Machete Season - Jean Hatzfeld

"For my part, I offer you an explanation: it is as if I had let another individual take on my own living appearance, and the habits of my heart, without a single pang in my soul. This killer was indeed me, as to the offense he committed and the blood he shed, but he is a stranger to me in his ferocity. I admit and recognize my obedience at that time, my victims, my fault, but I fail to recognize the wickedness of the one who raced through the marshes on my legs, carrying my machete. That wickedness seems to belong to another self with a heavy heart. The most serious changes in my body were my invisible parts, such as the soul or the feelings that go with it. Therefore I alone do not recognize myself in that man. But perhaps someone outside this situation, like you, cannot have an inkling of that strangeness of mind."

"All genocides in modern history have occurred in the midst of war - not because they were its cause or consequence but because war suspends the rule of law; it systematizes death, normalizes savagery, fosters fear and delusions, reawakens old demons, and unsettles morality and human values. It undermines the last psychological defenses of the future perpetrators of the genocide. The farmer Alphonse Hitiyaremye summed it up his own way: "War is a dreadful disorder in which the culprits of genocide can plot incognito."

"In Germany as in Rwanda, genocide was undertaken by a totalitarian regime that had been in power for some time. The elimination of the Jew, the Gypsy, or the Tutsi has been openly part of the regime's political agenda from the moment it took power, and had been repeatedly stressed in official speeches. The genocide was planned in successive stages. It thrived in the disbelief of foreign nations. It as tested for short periods on segments of the population."

"In Germany and in Rwanda, efficient preparations preceded the formal decision on extermination, as if the decision were too appalling to be announced in public until it was already being carried out."

"Killing could certainly be thirsty work, draining and often disgusting. Still, it was more productive than raising crops, especially for someone with a meager plot of land or barren soil. During the killings anyone with strong arms brought home as much as a merchant of quality. We could no longer count the panels of sheet metal we were piling up. The taxmen ignored us. The women were satisfied with everything we brought in. They stopped complaining.
For the simplest farmers, it was refreshing to leave the hoe in the yard. We got up rich, we went to bed with full bellies, we lived a life of plenty. Pillaging is more worthwhile than harvesting, because it profits everyone equally."

"At the risk of offending historians of the Holocaust with this quick summary of their work, I would say that most of them - in particular Raul Hilberg, and his monumental study The Destruction of the European Jews - see four stages in the unfolding of the event: The first stage brought humiliation and loss of rights; next came designation and marking (armbands, yellow stars, writing on walls); then deportation and concentration; and finally complete elimination, through famine in the ghettos, shooting in the areas conquered by the German army, and gassing in the six specialized camps. These stages overlapped rather than succeeded one another in rigorous succession, and they were linked by continuous repression in the pogroms, as well as by plundering and expropriations, which were important for ensuring the support of a decisive segment of the population."

"As Jean-Baptiste Munyankore, a teacher in Ntarama and a survivor of the marshes, confirms: "The principal and the inspector of schools in my district participated in the killings with nail-studded clubs. Two teachers, colleagues with whom we used to share beers and student evaluations, set their shoulders to the wheel, so to speak. A priest, the burgomaster, the subprefect, a doctor -they all killed with their own hands… They wore pressed cotton trousers, they had no trouble sleeping, they traveled around in vehicles or on light motorcycles... These well-educated people were calm, and they rolled up their sleeves to get a good grip on their machetes. For someone who spent his life teaching the humanities, as I have, search criminals are a fearful mystery."

Ignorant of mechanized agriculture and agronomic technology, Rwanda's peasant society made no attempt to modernize the carnage, ignoring all scientific, medical, and anthropological experimentation, employee no efficient industrial techniques such as gas chambers and no ingenious methods to economize effort. The army did not use helicopters, tanks, or bazookas, while lighter weaponry such as grenades and machine guns came only sporadically into play, and then simply for tactical or psychological support..

In the fields, labor was manual. Therefore, the killings in the marshes were manual, and they proceeded at the pace of a seasonal culture.

Alphonse Hitiyaremye says that at one point, "We hurried things up, because the killing season was coming to a close. It promised to spare us the labor of one harvest, but not two. We knew that for the next season, we would have to take up our machetes again for other, more traditional jobs."

In the land of philosophy that was Germany, genocide was intended to purify being and thought. In the rural land of Rwanda, genocide was meant to purify the earth, to cleanse it of its cockroach farmers. The Tutsi genocide was thus both a neighborhood genocide and agricultural genocide. And in spite of its summary organization and archaic tools, it was outstandingly effective." 

I'll explain. When you receive a new order, you hesitate but you obey, or else you're taking a risk.When  you've been prepared the right way by the radios and the official advice, you obey more easily, even if the order is to kill your neighbors. The mission of a good organizer is to stifle your hesitations when he give you instructions.

For example, when he shows you that the act will be total and have no grave consequences for anyone left alive, you obey more easily, you don't worry about anything. You forget your misgivings and fears of punishment. You obey freely.

