Macbraughton
Culture – Creativity – ConflictWhat I Thunk
Posted onJune 16, 2010What if I just told you what I thunk
Didn’t hide behind the lies and all the junk
That unfiltered flow covered all my pages
And my minds agony burst out in rages
Would you listen?
Would you run?
Would you show me how it’s done?
When you watch my soul come undone, unspun, in public, in the sun?
How fruitless is this earth
When sterility is our girth
And senility is our plight
As we look into the long dark night
I’m enraged and disengaged as I age inside my cage
As the sands of time flow faster
I race towards my Master
My Muse
My Light
The Source of my delight
The One who always knows
All those things I don’t disclose
To all the yo’s and the swine
Who take my pearls and whine
Then plot and design
To silence my divine
Energy | Karma
It’s my life, my Dharma
That they be hatin’
So they waitin’
Till I slip up
Then they be wastin’
Me if they can
Or a friend I call “my man”
That’s the plan
And as it stands
I don’t think I’ll ever get out of this place alive
Will you?
So while I’m here
I’m gonna give it
Gonna be sincere
Gonna live it
Stop hidin’ my light
‘neath that bushel
Not tryin’ to push y’all
Just remindin’
That those earthly lights may be blindin’
But they neva can compare
To those lights in the air
Those heavenly hosts
Be aware
They there
Ain’t goin’ no where
Till the new day comes to wipe it all clean
Know what I mean?
Look, I’m not tryin’ to be apocolyptic
But let’s just say,
It’s hard not to get cryptic
When we lookin’ at that crazy shit on the screen
While we hear
Playing in our heads
“Life is but a dream”
Or an illusion
What is it?
I don’t know
But I won’t dis it
I’ll just kiss it
Don’t wanna miss it
This may be our only chance
To bliss it
The Future of Reason
Posted onFebruary 14, 2008The Science Studio: Interview with Daniel Dennett
This video was taken during a conference of scientists, philosophers, and other forward thinkers called Enlightenment 2.0. It is kind of long for an internet video (1hr 19min) but well worth spending the time to watch if you can. It raises many questions and suggests many answers.
I first read Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea a little over a year ago and have admired him ever since. One of the main themes of that book, which is much in line with Richard Dawkins’ Selfish Gene, is that Charle’s Darwin’s theory of evolution is possibly the most important concept invented/discovered by humans in our entire history. The reason lies quite simply in its explanatory power.
What I admire so much about Dennett is his rigorous approach to all phenomena through the lens of evolution, and his persistent optimism that reasonable explanations can be (and have been and are being) discovered along this path. He is opposed to “magical thinking” or what he calls skyhooks and consistently shows us that many things previously unexplainable to humans of the past are no longer beyond our comprehension. We need only to tap into the explanatory power of the theory of evolution.
It is not magical leaps, but baby steps, cranes that have gotten us and everything else to where we are now, i.e “the cumulative effects of incremental change over time”. When the timescale is long enough, what appears to be miraculous is suddenly exposed as a natural process.
The theory of evolution itself is a magnificent key that explains and unlocks hitherto sealed mysteries and there are no realms off limits to its cypher. The impact of this is evident within so many different areas of scientific investigation, looking back, it is a hallmark of the twentieth century. How many things which we take for granted now are its fruit?
I can see a recursive process happening around the application of the theory of evolution within human civilization which is increasing our abilities in language and conceptualization, freeing us from the shrugging shoulders of our ancestors in our abilities to describe what was believed to be beyond understanding only a generation ago. We are still at an early stage in this process, though few of those who went before could have dreamed at the things we now count as knowledge.
Of particular interest to me personally, and Dennett as well (which he deals with in his most recent book Breaking the Spell) is religion as a natural phenomena. This approach finds much opposition because the very nature of religious thought places beliefs and faith beyond the pale of reasonable discourse. Fortunately, many denizens of the twenty-first century, even some who would consider themselves religious, are beginning to see the danger of this attitude: It is blindness, it is madness.
Proposition: Religion should be examined in light of the processes by which it has arisen among humans , not necessarily by the purposes it purports itself to serve. Belief for the sake of belief should be discredited in religion as it is in all other realms of human discourse.
Outcome: If this path is pursued on a large scale, the future of reason is quite bright indeed.
I believe…
Posted onOctober 10, 2007A friend recently asked:
“What do you believe?”
It’s not an easy question to answer.
Partly because one of the main premises of my belief system is uncertainty.
Randomness…
I believe that…
The universe is mostly random.
The universe is made up of energy.
Energy can neither be created or destroyed (The first law of thermodynamics).
Energy & mass (or matter, i.e. our physical bodies) are interchangeable. (As is stated in Einstein’s famous equation e = mc², that is energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light to the second power. It is this principle that underlies the harnessing of massive nuclear energy from tiny atoms.)
The universe is infinite…
Therefore any possible state of energy/matter that can exist does exist somewhere in the universe.
Where we find ourselves at this moment is the state in which the energy/matter in this area of the universe happens to be in.
Because energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only change state, in essence the universe is eternal.
The universe is eternally transforming into an infinite number of possibilities, one of which we happen to exist in and be conscious of at this moment.
The determining factor of what energy state that our area of the universe will change into next can be influenced by us, but is mostly random, and largely beyond our individual control.
Then there is the platonic heaven…
This is the universe of abstract objects.
Somewhere in relation to our physical universe (exactly how they are related is a matter of much debate) is the universe of abstract objects. The most familiar of which would probably be the numbers ( i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4…)
Now, there is a big difference between a numeral and a number.
The symbols “5″ and “V” are both numerals representing the same number.
The number five exists in what some have called the platonic heaven, the universe of abstract objects, outside of time and space.
It is a universe of concepts…
I believe that the universe of abstract objects is just as real as the universe we are able to observe with our senses and is also full of as many infinities of possibilities as the universe that we inhabit.
———————-
Now, my problem with God is…
He (she, it) is unnecessary to explain why things are.
Being is not of necessity derived from God. A suitable explanation is that the universe itself is eternal. The universe is. No “Let there be light” in the literal sense. The light has always existed, at one point it was electrons or frog skin instead of photons.
Everything is connected… quantum mechanics calls this phenomenon entanglement.
Events we attribute to Providence are really cases of Serendipity.
Randomness explains why good things happen to bad people and why bad things happen to good people.
Randomness explains why one person’s prayers seem to be answered and another’s are not.
Randomness through the lens of evolutionary biology explains why human beings have to find a reason and purpose in everything. It is a survival mechanism. It is unconscious and insipid.
As a metaphor, I am not completely against belief in God. God is that which is beyond our understanding, God is that which we cannot explain, God is the unknowable or unfathomable.
So much of what we call God though does not fit into those categories. So much of what we call God is really us just trying to make ourselves feel better or justify hiding from reality. God did it! Can’t argue with God. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away…
No! God isn’t a person sitting up in Heaven directing things according to his whim. Things don’t always happen for a reason, most events are random and we look for a reason afterwards and the easiest thing to do is just blame it on God.
Of this I am certain: that certainty is a dubious concept.
We don’t know what is going to happen next. That is why the Bible was written long after the events it described happened. That’s why all religions have to retrofit their theology.
I am against superstition in all of its forms. There is no such thing as an idea or object that is beyond reproach. The greatest power we possess is to question.
I believe in Beauty, Truth and Goodness.
Let all else fade away.
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