Ian's Philosophy

philosophy for the love of it

  • Arsehole theory

    Out of the last year with one theory, into the new year with my next theory.

    Each group of people has an equal number of arseholes (3-5% seems reasonable). So each nation will have a roughly equal number of arseholes. I have no idea if arseholes are more common in men than women. It’s definitely more noticeable in men because they use more force. Women I think have less desire for hierarchy, which by my definition makes them less likely to be arseholes, but since we can’t make a decent guess less just assume equal. I’m a good believer in equality.

    Arseholes want power over others. They’ll do this small scale when they beat their wife, or manipulate others for their benefit. Arseholes want hierarchy. Hierarchy, in almost all but the most basic forms, is the problem. Arseholes want to be king of the world – eh, Boris?.

    The question is where does your system put the arseholes? Does it give them money or influence? Who do you trust less – billionaires or politicians? (see Elon Musk’s Twitter poll).

    • Capitalism – gives the arseholes power over money (which in turn gives them power over people).
    • Socialism – gives the arseholes power over people (which in turn gives them power over money).
    • Anarchy – gives them neither, but then they are free to create chaos in the system. Slowly create worse hierarchies in the system.

    Capitalism and socialism are probably the best you’ll get if you want stable hierarchies. Capitalism works when there is no extra profit to be made, when there are lots of small companies competing. Anarchy is an ideal, but a dangerous ideal that can be easily corrupted.

    Borders are only there because arseholes in power claimed the land and then fought over it. Its the tragedy of the commons on a global scale. If we could eliminate hierarchies to all but the most basic, we could eliminate borders.

    Only when the desire of love can overcome the desire of being an arsehole can we keep the arseholes under control.

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  • Paradise theory

    Let’s assume that the earth is paradise (Heaven in other words). Its an oasis of life in the middle of billions of light years of death.

    So when we talk about global problems, we’re talking about paradise problems. Or indeed, trouble in paradise.

    Gaia theory says that paradise is alive. It maintains its temperature and living conditions through many feedback loops.

    All home owners, own their own piece of paradise. This paradise is our heaven, its where we go when we die. Our molecules break down and join with others.

    The trees are the angels. The mud and the mycelium where you go to meet your loved ones. The good and the bad all end up in the same place. Maybe the mycelium picks up the memories of the dead and dishes out revenge.

    But it’s all here. This is paradise. Look after it, cause you’re here til the end of the earth.

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  • Spirit of the teacher

    Carrying on from Scientific observers, shepherds and messiahs, here’s Maria Montessori’s take:

    But let us seek to implement in the soul the self-sacrificing spirit of the scientist with the reverent love of the disciple of Christ, and we shall have prepared the spirit of the teacher.

    – The Montessori Method, p13, Maria Montessori

    Teaching is where religion and science meet.

    Happy Christmas one and all!

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  • Antidote

    In Buddhism they have a concept of antidotes.

    Klaus Barbie, was truly a Satan walking amongst us. But he had an antidote. Marcel Marceau. The Butcher of Lyon and a butcher’s son from Strasbourg who went on to be a world famous mime artist.

    Marcel Marceau ended up in Lyon where Barbie carried out his horrific deeds. Marceau helped Jewish children escape to Switzerland, using his mime and entertainment skills to keep them calm. Klaus Barbie sent children to the concentration camps. There was a film Resistance released during corona times dramatising some of the work that Marcel Marceau did in Lyon. It’s hard to tell how much is true and I’m quite sure Barbie and Marceau never met each other.

    Barbie did far more damage than Marceau could ever repair, but the world remembers Marceau. When you take the inspiration of Marceau and expand on it, then you can reach a level where there’s so much antidote in the system that Barbie would never find a place to employ his form of evil.

    Marceau helped in a further, small, way through the modification of French children’s passports to make them appear younger that 18 at which age they would be sent to work camps. This is a truly beautiful way of helping. It doesn’t require on-the-spot bravery, it is one simple artist doing what he can to help. It doesn’t make him a hero, but it shows that we can all do something to help in our own way.

