mindcore

Essays on Love 1

2009-05-08T14:43:00.000-07:00

I have in my life loved a few people. I have wanted to have sex with a whole lot more.

I like to think everyone has lived this dilemma.

I am a big fan of evolutionary psychology, which if you are reading this on my blog pages you can just read the last entry to learn more about it.

Evolutionary psychology basically teaches us that if human beings are animals with instincts and that these instincts overwhelmingly work toward making more human beings.

Inside your infinitely complex mind, you tic toc in an ancient genetic rhythm to make more humans with your DNA.

Even if you are gay, the evolutionary psychologists tell us. There is no escape. They theorize that a certain percentage of gay people in a pack of humans will benefit the spread of the DNA of the gay people. Even if they don't make babies themselves, they would have found themselves strengthening the reproductive potential of their siblings and other genetic relatives.

In the end we are all slaves to our genes. At least within a certain range.

And never forget that we are all the children of savage animals.

Ancient humans hunted by chasing their prey until they collapsed from exhaustion. Then they would descend upon the animals when they were too tired to run anymore and ate them.

We come from this.

In fact humans are the animal who can run the longest without collapse to this present day. This is a byproduct of our evolutionary history as terrifying hunters who would run you to death.

From this ancestry emerges love.

What is love?

I have come up with a basic definition of love. This definition is up for grabs, I am still working on it. My main inspiration is personal experience.

I believe love is the hyperactivity of the nucleus accumbens deep in the limbic system of your brain. This is the same part of the brain employed by heroin, and other delightful addictions.

What I propose this feels like is a great joy and fascination with the other person.

The immediate critique this meets is that I am not describing love but infatuation.

I believe, as a die hard naturalist, this is a false dichotomy.

What people call infatuation is love unsustained.

I believe that the great challenge we all face is to make this last. To remember.

The great secret to love everlasting- Or at least lasting as long as you want it to- is memory.

Understand memory as the neuroscientist. Memory is when the brain repeats something it has done before.

Daunting in its very simplicity.

Remember what it felt like when that person knocked your socks of, feel it rise within you again, and make a new memory.

So precious.

Each memory becomes like a tiny ember with which you ignite a great torch.

Life assaults us constantly with the depletion of resources, the drama of one's family, the turmoil of the mundane.

One cannot be in a perpetual dream state, thinking constantly of their partner. No we must all allocate our neural resources to dealing with the bullshit that we must each wade through every day of our lives.

Then when we meet our partner the bruises we have endured from the day, or the week, or whatever, can make us forget what initially made us chose them in the first place. We begin to notice, and indeed, look for problems.

We become like a self mutilator who feels power by destroying themselves.

Now I am not talking about relationships which have genuine problems. Things like violence, infidelity (for those who are monogamous), deceit, theft, and emotional abuse are red flags that we must all commit to having no tolerance for.

In order to have a snowball's chance in hell you must already have a decent foundation of ethical treatment. You cannot be partners with someone who is trying to hurt you or themselves.

S&M is a different category, just for a disclaimer. I believe that people who enjoy S&M are not hurting each other.

But even relationships between those who are responsible and kind sadly collapse. They fall as the two people cannot find the long lost yearning they once felt for each other. They search their dendritic forest inside their head and can find nothing that lights the torch.

Think of the beacon torches in the Tolkien story where Aragorn must scale the mountain to announce the assembly of a mighty army.

The great beacon torch is the state of being in love with the other person.

It assembles all the wonderful ecstasy you have known with this person who you have at one time enjoyed so much that they aroused all of your greatest instincts from antiquity. Your very genes sang their name inside your body.

This assembly is greater than any army in any war. It is the only thing we could dare wane mystical about. The secret code written inside our cells which tells us to act like the long dead of eons which we come from.

Genetics is no mere science, it is a symphony.

To make love last with a precious being who beckons you you must understand that the fuel for great intimacy in joy is a stored within your memories.

Memories posses the mind when properly aroused.

They are stored in some way linked to the emotional systems of the brain. We call this the limbic system, which contains the hippocampus (the machinery of memory storage).

