The Root of All Malfuctions of Human Partnerships

[I'm not sure if I've picked a very good title for this entry. Because it is really unclear what I mean by partner. All through this post, I mean a life partner, e.g. girlfriend, boyfriend or spouse each time I'm talking about partnership.]

In a previous post I’ve discussed that even our ethics has been evolved by natural selection and has roots in biology. And in another one, I’ve described that human specie is not biologically monogamous. Here, I’ll briefly point to a very deep root of malfunctions of human partnerships and propose a controversial solution to that.

You have probably seen many partnerships around you, getting started with lot of hopes and good wills to make a wonderful future. Nevertheless, having a look at the divorce rate  statistics, you’ll see that there is something wrong with our marriage and moral! Even in the countries in which divorce is a kind of scandal, the rate is increasing as they develop. Even boyfriend-girlfriends feel unsatisfied after a quite a short while. If, at the beginning of their relationship, you ask them about the factors they considered to choose their partners, you’ll probably hear a more or less same range of answers, such as: “he is cool”, “she is smart”, “I like the way he plays violin”, “we feel like we understand each other”, “we have the same crisis”, etc. But if you talk to them when they breakup, you’ll hear another possible range of answers like: “he is embarrassing. I don’t have any place in his life! Poor me! His violin sounds like a screaming donkey, but he wants me to pretend I like it!”

But you might ask what really happened in between that I get such a similar answers! Is it possible that one’s talent in art suddenly vanishes? Is it possible that someone becomes embarrassing all of a sudden after being that cool?

I believe not! Instead, I would say when a couple meet, a very strong sexual attraction forms between them due to some electrochemical reactions in their central nervous system and their unconscious mind, if you like the term, mislead them and make them think they are attracted to the *sense of humour*, the *art* or whatever! There are many evidences for that, for example one can point to the fact that homosexuals are not as many as straight people! It suggests that human relationships from, based on, mainly, sexual attraction. Needless to say, after a quite a short while, the sexual attraction damps and they start to see the weak points and they become bored of each other! This fact gets even worse, when they meet another possible partner! They would think like: “Oh! What if I could meet this chap long before?!” and sometimes it ends up in cheating on their spouses and some other times in just a pity or what! However, in most of the situations, almost all of the conditions are the same but the sexual attraction. This sexual attraction damping has roots in evolution, too. (see the evolutionary explanation for polygamy)

So if the root of all these malfunctions is the damping of sexual attraction, what can we do about it to make it work better and maintain the social structure of human communities?

A possible solution is group marriage. Consider the way we resolve our physiological needs in a community. For each of our needs we go to a specialist. We ask the farmer to grow our food, the carpenter to build us a chair and so on. We also go to philosophy society to find someone to have a chat about our interesting philosophical issues, we go to photography society if we are interested in this topic and so on. We have learnt that we don’t need to have one society to do philosophy, photography, build a chair and everything else! We know that it wouldn’t be any efficient. So a very naive idea is to have different partners to resolve different needs; one for the sexual intimacy, one for giving the feel of confidence and all. Nevertheless, there is a major problem with this idea. It is the fact that having more partners mean having less privacy and less belongings and the concept of group marriage essentially destroys the meaning of belonging and social level. This would be a very favour to communists, however I don’t believe it is possible. Because we have evolved such that we need a basic level of welfare for ourselves and because of the limitations of the resources on the earth, unfortunately, not all us can have it. Moreover, many people always want more, and you can’t ask them not to want! Then the problem gets even worse!

A very natural solution to this issue is to minimise the number of partners, but not necessarily to one! Back to our example of philosophy and photography society, imagine if all of the people in a community became a member of all societies, then there would be not enough resources for all of them. However, if some of them became a member of philosophy society and photography society and some other to music society and painting society and so on, then they can make the best out of what they have. Similarly, just a very few spouses, each specialised in a few of your needs will highly increase the level of your relationship with them. Basically because it is like you have a person who is very good at everything (which for a single spouse case this is very unlikely to be). Moreover, as your sexual attraction damps or your ideas about some particular thing changes it wouldn’t ruin all aspects of your relationship. You can easily repair that by changing one, say out of three, of you partners! This could be done with a very lower cost! However, unfortunately this idea cannot be applied until people are stuck to this classical ethics and anything else is a taboo for them!

