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The paradox of language

Anyone that has even a moderate amount of intelligence, and without physical impediment or unusual mental issues can communicate verbally.  And yet we don't teach verbal communications explicitly, we just pick it up as we grow. Once we're old enough we're taught to speak properly, and to read and write.  Reading and writing are simply encoding of our natural verbal ability and so are derivative, teaching writing is basically learning to write the words you would speak, and reading is learning to absorb communication as if it were spoken.  What we are really doing is communicating with spoken words, and we have been doing this without the benefit of formal education for tens of thousands of years.


When I think about how we teach language, something that comes naturally to most people, there seems to be some amount of irony.  We try to come up with a definition of language to teach, but we're trying to teach something we don't fully understand, and yet do naturally. Anyone that believes that we actually understand natural language has never tried to write a computer program that can read a book and provide a summary.


Even the words that we use often defy definition.  Words like good and bad, beauty and virtue have been argued about for thousands of years, and yet we use them without thinking about them and are able to communicate relatively well with them.


This natural ability to use something as complex as language without formal teaching indicates to me that language as we know it is a mirror into our thoughts, and the constructs of our minds.  Our brains are specifically molded to communicate via language, and this ability to communicate via language provides an evolutionary advantage.  One can see the slow one-up-manship between our language and our thinking in an upward spiral of complexity.


In many ways, language is like music.  Many people can learn to play music without formal learning.  They just 'pick it up from dad' as the saying goes.  And many great musicians don't know one iota of music theory.  Yet that hasn't prevented us from developing a very formal theory of music.  Likewise we have very formal rules of language, and people are often judged by how well they know those rules.  A good musician knows that the rules of music theory don't dictate how you should write music, but is an analysis of how good music was written in the past, and what makes it good.  I would say a good speaker should not be afraid to break the rules, or make up their own rules.  A good story is probably like a good piece of music, moving away from what everyone else is doing, and coming up with something original, rules be damned.  When telling a story the point is to get the point across.  A good story, like good music, can be composed by the uneducated as well as the educated, and I might even go as far as to say that education on subjects like music or language theory could make one less capable of original and compelling creations if taken too seriously.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't study language, or music.  But we should be cognizant that both are a historical study, a study of what we have done in the past.  How we have used language up to now.  How we use language in the future is entirely up to us, and perhaps there's still a few notches up in the complexity level that we can gain, if we can just find the thoughts and words to express them.  True inventors/creators treat 'rules' with a grain of salt, as they often get in the way rather than lead the way.

Dreams Vs. Reality

What is the difference between a dream and a memory?  The obvious difference is that a true memory is based on sensory input from some tangible reality, so memories can be shared between two people, and the memories tend to follow the rules of the tangible reality, in as much as the sensory input and processing thereof is true and accurate.  Dreams on the other hand, are not shared between people, and do not have to follow any rules, and are often of a fantastic nature.
But dreams are vivid narrative that we see in our mind's eye, and they can form permanent memories, especially if we contemplate them soon after waking up.  We are aware that they are false memories, but probably only because we remembered them as we woke from a sleep state, or simply because of their often fantastic nature.
Since dreams are a vivid narrative akin to the wakeful narrative that is constantly playing in our mind's eye, I would hypothesis that our wakeful narrative is more like a dream that is based on reality.  That is to say what we see in our minds eye has gone through the same intermediate processing as a dream, only based on true sensory data.
So if we are seeing reality, or a dream, or a vivid memory that we conjure up, we are actually seeing from some coalescing  layer that can take it's input from multiple sources and produce the symbolic information that our mind's eye turns into an illusion.  As we grow from infancy, we learn to associate that illusion with reality.
This would certainly explain many of the optical illusions that we have come up with over the years.  By the time our mind's eye 'sees' something it is already a memory processed down to symbolic information.  Our expectations based on previous memories fills in the details.  Which would explain why dreams tend to follow reality to a large extent, because most of narrative of a dream is filled in with our own expectations.
This would also explain the results of an experiment that I read about recently where by tracking brain activity, it was shown that decisions might be made before we are conscious of them.  How much of what we do is done without the benefit of our consciousness?  Certainly I find myself making coffee in the morning without being conscious of it, my conscious mind being busy planning my day, and all of a sudden having that cup of coffee in front of me with only a vague recollection of making it. And finally it would explain why seeing something with unexpected elements is often hard to recall in detail.
This goes towards an explanation of consciousness, but still leaves open the question about the "mind's eye" which seems at once removed from reality by several layers, but immediate and undeniable.  Our consciousness instructs our mind's eye to get it's input from a memory, a speculation of some future event, our current sensory inputs.  Or in the case of a dream, from some random impluse that melds memory, speculation, and occasionally from our current sensory input (as when we dream of something that is actually happening).

Thoughts on thinking

In humans thoughts are intricately linked to consciousness.  Thoughts are a narration that occurs within ourselves (that is, observable by no one else).  So the question I have is: do thoughts give rise to consciousness, or does consciousness give rise to thoughts.

I think that thoughts are a mechanical process, we speak to ourselves in what ever language is convenient, and remember (or write down) the pertinent content.  Observation, speech, and memory are probably mechanical processes. It is a sort of Socratic method of learning that takes place entirely inside our heads.  We propose a solution to a problem (an idea) and then ask questions about it trying to prove it wrong.  We become two members of a debate team at once, taking turns scrutinizing and defending an idea.

The better we are able to abstract a problem, the more convenient it becomes to discuss it with ourselves.  If we are able to generalize a set of problems into a single meta-problem, we only need to go through the dialog once, and can then try to apply a solution to specific instances.  The ability to generalize and then specialize a problem are fundamental abilities of our brain, which evolution has given us to make predictions in unfamiliar circumstance based on similarities to remembered (known) circumstances.  This is based on memory recall that is not exact, but is induced by similarities.

There is a tuning process here that evolution has probably had it's hand in for hundreds of thousands of years.  How much memory is recalled based on what level of similarities.  Within the modern human there is a variance from person to person, and that is one aspect that we measure as intelligence, or creativity.  The person that is able to make a wide range of memory recalls based on a particular sensory input (or psuedo-sensory input, such as conjuring an image of a past event or future possible event), can establish a generalization that a person with a narrower range would not be able to.  This, of course, only works up to a limit, with too wide a range giving irrelevant recall filled with non-sequiturs that must be weeded out and could possibly lead to personality disorders.