The memories must awaken emotion to do this, and emotion awakens the whole body.

Selah.

Evolutionary Psychology

2009-04-22T20:57:00.000-07:00

I was honored to be able to be give the April presentation at the North Texas Skeptics.

I wanted to discuss something that was a legitimately debated topic in science, so I covered evolutionary psychology.

Darwin's theory of evolution is not considered controversial in science. But its implications on the development of the human mind over time are considered controversial by many legitimate critics.

To recap, evolution by natural selection is essentially the process by which organisms change over many generations. In principle, when a trait allows an organism to maximize its offspring it gets passed down.

Evolutionary psychologists say that this process has to have built significant aspects of the current human mind.

There a lot of claims made in the name of evolutionary psychology. Some more controversial than others.

In the article Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature (Miller & Kanazawa, 2007) the claim is made that evolutionary psychology explains why most suicide bombers are Muslim. I, personally, consider this claim to be absurd.

The beautiful thing about studying a field like evolutionary psychology is that one can remain skeptical and yet still be surprised by the truth revealed in this burgeoning field.

I discussed The Evolution of Desire (2003) by David M. Buss. David Buss is a well respected evolutionary psychologist who has shown through cross cultural surveying that men and women's mating strategies follow a pattern which was initially predicted according to evolutionary psychology. The finding, at the risk of oversimplifying, is that women like resources and men like the appearance of fertility.

I also discussed Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate (2002) which is not so much about evolutionary psychology per se as a discussion of the implications of genetics to psychology, and beyond that to its implications for society. Pinker discussed evidence for all matter of controversial findings for the power of genetics in making both the mind and human society. I tend to think of Stephen Pinker as the Carl Sagan of evolutionary psychology.

Evolutionary psychology is generally considered controversial because of a sordid past of science making claims about the heredity of mental phenomena. Most notable is the ideas behind eugenics, and its disastrous consequences in Nazi germany.

Yet the critiques go beyond merely saying that evolutionary psychology is a slippery slope.

There a good reasons to tread carefully with any scientific debate, including this one.

The most famous critic of evolutionary psychology is probably the famous paleontologist Stephen J. Gould. I discussed his book The Mismeasure of Man (1981). This book does not attack evolutionary psychology per se, but it does discuss its implications and the specific notion of the hereditability of intellect.

The idea that intellect is genetic is a proposition of deep political consequence. It has implications for human potential, and the American Dream itself. I would argue: how can people rise beyond their status in life if their status is the by product of genetic inheritance.

Gould's critique does not attack the basic premise of evolutionary psychology. Essentially both sides agree that evolution has to have shaped our minds over time. But Gould, and those who share his opposition, say that we should be cautios and that we over step the predictive power of evolutionary psychology.

Gould begins the book with a long and extensive study of racist ideas in behavioral science. He provides many examples of how well meaning scientists had misguided assumptions about race that were prominent in their time in history. The research is wrought with confirmation bias, and in some cases basic statistical error.

Gould also discusses I.Q. at great length, which could easily be the topic of its own presentation. The take home message for our discussion here is that to think of I.Q. trends as evidence for hereditary intellect would be a stretch at best. Gould shows this by discussing the history of the I.Q. test itself and its limitations, in conjunction with weaknesses in trying to study the hereditability of mental traits.

Good evolutionary psychologists are aware of these limitations and critiques and take them into consideration for their own research.

Personally I find evolutionary psychology to be an exciting field which has already produced compelling findings with a bright future. It is also a hot new science with plenty of good opportunities for even the seasoned skeptic to practice their critical thinking skills.

Teaching; The Trenches of the Culture War

2009-04-07T01:23:00.001-07:00

So today my life took a very interesting turn.

I just graduated college in December and had a few months of misadventure in New York City.

I have been back in the Dallas area since the end of February. I made two career moves, I got a night job at 7-11 and applied for a teaching certification program.

The program I applied to accepted me.

If all goes according to plan I will be teaching this fall, after some harrowing unpaid training this summer.

The prospect of teaching fascinates me on a lot of levels.