At bottom, we didn't care about what we accomplished in the marshes, only about what was important to us for our comfort: the stocks of sheet metal, the rounded-up cows, the piles of windows and other such goods. When we met a neighbor on a new bike or waving around a radio, greed drove was on. We inspected roofs along the way. People could turn mean if they heard about some fertile land already snapped up behind their back's. They could turn meaner than in the marshes, even if they were no longer brandishing there machetes.

All wars generate savage temptations  that are more or less murderous. The bloodthirsty madness of combatants, the craving for vengeance, the distress, fear, paranoia, and feelings of abandonment, the euphoria of victories and anguish of defeats, and above all a sense of damnation after crimes have been committed-these things provoke genocidal behavior and actions. In other words, panic or explosive fury and the desire to crush the enemy once and for all lead to massacres of civilians and prisoners, campaigns of rape and torture, deadly deportations, pure devastation in all directions. Sometimes non-military actions result as well: the poisoning of rice fields with pesticides, the slaughter of buffalo herds, the forced conversions to foreign religions and cultures. But to confuse these war crimes-even when they tend, in their collective insanity, to destroy a civilian community-with an explicit and organized plan of extermination is a political and intellectual mistake, symptomatic of our culture of sensationalism.

"War happens when authorities want to overthrow other authorities to take the wrong own turn at the trough. A genocide-that's what an ethnic group wants to bury another ethnic group. Genocide goes beyond war, because the intention last forever, even if it is not crowned with success. It is a final intention," says Christine Nyiransabimana, a farmer, in an astonishing echo of the "final solution."

In the Rwandan family, the main is the first one responsible for right and wrong actions, the in the eyes of the authorities and neighbors. If a woman wanted to hide Tutsi acquaintances, she had to get permission from her husband, because if she was found out, of course he was the one condemned by his neighbors to cut those acquaintances with his own hand, in public, right in front of his house. It was a punishment of some importance. It was a big thing to cut a person with whom you had shared years both good and bad.
The women were less deciding, they were less punishable, they were less active. They were in the second rank in that activity of genocide.
But really, in the Tutsi camp it was quite the opposite. The killings were more serious for the wives than for the husbands, if in addition they were raped at the end and saw their little ones get cut before their eyes.

It was not difficult to obtain sincere and detailed accounts from soldiers in Vietnam, from torturers for the Argentine dictatorship or in the Algerian war, from militiamen of the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, from secret policemen in the Iraqi or Iranian detention camps - sometimes by following the maxim of Oscar Wilde, "Give a man a mask, and he will tell you the truth."

The Saturday after the plane crash was the usual choir rehearsal day at the church in Kibungo. we sang hymns in good feeling with our Tutsi compatriots, our voices still blending in chorus. On Sunday morning we returned at the appointed hour for mass; they did not arrive. They had already fled into the bush in fear of reprisals, driving their goats and cows with them. That disappointed us greatly, especially on a Sunday. Anger hustled us outside the church door. We left the Lord and our prayers inside to rush home. We changed from our Sunday best into our workaday clothes, we grabbed clubs and machetes, we went straight off to killing.

In the marshes, I was appointed killing boss because I gave orders intensely. Same thing in the Congolese camps. In prison I was appointed charismatic leader because I sang intensely. I enjoyed the alleluias. I gladly felt rocked by those joyous verses. I was steadfast in my love of God.

"You will never see the source of a genocide", he says. "It is buried too deep in grudges, under an accumulation of misunderstandings that we were the last to inherit. We came of age at the worst moment in Rwanda's history: we were taught to obey absolutely, raised in hatred, stocked with slogans. We are an unfortunate generation."
He also says, "there are situations that set you singing if you win or crying if you lose", an unwitting plagiarism of the same observation made by Robert Servatius, Adolph Eichmann's lawyer, at his trial in Jerusalem: "There are some actions for which you are decorated if you succeed and sent to the scaffold if you fail."

When the Tutsis were caught, many died without a word. In Rwanda people say "die like a lamb in the Bible." Of course in Rwanda there are no sheep, so we have never heard their cry.
It sometimes touched us painfully that they awaited death in silence. Evenings, we would ask over and over, "Why no protest from these people who are about to leave? Why do they not beg for mercy?"
The organizers claimed that the Tutsis felt guilty for the sin of being Tutsi. Some interahamwe kept saying they felt responsible for the misfortunes they had brought upon us.
Well, I knew that was not true. The Tutsis were not asking for anything in those fatal moments because they no longer believed in words. They had no more faith in crying out, like frightened animals, for example, howling to be heard above the mortal blows. An overpowering sorrow was carrying the people away. They felt so abandoned they did not even open their mouths. 

Holy the Firm - Annie Dillard

"The joke of the world is less like a banana peel than a rake, the old rake in the grass, the one you step on, foot to forehead. It all comes together. In a twinkling. You have to admire the gag for its symmetry, accomplishing all with one right angle, the same right angle which accomplishes all philosophy."

