Philosophy of Physical Metaphors

The "intentional inexistence" of the object really means that the object cannot be located as a matter of fact in physical space and time. Further, mind operates by physical laws though not like the body. Rather mind and consciousness are more like an electromagnetic field, a system of electrical signals which work at the speed of light (in a vacuum) and so seems more simultaneous and unified than the mechanical motion of the body. When we say there is nothing, we really mean there isn't something extended in space-time with causal relations with objects that we thought would be there. Being in thought (being-for-itself) doesn't mean being in some immaterial world or nothingness, but only not having individuated bound existence. The free energy to do work is out there, until maximum entropy, to become bound energy to create from matter what is being entertained by the electrical activity of our brains.

Using scientific metaphors can help us make sense of the philosophers. Freedom and the nothingness of consciousness is the potential for free energy to be put to work and become bound energy to create from the matter of the universe what the electrical activity of the nervous system is itself bound to presenting to us as desirable. To choose the meaning of life we must convert electrical energy to mechanical energy, from the nervous system to the muscles, with the help of our technology too.

We aren't free in the libertarian sense of free will as we're subject to the determination of the laws of physics, and the real discrepancy between desire and reality is between the representation of the sensual world via the nervous system and the world of matter. Electromagnetism operates at the speed of light as light doesn't have rest mass. The objects of the "external" world of ordinary experience have rest mass meaning that it takes energy to overcome resistance to changes in motion and so cannot go faster than light. This is responsible for causality in the universe, as everything is instantaneous at the speed of light. The existence of rest mass makes it so events occur in space time in some sort of order.

Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years

Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 years by Dr. Fred Singer and Dennis T Avery is the definitive book of skepticism toward the mainstream consensus that human activity is causing global temperatures to rise and that this is bad, aka anthropogenic alarmist global warming. This book came out conveniently the same year as Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. Dr. Fred Singer is/was a professor at the George Mason University of Virginia and Dennis Avery is a fellow at the right leaning Hudson Institute. Neither are climatologists exactly, but Singer is an atmospheric physicist and Avery is an expert in food/agriculture policy which concern the climate however indirectly.

This book should be valuable to even those who take the consensus prima facie. The "90-something percent of scientists agree" line trotted about in favor of anthropogenic global warming makes it seem the only skeptical academics are a crazed political minority. But if you really look at those studies, you'll find the 90-something percent figure is of the papers which take a position on climate change which most don't, as if most climate researchers spend their time on that one question. A 2014 analysis by Steven Hayward of the 97% number, published by John Cook of the University of Queensland, found that 66.4% of abstracts of the 11,000 sampled took no position on anthropogenic global warming, 32.6% endorsed AGW, .07% rejected AGW, and .03% were uncertain. The skeptics are still the minority, but the consensus isn't that overwhelming. What could be going is a paradigm as described by Thomas Kuhn. Researchers in a field just assume the paradigm to be true and do research under the assumptions until contravening research piles up, and it is very costly to an individual to go against the consensus publicly. Those who do may receive money from the fossil fuel industry without their knowledge which would make their work paradoxically seem even more suspicious. It also seems to be right-wing public figures that challenge global warming aren't in academia, but then again conservative or libertarian types don't trust academia and do work for think tanks and institutes like Cato or the Heartland Institute.

Singer and Avery are the best of the climate skeptics one is likely to come across. They don't deny that there has been a recent trend towards warming, but only that human carbon emissions via the greenhouse effect of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are to blame. Rather the warming climate is a result of the activity of the sun and Earth's orbit around it over thousands of years. They also dispute that warmer climate is was or will be detrimental to human flourishing. 

The book is compact and their case relatively easy to follow. It is generally accepted that the Earth does go through natural cycles which do affect its climate. Ice ages occur roughly every 100,000 years due to the irregular orbit of the Earth around the sun, called the Milankovitch cycle. At different points in the orbit the planet gets farther from the sun and tilt of the planet changes resulting in varying amounts of energy from the sun. In between the ice ages are briefer interglacials lasting around 15-20,000 years, the current interglacial period we're in has been about 12,000 years. The warming of the Earth since 1880 however is too fast to be due to this cycle however which suggests something else is at work.

Singer and Avery present a different cycle to operate in between the great ice ages. The Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle proposes that the Earth has gone through 1,500 year (plus or minus 500 years) cycles of cooling and warming. The data for this cycle came from an analysis of oxygen isotopes from ice cores in Greenland which provided 250,000 years of data. The researchers compared the ratio of oxygen-18 isotopes to the lighter oxygen-16 isotopes and found a 1,500 year climate cycle of alternate warming and cooling occurring since the last major ice age 11,000 years ago. The data doesn't go back before the last ice age, but the cycle could have occurred during other interglacials. There isn't a straight 1,500 year solar cycle to account for this but there is the 87 year Gleissberg cycle and the 210 year DeVries-Suess cycle which when superimposed (7 of the 210 year cycles or 17 of the 87 year cycles) fit into a 1,470 year cycle. The Gleissberg and DeVries-Suess cycles have to do with the amount of sunspots which signals greater solar activity and so more warming. 

"The sun constantly releases a stream of charged particles-the solar wind-which partially shields the earth from cosmic rays. This solar wind varies with the sun's irradiance. When the suns activity is weak and the solar wind blows less forcefully, more cosmic rays streak through our atmosphere, creating more low clouds that, in turn, increase the earths ability to reflect more of the suns visible range heat away from the planet. That has a cooling affect.

"When the sun is stronger, as it had been recently, the solar wind blows more strongly, and the earth is shielded more effectively from cosmic rays. That means fewer low clouds and more warming. 

"The rays are thought to collide with particles or molecules in the atmosphere, leaving them electrically charged, or 'ionized.' These ionized particles then seed the growth of cloud water droplets...clouds that form low in the sky are relatively warm and made up of tiny water droplets. These tend to cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space. High clouds are cooler, consisting mostly of ice particles, and they can have the opposite effect...they argue that the imprint of the solar magnetic field in the solar wind has increased over the past century. So the shielding from cosmic rays will have increased, decreasing the formation and cooking influence of low clouds, and providing a possible contribution to the observed global warming."

Got it? Singer and Avery make a much easier explanation than it sounds. 

I've seen other arguments that solar activity is driving current climate change, but they have to do directly with the effect of the sun on Earth, and it is disputed whether there has been more solar activity since the 18th century closing of the little ice age and I've seen critics of the solar explanation claim that there has been less solar activity the last 35 years while temperatures have risen. Singer & Avery make a somewhat different argument. Solar activity affects the amount of cosmic rays that enter the Earth to create more clouds which reflect sunlight into space, reducing warming. Their argument still relies on a link between a relationship between recent solar activity and warming though with a different mechanism. 

The cycle they argue can be seen during the Roman warming period 200BC to 900AD through the medieval warming period 900AD to 1300AD, which is 1500 years. From 1300 to 1850 is the little ice age and from 1850 to the 20th century is a warming trend. From 1940 to 1975 is a small cooling trend, due to pollutants blocking out the sun, and the modern warming trend which started the public concern over global warming was from 1975 to 1998, the El Niño event. Even though there could very well be such a cycle of warming and cooling, I'm not so sure that this discounts the greenhouse effect of carbon and that recent warming fits into this cycle. If the Roman to Medieval warming was a 1,500 year cycle, shouldn't the cooling after 1350 have gone on past the nineteenth century? 500 years of cooling and then warming suggests that something happened to interrupt the cycle. The cooling stops and warming starts as the Industrial Age puts more carbon into the atmosphere. It's too early however to discern a 1,500 year cycle since the Middle Ages, so short term solar activity is the likely explanation.

Many if not most skeptics deny that there has been warming since 1998 or the later twentieth century. A pause in rising temperatures they say occurred after the El Niño warming event 18 years ago, so that there are people graduating high school who have never lived through global warming (very funny). The disagreement is due to whether surface or satellite data is used, the latter that John Christy and Roy Spencer claim indicates less warming. Reconstructing climate patterns from tree rings, ice cores, the atmosphere is harder than those who blindly take the consensus AGW view realize.

Singer and Avery discount the greenhouse effect as being responsible for current climate change because of the existence of these natural cycles. The scary predictions of hotter temperatures assume that the effect of co2 will be amplified by more vapor in the atmosphere. Warming will increase the moisture in the atmosphere from warmer oceans, but more moist and warm air could increase rainfall and leave the upper atmosphere at least as dry as previously. Warmer oceans could also mean more snow and ice on Greenland and the Antarctic which would eventually make sea levels fall. 

Singer and Avery don't think that warming is detrimental to human flourishing either. During the Medieval warming period Vikings established a colony in Greenland and wine was grown up in Britain! The industrial revolution and the economic progress it has brought mankind has occurred with the end of the little ice age and rising temperatures. Of course romantic anti-industrial leftists take this to the opposite conclusion, that industrial activity is warming the Earth and is nature's punishment for capitalism and economic growth. Anti-capitalist author Naomi Klein recently wrote a book This Changes Everything which argues that combating climate change will require the end of free market capitalism to be replaced by a world socialist order. Things haven't been looking up for socialism since 1989 so climate change is becoming the far left's raison d'être. 

