird intelligence on a continuum, nor relating bird behavior and human behavior to their eukaryotic organisms. I do wish to maintain that birds and humans are different species—they cannot viably mate. I recognize a different design in bird bodies and in human bodies, despite the fact that they are made from roughly the same stuff. [Given a cup of bird stuff (molecules) and a cup of human stuff I doubt you could tell me which one belonged to which.] I recognize different structures in their respective brains, including structures in human brains which never evolved in bird brains. I also wish to point out for the record that no bird yet discovered is a scientist or an Olympic competitor or a pantheist. And I account for a bird navigating by the stars and a human being composing a symphony by different explanatory matrixes—you know, like science does. Biologists speak of humans evolving a capacity for deliberative choice beyond that of any other known species, and they identify this capacity as the number-one reason for our species’ success on planet earth.
Regarding math, my philosophical aporia does not owe my distrust of mathematics but to the comparative absoluteness of my/our trust in mathematics. What makes math so &%$@ trustworthy… so decisive? I consider mobility, the ability to move up and down the various levels of complexity and emergence, the ability to pan in and pan out, to synthesize a coherent representation from multiple points of view, the benchmark of reason and the scientific method—you know the reason and method we Pantheists respect “as our best way of understanding nature and the Universe.” And, yes, we have the evolution of our bodies with their big brains—brains capable of reason and science—to thank for that.
George Thomas said:

James Doerfel said:

I can see no difference between a bird's flying by the stars and human's learning things to store in memory, memory being the storage capacities of synaptic patterns in the brain for recall when something in our environment compels those favorable memories back into the thin sliver of awareness. Memories, of course we all know, are stored with emotions and people without the capacity to feel (some of whom have been studied) that summons the connected thoughts, are unable to make decisions. (This last sentence is why I say that first comes the feeling (the instinct), then follows the thoughts that some of us believe are the impulse toward a behavior when, actually, it is the voiceless feeling that triggers the behavior, not the thought.) What we and birds do instinctively, we humans have learned the clever trick of discussing (ruminating, predicting) it afterwards. Step by step these improvements in learning capacities increased and at each step, the instinct preceded the thoughts about that capacity.

Jim, I can't help noticing that you express a distrust of the abstractions of mathematics but that in discussions of free will and/or consciousness, you do believe in going "up" several levels of abstraction and speak of "top down" reasoning toward the problems of consciousness and free will.

Title: THE LAST MAGICAL PROPERTY IN THE COSMOS

WAIT, PAUL, I AM A ROBOT, DARN IT. AND I CAN PROVE IT!

It’s now 9 am and as I awoke, my thought machine fired up. Here’s where we are now: I agree with Paul that my unconscious is part of the total package that is described as “me” and that my unconsciousness makes decisions for me. Therefore I must agree that I’m an object in the Cosmos that runs around making decisions without being conscious of making them (pause) except when reflecting upon those decisions afterward, sometimes within seconds of making them. These decisions are stored in memory for consideration at a later date when similar or different situations call my memories back into consciousness. Fair enough? And I have a memory of thinking, a memory that could be called the essence of consciousness because it allows my memories to loop back upon themselves and to become RECURSIVE.

Now… let’s construct a simple carpet vacuuming machine that guides itself. We already have them in existence. We attach to it a simple computer and speaker that fires up when you plug it in and bring it to LIFE. As it runs around vacuuming a carpet, it reports things like, “I’m vacuuming the carpet. Last week I vacuumed the carpet. Tomorrow, when I come to life again, you’ll see that I’ll start vacuuming the carpet again,” et cetera. Next, let’s connect these ruminations to the things Mr. Vacuum is actually doing. When it turns right, it says, “I just turned right.” When it hits an obstruction and can’t move, it says, “I can’t move.” When it backs up to free itself, it says, “You can’t keep a good vacuum down.” Et cetera. Further it stores in memory activities it did yesterday so that it tells you what it did the day before when you awake it to vacuum. And we might as well give it predictive powers so that as long it’s vacuuming a familiar carpet, it can do the same carpet, or household, repeatedly. Once Mr. Vacuum has done his job, he knows how to do it over and over.

I’ve just described a being that runs around making “unconscious” decisions that it can talk about. I’ve just described myself, minus my feelings. I more or less got that concept of robotics from Daniel Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained.

Next! Feelings are described in evolutionary psychology as adaptations for the regulation of the human machinery. So here’s what we add next. We attach a set of tubes and vials with chemicals and pumps and gages rigged into them. We’ll call them the limbic system. And we set the vacuum on an unfamiliar terrain. When the vacuum cleaner hits the end of its carpet world and senses the hardwood edge of a carpet (or a defining wall or object), it pauses, a pump fires up and sends chemicals from a full vial labeled CALM to an empty vial labeled PAIN, and Mr. Vacuum informs you it’s in PAIN. When the PAIN vial fills up, a switch is activated that gives Mr. Vacuum an order to turn right. It turns right but senses hardwood (or obstruction) again and the PAIN vial stays full. The computer automatically orders another direction, and Mr. Vacuum continues to try movements until one of the movements puts it in contact with carpet again at which time the PAIN vial returns its contents to the CALM vial while Mr. Vacuum “calmly” goes on its way vacuuming and, perhaps, if you’re a clever programmer, it hums Church In The Wildwood.

