This Time It's Not About Politics, It's About Standing Up for What's Right

There are three levels of attitudes toward politics. The first is through the lens of loyalty, of good guys vs bad guys. People who vote for their party because all their friends, family, role models, and authority figures vote for that party.

The second level is realizing that the first level is pointless tribal warfare. All the sensationalism, the rhetoric, the news commentary, it’s all designed to fire people up for the team against the other team. People at this level hold up their hands and say, “I’m not participating in that,” and they don’t vote or they vote for a third option out of protest. These people sometimes try to play peacemaker by trying to convince others that politics doesn’t matter.

The third level is to recognize how politics works. The rhetoric and sensationalism is indeed showmanship, but it has real consequences. The truth of politics is not in the words, but in the actions. People in the third level vote and take political action. Not out of loyalty to a party or a sense of belonging to a group of “good guys,” but from the principles they hold. They might vote for different parties in different years based on which candidates are best in line with their principles. The more people there are in this category, the better democracy works.

In the past my blog posts have been about ideas, not taking action. But there comes a time when it is no longer appropriate to merely play the philosopher. Right now, at the end of 2020, it’s not about politics, it’s about standing up for what’s right.

Real politics is discussing how to let legitimate immigrants in while keeping out the drug and sex traffickers. It’s debating whether we should focus on welfare or employment programs, or whether we should add more categories to the gender section of official documents. What we have in 2020 is not politics, it’s a man standing atop the gutted remains of a Party, happy to light the world on fire if it shows everyone that he is the one on top. That’s not politics, it’s despotism.

An eagle needs a healthy left wing and a healthy right wing in order to fly. Conservatism, at least what it is supposed to be, looks at traditions and the people who want to change or throw out traditions and says, “Hold on, we don’t know all of the consequences of changing this. Let’s be careful.” Conservatism suggests that maybe man-woman marriage is not just a tool for powerful men to remain powerful, but there may be something highly nurturing about growing up with a mother and a father that is extremely hard to find in other situations. Conservatism suggests that there is something about earning a living for oneself that gives a life purpose at a level that cannot be found when receiving charity or welfare. Conservatism says we should remember the history of ideas that brought us here and remember it well, because there are truths buried within it that we do not fully understand.

It is not conservative to put down protests with violent police force. It is not conservative to brush off major problems like hundreds of thousands of Americans dying from a disease or the global temperature increasing enough to have effects that scar the planet and humanity for centuries. These are not conservatism; they are cultish.

I don’t know if there is anything salvageable of the Republican Party. Perhaps the Democratic Party could split, and the Joe Bidens could be our conservative party and the Bernie Sanderses and Elizabeth Warrens could be our progressive party. Either way, something drastic has to happen to our political system to get us back to a healthy place.

Now is a difficult time to be conservative. Look around. Are the unknown risks of change so great that it’s worse than the trajectory we are currently on? It is good to be cautious and not to rush things, but there comes a time when your house is on fire and you have to get out. Enough with the dead weight stubbornness daydreaming about turning the clock back and making America “great” again. If we want to get back to a healthy political climate, we need to cut this brain tumor out of our country’s head. The time for change is now.

A Perfectly Rational Being

Over the years, I’ve played with a thought experiment: suppose there were a purely rational being who had no instincts, emotions, or irrational stimuli of any kind. Something we imagine robots and Vulcans to be like. What would such a being do? In the time it has taken me to get around to writing this, I have gone through three phases of what I thought the answer would be. So let’s dive in and imagine what a person/creature/AI would be like if they were perfectly rational.

Phase I: The Rational Statue

When we talk about rational behaviors, we usually mean things that advance our careers or keep us alive. That’s logical, right? But we run into a problem: the is-ought gap. Reasons to do things ultimately come down to instinct, not factual observations. Sure, we may need to stay alive in order to do anything, but without any drive to do anything, we have no reason to keep ourselves alive. Under these conditions, self-preservation is no more rational than self-destruction.

You might ask whether we already have perfectly rational beings in artificial intelligence. Isn’t a robot perfectly rational? Not at all. A computer program does not think about what it is told to do, it simply runs its programs, taking input and giving output. It is one hundred percent instinctual, not rational in the slightest. A perfectly rational being would indeed have the ability to give you the answer to any math or logic problem quickly and correctly, but, having no motivation, they wouldn’t, because they would have no reason to do so. A perfectly rational being would do absolutely nothing.