Ethical Vegeterianism

I’ve argued in a couple of posts that I believe there is nothing special about human consciousness. We are evolved from our ancestors and if you want to say humans are conscious, you have to accept that animals also have a level of consciousness. As I’ve discussed before, our consciousness could be defined as a set of very complicated reactions to some stimuli and many animals can also surprise us by their reactions. Therefore, they are conscious to some extent as well. On the other hand, we recognise humans as, omnivore species; they kill the other animals and eat their flesh.

If the human ethics was based on respecting the life of conscious beings, that wouldn’t be possible, as many Indians can’t imagine doing that! It would be as pathetic and revolting as serving a human infant instead of the poor pig or cow in the restaurant. Because they basically posses, more or less, the same level of consciousness, if you have some sort of linguistic definition of consciousness.

But when you look at the image above and think of grilling this cute baby and serve it on the table you might probably puke! So, evolution not only has made humans omnivore, but also it has constructed such ethics for them that they usually don’t feel that much inconvenience by eating the other animals’ flesh. The evolution has made us think that if we all turn to vegetarians, then there wouldn’t be enough nutrition for all of us. Furthermore, it would be hard to produce enough vitamins like B12 and many others, which cannot be found in plants. So human specie has to be omnivore to have a higher fitness in the nature.

Nevertheless, an important question rises here. One might ask, do you mean that you have found an ethical behaviour, that doesn’t have any evolutionary explanation?
Here is the answer: Even if you find one, it still doesn’t make any harm to Darwinism, but this has also an evolutionary explanation.

For some obvious evolutionary reasons, animals, including humans, fear from death and hence hate killing any of their own “type”. Moreover, humans believe they are conscious and on the other hand they have the ability to think and they have a very powerful imagination. Therefore, at some point some nice guys, like Mahavira, come and say animals are conscious as well as we are. Therefore, we are from a same origin and we fear from destroying “beings” with which we share the same origin and it is cruel to do that. Hence their cultural and ethical structures develop from that point such that it might be a nightmare for some of the Indians to eat meat.

I want to conclude that both non-vegetarianism and ethical vegetarianism, as well as any ethical system, have roots in biology and evolution and both of them seem rational to me.

One more week…

We didn’t have enough discussions on the last post, which I wanted to use to make some ethical arguments. I believe that was because most of the visitors of this blog were busy with their exams. Therefore, I’ll wait another week before I go to the main point. For this week you may just want to watch the following video, as a supplementary material.

Freewill of the Parrot!

The prerequisite of this week’s post is to see the following clips. The first one is a very well-trained parrot talking at TED, and the second is the same parrot, presumably some years earlier, when it was not that good at acting job!

Would you say this parrot is conscious or it is just reacting to some stimuli? If your answer is the second what would be your opinion about humans?

Lets go back to our previous problem: freewill! If you say we are just reacting, then can you define freewill for human being? A broad range of answers could be given to this very old question; from compatiblism to libertarianism. I’m just keen to know your ideas. I guess a good start will be a sharp definition of freewill. Do we have freewill if we have several choices and we are able to select one of them? If yes, then what would be the cause of this selection? If that is, say, a random process of some quantum phenomena in your brain with no particular cause, then how would this random process be free on your will?

Do you see the possibility that some (billion) years later we evolve to a more intelligent specie and they study in their biology courses that: “Humans were not conscious species! They thought they are, but they were just reacting to some electrochemical stimuli! Actually WE are conscious, and you can’t doubt about it!”

Quantum mechanics is OK… Just don’t touch the principles!

The motivation for publishing this post is my recent discussion with a friend on relational quantum mechanics. However, it is extensible to any other attempt to change the foundations of quantum mechanics. Richard Feynman compared [the precision of] quantum mechanics to predicting a distance as great as the width of North America to an accuracy of one human hair’s breadth. He himself said “If you think you understand Quantum theory, then you don’t understand Quantum theory”. Others go beyond that and formulate new interpretations and models to get rid of the indeterminism and nonlocality of the quantum theory! Carlo Rovelli in his paper, Relational Quantum Mechanics clearly mentioned eight objections against the Copenhagen interpretation. Bohmian Quantum Mechanics violates the Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle by introducing a new concept called quantum potential. And while we have the Bell’s inequality which tells us that no local and deterministic theory can, even in principle, make the predictions similar to what the quantum mechanics does in our single world where we live, many-worlds interpretation introduces a local and deterministic quantum theory but in the parallel universes! I am not against new minds and new philosophies for quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, if all these efforts are just because we don’t understand the mysterious world of quantum scales, then it would be a total waste of time and can even be a misleading way which takes us to dead end. (Anyhow, I should omit Bohmian model, if  the manage to show us their quantum potential or at least build a precise machine which is capable of measuring position and momentum to very high precision. In this case, they’ll have new words so say.)

