Tag Archives: philosophy

Some thoughts on entropy

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It seems like I spend most of my life in a constant, never-ending battle against entropy, the tendency of all natural systems to progress toward a state of increasing disorder.

Yesterday, Shelly and I spent a good deal of time cleaning up the living room. I’ve moved a great deal of the stuff that used to be in my office into the apartment–eight years’ worth of business records, files, several computers (including a G4 Cube, arguably the most beautiful computer ever designed), and all the other stuff that accumulates when one spends time in one place for an extended period of time.

I hate entropy. The second law of thermodynamics says that energy will, whenever possible, seek to become disbursed. The net total sum of entropy in any closed system–such as, for example, the universe–always increases; stars burn out, iron rusts, people age and die.

And frankly, it all pisses me off.

It seems to me a damn poor way to run a universe–build into it an immutable natural law which guarantees, in the end, the heat death of that universe and everything in it.

Put most simply, entropy is energy, but it’s energy that can’t be used for anything. The total amount of entropy in a system is generally represented by the letter S; the relationship between entropy and energy is given by the equation

where delta-S is the change in entropy in the system, q is the amount of heat absorbed by the system, and T is the absolute temperature of the system at the time the heat was absorbed. As a system absorbs heat, the entropy of that system increases.

Certain processes in the universe are said to be “thermodynamically irreversible.” What that means, in its most basic form, is that certain changes in a system which result in increased entropy will not spontaneously reverse themselves. (It’s a bit more complex than that, of course; thermodynamically irreversible processes will reverse themselves, and that reversal itself is thermodynamically irreversible, if the environment changes in such a way that the reversal of the process increases entropy. But I digress.)

The notion of thermodynamic irreversibility is an important one. It means that, barring a change in the surrounding environment, certain processes once run will not revert back to their initial state. The universe tends toward a state of increasing entropy; a process that increases entropy isn’t going to go back on itself.

Consider a baseball lying on the ground. If you were to make a movie of how that baseball came to be lying on the ground–starting from a pitcher’s hand, flying toward a batter, striking the bat, zooming up into the air, falling back toward the ground–and then you were to play that movie backwards, you would not see anything that violates the laws of physics. The ball could start on the ground; then, all the air molecules around the ball could suddenly conspire to strike the ball in just exactly the right way to increase its kinetic energy, flinging it up from the ground and accelerating it toward the batter. The ball could strike the bat, where most of its energy would be absorbed by the bat and from there by the batter, the muscles in his arms taking that energy and dumping it into molecules of water and carbon dioxide, turning them into glucose molecules. Slowed and with its trajectory altered, the ball could go flying toward the pitcher, where his muscles absorbed the remaining kinetinc energy, turning it into chemical energy by combining water and carbon dioxide and storing the energy in the molecular bonds of the glucose his muscles created.

It could happen that way, but it doesn’t. This sequence of events would require a rather startling decrease in entropy–the random disorganized molecules of air suddenly conspiring together to move in just the right way to propel the ball, the ball-s trajectory taking it precisely back to the bat, the muscles in the player’s arms absorbing kinetic energy and storing it in glucose molecules…

It doesn’t happen that way because all these processes are thermodynamically irreversible. A ball flying through air will collide with the molecules in its way, which will absorb some of its energy and go rocketing off in random directions, generating heat and friction that slow the ball down; this increases entropy. The air molecules aren’t going to spontaneously move to a more highly ordered state, and push against the baseball in just the right way to speed it up; this process reduces entropy, and a reduction of entropy in one place can not happen unless it’s offset by a greater increase in entropy somewhere else.

My first exposure to entropy was in a college physics class, where we discussed the relationship between the ideal gas law, PV=nRT, and entropy. If you take a container of gas at high pressure, and you open the top of that container, the gas escapes until the pressure inside the container is equal to the pressure outside the container. If you open a container and leave it sitting in a room, the air in the room will not spontaneously start pouring into the bottle until the pressure inside the bottle is greater than the pressure outside the bottle. When the pressure inside and outside the bottle is equalized, the entropy in the system is at its maximum.

Each individual molecule of air is bouncing around totally at random, but the probability of all the molecules ending up in the bottle at the same time is very low indeed. As each molecule bounces around at random, the total net probability that any one molecule will be in any one place is pretty low, but the total net probability that the number of molecules in one place will be the same as the number of molecules in another is very high.

This is important, because there is a relationship between entropy and probability. In a gaseous system, if the system has two different states that it can be in, and the probability of the less probable state is given by P and the probability of the more probable state is given by P’, then the entropy in the system can be determined by

where R is the universal gas constant and N is the number of molecules of gas. More generally, in any kind of system, (R/N) will be replaced by some kind of constant, whose value depends on the particulars of the system.

That is, the entropy of a system increases when its state changes from a low probability condition to a high probability condition.

Now, let’s consider a universe without entropy. Entropy provides a mechanism by which certain changes are thermodynamically irreversible; the system favors one state over the other, and changes that increase entropy won’t spontaneously revert. But what happens without this mechanism?

All the structures that exist in the universe today are the result of the gradual accumulation of small changes over time. The initial state of the universe was uniform; the processes that caused non-uniformities to exist, that caused molecules of hydrogen to form, that caused those molecules to congregate and gravitate and form stars, that caused those stars to fuse heavier elements and burn out and explode, that caused the debris from these explosion to accumulate and form new stars…all these processes are thermodynamically irreversible. Some of these processes did result in spontaneous localized increases in order and decreases in entropy, to be sure; but the net sum total of entropy in the universe increased at every step. (Creationists always try to argue that thermodynamics means the spontaneous emergence of highly ordered living things, and the spontaneous increase in the complexity of those living things, is impossible; what the Creationists don’t get is that entropy always increases in a closed system, but this planet is not a closed system. Increase in order is permissible, if you add energy to the system; but adding energy to the system increases entropy somewhere else. The sun is an enormous maw of entropy; the decrease of entropy in living things here is more than offset by the increase in entropy there.)

