All They Understand is Force

Joe was, well… just that. A regular joe. When asked, he would say that he loves his country and that he joined the army just because of that. He was a model soldier: neat, punctual, knowing when to speak and when not to. Not that speaking was an activity he indulged in much. He was just a grunt, one out of tens of thousands sent to Iraq during the latest crisis. Joe was on guard duty that day, he wasn’t really paying attention. He’s been doing this about 60 hours a week for a year now, and his mind seemed to be wandering off.

About three hours into his shift, some officers came by. He saluted them. They walked up to him, clad in formal wear, buttoned to the teeth. He felt ashamed that he couldn’t look as good as that. As good as his commanding officers, those brave men whom he would follow into battle in a heartbeat. He knew America was in danger. He knew that even though his duty was boring and monotonous – he was protecting his country and helping to build a better, democratic Iraq. One of the officers approached Joe. “How are you today?” he asked. Joe didn’t hesitate – “Very well, sir! What can I do for you , sir?” he answered while raising his chin, stiffening his back and doing all those things he’s done a hundred times before. “We have a slight problem, soldier”, said the officer. “We’ve been warned that a red car, carrying three passengers, all male, are going to try and infiltrate our base. We want you to see to that none such car comes through here”. Joe thought about it. Actually – he didn’t. “Whatever it takes, sir” he answered, “fucking towelheads, all they understand is force”. “Good man”, said the officer and walked back to his car.

About 30 minutes after the officer left, Joe noticed a suspicious vehicle. It was red, as they said, and it had three young Arab males in it. He approached the car with caution. His gun pointing forward. The car stopped. A few more soldiers from the back of the roadblock started to look alert. Joe was 30 feet away from the car when the window opened. “#$%#$^%^#%^!” said a man in an oriental accent, or at least that’s what Joe heard. “I can’t understand you!” Joe answered, again without thinking. “@#$#5*@#$$$?” said the car-voice. “I CAN’T UNDERSTAND YOU!!” yelled Joe, and suddenly he could.

It was as if Joe suddenly found himself in a foreign place. He heard someone yelling “@$%@$%@!” from a few feet away. He was sitting in a car. He was looking though the front window. He saw a very strange sight.

About thirty feet away from the car, holding an M-16 rifle, was a man who looked, to Joe, extremely familiar. It was him. But it couldn’t be. The body he was in looked to his right, his friend was speaking. “Well, what are you waiting for?”, asked the man seated next to Joe-in-the-Arab’s-body. “HAMID! DRIVE!”, the man yelled. Hamid drove. Both Hamid and Joe, inside Hamid, knew exactly what situation the were in. Joe felt like he could know everything about Hamid, and he did. He saw Hamid as a young boy. How his father used to play with him in the back yard. He remembered school ceremonies, singing the national anthem, saluting to the flag. That beautiful red, white and black. He remembered how proud his father was when he joined the Revolutionary Guard. “You’ll make us proud!” Hamid’s father said. He remembered how he had that nice uniform, and how all the girls would look at him when he walked through the streets of Basra, his hometown. How he loved his uniform and his rifle. It made him feel safe. He knew that if anything ever happens to his beloved Iraq, that he would help defend it against it’s enemies.

“Hamid! What are you dreaming about?! Take out your gun and lets go! We have to protect our country, we have to keep out those damn Americans. They’ll hurt our families, they’ll hurt our nation!”.

Hamid /Joe pulled out the MAC-10 submachine-gun hidden under his seat. He knew exactly what to do. He was protecting his country, he was doing his duty. “Those fucking Americans” he thought as he started firing, “all they understand is force”.

Is God’s existance even relevant?

I’ll start with some Descartes, if no one minds. Descartes starts with the questin “What can I know?” and examines certain phenomenons. He examines, for example, the fact that he can see thing, so that can be something he knows. Then he remembers than he can also see things in his dreams that can seem real, so he rules out that option. Afterwards, Descartes turns to his thought. He asks, “Can the things that I am thinking about be known and true?” and reaches another negative answer – people can think about things that can be wrong.

The only thing that Descartes succeeds in proving, then, is the existence of a “thinker” that is doubting the existence of any sort of reality. This conclusion is represented by his famous “Cogito” – I think therefore I am.

If we examine this famous argument, we see that a simple conclusion follows:  We cannot, without any pre-assumptions, prove anything other than the existence of  “a thinker”. You can call this “thinker” (or Mind)  God, because it creates your experience of reality. For example, when you dream – your mind creates a representation of reality where it controls everything. You could also call “everything” God and look at existence as one being.

Looking at existence as a consequence of the actions of a sentient being that acts and speaks, while giving every nation different directions and leading to countless deaths? Maybe not so much.

To conclude, when faced with the question “Is there a God?” you have to remember – the person who is asking this is probably thinking about a very certain, personal represention of God, as described in some text/oral narrative.

Answering the question “Can we know that a certain text is the truth?” is a much easier task. Just use our old friend Descartes.

d.

Free Will?