Of course Mr. Vacuum gives a running commentary of everything it is experiencing and doing. It can also be storing all this activity in memory for referral next vacuuming day. Soon, it will have memorized a new household or carpet. So… I’ve successfully added intervening mechanisms for the regulation of vacuuming into Mr. Vacuum’s circuitry. The machine is “feeling” its way through its life and talking about it. I claim, therefore, that I’m a robot just like Mr. Vacuum only I’ve got what is called LIFE. No one has to plug me in, but, wait a minute (pause) I wasn’t plugged in myself until my father plugged into my mother, was I? So I’ve been plugged in too, just like Mr. Vacuum, only it takes me a lifetime to finish my carpet.

Now all that’s left to do is define LIFE in purely material terms, define myself as a collection of matter that is arranged in such a way as to give an observer of my behavior the illusion that I’ve got this MAGICAL PROPERTY called LIFE. And since these other computers (people) need this capacity for projection to recognize my behavior as their behavior so that they can react (find the carpet) correctly for their survival, they give themselves the idea that they LIVE.

Are we, indeed, robots that have come to “life” (just like in science fiction), become cognizant of self and invented the concept of consciousness to describe the process of recursion? I think so. That’s right, we are matter through and through and there is no magical property of life that a power greater than ourselves has bestowed upon us. It’s rocks all the way down. And that's what I, as a naturalist pantheist, understand my condition to be in relation to the Cosmos. "Yep! He's got rocks in his head," some may say, but is that true?

MORE DISCUSSIONS FROM THE PANTHEISM WEBSITE

Okay, Paul, it's 3 am and I woke up thinking about this (damn, I hate this part of thinking), and I got this much. Are you saying that if my unconscious processes make the decisions, then, technically, "I" am making the decisions even if the decisions are unconscious decisions?

Okay, I got that, but then I moved to the problem of determinism. Do I make decisions or does the environment make me make my decisions? Then I had to ask if my choices are "either/or decisions" in that the environment offers my "synaptic self" (LeDeux?) choices that my unconscious processes select from among? Or are my decisions merely "reactions" to the environment and, thus, not free at all?

Then I was really splitting hairs, lying there in the dark. How about this? Those choices that are determined by my genetic makeup are my "free" choices because they lie within me? Any choices made by environmentally influenced distortions of my synaptic self are choices "determined" by forces outside myself and, thus, not free?

But, now, I think, as I wrote the last sentence, probably determined by that last sentence, "My genes are handed to me by my parents. I have no choice in that so even my "genetic choices" (for the sake of expression) are predetermined!"

I just thought also that I'm trying to dethrone reason from its mighty high perch in human affairs. Perhaps, it's rationality I'm quibbling with. And in the term "reason" I don't include the methodology of science because science is tightly linked to the world outside the self whereas all these rational arguments we are having involve the arrangement and rearrangement of words and definitions in order to explain to the unconscious what it's doing and to try and get other beings to see and agree with our inner selves, with our conscious selves.

YES, WE ALL ARE ROBOTS

I think I see something critical and essential to the discussion in the concept of emergence. From my viewpoint there is a direct, physical causality that links me in this present moment all the way back to the Big Bang. I am at the end of a chain of successful "changes" in the physical world that go all the way back through species to and through the first organic single-celled being which all brains agree to call living into the changes that preceded that arrangement. Just because different arrangements of matter act in ways that seem different (emergent) from what came before, does not mean that the chain of physical causality has been broken.

There is a past vision I have had when I imagined myself as not different from a mountain, a tree or an atom but as just a collection of non-living chemical and electrical impulses organized so as to act in such a way as to be called "life-like" by all the physical brains interacting with and perceiving this arrangement of atoms. The body which is me is just a collection of inorganic materials, all arranged and working to represent the affect of what other brains have agreed to define as "life" and "thought". In short, there is no such thing as "life". Life is completely and totally material, turtles all the way down. That vision hit me quite strongly, early on, when I was just starting to explore this fascinating world of evolutionary psychology. I know almost for sure that this act of imagination came to me as I was reading Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett in the passages where he explains robotic behavior so as one can interpret is as "conscious" behavior, indicating "life". I believe that that moment of imagination has kept me pretty close to a physical explanation of life all this long time since. Perhaps that is the distinction that keeps some of us passing in the dark.

If nothing else, my vision of reality eliminates the difficulty of defining and explaining the emergence of life, since life itself is just a definition for a certain arrangement of materials in the material Universe.

SUPREME COURT VICTORY FOR ATHEISM

Spread the happy word! The decision by the five activist and conservative mis-judgers that a crucifix is not a special religious symbol and can, therefore, be displayed in any public place is actually in agreement with atheist thought. We agree with them in seeing the cross as an empty symbol that stands for a non-event in the history of humanity. The crucifix and the crucifixion it symbolizes means nothing. Don't we agree with that? Of course we do. The cross is an empty symbol standing for nothing. The cross is just a cultural icon like a smiley face and Uncle Sam pointing at you, like Mormon bigamists, like McDonald's arches and apple pie, like the now famous Mustang Ranch in Nevada and going postal. The cross is just an ordinary cultural symbol which has no intrinsic meaning and stands for no religious beliefs. We need to thank those justices for tearing the meaning of the crucifixion down to the nothing we know it is.

I invite you all to embellish on this beginning while asking yourself if those judicial activists are really our allies and had to come up with this very tricky decision that seems to make Christianity a semi-official state religion but which really supports the Constitutional separation of church and state or did they just outsmart themselves as so many pompous a-holes often do.