So without entropy, there’s no mechanism for these small changes to accumulate. Without entropy, the changes that result inexorably in the formation of stars and planets and iPods and you and I aren’t irreversible; the system tends toward a steady state, with each change equally likely to be reversed.

So in other words, without entropy we wouldn’t be here. Without that ratchet that lets changes happen but then prevents them from un-happening, the universe doesn’t do anything interesting.

Which means I shouldn’t really resent entropy as much as I do. But dammit, it still seems like a poor way to run a universe to me. A universe that doesn’t run down and end in heat death, but doesn’t do anything interesting, or a universe that does marvelous and interesting things, then sputters out and dies…man, I want another choice!

Some thoughts on logic and emotion

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I know people who consider themselves rational and logical, and deny that their emotions control or even influence them.

I know people who are highly emotional and intuitive , and who make decisions based on their feelings and their intuition.

In my experience, both paths tend to lead to disaster.

The person who strives to be rational and logical often ends up making many of his decisions completely emotionally. Why? Because he has not developed the tools to understand his emotions, or even to recognize them for what they are. So he does what seems right to him, unaware how heavily what “seems right” is influenced by his emotions…and without the tools to understand his emotions, he often ends up completely unaware of the reality of the effect they have on his decisions.

On the other hand, the person who lets her emotions have the driver’s seat–the person who allows her emotions and feelings to tell her what to do–is no better off.

You see, there is no part of human perception that is without flaw. Just like you can think you know something intellectually, and be wrong, so can you also FEEL something, and still be wrong. Emotions, like rational thought, are not infallible. Emotions and reason are not two different things, and they are not subject to different rules.

Emotions are nothing more than the way the ancient parts of our brains–the parts that do not have language–communicate with us. Emotions happen for a reason, and the things you feel have a source.

However, it is possible to feel that something is true–to feel it so completely and so absolutely that you KNOW it, more surely than you know your own name–and still be wrong.

People who put their emotions in the driver’s seat often tend to believe those emotions without question. If they feel defensive, that means that they MUST have been attacked. If they feel frightened, that MUST mean that there is something to fear.

And emotions tend to create the reality they exist in. Feelings color and flavor our perceptions of the world. When we feel that something is true, we tend to see things that support that feeling and ignore things that don’t. The irony of this is that by doing so, we can actually take something that we feel is true, but is actually false, and MAKE it true. The person who feels that he can not trust someone, or that someone is hostile to him, may end up behaving in ways that actually do make that person hostile to him. The person who believes that her partner wants to leave her, and that her partner doesn’t love her, may behave in ways that alienate her partner, and make that feeling come true.

Feel with your heart, but check your facts.

Understand your feelings. Don’t deny them, but don’t put them in the driver’s seat either. Examine them. Look at what they are saying, and then decide for yourself whether or not what they are saying is true. Decide for yourself whether or not the things you see are real, or are fabrications ceated by your feelings to try to support themselves.

People who deny their feelings can, in extreme cases, become monsters, and commit acts of atrocity. People who trust their feelings implicitly, and who let their feelings guide them, are easy to manipulate and easy to lead; it’s no accident that the overwhelming majority of cult members are people who are very intuitive and who trust their feelings. In extreme cases, feeling that something is true and not challenging that feeling also leads to atrocity; a person must have passionate feelings indeed in order to fly an airplane into a building.

Feel with your heart, but check your facts.

The value of shame in protecting a healthy society…

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…or, “strangeness in Franklin’s email yesterday.”

So. My Web site generates rather a lot of email, some of which tells me I’m going to hell, some of which is incoherent and relentlessy bizarre, but most of which is quite positive.

And then there’s this one, that just arrived:

Came across your website (http://www.xeromag.com/fvpoly.html), and had a strong reaction. I hope you might be interested. This is not your ordinary “you will burn in hell” flame mail.

You have revealed a great deal of yourself online–far more than any properly modest person would do (but you do not regard modesty as a virtue)–and my reaction to that is to analyze and critique what you have revealed. I’m embarrassed, even mortified for you. If ever you actually find a little more wisdom, I think you will look back at your online missives with utter horror for the rest of your life. But of course, stubborn fools die all the time.

The fact that you do not understand how mortifying it is to have so much of yourself, and of your friends, on display is very indicative to me. Once upon a time was nearly as self-revealing as you are, and so I’m motivated to offer you some unsolicited advice.

Your openness about yourself shows more clearly than anything else could that you believe that you are morally “in the clear.” That there’s nothing wrong with you or the way you live. For someone as arrogant as you are, I know that moralizing will not impress or help you in the slightest. The only thing that has a chance of helping you, actually, is a combination of intelligent criticism and real, liberal education (not just reading a lot of books).

You’re perfectly aware of your self-confidence. Among your other writings is a revealing section called “Three easy steps to self-confidence.” Self-confidence is in general, of course, a very good thing. But it seems you have confused positive self-confidence with the capacity to turn off your natural feelings of conscience, i.e., the ability to quell healthy and natural self-doubt. In this way, sociopaths are made, cults are born, and civilizations are ruined.

Every page on your webpage also conveys the message that you think you have it all figured out: you’ve thought it all through, and this is how it’s done. Your Polyamory FAQ is a perfect example. You’ve got it all covered. If you answer all the critical questions cleverly, that shows that polyamory as you approach it is morally OK. The trouble, of course, is that your FAQ proves no such thing. Your FAQ is absolutely full of elementary errors of reasoning and fundamental assumptions, which any sufficiently well-educated person could spot instantly. It is a statement of your personal dogma. The only thing it really proves is to me is that you are, underneath the facade you put on for yourself and others, a very confused person.

That’s why I recommend very strongly that you take some time out and get a real liberal education (from other, sane people–at a university) and learn the habit and virtue of self-examination. It’s quite evident both that you really have not learned that habit and that you think you have learned it. You are evidently reflective, and you pride yourself inordinately on that reflective habit. But you must not confuse a habit for reflection and introspection (i.e., self-indulgent navel-gazing, which any teenage girl can do) with a habit for well-informed, critical self-examination. The latter requires wisdom and critical thinking, which requires liberal education. A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, and you’re an excellent example of why this is so.

