PANDEMIA

to put today’s pandemic in perspective i think it helps to compare it to the last one, the nineteen-eighteen-nineteen influenza just over a hundred years ago. at that time the earth contained one and a half billion humans. the number of people infected with the virus amounted to one in three persons, or about 500 million; the number of deaths was around 50 million. if the figures are adjusted to reflect the present human population of earth, about 7.5 billion, the numbers we can expect from this pandemic look like 2.5 billion persons infected and about 250 million deaths. that would be more deaths than were caused by all the wars of history, and this in just two years.

there is only one reason to presume our outcomes will be much less damaging than these projections and that is our vastly increased knowledge in molecular biology, medicine and science in general. we have a vaccine, something impossible to imagine a hundred years ago. the risk of death in taking the vaccine seems to be running at about one per million. the risk of infection for not having (or taking) the vaccine seems to be about one in thirty.

the fact that some people are trying to equate these risks represents one of the most mindless and stupid blunders in human history. and if large numbers of people refuse to be vaccinated, they represent a considerable risk to the general wellbeing of all the humans of earth, for now and the forseeable future.

when humans fail it is not likely to be a technical failure. we are great at technology. the errors that threaten us are always errors of understanding and intention, philosohical errors. for that the only cure is a more thoughtful and honest education, rather than the indoctrination that so often masquerades as education in this world of competing nation-states.

humans have not come to dominate earth because they learned to compete. all animals do that. humans have come to dominate this planet because they learned to cooperate in increasignly subtle and elaborate ways, and that trend will absolutely have to continue if we are to prevent the next devastation awaiting us on this little blue orb — global warming. it is past time to indulge in nation-states that seek to dominate others — or dominant individuals either. in that light one could view the present pandemic as a rehearsal of what is so shortly to come, a world more ordered and harmonious than humans have so far demonstrated their ability to sustain. and without an early and thorough grounding in logic and a discussion of all forms of prejudice, including especially groupthink and confirmation bias, i don’t think we can do it.

THE TROUBLE

the trouble with religion is that today as always it treats people in the aggregate  and that is not illuminating. what people are is really interesting mammals, animals of earth easily confused and then overwhelmed by egoistic thought.

but hey, though the so-called intellectual and spiritual musings of man are tainted with an embarrassment of ego, confirmation bias and flawed observation, they are not the culmination of human effort or the embodiment of rational understanding but merely a waypoint on a continuing journey which at length will move past errors in favour of evidence-based  observation, both at the individual level and finally, collectively.

 

SEPARATENESS

the human being is not a walled construction. the asymmetry created by the membrane separating any animal from matter outside itself is porous, permeable, and it is necessarily, essentially so. the really tiresome philosophical notion of separateness, of isolation, that inhabits nearly all of so-called modern philosophy, unravels like an ego-driven useless tangled ball of string in the face of simple logical questioning. yes, there is ‘me’. and yes, there is ‘everything not me’. but ‘me’ includes the collected surviving strategies from the past, inhabiting us from conception, integral to us through our genetic inheritance; also our physical nature and presence, including not only our bodies but much of our perception, behavior and thought. the whole notion of an individual is in a larger sense a rather dubious proposition, and along with that realization should come a serious uneasiness about free will and the division of actions into intentional and inherent. 

in this quest for singular uniqueness we are attempting to punch way above our pay-grade and it will never produce anything better than this tangled ball of string we presently still call 'philosophy'.

 excerpt: WHAT THE MAN IS

he couldnt help it he felt proud of her. the eagle was a thief intent on stealing the big fish caught square by the skill of the osprey. he knew that was the skill of the eagle, that it took courage at least equal to the osprey’s to take it from him. and could the eagle invent another way? so he wouldnt refuse the eagle. what about the courage of the osprey’s mate to dive on a dangerous foe? there was no chance he would refuse her. but why values? why an order? a hierarchy? why did he favor the vultures, in comparison to eagles so patient, so polite? wasnt that just a tactic? to avoid danger? werent they all just expressing their genes? and he who had long ago given up killing any animal, even his cabin houseflies, out of some human form of respect, how did he make evolutionary sense of that? for he believed absolutely that darwin above all had got it right. so what genes of his was that expressing? or was it possible to step beyond? to perhaps employ the greater information stored in the memory of his experience, to override genetic expression. but even the ability to do that might be just an expression of another genetic capability, so that free will, if not intentionality, would once again have to be questioned. the idea of islands, of each man being an untouchable island, began to chafe. more and more he had observed his thoughts and actions to be largely genetic. and where free will really ran into trouble was when one faced that influence honestly. it blurred the line most uncomfortably between inherent actions and intentional actions. it could be argued that dna did not really belong to us, we didnt initially and could never during our lifetime choose anything about it, it came down to us as merely the collected surviving strategies of our species and what that really led to was not a discussion of free will at all but a larger and more radical discussion of what exactly constituted an individual. this individual, upon which the moral and governing principles of our modern western states was based, was itself a fiction. there really was no such thing — a person existing unbegotten, without issue from other people or the collected experience of the past, both externally and most importantly, internally — genetically.

WITHOUT ENEMIES

i have spent a great many of my adult years to cultivate a life without enemies. i can’t imagine why it is not a common path. confronting life directly rather than through association seems to me a simple and truthful proposition. there is me, a physical manifestation of the cosmos, and there is everything not me, also physical manifestations of the cosmos. 

what earthly good would the fracture of this simple unity provide?