"Has he no power? Can the other gods carry time and its loves upside down like a doll in their blundering arms? As though we the people were playing house - when we are serious and do love - and not the gods? No, that day's god has no power. No gods have power to save. There are only days. The one great god abandoned us to days, to time's tumult of occasions, abandones us to the god of days each brute and amok in his hugeness and idiocy."

"The great ridged granite millstone of time is illusion, for only the good is real; the great ridged granite millstone of space is illusion, for God is spirit and worlds his flimsiest dreams; but the illusions are almost perfect, are apparently perfect for generations on end, and the pain is also, and undeniably, real. The pain within the millstones' pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other - for world and all the products of extension - is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones' sickening churn and arching to the realm of spirit bare.

"... The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by its sun - but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.      
But how do we know - how could we know - that the real is there? By what freak chance does the skin of illusion ever split, and reveal to us the real, which seems to know us by name, and by what freak chance and why did the capacity to prehend it evolve? "

"I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready at hand. There is an anomalous specificity to all our experience in space, a scandal of particularity, by which God burgeons up or showers down into the shabbiest of occasions, and leaves his creation's dealings with him in the hands of purblind and clumsy amateurs. This is all we are and all we ever were; God kann nicht anders ( God can do no other). This process in time is history; in space, at such shocking random, it is mystery."

"And we need reminding of what time can do, must only do; churn out enormity at random and beat it, with God's blessing, into our heads: that we are created, created, sojourners in a land we did not make, a land with no meaning of itself and no meaning we can make for it alone. Who are we to demand explanations of God? (And what monsters of perfection should we be if we did not?) We forget ourselves, picnicking; we forget where we are. There is no such thing as a freak accident. "God is at home," say Meister Eckhart, "We are in the far country."

"The higher Christian churches - where, if anywhere, I belong - come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute. This is the beginning of wisdom."

"Scholarship has long distinguished between two strains of thought which proceed in the West from human knowledge of God. In one, the ascetic's metaphysic, the world is far from God. Emanating from God, and linked to him by Christ, the world is yet infinitely other than God, furled away from him like the end of a long banner falling. This notion makes, to my mind, a vertical line of the world, a great chain of burning. The more accessible and a universal view, held by Eckhart and by many peoples in various forms, is scarcely different from pantheism; that the world is immanation, that God is in the thing, and eternally present here, if nowhere else."

"There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times."

Human Evolution is Driven by Consciousness

You see from Dawkins’ perspective consciousness is created by biology, therefore, it cannot have any affect on biology. This is the strictly materialistic view. However, there is evidence which suggests this might be incorrect.

For example, stress is a major killer. It leads to high blood pressure, heart disease, and there is even some evidence that it can cause or exacerbate cancer. But, if Dawkins’ theory is correct and biology controls consciousness and not the other way around, then we should not be able to affect our own biology through sheer will. And yet, through relaxation techniques we can lower our blood pressure. We can make a conscious decision to exercise or reduce our caffeine intake to lower our stress levels. These are common conscious decisions which alter our physiology.

Human Evolution is Driven by Consciousness

"The new results indicate that as brains grew larger and entered the world in a less developed state, it became increasingly advantageous to relax the genetic control of their organization, essentially providing a bigger, blanker canvas for adapting and learning. This greater ability to fashion our brains in response to our environment, the study maintains, could provide a link between biological evolution and cultural evolution."

humans-can-outlearn-chimps-thanks-more-flexible-brain-genetics

"There is no centre of the universe! According to the standard theories of cosmology, the universe started with a "Big Bang" about 14 thousand million years ago and has been expanding ever since. Yet there is no centre to the expansion; it is the same everywhere. The Big Bang should not be visualised as an ordinary explosion. The universe is not expanding from a centre into space, rather, the whole universe is expanding and it is doing so equally at all places, as far as we can tell"

"In a conventional explosion, material expands out from a central point. A short moment after the explosion starts, the centre will be the hottest point. Later there will be a spherical shell of material expanding away from the centre until gravity brings it back down to Earth. The Big Bang—as far as we understand it—was not an explosion like that at all. It was an explosion of space, not an explosion in space. According to the standard models there was no space and time before the Big Bang. There was not even a "before" to speak of. So, the Big Bang was very different from any explosion we are accustomed to and it does not need to have a central point."

Where is the Centre of the universe

Either Image

Either God has made man in his image,
or man has made god in his.
Either way, it is a poor reflection of one on the other,
for if God has made man in his image,
then what does that suggest of God?
If man has made god in his image,
then what was does that suggest of man?

The Moral Equivalent of War - William James

"Of the gods we believe and of men we know that, by a law of their nature, wherever they can rule they will. This law was not made by us, and we are not the first to have acted upon it; we did but inherit it, and we know that you and all mankind, if you were as strong as we are, would do as we do."

"Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won't breed it out of us. The popular imagination fairly fattens on the thought of wars. Let public opinion once reach a certain fighting pitch, and no ruler can withstand it."

"Peace" in military mouths today is a synonym for "war expected." The word has become a pure provocative, and no government wishing peace sincerely should allow it ever to be printed in a newspaper. Every up-to-date dictionary should say that "peace" and "war" mean the same thing, now in posse, now in actu. It may even reasonably be said that the intensely sharp preparation for war by the nations is thereal war, permanent, unceasing; and that the battles are only a sort of public verification of the mastery gained during the "peace"-interval."

"But inordinate ambitions are the soul of any patriotism, and the possibility of violent death the soul of all romance."

"Militarism is the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood, and human life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible. Without risks or prizes for the darer, history would be insipid indeed; and there is a type of military character which every one feels that the race should never cease to breed, for everyone is sensitive to its superiority. The duty is incumbent on mankind, of keeping military character in stock — if keeping them, if not for use, then as ends in themselves and as pure pieces of perfection,...."

"When the time of development is ripe the war must come, reason or no reason, for the justifications pleaded are invariably fictions. War is, in short, a permanent human obligation."

"The horror makes the thrill; and when the question is of getting the extremest and supremest out of human nature, talk of expense sounds ignominious. The weakness of so much merely negative criticism is evident — pacifism makes no converts from the military party. The military party denies neither the bestiality nor the horror, nor the expense; it only says that these things tell but half the story. It only says that war is worth them; that, taking human nature as a whole, its wars are its best protection against its weaker and more cowardly self, and that mankind cannot afford to adopt a peace economy."


The Moral Equivalent of Wat

The Social Conquest of Earth - Edward O. Wilson

"To form groups, drawing visceral comfort and pride from familiar fellowship, and to defend the group enthusiastically against rival groups - these are among the absolute universals of human nature and hence culture."

"prepared learning - the inborn propensity to learn something swiftly and decisively."

"People are prone to ethnocentrism. It is an uncomfortable fact that even when given a guilt-free choice, individuals prefer the company of others of the same race, nation, clan, and religion. They trust them more, relax with them better in business and social events, and prefer them more often that not as marriage partners. They are quick to anger at evidence that an out-group is behaving unfairly or receiving undeserved rewards. And they grow hostile to any out group encroaching upon the territory or resources of their in-group."

"The struggle to control vital resources continues globally, and it is growing worse. The problem arose because humanity failed to seize the great opportunity given it at the dawn of the Neolithic era. It might then have halted population growth below the constraining minimum limit. As a species we did the opposite, however. There was no way for us to foresee the consequences of our initial success. We simply took what was given us and continued to multiply and consume in blind obedience to instincts inherited from our humbler, more brutally constrained Paleolithic ancestors."

"Further, the mind consists not just of this inner world but also of the sensations and messages that flow in and out of it from all other parts of the body. To advance from robot to human would be a task of immense technological difficulty. But why should we even wish to try? Even after our machines far exceed our outer mental capacities, they will not have anything resembling human minds. In any case, we do not need such robots, and we will not want them. The biological human mind is our province. With all its quirks, irrationality, and risky productions, and all its conflict and inefficiency, the biological mind is the essence and the very meaning of the human condition."

"With enough population and wealth, the public services of art, sciences, and education can be added - first for the benefit of the elite, then, trickling down, for the general public. The heads of state sit upon a throne, real or virtual. They ally themselves with the high priests, and clothe their authority with rituals of allegiance to the gods."

"The ascent to civilization, from egalitarian band and village to chiefdom to state, has occurred through cultural evolution, not through changes in genes."

"No statistical genetic differences between entire populations have yet been discovered that affect the amygdala and other controlling circuit centers of emotional response. Not is any genetic change known that prescribes average differences between populations in the deep cognitive processing of language and mathematical reasoning - although such may yet be detected.
The stereotypes by which inhabitants of different nations, cities, and villages are often characterized might also have some hereditary basis in fact. However, the evidence suggests that the differences have a historical and cultural origin rather than a genetic one."

"Human nature is not the genes underlying it. They prescribe the developmental rules of the brain, sensory system and behavior that produce human nature."

"Human  nature is the inherited regularities of mental development common to our species. They are the "epigenetic rules," which evolved by the interaction of genetic and cultural evolution that occurred over a long period in deep prehistory.These rules are the genetic biases in the way our senses perceive the world, the symbolic coding by which we represent the world, the options we automatically open to ourselves, and the responses we find easiest and most rewarding to make."

"As epi in the word "epigenetic" implies, the rules of physiological development are not genetically hardwired. They are not beyond conscious control, like the autonomic "behaviors" of heartbeat and breathing. They are less rigid than pure reflexes such as eyeblinks and knee jerks.