Feel free to share this mail with your friends; amuse yourselves with it.”

Now, this is a very interesting piece of email, for a number of reasons. It’s not completely incoherent, but at the same time, I’m having a very difficult time understanding what this guy is saying, aside from the fact that he doesn’t much cotton to folks like me.

He seems to be saying, if I’m reading him correctly, that a deep and abiding sense of personal shame is the only thing that keeps society healthy, and that this deep sense of shame is the result of a proper education. I get the sense that for him, education, privacy, shame, and morality are all connected, and that for him, anyone who is not private both lacks shame and is “confused.”

I also get the sense that there’s a subtext here which suggests that this sense of shame is the only thing which prevents people from behaving unethically. He seems to feel that it’s lack of shame which characterizes a sociopath. (Most psychologists would say that a sociopath is characterized by a lack of empathy and emotional connection with other human beings; I wonder if this person feels that shame and empathy are the same thing, or that one can not connect with others emotionally if one is not shameful.)

An irony here is that he seems to feel a “liberal education” would fix my problems. This is ironic in no small part because I have sex [EDIT: Six! Six years’ worth! Aargh!] years’ worth of college education behind me, much of it a liberal arts education. It’s also ironic because, generally speaking, there is often an inverse correlation between degree of schooling and tendency to adopt socially and religiously conservative views; those who have a liberal education are, statistically speaking, more likely to talk about, and live, in unconventional ways.

Y’know, sometimes I just don’t get the way people think.

Some thoughts on rights, humanity, and what it means to be a person

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On another forum I read, a conversation has arisen about whether or not people have “rights,” and what it means to have “rights.” Like many Americans, I believe that people do, simply as a consequence of being people, have certain inalienable rights; and among these are the right to life, liberty, self-determinism, and to believe and express as they desire so long as they do not infringe on these same rights in others. I believe these rights are immutable; that they are a consequence of being a person, and are not granted by the state or by any other entity or power; and that a state or other entity can take them away, but not grant them.

But do I believe these things simply because I’m an American, and I’ve been brainwashed into believing them? Well, no.

There’s no question that a person’s social, political, and moral ideas and values are socially informed, and that people can and do absorb many of those ideas from the society around them.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I believe what I do because I’ve been “brainwashed’ to believe them, however. There are many cultural and social values held by a great many Americans which are just as firmly inculcated into people here which I reject; evidence suggests that cultural brainwashing doesn’t work too well on me. 🙂

More to the point, a person who holds ideas about rights simply because he has been told that “rights are good” probably is unlikely to think too deeply about the implications of those rights; a person who is simply repeating American cultural ideas about innate human rights is unlikely to, for example, see the contradiction between those values and the idea that it is OK to tell gays and lesbians that they cannot marry.

In fact, I think these ideas have often been enshrined in America more as vague theories than as matters of political and social reality. Even the very people who first articulated these ideas as a framework for American society did not really believe them, or at least did not follow their own arguments through to their logical conclusions; Thomas Jefferson, who believed that “all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” kept slaves.

When you do sincerely hold to these beliefs, and you do follow them through to their logical conclusion, which I do, you end up in territory that diverges radically from the reality of American society, and makes a lot of people uncomfortable. I’ll get to that in a minute, but for right now, suffice to say that these ideas are held by Americans only in an abstract theoretical way, rather than as a matter of real truth.

I do believe that a great many Americans do simply parrot back what their civics teacher told them about “rights” without thinking through what that means or what the implications of those beliefs are. I don’t think I’m one of them, and let me tell you why… Continue reading →

My kitties are a metaphor for social change

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Snow Crash, the tabby cat, is not an extropian.

We’ve spent the majority of the week moving–an experience which is, for most cats, traumatic. We’ve relocated from a three-bedroom apartment to a one-bedroom apartment–and we had too much stuff to fit in the three-bedroom, so, as you might imagine, the new place is rather a wreck.

Snow Crash has spent much of the past week in hiding. He quickly learned to open the cabinet beneath the sink in the bathroom, and there he has stayed, hiding from the frightening and overwhelming upheaval in his environment:

Molly, on the other hand, is having a ball. She loves very little more than exploring new places, and the new apartment, with boxes piled to near-ceiling height everywhere, has given her endless little nooks and crannies to explore. She’s had a blast poking her nose into, under, over, around, and through everything she can find, and just to make things even more delightful, it all keeps changing! Every time we come into the new place with another armful of boxes, we rearrange stuff and there’s more to explore! If she could have her way, I’m sure she’d have us move twice a month. I don’t think Molly has stopped purring since we took her over.

According to the Myers-Briggs theory of personality types, the majority of the population, by a wide margin, is “Guardian” personalities. Guardians, the theory goes, are people who favor consistency, conformity, rules, order, and continuity in all things. Guardians are uncomfortable with change, particularly social change; fond of hierarchy; and feel threatened when things stop being like they were. A Guardian is the personality most apt to say things like “We do it this way because that’s how it’s always been done.” Far rarer are personality types which embrace and even thrive on change, which discard systems that don’t work well and refuse to cling to them merely because they are traditional.

Now, you may argue that the Myers-Briggs personality types are flawed. The granularity is poor; there’s a lot of overlap within the personality types…whatever. Be that as it may, there are clearly people in the world who favor continuity over function, who feel threatened by change, who prefer safety and stability even when that stability comes at a cost to others; and there are people in the world who embrace change, who seek to improve the way things are done, who look to drive society forward, technically and socially. And no matter which way you slice it, these two philosophies are inherently incompatible.

America in the dawn of the 21st century is a bad time and a bad place for social conservatives.

On the surface, this may seem like a wonderful time to be a social conservative. The conservatives dominate all aspects of American politics; Fundamentalist Christianity, and the rigid, dogmatic inflexibility that accompanies it, is so powerful that the American president is among its number; the political party to which he belongs has become little more than an extension of the ultraconservative religious right, and has openly embraced and championed the causes of social conservatives. A good time to be a conservative indeed.