Yes our universe is queerer than we can suppose. Modern science teaches us that the size of nuclei is much less than the size of atom. And it means that an atom is mainly an empty space. However, our brains have been evolved such that it understands solidity, for us to be able to survive in the middle world. Middle world is the narrow range of reality which we judge to be normal as opposed to the queerness of the very small, the very large and the very fast. If a neutrino had a brain, it would say that rock really mainly consists of empty space; but our brain doesn’t. Our brain doesn’t understand duality and superposition. It doesn’t suggest that we should change our theories, if the calculations show that it’s such! Rovelli calls the quantum state a fictitious non-physical mental construction, because he doesn’t understand it, as Feynman said “I think I can safely say that nobody understands Quantum Mechanics”. But what does he mean by understanding? Is that just common sense? Then do you really understand Newtonian mechanics? If you do, you are wrong! Mixing the common sense with the scientific result is not science anymore! It reminds me of quote by Wittgenstein. “I’ve always wondered why”, said Wittgenstein, “for so long people thought that the Sun revolved around the Earth.”

”Why?’ said his surprised interlocutor,

“Well, I suppose it just looks that way” “Hmm”, retorted Wittgenstein “and what would it look like if the Earth revolved around the Sun?”

The Partially Examined Life – a philosophy podcast

Just a quick note let you about an amazing philosophy podcast. The point is that “you don’t have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text *they*’re talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion”, as they say.

My ultimate question…

This is my ultimate question and for me it is the most interesting post I’ve ever published in my weblog. But since every single individual is different, you might not find it that interesting. Nevertheless, I am very excited to talk about that. It is a little bit too long according to my standards. But I didn’t want to break the pleasure of flying in those dreams anyway.

Here I’ll show how a philosophical question can be root of almost everything I would like to think about. You can see an illustration of my ultimate question below:

Figure 1. the Platonic, the Mental and the physical worlds

This illustration is very similar the idea in Penrose’ book, but with a slight difference.  Lets first describe what these worlds mean to me and where we do exist. Plato taught us that the mathematical propositions – the things that could be  regarded as assailably true – referred not to physical objects (like the approximate squares, triangles, circles and spheres that might be constructed from marks in the sand or any other physical object) but to certain idealized entities. He envisaged that these ideal entities inhabited a different world, distinct from the physical world. One might ask if this Platonic world is an actual real world or not. The answer is yes. A simple example to show that is the Mandelbrot set.

Look at this extraordinary pattern that emerges from a mathematical rule of particular simplicity. The point is that no one, even Mandelbrot himself when he first caught sight of the incredible complications in the fine detail of the set, had any real preconception of the set’s extraordinary richness. Therefore, these sets are there, whether you find them or not. Just like the physical phenomena that you might discover them in the physical world or not.  The Plato’s mathematical world is a real world of mathematical objects, completely distinct from the Mental world, where you might want to explore and generate mathematical sciences.

The third world which might or might not exist is the mental world. The question is whether there is a mysterious fact about a conscious mind or not. The field of effect of this question is very wide; from the questions like “Are humans reducible to machines?” to “Do quantum states collapse when observed by a conscious mind” to “Are we living is mind of a daemon?”

I personally prefer to think this third world does not exist. I think people always want to think there is more in their mind than what actually is! It makes me sick! Nevertheless, whether I like it or not, we can’t neglect it since this is a very defining assumption in many philosophical and mathematical theories, including the intuitionistic logic.

Now that I have explained what I mean by these three worlds I am in a position to ask my big question: What is that in the fig. 1? Yes, this is my ultimate question. If I go through explaining this question my mind will boggle! Thus, I just raise some questions and explanation of that to make that a little bit more clear.