Singer and Avery make two claims commonly made by consensus skeptics to support the claim that the AGW consensus is political. First that the 1995 IPCC report by the United Nations was altered to remove skeptical passages about human contribution to climate. The alterations were made to chapter 8 which was about the causes of global warming. The chapter was based on lead author Ben Santer's two research papers neither of which had been peer reviewed when the report was published. Santer altered the report to support human activity as the cause of global warming. I haven't seen any good rebuttals to this, and alarmists like to say that the very possibility of catastrophic warming justifies such exaggeration.

The second claim is that Michael Mann's graph depicting a sudden and large increase in global temperatures along with greater carbon in the atmosphere is a fraud. The graph appeared in the 2001 IPCC report using tree ring data from 1000 to 1980. The tree ring data makes the medieval warming temperatures lower than contemporary ones. Data after 1960 used thermometer measurements grafted onto the tree ring data. Known infamously as the hockey stick, Steven McIntyre and McKitrick accused Mann in 2003 of falsifying data. Even though it appears there were flaws in his work, other reconstructions show the hockey stick pattern. The problem may be with the data itself. Tree growth isn't just determined by temperature and is most reliable short term, but not reliable enough for Mann to use for recent temperature apparently. The 2010 Climategate emails it is claimed revealed a deliberate effort to "hide the decline" after 1960 with this tacked on data. Mann has actually sued National Review author Mark Steyn for accusing him of fraud, as well as comparison to child molester Jerry Sandusky. At this point the data becomes very political.

The book is convincing, which means the reader should do their own research. I myself think global warming has been occurring and human activity has something to do with it, but I don't think it's as great or as bad as the alarmists make it to be. That would make me a skeptic, but not a denier. Liberals would claim that the mission of the skeptics is to induce doubt, not necessarily denial, so as to forestall necessary actions costly to the interests behind such skepticism. But I find that I learn a lot more by reading books like this critical of climate science, like reconstructing/modeling climate trends. I am reminded of the Confucian proverb: if something is popular examine it, if something is unpopular examine it.

I think long term the greater threat is global cooling; another ice age. The last interglacial period, the Eemian 120,000 years ago, was much warmer than even current temperatures so long run climate change is determined by natural cycles. The Eemian period also had higher CO2 levels, yet an ice age still followed. In maybe a few thousand years or even sooner another ice age is bound to occur as it has before. Interglacials don't last as long, so it's something to be concerned about. Humans have done very well since the end of the Pleistocene. The earliest civilizations don't go back much further than 10,000 years, which is not long after the end of the last ice age. The industrial revolution occurred after the more recent little ice age. Carbon dioxide seems more of a nutrient than a pollutant for us. Even if we continue to burn remaining fossil fuels and the greenhouse effect is as strong as we're led to believe, we'll eventually run out in a few centuries and the climate will resume its natural course. Maybe we should start preparing.

The Meaning and Importance of the Fairy Tale

I learned about and decided to read The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales from the documentary Room 237, which is about various interpretations of Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining. The documentary is quite good, I've watched it several times with great interest. The book is mentioned along with Freud's writing on the uncanny which Kubrick mentioned as an influence in an interview. 

"In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life.” 

The uncanny feeling is an encounter with something that was once familiar but has been forgotten, like seeing a ghost of a deceased loved one. Children Freud noted don't experience the uncanny, at least like adults to, due to their more magical and animistic mindset.

"Fairy tales quite frankly adopt the  standpoint of the omnipotence of thoughts and wishes, and yet I cannot think of any genuine fairy-story which has anything uncanny about it.

"...this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old—established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression.

"We—or our primitive forefathers—once believed in the possibility of these things and were convinced that they really happened. Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we have surmounted such ways of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new set of beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation. As soon as something actually happens in our lives which seems to support the old, discarded beliefs, we get a feeling of the uncanny."

Stanley Kubrick definitely had The Uses of Enchantment in mind when directing The Shining 1980. Wendy remarks when being shown the large kitchen that she would have to leave a trail of bread crumbs everytime they come in there, a reference to Hansel and Gretel who find their way home after being left by their parents in the forest using a trail of breadcrumbs. Danny locks his father in the freezer, like the witch was locked in the furnace by Gretel, which is when the only truly supernatural event happens in the movie; the door unlocks on its own. When Jack is terrorizing his family with an ax, around the "here's Johnny!" scene, he quotes from the three little pigs; "little pigs, little pigs, let me come in! Not by the hair on your chinny-chin-chin. Then I'll huff, and I'll puff...and I'll blow your house in!" 

The Shining can be seen as a modern fairy tale itself. Danny uses the magical power of his visions to uncover the true nature of the overlook hotel and is pitted in a face to face Oedipal struggle with a mad giant, his father. The hotel is high up in the Colorado mountains, like the home of the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk. If The Shining is a fairytale then it's a fairytale for adults. Most of the film's events can be explained naturalistically as family dynamics and psychology until the end of the film which relies on horror tropes (the scene with the skeletons and cobwebs). The presentation of the uncanny is done very well by Stanley Kubrick and lets adults experience what was once familiar but is now forgotten, and as Freud said better experienced in art than in reality. 

Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment which came out four years prior to The Shining is like The Shining a valuable way for adults to confront the magic of fairy tales, though in an intellectual way. Bettelheim was an Austrian-American child psychologist, known for the controversial theory that lack of maternal warmth is responsible for autism, who adopted Freud's as well as Carl Jung's psychoanalytic theories for his work. The concepts of id, ego, ego-ideal, and superego are the adult way to understand the fairy tale. Such concepts like the motifs and archetypes of fairytales are useful stand ins to find the personal meaning of such stories much as the concepts of matter, energy, and space are used to study the universe though they still are human constructions of language (inertia for example originally meant an indolent person). So long as such concepts relate to facts and are useful in explaining given phenomena then we ought to use them.

"If we, as adults, must take recourse to the creation of separate entities to bring some sensible order into the chaos of our inner experiences, how much greater is the child's need for this! Today adults use such concepts use such concepts as id, ego, superego, and ego ideal to separate our internal experiences and get a better grasp on what they are all about. Unfortunately, in doing so we have lost something which is inherent in the fairy tale: the realization that these externalizations are fictions, useful only for sorting out and comprehending mental processes."

Bettelheim's advocacy for the telling of fairy tales to children came at a time when picture books, television cartoons, and animated Disney movies came to be used by parents to entertain and "educate" children about life whether intentionally or not. These mediums are all visual and mass produced. Fairy tales used to be related orally, probably by women,  in illiterate societies, and reflected the culture of the time, the details changing over time while retaining a basic structure. What happened is that fairy tales started to be written down in collections by upper class educated men, the likes of the Brothers Grimm and Joseph Jacobs in the 19th century, and commercially sold on the market. The growth of industrial capitalist society has something to do with this, as well as the formation of national identities which the sharing of these tales developed. The power of the fairy tale however has been the personal way it is told and its archetypal nature which can't, or at least shouldn't, be copyrighted to any individual. Fairy tales and their power precede societies of mass production and consumption, individualism, scientific understanding and control of nature. Fairy tales are almost always set in the past or some different place where nature is still mysterious and anthropomorphic, a world less under rational control but more familiar, "once upon a time."

Communicating fairy tales verbally is the most primal way available to us. Humans are very visual creatures, whereas most mammals rely on hearing and smell, like dogs. The unfamiliar smell of the mailman is not dissuaded upon seeing the uniform for the dog. Hearing in some ways is more powerful than seeing. One can turn one's head or close one's eyes to avoid sight, but this isn't available for hearing. Before bed your parent will tell a story and you will hear something whether you like it or nor. Oral language is very powerful this way, dependent on movement of several organs and different with each person. It is much easier to manipulate visual stimuli than to manipulate sounds. This is why we have drawings and paintings from thousands of years ago, but not sound recordings before the 19th century. Telling stories verbally is a very different experience, more primal and unique . While one can visually recreate a scene with great detail, unless one records sounds with a device it isn't as easy to reproduce the way it was, even if remembered correctly. A sheet of music from Ancient Rome wouldn't mean the same if it was played for those today. 

Telling fairy tales in the original way is very important for children's emotional and intellectual development. The fairy tale represents in a distorted way the inner feelings and conflicts everybody goes through in early life in an acceptable way to a child's mind. Animals have minds like us, magic is real, wishes can affect reality, things can transform into different things easily. It is speculated first by Frazer in The Golden Bough 1890 and then by Sigmund Freud in the essay Animism, Magic, and the Omnipotence of Thoughts from Totem and Taboo 1913 that human civilization progressed through different stages of thought: magic, religion, and then to science. Early humans most likely didn't separate their thoughts, feelings, and intentions from animals and inanimate objects and so attributed to them human qualities, and also animal/natural qualities to themselves. Humans children are unique among animals for playing with dolls, attributing thoughts feelings and intentions to them. The first theories of the world were rooted in our own psychology. Its probably the case that playing with dolls and childlike thinking was a necessary stage to for the development of consciousness, in which we learn a theory of mind, that other people can think like we do. We "moderns" relegate thinking which was once the norm to early life and repress it later in life. Nevertheless we must come to integrate and explore to a degree such thinking to become successful adults and members of society. Just like those who aren't exposed to religion early in life and raised in an overly rational way can become susceptible later in life to cults and bizarre ways of thinking. Something like this happened to John Stuart Mill who learned Latin and Greek before age five had a mental breakdown at twenty. For Mill his break with childhood belief was in utilitarian rationalism, and recovered by reading romantic poetry. 