But do you feel that? That vibration underfoot? Bet you thought that was the enormous, unstoppable juggernaut of conservative zeal passing by, right? Wrong. That’s a seismic shift. That’s tremendous pressure building up along the fault lines of American social politics. That’s the earliest warning signs of an approaching earthquake that will rearrange the landscape in ways that many people don’t have even the slightest idea about…at least not yet.

You can already see some of it coming. The skirmishes being fought right now over gay marriage, over polyamory, over the asinine and intellectually bankrupt doctrine of “intelligent design,” these are the opening salvos in what will be a long, bitter war whose outcome is already decided.

Every single time the Guardians have waged war against social change–every single time, from the days of Galileo to the end of slavery, from the civil rights movement to women’s suffrage, every single time the Guardians have lost. Change is inevitable. Social progress is inevitable. No matter how many times we go down this road, the result is always the same–the people who have been denied their full and complete participation in society at large win in the end. Always. Gay marriage? Get used to it; it’s going to happen, just as surely as the end of slavery. This is a story we’ve seen before, and no matter how the forces of tradition may scream and fight (and plant bombs and drag people behind pickup trucks), anyone with any understanding of society already knows how this story will end.

And in the grand scheme of things, it’s nothing, really. It will make as much difference as the elimination of ancient and bigoted laws barring mixed-race marriage made–society, if that’s all that changes, continues on more or less as it was before, despite the inane squawkings of a few indignant traditionalists. The sky didn’t fall when women started voting, the world didn’t end when blacks married whites, and the universe won’t collapse when men marry men or women marry women–by and large, it’s just not really going to change all that much.

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. The social conservatives who fear gay marriage, polygamy, and the teaching of evolutionary theory are missing, as they often do, the real upheaval.

Snow Crash is not an extropian.

Snow Crash is not an extropian. It’s hard to be an extropian when you fear change. Extropians and transhumanists generally have noticed something that other people have missed–the technological and social change gripping the world right now, the shifts in society and gender and economics and politics that are fuelling wars and creating redefinitions in the most basic institutions of Western society, these aren’t like other changes. These are the tip of the iceberg–because now as never before in human history, technology is changing in ways that are increasingly rapid and increasingly unpredictable. We’re nearing the really bendy part of the exponential curve, the part where things start getting really, really interesting.

We like to think we’re advanced. We like to think the Information Age is a marvelous new thing, that we’re enlightened and advanced far beyond those poor primitive savages who lived, oh, a hundred years or so ago. In reality, this is nothing like the truth. The most advanced technology we possess today is still embarrassingly primitive, still just a notch or two up from flint knives and bearskins. Our ability to make things is still horrifically crude, wasteful and inefficient, little more than increasingly sophisticated variants on the same old primitive themes we’ve been using since far before the Industrial Revolution. But that’s changing, and if you think that wars for oil and social chaos because a couple gay men in San Francisco want to marry each other are a big deal, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Back in the 1800s, the official stance of many religions was that black people did not have souls. This was a socially convenient stance, because if these people didn’t have souls, then they weren’t really people at all; the thing that separates man from the lesser animals, it was reasoned, was possession of a soul, so if black people didn’t have souls, then that cleared the way for exploiting them the same way one might exploit an ox.

It was all bullshit, of course. Wasteful, appalling, immoral, costly bullshit that required a major war and at least two civil rights movements to fix. But let’s think about this for a moment. If we find it so easy to deny personhood to an entire class of people based on the color of their skin, imagine how easy it will be to deny personhood to an entire class of people based on the fact that they are birthed outside a womb. Or uploaded into a machine. And if you think these things are impossible sci-fi fantasies, you’re not paying attention.

In the past, social change has generally meant changes in religious traditions, or changes in civic arrangements, or changes on political or economic structures–prompted, usually, by changes in technology. We’re on the horizon of changes in what it means to be human–changes in how we see ourselves, changes in how we think about the very things that separate us from other animals, changes in those things which differentiate us from every other form of life we know about. And oh, my God, is that going to make people upset.

We are social beings; we live in a social landscape every bit as real and relevant as the apartment my cats are in. Right now, we are where the cats were a couple weeks ago–a few little things are changing, stuff is disappearing from the shelves and cardboard boxes are appearing on the floor. Something’s up. We have an advantage over the cats, though; they could not possibly hope to anticipate the cataclysmic rearrangement of their lives that was coming, whereas we can, if we have the wit to do it, look ahead and see that these things are signals of a greater change than we might imagine, and see that our entire environment is about to be turned upside-down.

Most people fear this. Most people can’t even handle the idea of a trivial rearrangement to what the word “marriage means, much less complete redefinition of what the word “human” means.

Snow Crash is not an extropian. Molly, though, very well might be. And there’s a lesson in there.

Snow Crash was, and still is, traumatized by the move. Molly could not possibly be more delighted. The move was inevitable; neither one of them could have done anything to stop it. But one of them is happy and the other is not, and the choice about which to be is a choice we can make.

Shelly argues that you don’t have to be a neophile to be a transhumanist. That may be so, but it certainly helps. And in times like these, those of us who embrace change, who welcome it and adapt to it, have an enormous advantage over people who don’t.

Some musings about security in relationship

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So what is it that makes one person secure in a relationship, and another person not secure? Why is it that some people are perfectly fine with the idea of their partners having lunch with, romantic relationships with, or mad passionate sex with another person, while some people would rather be shot multiple times in a drive-by than see that happen?

It’s too easy just to say “Oh, some people are jealous.” That’s a non-answer. Whenever I hear someone say something like “Oh, I could never do that, I’m a jealous person,” it sounds as nonsensical as saying “Oh, I’m a hungry person” or “Oh, I’m a tired person.” Jealousy is an emotional response; to say “Oh, I’m a jealous person” and to let it go at that is to treat it as if it is some fixed, immutable thing we are powerless over, like saying “Oh, I’m a Western European person” or “Oh, I’m a dark-haired person.” In fact, scratch that–many people seem to feel they have more control over the color of their hair than over their emotional lives!

Now, there are certainly plenty of people in the world who do indeed feel unhappy and insecure if their partner spends time with someone else. There are many reasons that someone might feel this way, of course; insecurity, low self-esteem, a feeling of being expendable or interchangeable, a feeling that one’s needs are not important to one’s partner, feelings of being marginalized or trivialized.

