Life Luck

Obviously people are born into different situations, endowed with certain traits. Equally obviously, they are buffeted throughout life by good and bad events. Religions may variously assign this to a karma of rebirth, God, universal plan, or other mysticism, but even the most fanatic admit that it is unknowable and hence as irrelevant as its apparent randomness.

Most folks have some control over their own lives. But a brilliant beautiful wellborn woman has different options than a stupid ugly diseased man. Anyone born wealthy in a stable rich society will face different choices than another born into war-torn misery .

That is the luck of human life. Many of us believe that it is the role of society to aid the disadvantaged and to harness the skills and resources of the well-off to do so. We have taken to calling such ambition “civilization”, whatever that term may have meant in the past .

I do accept that people should be rewarded for good actions, especially those that make life better. There are a great variety of ways to do so, and generally reward should flow to the most innovative, ambitious, and hardworking. With two caveats .

First, always recognizing the role of luck, constantly compensate by leveling outcomes from the fortunate to the unfortunate .

Second, never mistake the fortunate few for the purpose of the universe .

Life is universally a gift, but not equally supported, nor equally the result of individual actions .

Babies and Puppies

Advertisers know that big eyes sell. Slap a picture of a baby or a puppy on a product and more people will buy it. Most of us can scarcely resist those cute expressions, and we get a rush of endorphins just looking at them .

Nature probably evolved this in certain mammalian species (especially primates) which have young who require extended care. Humans then tended to breed dogs whose puppies were more appealing. In both cases, the cutest survived. 

Social causes have now become deeply entangled with standard advertising. In particular, anti-abortion groups always picture helpless human infants as those being “murdered”. In truth of course most modern abortion involves discarding a lump of mostly formless tissue .

Ah, but the potential… Unsurprisingly anti-abortion never mentions surly teenagers nor terrifying criminals who may result from the rescue. 

After babies grow up to be surly teenagers, hardened criminals, nasty insane terrorists, or just people we dislike, we have little trouble handling them roughly. “Pro-life” can be code for a social movement to preserve the “right people”. 

Of course the crusaders are sincere. After all, they’ve seen the cuddly pictures on the propaganda media.

Looney Geniuses

Overwired brains often descend into what seems madness to others. Brilliance can be associated with insanity. Isaac Newton pored over mysticism, medieval alchemists tried to turn lead to gold, Chinese emperors ate crazy stuff to become immortal, many religious fanatics  pondered the ineffable reasons for the universe even as they admitted humans cannot know .

Most of our current batch of lunatic geniuses concentrate on science fiction. They want to move humans to other worlds, live forever young, turn the next stage of evolution over to silicon machines, vanish into a “singularity” which, if it existed, would exactly resemble the current universe .

But in one or two areas (when financed with other gullible people’s money) they are indeed brilliant. Some actually build things, many simply manipulate gambling spreadsheets. Their narrow focus on whatever they succeed at makes them less than stable and realistic in other areas of their lives .

I truly enjoy reading of their adventures in immortality. Instead of ingesting gold or jade, hiring magicians to enchant them, or bathing in virgins’ blood, they simply do weird self-denying rituals. Living in oxygen tents, starving, precise foods. All to extend lives which _ examined from a wider human experience _ hardly seem worth living .

I wander outside to smell the roses and laugh in the moonlight . In my own world, forever, eternally young 

Imagination

Imagination is wondrous. It can raise hopes, deepen fears, widen our perspectives. We can mold it and change focus in an instant. It is the basis of narrative stories and most artifacts .

It is, in fact, as important to our consciousness as logic. And, in the hands of the obsessed or powerful, far more dangerous. Dreaming of doing something is not always a benign pastime, as we know from past activities of prophets and dictators .

Unfortunately, our technology has escaped control by social systems, and society now faces the peril of those with vast imagination, unlimited wealth, massive technology. Most of our billionaires seem to be narrowly ignorant of true humanity .

Perhaps the worst examples are those whose science fiction imagination is creating ruin. They want humanity to expand into space like in Heinlein juvenile novels, and they ignore the wonderful planet they actually inhabit and which will probably remain the only home of humanity forever. In the meantime, among many other catastrophes, they garbage up near Earth orbit with debris that could end our current technology age quite dramatically.  

Unlimited power in fanatic minds is always a prelude to disaster. And that prediction is only a little bit relying on my own imagination .

Why

Responses to the simple question “why” are traditionally “why not” and “because”. A more useful answer would be “irrelevant”.  

Our intellects have allowed us to expand instincts into learning. We remember the past and project visions into the future. This is quite useful, it lets us know, for example, that if we drop a rock it will fall. Using language, we can become quite clever about everything .

So we become almost instinctual about cause and effect, and the logic that ties them together. Everything, we start to believe, must have a cause. In our egocentric anthropomorphic conceptual universe, we then project that every cause requires a reason. 

We think that we also must have a reason beyond simply being. That seems wrong at a metaphysical level. It’s purely selfish egoism with delusions of grandeur. 

Cause and effect logic is useful. It doesn’t necessarily underlie a mystic reality of the universe. We don’t even have much perspective on the nature of time itself – and time is essential for cause and effect .

Oh, “why” can be fun. Like any other dream. And “why not” may be a decent answer. But mostly at high abstract levels it is simply an entertaining and useless waste of time (whatever time may be).

Medical Mess

Social systems, like organisms, are often insanely complex and convoluted. “Simple” things like an animal taking a step invoke nearly infinitely complicated signals, even after we discount the infinite underlying reactions keeping life going.

Any crackpot or “normal” person tends to believe if we “just keep it simple” we could clean up a social system such as medicine and make it cheaper, more responsive, and more robust. After all, how hard could it be?

Ask a biologist what’s involved in a deer strolling across a meadow.  And don’t forget things like all the trillions of ATP cellular reactions.Fixing a social system is even worse. Like organisms, social systems are not isolated but exist in an ecology. 

Reform may, in fact, be impossible.  What often happens instead is extinction or replacement by creatures invading the territory. 

I suspect we are in such a situation. Most of our cultural systems are complicated ancient relics that still work but are increasingly susceptible to extinction or replacement. 

Not “fixing them up”, not “evolution”, but vanishing into irrelevance.

Medical coverage and practice among them .

In such cases, it seems better to concentrate on “why” rather than “how”. Presumably our AI masters will produce all the answers necessary.

Not sure we will like those much .