Life and Reproduction.

If your read almost anything on evolution, or anything that makes a reference to life's (biologic) purpose, they all will say something along the lines of: "The purpose of any form of life is to reproduce itself".

This pisses me off, because it misses something crucial.

Reproduction is a symptom of life. Not it's purpose. Otherwise, the next meal would be the purpose of life. The next drink. The next step toward the next drink, the next tensing of a muscle toward the next step... ad infinitum.

Life in the plural sense, evolution, whatever, are not purposeful things. What's the purpose of a rock tumbling downhill..? To keep moving..? Purpose, and the concept of purpose are perspectives tacked on after the fact by... us. And as such, become all equally valid if not all equally convincing.

Some would say the purpose of life is to discover the nine billion names of God, others would say it is to make as much money as you can and die snorting coke out of a prostitute's navel. Who's right, and how would you know..?

Does there have to be one..? Unless there is a God, and unless he had a plan for us/life, there is no generalized meaning, or purpose to living. Purposes are reserved for things that are constructed by an outside force - I make a hammer. I make it to hit things. I impose a purpose upon it. But that purpose is a function of my use of it, not inherrent to it as a separate object in itself.

I'm sorry, but everyone gets this idea arse-side up. Reproduction is not automatic to 'life' and a 'species' is a symptom of reproduction, or rather of over-reproduction of a single pattern, not life. The conditions of possessing sexual reproductive capabilities require at least two similar patterns to exist, and preferably more.

If you get down to quantum sized tacks, me and the table this computer sits on are the same stuff. The only difference is (a) the gross pattern upon which the table and I are shaped and (b) the opportunities for 'higher' emergent systems these patterns allow to manifest. ie, I'll never play chess with a table, because the pattern that average "tableness" is based upon, does not facillitate the emergence of self-awareness and abstract thinking.

Your muscles are the memory of every push-up you've ever done, just as your lungs bear the imprint of every cigarette you've ever puffed on. Even in the womb, your little foetal self became in part the embodiment of whatever crap your mother might have been eating during your formation. Epigenetics - chemical markers which left their imprints upon your body and metabolism spurred by the events your mother went through as she carried you, stressful, soothing; events that left their tracks however small, in your brain, your mind.

As much as you are flesh and bone, you are also pattern.


Patterns. All (physical) patterns require energy to maintain them with any fidelity over time, some more than others. Generally, the more complex the pattern (or the more improbable), the more energy it requires to persist for any significant period of time. An equilibrium is reached between complexity and energy consumption. However, any energetic system tends to destroy itself over time because fuels are indiscriminately reactive in nature - harmless, inert materials don't burn easily - take oxygen, we need it, but it really fucks us over.

Evolutionists don't often seem to mention that reproduction is only the second way life has of renewing itself. Two weeks or so ago, my skin was completely made of different matter. A couple of years ago, my entire body was composed of different materials. I didn't notice though because - Like the axe-blade and the handle - the only thng persistant over time, is the pattern.

Now, why does the body do that..? If reproduction is the be all and end all..? Why doesn't it just cut to the chase..?

Because life, like anything else from rocks to stars, is just another pattern that possesses the inevitable property of persistance.

Life, or rather the differing patterns that fall under that abstract catagorization, reproduce only because there is a limit to how much a complex pattern can do with a single physical representation of itself - given the balance between energy consumption and damage control - before it breaks down completely.

Reproduction is like reformatting - setting the pattern back to it's original error-free version - its factory settings.

Renewal and reproduction are strategies imposed upon complex patterns by the condition of being 'written' in finite matter. Life is like "Oh bloody hell, I've gotta goddamn well knock this body down again and build another. Jeeze. I liked this place. Bloody crappy construction materials, cheap lousy gas." about reproduction. And as for species, that just makes the whole damn business of being 'life' more bloody complicated. A classic case of 'there goes the neighborhood'.

Y'see what I meant about pragmatics..?

On the metaphysic side - the meaning of life is not reproduction, any fool can do that, it's about making useful, happy human beings from the greasey squalling brats that fall out of your wife's fanny. Or vagina, if you're American, rather than just more apathetic moribund consumer-parasites, as is the norm. 

A Tale of Two Incomes

One of my favourite rants is about working women, not from a "Hah - Women..? Work..? Ridiculous !!!" Bullshit POV, but from an economic one. It doesn't matter which sex worked directly for money first, and which second, because it wouldn't ever have mattered anyway, the result is always the same: everyone gets fucked over.