Some of these, such as low self-esteem, are internal. Low self-esteem in particular is a real bitch, especially when it comes to relationships; I’ve seen many people cling to their low self-esteem like drowning men cling to a piece of driftwood, refusing to give it up. It’s self-reinforcing, because it creates a sense that you’re not valuable and thare are many people in the world who are better than you are, so you best not let your partner be with any of them, or best make sure you’re in control of the situation. The thought of giving up the low self-esteem is terrifying, because if you give up your low self-esteem, then it might be okay for your partner to spend time with another person–and you don’t want that to happen, because it makes you feel insecure! Hence, you don’t want to give up the low self-esteem, because giving it up means that you may face situations which…trigger your low self-esteem.

Some of these are external. There really are people who shouldn’t be comfortable if their partners express an interest in someone else; there really are people who treat their partners as expendable and interchangeable, and who aren’t concerned with taking care of their partner’s needs. Many “free agents” in the poly community behave in ways that don’t exactly inspire confidence in their lovers; some behave as if they barely recognize the differences between them at all.

Okay, so there’s nothing new in any of that. We all know this already, right? Behave in a way that doesn’t acknowledge the needs of your lover, and your lover may not feel secure in your relationship. Behave with indifference to your lover, and your lover may not feel secure in your relationship. Behave as if your lover is the flavor of the day–“Ooh, you’re so cool, I dig you, I’m so glad we met, I totally lov–oh, look, potato chips!”–and your lover may not feel secure in your relationship. This isn’t really rocket science.

But what happens if you flip that coin over and look at the other side?

There are people in the world–I’ve met more than a few–who have a strong sense of self, a robust sense of security, who are in partnerships with people who are sensitive to their needs and treat them well, yet who still seem plagued by insecurity in their relationships. I’m not talking about people who simply aren’t polyamorous; there are secure people in healthy relationships who are just monogamous, and that’s the end of it. No, I mean people who seem to be secure in themselves and have partners who treat them well, yet seem insecure in their relationships all the same. So what’s the difference?

Conjecture: Putting your partner’s needs first, putting your partner’s happiness before your own, doing everything you do in your relationship for the sake of your partner, can also cause your partner to be insecure.

Reasoning: Now, this doesn’t seem to make intuitive sense at all; if your partner is respectful of your needs and consistently puts your needs ahead of his own, it wouldn’t seem like this should breed insecurity. Just the opposite, in fact; a person in a relationship with someone who has a consistent track record of making his happiness the most important thing should feel secure, right? But bear with me here.

Let’s say Alice and Bob are in a relationship, and Alice consistently puts Bob’s happiness ahead of her own. Alice genuinely wants to make Bob happy; in fact, this is her first priority in all matters great and small. Alice has always done everything she can to make Bob’s needs her first concern. Could you reasonably expect Bob to feel secure with Alice?

I think the answer is “no.” Every human being does have needs; a romantic relationship where one person’s needs are important and another’s are not isn’t sustainable, even if it’s the choice of the person whose needs are being neglected.

But it gets worse. If Alice has never made her needs or her happiness a priority, and has never stood up for the things she wants, then it’s entirely possible that Bob doesn’t understand her needs, and because of that has no idea how to make her happy. Alice’s self-sacrifice backfires, because by not standing up for her needs, she has denied Bob the opportunity to meet them. Can Bob make Alice happy in their relationship? Bob has absolutely no way to know; he has no handle on what Alice needs…and indeed Alice herself may not have a handle on her needs! When the day comes that the relationship becomes unsustainable, when Alice must start considering her own happiness…what then? Bob doesn’t have the tools to make Alice happy; if some situation comes along which DOES make Alice happy–even if it’s a situation Alice herself could not have foreseen or anticipated–the Bob may very well lose Alice, and the poor guy never had a chance.

The dangers of putting your own needs ahead of everyone else’s are pretty obvious, really. Being a selfish prick isn’t a good relationship strategy, and I think most reasonably people can easily see why.

But the reverse–putting your partner’s needs ahead of your own–is a dangerous game as well. There comes a point where you must stand up for your own happiness, and defend the things you need and want; if you do not, your partner may be left with no idea what those things are, and no idea how to make you happy.

Were I in a relationship with someone I did not know how to make happy, I do not believe it would be possible for me to be secure in that relationship–even if my lover did everything in the world for me. Reciprocity in a relationship is more than just fair; it’s the very thing that gives the people involved the tools they need to make one another happy. It’s very important for me that my lover stand up for her happiness, and be able to assert herself and ask for what she wants. If I know what she wants, I may or may not be able to provide it–but if I don’t know what she wants, I don’t have the most basic tools I need to make her happy, and if I cannot make her happy, I can never really trust that she will stay.

Some thoughts on being lucky

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“Oh, you’re so lucky.”

I hear it all the time–in emails people send me, in conversations, in feedback on my Web site. “Oh, you’re so lucky.”

Why am I so lucky? For reasons that have nothing to do with luck. You have a girlfriend who likes bondage? Oh, you’re so lucky.” “You have more than one partner, and everybody is OK with that? Oh, you’re so lucky.” “Oh, you own your own business? You’re so lucky.”

It’s profoundly annoying. No, I am not so lucky. I have the partners I have, and I live the life I live, because i sat down and made conscious, deliberate decisions about the way I want my life to look and the people i want to share it with. Luck has nothing to do with it. I own a business because I chose to start a business, and accept the risk that comes along with that. I have the partners I have because these are the people who I have chosen to share my life with, and they are with me because they have chosen to share their lives with me.

“Oh, you’re so lucky.”

It seems as if people actually do believe that their lives are all about random chance. The job they have? Luck. The partner they’re with? Luck. The shape of their lives? All random happenstance; luck of the draw, that’s just the way it turned out.

