BitsOfMyMind

I recently did a bit of thinking about the relation between consciousness and evolution and how both of them are certainly the main causes of the human self-importance syndrome, or a necessary bias towards what favors us. I got this idea from this TED talk, which is very well worth taking 15 minutes to listen to for it is a very good lesson in humility.

We all pride ourselves of being conscious creatures. It is what seems to differentiate us the most from other animals and is pretty much the only advantage we have over them; a human without his intelligence is defenseless against nature and certainly near the bottom end of the food chain. Some may think this mental capacity was a gift of some higher being but this is entirely debatable and completely biased since as sole owners of consciousness, we find ourselves incapable of making an objective statement about it. If it wasn’t the case, then anything could claim consciousness but thanks to reason and logic, we know the answer cannot come from us but from observation so we should try adopting an outsider’s perspective if we wish to find a reasonable explanation.

If we look in other living beings to find an explanation for consciousness, we will undoubtedly be let down because we are again the sole creature that seem to possess it. However, humans have not been constant in time and have only existed as such for a very short while, which means there must be a point in our biological history where we or our ancestors acquired this trait through evolution; between you and me, it makes a lot of sense to be conscious. While it has been a blessing of nature in terms of providing us with a definitive intellectual advantage against other species, it has also, by definition, tricked us into thinking we are different and unique when consciousness is most likely just another trait acquired trough natural selection like gills or lungs.

Consciousness has given us the notion of individuality as beings, this is well known, but I would postulate that it has duped us into compromising our very own existence just for the sake of perpetrating this impression of individuality. Individuality as we all conceive it is inevitably tied to Others as explained by Existentialism; with consciousness being the mechanism enabling the separation between ouselves and others. In other words, this sentiment of individuality, subsequent to us being conscious agents, can then only occur trough interaction with others we can relate to in terms of mental capacities and apperance. We see them as equal to us and capable of filling the role of Others. However, when we compare ourselves with other living organisms, we find it very hard to consider them as equivalents because they lack so many of the aforementionned characteristics, thereby limiting individuality and all it implies (equality, free-will, rights, etc.) to the human race.

Considering all that is not us as a separate class (amplified by our mastering of nature and increasing intelligence) can only lead to a sentiment of self-importance ( the human self-importance syndrome) and incidently the unconscious realization of the destructive but evolutionary advantage of consciousness. It might be our doom as blinded by egocentrism, we fail to see the impact we have on this environment we rely on. Nature will get rid of us in no time if we fail to adapt to the consequences of our own intellect and greed; just like the people that used to inhabit Easter Island.

Once this simple principle is accepted, it becomes a lot easier to reason racism, the invention of theories that like intelligent design (based by a gross misunderstanding of complexity), geocentrism, but also the need for the scientific method and why more primitive communities tend not to be so disrespectful to nature. Consciousness, both from an evolutionary and human point of view, is mainly exacerbated favoritism; favoritism for oneself and then for our own kind. That feeling of specialness is consciousness and so is the difficulty most of us have of accepting theories or facts that do not favor us while inventing some that do.

Twitter describes itself as a micro-blogging service, which tends to be a bit misleading in my opinion. To me, a blog is (amongst other things) a personal journal with which you can share anything, from emotions to ideas. I guess I could use Twitter for that purpose, but the shortness of the tweets (140 letters limit) gives me the impression it is better suited for advertisement and petty conversations. 

As I mentionned in a previous post, I really like what I write to remain pertinent troughout time and Twitter just drops the ball on this; I do not care about my opinion of the weather a few months ago (people tweet about this a lot it seems(and it’s the alma matter of office conversations)). There is no blogging whatsoever involved in twittering my state, or else, I should be able to consider all the content that sits in /var/log (on unix machines) to be blogging.

A blog post gives me the opportunity to sit back and think about specific events, thoughts or places that marked an otherwise normal day; its intellectual retrospection and makes me a better individual. On top of that, my thoughts might even interest someone that happens to be in the same situation or just curious about the same subject. Generally, every well formed blog post will share something with the rest of the web, be it insight or information. Twitter, on the other hand, is just another vehicle for web exhibitionism; I do not see anything immediately useful that can be derived from a twitter feed except some social (trends is one example) data you can get through search engine statistics anyway.