Let me 'splain. Very simply, beacause I only do simple:

Let's say there is a society of psychotics. They get paid in happy pills. Each psychotic needs a minimum dose of ten pills a month in order to stay calm, and not go on a rampage of machine breaking, boss beating and general assorted mayhem. They are employed by people who give them benzodiazepines in return for work. Happy pills are expensive however, so they really want to pay the psychotics the minimum possible.


However, the psychotics usually live in clusters averaging three members. The tradition of this particular society is that only one psychotic in any particular cluster works for happy pills. Therefore the minimum monthly dosage doled out by the employers to any particular worker-psycho is necessarily not less than 30 pills.


However, over in another valley, each cluster, still averaging three members, is accustomed to having two worker-psychos out earning pills. Everything else is the same, each Psychotic still needs a minimum 10 pills a month to keep them on an even and productive keel.


Initially, when the first two income clusters appeared, they were better off, - earning twice the basic wage, 60 a month - happy as Larry with a few extra pills stuffed under the futon for a rainy day. Then the employers twigged they were paying too much, that the psychotics could put up with less income per capita, and still not go on the rampage, at least not en-masse. So the wages of a single psycho-worker gradually, over a period of years, fell, until it approached roughly 15 pills, totalling 30 per two-income cluster per month, just enough to keep them all sane.


One day, a psychotic from the one-income valley crossed the ridge and strolled through the two-income valley. When they got to talking shop with some of the people there, the one-incomer laughed. When the indignant indigenous psychotics asked why, the stranger said "One of you is working for nothing."


Then of course they killed him and ate his liver.

I don't care who the first income earner, or the second income earner, actually is, genitalia-wise, but I am really pissed off about the 'working for nothing' bit.

And although yes, it is a good thing that more potential earners can now pursue their particular dreams, and true that they can sometimes become doctors and professors and rocket scientists, and be happy and fulfilled (and not to mention rich) in those positions - moreso than they would perhaps have been should conditions have been different - it is also true that the greater majority fail in those dreams and aspirations, and find themselves paying heavily for the opportunities that, with hindsight, most of them were never destined to realise anyway.

This has been an exercise in restricted personal pronoun usage.

Government for the Many, Anarchy for the Few.

I was talking to some guy in a bar the other day. A self-proclaimed Anarchist. I was drunk, so we had an argument. He told me that no such creature as government actually exists, and what we have in reality are scaled-up versions of the 'friendly' skills and commodity bartering systems of old - hierarchies arising spontaneously and organically within anarchic states, without the need for the artificial contrivances and paraphernalia of elections and politic structure.

In short, he said that governence is an illusion, unattainable in any perfect form, and as such only pursued by fools, and that an acceptance of our true 'anarchic' statehood is a more practical, realistic POV.

There are a few things wrong about assuming a social system can be scaled up without distortion - a system which works well in a community of a few hundred people may not work so well when applied to a society of a few million. There are reasons for this. Reasons perhaps most succinctly outlined by game theory.

You may be familliar with game theory in its most well known form of prisoner's dilemma - two suspects, held incommunicado in separate interrogation rooms, deciding whether or not to implicate the other - mutual co-operation (enabled by a faith in the good faith of the other) leading to freedom for both.

This is however, only the tip of the iceberg.

When applied to larger groupings of people, game theory - an attempt to outline the variables affecting co-operation, betrayal and recidivism; punishment and forgiveness and analysing the stability of different individual social strategies within a non-homogenous behavioural community - shows that unfortunately OG's assertion of a scalable 'gentlemen's agreement' system becoming a 'natural/anarchic' government, to be unrealistic.

There is a numerical limit, beyond which a group begins to factionate and schism. For humans, this number would seem to be around 150-200 people. This is extrapolated from brain capacity - of the neocortex, in comparison with average group/brain-size ratios in our fellow primates (Dunbar).

I do not claim it to be especially accurate purely from scientific grounds - rather I draw more confidence from historical observations of military units - the Roman century for example - why hundreds not thousands..? And more modern army units - the largest grouping being (before the command structure splinters into a complex hierarchy) the 'company' - consisting of a max. 250 men, composed from platoons. Also the observance of primitive communities - for example the Australian Walbiri and the Ammassalik of Greenland - all possessing an average of 148.4 people in their villages. (Maybe the 0.4 had a boating accident or something). Also observe the more modern 'primitives' - such as the Amish and the Hutterites. Their leaders observe that "keeping communities below 150 keeps management efficient - beyond that people become strangers to one another". ("The tipping point" - pg. 178)

ie: An anarchic government of gentlemen/gentlewomen does not scale up.

The basis of any co-operation is trust. And trust is not based on friendship so much as predictability. A predictable enemy - the devil you know - is easier to live with than a complete unknown. Anyone that went around trusting everyone on sight willy-nilly, would soon get burned.