I cannot rightly apprehend what would make someone feel so profoundly disempowered in his life. “Oh, you’re so lucky”–this is the cry of someone who sees something he wants but feels utterly powerless to have it, someone who goes through life seeing only a random collection of unrelated events, driven by pure chance, with no connection between them and no hope of comprehension. The person who feels empowered–the person who feels like he can have the things he wants, if he just puts his mind to it–does not see luck.

“Oh, you’re so lucky.” I live with a woman who enjoys being tied up because I share with my partners the things that interest me, and the things that I like; I communicate with them, and build a foundation of honesty and trust and mutual respect. This is not luck. I have received countless emails from my BDSM Web site that are variations on one of two themes–“I want to try this stuff but I’m afraid to tell my partner, what should I do?” and “I have always wanted to try this stuff, but I didn’t tell my partner, and after we’d been together for fifteen years he told me that he’s always wanted to try it too.” Well, see, there you go. If you don’t ask for what you want, don’t expect to get what you want–luck isn’t going to help you.

Of course, a person who does not believe it is possible for him to have something is not going to feel empowered to seek it. I wonder, though, what does he see when he sees other people living the way he wants to live, but believes is impossible? What is it that makes him feel so disempowered? Why should these things be accessible to others but inaccessible to him? “Oh, you’re so lucky.” We make our own luck. A person does not start a business by accident; it’s not like you’re walking down the street one day and you see a busines lying on the ground that’s fallen out of someone’s pocket and say “w00t! Lookit that–wow, I’m lucky!” And the conduct of a romantic relationship is no different. One does not choose a partner by luck; one does not have an exciting and rich sex life by luck. “Jeepers, you got Betty Sue in the Mate Lottery and I got stuch with Sally May–I hear Betty Sue’s really kinky. Boy, you sure got lucky!”

So a person who feels disempowered in his life, who believes his life is nothing more than a series of random unconnected events–how does he choose a partner? What does he say to his partner–if he does not see any hope of controlling his life, and does not see any way for him to effect any control over his destiny, what does he talk about?

“Oh, you’re so lucky.” Every time someone says that to me, a part of me wants to grab him by the shirt collar and scream, “Do you have the faintest idea what you’re saying? Do you even realize how much it says about you and the world you live in? This is your fucking life, and nobody is accountable for the way it looks but you! If there are things you want in your life, then for God’s sake, why aren’t you going after them??! What’s holding you back? This is your fucking life, man! It’s the only one you’ll ever have! DO something about it, already! Don’t insult both of us by telling me how lucky I am because I have something and you want it, go and get it already!”

“Oh, you’re so lucky.” It’s insulting and baffling at the same time. Insulting, because it totally misses the decisions I’ve made that have made me who I am; baffling, because anybody can make these choices, and indeed people do, every day. A person who wants something but chooses not to pursue it turns his back on what he wants, and then is surprised when he doesn’t have it. What the fuck? Your life, every day, is shaped by the choices you make. Don’t like the music? Change the tune!

Some thoughts on communication style, self-knowledge, and fear

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A few days ago, Shelly, S, and I had dinner together at a Thai restaurant, where the conversation turned to Turing computability, representing data in n-dimensional space, constructing an experiment from within a virtual reality environment like the Matrix that could determine whether or not the environment was a virtual reality, and other light dinnertime fare.
During the conversation, Shelly made the observation that you’re more likely to hear things like “Turing computable” at any given time in our house than you are to hear words like “cheese” or “toilet paper.”

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide people into two kinds, and those who don’t. According to some members of the former group, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who think, and speak, in terms of abstract ideas and concepts, and who use abstract language and metaphor in their communication, and those who think in terms of concrete concepts, and have difficulty grasping and understanding abstract communication.

Now, I’ve dated people who have difficulty with abstract ideas and concepts. One thing I’ve learned is that I do better in relationships with people who can think abstractly. Another thing I’ve learned is that people who lack the ability to think abstractly often lack the tools of introspection and inner contemplation which would allow them to understand themselves. This lack of introspection carries a high price tag–bot for themselves and for those around them.

Dr. Roger Penrose is fond of handwaving. He got a lot of newspaper inches a while ago by proposing that artificial intelligence is impossible on the grounds that consciousness, intelligence, and self-awareness are quantum effects. He even wrote a book on the subject. This book is 480 pages long, but in case you haven’t time to read it, it can be summed up this way:

“I really, really, really, really, really don’t want consciousness to be possible in a computer. Thinking that a computer could be as smart as a person makes me very, very uncomfortable, and makes me feel less special. So here’s a lot of handwaving about how impossible it is. Look! It’s impossible! Quantum mechanics! Quantum mechanics! Of course, I’m not a neurobiologist, but I’ll throw in a bunch of really scientific-sounding language and a whole lot of math in the hopes that you don’t notice the fact that I’m not actually proposing any REASON why quantum mechanics should be necessary for thought, nor proposing any mechanism by which quantum effects occur within the brain, nor even describing any way whatsoever that quantum mechanics might affect the functioning of a neuron. But did I mention I really, really don’t WANT artificial intelligence to be possible?”

Dr. Penrose, whose degree is in pure mathematics as opposed to, say, cognition, neuroscience, or quantum mechanics, has a history of this sort of thinking. In 1989, he gave an interview in Scientific American in which he rejected quantum string theory because “It’s just not the way I’d expect the answer to be.” Now, string theory may or may not be correct, and it may or may not have value, but to reject it because it’s “not how I’d expect the answer to be” is bad science–and on top of that, it’s stupid. Albert Einstein made the same mistake when he rejected quantum mechanics for religious reasons; as a result, he spent the last fifteen years of his life as a living monument, contributing nothing to physics because his religious beliefs would not let him accept the truth.

People make this same mistake all the time. I’ve known many people who have difficulty with introspection who end up believing things about themselves which are manifestly and obviously (to those around them, anyway) untrue, because they are unwilling or unable to examine their beliefs about themselves and unwilling to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth.