"The behaviors created by epigenetic rules are not hardwired like reflexes. It is the epigenetic rules instead that are hardwired, and hence compose the true core of human nature. The behaviors are learned, but the process is what psychologists call "prepared." In prepared learning, we are innately predisposed to learn and thereby reinforce one option over another. We are "counterprepared" to make alternative choices, or even actively to avoid them."

"Their parallel in medical genetics is the "susceptibility" genes of cancer, alcoholism, chronic depression, and many other of the more than a thousand known inherited diseases. Those who possess the genes are not absolutely condemned to acquire the trait, but in certain environments they are more likely than the average person to do so."

"The epigenetic rules of behavior that affect culture, and have arisen by natural selection, act the same way but have the opposite effect. They are the norm, and strong deviations from them are likely to be scrubbed out by either cultural evolution or genetic evolution, or both.

"As defined broadly by both anthropologists and biologists, culture is the combination of traits that distinguishes one group from another. A culture trait is a behavior that is either first invented within a group or else learned from another group, then transmitted among members of the group."

"The elaboration of culture depends upon long-term memory, and in this capacity humans rank far above all animals. The vast quantity stored in our immensely enlarged forebrains makes us consummate storytellers. We summon dreams and recollections of experience from across a lifetime and use them to create scenarios, past and future. We live in our conscious mind with the consequence of our actions, whether real or imagined. Placed out in alternative versions, our inner stories allow us to override immediate desires in favor of delayed pleasure. By long-range planning we defeat, for a while at least, the urging of our emotions. This inner life is why each person is unique and precious. When one dies, an entire library of both experience and imaginings is extinguished."

"What was the driving force that led to the threshold of complex culture? It appears to have been group selection. A group with members who could read intentions and cooperate among themselves while predicting the actions of competing groups, would have an enormous advantage over others less gifted. There was undoubtedly competition among group members, leading to natural selection of traits that gave advantage of one individual over another. But more important for the species entering new environments and competing with powerful rivals were unity and cooperation within the group. Morality, conformity, religious fervor, and fighting ability combined with imagination and memory to produce the winner."

"The genetic basis of human language acquisition," the researchers conclude, "did not coevolve with language, but primarily predates the emergence of language. As suggested by Darwin, the fit between language and its underlying mechanisms arose because language has evolved to fit the human brain, rather that the reverse."

"What genes prescribe or assist in prescribing is not one trait as opposed to another but the frequency of traits and the pattern they form as cultural innovation made them available. The expression of the genes may be plastic, allowing a society to choose one or more traits from among a multiplicity of choices. Or else it may not be plastic, allowing only one trait to be chosen by all societies."

"Are people innately good, but corruptible by the forces of evil? Or, are they instead innately wicked, and redeemable only by the forces of good? People are both. And so it will forever be unless we change our genes, because the human dilemma was foreordained in the way our species evolved, and therefore an unchangeable part of human nature. Human beings and their social orders are intrinsically imperfectible and fortunately so. In a constantly changing world, we need the flexibility that only imperfection provides."

"Nevertheless, an iron rule exists in genetic social evolution. It is that selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, while groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. The victory can never be complete: the balance of selection pressures cannot move to either extreme. If individual selection we to dominate, societies would dissolve. If group selections were to dominate, human groups would come to resemble ant colonies"

"coercive empathy, meaning that unless people are psychopaths, they automatically feel the pain of others."

"Human beings are prone to be moral - do the right thing, hold back, give aid to others, sometimes even at personal risk - because  natural selection has favored those interactions of group members benefitting the group as a whole."

"The learning of complex information and its storage in memory are deliberate, painstaking processes, but the loss of information seems to take place with no trouble at all."

As the seventeenth-century essayist Francois de La Rochefoucauld observed, "Modesty is due to a fear of incurring the well-merited envy and contempt which pursues those who are intoxicated by good fortune. It is a useless display of strength of mind; and the modesty of those who attain the highest eminence is due to a desire to appear even greater that their position."

"indirect reciprocity, by which a reputation for altruism and cooperativeness accrues to an individual, even if the actions that build it are no more than ordinary."

"The power of organized religions is based upon their contribution to social order and personal security, not to the search for truth. The goal of religions is submission to the will and common good of the tribe."

"The illogic of religions is not a weakness in them, but their essential strength.... For outsiders openly to doubt such dogmas is regarded an invasion of privacy and a personal insult. For insiders to raise doubt is punishable heresy."

"Religious faith offers the psychological security that uniquely comes from belonging to a group, and a divinely blessed one at that. At least within the immense throngs of Abrahamic faithful around the world, it promises eternal life after death, and in heaven, not hell - especially if we choose the right denomination within the many available, and pledge to faithfully practice its rituals."

"Our sensory world, what we can learn unaided about reality external to our bodies, is pitifully small."

"Humanity is a biological species in a biological world. In every function of our bodies and mind and at every level, we are exquisitely well adapted to live on this particular planet. We belong in the biosphere of our birth. Although exalted in many ways, we remain an animal species of the global fauna. Our lives are restrained by the two laws of biology: all of life's entities and processes are obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry; and all of life's entities and processes have arisen through evolution and by natural selection."