Once a generalization has been worked out, specializing is a simple process of applying the generalization and seeing if the outcome matches the expectation that the generalization predicts. Language is an important part of this equation, since if thinking is a dialog with ourselves, we need a medium of exchange of not only the description of a problem, but the set of possible solutions to mull over.  So language and thinking go hand-in-hand, and are boot-strapped and build up over time.  More sophisticated thinking requires more sophisticated language, so over time we add to our repertoire of thoughts and words in a upward spiral.

Language my have evolved as a means to communicate with our fellow humans about present circumstance, but soon became a convenient medium of teaching and passing along a store of knowledge from generation to generation, and being able to convey possible outcomes to avert tragedy or increase desirable outcomes.  So story-telling is built into our psyche as much as our inferential abilities.  We love stories and share them at all opportunities with each other.  Evolution provides an obvious mechanism for the refinement of these processes, since our ability to pass along knowledge and predict future events has a direct impact on our survival.  Written language amplifies this ability tremendously as it broadens the scope of our audience far beyond what is physically possible for a person in a single lifetime.  But it also solidifies knowledge so that as circumstances change, we my be tempted to misinterpret written knowledge, while oral knowledge has the ability to evolve on it's own.  Something to consider when reading the writings of antiquity, even people that we consider geniuses think in the terms of their times, and few truths are absolute across time and space.

So the story of the boy who cried wolf, isn't about some specific boy and what he actually did.  His existence or non-existence does not diminish what we learn from the story.  The story is about us and how we should live our lives.  For simpler people, that moral of the story is added at the end to emphasis the fact that this is a generalization that we should apply in many different circumstances. It adds a pseudo-memory that we can recall in similar circumstances. We remember the generalization, and then based on the wideness of our ability to recall the generalization based on specific circumstance, the better we are able to apply this general knowledge to actual events.

So if we can tell stories to others, it seems obvious that we should be able to tell them to ourselves.  This becomes a convenient way of mulling over problems and generating a set of solutions quickly on our own.  Once we have a set of solutions, we can use our inferential abilities along with thought-experiments to narrow down the possible correct or optimal, or even sub-optimal but possible solutions to actually try.  This can greatly reduce the effort of finding solutions to problems, by working out a smaller subset of the solutions in our mind, and only implementing the ones that pass the critical thinking stage.  People that are more intelligent are more efficient at reducing the number of solutions that actually need a physical experiment to confirm it's correctness and compare it to other solutions.

So our intelligence is built up of several intrinsic brain activities. 1)  The ability to remember past events. 2) The ability to recall those events based on present circumstances or perceived future circumstances.  3) The ability to weed out irrelevant memories through critical thinking.  This last one is perhaps the most important to higher intelligence, we weed out irrelevant memories by telling our ourselves 'what if' stories to test for correctness/applicability.  The faster and better we are able to weed out the irrelevant memories, the faster we are able to come up with a smaller set of possible solutions to try.

The implication of this hypothesis of thinking is that we have no deductive power at all, only inductive abilities.  Our ability to deduce is simply a 'try all reasonable possibilities' and see which ones work approach.  I believe this is confirmed in our history of hundreds of thousands of years of the existence of modern man, with only the last small fraction of it making any progress at all in mastering our environment.  Intelligence is simply a measure of how much we can do in our minds before actually verifying/trying them in the real world.  Our sophisticated language, and specialized analytical  language such as math and first order logic, help speed up the process, but are not the process themselves.  These are processes that build themselves around our core inferential abilities, and provide a feedback loop by which we can take a generalization and refine it to the degree necessary to be useful in our lives. Our ability to communicate via our sophisticated languages allow more than one mind to be involved in this refining process, thereby speeding it up even further, and producing the accelerated buildup of knowledge we have seen over the last few millennia.


The problem with innovation is that all of the easy solutions have already been solved.  That only leaves difficult solutions for us to work through.  There are two ways of finding solutions to difficult problems: going in through the side door, and simply formalizing intuition.  The first solution, we should assume that everyone has tried going the the front door to an unsolved problem, and has failed.  If there is a solution, we probably need to go through the side door, which can be tricky, because our natural path of thinking always leads us to the front door.  Sometimes it is necessary to abandon everything we know about a problem before we can see clearly the secondary and correct path.  This Rene Descartes advocated by abandoning everything that could be doubted (and for the truly skeptical EVERYTHING can be doubted) and build up from there.  The second path is to take a problem that is 'intuitive', that is everyone understands the solution but no one is able to communicated it due to a lack of vocabulary.  We can see this in the solution to Zeno's paradoxes which I believe were intuitively understood at the time (no one took as true Zeno's assertions), but it took 2000 years of mulling over this problem where the model didn't reflect reality, and all it took was for Newton and Liebniz to formulate a vocabulary that could be communicated exactly and built upon.


This all brings us back to the relationship between thinking and consciousness.  While we are thinking these thoughts, 'someone' is listening.  Who is this second person in our dialog with ourselves?  What is it that gives us this lucid observation of present reality?  Animals with no obvious characteristics of consciousnesses have the power to observe, induce and react. Could consciousness be the interplay between the side of us that observes and the side of us the thinks?  As we observe we give a constant narration of what is going on, and what could happen.  The medium of that conversation is language, so language seems tied up in the whole mess. Certainly as children have imaginary friends, we can have imaginary thought partners that we consider 'the real us' and distinct from our physical bodies.  But then who is this 'we' that imagines our thought partners, and so the circle continues.

Perhaps consciousness is a part of the human psyche that disassociates our internal narrator from our physical selves, and considers themselves to be a separate entity.  We certainly have the ability to go into a dis-associative state when faced with a traumatic experience.  Perhaps consciousness is a partially dis-associated state that is normal during waking hours.  As we lose consciousnesses every night when we sleep this dis-associated state separates itself even further from our observatory selves as we dream in thoughts that have little to do with our surroundings.  And then we lose consciousness completely.  To me this is the greatest argument that consciousness is a mechanical process that can be turned on and off.  Coming into and out of sleep tear down and build up this mechanical process and begin it again each day.

An article I read in a recent Scientific American describes an experiment where the conclusion was that we make split-second decisions first and then become conscious of them. And yet for the people in the experiment, it seemed a conscious decision.  Obviously, for decisions that are not split-second our consciousness plays a primary role, but it begs the question, how many of our decisions are made without the benefit of our consciousness, and our consciousness is only brought into play to rationalize the decision by creating a story.  This becomes even more like the scenario that our consciousness is a person watching a movie of our observations (and our own un-consciously motivated actions) and then creating a story by which we can store in our memories.