"If a child is told only stories 'true to reality'...then he may conclude that much of his inner reality is unacceptable to his parents."

The goal of the fairy tale is to integrate different and often conflicting aspects of the self and relations to others in a psychologically satisfying way, the process Jung called individuation. Fairy tales are marked by optimism, usually with happy endings in which danger or challenge is overcome or avoided with a lesson learned or something gained.  Sometimes there is an aspect of vengeance, like the boiling of the wolf in red riding hood or the burning of the witch in Hansel and Gretel. This is all in contrast to fables, like those of Aesop, which are moralistic and have a clear causal relationship between what action and consequence. The ant and the grasshopper ends with the grasshopper perishing in the cold because he didn't work hard when it was warmer, and we're supposed to identify with the ant who doesn't take him in and works hard for himself.

Different aspects of the child and adult are presented together though in different ways to make them psychologically acceptable. "Fairy tales offer figures onto which the child can externalize what goes on in his mind, in controllable ways." The tales are works of conflict resolution by which these different aspects of the child's relationship to the world can be resolved. Some stories present the duality of the sibling relationship, like in Hansel and Gretel in which one sibling saves the other from the witch, succeeding without the help of the other. The three little pigs represent different stages of mental develop argues Bettelheim. The three houses represent advances in protection against nature: straw huts to wood homes and to brick houses. This demonstrates it is possible to defend ourselves from nature using our minds. The three pigs are the child at different stages at mental development, with the hope that he too will be able to grow up and defend against external threats. The wicked stepmother allows the child to confront negative aspects of their mother/female caregiver. The grandmother in little red riding hood is replaced with a rapacious wolf, much how the same grandmother can be both caring and then furious at other times. The giant in Jack and the beanstalk represents aspects of one's own father. Jack's mother is a widow and by stealing from the giant and killing him is able to provide for his mother to live heavily ever after. This is an Oedipal story, as well as a transgressive one in which a boy breaks into a home and steals from an individual he doesn't know or has wronged him. 

Fairy tales achieve integration between the id and ego and build a sense of self. Myths operate to build and strengthen the superego over the ego, instilling a sense of common history, morals, stories of heroism, cosmologies, and often stories of the gods. This is what Homer and Hesiod gave to western society. Myths can bring to the individual a sense of pessimism in which they or society isn't living up the ideals embodied in the myth. Myths or at least aspects of them can never be disproved for those who believe in them, whereas fairy tales are recognized for what they are as we grow into adulthood. Fairytales relate much more to personal meaning and development than myths and because of that don't lose their power if not based in history or fact. Fairytales are almost always set in the past and familiar historical settings that are culturally relevant, but don't afford exact localization in time and space, much like the unconscious itself. 

The benefit of fairy tales is that they allow exploration of wishes in a disguised way with only temporary consequences. Wishes are fulfilled in a safe way within the linear archetypal structure of a story. The promise of the fairy tale is that one day we'll be able to frame the events of our lives in a way in which we can overcome life's challenges through the power of our own understanding. Rash wishing doesn't have permanent consequences and a lesson can be learned. A child's mind however is not prepared to directly confront the sources of their desires and anxieties. The content of children's dreams says Bettelheim are not as symbolic as that of adults. In the story Rapunzel when the prince finds her in the wilderness she has been exiled to after the tower, she has twins with her. To a child this could demonstrate that sex is not where children come from, though to adults it implies she and the prince did something else during tower visits than chat. 

The psychological truth is that our notion of reality is something that develops over our lives. The ego has not yet gained control over the id; the pleasure principle rules over the reality principle. Human intelligence takes a good deal of time to develop, much as it took millions of years for the species to evolve. The thinking part of the brain, the cortex, develops after the older "lizard brain" in common with other animals. As adults we can look at these tales for what they are and go from the literal to the latent content, but we should not expect our children to do so. 

The Uses of Enchantment is a landmark work of child psychology (which won a National Book Award) using psychoanalytic theories of mind which is also of use to adults to realize the latent meaning of fairy tales that makes them so important to all of us. The real meaning of things is often hidden to us, even into adulthood. This is mostly for our benefit so we can approach things in a familiar way and so we can move on in our lives. But some of us moderns have forgotten too much that was apparent to illiterate preindustrial society. We've come to rely on the image over the word (pictures, film, and television) to connect us with the world when the most important thing for us are the personal relationships to one another. As Goethe said, man never realizes how anthropomorphic he is.

A Major Breakthrough: Realism

It's time to leave anti-realist, idealist, and phenomenalist philosophy behind. I've decided on empiricism/positivism/verificationism, whatever you want to call it, but have to abandon the association I've had with such doctrines and anti-realism of various stripes. George Berkeley was one of the British empiricists and also an idealist and John Stuart Mill, Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius in the 19th century adapted empiricism to a secular version of subjective idealism, phenomenalism. The empiricism I subscribe to is about the criterion of meaning not just epistemology and definitely not ontology. A statement about the existence of something is meaningful if it can be verified but that doesn’t make its existence constituted by verification itself. This is Russell’s distinction between idea of a thing and a thing being an idea, Berkeley’s error was not making this distinction.

The philosophy of realism holds that the world exists independently of our knowledge of it. To perceive is not to be (per Berkeley), it is to discover what already exists. Though we know things by perception, it is another matter to argue that perception constitutes the objects which we perceive (which is idealism). Consciousness is of something, something which exists. That I perceive means I exist, but only because I perceive what I call myself, not that my perception constitutes my existence. Universals are what make facts true, it isn’t that facts themselves constitute the world (which is positivism). Relations between facts are themselves true, like that the capitol of California is Sacramento. This is true regardless of whether one is acquainted with Sacramento or California. That the present king of France is bald (Russel’s example) isn’t just false as a matter of fact but because the relation isn’t true. These relations aren’t factual things, they presuppose them, but are real. So there must be something which makes them real. The past exists even though I haven’t been to it, though it’s a more difficult question whether the future exists as well.

There are then two assumptions to realism then: 1) existence exists independently of perception 2) perception is of something that exists.

I have to be a realist because of my perspective of scientific naturalism, in particular the Neo-Darwinian paradigm, so fruitful in my study of human nature. The problem with anti-realism is that if there is no God and living/conscious things didn’t always or have to exist, then how did the world exist? This was I think a criticism by Vladimir Lenin in his Materialism and Empiriocriticm against Mach and Avenarius. Mach I think tried to relate the evolution of the organism with psychological development to explain this, as if the notion of natural history depends on psychological development.

I am also a realist because of my intense dislike of social constructivism, postmodernism, post-structuralism whatever the name theories which the current political left and purveyors of victim politics like to employ. Any disparity has to do with power and never with physical realities like scarcity, lack of knowledge, or biology. Gender and race having nothing to do with biological development, thousands of years of evolution have nothing to do with the way societies have tended to be.

It’s also important to me that Marxism and socialism be based on realist grounds so they can be criticized as well as maybe improved. The current left lives in a fantasy land of their own making.

It is tempting that grounding thought in radical subjectivity can save some precious beliefs in individuality and safeguard free will and dualism. But this opens up the possibility of reality being inter-subjective, thus being a collective construction by language which is the worst kind of philosophy one can arrive at.

The implicit doctrine behind anti-realism and at least some forms of idealism is the doctrine of internal relations. This doctrine states that all relations between things are necessary, and nothing can be understood in isolation but only as a totality. This is the philosophy of Hegel which is at the foundation of so-called continental philosophy, as well as for analytic philosophy which criticized the doctrine. The doctrine is meaningless as what explains everything holds true for any possible configuration of facts and can never be disproven, and so never proven. If everything is a social construction, then nothing is a social construction.

The way to deny external relations, which are essentially causal relations, is to argue that causality is purely phenomenal, conditioned by the mind into reality to make individual things understandable. It is true that space and time don’t operate in the Euclidean/Newtonian way we were accustomed to, but that doesn’t mean those ordinary perceptual aspects aren’t real aspects of the world. And further space and time are physical phenomena. Neil Degrasse Tyson said something to the effect that if the scientific conception of the universe doesn’t fit your religion, then your religion is too small. That Newton’s laws don’t apply to everything means that more laws or changes are needed.

My realism is indirect realism, the type of Descartes and Bertrand Russell. That the world we perceive is qualitatively different from the actual world, and the actual world is possibly independent of sense data. This view owed itself to working through philosophical problems like illusion, hallucination, dreams, evil demons etc as the way things appear is different person to person and location to location. John Locke gave us primary and secondary qualities to matter, those which reflect the nature of the object and those which exist in our minds as a result of causal interaction with the object. For this reason indirect realism is also called causal realism.