Is this the fabric of reality? I suppose a scientific answer to that would be negative. I strongly believe in the intrinsic incompleteness of science. If the science is incomplete, then always there would be something out of it and there is a probability that this portion has more effect than everything we already know! We even don’t know if we are living in a computer simulation or not! How on the earth we could have any idea about the structure of reality? The Fabric of reality is not the business of science! It is not even important at all. What science does is just to predict and explain the phenomena which it can see due to its current state. Therefore, one philosophical question that can be root of all sciences is what is that illustration.

Due to our current philosophical and scientific arguments it is a reasonable assumption  to take those worlds seriously. Then we can see how science will be generated from that. If we just take those worlds as real then the following four questions will generate all the science and a philosophy that is capable of generating even more science!

1. How to surf on these worlds

2. How they are related and how they affect each other? (the arrows between them)

3. Are there any other worlds?

4. Does our reality need to be unified?

The first question is the origin of questions such as “How to quantify gravity” or “How to define different geometries?” or “Can we build a conscious robot?”

The second question can make you ask “Where are maths, physics and cognitive science come from?”. This is a very deep question. You may see that people omit one axiom from the Euclidean geometry, then they find its counter intuitive results in the nature and the curved spacetime. They talk about intuitionism and its logic and the Heyting algebra. Then they find it in the quantum mechanics. There are lots of these clues that suggest there would be a correlation between these worlds.

The third question is the most fundamental but improbable question which if we find any evidence for that, we will enter a completely new world!

Finally, the fourth question asks whether they should be different aspects of a reality or they can be distinct worlds with just some bridges between them?

You’ll see that the first question can generate hundreds of deep questions. I do hope that the few samples above have made the importance of that question clear enough.

My deepest sympathy…

There is a harsh, burdensome and heartrending situation in Iran. I would like the people of my country to accept my deepest condolences and sympathy for all the bloodshed, violence and stupidity there. I shall keep the header of my weblog black until we see a normal situation again!

On Defence of Polygamy

Different surveys show different statistics on the infidelity of humans in their relationships. Some say about 60 percent of men and 40 percent of women cheat on their spouses, while the other say 28 percent of men and 18 percent of women. 80-85 percent of societies allow polygamous marriage. There are loads of surveys, if you search, which might not be consistent numerically; but, they have one word in common: human is biologically not a monogamous specie. This shouldn’t be very surprising if we look at over 90 percent of birds engaging in social monogamy but only 7 percent of mammals. By polygamy I don’t mean polygyny, which is commonly mistaken with polygamy and is obviously a serious offense to women rights. I mean an actual group marriage. The evolution of monogamy in human societies was because of their children weakness in adapting to the nature. They needed to have parents stay longer to protect them until their growth. But even now that our situation has been changed, we stick on the same ethics, but not because of our genes but our memes.

An estimated 16 percent of men pay for sQeQxual relationship, according to a 2005 report by social work professor Sven-Axel Månsson. Månsson reported that 14 percent of Dutch men have bought sQeQx as compared with nearly 40 percent of men in Spain. (Prostitution is legal in both countries.) And according to HYDRA, a Berlin-based organization that provides legal advice and other aid to pQrQostitutes, up to three quarters of men in Germany, which also has legalized prostitution, have paid for sQeQxual services. Meanwhile other estimates for Germany put the proportion far lower, at about one fifth. In Thailand, one study suggested that a whopping 95 percent of men have slept with a pQrQostitute.  This shows that the current form of marriage and moral doesn’t work. It is biologically not natural for the human specie. They try to escape from that whenever you let them free. Even if you have ever felt a person of different gender is cute, but you’ve damped your feeling due to your ethical background, while you had a partner, this would be an evidence for nonmonogamy of your specie.

In the later posts of these series I will propose my own model which, I believe, is a controversial hypothetical solution to human relationships failure in their societies.

Which one is more likely to be true: Jainism or Islam?

This post is gonna be so messy, as my mind is at the moment. At first I wanted to write about sQeQx  and our sQeQxual feelings (the Qs are added to avoid automatic filtering in some countries).  Then I realised in this post I was supposed to have a discussion about Deistic god and other types of gods which does not intervene our lives and hence  are more difficult to deal with! Then I thought the visitors of my weblog (and also I) are no more enthusiastic to hear about religion. Therefor,  I decided to merge this with my next atheistic entry about Islam and put them all together here. I’ve separated them, you can skip either if you are not interested in.