My own political world view hinges to a great extent about things I believe about education.

Like most people my own political views have developed throughout the experiences of my life. My life has given me many inputs for my perspective, but one of those is that since I left my parents house at the age of 16 I have yo-yoed in and out of the middle class.
My own experiences have included having using food stamps and living without medical insurance, and a few years later driving a relatively new car while living in a nice Dallas apartment with a guard at the entrance.

I believe that one of the major factors in american poverty is a lack of education among our citizenry.

Many studies have revealed that the average American's academic knowledge is down right shameful. Things like not knowing the Sun revolves around the Earth or being unable to name more than 2 or 3 American presidents.

I believe that education emancipates people from poverty. It has done so for me.

I am a highschool drop out.

I worked odd jobs and had some failed attempts to start my own business from ages 16 to 25. When I was 25, 4 years ago, I enrolled in college.

I should add, with the lowest ACT score that my first school would accept.

I quickly hammered out a good GPA and got myself into an HHMI (which is a major science funding organization) undergraduate research program and into an Honors College.

I transferred to UT Dallas and finished a degree in Neuroscience there. I continued doing undergraduate research which included a fellowship with the SURF program at UT Southwestern, which is a graduate school which hosts something like 4 nobel laureates in Biology.

What am I doing now?

Working nights at 7-11 but my education has given me both the credentials and wherewithall to land a job as a teacher, which pays a little more than 4 times what my job at 7-11 pays.

There are a lot of factors to consider in this. I could be getting work because society has developed to much restriction for living wage pay based on college diplomas. That may be, but thats all the more reason to make sure as many people as can get one.

I will be working as a Bilingual Generalist grades: 4-8. I don't know what I will be teaching exactly with that title. But I do know I will be working with Hispanic kids.

I think this is fantastic.

I will be dealing with a marginalized population which depends very deeply on the Catholic Church for its social services.

I am going to be a Latino Secular Humanist in the position of trying to educate these kids.

I have no idea what I'm in for, but one thing is for sure it will be intense for me because of all my deep beliefs about society. I will be on the frontlines of so many issues I care about, integrity in teaching, populist desires for education equality, immigration issues. I will be right there.

Which is exactly the kind of thing I want from a job.

I have a lot of goals for the work I want to do in the Dallas area. Including some lofty goals for establishing a Center for Inquiry here.

Check out their website at http://centerforinquiry.net

If teaching becomes too much of a hinderance for those goals I may reconsider my career decision. But it seems to me that all careers worth doing come with severe time demands and to be prudish about that is to condemn oneself to a life of meaningless toil.

I have to have a job.

I would like it to be one I love.

Stream of Consciousness

2009-04-06T08:24:00.000-07:00

I have always juggled with the idea of writing about my personal life.

In general I am opposed on the grounds that I should reveal to much about my own personal drama and look weak.

Believe me, I have done it before.

But I also don't want to be impersonal.

I am a naturalist, I live my life, every moment observant of the collisions of causality that bind our existence.

I am hanging out with my roomate.

I just graduated college.

Our house is full of plants, undergoing photosynthesis with all the roaring vitality of a symphony.

But a real german symphony, with the glorious sound that the romantics would make when they yearned for utopia.

The sun is feeding them well today, with all of its atomic glory.

The Sun can be thought of as a forest of atom bombs, singing silently in the sky.

This atomic bomb forest has all the powers we have ever attributed to a God, big or little "g".

Yet it has no consciousness, like all celestial bodies, it moves only by the mindless will of gravity as it plays its role in at least 4 dimensions.

No, but around me there are nervous systems abounding, just as verdantly as the plants.

My roomate has a kid, she has better bones than me, they are flexible. She moves like a creature with rubber bones. The nervous system accommodates the potential of this machine. Like the plant it seeks energy, preferably in the form of the energy released from the breaking of bonds made when one consumes polysaccharides.

This reaction is called exothermic, in that it produces energy.

I am listening to the molecular patterns formed in the air, it sounds like Beethoven, which is what my computer tells me is playing.