For as to how we have access to the objective world, I hold onto what Epicurus said in his principal doctrines. How can the senses lie to us? From where did you get that idea? If you distrust all your senses you won’t have any knowledge. Using instruments doesn’t replace the senses but allows them to see new things they’re capable of seeing.

22. “We must consider both the ultimate end and all clear sensory evidence, to which we refer our opinions; for otherwise everything will be full of uncertainty and confusion.

23. “If you fight against all your sensations, you will have no standard to which to refer, and thus no means of judging even those sensations which you claim are false.

24. “If you reject absolutely any single sensation without stopping to distinguish between opinion about things awaiting confirmation and that which is already confirmed to be present, whether in sensation or in feelings or in any application of intellect to the presentations, you will confuse the rest of your sensations by your groundless opinion and so you will reject every standard of truth. If in your ideas based upon opinion you hastily affirm as true all that awaits confirmation as well as that which does not, you will not avoid error, as you will be maintaining the entire basis for doubt in every judgment between correct and incorrect opinion.

I hold that because we perceive the world, we know that it exists, but the existence or nature of the objects is not constituted by the experience. They exist independently of our experience of them.

Development of the Family/Speculation on the First Units of Society

"Human females have hidden external genitalia and do not advertise estrus, thus differing from females of other primate species. Both men and women, when bonded, invite continuous and frequent intercourse. The practice is genetically adaptive: it ensures that the woman and her child have help from the father. For the woman, the commitment secured by pleasurable nonreproductive intercourse is important, even vital in many circumstances. Human infants, to acquire large organized brains and high intelligence, must go through an unusually long period of helplessness during their development. The mother cannot count on the same level of support in the community, even in tightly knit hunter-gatherer societies, that she obtains from a sexually and emotionally bonded mate." Robert Ardrey, The Hunter Hypothesis 1976

"When this happened, the male acquired a motive for keeping the female, or, speaking more generally, his sexual objects, near him; while the female, who did not want to be separated from her helpless young, was obliged, in their interests, to remain with the stronger male." Sigmund Freud Civilization and Its Discontents 1929 Book IV footnote

The family is the first unit of society. A true family involves a bond between offspring and parents who invest in offspring something other than their gametes and birthing. Animal life until the influence of culture is shaped primarily by natural selection which decides what is inherited by posterity.

Not all living things have sex. Reproduction by multiplication creates offspring with most of the same DNA as the parent. With sex, offspring have half of each parent's DNA, and the individual must find and be a partner fit enough to ensure the survival of their genes in changing environments over generations. Sexes evolved it is thought because it offers greater genetic variation relative to asexual reproduction for future generations to continually adapt to parasites, the "Red Queen" hypothesis. Why two sexes? It seems to have been the most stable arrangement due to its popularity but isn't the only way things could have gone.

Sex is the most important bond between animals besides birth, but in most animals this occurs during a small part of the year, heat season, and the male and female don't stick around with each other after that. Another bond is that between offspring and mother, but this becomes an important bond later with birds who have nests and pair bonds and mammals who give live birth and provide fluids to their young after birth. Reptiles just lay and bury eggs and leave them to hatch on their own. Giving live birth and providing milk gives mammal females a stronger bond to offspring than reptiles and their eggs.

Our distant evolutionary ancestors didn't have specialized sexual organs. They had a cloaca like birds and reptiles, a single hole for excrement and fertilization. The specialization of genitalia is a later acquisition in developmental history. Placental mammals, most mammals, don't have a cloaca. The reason is that most mammals don't lay eggs; the embryo develops internally and demands fluids provided by the mother, thus specializing sexual organs from the birthing process.

The "invention" of specialized genitals is because of the gestation and live birth of mammals. This is the first step in sexual organs becoming divorced from other bodily functions and sexual activity becoming more than a reproductive activity, leading to other bonds between sexes. Both greater mammalian maternal attachment to the child and greater sexual attachment of males to females are linked to these anatomical changes.

The major biological breakthrough was sexuality becoming continuous rather than periodic. Most animals go through seasons of heat and rut, reproducing during a particular time of the year. Human and ape females go through monthly cycles of ovulation and can have sex year round. There aren't as obvious signs for female ovulation, by "hiding" ovulation regular sexual activity is encouraged. Unlike chimpanzees and other apes however, human female sexual organs aren't on display and don't give the obvious sign of ovulation. This is the first step toward social bonding as males have a motive for being around females continuously. Continual sexual receptivity and "concealed" ovulation.

Strengthening the sexual bond is face to face sex rather than from behind, which is almost exclusive to humans. Having genitals and not a cloaca is the first reason for this, as is being bipedal with the organs on display, with greater lower limb locomotion. This creates an affective bond, individualizing the sexual experience. This would be quite adaptive to get males to stick around to invest in their offspring.

Having a big brain requires a long period of physical development outside of the womb. Our big heads wouldn't fit through the birth canal if allowed to grow any larger, and so we're born premature. It takes over a year for a baby to walk, whereas foals can get and go when they're born. Its not for 15 or 20 years that we're considered adults.

A basic sexual division of labor would emerge from differences in parental investment in offspring which would be considerable to develop those big heads; man the hunter and woman the gatherer. The father would go out and hunt/find food to provide for the child and the mother would spend time caring for the child, feeding. This would be due to a stronger bond between mother and child because she always knows the child is hers whereas the male cannot be certain. The mother's mobility is limited by the child as carrying the youngling would immobilize at least one arm and limit activity to gathering within the area. Men with less of an attachment to the child would go hunt. Since a man only invests his sperm at one moment for the development of a child whereas a woman has to carry the fetus for nine months, women should be more "choosy" when it comes to a mate. A male would have to demonstrate their commitment by provision of resources. This would be done in competition with other men who if not successful have to wait at least nine months for another chance or find another partner. In terms of children, women are guaranteed a child if pregnancy is successful.

The limited mobility of bipedal motion, with no wings, and the long time it takes to develop physically due to large heads precludes multi-generational life. Having a campsite to go home to where women and children would be would be advantageous due to limited mobility. A mother can't just fly off and start her own nest like birds. Most likely she would stay with members of the group, or possibly join another group presumably of the male partner (matrilocal versus patrilocal residence). Having a home camp would preclude multi-generational living. Though life expectancy was low, the number partially dragged down by high infant morality, some of those who survived into adulthood could assist care for grandchildren. This "investment", presumably by the mother's parents, wouldn't be as much as a mate would provide, but would certainly help. Knowledge could be passed down directly from generation to generation, a gerontocracy of knowledge.

Always operating with this first unit of society is kin selection. All of this investment would be adaptive because of its promotion of inclusive fitness; propagation of genes of the individual as well as relatives sharing genes. A child shares half its genes with both parents and siblings, a fourth of genes with grandparents and half-siblings and uncles/aunts, and an eighth of genes with cousins and great-grandparents. Hunter gatherers lived in small bands of 10 to 100 people who were most likely related in some way. Sexual couples all having their kids could continually mate together. Could the children of Adam and Eve avoid incest in sufficient numbers? What effect would this level of relatedness have on social life compared to contemporary society?

Larger social groups like tribes could have emerged from the practice of exogamy, individuals leaving a group to find partners not related to them to prevent incest. Perhaps men stole women from a rival group, something that began the Trojan war in Homer's Iliad. Or men challenged the men of another group to battle and the outcome could've joined members of the two groups. The resolution of the conflict between families could've been like the wergeld payment of old Germanic law in which restitution for theft, damage, injury or murder was paid to the victim's family to prevent a blood feud between the families of the victim and perpetrator, Hatfields and McCoys style enmity. The practices of brideprice and dowry, which are different, could also be reflective of an origin to larger social organization from a merging of different families through a mutually acceptable agreement. Maybe exogamy began with men leaving the group since a surplus of men doesn't lend to as much reproductive opportunity as a surplus of women to fewer men. A polygamous situation could have sparked this male exogamy by monopolizing multiple women to a single or few men and leaving the other men with no reproductive prospects in the group.

Is Group Selection Viable?

I feel like EO Wilson is trying to do two things in The Social Conquest of Earth 2012. One is to defend multilevel selection versus individual genetic selection by using ants, bees, and termites as examples of eusocial species and the compare/contrast them to humans. The second thing is to demonstrate that humans really are altruistic/eusocial on a real level because the mechanism of group selection operates on us at a genetic level.

Back in the 1970s when he coined the term sociobiology Wilson was a proponent of individual inclusive fitness. Inclusive fitness is the view that natural selection acts on the level of genes which through the vehicle of the individual organism aim to pass themselves on to the next generation. The two forms of altruism that can occur with inclusive fitness are kin selection, direct benefit to relatives who share genes by different degrees, and reciprocal altruism in which one helps others for benefit in return, “you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours.”

Group selection also operates at a genetic level but sees genes as influencing individual behavior toward their social group which is a unit selected for genetic expression. Group selection was more widely accepted before the 1960s and 1970s when mathematical models of individual fitness proved themselves more useful. Since the 1990s however a repackaging of group selection has come about called multilevel selection, proposed by David Sloan Wilson (no relation to EO Wilson). Selection does occur on the individual level, but can also occur on the group level under certain conditions, hence multilevel. Genes they would argue already operate on different levels on individuals, whether it be protein formation or eye color. If groups are a concrete enough influence and compete with one another, then genes can be selected for individuals which orient them to the good of the group. Wilson seems to have switched his position because of his work with ant colonies and what to him seems to be research conflicting with inclusive fitness.