In response to livelyackerman’s post:

The fact that an action is a consequence of previous actions, does not mean that the fact has no importance in itself. You can see it from two perspective – One, as a deterministic series of actions, reactions and synthesis and Two, as an action for itself. The things that we go through in life affect out decisions, including our education, the place where we grew up and the things that we were taught to believe. Calling such a complex system deterministic is very easy, but considering that there are literally millions and billions of factors involved, and that every human goes through a different experience of life, and so has different causes and effects means that there’s no possible way of knowing what you’re going to do. You’d have to go through every milisecond of your life, your parents life and all of history for that. So, determinism doesn’t really matter. And yes, our actions may be predestined, but we can’t know what they will be – so that doens’t matter.

If God predetermines everything, can He or does He therefore participate in the process of evil to the extent that He knows of every evil act before its commission? Yes, he does. The only dilemma here is that it’s uncomfortable for you to think about it. If god is everything, he is also evil.

Does our Maker’s omniscience completely preclude any substantive notion of human free will? How can one make any meaningful deliberate and free choice where our choice is already known by a higher being? Already explained that. Freedom, or the illusion of Freedom is the result of an infinitesimal amount of events that you can’t possibly know about (a neuron moving in your brain) so it doesn’t matter.

If god knows all, how can there be free will? It can’t. It’s either Omniscience or Free Will.

And as for morals, faith is my answer too. Faith in, say, a series of principles that are written by humans and incarnated in laws, constitutions and actual deeds. Faith does not require God, a god or any supernatural being. Faith is just our name for a belief that things we don’t see can be true. These things are generally derived from stories, but they can also be derived from, say, documents. When we sign an agreement, such as a truce or a peace treaty, we “create” peace. Thus, our faith in peace creates a state of peace, bound by law and the force of international organizations who’s interest it is to uphold it (because they believe in a certain way people should treat each other).

True, that does pull the wind out of the whole “My morals are better because God said so” argument. That just means you’ll have to find a better reason for enforcing your morals. Such as… the well being of mankind, and who would want to put their faith such a ridiculous notion?

Ethnicity and Music: Why are they playing that when he’s there?

I came across a strange phenomenon while watching an episode of “Lie to Me”. There was a scene where a Korean father was apologizing to his son and oriental music was playing in the background. It got me to thinking about parallel examples. Would we be as surprised to hear Country music playing if a white American walks into the room? Hip Hop for a black American?

I wonder what was going through the mind of the sound editor when he decided to put that clip on that footage. Was he thinking, “Well, that’s generally Korean, let’s do that” or was there something else?

I don’t offer any answers here, just wondering what your thoughts are?

Daniel

Manifesto

It’s not an easy thing, this disease. It’s a hard thing to deal with. You wake up in the morning and you find yourself thinking: “What am I even doing here? What am I getting from this? Don’t I have more important things to do?” and then you remember what you have to do this week. You have to hand in that Statistics assignment that seems like you already did once, you have to hand in that three page report where you’re supposed to “think” and “analyze” some useless piece of everyday life. You write the occasional story for a local or collegial magazine and think – “Now they’ll know me! I’m gonna be famous!”. You think people are going to cheer and hail your genius while patting you on the back and thinking “Oh, if only I were more like him…” when they see you walk through the campus halls . Maybe you reach the conclusion that your little article, even if it did get praised by everyone who read it, and even if people call to congratulate you – is not what’s going to get you there. That place where really successful people are. You think that you might be building your expectation from life too high. Who’s even going to listen to an undergrad student, even if he’s going to graduate soon. You look around and think that there are thousands of other people and, for them, they are in that same situation, and why should you get treated any differently. You think that you should move forward, get that Masters Degree and that Ph.D. Then, as “Dr. Whoever” maybe someone will notice me. Sometimes the future seems to hit you in the face and you think of tomorrow, and if you might, maybe, ask that girlfriend of yours to be that wife of yours. It scares you a little, but something distracts you and you escape back to everyday life.

Our student board got us better transportation. Junior staff got better employment terms. We can all sit on more comfortable chairs, in better air conditioned classes and listen to our professors chew our material for us and spit it straight into our gaping mouths, so we don’t, god forbid, have to use some part of our brain. The TA uses the same example he gave two weeks ago to explain the question that was asked a month ago and sometimes you wonder why you still show up for classes. The last article you read was some time in in your first year but you have to give the impression that you read and study so sometimes you drop a name or two you heard somewhere. You read 3 books in the last year but if someone asks, you’d say 20. At least. Then, when someone asks you who your favorite writer is, you’ll Google someone who they’ve never heard of. You don’t really know why.

Facebook use to be for “them”. Now you say that you’re only there to keep in touch with people you really know. Actually, you play stupid games and check every message, computer or human generated, that might pass a few minutes of boredom. You say you have principles but if someone asks you to specify them, you wouldn’t have the slightest idea of where to start. You say you have a good taste in prose and poetry, but it’s just about the same there. Maybe you’ll throw some names, maybe they’ll impress someone. Sometimes you think that everyone is like that, so you write in second person and hope that someone might identify with you, and if not – they can all go fuck themselves.

d.