Death, thou shalt die

Two recent (quasi-)religious rituals: the funeral for my stepmother Frances in Chicago over Thanksgiving, and this rationalist/secular solstice celebration that took place recently in Oakland (which I was tempted towards, but ended up missing). These two events seem like opposites on a variety of spiritual dimensions. Aside from the most obvious one (mourning of death vs celebration of life) there is the matter of choice. Anyone at a solstice celebration in 2014 is there out of their own individual will, they have reasoned their way there, but nobody is at a funeral by choice or calculation. And the Jewishness of the funeral was also not a choice: unlike many religions Judaism is something you are stuck with, not something you find your way to (the nature of that stuckness may deserve its own post). Funeral customs are some of the oldest rituals of humanity, while trying to create rituals for atheistic rationalism is pretty new (relatively speaking). Whereas a funeral is an ancient method of dealing with the concrete facts of an individual death, the people behind the solstice celebration aim to conquer death in toto. So despite their dissimilarities, death is at the core of both, and perhaps everything having to do with the sacred.

Pascal Boyer has theorized that the origin of religion lies in the very basic facts of death and the practical and cognitive necessities imposed on the surviving members of a family or community where a death has occurred. Where there recently was a person, with all that implies, now there is only what is basically trash, an unclean lump of matter that needs to be disposed of. But because traces of personhood linger on, you can՚t just throw the trash away blithely, but have to do it in an elaborate ritual. Dead bodies are a challenge to the coordination of various mental subsystems; we keep making inferences about the person even in the face of an inanimate corpse (similar discoordinations between systems are thought to responsible for such exotic psychopathologies as Capgras Syndrome). Realigning these subsystems so as to re-establish the normal structures of social cleanliness is the aim of death rituals.

I don՚t know if I believe Boyer՚s origin story but there is no question that dealing with death has the feeling of activating some very old built-in psychosocial machinery. A death is a great disruption in the normal functioning of human affairs. All of what we think of as normal routine is set aside and you enter a different zone of being for a while. The Jewish funeral customs, informed as they are by a certain practicality that has kept the culture going for millenia, are designed to acknowledge this reality by giving people some time and space to process the reality of it before going back to their normal lives.

How well it works, I can՚t really say – compared to what? I felt far more shaken up by Fran՚s death than I had expected to be. and in truth I՚m still processing it. it՚s much too personal an encounter with death than I am used to – normally death is either an abstraction that applies universally to everybody (so what՚s the big deal), or it՚s my own personal death which never bothered me that much, seeing as I axiomatically would not be around to remember experiencing it.

This was not the first death of someone I was close to, and Fran was 88 years old and had a good life and as good a departure as you might want, surrounded by family and friends, retaining her wits until the very end. Those factors would seem to mitigate the impact, but they didn't really. They made it less tragic than some other deaths in my experience -- I know far too many people who died young -- but no less terrible in its finality.

Death is heavy, and so the solstice thing seems inescapably light in comparison – but I mean that in a mostly good way. Why shouldn՚t people attempt lightness, rather than being dragged inexorably down to earth by human biology? The solstice celebration appeared to have been an occasion devoted to light, the light of the sun that all the winter rituals are devoted to preserving, and the light of reason and knowledge. Death makes an appearance only as an enemy to be conquered as we have overcome so much of the other miseries of the human condition. The goal is to escape death through reason and science, which is just taking what we do ordinarily with medicine to its logical endpoint.

The closing speech by Nate Soares I found very moving. He՚s making a passionate case for real humanism, for the use of the mind to better the human condition.

Look around you. We are warm, well-fed, and finely clothed. None of us fears for our ability to make it through the winter. This dark season, which posed a terrible trial to our ancestors every single year, is now instead an excuse to come together with friends and family to enjoy our great wealth.