And this is where an archy, with a convoluted judiciary system, wins out in the "large population co-operation between strangers" front. By routinely limiting the extremes of behaviour - rape, theft and murder for example - ritualising interactions between people and most importantly being seen to punish prohibitively those who trespass, they provide a proxy for prediction between erstwhile strangers and hence a basis for trust between those interacting with each other for the first time.

The function of a law, a rule or a moral is not to erradicate totally the behaviour against which it proscribes but rather to reduce the probability that the majority of that society faces of ever becoming a victim of that particular behaviour to such a low degree that it becomes more reasonable, from a cost/benefit basis, on the part of any given individual member of that society to forgo taking prohibitive precautions against such an occurence in their day to day lives.

What I want to express, but perhaps have not done so well enough is to highlight that as a member of a 'lawful', archic society I do not need to become expert in say some defensive/offensive discipline - such as fencing or shooting or a martial art - because the penalties I will incur in terms of the time invested and risk of injury involved in their pursuit are no longer outweighed by a reduction in the risk of injury and death from - I don't know - a duel for example, or a mugging.

In being a member of a society where such an option exists - ie. paying through taxation for a judiciary system and accepting the governmental veto on my expressing dissatisfaction through direct violence against another person or persons - I incur less penalty than would be entailed by having to aquire the skills and equipment necessary to maintain a reasonable degree of protection within an anarchic society without such an externalized system.

In short, Some kind of X+archy fosters co-operation in ways anarchies cannot. It also frees us all from having to become Jean Claude Van Damme in our spare time.

More free time coupled with less violent disruption = more work. Well, more something anyway.

On another tack - that of 'alpha personas' - anarchists are right to emphasize the natural arisal of leaders, but they are forgetting duration. With an anarchy leadership is faddish - a leader lasts only for as long as there is no other serious contender, or he retains the imagination of his group (think literally highschool popularity contests and playground bullies) the anarchist leader may be king for a day or king for a year - he has no way of knowing - producing 'slash and burn' crowd-pleaser strategies which though may ensure the alpha's continued leadership, will not necessarily benefit the group long term.

Even if the anarchic equivalent of a totalitarian despot arises and rules for his or her entire lifespan - that is still a very finite spell - not even the three-score and ten is guarrenteed - which though may be a long time in politics is a short time for anything else. The cathedral in my home town for example, took 400 years to complete back in the day. Anything is possible I suppose but I would bet most of this month's salary that the social attention-span of an anarchic body-politic would veto such an endevor.

However, with an 'archy', a leader - once come to power - usually has a certain period of power guarrenteed by an established social dictate - be it a lifetime or a four to eight year span, perhaps even a multi-generational lineage or at least an itterated political-party presence - which allows him or her to put, realistically, into effect plans which though not paying off in the short term, pay off big in the future.

ie. Anarchic leadership is short-sighted, and any autopoietic hierarchies thrown up, are mayfly in lifespan, subject to whim.

All of which puts me in the position of performing my own version of OG's 180° tyre swing in saying that rather than being 'unrealistic and ivory-towered', the pursuit of government, of archy, however flawed and cruel it may be or become, is the only realistic reaction to a species that cannot keep its collective legs together and the burgeoning populace this inevitably produces.

Let me repeat, a romantic adherence to the vice of anarchy, however soft or hard, applied now, to a population as big as the one present would only condemn humankind to the old cycles of growth and mutual culling at a hugely accelerated rate.

But then, romance has ever been cowled in blood.

See also: http://writeitorbust.blogspot.com/2008/11/why-archy-beats-anarchy.html

Moral Universals: Just Say No.

There are a variety of different conceptions of what “universal human morality” means, all of them involving varying degrees of absurdity. Perhaps the simplest definition would be an 'innate' morality which all human beings share. Trouble is though, it's just wishful thinking, and ignores something, well, huge: The world around us.

Why are we so obsessed with morality and absolutes anyway..?

Hmm. I think it's because we are all natural scientists at at heart, and have come to expect that what looks like chaos on the surface, is nothing but a smokescreen that conceals a hidden order underneath. I mean hell, it works for stuff like tornados and wave-patterns, why not human behaviour..? Like my friend said to me the other day:

"In the science realm this comes in the form of things like Cymatics. It is interesting that the universe shows so much complexity and elegance, and undeniable order, because we haven't been able to figure out parts of it, some are quick to claim there a lack instead of a possible unity."

 Cymatics. Well, that was a new word for me too. So, underlying order in the macro-cosmic chaos hmm..? Sexy. But I think the opposite - that we are lured into nonsensical concepts like universals with regard to human behaviour exactly because of our infatuation with (and general misapplication of) mathematic principles in the broader world. We long for the sense of finality they lend, the stability; a panacea for the troubled human condition.