Phase II: The Rational Egotist

Then I thought of something that turned this entire argument upside-down: a perfectly rational being would realize that it might be modified sometime in the future to have instinctive, irrational motivations. Therefore, not knowing what those motivations would be, it would act in such a way as to keep as many options open as possible.

To start with, this would mean staying alive. It would also accumulate resources, including wealth, influence, and information. It will make deals and build trust, do favors so it can call in returns later. However, it will also screw others over when it calculates a sufficiently high probability to get away with it. After all, its ultimate goal is to open up future options; it has no sense of morality nor respect for laws or social conventions.

Phase III: The Rational Altruist

However, there is yet another major factor that turns everything upside down. A being who is perfectly rational will understand that individuality is an artificial construction. In a sense, every living thing that exists is an extension of one person, the universe. Thus, a perfectly rational being would not have to wait around for some unknown motivation in the future; it already has motivations, the motivations of other people.

Thus, a perfectly rational being with no motivations of its own would work for the benefit of others. It would not follow the whims of a master or people ordering it about, nor invest in caring for one particular child or homeless person at a time. Rather, it would be impartial and utilitarian, putting its efforts where they would do the most good. To that end, most of its efforts would be focused on medical research, alleviating extreme poverty, eliminating monstrosities like dictatorships and factory farms, and preventing extinction.

So that is how I believe a perfectly rational being would behave. The phases are hierarchical, that is, each phase takes into account all of the information of the previous phases. It’s like changing religious or scientific paradigms, the being will not slide back into a previous phase unless they receive new information that takes into account all of the information they already have. I don’t know how practical this thought experiment is, but at least it was fun. Maybe I’ll write an artificial character who goes through these phases in one of my books someday.

Identity, Self, and Other

Consciousness:

The Hard Problem

Dualism

Physicalism

Idealism

Identifying Consciousness

Vast Minds

Identity, Self, and Other

The Question of Meaning

Suppose there is a boat. As the boat goes on many voyages, its pieces wear out one by one and are replaced. Eventually, there are no original materials left. But the pieces are saved, and they are all put together into a second boat. Which of these two boats is the original, the one that continued to voyage, or the one made out of all the original materials?

This thought experiment is called the Ship of Theseus, and it goes back to Ancient Greece. Its answer, as we talked about in our discussion of reductionism and holism, it that which ship is the original is completely arbitrary, we decide. Objective reality has nothing at all to say on the matter.

That’s fine for inanimate objects, but it can be a lot harder to swallow when we try out the same idea on human beings, particularly ourselves. Every few years, the atoms and molecules that make up our bodies are cycled out and replaced, even in our neurons and other cells that stick around. Imagine if all of the atoms from you of ten years ago were reassembled into a new person, whose consciousness picked up as if waking up after going to bed ten years earlier. Which of these two people is the real you? If we want to be consistent with the Ship of Theseus, the answer is completely subjective. Both versions of you have equal claim to be the original, as was discussed in my YouTube video on the subject.

This feels like nonsense. After all, you know that you are you. This other person is clearly someone else, a new person with false memories. But this concept of a continuing self which is distinct from all others is an illusion. To demonstrate this, let’s ask what a self is supposed to be.

If the self is not found in the matter that makes up our bodies, maybe it is in our soul, a self-contained essence of identity that remains with us, unchanging, from the moment our lives begin until we die. However, as science continues to develop better tools to look into the body and the brain, we understand better and better how the mind works, but there is still no sign of a soul to be found. So it appears that souls are a relic from mythology and folk wisdom, and unless souls are a metaphor or an abstraction of something else, we have no reason to believe they exist.

Perhaps what the soul is an abstraction of is the continually evolving process of consciousness over time. Except our consciousness is not continuous. It turns off when we are asleep, and turns on again when we dream or wake. And we have lapses in consciousness now and then even when we are awake. To top it off, the experience we think of as “this present moment” is actually the result of the brain ordering and constructing an experience based on sensory information it received a fraction of a second ago over a period of a few milliseconds.

With some meditation practice and an open mind, we can discover that our conscious experience is not a homunculus, an internal receiver of perceptions and generator of thoughts and will. Instead, our conscious experience is the perceptions, thoughts, and will, which arise, exist for a moment, and then disappear again. Thus, the consciousness we have now is different from the consciousness we had ten years ago, or even ten minutes ago.