The case for multilevel selection as existing at all is the most interesting even for those who disagree. The best parts of the book are the middle and latter parts which discusses eusocial colonies. Eusocial means “true social”; organisms which behave and sacrifice their lives for the good of others. Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, termites, ants) are the best example of eusocial organisms in which their many members cooperate for the good of the hive/colony, sacrificing themselves in defense and not breeding, only the queen doing so. But as Wilson points out most organisms and even most insects aren’t eusocial. “The twenty thousand known species of eusocial insects, mostly ants bees wasps and termites, account for only 2 percent of the approximately one million known species of insects. Yet this tiny minority of species dominate the rest of the insects in their numbers, their weight, and their impact on the environment.” Eusociality is rare, but if the conditions are met, it can be very advantageous.

So what are the conditions for eusociality? There are two important preliminary steps: 1) a defensible nest, and, 2) multigenerational division of labor. Birds make the first step of having nests, but don’t stay around the young long enough for step 2. In an ant colony the queen stays and the workers forage for food. Multigenerational living is what creates the group. The parents or older generations stay with the young past childhood and exert a greater influence, create stronger bonds. Eusociality works because everyone in the colony is related, born of the queen. The insects aren’t altruistic the we think of it, they are really the “robotic extension of the mother’s genome.” The ants are the extended phenotype of the queen. A home to return to gives an incentive to work together, dividing the labor, as some must maintain the home and others to find food. Wilson admits this isn’t the altruism we think of, which is on the individual level and toward strangers for no benefit to the individual and instead a cost. But it demonstrates to him the possibility of the group level of selection.

Eusociality has further steps to become adaptive. 1) formation of groups 2) nest 3) alleles for eusocial traits 4) favorable environmental forces 5) group selection sufficient to produce changes. The third step is very important, the alleles which are altruistic must be capable of genetic selection. Flexible alleles capable of different expression help the division of labor. For these alleles to be selected favorable environmental forces must be present.

Wilson says that for humans these are large body size and limited mobility which make us dependent on each other. We need protection when traveling as we don’t go very fast on two legs, and females can’t easily leave and start their own family because of their limited mobility as well as that of the infant which can’t walk for at least a year. It takes a while to develop our big brains, so we go through a long period of physical dependency on others.

For vertebrates eusociality is extremely uncommon. Only the naked mole rat and, Wilson claims, humans have made it to true sociality. The case for human eusociality doesn’t actually begin with our big brains, as there isn’t a strong correlation between brain size and eusocial behavior. Apes are quite smart and have rudimentary social communication but aren’t truly altruistic.

So what are the causes/evidence for humans being eusocial? Humans have defensible campsites as well as multigenerational living. Having campsites is something predatory carnivore species like wolves and lions have, to return to after hunting and to protect offspring when away. Humans stuck around for a long time after the birth of children to raise them to maturity, which takes a long time. The argument is really that the transition to hunting life with the challenges of the last ice age are what changed us from a primate social order to eusociality because of a home base, greater male cooperation and investment in offspring, women raising children for a long period of time, growing brain size enabled by all of this and finally technological innovation with the control of fire and later agriculture. Humans live in social groups, though these were much smaller in Paleolithic times, 30 to 100. Likely it was that everybody in the group was related and being social also means excluding as well as including; non-kin. Having multigenerational living, an extended family, with a basic division of labor would be the factors inducing eusociality.

William Hamilton came up with the famous formula for inclusive fitness, rb>c; the degree of kinship to the altruist times the benefit to the recipient must be greater than the cost to the altruist for altruistic behavior to occur. Wilson reverses the equation and argues that sometimes organisms cooperate not because they are related genetically, but are related because they cooperate. The criticism Wilson sort of touches on is how the hell does an organism know it’s degree of relatedness to others? Also do organisms calculate the costs and benefits of every action? Most of this behavior in social encounters occurs without conscious choice, so something else is operating. It is genetic selection, but of what kind? The example in the book is the Westermarck effect; we aren’t as sexually attracted to people we grow up with. This is an example of behavior evolved for a specific social purpose which benefits the species, preventing incest. The effect applies to even non-kin if one is raised in close enough proximity early on. It is a pro-social adaptation which can operate without even knowledge of genetic relatedness.

What Wilson wants to argue for humans is that human altruism is genuine, rooted in our genes, and not just from relatedness or an extended phenotype. What seems to be going on is what is called coercive empathy or negative altruism. Emotions of stress and anger are produced when acting in certain nonadaptive selfish ways, so that one literally feels the pain inflicted onto others. Presumably this has to do with proposed mirror neurons which activate the same areas of the brain for certain activities we observe in others. The amygdala emotionally charges memories of our earliest relationships which form attachment patterns later in life. We feel pleasure at the punishment of those who don’t follow our expectations of behavior towards other, displacing our own anxieties which in turn reinforces our own expectations. All this is prior to the rational judgement of the cerebral cortex, which is above the amygdala-limbic system and evolved later. Some physiological adaptations like a visible white sclera, crying, and blushing make shame easier to induce as our emotions tend to follow what our body is doing. Individuals and groups would have their genes passed on because of these mechanisms/behaviors which benefit us in our social lives, rather than the genetic advantage leading us to as unconscious Machiavellians to manipulate people’s emotions.

The incentive for developing group selection is competition with other groups. If certain traits allow the group to outcompete another group for resource conflict, then they will pass their genes on.

I’ve thought of some mechanisms that would allow group selection to occur. All would have to increase the genetic relatedness of the group over time, relative to other groups. The most simple is reproductive isolation over time. People breeding amongst themselves for many generations will come to resemble each other genetically and in phenotype more than outsiders. They should favor those who look like them, because they are probably more related to them than other people. This we’d call ethnocentrism. This would work relative to other groups though, as individuals would still be as genetically related to others within their group as outsiders are related to their own ingroup. But greater competition with other groups would make the intragroup differences more salient and induce greater ethnocentrism. Presumably people would evolve different traits according to their environmental challenges over time other than just appearance which would differentiate them from and help compete with other groups:

-As humans moved latitudinally away from the equator’s tropical climate into colder territory, paternal investment would become greater. Women couldn’t gather year round, and men had to take up hunting meat. Those in the colder climate with changing seasons, eurasians, would develop: greater paternal investment, later sexual maturity, less sexual dimorphism, and greater intelligence to survive and plan in the regularly changing environment. Such persons would follow a K-selection reproductive strategy, K for competitive, which emphasizes quality of births over quantity, which is R-selection, R for rate.-

Consanguinity, marriage between first cousins, would make individuals more genetically related within the group than strangers within their groups. Polygamy, mostly polygyny of several females to a male, would also produce more genetic similarity and approach something like the eusocial condition of insects who reproduce from a single queen. Even when polygamy is proscribed, it occurs de facto with adultery, bastards, with particularly powerful men, and also divorce where the same man can have several children from different women.

Humans overall compared to other animals are moderately polygamous, serially monogamous, and are more K-selected. This differs between groups and would explain different survival strategies and levels of ethnocentrism.

The Hunting Hypothesis: Why Aren't We Apes?

The Hunting Hypothesis 1976 is the capstone of Robert Ardrey's "nature of man" series of books: African Genesis 1961, The Territorial Imperative 1966, and The Social Contract 1970. Throughout these books Ardrey promoted a different view of human nature than the one reigning by the mid twentieth century. "Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born" is the first sentence of the series. The commonly accepted origin for mankind was either in Asia, the discovery of Homo Erectus in Indonesia in the late 19th century, or in Europe as the infamous piltdown man fraud in Britain 1912 convinced many for over 40 years. In either case it wasn't in Africa that modern Homo Sapiens evolved, a reflection not only of archaeological discoveries and hoaxes at the time but also racism and ethnocentrism. The skeletons found there were seen as too primitive and close to the ape to be our direct ancestors. It was also thought that the expansion of the human brain is what separated us from apes and made us human. The skull of piltdown man was actually a Homo sapiens skull fitted with a modified orangutan jaw to make it appear that the big brain preceded decrease in jaw size, preceding a change in diet. Humans must originally have been scavengers or even vegetarians at first, rarely acquiring meat. We were smart peaceful mostly vegetarian apes who learned to walk on two legs because of our ability to make tools and because we searched the ground for food instead of trees.

As for human nature in the traditional social science paradigm, that is determined by culture. Only our physiology is inherited, not our behavior and social practices. Evolution just gives us fixed instinctual responses and physical response capabilities to stimuli. Anything more complicated is socially learned early in life from authority figures. It is society which makes us violent, we're either good or amoral by nature. This is the view shared more or less by the influential behaviorist and Marxist perspectives, see Lysenkoism in the USSR which opposed genetic research. Sigmund Freud applied evolutionary theory in his anthropological/cultural writings, though not always with modern Darwinian mechanisms. The blank slate view was reinforced by the discovery of pre-agricultural people in the "new world" who observers concluded represented how humans originally lived rather than a separate path from our ancestors, much like the idiotic "we come from monkeys" critics lob at evolutionary theory, as if primates today are the same as they were millions of years ago. Also the fact that many animal studies were done in capativity, the conditions which alter animal behavior. Thorndike's cats, Pavlov's dogs and Skinner's pigeons. 