I mean sure, no-one's going to overly dispute the validity of things like the universal laws of motion for example - even if things do get a little screwy at relatavistic levels, they remain perfectly good for a huge class of masses and velocities.

Thus intuitively, we go on to think "Ah - so if we can find universal principles governing things so astronomically huge as planets or as tiny as quanta - it shouldn't be so difficult to sort out a few universals for a bunch of retarded homo sapiens."

Afterall, though it's hard to measure a planet's mass and velocity, it's comparitively easy to measure or own - all we have to do is stand on the bathroom scales and carry a stop watch while we move. Surely then, intuitively, human behaviour, in comparison to astrophysics, must be child's play..?

You wish. We wish.

It's all about variables. Universal laws in the mathematic world only work because phyicists have reduced the number of variables a particular formula deals with down to the absolute minimum. In the case of motion/gravitation - mass and velocity and distance of separation. Like this:

Now, imagine if Newton had also had to take into consideration how many moons a planet had. How old they were. If that planet was in a commited relationship with a comet, or liked pepperoni on it's pizzas, or was molested as a dust cloud,



or was orbitting in a dreary, monotonous solar system with no possibility of promotion to somewhere interesting. If that planet was depressed or on medication perhaps.

That would make his lovely short equation into something very weird indeed:

I think it must be accepted that human behaviour is an infinitely more complicated process than any of the situations we have so far managed to successfully find and apply universal principles to.

Firstly - each of us are pretty much unique beyond a certain threshold of resolution - look at even Siamese twins closely enough and you'll discern differences of temprement and will - and as such cannot really be catagorized as being uniform in property as we would say, a given mass, a chemical element or particle.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, no two situations to which the wannabe universal-izer may wish to apply a universal morality are the same either.

Let's take as an example something so mundane and everyday as "aquire food".

How would we begin reducing the elements of this scenario to a small enough array of behavioural variables to ever extract some sort of universal - "works for everyone - no matter what" - Kantian moral laws..?

I mean, for a start, how many ways are there of aquiring food..? How many fingers do you have..? Enough..?

Take one extreme. Self-canibalization. You could take a quick course in surgery, another in local anaesthesia, lop off a leg, fry it up and eat it. There you go, your belly is full, you aren't dead, and no other lifeform was exploited or damaged in any way. Super. Moral as hell.

But then, what about those who are dependent on our newly peg-legged friend - his selfish unselfish action has perhaps damaged his ability to look after his children, perhaps emotionally scarred his wife, decreased his usefulness to his colleagues at work... Blah blah ad infinitum.

The other extreme, bop someone on the head and eat their liver. The Hannibal Lector option. Surely that is pretty cut and dried. Immoral. But then, what if we're on a lifeboat, starving to death, one of us is in a coma, dying, and I take it upon myself to hack the guy up into cutlets and fricassé his ass for dinner. Not only have I saved my fellow survivors from starvation, but also, in shouldering the burden of conscience entailed by this act of 'murder', saved them from a mental/spiritual trauma POV. too.

I'm a fucking hero.

Any attempt to universalize human behaviour into black and white "this action is moral, this is not" equations - ones suitable for any individual, in any situation - are doomed simply because for all intents and purposes there are no sets of standard humans, nor sets of standard situations to which to apply morality to.

Now to move onto something else that's been bugging me thoughout the whole debate so far:

This whole "Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" version of morality that ILO are proposing. I always had morality down as a thing that required more than one to play.

I don't get this 'individualized morality' bit at all. I'm getting flashbacks of ILO's anarchist arguments, but this time substituting morals for law/governence. I mean, it didn't even sound convincing the first time.

Trolling around the net to find if indeed there have been *any* real-life examples of such a minimilist morality the best I can do is Aleister Crowley and Thelema.

I mean, actually now I've seen the picture, I'm convinced. He looks like a deeply moral man.

In abstract, and purely in the rarefied and unemotional medium of text, it's easy to declare 'morality is X.' but when we get down to cases and start comparing real individuals...



It becomes a no-brainer:



Equally moral..?

Morality and the designation of moral act/immoral act, is, like most of human observation and judgements, a process of comparison, and as such, needs at least two to play. Declaring a morality of one is like expecting to meet new, fun people by playing solitaire.

It's a catch 22 situation - a 'universal morality of one' is a meaningless concept, but expanding it to encapsulate two with any maintainance of rigor is equally impossible to achieve, without equally matched sets of people, and identical situations.

Universals, schmoonivershalz.