update on What I Believe

[metasynthie]

It's been cold this winter and as a result I've been spending a lot of time inside my own head. I have been rattling around and reading lots of philosophical papers and the like, with the result being that I have formulated a new set of beliefs for myself:

• things worth paying good money for include (but are not limited to) strong garbage bags, nicely made books, fancy pork products, power supplies, mattresses, and haircuts;
  
• although many of you may associate me with the term "halfrobot," I have decided that I am not half-robotic, despite one of my parents being significantly more robotic, in a stereotypical sense, than the other one. Part of the reason I've abandoned this identity is because it's just a little too angsty for my 30s. The other half is because:
  
• I've come to believe that there's not really much difference between human beings and robots anyway; humans are just very complicated organic robots with self-awareness;
  
• This also basically means that all those theories about free will are pretty silly; nobody really "decides" anything in any way that is different than a computer program taking a particular branch on a decision tree in accordance with a large set of factors. I am with Daniel Dennett in his valuing of "varieties of free will worth having," namely agency, which is the same kind of decision-making power and autonomy that a self-aware robot has. In other words, I am a "compatibilist"
  
• The most important upshot of this is that it's utterly ridiculous to "punish someone for being bad," and that the punitive aspect of our justice system should be eliminated, leaving us with a model that is essentially reparative, one that tries to make it more likely that better choices (and better opportunities) will happen in the future, leading to better ramifications;
  
• Also, no souls, since one of the reasons for the invention of the soul seems to be a rationalization of free will. The other one is the afterlife, which is a horrible, grotesque idea. Why would you want to die and then BE ALIVE again? I want to die and just be dead, thank you. I didn't want Seinfeld to go on for as many seasons as it did either; death is often a wonderful and scary and meaningful thing. Death gives meaning to so much in life, and the loss of death is inextricably interwined with the sweetness of love. This is why all our stories about people living forever have an undercurrent of being about sad meaningless existences. So for heaven's sake, why would you want to have another life after this one? Yuck! Just die and be happy about it;
  
• late-industrial capitalism is very problematic, but free markets are basically a fact of humanity, just like farting, and trying to get rid of things like trade and money is silly, hubristic, and tends towards a "controller class;
  
• I should really learn Spanish, since so many people seem to like coming up to me and talking to me in Spanish or asking me questions in Spanish. I feel like it would be more polite and less single-language-politics of me if I actually could answer them;
  
• I got into the habit of describing myself as an atheist for the last few years, and I do have to say that the public (not private) disdain for and discrimination against atheists is kind of appalling in this country. But really I was just saying that because I figured there probably wasn't a God. Now that I think about it more, it's kind of amusing to think about gods and their effects on the world, since they certainly exist as a very large kind of meme. And who knows, really, they might have existed at some point or are still out there somewhere. What I find utterly ridiculous is the idea of a capital-G God that is benevolent, loves you personally, and also created the universe and knows and controls its entirety. That's an internally incoherent and inconsistent idea; it's just silly. If you believe in an omnipotent and omniscient creator God, then that God is by definition a crazy asshole who is bent on torturing people, and why would you worship that? It's like trying to get little favors from Insane All-Powerful Hitler or something. I'm perfectly happy to believe in "sure maybe there are gods," plural, in the animist sense that goes back to my roots on one side of my family. It wouldn't really be fair (or wise) not to hedge your bets on multiple gods, since if you're supposing that there might be one out there... why not a BUNCH. But that tradition basically teaches that although there might be gods out there, you should Not Mess Around With Them More Than Necessary to Placate Them because they are Not Necessarily Nice and May Want To Eat You Or Fill You With Horrible God Babies. I mean, it's happened before. So I'm basically what they call a dystheist, with a rather Confucian strain of "leave those no-good gods alone and get back to studying some human ethics, fool."
  
• Gays and queers are two mostly-distinct groups of people. You can usually (but not always) tell them apart by asking them, "what do you think of the struggle for marriage equality?" This is not news to most of you, but I thought that some readers may benefit from an exposition of this belief.
  
• I believe that children are the future. I mean, they are. After most of the older people are dead, they're going to be running things, right? At least until some kind of method for immortality is developed, which may happen in the next 200 years. In that case most of the people alive then will also be the future, which is probably really, really, really bad news.
  
• Eating animal products is immoral and wrong, but it's really convenient for protein and I'm lazy, plus human beings are built so that meat tastes really good, even though this is amongst the biological parts of humans that is not really appropriate anymore. So I'm willing to inflict unjustifiable suffering on other beings, because I can and because it's socially sanctioned. I think about this whenever I eat meat, but I have trouble getting it to bother me. This suggests that a lot of my morality is bound up in convention and possibly social contract, rather than universal compassion.
  
• Trans people should protect other trans people from poor personal appearance decisions, but within limits. I still feel a little bad about successfully pressuring a friend to shave off all his scraggly facial hair.
  
• Nature is messed up, and it's necessary to get beyond parts of it; however, nature is also very large, complicated, and powerful, so it's also rather hubristic to think you can just mess around willy-nilly and change everything for the better without messing something else up. I mean, the same is true of big huge computer programs, and humans usually MADE all of that ourselves, and nature is way the hell more bigger and complex.
  
• Saying that something is "natural" is one of the poorest justifications for something's good quality that I can think of. Human beings and animals do all sorts of horrible things naturally, and people who romanticize "nature" are largely deluded, except for the ones who romanticize nature in all its horror. Humans' nearest relatives also beat each other to death, plus then they eat the babies; a lot of animals "naturally" rape each other, or "naturally" deforest their own environments, and large groups of humans do the same thing! Look, it's not like nature can't be broken too; that's kind of silly (unless you believe that some kind of superhero God made everything all perfect and only people screwed it up, which also seems silly).
  
• Civil unions were a good idea, but the Connecticut Supreme Court put the kibosh on that idea, which was a misguided decision based on the wrong principles, if you ask me.
  
• You can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't -- oh wait, now we have the Internet.

If anyone wants to discuss these exciting topics with me, I'm sure my friends and roommates would be most grateful, since they are like, totally sick of me babbling about "agency."