How did humanity come so far? By the ingenuity of our ancestors, who ferreted out the secrets of this world one tiny, cloudy insight at a time. Humans had no words in their thoughts, when they invented language. Societies had no letters, when they invented writing. Humanity cracked the secret of the lever and the wheel. We studied and grew, discerning the mechanisms behind germs and viruses, behind architecture and electricity, behind fire and iron and the stars.

But of course I find myself gravitating to the parts of it that I am less comfortable with, the part where he asserts we are here to conquer death:

Some of us have glimpsed the full magnitude of suffering around the world. Some of us have looked to the horizon and seen challenges that threaten the very existence of our species. Some of us must simply protect a loved one, a child, their family. And some of us have taken on death itself as our enemy. This room is filled with people who saw important problems and took them seriously.

Something in me rebels at that, it just seems wrong on an elemental level. A great many myths and stories warn us of the spiritual dangers of desiring or acquiring immortality, and I՚m inclined to trust them. I don՚t have any great faith in my own stance here, in fact, it seems almost indefensibly conservative and boring. And I don՚t want to be pro-death, so why should I be opposed to the people who are trying to do something about it? If “we are the light”, as their song has it, than do I really want to find myself allied to darkness?

Yet I find myself taking a basically irrational stance, which is to say, I trust my gut reactions far more than I do any kind of argument. My gut says: Death is such an important part of human nature and human culture that it can՚t just be eliminated by science and technology and reason as if it was some kind of mere nuisance. Or rather, it shouldn՚t, because such efforts, while marketed under the term “transhumanism”, are actually anti-human, the violate something basic to what it means to be human.

I am somewhat bemused by my own reaction. I am not repelled by other modern twists on humanity (such as gender reassignment surgery or eating ice cream cones in the street) so why does this cause such strong emotions? I think it has something to do with sacrality, although that is not much of an explanation and even less of a justification. Death is a point where in which normal life touches on the eternal, the realm between worlds is parted, a happening shrouded in mystery, terror, significance, and spiritual risk, and hence highly charged and sacred. My minimal attitude towards the sacred is basically “don՚t mess with it”. Freezing a corpse in the hopes of reviving its animating software is messing with the sacred in a big way.

That՚s a pretty weak argument. And in truth I don՚t want to make any arguments; I mostly don՚t care if other people want to make a bid for immortality, it's really their business and none of mine. And I really want to avoid the temptation to come up with spurious psychological critiques. One other consequence of the sacrality of death means that people need to be free to address it on their own terms and not be subject to third-party kibitzing.

Death rites are designed to enable letting go. That sounds too schmaltzy perhaps. How about this: they are a public acknowledgement of the fact of a death, firmly acknowledging it as a social reality, regardless of what individuals may be feeling about it, demonstrating that the world continues on in its normal way even as it assumes a different configuration. They wrap death up in a package, surround it with food and friends and the small comforts of engaging in an activity as old as humanity. At some level they are about soothing (or repressing) our own terrors, our feelings of overwhelming loss, the knowledge that time will do to us what it has just done to another, that is, eventually grind us away and reduce us to an absence as well, a notice in the paper and a shadow life in the collective memory.

Death then is a rather forceful and brutal way to learn the spiritual lesson of non-attachment, the same sort of thing that meditation techniques teach in a much gentler way. One should be able to let go of things, clutching at grasping at life leads to suffering.

But I hardly feel qualified to give anybody else spiritual advice, and my recent encounter with death may have scrubbed away some residual intellectual romanticism about it. The more elementally simple view that it's a bad thing and should be fought has a lot of force. And who knows, all my ingrained suspicion of the drive towards immortality may be wrong, one of those inherited neolithic aspects of human nature that we should be glad to get rid of. Just because immortality was traditionally reserved to the gods, with punishments for humans who dared aspire to it, doesn't mean we have to avoid it now that the gods themselves are dead.

Warren Zevon, The Indifference of Heaven

Death and Dualism

My stepmother Fran is in the hospital, close to death. My bio-parents died a long time ago, so she՚s pretty important to me.