Every one wants to know how their friends are doing, sure, but I like the communication to be in the form of an e-mail or a conversation. Twitter does not fall short of updating indiviudals with their relatives’ status, but it does so in a way that demotes spending quality time interacting with others or with our own self. I have no hard feeling towards people on Twitter, I am just someone that likes to ask himself how and why rather than what and from the point of view of an outsider, Twitter is just another service that adds to the information noise the web is increasingly drowning into. It promotes this technologically induced attention deficit disorder my generation is increasingly being affected by.

I might end up on twitter one day. It could be that I don’t get it, that I am just too old (what ?) to do it on my own accord, for business, who knows? But right now, when I see Twitter, I do not figure a bunch of birds perched on an electrical wire and twitterring to each other, I see the droppings they leave behind.

A few days ago, I got fed up with the firmware of my MP3 player (Sansa e250) acting all quirky and refusing to mount under Linux 90% of the time. I searched the Web for an alternative solution, stumbled on RockBox and promptly installed it. There are plenty of RockBox reviews around the web so it would be pointless to give my own or get into writing a tutorial, but I must say that if you even feel slightly dissatisfied of your MP3 player firmware or just want more, then you ought to give RockBox a try. Its obscenely easy to install and uninstall and using it for the first time felt like a breath of fresh air and even got me that strange empowering feeling I always get whenever I install Linux on a computer that did not know any better. It’s too bad there its not more publicized, people should be aware that alternatives exist even for their MP3 player firmware. RockBox comes with all options you could ever think of and supports a huge amount of formats. As an example, the speaker in my right ear bud is damaged and does not play as strong as the other side. I could just have thrown away the headset but for reasons I hope are becoming obvious to everyone nowadays, I had to find a way to save it and figured out RockBox would allow me to balance the sound in both ears; it did. It did also provide me with a complete five-band equalizer, faster boot time, better sound quality, better battery life, faster UI, Doom (the game) and a plethora of other options on top of being capable of everything the default firmware on the Sansa e250 is. Well, all of those features do come with a few downsides and I will admit that the main one would be that which arises from RockBox’s customizability: your MP3 player just got a lot more complicated. In my case, it’s a trade off I am willing to make , but for those that have a hard time finding their way around the Ipod interface, stay clear of RockBox. Did I mention its open-source software? Give it a try, if you do not like it, uninstall it.

Positivism is an euphemism for denial. Whenever something sucks and someone advise you to adopt a more positive oultook, they are actually saying that you should find ways to not think too much about the situation you are in. It undoubtebly has its uses because sometimes, shifting your thoughts around to see the big picture or in the long run can truly help one realize that the whole issue is not that bad. However, I believe that it is nowaday overused to hide away problems that we are too lazy to act upon or too scared to tackle. Let’s face it: when something sucks, the course of action should not be positivism but rather to ask ourselves the following question: can it be acted upon? Most of the time yes but when the answer is no, then it becomes advantageous to adopt a positive attitude.

I recently came about hearing in a radio program of a couple whose last child was mentally deficient and I was amazed by the mechanisms they had devised to not think too much about it. They lived on planet “Kelly”, which is a planet full of adventures and where every day was different. To make a long story short, they had over the years tricked themselves into believing that this child was actually a blessing and one of the best things that had hapenned to them. Sure, but you know what? A mentally retarded child is probably one of the worst things that could occur in anyone’s life (with exceptions of course). There is absolutely nothing good about having a retarded kid; it genuinly sucks. Does this mean these people should stop the lie now and come back from that crazy planet? No, simply because there is nothing (ethical) they can do about this situation and it is much better to live in that sort of denial than to be unhappy for the rest of your life. After a while, it also tranforms you. This also holds true for cancer and other afflictions for which wishing them away simply does not work and no action except that of time can cure the problem. It has been medically proven that keeping a good spirit significally increases your chances of survival.

However, most troubles in life can be sorted out with a little bit of action, decision and audacity and the first step towards resolution is to actually get rid of this mask of denial so we can see with our own eyes that the situation is indeed awful. Put differently, an effort has to be deployed in order to let the incomfort necessary for an action to occur take over. Humans are naturally undecisive creatures, especially when it comes to issues that will affect the status quo of our confortable lives; positivism is just another way of hiding this fact.

However, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Microsoft achieved dominance in the American market during the same period that bottled water became omnipresent. In both instances, clever marketing convinced the general public that something that was clean, safe and free was inferior to a product encased in plastic.

Source: A comment on a linuxtoday article.