The problem of consciousness seems a forever circular one, as it is our own consciousness that is considering our consciousness.  Again Rene Descartes' first principle 'I think therefore I am' is inherently circular as it pre-supposes the 'I' in the first part to draw the conclusion of the existence of 'I' in the second part. Upon this wobbly foundation he proceed to build an entire philosophy which might fall like a house of cards if the pre-supposition at the base is removed from the structure.  Descartes' argument is that 'I' becomes self-evident through thought (if thought is taking place, something must be thinking), but that assumes that thought is not a mechanical processes, in which case 'I' simply becomes part the body we live in. I would separate consciousness from thought, so I might be tempted to say 'I am conscious therefore I am'  But then I must define consciousness or my first principle becomes as wobbly as Descartes'  And I can't define consciousness aside from the conjecture that I presented above.

As with any circular problem, we can produce any solution we want, interject it into the circle and it becomes a reasonable self fulfilling conclusion.  And this is played out in our stories of consciousness which are countless and run from absurd to mystical, to pragmatic.  So, unfortunately, until I can somehow rise above my own consciousness, and provide an outsiders view, my only advise it to pick a solution that best suits your belief set and stick with it.  It probably doesn't matter anyway which belief we choose about consciousness, it is merely a curiosity for the pathologically inquisitive, similar to mathematicians fascination with prime numbers. I would actually follow Voltaire's advice that tending your garden is a more productive activity.

Happy gardening everyone!

Classification

So much of object oriented programming revolves around classification.  And yet classification is subjective.  Classification is simply an artifice that helps us to organize a dis-organized world.  If gives us a way to think about things in a general way.
There are many properties that we can infer from an item in a classification hierarchy.  But such inference can also get in the way of understanding an item.  It is just another form of generalization. Anyone that has had injury done to them because they were miss-classified, understands the problems with generalization.
But it is an expedient without which the world is a chaotic mess.
Part of what we consider 'reason' is our innate ability to classify, to generalize a set of classes, and then to be able to make predictions about new classes that appear to belong to a set.  We don't see the particulars of this process, we just accept it as part of our thinking ability.
But this expedient that gives us thought fails when we try to apply it in any sort of absolute sense, especially when modeling reality.  It works well, however when we apply it to artifices that we've built ourselves.  So we can build a system that fits into a classification scheme, but that system is artificial.  Reality resists classification.
Another problem with classification is that we tend to classify based on properties, especially static properties.  So we classify animals based on whether they have feathers or fur.  We might be better served by classification based on behavior, but anything that is worth understanding has complex behavior.  Behavior is based on state, which is an expression of properties.  So classification falls back to distinguishing properties, and inferring behavior from that.  We may wish to skip the observation of properties, and simply consider behavior instead, since behavior the the expression of change that we wish to predict in the first place.
In the Java programming world, we classify behavior with interfaces, which ignore properties and state, in favor of defining the verbs that an object is capable of.  I see a slow transition in the object-oriented programming world away from classification based on properties, to classification based on behaviors.  This allows us to define a behavior without being specific about the properties and state that manifest it.  It sometimes means that we have to define the specifics of a behavior more than once, but that can be mitigated by creating a new artifice that defines these specifics for the majority cases, without imposing them on the exceptional cases.
What a mess, there must be a better way of dealing with these computing/communication devices, but I fear that our own thinking processes are getting in the way.  We force our computers to see the world in this way because we see the world in this way.  Philosophy has taken over thinking about computers, but maybe we should get back to looking simply at mechanics without using the terms that we have come up with to define our own imperfect thinking.

Believing in belief

Belief is a funny thing.  We need to believe in something, it is built into our nature.  Religious people formalize their beliefs with written histories that revolve around God, and ritualistic behaviors meant to appease him/her. Scientific people believe in un-provable theories that conform to observation.  Rational people believe in their observations, which is a leap of faith in-an-of itself.  Mathematicians believe in their abstract constructions that occasionally have a correlation to reality.

We are trapped in this reality of ours, and belief gives us something to think about beyond what we can sense.   I will refer to that as a 'meta-reality' without making any claim about it's existence, but as a concept that fits into our fundamental belief that something exists beyond our own reality. But a belief is simply that: 'a belief'.  There is nothing to prove it, nothing to give us any assumption that it is true.  So how do we consider ourselves rational creatures, when so much of our view of the world is a belief.  What makes a belief good?  For me, a belief is good if it fulfills a need and it doesn't cause harm.

I equate belief to food.  Sort of nourishment for the soul if my reader might forgive me a bit if poetic frivolity.  True you wont die in a few weeks if you don't have any beliefs, but you will probably not thrive and you will be plagued with a vague hunger that will probably manifest itself as an unease that is hard to define.  Marx is paraphrased as saying 'Religion is the opium of the masses'.  Perhaps he was being a little hard on people who hunger to believe in something.  Perhaps the quote was aimed more at the established religions, and I will agree with him there.  Many organized religions peddle their specific beliefs like drug dealers, as a way to obtain power without earning it.

Even atheists who are often considered the ultimate non-believers, believe that God does not exist, which is a statement about meta-reality, or even a denial of any sort of meta-reality.  Either way it is a belief about the nature of the un-observable.  I suspect that many atheists are in fact deists, but simply despise established religions as a con-game where we sell snake-oil that feeds our hunger for a belief in something.  For me personally, the idea that this is no meta-reality is akin to the idea that the sun revolves around us, and we are the center of the universe.  So I must argue for a meta-reality without any proof or observable phenomenon, simply based on an extrapolation of the past mistakes of our vanity.  I should, at this point define reality as that which is observable, and meta-reality as an extension of that which is not observable.  We might even define a new term which I will lightheartedly call the googlety which is the combination of reality, the hypothetical meta-reality, and meta-realities of meta-reality.  This does sort of smack of the 'Turtles all the way down' expression, but an infinite expansion of meta-realities has a bit more of an air of seriousness about it.

So what makes a belief good?  I'm going to stretch my food analogy a bit more, and say a belief is good if it satisfies a need, and it does no harm.  So if your belief is all dessert, it may make you feel better in the moment, but could cause problems that build up over time.  If your belief is poisonous, it may even hasten your demise. I like to believe in an afterlife simply because it fills a need, and does me no harm.  I like to believe in a judgement by a higher power, simply because it allows me to tolerate my helplessness to resolve many injustices, and it allows me to add extra motivation to ethical behavior.  I like to believe that my body is a shell for my spirit as a hermit crab moves into a shell, and perhaps moves from shell to shell as it grows.  Again, my rational for these beliefs is 'why not?'.  I don't worry excessively about being wrong about these things, as I fully admit that I may well be and don't care.

