BitsOfMyMind

In America, Most of the people are atheistic about gods like Thor, some daring individuals go one god further.
— Dawkins

The link between demographics and climate, although logically evident (more humans -> more pollution), has been spoken of very little during the whole debate until now. The new report on the state of population and climate change that has been published by the UN, while being full of euphemisms and very careful about its words, it finally challenges the taboo and sheds the light on this issue. We can attribute the difficulty of bringing this argument to the table on the bad reputation population control policies have and it’s obvious conflict with more conservative religious organization, but the time for screwing around is up. This problem, while caused entirely by our actions as a race, can have consequences that are far bigger than humanity and only science has so far been capable of solving problems of inhuman scale. Now, I can see from miles away the great organized religions coming to interfere with resolving this crisis.

Everyone with a half-decent knowledge of psychology and philosophy will know perfectly well that us humans have a natural aversion to all that is dehumanizing. Yes, I can understand why birth control and abortions are considered immoral by some, but now is not the time to bring everyone’s religious or spiritual opinion to the polemic. Every time I hear someone saying that this whole climate issue is the will of some divinity is another blow to the respect that I have for humanity and my hopes that we can fix this problem. They can think their god is to blame, but if such is their reasoning, then I would very much appreciate them not interfering with those that are actually using their brains and trying to solve this issue.

Either way, there will be birth control in the process of resolution either in the form of policies or in the form of a cataclysm, we have the choice. Nature knows no spiritualism as any divinity is the creation of the human mind, and if we fail at sorting ourselves out, it will gladly exercise its overdue right of population control, just like it has been doing for lesser beings since life first appeared in the universe and for us before we became intelligent enough to circumvent it. The Chinese policies have prevented a good 250 million humans of being born from 1979 to 2000, which translates to a obvious amount of savings in CO2 emissions. It has created a whole host of other sociological problem, but minds are much easier to change than overpopulation.

Once we are past this crisis, I hope someone will have the courage go confront the churches and tell them that they have been wrong about everything, that they have been wrong in past, that they are wrong and that they will be wrong in the future. In fact, there is no wrong nor right in what religion preaches, there are only statements devoid of any reasoned predictions and anything that comes out of organized religion should be barred from having any influence on human governance.

I stumbled upon this organization while researching the subject. I sincerely hope it an other similar initiative will get more visibility in the future.

My mind is almost set on getting rid of my Mac, there are just a few bits here and there I need to get over with. I got convinced by the viral Windows 7 campaign and will be swi… No, I will actually start using Linux as my desktop OS. It have been soliciting its services for quite a while on a bunch of servers and only now have I got to fully appreciate its power and architecture. So much that it has lately become overly tempting to make the plunge. In fact, I had been contemplating this as a necessary outcome only a few months after purchasing that 2400 CDN$ Macbook Pro and cementing my switch from Windows XP to *nix only. Yes, Mac OS X is a great OS, but I knew deep down that I would get over all its bells and whistles pretty soon; what really amazed me was its Unix core and that my next machine would not be a Mac but something with Linux on it.

Mac OS X is kind of like a pretty but stupid girlfriend. When the charm dissipates, all that is left is a hollow shell of a human. Linux, on the other hand, is quite like growing your own vegetables. You get the full satisfaction of eating the product of your work but sometimes, the whole crop gets bricked and you just cannot figure out why. As for Windows, I cannot really find a satisfying metaphor, it’s just a tool.

Mac OS X being another flavor of Unix, there is actually plenty to do on it. What is lacking are the resources: once you stumble upon a problem, you are pretty much left to figure it out for yourself or resort to the mailing lists. With Linux, the web is littered with just about any kind of information on every part of the system; if problem, then google. Not that I am part of any, but I have found the Apple community to very superficial compared to Linux. A consequential part of the discussions seem to be about Apple gossip, features, or just plain bragging about who has the most gadgets with a white apple on it. On Linux forums, the dynamic is different. Yes, there is always a fair amount of noobs (me being one) hanging around, but very often, you will encounter a bunch of geeks marveling over some very clever network trick or pure altruism in the form of someone explaining how to get this thing to work with that stuff. By the way, noobs are also very welcome and everyone over there is very happy to help someone trying to break the shackles of techno-slavery.

So my Mac is in need of a new home. There is after all nothing wrong with having a stupid girlfriend and Macs are nonetheless very impressive pieces of technology pretty much anyone will fall in love with. As for me, it appears that I have a fetish, and only the perspective of a natively recompiled kernel will give me a hard-on.

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.