For example, I know people who insist that they are rational and logical, and who express a disdain for “mere emotion.” Not surprisingly, many of these people are the most emotional people I’ve ever met, and some of them live lives completely ruled by their emotions. Wihtout the capacity for abstract thought, and the capacity for introspection which seems to rely on it, they simply don’t NOTICE–or perhaps, don’t acknowledge–the almost entirely irrational and emotional ways they make their decisions. No introspection means an enormous blind spot to the most basic truths about yourself; no capacity for abstract thinking seems, for some reason, to mean no introspection. At least, I have yet to encounter anyone who lacks the ability to think abstractly yet who still has good introspective skills.

People put a lot of effort into their insecurities and into their discomforts. Introspection is sometims uncomfortable, because it may bring one face-to-face with some truths which are as uncomfortable as the notion of artificial intelligence is to Dr. Penrose. But avoiding the truth out of fear of discomfort works outwardly as well as inwardly. Dr. penrose is made uncomfortable by the notion of a machine with the cognitive ability of a person; closer to home (and more ploddingly pedestrian), many people fear hearing the truth about their partner’s sexual history, say, because of the same discomforts. A person who fears and avoids discomfort is unlikely ever to reach the truth about anything–himself, his partner, the world around him. The more pedestrian forms of avoidance aren’t as interesting as Penrose’s 480 pages of handwaving, but their effects are more immediate.

Last night, I had a conversation with datan0de. It went something like this:

ME: “You’re the reason I’m going to crush the world in my iron fist.”
datan0de: “Do you mean literally or figuratively? Are you actually going to crush the world in an enormous fist made out of iron?”
ME: “Of course I mean that literally! It’s more satisfying, don’t you think?”
datan0de: “Depends on where you’re standing.”

datan0de seems equally comfortable in the realm of the abstract (demonstrating that the set of real numbers is an uncountable infinity, for example) or the concrete (talking about how fast an actual fist made out of iron that’s three-quarters the mass of the Earth would take to rust). That’s quite a trick; I can talk to someone who thinks only in concrete terms–an eighteen-year relationship with a person who can’t think abstractly taught me that skill–but I’m happier talking in abstract terms, because it’s closer to how I conceptualize the universe. Shelly’s even more extreme in that regard.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere. People who don’t think of themselves and the world around them in abstract ways seem, at least in my experience, to be more uncomfortable by the truth, and to resist more strongly the idea that introspection is a tool which has value. I’m not sure why introspection and abstract thought are coupled, though it certainly seems to be the case. In any event, the less likely someone is to confront some part of his or her personality unflinchingly, the more likely that person is to become angry at the suggestion that he should. Suggest to someone who’s jealous or insecure in his relationship that he should examine the causes of those insecurities, with an eye toward overcoming them, and you’re likely to meet quite a hostile response. Point out to someone who believes herself to be rational and analytical that she is making profound, life-shaping decisions solely on the basis of an emotional response, and you’ll really end up in the shit. In a weird, snake-eating-its-tail kind of way, this response, and the avoidance of discomfort that produces it, itself is seen as a beneficial and positive thing–suggest to someone that there is value in exploring things which are ucomfortable and the very fact that theey are uncomfortable is itself held up as proof that they have no value.

Penrose avoids his discomfort by writing hundreds of pages of vigorous handwaving; other peope avoid their discomfort by insisting that they are something they are not, or avoiding intimacy and the knowledge of a partner’s past that comes with it. But avoiding uncomfortable things is not the same thing as mastering those things. Smetimes, life is uncomfortable; sometimes, the truth is uncomfortable. In the end, however, living in a world where the truth is acknowledged is superior to building a life out of avoiding the truth.

Faith can move mountains? Not quite.

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You hear it all the time. If a person had as much faith as a mustard seed, then that person can move a mountain. Faith is all you need. Faith can work miracles. Right? Right?

Weeeeeeeellll…no.

Sorry. It sounds nice, it appeals to that part of us that wants dominion over the natural world, but…it ain’t so. Hate to have to break it to you, guys. It just plain ain’t true–at least, not in the way that people think it’s true.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Having a belief that something is possible is a prerequisite to doing that thing; if you don’t think you can do it, you ain’t gonna try. Faith, at least faith of the “I believe this is within the realm of the possible” variety (rather than the Mark Twain “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so” variety) is necessary and essential to anyone who wants to move a mountain.

But it doesn’t stop there. If you have faith that you can move a mountain, but that’s all you got, then the mountain ain’t moving. Ain’t no way. You see, it takes more than faith–you have to have faith the task can be done, but then you also have to do the work. (Moving mountains, just for the record, is backbreaking work. Mountains are big. I mean, really, really big. Tens of millions of tons of rock, and you gotta move it all from here to there.) Faith alone will get you butkis; the way faith moves mountains is by enabling you to do the work it takes to move a mountain, giving you the belief that you can figure out how to get it done.

In the case of literally moving a mountain, having faith that you can do it is what gets you started; but from there on, you still have a whole lot of work to do. It helps to have one of these:

Now, this machine required a lot of faith to build. It took faith that such a huge (and expensive!) project was possible. It took faith that it would work. It took faith that it would work and do so in a way that was more efficient than just spending the same amount of money on a whole bunch of people with shovels.

Faith is the first step, but if you believe faith alone can move a mountain, you’re deluding yourself. Faith without work is nothing; faith without the investment it takes to get things done is pointless narcissism. Faith may get the ball rolling, but it’s work, not faith, that gets the mountain from wherever it is to wherever you want it to be.

Now, this is true of any task, even something a lot smaller and closer to home than activist geology. A person who tells you that faith can make a relationship, for example? Bullshit. Relationships don’t succeed by faith. Relationships succeed because the people involved have invested in good communication skills, a suite of problem-solving and conflict-resolution tools, integrity, trust, honesty, self-knowledge, compassion, and respect. It is those things, not faith, that build a good relationship. It requires a belief that a good relationship is possible and desireable to make the other things seem worthwhile, but it’s not faith alone that does the job.

Faith can move mountains? Hogwash. Faith, of and by itself, can’t move a paper clip.

By the way, if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him. 🙂

Some thoughts on information theory, complex systems, and love

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Often, when two people end a long-term relationship, one of those two people — usually, the person initiating the breakup — will say things like ‘I just don’t know you any more” or “You’ve totally changed.” And often, it’s not true, though the person saying it may feel that it’s true. The truth is a little bit more complicated, and a quick glance at information theory can explain why.