It's the people that have trouble admitting that they may be wrong that I have to watch out for.  Not only will they judge me as absolutely wrong, they will condemn me to some terrible after-life that is segregated by our ability to guess what is unobservable. Like a cosmic game of Let's make a deal, we have to decide between curtain number one, curtain number two, or curtain number three. The worst of these people that are tolerance-impaired may dehumanize me and wish to hurry my deliverance to the after-life. At the very least they may knock on my door while I'm busy blogging in a futile attempt to save me, but instead simply waste my time and break my train of thought.

There still is one problem: believing in belief.  While beliefs are a natural aspect of our psyche, when you've pondered the world as much as I have, it's hard not to belittle your beliefs as simply whistling in the graveyard.  Perhaps as I grow older, and face my meta-reality, I will learn better to suspend my dis-belief.

Life in balance

So many of my past posts have talked about balance.  That reflects the apparent fact that there are no absolute answers.  If we want to live an ethical life, any decisions we make must balance our own needs with the needs of the group.  If we want a good government, we must balance societal influence with societal interference.  Even here on the internet we must balance keeping our lives private, and the desire to share who we are.

As a parent of adult children who still consider me a source of occasional advice, the most difficult questions I get are 'what should I do?'  I can go over pros and cons, I can try to put things in perspective, I might even admit to what I might do if I were in a similar situation, and why.  But life is a tightrope that we all must learn to walk.  In the end, the decisions we make are our own, and we are the one's that must live with the consequences, be they good or bad.

The good news is most of the decisions we make have little lasting impact on ourselves or others.  Even decisions that seem important when faced with them, can be seen through the lens of time as actually quite trivial.  The decisions that have a lasting impact are occasionally unforeseen and seem trivial when initially faced. So there is a certain amount of futility to worrying endlessly about most decisions, and when we make our list of pros and cons, we should add in a spoonful of whimsy.  Life is like swimming in a stream, we may swim one way or another, but the stream still carries us where ever it's going.

The concept of balance seems more important in eastern thought then western thought.  Western philosophies seem to want to provide absolute answers, and dictate behaviors.  Concepts such as good and evil are seen as black and white, and not a continuum.  Eastern philosophies see balance as key, with such concepts as yin and yang.  And perhaps this lack of absolute answers leads to a sense of fatalism.  In the west we look to our philosophies for answers rather than guidance. 

To lead a consistent life, and a purposeful life, each of us must come up with a personal philosophy. We can be guided by the great thinkers of our time or of the past, but ultimately we must synthesis the best of these thoughts into our personal guiding light.  We need to see the correctness in the thoughts of our gurus, but we must also be able to see when they over-reach their authority and ability to provide absolute answers.

The problem most people seem to have with this synthesis, is that there is a natural desire to be seen as correct.  So we pick our heroes, deify them, and then defend them to the death.  This is part of how we define us, how we belong to a group.  We see our way as the way, and deny others the opportunity to be even partially correct.  We choose sides and vilify the other side.

We define ourselves not just in the thinkers that we follow for guidance, but various role-models that we choose, be they athletes, musicians, or leaders.  We are all, at our core, fanatics and must resist the urge to be influenced too much by a single person, or a single group.  We need to recognize that other people and groups may be right on occasion.  In this way we can include many different view points when making a decision or judgement.

Having a personal philosophy, one that is well thought out, and not just a blind allegiance to some existing philosophy, is the best way to avoid the fallacies of fanaticism.  Give passing acknowledgement to those that agree with you, but listen closely to those with whom you disagree.  Thinking carefully about the arguments of those you disagree with will help you either hone your rational for why you are right, or see where perhaps you are wrong.

Unfortunately, that sort of critical thinking is like exercise, it is not something we are naturally inclined to do.  But just as exercise is important for a healthy body, critical thinking is important for a healthy mind.  So just as we must carve out an hour of our day for exercise, so too we should carve out an hour of introspection and meditation on who we are and how we live our lives.  That will help us to keep our lives in balance.

Thoughts on thinking

The minute we name something we begin to misunderstand it.  Reality is a continuum of things and motions that is infinite in size, precision, and interconnection.  In order to comprehend reality we need to tear it apart into discreet things and events.  We divide things up into containment units and give them names.  This helps us make sense of reality, while at the same time brings us further away from its true form.

This symbolic expedient can be seen when we are asked to draw something.  An untrained person, if asked to draw a face will draw an oval for a head, a couple ovals for eyes, a line for a mouth, etc.  An artist that is trained in depiction learns first how not to draw a face, but sees past the iconic features of the face they are depicting.  That is a difficult thing to do, as our thinking demands organizing reality into a hierarchy of discreet things.

Time too is a continuum that we must divide up into discreet units.  Time is the medium of change, and we measure one change by comparing it with other changes, usually ones that are cyclic events in nature.  So a day is the amount of change from one sunrise to the next.  If we are thinking machines, that is our thoughts are manifestations of changes in our brains, thoughts, too, are subject to time.  So we often thing of time as flowing, and yet in reality it is our thoughts that are flowing as the changes that bring about our thought are measured in comparison with other cyclic events.  We often speak in terms of the future and the past, and yet these are simply artifices that we use to describe change relative to our thoughts 'at the moment'.

Reality is essentially chaotic in nature, and yet we find pockets of organizations within this chaos.  The chaotic nature of reality means that it can never be comprehended in it's entirety. It is the pockets of organization that we can use to make predictions about change.  This chaos of reality is a measurement of the infinite inter-connected-ness of reality, the lack of boundaries of cause and effect.  We find places where the interconnected-ness becomes so sparse as to be negligible.  A discreet change and it's effects can be seen as a ripple in water, caused by a pebble being tossed into it, the change emanates out in all direction becoming smaller as it's circle of influence becomes wider, until the size of the ripple becomes smaller than the other influences that alter the surface of the water, and we consider them to 'disappear'.