The undetectable god!

A good friend of mine, Amyr, has always had this comment on my atheistic views that although one can easily refute the existence of Abrahamic  god through its contradictions, how can you ignore the ” probability of existence of some other religious-free if you will sort of God?”

I have also repeatedly heard from friends that you can’t disprove the probability of the existence of a god who has once created the laws of physics and then retired or dead and is no longer keeping touch with us! Since it’s dead now, it can’t do any harm to anybody. We are more comfortable with that, because we like to think that everything was created for a purpose. Therefor, we believe in that!

Now let’s have a look at the risks and benefits of such a god. I start by a piece of consciousness-raising. Do we need to believe that a flying teapot is revolving about the sun? or some thousand light years away about another star if you like? Believing in a god which is out there but doesn’t interact with us and doesn’t affect our lives is neither scientifically nor philosophically useful! Why should we believe in such an idea? Would it be helpful? Does it give any better explanation of the universe in which we live? If a purposeful intelligent designer has created our universe, what would be that purpose which doesn’t need any communication with the creatures!?

Believing in such a god is both useless and risky. The risk is not of a kind of encouraging people to commit terrorist attack. But it will increase irrational thinking. Yes, there is a, however low,  probability of the existence of a god, just sitting out there, somewhere beyond our universe where there is no link between us to touch each other. However, believing in the existence of anything needs evidence. I’ll ask you: where is your evidence? If you believe in anything without evidence then you are thinking irrationally. For a scientist it is death. Sometimes, irrational thinking is a very tiny thorn which is very hard to pick up! Robust rational thinking is a very defining property that a scientist should have, especially in the modern science which common sense plays a very minor role!

You might say the idea of purposeful god which is no longer alive is more comforting, it is consistent too; so I prefer to think irrationally just a little bit.

Then I ‘ll say you are offending the idea of humanity. We have been created as such by the natural selection. Then we have constructed our societies. Why on the earth you find it less valuable to seek the purpose within the society which is constructable by our own hands? What is this slavish desire to receive the purpose from somewhere beyond?

Some of the deists believe that god has left us after the creation and will catch us again after death (!) and they find this one comforting too! I can just quote Mark Twain: “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” On the other hand, if I think of a nasty god waiting for me to burn me in hellfire, I would really freak out!

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Jainism vs. Islam

I was motivated by my Indian friend, Krina Mehta, to read about Jainism. I don’t know why I haven’t ever had a look at it before. I found it really interesting. Therefore, I want to introduce it to you by having a quick comparison with Islam.

Muslims claim that their god has revealed scientific facts in their holy book. (for those of you who can’t open the link, this is just an explanation of how stupid those ideas are). They claim that the Big Bang was described in Qur’an (21:30). I’ve read it a hundred times, but I couldn’t find how it is any related to the Big Band! Well maybe god didn’t know about singularity at the moment of sending Qur’an to Muhammad! Anyway,  even if I accept that as Big Bang, Jainism has revealed the Big Bounce, which is a much more recent scientific discovery! Advantage => Jainism!

The main belief in Islam is the creation of the universe in a certain time by god, which I have always pointed the consequential paradoxes. On the contrary Jains have a famous quotation in Mahapurana which says:  “Some foolish men declare that a creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill advised and should be rejected. If God created the world, where was he before the creation? If you say he was transcendent then and needed no support, where is he now? How could God have made this world without any raw material? If you say that he made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression.” Muslims, Checkmate!

Jainism has a very strict emphasis on non-violence . They go far beyond vegetarianism. They refuse food obtained with unnecessary cruelty! That’s while Muslims sacrifice animals in their Great Eid just because Abraham didn’t sacrifice his own son! Holy shit! Lucky Ismael! It was a really scary story! Generally speaking, I found Islam a very violent religion! They have Jihad as one of their duties!!!

Having said that, Jainism have some minor problems. For example Jain texts describe the shape of the universe as similar to a man standing with legs apart and arm resting on his waist. Anyway, it is not wronger than breaking the mass-energy conservation law by disappearing Jesus from the universe or breaking any laws of gravitation and electromagnetic force by splitting the moon!

Oh, I’m tired of typing some random bullshit here! Believe me my friend! Islam (and any other religion) is ridiculous.