By the 1950s this view was being challenged. Raymond Dart discovered Australopithecus Africanus in South Africa back in 1924 and identified it as the beginning of our line, but was dismissed for decades. In 1953 Dart wrote the article The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man which argued that man evolved from a line of apes in Africa which became reliant on hunting and eating meat from evidence of fractured bones in A Africanus caves. Some primates like baboons will eat meat when nothing else is left, but A Africanus made it part of its diet, and with large beasts. Upright posture, freeing hands for tool use, would only be made adaptive to use weapons for hunting prey. The A Africanus skulls indicate that decreased dentition preceded a big brain, as eating meat cut up with tools along with use of fire would deliver a lot more energy and less mastication than fruit and tubers. Man didn't evolve to be upright as Friedrich Engels thought just by labor and technology freeing the hands, but by a need to hunt and subsist below the trees which gave us a reason to use tools. Meat eating and as we'll see changes in social organization preceded expansion in intelligence.

The transition to hunting ape most likely didn't happen this far back in history with A Africanus however. These hominids probably were scavengers and opportunists for meat and mostly ate fruits and nuts. However by Homo Erectus nearly 2 million years ago, who also discovered fire and left Africa, the hunting transition became part of human nature.

Robert Ardrey took Dart's work and presented it to the public, making it an all encompassing story of human origins. Back in the Miocene epoch about 20 to 5 million years ago forests were more abundant and the primates flourished. There was plenty of food for the vegan primate diet and tree cover to live in rather than facing formidable terrestrial predators. But then an unremitting drought and diminished rainfall wiped out millions of square miles of Miocene forest. The climate turned against the apes by the time of the Pliocene; the forests of Africa began to disappear and ape populations have slowly dwindled ever since. What was left was the environment of the savanna. To survive in this environment an ape would have to compete with the specialized claws and fangs of land predators for the new food source of raw meat. Man was expelled to the east of Eden, and came to bear the mark of Cain. The only was to thrive was to adapt from the ape legacy what could be used for predation: starting with a greater upright stature and hands specialized from feet and then sweat glands and less body hair for going long distances. 

The great question of The Hunting Hypothesis is why are we human beings and not apes? We diverged from our common ancestor with chimps 5 to 7 million years ago and have taken radically different paths. Chimps are known to hunt small game occasionally, though it's not an important part of their diet. This implies that at some point chimp ancestors could have taken the hunting ape path. Humans retain much of their ape ancestry such as a body fitted for general tasks not specialization, reliance on vision, a natural curiosity, desire for varied taste pallet and diet, social behavior and intelligence and the higher apes walk upright for periods of time or in a hunched position. The social behaviors that make us different like sharing food, cooperation on hunts, and keeping a home base are shared with meat eating predator animals like wolves and lions. Before better weapons like bow and arrow, slings, or throwing spears were developed hunting would have been most effective in groups. Cooperation and strategy would have to suffice for mans inferior hunting equipment. Baboons travel in large numbers so the rudiments of social organization were availiable from ape life. Hunting life would mean becoming a more territorial animal with a sexual division of labor, men going out to hunt and women protecting the home. Males would have to learn to trust one another, to work together and share the rewards of their collective effort, and eventually develop a different social order than one with the alpha ape on top having primary access to women and food. Some greater access to women had to occur, be it monogamous pair bonds or sexual promiscuity, which occurred with early humans is still debated. With agriculture and a surplus of wealth the alpha male emperor with a harem of females would be reestablished in early societies around the earth: Babylon, Egypt, China, the Aztecs, the Incas. But by the time of hunter gatherers relative egalitarianism between males and monogamy would for the most part rule. Multiple wives as well as slaves are costly. 

Ardrey's project has a larger goal than establishing hunting and eating meat as crucial in human development. This is to link behavior with evolutionary development; that certain behaviors and social practices are due to genetic inheritance and behavior itself produced evolutionary changes. Anatomical change comes about as a consequence of behavioral change. "Birds do not fly because they have wings; they have wings because they fly." There are roughly three "instinctual" or imperatives that drive behavior in all organisms. These are dominance, territory, and sexuality. Animals have a "pecking order" which determines who has access to food and territory. The importance of dominance is that whoever can outwit or brow beat their fellows into submission is more likely to pass on their genes, and so animals have a disposition to fall in line, like a castration complex. Ardrey appears to disagree with Freud and psychoanalysis that sexuality is the driving force in behavior, instead arguing that those who don't come on top or outcompete don't get to reproduce and so dominance is actually preliminary to acquiring a mate. However the position that sexuality but not dominance/aggression is innate is really that of Neo-Marxists like Herbert Marcuse who tried to incorporate Freud into the general Marxist canon, minus the aggressive drive. Individuals are motivated by drives, but the species is defined by reproduction and so there will evolve ways to gear sexuality towards behavior which will secure reproductive fitness. 

"First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women." Scarface 

Sexuality is the drive that produces greater bonds between individuals. Most animals go through seasons of heat and rut, reproducing only a single part of the year. There isn't an incentive for the mates to stick around after fertilization, and sex isn't a very pleasurable affair for many animals. The incentive of continual sexual activity isn't there. Regular periods of ovulation, estrus, means year round sexual receptivity and an incentive for the male to stick around. Once the eggs are laid for reptiles or chicks born for birds the parents don't stick around the offspring. These two things begin to change with mammals and particularly with primates. Giving live birth and providing fluids to offspring extends the amount of time the parent spends with the child, giving a stronger social bond. "Primate sexuality was the consequence, not the cause, of primate social life. Basic to that life was the handicap of slow growing young, the long years of learning, and the immobilization and vulnerability of mothers. Without the group, few would be the young who lived to maturity." Continual sexual receptivity became adaptive because it ensured greater paternal investment in the female and children, needed because of the long time it takes for us to mature. Sex became personalized with face to face sex, itself a product likely of bipedalism. Human females have "concealed ovulation" in that most of her sexual organs are not on display and isn't immediately apparent when ovulation is occurring. So the prospect of sex year round for the male and greater time raising offspring for females is what gives us our family unit. 

Territory is the drive that Ardrey has the most to say, as he wrote an entire book on it. Dominance and sex are pretty well known, though those on the political left downplay the former and those on the right would downplay the latter as determining human behavior. Territory was not really considered relevant to human behavior until The Territorial Imperative came out. Anthropologists used to think that scarce resources and/or property ownership are what caused social conflict, and in turn the struggle for dominance. But it isn't as if all people are under harsh scarcity all the time, there can be plenty out there but none for Peter is Paul monopolizes the good land. Those who don't have territory also have bad prospects for mating. Territory is very important to animals as it is defined within a species as well as between males which decides access to females as well as resources. 

The concept of territory has some misconceptions. Keeping territory isn't about killing intruders or taking revenge, just repelling them. Human aggression and war have to do other factors as well as territory. For most of the time, people can just avoid one another especially if populations are low, which they would be in the envrionment of our ancestors without agriculture, and space is large. Humans are so generalizable and curious that we can travel in succeed in a variety of different environments. But if somebody intrudes on your territory, the first instinct isn't to welcome them. As Thomas Hobbes noted we still lock our doors even when we live under a state with laws, sometimes locking rooms or possessions away from people we live with or welcome into our home. In Anglo law at least an individual does not have to retreat of defending their home. In the US many states have adopted the castle doctrine-the right to use firearms when on your property. But as divisive as territory is it also brings people together.

Ardrey has the amity-enmity complex to apply the territorial complex to civilization; humans protect their own and destroy their enemies because of the same impulse of defending what is theirs. This complex purports to explain the social behaviors altruism, loyalty, charity and mercy as compatible with the struggle for survival. We identify with people like us because of who we're against and vice versa we identify who we're like. Plato identified this as a quality of the guardian in his Republic; fierce towards enemies and loyal toward masters, like a dog. No doubt the transition to hunting intensified the dual nature of the complex, extending who identify with as well as who we're against. From the family to the clan, to tribe, to nation against other families, clans, tribes, and nations. As populations increase and come in contact, both unity and division is the result. It's no secret that the enemy of an enemy is a friend, which is why the complex works on different levels. Families within a nation will unite against an enemy nation in war even if they don't like or know each other. The good of social life is mixed with the bad, and it doesn't seem likely or easy for us to identify with all at the international level and against no one, in spaceship earth. 