So we understand things by misunderstanding them.  We build up ideal models of things and events that reflect reality to a certain degree of precision.  We tear up reality into chunks that are comprehend-able and assign them names.  But just like the artist that sees past the features of a face they are trying to depict, we can understand reality better by seeing past the names that we give things, and see how all things are one. We can see that events are simplifications of the interconnected-ness of reality, and time is an abstraction that we use to compare one event to another.  These names that we use, person, planet, minute, day; and the verbs that we use, to move, to strike, and even to think are artifices that we used to describe elements of a single indescribable thing: reality.  We can circumvent the problem of defining reality by being all-inclusive: all that ever was, is, and will be.  But that is it's definition, not it's description.  It is the 'granddaddy of all abstractions'.

Our ability to think serves one purpose:  to predict the future.  To understand change, and how it might affect us.  We have a built in desire to understand change in general, as the more we understand about change, the more we may be able to protect ourselves from it, or use it in our favor.  But because it is a general desire, and not necessarily one aimed at understanding of any set of events, we think about many abstract things that may or may not have an impact on our future.  This has give rise to thinking from a purely utilitarian process that evolution has given us to this grand ability that us humans distinguish ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom.  Right now I am thinking about the nature of reality, not because it may help me to survive, but because I cannot help but think about something.  The only time I am not thinking is when I am in an altered state of consciousnesses, such as deep meditation or deep sleep.  Even while I am in light sleep, I think about things in the form of dreams. When Rene Descartes uttered his famous phrase 'cogito ergo sum' it was not to indicate that thinking somehow brings us into existence, but that this continuous stream of thoughts is inextricably linked to what we call consciousness.

But again, we give something a name: 'consciousness', and then precede to stop thinking about it.  It simply becomes a word we use (or misuse) to communicate some partition of reality to others that may be commonly understood or mis-understood.  It is this set of nouns and verbs that allow us to think, and to communicate our thoughts.  Language and thinking leap-frog each other in an upward spiral of knowledge and the precision in which we understand reality.  But the more common a noun or verb is used, the less inclined we are to think about it's precise meaning.  Again, Rene Descartes describes throwing away all pre-conceived ideas and starting from scratch to build up a more perfect model of reality.  Unfortunately, he then uses this method to simply re-enforce his own pre-conceived ideas, so he had the process right, but was simply unable to execute it.  It is the nouns and verbs of language that allow us to build up a model of reality, but then interfere with our ability to refine it.

As a software engineer, I face this problem very often.  All useful software models something, be it a business process used by businesses, some alternate universe of a game, or a book or library with it's store of knowledge.  If I can identify some ill-conceived model or concept commonly used in a business application, it is an uphill struggle to re-define it, because there are so many people that need to be convinced that there is a better way.  Typically the only way to push forward a new concept it to demonstrate it, which could be so difficult to implement, or so subject to rhetorical argument, that it sits unused.

Expanding our knowledge I consider akin to molting.  We must throw away the things that restrict us before we can grow.  On a personal level, this is difficult for some people because it would imply that they are wrong about something.  For me, it is not as much of a problem, as I believe that all of our knowledge is an imperfect reflection of reality, so therefore I am always wrong to a certain extent, and can always refine what I know.  I often say that if I can't look back ten years ago and say to myself 'how stupid I was', then by definition, I have not grown.  On a societal level, I once read, but cannot attribute the source: 'Science progresses with every funeral'.  Even one of my greatest heroes of thought, Albert Einstien spent the last years of his life trying to refute quantum physics, unable to reconcile the injury it had done to his theory of relativity.  One can only imagine the malice that Issac Newton might have felt towards Einstien had they been contemporaries when Einstien spliced in his own bit of knowledge into Newton's 'laws'.  However, the work that Einstien did in trying to refute quantum mechanics, and coming up empty, makes for a good argument that there is some truth in quantum physics.

So at once we are lifted by our language and abstract ideas, and hindered by it's imprecision and our own stubborness.  Even if we try to use precise language such as first order logic, we can only prove abstractions, and fail to achieve perfection once we apply concrete nouns and verbs which themselves are by definition imprecise (since the things they attempt to describe are infinite in precision and interconnected-ness). Of course, most people don't resort to first order logic, and are plagued by the multitude of cognitive biases evolution (or a capricious God) has saddled our untrained thinking with.  We find that while we are the most complex creatures in terms of our behaviors, we are hopelessly ignorant when our ideas are juxtaposed with reality (hence the old cliche 'the more we know, the more we don't know').

Our understanding of reality will never be finalized, unless we delve into the realm of meta-physics and believe our awareness, consciousness, spirit, or whatever are somehow facets that transcend reality, and that given the right circumstances (perhaps through meditation, or perhaps in an after-life) we can see everything about our reality in all it's precision.  However this begs the child's question when told that God created everything: but what created God?  If our 'spirits' transcend reality, that implies some other reality that we must transcend to.  And then if you define reality as 'all that was, is, and will ever be', this higher level reality simply folds into the original definition.

Is it futile to think about reality?  Perhaps.  But I can't help it, it's ingrained in who I am, it's a biological process like the beating of my heart. I see the world around me and I want to know it's secrets.  This nagging voice within that tells me: 'perhaps with a little more thought it will all come to you' keeps me alive, and looking forward to each day to learn a little more, or unlearn some false concept.  Thinking isn't my purpose in life, making the world a better place is.  But perhaps I can think up of something that will make the world a better place, and I will have fulfilled my goal.

Cooperation vs Competition

In my last two blog posts I talked a lot about the effects of cooperation.  In general the more cooperation within a group of people the more effective they are at achieving goals.  Cooperation requires trust within your group, and a common purpose.  Today I will look at Individualism.

People are a social animal, so the tendency towards trust and cooperation are in our nature.  However there is a competing factor, self-interest that tends to look after one's own needs before cooperating in a group.  This conflict is in everyone, and is probably the core conflict in our nature.  The movie cliche with the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other offering differing advice exemplifies this conflict.

 As good as cooperation sounds on paper it has it's own set of problems.   The two biggest, mentioned above are trust within the group, and a common purpose.  Another issue with cooperation is distinguishing us vs them, where we include only a certain set of people to cooperate with.  We want a more inclusive group to cooperate, but the larger the group, the harder it is to have trust and common purpose.  Our experiments in the last century with collectivism proved to be tremendous failures, because they tried to impose trust, and trust is something that is built-up over time, and cannot be dictated.  Entire countries tried to impose cooperation without considering factors such as regional dis-trust, and the self-interest that is also in our nature.  One way to mitigate the problems with cooperation within a large group is to have a hierarchy of groups with each level cooperating within the level above it.  But I digress.