My computer. My beloved computer.

Everyone should name their computer. My computer is named Excalibur, because she was pulled from a stone by me to make me a King.

My other computer is named Donkey. She is slow, stubborn, but can still carry a load.

These are machines.

Little, sleek, beautiful thinking machines.

Some day as we approximate the sublime aspects of our nervous system, these little machines may think as we do.

This is nature.

Beloved nature.

She dances cooly like a ballerina looking beyond you with nothing but the dance to her mind.

To see intelligence between the lines of vast emptiness that seperate us between other worlds, or intelligence between the lines in the synapse, or orbitals of atoms, is to shit all over this majesty.

It took me a long time to become pleased about the vast, but uncoscious, universe.

I used to need a mind there.

Then I realized that embracing life for its own sake was far more true. For me truth is like the flame that attracts the moth. It may kill us, but we must run to it.

I can not even define this madness that is love for the truth.

But for me the truth has been kind.

When you see that the only minds that nature makes are survivors of the subtle deletion war which is evolution.

These minds are so precious.

This vast cold universe, with its mindless electromagnetic tug of war in the valleys of gravity, rarely makes minds.

For the exponential millions of cubic miles of the universe we can see, the only minds like our own we can find are ours.

Our precious minds, which by the tide flow of synapses gives us the gift of kindness.

Humans are not alone in their ability for kindness.

The neurons of housepets like cats and dogs have a tendency towards kindess as well, given appropriate nurturing.

Kindness is natures gift to us, in us.

Our sentient minds make her dance of molecules give us the joy of happiness.

Happiness is produced in the limbic system. The sub-organ within the brain responsable is most likely the nucleus accumbens for its role in a brain circuit named casually "the reward pathway."

Its collisions like billiard balls in a gelatinous web beneath your skin which make you feel joy.

Deepest, most beautiful joy.

This is a good way to sit and see life in its tumble.

Sam Harris Video

2009-04-06T04:47:00.001-07:00

Sam Harris is my favorite author. This video is of one of his wonderful talks. In it you will hear the arguments that caused me to take freethought as my cause for activism.

New Podcast Episode: Mindcore 2.0

2009-04-02T07:37:00.001-07:00

Here is my new podcast episode.

This episode features Elles from Splendid Elles and Teen Skepchick

Here is the show:

What The Fuck Are Atheist Doing?

2009-03-22T22:29:00.000-07:00

So it seems to me that exposure of atheists and atheist issues has been on the rise in the last few years. I think this is a wonderful accomplishment and to be taken very seriously.

There are recent books which have been New York Times best sellers like The God Delusion, Breaking the Spell, The End of Faith, God is not Great, Infidel and others. We have a wonderful recent movie from Bill Maher; Religulous.

If you are into new media like I am it is impossible to keep track of all the freethought podcasts out there. Blogs are even more ubiquitous. We are getting our message out there.

In Canada and England we are boldly beginning to advertise on the sides of buses. The Freedom from Religion Foundation has advertised on billboards here, in the U.S.

Skepticism is thriving on new media. I follow several websites.

Science enthusiasm is rife with wonderful products, has anyone watched Nova lately?
There is great stuff online like Edge.org and Vega science trust, and I also enjoy the science channel, animal planet, and National Geographic on cable.

So what are we doing?

We have resources?

We are producing?

What are we doing?

What is our objective?

Do we just want to get rid of religion?

Is there nothing else that is a common goal to the sentiments of those who oppose religion?

Is there a common thread for the goals of skeptics, atheists, and science enthusiasts?

Is there a deeper sense of shared common values?

Metaphysical Naturalism

2009-03-06T15:30:00.000-08:00

The only thing worse then trying to tell people that you are a Secular Humanist is trying to tell people that you are a metaphysical naturalist.

WTF? Metaphysical Naturalist?

Its almost as if someone where just trying to make big words to sound smart. But metaphysical naturalism is a real thing, and it happens to describe a huge part of my worldview.

When you tell others that you are a metaphysical naturalist, the word that dominates their thoughts is nature. Particularly thoughts of camping, hiking, and Walden Pond. Or worse yet; nudist colonies.

