New Blog for my Second YouTube Channel

A few days ago I created a new blog for my second YouTube channel. Since I don't think I mentioned it here already, I have two YouTube channels. The first one is fduniho, which just focuses on personal things, such as my hobbies and exercise. It mainly has videos on Chess variants and on how I exercise. The second one is fortheloveofwisdom, and this one focuses on freethought and philosophy. The new blog for it is at fortheloveofwisdom.blog.com. Since I'll be using this new blog for posting philosophy articles, I've changed the title of this blog to just "Fergus Duniho's Personal Blog." For the present, I am just making blog posts about my videos, embedding the YouTube video in the blog post and adding a transcript or summary of the video. I'll also be writing articles there that don't go with videos.

On Human Nature

I recently finished reading On Human Nature by Edward O. Wilson. The premise of this book is that natural selection has shaped human nature. This is a premise I already agree with. It has come up in other reading I have done. The importance of this book is that it one of the first books on the subject, and perhaps the first to focus on it in depth. Wilson applies this idea to better understanding aggression, sex, altruism, and religion. I should read it again sometime, because I can't recall enough of it to say much in detail here. Some details I remember: The Aztecs practices human sacrifice and cannibalism, because they had a low population of big game animals. The Indians (of India) dealt with the same situation by creating religions that favored vegetarianism (Jainism, maybe Buddhism) or allowed meat only to the Brahmin caste (Hinduism). The sisterhood social structure of some insects (ants and bees) is due to the ability to reproduce by haplodiploidy, the ability to determine the sex of offspring males coming from unfertilized eggs, females from fertilized eggs. Among humans, females are more commonly conceived during times of stress, because females are more durable. Female humans tend to mate with someone of equal or higher social rank. Some social behaviors are hypertrophies of earlier adaptations, meaning that they are exaggerated forms of them. Most altruism has been limited in scope, favoring one's own relations or group.  Religions tend to unite people together, helping to create and maintain a group identity. So, people have evolved to have some tendency toward religion. Gay animals are common, and gays may have evolved to limit destructive competition among members of the same gene pool, because there is more survival advantage for the genes in gay uncles taking care of nieces and nephews than there is in brothers killing brothers for the same woman.

An error in Polgar's book of chess problems

Laszlo Polgar has written a huge book of Chess problems, called Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations, and Games. I've had it over ten years now, doing problems every now and then. After recently finishing the 1000th problem, I realized I had better quicken my pace or I won't finish the book until I'm in my 80's. I'm now trying to do a page a day, at least most days. Today I came across problem 1071, which is the first problem I've found that is misdescribed. It is supposed to be a mate-in-two, but it is a mate-in-one. To make sure that I wasn't missing something, I double checked it by setting up the position in Zillions-of-Games. I then copied the position into a Chess preset for Game Courier, which may be viewed here.

Inner and Outer Religion

There is a difference between inner and outer religion. Inner religion can be experienced, but it is hard to describe. In contrast, outer religion is full of descriptions, narratives, commandments, laws, "the literal word of God", etc. The idea behind inner religion is expressed in the first line of the Tao Te Ching, "The Tao that can be spoken of is not the Tao." Outer religion may arise from attempts to express and concretize the experience of inner religion, but these attempts fail, and outer religion imposes all kinds of trappings that are unnecessary for inner religion. The distinction between inner and outer religion sheds new light on M. Scott Peck's four stages of religious development. In light of this distinction, I would characterize them as (Stage 1) the absence of religion, (Stage 2) the imposition of outer religion, (Stage 3) the rejection of outer religion, and (Stage 4) the experience of inner religion.

