The final word on John Edward

No, this post isn't dedicated towards ridiculing John Edward's beliefs. That'd be easy to do.

OF COURSE the dead don't actually 'exist', much less communicate things (except metaphorically through the evidence that their decaying bodies provide to the forensics!). I was more interested in the question of whether John Edward actually believed that he could speak to the dead. This question is now, perhaps, answered. So is he a liar preying on fools, or just a fool?

I think the Sydney Morning Herald's "Good Weekend" section provides a clue. In the weekly column, they ask various people the same questions every week. When John Edward was asked what his earliest memory was, he stated that he remembers his entire one-year birthday party vividly.
The problem, of course, is that this is entirely impossible. One-year-olds simply don't have the necessary areas of the brain developed to commit what they experience at their one-year birthday party in to their long-term-memory.

So what stands out is that Edwards is the kind of guy who can easily convince himself of that found to be logically or empirically impossible. Of course, it is glaringly more improbable, absurd to convince yourself that you can talk to the dead than that you could remember events from when you were a one-year-old. But we can just put him in the idiot basket, which is a lot more generous than what you could otherwise say about him.

Quote

I don't like the word 'evil', partly because of the heavily supernatural and religious connotations it has (I prefer a scientific, analytical approach to studying the various problems plaguing humanity and think we learn much more this way!), but I like this quote:

"Evil is humanity turned against itself and so conflict and contradiction are fundamental to its nature".

I find the statement quite applicable in our modern judgement of Communism. Communism sought, through brutally-enforced naivety, to bend humanity to behave more altruistically than we are perhaps naturally inclined to. This could lead us to have contempt for, and ultimately to hate ourselves and to be willing to commit atrocities to improve what mankind is.

A Human Being Died That Night

...a book By Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela about her interviews with Eugene de Kock, the so-called "Prime Evil" killer of apartheid South Africa.
Highly recommended. She gets in to her subjects head extraordinarily well, apart from some incidents in which I think she doesn't understand because she's not male and doesn't understand male sexuality.

Anyway my comment about the book for readers: South Africans tried to pretend that nothing was wrong after Apartheid. By jailing the big guys, they tried to isolate the dog behaviour to just a few people, and so the blame was concentrated rather than diffused, where it belonged. What was really happening though, was that the population was disowning its popular leaders, the ones who did all the dirty work which the rest of the population was grateful for.

Blackwater

How did it get to the stage where instead of the Army or the Police doing domestic security or invading other countries / defending ones own country, we now have private companies like Blackwater waging wars, and being paid 5x what regular Army servicepeople would be paid to do so?

It is just so incredibly dodgy that you have private companies now being enlisted to defend the Army or a country's VIPs, and you have civilians of other countries being killed by private security contractors, and legally, this is all acceptable. These dodgy-ass motherfuckers also don't have the same rules apply to them than do other registered killers.

Counterfeiting

Reading about how sophisticated the counterfeiting operation has become for many electronics products. The thing is though, if these products really are practically so identical to the real ones (leading manufacturers to have to use high-tech methods to leave signature traces, like a sort of serial number), then is this such a problem? I mean, if the counterfeits of say a computer processor are so professional that they're otherwise indistinguishable from the real thing unless the owners etches a serial number on the chip in nano-sized writing.....then perhaps as consumers we should be happy to be using counterfeits. If it's still profitable to be doing this, then perhaps the investment that the company made in its innovation process wasn't so great, or perhaps something which others can easily do shouldn't be protected by such strong patents. And the counterfeiter is playing a role in driving down prices through enhanced supply. Obviously when it comes to counterfeiting cash, this is a slightly different matter, though.

Everyone says I sold out

People say others have sold themselves out to this or that.
Can't one buy oneself back?
We use money to buy time, affection, fame, and other things. Not that I am planning to, but why can't we buy ourselves back the freedom to create a personality, a lifestyle, a change of job, a change of perspectives?

The Anti-Philosopher Philosophy

I'll be doing a series of postings about my growing hostility towards the concepts created by many philosophers over the millenia.
I'll take issue with a number of words [including consciousness, rational, immoral, justice, fairness, freedom, subjective, reality, belief] and use my scorn for these words to build a larger case against the practitioners of various philosophical traditions, the Western analytic one being that with which I am most familiar.
The aforementioned words are all exceptionally vague 'suitcase' words, as are their duals; unconscious, irrational, moral, unjust etc. They are supposed to refer to a lot but ultimately lead us in to blind alleys.