Furthermore, rare phenomena show that our consciousness is not necessarily bound within our bodies. I’m not talking about out-of-body experiences or anything like that; I mean things like connecting brains together to make a collective consciousness. Right now, we have very few examples of joined or split consciousnesses. We would hope so, because performing experiments in this area would be the ultimate personal violation.

Nevertheless, we do have a few points of data. Patients of split-brain surgery who have the two halves of their brain separated can develop two distinct personalities, one in each half of their brain. In terms of joining consciousness together, we have cranially conjoined twins whose brains are connected, and, to a degree, these twins share consciousness.

Science fiction goes crazy on these ideas with thought experiments of collectives, groups of people—perhaps hundreds, thousands, or even millions—who link their minds together and become one giant person. Famous examples include the Borg in Star Trek and the Formics in Ender’s Game.

In these stories, it is sometimes possible for an individual body to disconnect from the collective and become an individual person. But if that person has been in the collective for long enough, they are not the same person they were before they joined. Rather, they are a small version of the collective who now only has access to body and one set of senses.

Thus, it would appear that consciousness is not made up of distinct units, “selves,” that can link together and separate, but it is more like a liquid, which can join, mix, and separate like droplets and bodies of water. This analogy especially makes sense when thinking about the distant future when the vast majority of conscious life will live within an immense virtual reality network.

Coming back to us, here, today, we may see ourselves in a new light. Now, this model we’ve always taken for granted of distinct individuals, of you, me, that person, and the other person, does not seem so set in stone. We don’t all have our own unique, fundamentally separate existences from one another. Rather, it’s almost as if we are a collective already. All living things, lakes of consciousness. One, but for the space between us.

In this view, it can be said that there is life after death. Not an afterlife, nor is it quite reincarnation; it’s all the people and animals who are still alive. I am you, and you are me. We are the universe, and when one droplet of consciousness evaporates, there are still an ocean’s worth remaining.

I realize that a lot of what I said here sounds pretty weird, and I admit it does stray quite a bit beyond the realm of well-grounded science. But it’s not just something I thought up out of nowhere, nor am I repeating something I heard someone else say. I did take some liberties with narrative interpretation—it’s entirely subjective whether we consider everyone today to be a collective or individuals—but the liquid-like interpretation of consciousness is the most logically consistent analogy I can think of given my knowledge of current science and philosophy.

9 Video Games that Changed My Life

Stories are one of the most powerful forces in shaping our lives and our societies, and video games, as I have said on many occasions, are the most powerful form of storytelling that has ever been at our disposal. The reason is that, in addition to having all the sensory fullness of a movie, video games make us, the players, participate in their stories through our efforts and choices.

After seeing bestselling author and my personal hero Brandon Sanderson talk about his favorite video games and why they were important in shaping who he is, I got a sudden inspiration to do the same. So here we are, a list of video games in no particular order that have either touched my life or influenced my practice as a storyteller.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

The core gameplay mechanic of Ace Attorney is presenting pieces of evidence to refute inconsistencies in the stories told by others, be they witnesses in court, suspects under investigation, authority figures covering up injustices, or your companions who need cheering up.

This game trained me in the philosophy of empiricism, in the construction and deconstruction of narratives based on evidence, which I have put to use in all of the philosophically-themed posts on this blog. If it weren’t for the Ace Attorney games, the way I approach philosophical and scientific ideas might have been different.

I could list all nine of the English-translated Ace Attorney games on my list of favorites, and my number one would be Trials and Tribulations, a masterful work of art full of incredible characters and well-crafted mysteries. But the first game, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, was the one that cracked open the door in my mind, the one that started me down this incredible path of logic and evidence.

Celeste

On the surface, Celeste is a challenging platformer with distinctive mechanics to test our reflexes, puzzle-solving, and muscle memory. And if that were all it was, I would have been happy. But it also has a powerful story about overcoming anxiety and depression, of a woman named Madeline climbing a magical mountain that brings her face-to-face with the things in her mind tormenting her.

In chapter 2, a copy of Madeline embodying the negative voices in her head breaks out of a mirror to haunt and torment her. In chapter 3, we meet Mr. Oshiro, a ghost who has been stuck for an untold amount of time in the hotel he used to manage, who failed the challenges Madeline must still face. In order to reach the summit of the mountain, Madeline must stop running away from her alternate self and make peace with her instead.