One of the axioms of information theory is that the output of a system you do not understand looks random. Early man lacked the ability to predict such things as solar eclipses and whatnot because he did not understand the system; he knew nothing of gravity, didn’t understand that the earth orbits ’round the sun, and so on. So these events appeared random to him, and he invented explanations for them that were based on random events — the dragon wakes up particularly hungry and devours the sun, that sort of thing.

As time progressed, man learned to predict certain events, such as the course of the planets in the heavens and the rising and setting of the sun as the seasons changed. The models he built were based on repeated observation; he could predict certain events, but he still did not understand the mechanisms behind them; repeated observation was enough to show that the system wasn’t random, but it still couldn’t be predicted precisely, because he still didn’t understand it. Certain events, like eclipses, still appeared random.

This is true of any system whose mechanisms are not understood. The process of understanding something lies in constructing models of that thing; the ancient Greeks attempted to model the behavior of the planetary bodies by constructing models based on rotating, interlocking Platonic solids, for example. A model is useful, and can be said to describe something, only if that model makes predictions that accurately predict the behavior of the thing being modelled. The Greeks ran into a lot of trouble here; their models of the heavens made predictions that were reasonably close, most of the time, but didn’t always jive with observable reality; the more they tried to jigger the models to account for the discrepancies, the more mucked-up and complex the models became, until finally Copernicus got exasperated with it all and said “Here, look, it’s got nothing to do with Platonic solids, see? If you assume that the sun is at the center of the whole mess, and we go ’round the sun, and the other planets go ’round the sun, you get a model that’s very simple and makes predictions that are pretty much perfect, see?” In 1992, the Catholic Church finally agreed, and officially accepted the heliocentric model of the solar system.

The output of a system that is not understood at all looks random. As someone learns to find patterns in the output, and builds models that explain the behavior of the system, the output stops looking random — but, as the Greeks discovered, a model that seems good, and makes accurate preductions some or even most of the time, can still be completely bolloxed. The Platonic-solids model made reasonably good predictions much of the time, but it wasn’t really a terribly accurate model; in fact, it wasn’t even close.

So what does this have to do with love?

The same laws of information theory that apply to planets and solar systems apply to people as well. If you don’t know someone and don’t know a blasted thing about him, you probably can’t predict his behavior very well. You can predict very general things, simply by knowing that he belongs to the class of objects called “human beings,” of course; you can predict that he most likely doesn’t have wings, and so on. But you can’t make predictions about how trustworthy he is, what kind of music he likes, how good he is in bed — despite the best efforts of astrology, fringe racist groups, and those goody urban legends that say things like a man’s penis size is related to the width of his hands. Fact is, until you have a reasonably good mental model of that person, you just plain don’t know what he’ll do — his behavior might as well be random.

When you’re in a relationship with someone, you have a pretty good opportunity to observe that person’s behavior over an extended period of time. When you do this, you begin to see patterns emerge, and those patterns let you begin understanding that person. You build a mental model of that person, and as that model seems to predict that person’s behavior, you understand that person still more. In fact, intimacy is the ongoing process of learning to understand another person with greater and greater accuracy.

But it’s possible to go wrong. People tend to re-create the world in their own image, and to project their own feelings and beliefs and philosophies onto other people. This is to some extent unavoidable; it’s very difficult to understand a person who conceptualizes the universe in a way that’s completely different from the way you do. Your model of that person starts with the assumption that certain things about that person are basically similar to certain things about you. And given that many people are similar in many ways, often that works just fine.

But sometimes, two people who are very different in worldview get together. When this happens, it’s possible they may never really understand each other; they may build mental models which, like the original Greek model of the solar system, work pretty well most of the time…but which are actually built on premises which are completely inaccurate.

So these two people go be-bopping down the road of life, not really understanding one another, but thinking they do — and wham, a solar eclipse occurs. Something changes in the environment — perhaps something that goes completely unnoticed, because it’s not relevant to the mental models they’ve built of each other — and one of them acts in some way that the other one never saaw coming and could never have anticipated.

“You’ve changed! You’ve completely lost it! I don’t know you any more!”

No, the fact is, that person is the same as he’s always been; you never knew him. You thought you did, but that understanding was flawed; and now your model can’t predict his behavior any more. Which means that, to you, his behavior appears random — a very scary thing in a partner you’ve been with for a long time.

The greater the difference in two people’s worldviews, the more likely this can happen. It’s especially common when two people who have very different drives or needs in relationship get together; each tends to project his own needs and his own drives into his model of the other. Even where it doesn’t cause a meltdown, it can still create problems in the relationship; “My partner says she is ‘polyamorous,’ which means she wants to fuck other people — I better keep her on a short leash, because if I don’t, she’ll just run off and fuck everyone in town.” This is not a realistic model of ‘polyamory’ — but a person who is not polyamorous may not really understand polyamory; the behavior of a person who is polyamorous may appear random.

Building an accurate model of something, especially a complex system, is very hard work. Building a good model means being able to step back from your own preconceptions and look — really look — at the system, without projecting your own desires onto it. the Greeks really, really wanted to believe that the model of the universe had something to do with Platonic solids, because they were utterly fascinated with what they perceived to be the harmony and beauty of Platonic solids, and it bolloxed them up for a very long time.

Which brings me to the second part of building a model of something, which is being able to discard that model when it makes predictions that don’t come true.

That second one is especially difficult in romantic relationships. Like the Greeks, people in love become emotionally attached to their understanding of their partner, even if that understanding is based on projection. We tend to re-create the world in our own image, but more than that, we want our lover to be like ourselves; it’s comforting. Things we don’t understand about our lover are really scary; they make our lover’s behavior seem random. It’s much easier to embrace a model that has flaws than to discard the model, say “Actually, there are things about this person I don’t understand, and if i want to understand them, I must first admit that I don’t.”

That takes work — a lot of it. Scary work. The alternative, though, is having the conversation which usually starts with You’ve changed, I just don’t know you any more and usually ends the relationship.