"The more the physical processes of consciousness have been defined by scientific research, the less has been left to any phenomenon that can be intuitively labeled as free will. We are free as independent beings, but our decisions are not free of all the organic processes that created our personal brains and minds. Free will therefore appears to be ultimately biological."

what is confabulation

"most writers on the subject do not consider confabulation to be lying, because it lacks at least two crucial components: the intent to deceive, and knowledge contrary to what is claimed."

" The creative ability to construct plausible-sounding responses and some ability to verify those responses seem to be separate in the human brain;"

"Confabulation involves absence of doubt about something one should doubt:..It is a sort of pathological certainty about ill-grounded thoughts and utterances. The phenomenon contains important clues about how humans assess their thoughts and attach either doubt or certainty to them"

"There is also a clear connection here to the human gift for storytelling....? Philosopher Daniel Dennett argued that one sort of meaning we can give to the overworked term ‘‘the self’’ is that the self is the subject of a story we create and tell to others about who we are: ‘‘Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs, but telling stories, and more particularly concocting and controlling the story we tell others—and ourselves—about who we are’’ (Dennett 1991, 418)."

"Confabulation may also share with Dennett’s storytelling an unintentional quality: ‘‘And just as spiders don’t have to think, consciously and deliberately, about how to spin their webs, and just as beavers, unlike professional human engineers, do not consciously and deliberately plan the structures they build, we (unlike professional human storytellers) do not consciously and deliberately figure out what narratives to tell, and how to tell them’’ (1991, 418). In this Dennettian conception, confabulation is also a social phenomenon, but one that is more directly in the service of the individual than those mentioned earlier about the need for leaders to be confident....Making categorizations always involves a risk of error, but doubt is a cognitive luxury and occurs only in highly developed nervous systems.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262582711_sch_0001.pdf

Six Easy Pieces - Richard P. Feynman

"Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet."

"all things are made of atoms - little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distant apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another."

"The most important hypothesis in all of biology, for example, is that everything that animals do, atoms do. In other words, there is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics."

electrical force = likes repel, unlikes attract.

if we get very close, attraction rises, because the repulsion of likes and attraction of unlikes will tend to bring unlikes closer together and push likes farther apart. Then the repulsion is less than the attraction.

quantum mechanics = it is not possible to predict exactly what will happen in any circumstance.
"nature, as we understand it today, behaves in such a way that it is fundamentally impossible to make a precise prediction of exactly what will happen in a given experiment.

"the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment."

"Now it is true that when the frequency is low(matter), the field aspect of the phenomenon is more evident,...But as the frequency increases (light), the particle aspects of the phenomenon become more evident..."

"We do not know how the universe got started, and we have never made experiments which check our ideas of space and time accurately, below some tiny distance, so we only know that our ideas work above that distance."

"The stuff of which we are made, was "cooked" once, in a star, and spit out....The furnace was like the stars, and so it is very likely that our elements were "made" in the stars and spit out in the explosions which we call novae and super-novae."

"The central problem of the mind, if you will, or the nervous system, is this: when an animal learns something, it can do something different than it could before, and its brain cell must have changed too, if it is made out of atoms. In what ways is it different? We do not know where to look, or what to look for, when something is memorized. We do not know what it means, or, what change there is in the nervous system, when a fact is learned."

"This is a very interesting subject which we have not the time to discuss further - the relationship between thinking and computing machines. It must be appreciated, of course, that this subject will tell us very little about the real complexities of ordinary human behavior. All human beings are so different."

"A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics; the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of the stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts - physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on- remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!"

conservation of energy = there is a certain quantity of energy that does not change.

It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is.

"it is hard to exaggerate the importance of the effect on the history of science produced by this great success of the theory of gravitation. Compare the confusion, the lack of confidence, the incomplete knowledge that prevailed in the earlier ages, when there were endless debates and paradoxes, with the clarity and simplicity of this law-this fact that all the moons and planets and stars have such a simple rule to govern them, and further that man could understand it and deduce how the planets should move! This is the reason for the success of the sciences in the following years, for it gave hope that the other phenomena of the world might also have such beautifully simple laws."

"All we have done is to describe how the earth moves around the sun, but we have not said what makes it go. Newton made no hypotheses about this; he was satisfied to find what it did without getting into the machinery of it. No one has since given any machinery. It is characteristic of the physical laws that they have this abstract character. The law of conservation of energy is a theorem concerning quantities that have to be calculated and added together, with no mention of the machinery, and likewise the great laws of mechanics are quantitative mathematical laws for which no machinery is available. Why can we use math to describe nature without a mechanism behind it? No one knows."

