fractured reality

In an attempt to procrastinate during my last days here, this afternoon I wrote a PHP script to access a mySQL version of the todo.txt thing. I wish I had time to whip up a Flash version, but maybe I’ll do that Monday.

I got tired of keeping two copies of the list, one at work, one at home.

Also, I listened to a lot of Richard Dawkins. Now it is Friday and time to leave, so off I go to pack!

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An amusing passage form a recent blog entry by Dawkins.

Montreal is officially French-speaking, but perhaps the message hasn’t reached all the plumbers in the city. I was amused to note that my bathroom taps (faucets) were reversed: C was cold and F was hot. One of my fellow breakfasters told me that this mistake is quite common and once caused him to sprinkle his lawn with hot water. His colleague told me that quite often you see both taps labelled C. C for Cold, and C for Chaud – makes sense except that presumably, somewhere else, someone else will be staring at the pairing F with F.

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I also have a mental list of things that I think/believe which are much more flippant, and contains items like:

*5. I think that in general, white wines are more pleasant to drink than reds.

or

*12. I believe my affinity for short-haired women can be traced to my infatuation with the heroine from Brazil.

or

*13. Daisy is hotter than Peach.

and so on.

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In his varyingly received movie, Dogma, Kevin Smith puts forward at one point the idea (which has undoubtedly presented before) that beliefs are dangerous, and that it’s better to have ideas. People kill and die for beliefs, and in the end, as a throw-away acceptance of the idea, Rufus asks Bethany if she’s now a believer, to which she replies, smilingly, “No, but I’ve got a good idea.” Ha ha, how droll!

For awhile after watching the movie, I myself embraced the idea. Beliefs were one aspect of my over-arching disdain for organized religion. People feed one another beliefs, which, if accepted, can be used to block out all manner of discussion, discourse, debate. Hot on the heels of belief comes faith, and that is even more steadfast and immutable. Some are likely to adopt the position of, “I have faith and nothing you say or do can change that,” which is the self-righteous verbose version of, “Shut the fuck up.”

Recently, and I mean that in the sense of the past few years, I think I’ve come back to thinking that beliefs can be a good thing. That is, I don’t think that having a belief, or having faith, even, are inherently bad things. In fact, I’ve come to the conclusion that believing in things, having faith, is a selected-for advantage. They can work as a source of strength in times of strife, light when all else is darkness. Faith allows one to work in a different realm for a time, to take something as given provides a basis for certain courses of action that would otherwise prove infeasible or counterproductive. It is one of the primary bases of passion, of emotion.

But, and here my scientific mind shows, if the assumptions lead to contradiction or if the belief leads to the spreading of misery, then one must be willing to say, “Hmm, my faith in this thing may actually be misplaced.” Nothing is unchanging, even the laws of physics break down at crucial moments we don’t fully understand. I think maybe that one’s beliefs should also be supple, ammendable. We are admittedly all human and we therefore make mistakes, errors of judgement.

This is all a terribly long-winded way of getting around to the following, which is a list of things I think and things I believe. This is an ongoing process, which hopefully will never be completed, but which I hope to refine as I go.

1. I believe there is no God.
2. I think that, while it is certainly in the eye of the beholder, to an extent, not all beauty is relative. There is such a thing as absolutely Ugly, there is such a thing as indisputably Beautiful.
2.a. The above thought extends to all instances where “beauty” is an assignable trait (music, art, formulae).
2.b. I further think that should we ever attain near-complete knowledge of the brain/mind, we will discover the underlying evaluation criteria.
3. I believe immutable beliefs are dangerous. I think it important to remain flexible.
4. I believe that people should be able to consume whatever substances they want.
5. I believe that people should have the freedom to make mistakes.
6. I believe that humankind as a species originated in Africa, and migrated from there in no fewer than two distinct waves.
7. I believe that the scientific method is not the end-all of reason or discovery. I think it is one of the most useful tools we have at this time, but it is not the ultimate one.
7.a. I believe that even the most elegant mathematical representations of physical systems are mere approximations, lovely imaginings of how we wish the world was.
7.b. I believe string theory is the current extreme extension of this. It is lovely, utter bullshit.
8. I think that we will eventually be able to express ourselves on computers by thought alone.
9. I think Good and Evil are relative, and are generally abused as labels.
10. I conjecture wildly that all Labels are abused.
11. I think naps should be limited to the realm of 15 minutes, maximum. Anything more is Sleep.
12. I believe that animals have a consciousness, but that it differs fundamentally from our own, and fro mone another. A cat has a consciousness differing from that of a dog, or snake, or a cockroach.
12.a. I think at this very moment that consciousness arises from neural interactions, so anything without some sort of nervous system lacks a consciousness. I also think that my belief of this point will change significantly.
13. I believe that humans are still evolving in the Darwinian sense of the word.
14. I think that while killing animals for our own sustinance isn’t Wrong, factory farming them in miserable conditions for such purposes is.
15. I think the removal of our awareness of the killing of our food sources is a harmful process.

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1. Today I got out of the coffee shop, noted the gray sky and thought, “Ah, another gray Thursday.”
2. It is Tuesday, not Thursday.
3. It is absolutely freezing in this office.
4. I have bruises on my arm, and a finger busted open from where I moved a chest of drawers by myself this past weekend.
5. Mario Hoops 3 on 3 should really be called “1 on 3″.

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