This is slightly off target.

Perhaps for this reason when people ask me about my naturalism I tell them that as a naturalist I am intrigued by the loveliness of nuclear waste.

When a naturalist discusses nature he discusses the natural world as it is determined by scientific examination. When a naturalist discusses nature its not usually to contrast forests with cities, as culture has programmed us. To the naturalist the city is a perfectly comfortable manifestation of nature.

It is not the fault of the public that the definition of metaphysical naturalism is not well known.

It is however high time that we discussed naturalism enough for people to at least know what it is.

Naturalism is the idea that what we know comes from empirical study of nature. The scientific method is known as methodological naturalism. Quite simply, naturalism at its basis is science. Metaphysical naturalism is built on the cornerstone of methodological naturalism. It is the bloom on the root of the scientific method.

What me know must come from science says the naturalist. But when we begin to ask "what should we do with what we know?" that the task of the metaphysical naturalist.

Metaphysical claims are notions about how things should be, ethics, love, freedom. Out of professional courtesy and discipline scientist do not make metaphysical claims in the name of science. Metaphysical naturalists do.

The naturalist asks, "If this be true in nature what does it mean for humanity?"

One example is the thoughts of John Dewey on free will. Naturalists tend to reject notions of free will as something that exists beyond nature. Christianity, for example, teaches us that our will is something that transcends this mortal coil and reaches beyond from a spiritual realm. Naturalist reject this by pointing out that everything we chose to do we chose as a result of causes. John Dewey argued that we should think of habits as free will.

In short, naturalist answer questions on the nature of free will by illustrating the evidence that this universe is governed by causes. This is a principle known in physics and chemistry and by the metaphysical naturalists: thought of in the context of human choice.

Metaphysical naturalism has many champions: Betrand Russel, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Paul Kurtz, Pat Churchland, Victor Stenger, Richard Carrier, and Susan Blackmore (who's punk rock antics endear me).

Naturalism is the philosophy behind respectful atheism. Those atheists we all love for their beautiful words would happily admit that they are naturalist. It is just harder to sell books on naturalism; remember the whole nudist colony/Walden Pond problem.

Why Secular Humanism?

2009-03-01T09:30:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately secular humanism tends to be an obscure term. I imagine that if you went up to people randomly all day long at the mall and asked them what secular humanism means you would get ignorance and wrong answers all day long.

In the general media world, excluding specialized blogs and podcasts, the only person I have ever seen use the word "secular humanism" on a regular basis is Bill O'Reilly. He uses the term as a way to demonize atheists, often claiming that "secular humanists" comprise a conspiratorial "war on Christmas." It is simultaneously laughable and depressing.

I believe that secular humanism should be the standard value system of civilization. Hence; I think its pretty important.

In essence secular humanism is an ethical philosophy that excludes religion from its calculus, but still values empathy, and shared human experience as its foundation. Essentially it is a system for forwarding and treasuring humanity without religion.

In the U.S. today there is a dominant assumption that we get our values and morals from religion. I think this assumption is worse than wrong. I believe that it actually constipates our moral progress.

The secular humanist argument is dauntingly simple: truth matters and people matter.

There is an erroneous belief in our society that all ideas that are religious and cultural in nature have unquestionable value. That claims like Jesus governs the universe as one facet of a triune God, or that Muhammad ascended to paradise on a flying horse are truths beyond fact which deserve the reverence of everyone.

Of course Muslims and Christians routinely do not practice this tolerance with one another, but that is besides the point.

We know that certain things are far more likely to be true than others. We have well placed systems for determining this. We use them in courts of law when someone is accused of a crime. We use them to determine natural laws in science. These systems are skeptical and evidence based. Secular humanists believe that our ethical and moral understandings should abide within the confines of these ways of determining truth.

Secular humanists believe that ethics comes from shared and individual human experience. Not dictates attributed to supernatural beings.