    Resistance is one of the finest movements that came out of WWII. For if Anne Frank was betrayed, there were many more that risked their lives in helping them, and yet more that knew about them but kept quiet.

    These small acts of kindness are what I hope work their way through each and every country. Like Marceau’s modification of passports, the acts of resistance can be so small that the risks of being caught are tiny. It’s turning a blind eye, not listening to a conversation talking about someone in hiding. Loving thy neighbour, even when that neighbour is of a different religion, colour, class and not even that nice.

    This art of love is the antidote to hatred.

    You could go from love to hate. But you cannot, at the same time, toward the same object, the same person, want to harm and want to do good. You cannot, in the same gesture, shake hand and give a blow.
    – Matthieu Ricard’s TED Talk @12:01 in the video

    He clarifies some of these antidotes:

    • Benevolence, loving kindness against hatred.
    • Rejoicing compared to jealousy.
    • A kind of sense of inner freedom as opposite to intense grasping and obsession.

    These are small acts, and each time you practice one you reduce the other. These acts also directly impact those around us. You are the father or mother of your family. You can’t save the world, but you can practice loving kindness, rejoicing and the sense of inner freedom and see how your family respond.

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  • Keep It Simple

    Occam’s razor (from FOLDOC).

    The English philosopher, William of Occam (1300-1349) propounded Occam’s Razor:

    Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

    (Latin for “Entities should not be multiplied more than necessary”). That is, the fewer assumptions an explanation of a phenomenon depends on, the better it is.

    Or simple is better than complex. But also it’s about assumptions, the less assumptions the better.

    Now because FOLDOC is from the Imperial Computing lab in London, they also link it with the same thought I had, the Keep It Simple Stupid principle. The KISS principle is simpler to remember than Occam’s razor, thus, by Occam’s razor I now rename Occam’s razor to KISS. Or maybe ‘Keep it simple’, then there’s one less acronym in the world.

    If we’re going to have philosophy for everyone, the language has to be in terms that everyone understands. There is of course beauty here too in this simplicity as poets and writers show us.

    “Perfection is reached not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to subtract.”

    – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

    Here for example is simple Wikipedia’s page for Occam’s razor.

    The explanation that requires the fewest assumptions is usually correct.

    Their Latin translation comes as: “More things should not be used than are necessary“. Also “Occam’s razor only applies when the simple explanation and complex explanation both work equally well.”, and “the sentence is not really about things but about explanations”.

    Perhaps I should modify my version to:

    A simple explanation is better than a complex one.

    Ptolemy also described it nice and simply: “explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible”.

    There is a tension between ‘less assumptions’ and ‘simple’. Making assumptions can simplify things, but can also lead to worse explanations.

    But for now I’ll just stick to ‘Keep it simple’ instead of ‘Occam’s razor’.

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  • 100 million years

    I like to think about time, especially how short-sighted we are.

    It took “only” 100 or so million years to create life on earth (from Lex Fridman vs Andrej Karpathy @13:26).

    Reading about How fast is gravity, the Neutron Star collision that enabled us to detect the speed of graviational waves a few years ago was 130 million light years away.

    So in the time that the light got to our earth, earth had formed and create life.

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  • The sins of love

    Most of the seven deadly sins are defined by Dante Alighieri (c. 1264–1321) as perverse or corrupt versions of love; lust, gluttony, and greed are all excessive or disordered love of good things; and wrath, envy, and pride are perverted love directed toward others’ harm. The sole exception is sloth, which is a deficiency of love. In the seven deadly sins are seven ways of eternal death. Pride is often thought to be the father and promoter of all the other sins.

    — Seven deadly sins, Wikipedia

    I’ve heard about this often enough, but not how they are all related to love.

    • perverse love of good things: lust, gluttony, greed
    • perverse love for others’ harm: wrath, envy, pride
    • deficiency of love: sloth

    The love for other’s harm is relatively clearly Tolstoy’s law of violence.