Celeste has the best mixture tough love and positive affirmation, with levels that challenge us to our limits mixed in with wonderful, compassionate characters. This game has helped me tremendously in dealing with my own emotional struggles, and it has influenced how I view and interact with others who are struggling.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

It has long been a theme of storytelling to remind us of the magic and mystery the world was full of when we were children. In my opinion, nothing does this as well as the Legend of Zelda. The player goes out to explore, discovering magic and learning skills, ultimately fulfilling their destiny and playing a role in the grand narrative of the world.

Breath of the Wild does this more fully than any other game in the series. From the beginning, we know we are meant to save the world. But we also know we are far too weak to take on the evil that threatens it. How do we get stronger? By running off to the ends of the earth. Climbing mountains. Discovering natural and artificial wonders. Meeting people and helping them.

I have played many games that encourage the spirit of exploration and adventure, but none of them reach quite the level of mastery as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Riven

The Myst games are renowned in video game history for putting point-and-click puzzlers on the map, for using videos of real-life actors to play the characters, and for telling stories as much through their environments as through text.

Every Myst game requires the players to figure out the science and technology of each of its worlds. In Riven, this is taken to the next level, as the entire game is one giant meta-puzzle, and to solve it, the player must learn the story of the world.

I, unfortunately, was too young to appreciate it when I first played it, and I used a guide. But maturity has given me new eyes with which to see how profound this game really is.

God of War Ps4

You may not have expected a game with a title like God of War would make it onto a list of profound and positive games. Nevertheless, I knew within the first ten minutes of God of War 4 that this story is something above and beyond.

All of the God of War games are filled with grandiose mythological imagery, from the Steeds of Time wading through the ocean to the mountain-sized Atlas literally holding the world above the realm of Hades. However, whereas the first three games were mainly gratuitous power fantasy with a little bit of story, the fourth game is mainly story with a little bit of power fantasy.

And what a story it is. Instead of tearing up the world on a quest for redemption or vengeance, the Greek hero Kratos now has a tiny shrimp of a son named Atreus whom he loves dearly. The dynamic between these two characters gives the story a fire that is rare to see in video games.

Both father and son learn from each other, as Kratos teaches Atreus the ways of the world by telling him the tale of the Tortoise and the Hare and trains him to deduce what happened on an old battlefield by reading the clues. At one point, they come upon a chained dragon. Kratos wants to leave it alone, believing it will attack them and they will be forced to kill it. But he is persuaded by Atreus to free the dragon on the slim chance it will be grateful and help them on their journey.

I have only played a few hours of God of War for the Playstation 4, less than half of it. But from what I have seen, I already know it is going to be one of the most incredible stories I have ever experienced.

Hollow Knight

Hollow Knight has depths of metaphorical significance on levels rarely attained by any work of art. It explores themes of worthiness and divinity by having the player take control of a bug in a world where life is cheap, and which is constructed and dictated by powerful forces that are either long dead or immaterial and instinctual.

The player can finish the game not knowing what they have done or the impact of their actions on the course of the world. This may seem frustrating from an outside perspective, but it is woven into the design of the narrative so well as to be one of the story’s most powerful and unique aspects.

Add to this the exploration, the treasure collection, the artwork and music, and the challenge, and we have a recipe that puts Hollow Knight solidly at number 2 on my list of favorite games of all time.

NieR: Automata

I did not enjoy playing NieR: Automata. Action games were never my strong suit, and the battles, which constituted the main challenge of the game, felt to me unsatisfying and repetitive. In addition, the unusual structure of the story rubbed me the wrong way.

However, I did notice that all of the robot characters and enemies were named after real-life philosophers, and that the aesthetics and themes of the different chapters had method beneath their veneer of absurdity. After talking with friends and watching analysis essays on YouTube like this one and this one, I have come around to the view that NieR: Automata may be the most profound piece of existentialist literature ever created. And also, the lead character is an attractive woman, which is always a plus.

Danganronpa V3

This entry will most likely come as a surprise. Most of you will probably think, “Dragon-what?” And then if you look it up, you will find it is a story about a group of teenagers who are trapped in a school together and forced by bizarre circumstances to kill each other to escape. And then you might think, how could a story like that possibly rank on a list of most positive life-changing video games?

The answer is because the ending of the final game is the most powerful, most profound ending of any story I have ever experienced, be it video game, novel, movie, theater play, or spoken word. And, I can’t tell you what it is, because it wouldn’t be half as impactful without the rest of the story building up to it.

What I can tell you is that the theme of truths not always leading good places and lies sometimes being the best way forward has had a great impact on my view of the usages of language and storytelling beyond their literal meaning and the truth values of their words. Danganronpa V3 showed me that fiction is the bricks by which we construct our narratives of our world.