"... No machinery has ever been invented that "explains" gravity without also predicting some other phenomenon that does not exist."

unified field theory = effort to unify electricity and gravity, force of electricity is a constant, with a minus sign, times the product of the charges, and varies inversely as the square of the distance. The two laws regarding electricity and gravity both involve the same square of the distance

"If we take, in some natural units, the repulsion of two electrons (mature's universal charge) due to electricity, and the attraction of two electrons due to their masses, we can measure the ratio of electrical repulsion to the gravitational attraction. The ratio is independent of the distance and is a fundamental constant of nature."

"It is a fact that the force of gravitation is proportional to the mass, the quantity which is fundamentally a measure of inertia - of how hard it is to hold something which is going around in a circle."

Einstein's law of gravitation = anything that has energy has mass.
mass - a thing attracted gravitationally. Even light, which has energy, must have a mass.

"The quantum-mechanical aspects of nature have not yet been carried over to gravitation. When the scale is so small that we need the quantum effects, the gravitational effects are so weak that the need for a quantum theory of gravitation has not yet developed."  

"We would like to emphasize a very important difference between classical and quantum mechanics. We've been talking about the probability that an electron will arrive in a given circumstance. We have implied that in our experimental arrangement (or even in the best possible one) it would be impossible to predict exactly what would happen. We can only predict the odds! This would mean, if it were true, that physics has given up on the problem of trying to predict exactly what will happen in a definite circumstance. Yes! Physics has given up. We do not know how to predict what would happen in a given circumstance, and we believe now that it is impossible, that the only thing that can be predicted is the probability of different events. It must be recognized that this is a retrenchment in our earlier ideal of understanding nature. It may be a backward step, but no one has seen a way to avoid it."

does there need to be a nonmaterial cause as an explanation for the entire material universe?

"No one looking at the vast extent of the universe and the completely random location of homo sapiens within it (in both space and time) could seriously maintain that the whole thing was intentionally created for us. This realization began with Galileo, and has only intensified ever since."

"In any case, does there need to be a nonmaterial cause as an explanation for the entire material universe? Causal explanation either goes on forever backward in time or it comes to a stop somewhere. Even people who want to postulate a nonmaterial cause of the material universe often see no need to invoke yet another cause for that nonmaterial cause, and so are content to let the sequence of causal explanations come to an end. But the initial state of the universe (if there is one) could just as well be the uncaused cause. Or if there is no initial state, and the universe goes back infinitely in time, then it can’t have a cause that precedes it in time."
"Krauss does not suggest that the universe came to exist “from nothing” in the sense of “did not come from anything at all,” but rather that it came from a quantum vacuum state. He seems to think that such a vacuum state would be a satisfying place to end the causal regress as the state with no causal antecedent. The vacuum state has many important symmetries, so if one could tell a physical story of everything coming out of a vacuum state it would have a certain appealing plausibility. But one could still ask, “Why start with the vacuum state rather than something else?” I think we don’t know enough to make any plausible guess about even whether there was an initial state, much less what it might have been. This goes beyond what we have good evidence or theory for."
"Atheism is the default position in any scientific inquiry, just as a-quarkism or a-neutrinoism was. That is, any entity has to earn its admission into a scientific account either via direct evidence for its existence or because it plays some fundamental explanatory role. Before the theoretical need for neutrinos was appreciated (to preserve the conservation of energy) and then later experimental detection was made, they were not part of the accepted physical account of the world. To say physicists in 1900 were “agnostic” about neutrinos sounds wrong: they just did not believe there were such things.

As yet, there is no direct experimental evidence of a deity, and in order for the postulation of a deity to play an explanatory role there would have to be a lot of detail about how it would act. If, as you have suggested, we are not “good judges of how the deity would behave,” then such an unknown and unpredictable deity cannot provide good explanatory grounds for any phenomenon. The problem with the “minimal view” is that in trying to be as vague as possible about the nature and motivation of the deity, the hypothesis loses any explanatory force, and so cannot be admitted on scientific grounds. Of course, as the example of quarks and neutrinos shows, scientific accounts change in response to new data and new theory. The default position can be overcome."
From: Opinionator | Modern Cosmology Versus God’s Creation

By GARY GUTTING

 JUNE 15, 2014 8:00 PM

Tim Maudlin, a professor of philosophy at New York University and the author of “Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time.”

The Meaning of Human Existence - Edward O. Wilson

"Human existence maybe simpler than we thought. There is no predestination, no unfathomed mystery of life. Demons and gods do not vie for our allegiance. Instead, we are self-made, independent, alone, and fragile, a biological species adapted to live in a biological world. What counts for long-term survival is intelligent self understanding, based upon a greater independence of thought than that tolerated today even in our most advanced democratic societies."

"We are all genetic chimeras, at once saints and sinners, champions of the truth and hypocrites not - because humanity has failed to reach some foreordained religious or ideological ideal, but because of the way our species originated across millions of years of biological evolution."

"Within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. Or, risking over simplification, individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue."