I՚ve long had a sort of intellectualized view of death: that it should be no big deal, that it is an essential part of life so we might as well get used to it, that there is no sense fretting about something that is inevitable. This is not an entirely puerile stance. Too much obsession with death is pathological and we should focus our attention on the living. But still – the reality of death is the prototype of That Which Cannot be Intellectualized Away. It takes away something you love and when it is gone it is gone for good, and we are all share the same fate sooner or later. To be human is to live with that reality, to trivialize it is a false sort of sophistication.

I like to go on about embodiment, and sometimes fancy myself a preacher to the rationalists, who think they will conquer death through science, eg by freezing their heads or uploading their software to a better medium than flesh. I will get them to accept the reality of our messy, finite, creaturely existence, goes this fantasy. Well, I haven՚t exactly given up on that, but today I am aware of the downside of embodiment, of having a mind that is inextricably intertwined with a decaying body. Frankly, it sucks, and perhaps my sniffiness at their dreams of immortality is another form of false sophistication. By all means, let us figure out how to break the mind-body connection for good. Even a small hope of keeping us out the grinding maw of old age and death may be worth a shot.

Anybody who believes that you can decant the soul out of the body and put it in a different substrate is a mind/body dualist,  exactly as much as any religious person who believes in an afterlife. I՚m pretty sure that both are wrong in some fundamental way, but right now want to acknowledge whatever truth there is in such beliefs. There is something immaterial about our being, although if you just look at an isolated individual you can՚t see it. We are to some extent a set of roles, stories, relationships, shared experiences, all things which are implemented in our biological hardware but are not rigidly bound to any one body. All those parts live on after death, in a sort of symbolic half-life, embodied as memories in other minds. It՚s not much perhaps, but it՚s not nothing. Whether our immaterial part is soul or software, the purely mechanical view of the mind leaves it out, and the failure of the mechanical part of a person leaves behind whatever that other stuff is.

Geometry has Politics

So today our company moved to newer more spacious digs. When I joined a year ago they were housed in a storefront on Castro Street, and the building was kinda funky in both good and bad ways. The company is growing at an alarming rate, and growing up, so requires a more business-like environment.

I was happy to snag myself a cubicle, because the alternative was a desk in a big open-plan area with no isolation from the environment whatsoever. This type of work environment is of course extremely trendy at tech companies, for reasons that elude me. It virtually guarantees extra distractions to people trying to do work that requires focus and concentration. I guess it՚s supposed to promote communication or being more Borg-like or something like that, but I just can՚t see it.

Anyway, by pure coincidence I also happened today to listen to this episode of 99% Invisible, which is my current favorite podcast. It tells the story of “Austrian artist and designer Tausendsassa Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser (which translates to “Multi-Talented Peace-Filled Rainy Day Dark-Colored Hundred Waters” in German)”.

The time has come for people to rebel against confinement in cubicle construction like prisoners or rabbits in cages, a confinement which is alien to human nature.

Hundertwasser is known for his Dr. Seuss-like structures that implement his principles, and are anything but cubicular.

The idea that geometries have politics, and that the straight line and right angle are tools of The Man, is not new. The geodesic dome builders of the 60s had the same meme and liked to go around quoting the line from Black Elk Speaks: “there can be no power in a square”. Of course he was wrong about that; the squares seem to be winning, at least in the medium term.

But it is kind of weird. Does the cultural split between left and right, or authoritarian and rebel, or whatever it is, really extend so far into what basic geometric primitives you prefer? Apparently so. But I realize that while it seems weird to my nerd-brain, such correlations are the basic raw materials for other fields like architecture and graphic design, where the job is to create artifacts that manipulate human feelings and the tools are largely geometrical. Why should I be surprised to find a tight interweaving of geometry with aesthetics and politics, since those two things are present in virtually everything?

Reading Recommendations for Rationalists

Here are a couple of somewhat congruent interactions between the deeply idealistic rationalist community and myself in the role of cynical old bastard.