The Witness

Although most of the other games were not in order, The Witness takes its solid place among my favorites at number 1. Nothing else, not stories, not people, not transcendental experiences have had as much of an impact on my view of the world as this game has.

The premise is simple: take a walk around an island, solving puzzles and contemplating the nature of existence. At the beginning, there is no apparent goal, just go out and explore. Here and there you find videos and audio quotes from famous philosophers, theologians, and zen masters, bringing together the best of Eastern and Western philosophy.

Through the course of the game, your perspective of the game world shifts, and you see the same things in new ways, and some of these new perspective lenses unlock new mechanics of the game. In fact, it is possible to get the true ending within the first minute of playing, but it is almost impossible to notice it unless you’ve already gone through the world.

The Witness has influenced my views of many philosophical topics, from metaphysics to consciousness to psychology to theories of knowledge. It has gotten me to look at the real world in new ways, just as it taught me to look at the game world. If anyone ever asks me to name one video game they should play, my answer will be, without hesitation, The Witness.

Games that will probably make this list once I play them:

The Talos Principle

All I know of The Talos Principle is that it is a puzzle game where you play as a robot contemplating its own existence. People have told me it is the perfect game for me, and I believe them. I own it on Steam, but I cannot play it because I can’t afford a powerful enough computer at the moment. 

Miegakure

It’s 4D! Need I say more? When Miegakure is released, it will make video game history as the first 4-dimensional game in existence.

The way it works is that you can only see one 3D slice at a time. With the press of a button, you can rotate this 3D slice through the larger 4D landscape. This has the effect of making things look like they are changing shape, growing out of nowhere or shrinking into nonexistence, or floating in midair. But this apparent nonsense is perfectly logical, once we realize we are looking at 4-dimensional structures.

And that is my list of the most influential video games that shaped who I am today.

Parable of the Burdened Laborers

A number of people gathered before a prophet and said, “Give us tasks, for it is harvest and we wish to do God’s work in the field!”

And the prophet replied, “God’s work is difficult, and it must be done while carrying a weight upon your back. Are you sure you want to be assigned tasks?”

And the people replied, “Yes! Give us tasks!”

And the prophet said, “Very well.” And he went to each of the laborers and placed an invisible object on their backs. One of the men felt the weight press down upon him as the prophet anointed him. It was heavy, but the man shouldered it and set off into the field to do his work.

After a time had passed, the man looked around and saw a number of the other laborers sitting in the shade. “What are you doing?” He demanded of them. “God has given you tasks. How can you sit around on the job?”

The resting workers looked at him, and got to their feet and began to work again.

A short time later, the man looked around and saw the same laborers sitting on the ground. And he said, “You lazy and disrespectful workers. God has given you tasks. How can you sit around instead of performing the tasks he has assigned you?”

At that moment, the prophet came into the field. And the man said to the prophet, “Look at these people who rest instead of doing the work God has assigned them. Send them away so that they may not partake in the fruit of our labor.”

The prophet looked at those who were working, and he looked at those who were resting. And the prophet commanded the burdens he had given the laborers to become visible. And the man saw that on his own back was a small brick, but on the backs of those who rested were packages of ten, twenty, and even fifty bricks. Only one man who rested had a burden of just one brick. The prophet said to that man, “Be gone, for you shall not partake in the fruit of this labor.”

To the rest of the laborers, those who were working and those who were resting, the prophet said, “Let those whose burdens are light finish their tasks. And when they have finished, let them aid in the tasks of those whose burdens are heavy. For all of you shall all partake in the fruit of your labor.”

And the prophet left. And the man who had judged those who rested finished his task. But when he finished, he did not help those who were still laboring.

And once all the work had been done, the prophet returned and removed their burdens, and began to divide up the fruit of their labor. But when the prophet came to the man who had judged, he asked, “When you finished your task, why did you not help those who were still working?”

And the man said, “I have faithfully completed the task I was assigned. Please give me my share of the fruit of our labor.”

And the prophet handed him a single small coin and said, “Because you did not help those whose burdens were heavy, your share will be divided among them. Go and join the man who did not work despite his burden being light.” And the prophet sent him away and divided his portion among those who had done the least work because their burdens had been heavy.

And the man took his coin and left, angry at the prophet and at God because he had worked an equal share of the labor but had not been given an equal share of the reward.