    Love of good things is perhaps a health issue? They’re seen as the ‘lower levels of hell’, a bit of lust never did me any harm, nudge nudge, wink wink.

    Deficiency of love isn’t really a sin, just a shame. At least a sloth won’t do as much damage when infected by wrath, envy and pride.

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  • The separation of church and religion

    The Christian religion should be definitively split from the Christian church. If not in real life (although I wish this too), it should definitely be split in any discussions.

    I was reading about Thomas Huxley vs Bishop of Oxford in 1860. Huxley wasn’t attacking religion, he was attacking the church. We keep ending up in an argument against religion when it’s against the church. It’s the religion that was shoved down our throats by the church that we rebel against. The various churches that claim they follow Jesus Christ should come up with their own names. Let’s start calling all these different Christian churches ‘a bunch of blokes who read the bible’, or ‘The bible book club of Timbuktu’.

    Listening to Stephen Fry talking to Jordan Peterson, both who know vastly more about religion and the church than I do, yet they make the same slip. They’re talking about the switch from the sacrifice of animals and children that migrated to the ultimate sacrifice of God himself (cheers Jesus). This is good. However, Stephen Fry then directly moves on to talking about how this was a bad thing because regular people were then told to sacrifice their happiness now for life in heaven.

    there is a story to be told from religion stopping ordinary citizens from having any say in their life and their world

    – Stephen Fry @42:30

    Right there… Stephen Fry has switched from religion to the church. Religion didn’t stop ordinary citizens. The church did. The church used religion, but religion don’t abuse people rapperspriests do.

    The bloke I follow who read the bible is Tolstoy. I guess that bloke the pope probably read the bible too, but I just don’t want him telling me whether I can wear a condom or not. I don’t particularly want Tolstoy to tell me whether to wear a condom or not either. You go find your bloke/bird who read the bible, I hope they’re nice. Or read it for yourself and make your own mind up, but again don’t assume that you can then advise me about my condom habits.

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  • Delegation

    In a more detailed teaching, Martin Luther explains that God and government are not constrained by the commandment not to kill, but that God has delegated his authority in punishing evildoers to the government.

    – Lutheranism version of ‘Thou shalt not kill’

    Lets repeat…

    God has delegated his authority in punishing evildoers to the government

    OMG

    These men from history who are not seen as prophets (direct telephone with God) seem to know an awful lot about what God says.

    I would like to say that I have just as much knowledge about what God thinks (none) and according to me God does not delegate any of his authority to the Government. Government is not a not a form of God. It’s a bunch of people that like organisation and power. There is nothing holy about Government.

    (How is it that I keep coming across ‘Martin Luther’ and yet he professes such things as saying Government is as Good as God. I keep hoping people are talking about Martin Luther King, but no.)

    What Luther did agree on is that the Pope isn’t the delegate of God either.

    Can we, please, somehow, clear up this mess where random men decide that they know what God says/wants.

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  • Sea of thermodynamics

    Reading about Ernest Shackleton stuck in a boat (the James Caird)…

    … the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which men never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated.

    — Alfred Lansing, Endurance p.223

    This so very closely matches the short version of the laws of thermodynamics:

    1. You can’t win
    2. You can’t break even
    3. You can’t get out of the game

    From the long version:

    The zeroth law of thermodynamics defines thermal equilibrium and forms a basis for the definition of temperature: If two systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third system, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other.

    The first law of thermodynamics states that, when energy passes into or out of a system (as work, heat, or matter), the system’s internal energy changes in accordance with the law of conservation of energy.

    The second law of thermodynamics states that in a natural thermodynamic process, the sum of the entropies of the interacting thermodynamic systems never decreases. A common corollary of the statement is that heat does not spontaneously pass from a colder body to a warmer body.

    The third law of thermodynamics states that a system’s entropy approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches absolute zero. With the exception of non-crystalline solids (glasses), the entropy of a system at absolute zero is typically close to zero.

    — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics
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