Individualism favors self-interest over cooperation. It tends to dis-trust large social entities such as governments, in favor of smaller entities such as families and communities.  The obvious downside to individualism is the lack of effectiveness when compared to large scale cooperation.  But it has several advantages.  First of all it allows individual thinking so many more ideas can be pursued on a smaller scale.  It encourages pride in accomplishment, and motivates towards hard work, as individual accomplishments can be recognized and rewarded.  It encourages self-sufficiency and initiative.  Fundamentally an individualistic society is one that thinks more and, as a result, refines it's methods of production to become more effective over time.

Cooperation and Individualism are both strategies that take advantage of our duel nature as a social animal, and our desire for self-interest.  Many philosophers in the past have exclaimed one to be superior to the other, and many social experiments that adhered strictly to one strategy or the other have failed miserably.  Adhering to one strategy alone is basically a Utopian ideal that ignores the dual nature of our character.  It also ignores changing environmental condition that would favor one strategy over another.

The basic game of life is a struggle between society and nature.  Nature is completely indifferent to our needs, and if I may quote the Bible from Genesis 17-19:

“Cursed is the ground because of you; 
   through painful toil you will eat food from it 
   all the days of your life. 
It will produce thorns and thistles for you, 
   and you will eat the plants of the field. 
By the sweat of your brow 
   you will eat your food 
until you return to the ground, 
   since from it you were taken; 
for dust you are 
   and to dust you will return.”



Which states the truism that we all must struggle against nature to survive.  It is like a chess game, where nature is our opponent, and we cannot predict it's next move.  We must be willing to adopt whatever strategy might work best against the current situation.  I would say that, in general, cooperation works best when times are tough, and individualism works best when times are easy.  In addition these strategies cannot be imposed on a society, but must form naturally, perhaps with some encouragement from our leaders.

On a personal level, our ethic is also a balance between cooperation and self-interest.  This is a problem because no-one can say where that balance lays, so each decision must be thought through if we wish to lead an ethical life.  This philosophy offers little advice on how to act, and only indicates a process by which we can try to figure out how to act, both on a personal level and a societal level.

I think it is clear that these conditions of cooperation and individualism correspond closely to economic ideologies such as communism and capitalism. The two great experiments with communism of the last century were unmitigated failures, and both China and Russia now have blended ideologies under which they are beginning to thrive.  Our own experience with Capitalism in the United States has been tempered by strong cooperative groups such as our labor unions, and encouraging them has probably save us from the turmoil that both Russia and China experienced while imposing a single strategy on an unwilling society.

Capitalism encourages the free market.  The market is another natural element of all human societies.  Even in the most basic of societies markets exist and allow specialization to make us more effective as a society.  When the government tries to impose control on a free market, black and grey markets spring up like weeds. It is in our instinct to buy and sell, barter and trade, and to do so to our best advantage.

The free market and the currencies that we create to facilitate them require trust.  The more trust we have in a market, or a currency, the more efficient they will be.  In markets we would like to trust that we are getting the best deal possible for both the buyer and the seller.  It helps to have a dis-interested third party observing trades to ensure that no cheating is occurring, especially when the market is dealing with very complex abstractions such as the multitude of derivative contracts now traded.  The government would normally act as this third party, and it is with the domain of the government to 'promote the general welfare' to do this.  Having a watchful eye on these institutions promotes trust, and encourages money and goods to go where needed with the least amount of loss.

Trust for currency is two-fold.  First of all we have to trust that the currency will retain it's value, since the paper it's printed on isn't worth much.  In actuality money will always lose some value over time due to economic forces.  The idea behind currency is that we shouldn't keep it, as it is worth very little if we simply stuff it in our mattress.  Any currency that we have should be spent on our needs or should be out doing something.  So we put it in a bank, and the bank loans it out to someone with a good idea on how to produce something and make more money, and pays it back with interest.  We get some of that interest ourselves, so our money is out doing something and returning us more money.  Other investments such as stocks and bonds work the same way.  The basic idea is that money that is just sitting around is losing value, but money that is out working will likely at least retain it's value if not increase in value.

That brings us to the second element of trust concerning currency.  In order for our money to be working for us, we have to trust people we are loaning it to, or the bank that we are depositing it in and loaning out for us. As always the case with trust you can have too much.  If you're too trusting and you loan your money out to people that have little chance to pay it back, you risk losing your money.  As a society, we seem to run in a cycle of trust, as we slowly build up trust, until we begin to trust too much.  Then when loans start to go bad and people start to loose money, our trust plummets.  When our trust plummets, people with good ideas that are low risk have trouble getting loans, and the economy slows down, because our money is not working hard enough.  Again, the best way to avoid this is to 'dampen' the cycle by not allowing to much trust.  And once again, the government can act as a dis-interested third party to keep an eye on loans and impose regulations to prevent loaning money to too many high risk ventures.  Trust is the lubricant that spins the gears of our economy.

The free market can be seen as a natural entity. It pops up naturally where ever people gather.  It is like a jungle where a little rain and a little sunshine produce growth without any other input.  Left of it's own accord, the law of the jungle reigns.  It is interesting to hear the cognitive dissonance expressed in our current Republican primary where 'vulture capitalism' is decried and at the same time an unimpeded free market is promoted.  The free market will produce both wildebeest and lions, and if we can't stomach watching the lions take down the wildebeest and the vultures picking over the carcass, we need to impose a little bit of control over the situation. Survival of the fittest works great in the jungle, but stability is a rational concern for society and it's components. So again the government can step in an impose anti-trust laws and support for fledgling enterprise.

Individualists abhor big government, libertarians believe that people can govern themselves.  And yet without enough government, the law of the jungle reigns.  Such Utopian ideas as promoted by libertarians ignore human nature and the conflict in us all between cooperation and self-interest.  We will always have conflict between people, and we need a trusted dis-interested third party to help resolve such matters peacefully.  In my previous blog on ethics, I describe the concept we create in our minds of an ideal outcome to situations, but how nature is indifferent to this ideal.  Government is a fundamental way that we can wrestle nature towards the ideal outcome, and help satisfy our desire for justice and equal treatment for all.  Government cannot create the ideal outcome, but it can help to soften the blows of fate, and make life more enjoyable for all (the pursuit of happiness).

Since the optimal solution is a balance between cooperation and individualism (big government vs little government), and that balance is impossible to calculate, the best that we can do is find the balance as a result of the democratic process.  That will not find the optimal balance, but it will find one that is considered as fair as possible by most people. And it tends to be self-correcting as we do correctly identify when we have way to much of one or the other and swing in the opposite direction.  Unfortunately, it is a compromise, and a good compromise is one that makes both sides equally unhappy.  So if you're unhappy with the size of our government, whether you think its too big or too small, take heart, you're not alone.