People at stage 2 are frequently fearful of the atheist, characterizing the atheist as without morals. This is because people at stage 2 have experienced stage 1, which might fairly be characterized in this way, but don't yet have experience of stage 3, which is altogether different from stage 1. The pre-religious stage 1 atheist lacks knowledge of religion, while the post-religious stage 3 atheist is an informed critic of outer religion, one who has generally developed moral beliefs that do not require support from the trappings of outer religion, and even one who may use his moral beliefs as a grounds for criticizing outer religion. One of the common arguments used by stage 3 atheists against the existence of God is the argument from evil, which argues that God's existence is incompatible with the existence of evil, and since evil exists, God cannot exist. Without moral beliefs, such an argument is incoherent. What stage 3 atheists usually discover is that morality does not depend upon the existence of God, and they can be good people without being god-fearing people.

While stage 2 is frequently about the fear of God as an external being who will punish you if you don't do the right thing, stage 4 is more about the experience of something that some choose to call God, though strict identification of it with any stage 2 deities is likely mistaken. Some people at stage 4 will use stage 2 language in a very different way than people at stage 2, while others at stage 4 may shun stage 2 language. It depends more on the person and how he or she chooses to express his experiences, if at all. While people at stage 3 can be informed critics of outer religion, it is hard to be an informed critic of inner religion. Stage 2 formulates ideas that are more or less easy to knock down, but stage 4 is grounded more in experience, and experience usually isn't something that you can argue for or against.

English Major

A few nights ago I dreamed that I was taking a college English Literature class. It was meeting so frequently that on the first week of classes, I had been to it three times before attending any of my other classes. I remember there was a woman in the class whom I liked, but I don't remember much about her now, only that she seemed to not be anyone I actually knew in college or have known at all. It seemed to be in a room in Champlain Valley Hall at Plattsburgh State, which is where I actually took many English Literature classes and did like one of my female classmates.

When I awoke, it occurred to me that majoring in English, as I did for most of my time in college, did leave me with an important life skill. The main homework in English Literature classes was to analyze the meaning behind novels, stories, plays, or poems. Applying the skills this took to life, I am able to examine events in my life for meaning, and I can view my life in terms of meaningful themes, plotlines, and story arcs. It can be easier to find meaning in literature, because literature normally sets out the relevant incidents or details without all the insignificant details that don't contribute to the meaning. But it is still possible to view life in the same meaningful way that literature can be viewed, and this is an important life skill to have, because people are happier and live longer when they feel their lives have meaning.

Innocence

I'm still thinking about the second lesson from The Way of the Wizard. It promotes innocence as a way of transforming how we look at the world. Innocence doesn't make all the distinctions we usually make, and innocence is what Adam and Eve lost when they gained knowledge of good and evil. It was not so much from knowing evil that they lost their innocence but from beginning to make distinctions, such as between good and evil, heaven and earth, etc. This idea gets highlighted during the next lesson. Merlin is running around with a huge butcher's knife. When Arthur asks what he is doing, he explains that he thought all mortals use their minds like knives, and he wanted to find out what it is like. With my background in analytic philosophy, I know exactly what he means. Analytic thinking breaks concepts down into smaller concepts and so forth. It understands by cutting up what it seeks to understand into pieces. Chopra is maintaining that the Wizard sees without doing this.

In my dissertation, I maintained that the end of innocence allowed for responsibility and meaning, that the loss of innocence portrayed in the Eden story is ultimately a good thing, because it allows our lives to be meaningful. Chopra is offering a different perspective on innocence, one in which innocence allows a more transcendent perspective on things. It is something to consider thinking about as I read the book. Curiously, the distinction between innocence and guilt is one that arises from the loss of innocence. That's a koan to mull over.

Emotional Freedom

Another book I'm reading is Emotional Freedom by Judith Orloff. I have finished reading the chapter that describes four emotional types, these being Intellectual, Empath, Rock, and Gusher. I could see something of myself in the first three but not so much in the Gusher. I'm inclined to think that Intellectual is the type that fits me best. I can be very analytical, detached, and unemotional about some things, even things that other people would be very emotional about. But I also have my empathic side, and I am sort of like a Rock but more introspective.