"It was only after eons of time, during which millions of species has come and gone, that one of the lineages, the direct antecedents of Homo sapiens, won the grand lottery of evolution. The payout was civilization based on symbolic language, and culture, and from these a gargantuan power to extract the nonrenewable resources of the planet - while cheerfully exterminating our fellow species."

"In ordinary usage the word “meaning” implies intention, intention implies design, and design implies a designer. Any entity, any process, or definition of any word itself is put into play as a result of an intended consequence in the mind of the designer. This is the heart of the philosophical worldview of organized religions, and in particular their creation stories. Humanity, it assumes, exists for a purpose. Individuals have a purpose in being on Earth. Both humanity and individuals have meaning.
There is a second, broader way the word “meaning” is used and a very different worldview implied. It is that the accidents of history, not the intentions of a designer, are the source of meaning. There is no advance design, but instead overlapping networks of physical cause and effect. The unfolding of history is obedient only to the general laws of the Universe. Each event is random yet alters the probability of later events."

To be kept forcibly in solitude is to be kept in pain, and put on the road to madness. A person’s membership in his group — his tribe — is a large part of his identity.

"the collective human mind shrivels without frontiers. The longing for odysseys and faraway adventure is in our genes."

"The human impact on biodiversity, to put the matter briefly as possible, is an attack on ourselves. It is the action of a mindless juggernaut fueled by the biomass of the very life it destroys."

"We alone among all species gave grasped the reality of the living world, seen the beauty of nature, and given value to the individual. We alone have measured the quality of mercy among our own kind. Might we now extend the same concern to the living world that gave us birth?"

"All of man's troubles have arisen from the fact that we do not know what we are and do not agree on what we want to be" Jean Bruller - You Shall Know Them.

"The human mind did not evolve as an externally guided progression toward either pure reason or emotional fulfillment. It remains as it has always been, an instrument of survival that employs both reason and emotion."

"Decades of research have discovered that human nature is not the genes that prescribe the emotions and learning preparedness. It is not the cultural universals, which are its ultimate product. Human nature is the ensemble of hereditary regularities in mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to others and thus connect genes to culture in the brain of every person."

"The problem is not in the nature or even in the existence of God. It is in the biological origins of human existence and in the nature of the human mind, and what made us the evolutionary pinnacle of the biosphere. The best way to live in this real world is to free ourselves of demons and tribal gods."

"... what if anything in the manifold activities of the brain could possible pull away from the brain's machinery in order to create scenarios and make decisions of its own? The answer is of course the self. And what could that be? And where is it? The self cannot exist as a paranormal being living on its own within the brain. It is instead the central dramatic character of the confabulated scenarios. In these stories it is always on center stage, if not as participant then as observer and commentator, because that is where all of the sensory information arrives and is integrated. The stories that compose the conscious mind cannot be taken away from the mind's physical neurobiological system, which serves as script writer, director, and cast combined. The self, despite the illusion of its independence created in the scenarios, is part of the anatomy and physiology of the body."

"Because the individual mind cannot be fully described by itself or by any separate researcher, the self - celebrated star player in the scenarios of consciousness - can go on passionately believing in its independence and free will....Confidence in free will is biologically adaptive. Without it the conscious mind, at best a fragile dark window on the real world, would be cursed by fatalism. Like a prisoner confined for life to solitary confinement, deprived of any freedom to explore and starving for surprise, it would deteriorate."

"So, does free will exist? Yes, if not in ultimate reality, then at least in the operational sense necessary for sanity and thereby for the perpetuation of the human species."

"We were created not by a supernatural intelligence but by chance and necessity as one species out of millions of species in Earth's biosphere. Hope and wish for otherwise as we will, there is no evidence of an external grace shining down upon us, no demonstrable destiny or purpose assigned to us, no second life vouchsafed us for the end of the present one. We are, it seems, completely alone. And that in my opinion is a very good thing. It means we are completely free. As a result we can more easily diagnose the etiology of the irrational beliefs that so unjustifiably divide us."

"Faith is the evidence given of a person's submission to a particular god, and even then not to the deity directly but to other humans who claim to represent the god."

Ragtime EL Doctorow

" It proposed that human beings, by the fact of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through"

" I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them."

"It is the law of wealth that such people only profit from the money that is taken from them. It is the way things work. Somehow every dollar paid over to you has resulted in his profit. And you will be left with a finite amount of money that you will spend and waste until you are as poor as when you started."

you are not that

what is the purpose for meditation?
no purpose
what is the reason for meditation?
no reason
what is the goal of meditation?
no goal
why should I do meditation?
no I

you are not the right hand, nor the left hand
you are not both hands, nor neither
you are not the inbreath, nor the outbreath
you are not swaying to the right, nor to the left
you are not the center
you are not that

you are not the rising nor are you the falling
you do not revolve around the sun, nor does the sun revolve around you
you are not the living, nor are you the dying
the red leaves in the fall are green in the spring
the cold air in the winter is hot in the summer
what is, is not, what is not, is