Human Creations

Humans create a lot of things.  We build houses, furniture, buildings of commerce, industry, and worship.  We create music and musical instruments, works of art, and stories.  Many of these are concrete things: things we build with our hands by refining natural objects and putting them together in structures that take up space.  Some of these things are abstract: music, poetry, plays and movies, which are mostly enjoyable diversions or information we deem important to remember. But of all the things we create, I believe the most important things are the artifacts of cooperation.

Artifacts of cooperation are groupings that we belong to and work together for a common goal.  For the family, the common goal is making basic life easier for the members of the family.  Families can also give us immortality, in that we my die, but our offspring will carry on. Businesses are another artifact of cooperation, were people band together to produce something of need for exchange.  Businesses and families are sometimes intertwined, as in a family business. Religions are artifacts of cooperation where we promote a common belief system.  Governments are also artifacts cooperation, where we band together to provide for a common defense, common welfare, and system of justice.  And finally, markets are artifacts of cooperation where people and businesses can exchange items of need.

The thing that all of these things have in common, is that they all arise spontaneously.  Throughout history, and most likely for hundreds of thousands of year before history, we can imagin all of these artifacts come into being in surprisingly similar circumstance.  I believe that we can tell a lot about ourselves by examining these artifacts, Just as we can tell what our size is by the shape of our furniture.

The family is probably the oldest of these artifacts, in that originally the family was a religion, a government, a business, and a market.  Certainly our level of trust will always be higher with people that look like us, and families tend to look alike.  Trust is a primary promoter of cooperation.  Familiarity between parent and child, and between siblings also promotes trust.  We need trust so that we feel fairly treated, as we specialize our work, so that the sibling that grinds grain feels they do an equivalent amount of work as the sibling that reaps it.  Specializing allows us to gain expertise, at the expense of our interdependence.  As long as we are willing to see the bigger picture, and understand that specialization along with cooperation gives us an advantage over families that are less cooperative, we may be more willing to subjugate our independence, especially if there is a high level of trust that all members of the group are being treated fairly. So here is our first balance that humans face: work with the group for a greater good, or work for yourself with less effect, but more independence.  Of course, at the family level, striking out on your own, especially in primitive times would be a pretty scary adventure, so the balance is highly tilted towards working within the family group.

Fear is also a motivation, but it does not produce cooperation, only a temporary willingness to work towards a common goal.  Once the fear is lifted, the willingness disappears, and there will always be less willingness as there is with trust based cooperation.  In addition fear as a motivation may backfire if the fearful can band together in cooperation to overcome what they are fearful of.  But history if filled with great accomplishments that were supposedly created by using fear as a motivation.  So our second balance: Motivate with fear, or motivate with trust.

So trust and cooperation are intimately linked.  The higher levels of trust, the more cooperation you will find between people.  People are ultimately a social animal, and tend to feel comfortable and even enjoy banding together.  Of course the family is the primary band, since they are necessarily co-located at least for a certain span of time.  When one family meets another family in a primitive situation, mistrust and hostility are like to occur.  So I would imagine that families tended to keep their distance.  Of course we also have a natural dis-like of mating with close family members, so nearby families may have banded together as members chose mates from the neighboring family.  This may have promoted cooperation between families.  One might even imagine that our dislike of mating with close family members is an evolutionary artifact of the increased cooperation that inter-breeding between nearby families brings.  That brings us to our third balance: cooperate with nearby families, or compete with them.  This is similar to the first balance, except that this balance is made as groups not as an individual decision, and the balance is probably tilted at first towards competition.

Markets are probably the next artifact of cooperation to arise.  Families still probably held monopolies on religion and government.  But as families began to specialize, there is a motivation to cooperate based on needs, especially the covetous need we all have for things that other people have.  So if one family is located near the shore, and the other family is located in the hills, the two families may desire to exchange fish for berries.  It might be more effective at first to simply go kill the shoreline family and take their fish, or use fear to take if from them.  But killing them means they won't fish anymore, and the issues of fear were discussed above.  Eventually the logic of cooperation created the market, which may not have been an actual place, but simply some agreed upon circumstance in which to exchange goods.  Again it is a building of trust that allows us to cooperate.  The trust involved is that the effort involved in make some item is equivalent to the level of effort involved in the item exchanged for.  The evolution of complex language probably coincided with the evolution of the market, just as writing and arithmetic started simply as an expedient for commerce.

Thousands of years pass, language is thriving and people have become used to having markets of exchange, that is more effective in the long term, as an alternative to conflict and plunder.  Trust in this system of exchange grows with every generation, and the network of exchange becomes more extensive.  But conflict still exists, fairness of exchange is questioned, families still have disagreements among themselves over areas of control or fights between members of separate families.  During this time complex language probably evolved from strictly an artifact of exchange, to recalling events and a medium of transmitting knowledge.

Language inflames disagreements as now we have a medium of building consensus by describing the offending infractions.  This new tool of complex language probably initially increases the amount of conflict, lowers trust, and shrinks the networks of exchange.  But it probably also brings a longing for the past (probably an idealized past) by recounting the days when exchange was free and open, and the current level of conflict didn't exist.  At some point we probably learned to use language as a medium of resolving conflict between families.  It was probably an extrapolation of use of language to resolve conflicts within the family.  The heads of each family with a pending conflict may decide that mutual destruction is probable should conflict boil over, and get together to resolve the conflict with language.

Thousands of more years pass, and the stories that we use to transmit knowledge become filled with circumstances when mass destruction was avoided by family heads resolving conflict through dialog.  Just as the tool of complex language probably initially created chaos, it eventually brought a new level of order to humanity.  The idea of family heads getting together probably became a more formal affair as a medium for conflict avoidance, and allowing a family group to speak with one voice.  Now we have an embryonic government.  As conflict between families decreased, trust and cooperation increased.  The market network web increased again, and also became more formalized.  Certain locations became customary meeting places for family heads and market exchange.  This is the birth of the city.

Family heads were probably also the primary proponent for the families religious activities.  As family heads gathered, there were probably also an exchange of religious ideas, and religion was freed from the confines of the family and becomes a function of the government.  The decisions that were made by the family heads together would be sanctioned by the spirit world.