Take the word consciousness - we are not 'conscious', there is no single, first-person experience. Consciousness is only mysterious if you fail to realise that it refers to a lot of different things which are simultaneously occurring all of which we have (confusingly, for serious thinkers, but usefully, for laymen) called consciousness. The whole idea of their being a single Experiencer inside our brains which is conscious is a throwback to the idea of a soul, and indeed, the masses aren't able to think beyond simple concepts like the soul or consciousness. If we examine the concept of consciousness it is clear why the concept of soul was simple, irreducible, and shrouded in mystery, eternally so; and yet it seemed like an indispensable concept. However, if we are to be smart about it, we realise that there is no single element which experiences the irreducible sensation of redness, or the irreducible smell of garlic. There is no singular entity which writes a novel, has a child, lives life, though we may name it. There is no Me and no You...except for a conceptual Me, and the concept of there being a single Me or You breaks down under closer examination. Just like there are instruments which can print on a piece of paper that it detects red light incoming, our brain is [note that I'm using a metaphor here, not a simile!!] simply thousands of serial and parallel instruments for detecting light, instruments for talking, instruments for pumping blood, instruments for self-repair. Like all other machines, we're simply a bunch of inputs and outputs with much computation and digestion in between. What you could call "I" is a compound of instruments, parts of machines which can perform a variety of functions from self-reporting errors (it could be emotional issues, or stomach pains) to writing poetry and solving mathematical problems. The 'first-person experience' is a nonsense concept if taken seriously, and a useful communicative tool if understood properly. The dualism here is conscious vs non-conscious, and people who think that creatures are either conscious or nonconscious must of course struggle with the question of whether or not a spider is conscious. Those who then propose that consciousness comes in varying degrees have understood the situation slightly better, but have failed to realise that this demonstrates that consciousness simply refers to the simultaneous operation of many processes, and different machines have different levels of complexity. It is not the case that consciousness is a good, unfairly derided concept, which isn't invalidated by the grey areas at the periphery of its applicability, for instance, to a spider. It is that consciousness is a poor concept, which is better replaced by understanding the components of this concept, and realising that some of the components of what we call consciousness are present in some machines, and not in others. There is no mystery to consciousness, none whatsoever! The only problem here is the inability of a large number of people to think and speak of themselves as machines, to understand how they are constructed, and to have some knowledge of what different parts of their bodies, especially their brains, do. When you learn to, and practise, understanding yourself as a machine, there is absolutely no confusion whatsoever left within the concept of consciousness. Philosophers run in to the same problems that anyone from any discipline does if they take too seriously the concepts that they have created. People somehow stunningly forget a very basic truth about language; we attempt to segment the world in to discrete packages, that is, by naming things. That's all well and good, it is essential for communication and for practical living; however, it introduces an essential inaccuracy - the world is continuous and not composed of categories, nor does nature appear to operate with respect to the categories we have chosen. This presents a myriad of difficulties, but it is amusing that therefore people should be truly troubled about whether or not something belongs within one category or the other and quibble endlessly about it. This inaccuracy isn't so evident provided that we stick to basic categories. Or of course, as scientists do, we can form specialist clubs of people who use and understand technical categories, which can be adapted over time. This necessitates that others will not understand the concept, and they will continue to use other, older words, which are less successful in communicating certain things. There's little confusion over what is a tree, but more about what is a reptile, and more about what is a theory. Nobody is suggesting that we should stop naming things, however, one has to be able to stand back and be able to judge how useful a concept is, and it is scientists' disapproval of words like consciousness which gives rise to their eventual split from philosophy.

Observatory

Sydneysiders, go to the Observatory. Me and the gf went last night, the clouds cleared up just in time, and it was great.
It's an awesome thing to see, amongst other things, Saturn and its moons (it looks exactly as it is depicted in junior science books, you can see its rings). They've got a telescope whose motor is controlled by a computer program; and the astronomer just clicks on things that he can show you on that night.


Random fact; did you know that when galaxies collide and swallow each other up, the individual planets/suns hardly ever actually collide? It just screws up their orbits and stuff!

Started Work

So I'm learning to become a market maker. The learning curve is steep, the pace furious, and the work challenging and interesting. It's consuming other aspects of my life at the moment, but it's a great opportunity, an excellent company and workmates, and I'm enjoying it. I did write a lot of posts which were only saved a while ago, but it should be a while again, probably a few weeks, before I start actively blogging again.

Emotions

Are neither good nor bad. The concept of an emotion being negative or positive was a stupid and destructive concept.
Emotions are our motivation engines. Yes, we are sometimes motivated to do things which may or may not be in our best interest, if you can clearly define what is in one's best interest. Some might say, for instance, that rage is a destructive emotion as it may motivate us to commit violent acts, and land us in jail (plus all the damage to the victim(s)). But all emotions have grades and purposes, and trying to prevent them is stupid; we can only manage and control their effects on our behaviour. Only when we succeed in crushing our "negative" emotions do we realise what function they served, and allow those emotions back in to our lives. The human species needs rage, jealousy, depression, resentment and hatred to function. Obviously, our judgements on the appropriateness of emotions depends upon the context in which they are experienced, but there is room for our darker sides as well as the lighter sides, so those stupid religious radio stations which only emphasise being positive in reaction to anything that happens are just confusing people.