(1) I was at a LessWrong event the other night where Ethan Dickinson spoke on social interactions and the problems that can arise and various ways of dealing with them. Here՚s the blurb:

Imagine a world where people cannot truly know each other. Miscommunication abounds. Well-intentioned remarks offend, while obvious truths are hidden or denied. Certain actions are deemed admirable by some, yet annoying or abhorrent by others. Entire communities enter into downward spirals of evaporative cooling, unproductive bickering, and bitter tribalized feuding.

This is the dystopian mindscape we find ourselves in when we fall prey to the biases and heuristics surrounding mental modeling and communication. What are these flaws in our understanding of each other? Is there a realistic path of self-improvement that can lead us to become better predictors and communicators? Can individual-level skills be parlayed into community-wide improvement?

My very immediate reaction to the first sentence was, wait, what other kind of world is there? Maybe the failure of imagination is mine, but I cannot imagine a world where we “truly know each other”, or even truly know ourselves for that matter. One thing you can say for humans, they are complex, and even for the people we know very well, there are always untapped depths.

But let՚s assume that we don՚t take “truly” overly literally. In fact, delete that sentence and I can՚t find anything objectionable at all. Still, I am not sure the idea of accurate representation of other people is the right model for human communication, any more than accurate physical cosmology is the right model for religion. Religion is about participating in ritual community; the truth of the words of a prayer have very little to do with it. And ordinary human communication also has a ritual quality to it, it is about expressing emotions; satisfying needs; finding, signalling, and reinforcing political/tribal realities; passing moral judgement; or simply enacting social roles. People interacting are only incidentally building more accurate models of each other; there is usually something else going on, and that something else has to be recognized and acknowledged.

My reading recommendation: All of Erving Goffman՚s work on strategic social interaction. Start with “On Cooling the Mark Out” and for more, see books like Interaction Ritual and Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity.

(2) Here՚s Scott Alexander making a typically lengthy and tightly-written fret about the fact that people use all sorts of irrational techniques to reinforce their beliefs, that tribalism is both a cause and a consequence of all sorts of questionable kinds of reasoning, and that lot of what should be rational debate is actually just mindless cheerleading for your side or hatred of the other side.

I hate to argue with him because he is so accurate in his diagnoses and so high-minded in his solutions. But essentially he wants human nature to change, for everybody to put down their emotion-based alliances and think objectively, which in cases like these mean among other things being able to empathetically take the viewpoint of an opponent.

As in the first case, this seems like a great idea but in some respects it misses the point of political speech, which is not primarily about reasoned debate and more about forming coalitions of power.

My reading recommendation: All of Bruno Latour՚s work on the politics of knowledge, starting with Science in Action. Also his bit on Socrates and Callicles in the more recent Pandora՚s Hope.

(3) Both rationalists that I am riffing off of are disturbed by the negative effects of emotion and power in human affairs. Rationality is seen as a corrective, a way of thinking (and being) that is at least in part insulated from such destructive forces. As a goal, that seems hard to argue with. But it may be that emotion and power are too fundamental to human behavior to be papered over by the rather thin layer of rationality available to us.

One could make an argument that these authors are actually more in tune with a certain kind of rationalism than positing a more naive sort of default agreeability. After all, there is no a priori reason why one agent in a conversation or other social relation should have the same goals as any other agent. Presumably they are out for themselves, and if they can find common cause, that՚s wonderful, but it՚s an achievement that has to be accounted for. And in all likelihood not as stable an achievement as we might like. So a properly rich rationalism would treat human interaction as more goal-oriented than accuracy-oriented.

The authors I am recommending have something in common: they both, in quite different ways, try to deal with the reality that humans are power- and status-seeking creatures well before they are truth- and comity-seeking. And whatever success they have at the latter is built using the machinery developed for the former. Latour and Goffmann both have developed a rich set of methods for describing the relationship between power and knowledge: Goffman applies the vocabulary of drama to ordinary life, and Latour merrily dispenses with normal ontological distinctions so he can describe power alliances between people, ideas, machinery, and nature. Conflict is an essential part of their world-pictures: people and other things have their own interests, the world is a chaos of competing interests, not a well-behaved unity.