That is my story of the possible evolution of each of these artifacts.  Each provides for some element of human nature.  Families, religion and government provide for conflict resolution and achieving goals beyond what the individual can achieve.  Business and markets allow for specialization which allows increased levels of expertise by individuals and increased interdependence.  People are by nature social animals, but have built-in tendencies for conflict.  People are spiritual in that they imagine things not perceived with the senses, and hold them to be real.  People are ambitious and covetous and wish to produce needed things, and exchange them for novel items.

Families, religion, government, business, and markets are the creations of mankind.  They are as real as the buildings that we inhabit or the roads that we travel.  They arise out of our needs and are uniquely shaped to the human condition.  They have evolved over thousands of years to the state they are at now.  Any attempt to change them needs to take the needs that created them into consideration or it will eventually fail.

Family and religion are intensely personal artifacts and have no place in a general philosophy, but must be part of a personal philosophy.  As such I believe there is no room for debate about family or religious practices that do not encroach on the domain of the other three.  So, for example, government should not interfere with religious practices, unless they include, say, human sacrifice, as the common welfare of the people is within the domain of government.  The other three, government, business, and markets, because they impact us all are fair game for a general philosophy.

In a future blog I will be analyzing government, business, and markets as the three global creations of mankind, and presenting a general philosophy that can guide our understanding of each of them and provide a rational view that incorporates the needs that they fulfill, and tries to balance the conflicts they can create.

Ethical Logic

I have often said that there is no 'logic center' in the human brain.  That is in response to comparing our thinking to that of a computer.  A computer has a logic center that can add numbers, compare numbers and other numerical manipulations.  We have nothing like that, though we are able to be taught to perform those operations.  My statement is also in response to the general query 'why can't people just be logical'.  Even very smart people can be notoriously illogical at times, usually falling prey to one of the many fallacies that plague our thinking.  Fallacies such as over generalization is an obvious by-product of our inductive reasoning gone awry.  But there are other Fallacies that are harder to explain, such as the one I call the 'external agent' fallacy, where we attribute unexplained phenomenon to various entities such as luck, gods, devils, or other supernatural agents. this has been a component of human nature since the beginning of time, and still exists today. One aspect of the external agent fallacy, is the idea of judgement of our actions by supernatural agents, and reward or retribution for our actions.  This implies that we have some idea of what is right and wrong.
 
Just like addition and subtraction, the idea of right and wrong is mostly learned, but there is probably a core of ethical reasoning built into us, just as we have a core of inductive reasoning.  Our core ethics come from our empathic feelings, our ability to see through another's eyes and have sympathy for them.  If there is a logic core to our brains it is in our ability to conjure up an ideal model of a situation, and compare that to reality by which we can arrive at a judgement of whether the real situation is good or bad.  Built into our brains are the addition circuits that add up all aspects of some circumstance, and then compares the sum to some idealized outcome.

This idealized outcome depends on whom the circumstances effect.  Also built into our thinking is the concept of 'us' and 'them'.  Idealized outcomes for 'us' is usually what we would like to see happen to ourselves.  Idealized outcomes for 'them' is anything except what we would like to see happen to ourselves, the exact nature being left to the imagination.  This idea is easily and intuitively aligned with evolution of our species as a social animal, that is, one that depends on cooperation to succeed.  In our governments and other social structures we often strive to wrestle with nature to produce idealized outcomes, to reward the virtuous, punish the wicked, and help the downtrodden despite natures observable indifference.

Difficult ethical questions, such as 'would you pull the lever to divert a train from hitting a group of people to a track with only a single person' cause conflict in our ethical logic.  In brain-scanning studies of people who are asked to make similar decisions finds that different area of the brain are in conflict about what to do.  The study also makes the claim that they can predict what decision a person will make based on which area is more active (the study appeared in a recent edition of scientific american or scientific american mind, but I'm too lazy to search through my back issues, so finding the reference is left as an exercise for the student).

So we have an ethical logic process that allows us to make ethical decisions, idealize ethically correct outcomes, compare the ideal outcomes to reality and make ethical judgments. The only problems we face are other fallacies that allow us to favor behavior that benefits us, and our innate concept of 'them', for which our empathy and ethics do not apply.

I believe that if we try, we can overcome our concept of 'them', especially if we start at an early age emphasizing  that we are all one people.  We have all heard of anecdotal stories of soldiers in war time, who may kill without thought most of the time, but who finds some situation in which an enemy soldier suddenly becomes familiar and guilt for the killing manifests itself.  We have the ability to see all people as we see ourselves, but our cultures still differentiate and serve to fan the flames of animosity, and negates our innate ethical behavior.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote 'All men are created equal' it was only applied to white land-owning individuals.  However the act of writing it down gave it a life of it's own with it's inescapable logic: that it applied to women and people of color and to all people on earth.  Slowly over the centuries we see the 'us' becoming more and more inclusive, and I believe that it is inevitable that us will become all-inclusive, at least on a formal level, if not individually respected, and those that wish to divide us will be shamed into inaction.

While I do believe that we can make our concept of us all inclusive, I don't believe in any Utopian brotherhood of man, there will always be conflict.  Even with our ethical logic, we tend to be programmed to favor our own interests slightly (or greatly for 'selfish' people).  This self bias tends to balance itself out because everyone has it, but it implies conflict and rules and processes for resolving them.

There is a logic for ethics which is simple and intuitive: cooperation tends to be more successful than individual endeavors. This is a logical basis for ethical behavior.  Religion, as so many wish to believe, is not necessary for ethics, except that our 'external agent' cognitive bias manifests a fear of uncooperative behavior. But the logic exists without our conscious manifestation of our social tendencies.  So good and evil can be defined in terms of cooperative behavior and uncooperative behavior.  Ultimately, good always wins as cooperation is more efficient, even though evil sometimes wins individual battles.  But as long as we have us and them built into our thinking, one man's good will be another man's evil.

Because cooperation tends to be more successful than individual action, and our governments are the agents of our cooperation, we as a people tend to prosper when our governments are more pro-active about organizing projects that benefit us all.  It was this spirit of cooperation that put a man on the moon, and gave us the foundations of the Internet.  Unfortunately this spirit of cooperation seems to only be active in the face of a real threat.  Without a unifying force, our actions tend to meander and cancel each other out, and only outstanding individuals can have any success.  But these successes pale in comparison to what we can do if we can be of a single mind about some project.

And finally, my identification of the 'external agent' fallacy does not preclude the existence of some external agent(s).  We know not what exists outside of the realm of our existence, and the existence of our belief in some external agent may be a shadow of the hand of God.  Or it may just be an odd character defect, the choice is yours.