The final chapters of the book concern the relationship between human nature and climate, between the last ice age and the current interglacial period. The question for humans after the transition from ape is why did we leave Africa, and what happened to the other hominids living in Eurasia? The answer seems to be a combination of natural curiosity and want of variety from primate past along with new technology from hunting enabling survival. Homo sapiens became Homo sapiens during the last ice age when some of us left Africa and didn't come back. Those that left didn't come back because our evolution transcended the former forests which our ape ancestors once live, and it isn't possible for us to revert back to that lifestyle anytime soon. It was our new technology, eventually fire and dogs, and social organization that allowed us to survive in different environments. Much of the world was frozen over and sea levels far lower than they are today. In addition we had to contend with large land mammals and other hominid species. By the end of the ice age 12,000 years ago humans were the only hominids left, Neanderthals going extinct 30,000 years ago possibly absorbed by the Cro-Magnons or other modern humans. Ardrey argues that the disapearance of the Neanderthals in Europe was genocide, clearing the way for territory. Just look at how much people hate others who differ from them in small ways. But Cro-Magnons inhabited Europe with the Neanderthals for 10,000 years or so without wiping them out, and today both the Cro-Mags and Neanderthals are considered to probably just be homo sapiens. The disappearance is a mystery, but it would follow Ardrey's theories on conflict which don't exclude some interbreeding. As human populations grew and explored new areas, they wouldn't be able to avoid one another and be content to evict intruders. It takes 3-7 miles of hunting range to support one person, claims Ardrey. The possibility of ethnic cleansing was opened up given the same weapons we used to hunt and cut open meat. Individual transgressions would turn into collective ones if a stray male was ganged up on or a female stolen from the camp. Small separate bands could practice avoidance and satisfy the territorial imperative, but no longer. 

Homo sapiens has prospered since the end of the ice age. I myself wondered why if humans in modern form were around for hundreds of thousands of years, why do the earliest civilizations only go back 10,000 years? Its because an interglacial period began 12,000 years ago. By the end of the ice age fire was discovered, wolves domesticated, some men permanently left Africa, and other hominids were gone. Warmer temperatures are better for global human flourishing, opening up new land for agriculture; see the viking colony of Greenland during the medieval warming period. The industrial revolution occurred soon after the end of the "little ice age" around the 19th century and temperatures have risen since. Ardrey thinks humans are doomed, or at least will have their standard of living dramatically reduced, in the long run because of the eventual return of another ice age thousands of years from now. Ardrey today reads like a climate skeptic; he didn't buy into global warming apparently, but then again not so many did back in the 1970s when some mainstream publications warmed of global cooling. Of course there are many climate skeptics/deniers today, the worst who deny any warming trend and the more cogent who attribute it to solar cycles. This dates the book more than anything else, along with a very brief discussion of the then new inclusive fitness view of evolution, which is that organisms evolve to promote their own genes and not that of the group. Ardrey speculates whether his hunter hypothesis follows the some of the logic of group selection, though I don't think it has to given that the argument is that while individuals can behave altruistically, the species' continuation is due to selfish imperatives. Such imperatives can be largely unconscious to the individual, and made to seem virtuous.

I thought The Hunting Hypothesis was quite good. The book is relatively short and very general, but full of informative speculations which go well with his other books. Robert Ardrey's influence is pretty widespread, which can unfortunately dull the impact of his ideas today. That humans came from Africa, weren't peaceful vegans/scavengers, and evolutionary history still has an effect on us aren't as heterodox positions as they once were. The Neo-Darwinian paradigm was developing when he was writing his series, and the popularity of his works gave a ready audience for sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Director Stanley Kubrick's 1968 movie with Arthur C Clark 2001: A Space Odyssey is influenced by Ardrey, most obviously the opening scene when the ape proto-men pick up bones as weapons, something actually mentioned in African Genesis. The jump cut of the bone thrown up into the air to a space probe acknowledges that this change from primate behavior exhibits itself even in the space age. Another director of the same time period Sam Peckingpah read Ardrey; his controversial 1971 film Straw Dogs definitely exhibits the territorial imperative. In general his thesis of human evolution from apes as being due to hunting of meat is widely accepted today, even by honest vegans who like the wisest of us recognize the incongruity between reality and human's desires. Robert Ardrey was a professional playwright before writing his series of books, and here he gave a popular audience his evolutionary tragedy of man.

There is one conclusion derived from the hunting hypothesis that is still debated and relevant today, which is that the switch to a hunting lifestyle for males meant a change to a more pair bond or monogamous living situation for hunter-gatherers, a position taken in The Naked Ape 1967 by Desmond Morris. The recent book Sex at Dawn 2010 uses the evolutionary psychology position to argue that humans were originally promiscuous free lovers, like the bonobo chimps which are as related to us as are regular chimps. Bonobo chimps have egalitarianism between male and females who hunt together and sex is used as an aphrodisiac. Bonobos have face to face sex, something shared with humans and not chimps. So rather than humans being naturally polygamous or monogamous, we had sexual freedom, equality, and because we didn't care about paternity uncertainty or mate guarding, peace. This conclusion is controversial and probably not all true, but not without merit, but it demonstrates the continuing relevance of the hunting hypothesis and reconstruction of our evolutionary past which even the political left is starting to see matters for society today which is a testament to Ardrey's work.

God Told Me to Skin You Alive

God left us to die here
With no proof of his existence
We're subjects trapped in a world of objects
With no knowledge of how we got here

All we can figure out about ourselves: On a planet surrounding a dying star, relatively hairless bipedal former apes who perceive three dimensions of space and one of time, largely unaware of the causes of things.

"Poem" by me, Nicholas Anderson. Above collage by Winston Smith, used as cover art of Green Day's 1995 album Insomniac. 

The Typewriter is Holy: Retrospective on the Beat Generation

This really is the uncensored and complete story. The book is full of interesting stories and little moments which give a very personal understanding of the members of the "beat generation." One story that in particular caught my interest is the account of Lucien Carr biting off glass from his beer bottle; bleeding badly he challenges the others to do the same, and Burroughs enters the room with a try of razor blades and light bulbs as "hor d'ouevres." 

The book's theme is that the beat movement should be seen as an extensive social group with Allen Ginsberg at the center bringing and keeping everybody together. Whether this is totally accurate (this is the first history of the movement I've read) isn't really important. The thesis gives a nice structure to the work and is credible enough. What defines the Beat Generation is a general attitude of life; adults coming of age in the World War Two and post-war years feeling a lack of authenticity and spirituality in American society, who welcomed and experimented with alternative and low life ways of living as personal inspiration. The beats were as intellectual as they were sensual, an aspect overlooked by contemporaries be they reactionaries or hippie baby boomers. 

As for the name the beat generation, it was coined by Jack Kerouac who first heard it from small time thief Herbert Huncke describing the beaten down feeling of the post war conformist culture as well as the spontaneous feeling of jazz music which inspired their work. John Clellon Holmes, whose 1953 book Go is the first beat novel, got to describe the generation to readers in the New York Times and brought the term to public consciousness. And as for the name of this book, it's from a footnote in Howl: "The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!"

The beginning of the beat generation was a chance encounter between college students Allen Ginsberg, a New Jersey native, and Jack Kerouac, from Lowell Massachusetts, at Columbia university during World War II when Allen heard music coming out of Jack's room at the residence halls and decided to visit him. Ginsberg and Kerouac, who was there on a football scholarship, got to know another classmate Lucien Carr and through him David Kammerer, an older homosexual admirer, and through Kammerer William Burroughs, heir to inventor of an adding machine, became part of the group. Burroughs, Carr, and Kammerer's all previously lived in St. Louis Missouri; Kammerer followed Carr to New York and so did Burroughs. Through yet another Columbia student, Hal Chase, Ginsberg and Kerouac got to know Neal Cassady with whom they would make their famous cross country travels. By hanging out with these individuals, the inhibited Allen and Jack got inspiration for their work as well as the ability to transgress social boundaries. This is when the lore of the generation begins, with a story of murder figuring in at the beginning. Kammerer's sexual advances on Carr who was straight weren't welcome and when David tried to follow Lucien on a trip overseas, Lucien stabbed David and threw his body into the water. Kerouac and Burroughs would collaborate on a book about the event, And The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Pots which was published only recently, named after a radio report they heard about a zoo fire. Carr got off pretty easily as back then murdering a homosexual wasn't much of an offense, so he literally got away with murder. 

Allen and Burroughs got involved with criminals and criminality through Herbert Huncke, the king of 42nd st, which furthers the story. Herbert was living with Allen and started stashing stolen items there. In 1949 Ginsberg was caught in a police chase in a car with stolen goods and escaped after the car crashed, but was incriminated by the writings left behind. He escaped hard time by pleading insanity and become institutionalized. While institutionalized Allen met Carl Solomon who introduced surrealism to him. Solomon himself was institutionalized for his erratic behavior which was at least partly aesthetic, like throwing potato salad at a lecturer on Dadaism. Solomon actually demanded a lobotomy be performed on him. Allen was so influenced by Carl that he dedicated his famous poem Howl to the man. 

Burroughs sold morphine syringes to Herbert, who thought Bill was FBI due to his attire, an account retold in Burroughs' first novel Junkie. Bill would move to Texas with his common law wife Joan Robinson to try his hand at farming hemp, and then sell it as marijuana. 