This point of view may seem superficially cynical. But the depth of these authors՚ intellectual humanism elevates their work above mere cynicism. It is clear that despite seeing the often dirty and ugly machinery that underlies cognition and society, they still retain fondness for humans and their complex processes. And my argument for reading them is not based on either cynicism or idealism, but realism. They add a layer of depth to our understanding of human social processes.

Emacs hack: yank URL from Chrome (on Mac)

Damn is this going to be useful:

(defun yank-chrome-url ()
 "Yank current URL from Chrome"
  (interactive)
  (require 'apples-mode)
  (apples-do-applescript "tell application \"Google Chrome\"
 get URL of active tab of first window
end tell"
    #'(lambda (url status script)
        ;; comes back with quotes which we strip off
        (insert (subseq url 1 (1- (length url)))))))

I suppose I should have separate blogs for stupid hacks and Deep Contemplations of the Nature of Things, but who has the time to manage multiple web presences?

Lambda the ultimate incantation

I endorse this:

Thus, I believe it is possible...to understand programming languages as the latest instance of a dream and set of technologies developed by mystics, alchemists, philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. These languages do not just represent things, they also do things in the world. They are both symbolic and material in form. They are central to the disenchantment of the world and, simultaneously, the substrate for a "reenchantment of the world." They are, to sacrilegiously misappropriate the lexicon of the Catholic Church, "the word incarnate." Programming languages melt the boundaries between science and religion because they are an unholy union of the two.

-- Warren Sack, The Software Arts (forthcoming)

(for more on this project, see here).

Computation is the intersection of quite a few different things: science and religion, mathematics and language, engineering and psychology, and more. I don't know that these unions are exactly unholy, but let's just say they tend to have relationship problems.

The Sacred and the Rational

At Burning Man, the Temple of Grace was something like the sacral center to the whole chaotic affair, an oasis of silence and tranquility amidst the noise, a place of meditation, where people went to commemorate and mourn the dead.

I made quite a few visits there, but my first was in the company of some friends, including the one who diagnosed irony in my dancing. He՚s a big-time rationalist, and I had an urge to start an argument/discussion with him there, to grill him on what the rationalist idea of the sacred was, how these two things were supposed to co-exist in his worldview. I did not do this, because that very urge seemed to go against the mood of the place, it would have been an attempt to generate heat and words in a place of calm and quiet. He (I assume) makes his own peace between reason and sacrality, and why should I trouble that peace at that moment? Quieting mental chatter, internal and external, also seems to go hand-in-hand with the sacred.

But I couldn՚t help mull over the opposition in my own mind, and am apparaently still doing so. Reason wants to break down and analyze and measure everything, the sacred exists outside all of that. The sacred is definitionally beyond reason, beyond all forms of contaminating human inquisition. It is that which demands the highest respect, and in that sense is the same for all religions and rituals. You don՚t have to believe in any particular god or creed to recognize it, and if you aren՚t a jerk you respect other people՚s sense of the sacred even when you disagree with their beliefs. It is that which can՚t be argued with. My own tendency to argue with everything gets put on hold (partially and temporarily) in its presence.

It is almost Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, and I am going to go be part of that (with the usual doubt and reluctance that apparently doesn՚t matter all that much). Ritual tunes up your relationship with the sacred. It is apparently something I need to do; probably something most people need to do.

Given our multicultural society there is not much that is held universally sacred. The minimal sacred object is personhood, the inner core of every person that deserves respect no matter how wrong, assholic, or fucked up they happen to be. That may not be enough, there is something about the sacred that demands public ritual. But it՚s better than nothing.

Previous Yom Kippur-related posts also seem to touch on this notion of that which is beyond language and reason. Hm. I am getting almost tediously repetitive. Maybe I need to call it a ritual.