Though most people used skeptical evidence based systems of assessing truth in their day to day lives (people check their bank balances to know how much money they have, rather than have faith), we see no problem with abandoning this standard when deciding the governing morals of our civilization. Our society allows fantastical religions to have a major say in our laws and governance. One good example of the failure of this approach is the fact that laws against the civil rights of gays have been rampantly passed across the U.S. as recently as 2008. Another example is the routine blocking of funding for embryonic stem cell research within the government. There are no good secular reasons to oppose gay rights or embryonic stem cell research. These stirrings of progress are blocked by the political assertions of those who insist on living by the ancient fantasies.

I believe that the appeal of religion for most people is that religion is a common introduction to crucial values like empathy, charity, self-discipline, community, and ethical contemplation. Unfortunately it seems most people see the baby as somehow attached to the bath water.

Secular humanism is not without reverence. Only that reverence is for humanity, fellow humans on this world. Not reverence for hidden supernatural beings who may or may not exist. Common to all secular humanist is a simple understanding that whatever goodness to be found is found in human experience and in our relationships with one another. There is nothing else, and there need not be to know vast fulfillment.

I personally subscribe to the secular humanism of philosopher Paul Kurtz. In this approach humanity is valued for its own sake, and fulfillment is found by practicing compassion for our fellow humans, the courage to live life to its fullest, and a personal and civic dedication to free inquiry. There are many secular humanist philosophers, Kurtz is the one I am most familiar with.

What is so great about secular humanism is that these values are not exclusive in any way. All people, including religious people, can agree that humanity should be valued, that empathy and compassion are the root of good behavior, and that we should make our society as successful as possible. It is merely that religion introduces extra nonsense to this basic understanding, and seems to routinely feel the need to interfere with people as they pursue happiness without harm to others. If we made secular humanism the standard guide for the ethics of civilization, the religious would have common experience along with the rest of us as the guide. They would just have to keep their ecclesiastical sanctions to themselves.

My own experiences with secular humanism have deeply enriched my life. I find that because I am deriving my values from a skeptical understanding of reality I avoid self-deception. Self deception in the pursuit of happiness is a positive feedback loop of error. It causes to waste precious lifetime. When one is free of self-deception more is gained from relationships, decisions, and experiences. The roses smell sweeter when you realize there is no celestial rose garden awaiting you after death. Friendships are deeper when you realize that they must end.

It is not just rejection of belief in the afterlife that has improved my life, but better understanding of human nature, including my own. Deeper understanding of how the world works and its limitations makes my decisions more precise. I strive to not deceive myself, and as a result I find that get more out of life.

New Beginning

2009-02-24T16:18:00.000-08:00

My handle is mindcore. Thats with a lower case m. The name is supposed to be an obvious play on the word 'hardcore.' It is supposed to make a deliberate link to hardcore music.

I am an activist with an agenda.
This blog is a part of executing that agenda.

This blog has actually existed for years, I have also hosted a a podcast by the same name.

I deleted all of the old posts for this blog and am starting again for scratch. The same thing was done for me by my podcasting site, podbean, due to me not paying my bill.

I decided to see it as a good opportunity to correct some things about my approach. They say hindsight is 20/20 and as far as cliches go this one seems to hold true.

My old podcast and blog had a problem in that I was disclosing too much about my personal life, this is something I would like to change.

I want the focus to be more intensely on my agenda, my goal, and my passion.

The agenda is hard to describe. Which is a problem. But I will try.

The agenda is to promote several ideas which are intrinsically linked, but can also be taken independently. These ideas are secular humanism, metaphysical naturalism, skepticism, scientific thinking, and a stronger embrace of technology and expertise in government and the general culture.

The way I want to promote these ideas is by trying to create a culturally and politically significant movement to support them.

Much of this is already in play. I am a member of CFI which works to promote all of these things.

I am inspired by the work of many similar organizations and activist which do the same thing.

However the general culture seems to be rejecting these ideas.

The question is how do you break in?

Some say that the best way is to make our ideas as palpable as we can to as many as we can.

That may be the best approach; but it seems impotent to me.

What I am inclined to do is to go all out, be passionate and be creative, and unapologetically promote our world view as a better way.