While staying in Mexico in the early fifties Burroughs killed his wife Joan. While drinking Joan put a glass on top of her head and dared Bill to shoot it off, like the legend of William Tell. Burroughs was usually a good shot, but he missed and killed Joan. Burroughs left Mexico, was tried in absentia, and for nearly two decades didn't live in the US for any protracted period of time; not coming back permanently until 1974. By then the US changed and was becoming more open to alternative lifestyles, but I suspect it really was Joan's death. He did say that Joan's death made him become a writer. Much of Naked Lunch is inspired by his travels in South America and his time in Tangiers.

The rest of the beat story is mostly geographical. Living and typewriting in Mexico City, Kerouac making his famous travels with Neal Cassady to the west coast, meeting European intellectuals like Duchamp and Celine in Paris at the "beat hotel", Burroughs spending two decades living outside the United States in Europe and Tangier Morocco, and very significantly setting up a west coast cultural movement in San Francisco, making ties to the burgeoning counter culture. Ginsberg moved to San Francisco after failing to rekindle a romance with Cassady in California, his wife didn't approve of it. It was there that Allen gave an important public reading of Howl at the Six Gallery 1955 which was met with great enthusiasm. 

Notoriety of their writing built up slowly over the 1950s. In San Francisco the city lights bookstore run by Lawrence Ferlinghetti published their work in pocket editions and contact was made between the west coast counterculture there with the beats who originated in New York City, along with the so-called subterraneans of Greenwich Village, where a folk music movement would latter blossom. Kerouac's On the Road got a positive review in the New York Times when it finally came out and he was dubbed the voice of a generation. The two high profile censorship court cases of Howl and Naked Lunch also boosted their public profile. It was in San Francisco and the city light bookstore that Ginsberg poem ran into legal trouble, peddling profanity. The judge sided with Ginsberg and the ACLU and accepted the artistic merits of the work. The case also led to an end of censorship of other controversial works Tropic of Cancer and Lady Chatterley's Lover. Naked Lunch was banned in Boston in 1962 which was reversed by the state Supreme Court in 1966. After this decision outright censorship, like the destruction of Wilhelm Reich's books, would become a thing of the past. 

Most people who know of the beats know only of the big three: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S Burroughs and their well known respective works Howl, On the Road, and Naked Lunch. But there were many others important to the movement and who influenced or appeared in their work. Most prominently Neal Cassady who appears as Dean Moriarty in On the Road, and who inspired the spontaneous free writing style used in the book, in a letter sent to Jack describing his sexual conquests. Other important figures besides those I've mentioned were Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the few African Americans Leroi Jones, Diana Di Prima, Ginsberg's lifetime partner later in life Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snider etc. The largely white and male status of the generation is discussed by Morgan in a critical though contextual light. The generation was throughly progressive in its acceptance and practice for many of homosexuality.  Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kammerer were homosexual and Cassady slept with men from time to time. Their writings are the first and most honest portrayals of homosexuality in American literature, and so the pc crowd can get over some of their sins. 

It is still useful to view the history of the beat generation through the three personalities of Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs. Ginsberg was the communicator and movement builder of the group, making important relationships with the likes of Bob Dylan. Ginsberg came up in the age not only of repression of homosexuality, but active efforts to reform non hetero behavior through the medical establishment. He actually convinced himself that his homosexuality was a sign of mental insanity, which had taken over his mother. Ginsberg went through psychotherapy which actually convinced him to date women and be straight. Incidentally his mother went through psychiatric surgery, which Ginsberg agreed to with great regret, which turned her into a vegetable. Ginsberg of the three was shy and inhibited, as was Jack, but also it seems the most congenial and ecumenical. His curiosity, desire to experiment, and just to be with people like himself helped to link the people in the book together. Also as mentioned once in the book Allen sort of took on the persona of his Jewish mother, protective and understanding. 

Jack Kerouac is a tragic case. Shy and inhibited like Ginsberg, he was also fairly conservative. Though the heterosexual of the trio, he was married thrice and avoided child payments for the rest of his life, denying paternity. Of the three he is the intellectual spokesman of the generation, who articulated its principles and aimed the most to be a traditional writer. He had a knack of coming up with titles and phrases, "he took life in the raw" is how he describes Dean Moriarty in On the Road. Kerouac really just wanted to be a respected American writer like Thomas Wolfe. Though now recognized as one of the great American novelists by many, in his lifetime he and his writings were the subject of criticism and ridicule. He didn't like the counterculture and distanced himself from the outside world. An important reason for this was his strong attachment to his mother Gabrielle; if Jack never let go of the apron strings he would never get to be his own man. As she aged Jack spent more time and moved in with her, probably something to do with his French Canadian heritage. What did Jack in was his drinking problem, which led to his death and unlikable public persona. He made a serious attempt to kick his habit, recounted in one of his last books Big Sur in the Sierras, but wasn't successful. Kerouac died before reaching 50, in 1969, to be outlived by Ginsberg and Burroughs who lived to the 1990s. Recently, as in twenty first century, there has been "new" material from and about Kerouac such as the 2007 publication of the original taped together scroll manuscript of On the Road, the 2008 publication of the Burroughs collaboration And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Pots mentioned earlier, as well as the 2012 movie adaptation of On the Road directed by Walter Salles, which is okay (don't watch before reading the book). So he lives on.

Burroughs is portrayed as aloof and intellectually eccentric, despite having a deadpan demeanor and dressing in a g-man suit. The oldest of the group he was also the most revolutionary artistically. He along with Brion Gysin pioneered the cut up method: take a page and cut it down the middle and place the halves with halves of other pages to make something completely. This method can open up new ways of reading texts and he claimed see into the future. Much of Burroughs' work enters the realms of fantasy, science fiction, and even horror. There is a dark humor to his writing and along with the anti realism would go on to influence postmodern literature. Burroughs is the one who's influence extends beyond the 1960s to the punk/alternative subcultures, being an inspiration to Ian Curtis of Joy Division and even collaborating with Kurt Cobain before Nirvana went big. Bill even appears in the music video Just One Fix by industrial band Ministry. Director David Cronenberg was heavily influenced by Burroughs with his postmodern horror vision, and even directed a film adaptation of Naked Lunch in 1991 which is also biographical. Burroughs really outlived the beat generation and the 60s counterculture which he didn't like and anticipated the new cultural and youth movements of the late 20th century. 

If Ginsberg is the Jewish mother, Kerouac is the wayward son and Burroughs is the perverted uncle. In terms of their political views Ginsberg was the liberal activist most sympathetic to socialism, Kerouac was conservative, and Burroughs a libertarian maybe leaning to the right. 

Of great interest is the connection between the beats and the 60s counterculture. Cassady was the driver of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' acid trip, recounted in the book The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test. Huncke and Burroughs participated in the 1948 Dr. Alfred Kinsey sexual study of the American male which presaged the sexual revolution. Allen partook along with Kesey in the mk-ultra program, the CIA program which tested LSD. Timothy Leary also associated with the beats but his drug advocacy was not as intellectual as theirs was. Burroughs traveled South America looking for powerful hallucinogenic drugs to inspire his writing. 

The beats were the beginning of the American counter culture all the way back in the 1940s, chiefly in Greenwich Village and San Francisco where later movements grew out of. Kerouac himself claimed that the actual movement ended by the early 50s, whereas in the popular mind beatniks went all the way up to the 1960s, reading poetry to jazz music and wearing all black turtlenecks and sun glasses, playing bongos and smoking cigarettes. When you consider the generation as a social group around Allen Ginsberg, then the generation extends from the 1940s to the 1970s, as this book recounts. 

The beats hold a special place in history. They exist as an example unto only themselves and those who care to listen. They were against the controlling conformist world they came into and were misunderstood by the later counterculture which didn't care for the intellectual and reflective side. I think they exemplified what Americans should be, proud individualists who dare to explore new things, no matter how seemingly strange or dangerous. Their goal was to expand human consciousness into both the lewd and obscene as well as the intellectual and spiritual. The entire capability of human experience, which most movements and cultures throughout history seek to limit to fulfill their agenda. It reminds me of what John Stuart Mill said in response to the simple utilitarian criteria of all pleasures being equal: "it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied." While typing away manuscripts their raucous exploits could be given the careful treatment of conscious reflection to cull something greater than the sum of disparate events, and communicate this to willing readers. If you want to understand the members of the beat generation, you have to read and think as well as "be" and "feel". I don't expect you to understand. 

I got interested in the beats back in High School. My interest was consummated when I first read On the Road the summer of my senior year. Around the same time I was fascinated with the book and movie Into the Wild which is about Christopher McCandless' own cross country journey and rejection of the life expected of him. Towards the end of high school I came across a copy of Naked Lunch in a name-your-price bookstore downtown which sold old playboys with a nobody under 18 label. I later befriended a neighbor who I didn't know existed not far from my street who had a little collection of beatnik literature, which is where I read Howl while house sitting. My interest in Kurt Cobain and the music along with the reading Jon Savage's history of the Sex Pistols England's Dreaming in middle school was what convinced me that the ethos of the American counter culture was how I should model my own life. Nothing has pleased me like making connections between the individuals who have have influenced and interested me. Jim Morrison also read On the Road at a formative age. It's the people who expressed themselves in the way they conducted their lives which becomes handed down to posterity who make life something to be treasured. For me it begins historically with beats, like when John Lennon said that before Elvis there was nothing.