Being is Nothingness

"Stoic absence of passion, Zen absence of will, Heideggerian gelassenheit and physics-as-the-absolute-conception-of-reality are… just so many variations on a single project - the project of escaping from time and chance." (Richard Rorty)

 It is our human nature to rage against the dying of the light, to fill the nothingness with somethingness, to give meaning where there is none, truth where there is none, knowledge where there is none, to make reason where none exists, to be rational where irrationality reigns. At least, this is my observation. I thought I should write something about this at this current time and lay out a more comprehensive article after my last few on being and consciousness. As you will know, these things mean something to me and I want to try and give a slightly more comprehensive account of them from my own understanding. It will at least help me to do this and, maybe, one or two others as well.

It is my intuition that the time has come to acknowledge the gaping hole that exists at the centre of Being, to acknowledge that our human powers and perceptions fail, to acknowledge that truth is insubstantial, knowledge is merely what is useful, that our seeing is partial and mostly blind, that we are contingent and merely fitted for a form of life, a very narrow form of life, evolved to live and die on an inconsequential speck in the vastness of space. I do not see that there is any Whole or Unity or Truth or amount of Knowledge or Privileged Insight or Enlightenment or Meaning that we can work our way towards or find. There is no Deity or Spirituality, no Body of Privileged Information or Holy Being which is going to allow us to see behind the veil of our limitations and glimpse the Holy of Holies of  "how-things-really-are" or "what-life-is-all-about". There is no "our-true-place-in-the-universe". These things are a mirage, and we are victims of their illusion.

It should be noted, then, that I am hardly the first person to diagnose nothingness at the centre of all that is. "Nihilism" has been a problem for European philosophy for 200-300 years. In other traditions, emptiness has been held as a value in itself. 2,300 years ago there was at least one Jewish teacher (a person named Qoheleth, the speaker in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes to which I will return below) teaching that life is "breath" and a chasing after the wind. And he was continually asking "What does it profit...?" So we can be sure that we are not the first to have the thought that at the centre of Being is…. nothing and that life itself is insubstantial. It may be, like the Ego, that certain illusory goals and beliefs (the aforementioned list of gods and pseudo-gods such as Meaning, Truth and Knowledge) were necessary and that evolution fitted us with them to best enable our survival. But we make a terrible mistake in taking them too seriously, petrifying them and making deities of them. But, then again, maybe we are only living out the life that we were meant to lead in doing so?

Nevertheless, I want to suggest today that the claim that something "is" (in any essentialist or foundational sense) is the most meaningless claim any human being could ever make, in my opinion. We have neither the insight nor the means to make any such claim. We live in a constant stream of existence, of consciousness, and randomly pluck things from the torrent as it rushes past and then make connections between one and another. If it has the utility of working or being, so it seems, repeatable, then we deify it as something that is…. but have no genuine right to do so. We can only ever speak properly of a constant becoming, a changing as one day turns into the next. We are part of a stream and we observe a small stretch of the journey before we blink… and cease to exist.

I think the key insight here, which I hope to flesh out below, is that it's not in spite of the nothingness that we make meaning, truth and knowledge: it's because of it. It might have been thought, pre-reflectively, that these things arise as we have an awareness of a greater thing that is out there, some god or truth or insight into being that is currently beyond us. And so we yearn to reach it guided by our belief that there is "a-way-things-are". But this is not so. Instead, we experience the void of nothing and experience the edge of chaos and cannot bear it. And so we become (or, in evolutionary terms, became) machines for the creation of meaning, truth and knowledge to give us something that can allow us to live. No one could survive the chaos, it would make our lives unlivable. Instead, we find a form of life through which we can survive, endure and prosper. Because at the heart of Being there is a void, we find things plastic to our touch and begin to create. This is to say that our "reality" is not nearly so fixed as some might have you believe. Or, at least, not nearly as restrictive.

It's worth noting at this point that I am not here making any claims to universal knowledge. That would be both arrogant and entirely contradictory to my point. I am simply emptying out onto the page my understanding such as it is at this current time as it has been educated by the thoughts, and the thought, that I have encountered on my journey down the stream. I regard "right and wrong" in this connection as to be strictly missing the point. I don't regard the journey as about right or wrong. I regard it as about the experience of the journey. I regard philosophy, which is nominally what I am doing here, as about utilization of the mind and as about, as it originally was, a love of wisdom and not as a means to some fabled special insight, much less some technical or hidden knowledge. As such, I believe that questions are more fundamental than answers and that thinking is the most important activity, one that can lead us to find the questions at the heart of our existence and our being. This, I see as I look back, is what I have really been doing throughout my life since I was 8 or 9 years old.

For myself, I see myself at a crossover of Philosophy and Spirituality, two things which can, indeed, be compatible. There have been many spiritual and philosophical thinkers. The belief in god is a logical outworking of one way of doing these things but not a necessary one and not one I have found myself coming to be convinced by in the end. Indeed, I think back 20 years to when I would have said I believed in a god and cringe at how naive I was at that time. However, I don't think that spirituality, in itself and in all its forms, is to be pilloried or violently attacked as some like Richard Dawkins do. Both Philosophy and Spirituality are searching for things to fill the nothingness at the heart of being (things like meaning, truth, knowledge or god) and, as such, are entirely understandable in that context. The attacks of those like Dawkins merely show an arrogant and boorish lack of humble understanding. Humility, we should remember, is perhaps the quality human beings need most in the face of the all-encompassing nothingness that surrounds us. Perhaps those who are least humble are the ones who are most desperately running away in a futile attempt to escape it? I would argue that where Dawkins sees "god" and rages he actually only sees "Truth" instead - which functions in much the same way for him as god does for his opponents. He is more like those he despises than he would ever want to admit.

My approach below in the rest of this blog will be based on a firm belief that all the connections human beings make in their thinking are fictions. They are merely either useful or not useful. (It is to be noted that fiction is not an opposite of truth. We habitually share fictions that, whilst not true in themselves, elucidate some truth or beliefs we would hold dear.) All syntheses are at least fictional and tell a story that works at a certain time and place. We know that nothing stands for all time and so in place of models of accuracy and truth, models which have their very failure inscribed within them from the start, I use models of honesty and authenticity which have a validity of time and place. What follows will be my attempt to describe the nothingness at the heart of not just human being, but all Being, and how I came to find it. I will do so in my own words (believing that this is the most authentic way I can do it in a blog for general readers) and I will also try to point up some issues this raises and some of the options before us. I take it that I don't need to point out again that this is merely my own partial account (in at least 2 senses).

So why would anyone think that at the heart of Being there is a gaping chasm of nothingness, a black hole at the centre of all that is? For me this realisation came by thinking and reading in addition to the lived experience of my life. I read philosophers like William James who said that "truth" was those things that were merely "good in the way of belief" and Richard Rorty who wrote papers and books extolling the idea that beliefs are not true or false in the sense of corresponding to an antecedent world, but only in the sense that they are useful beliefs and that it pays to believe them. Where James, a man of his philosophical time, talked about the world of experience, Rorty, in keeping with the linguistic turn and focus in more modern philosophy, talks about language. Indeed, Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher obsessed with thinking about Being, called language "the house of Being". But it is when thinking about language that we begin to realise that language is not a perspicuous tool for penetrating to the heart of Being but, instead, a collection of "tools for coping with objects rather than representations of objects, and as providing different sets of tools for different purposes" (Richard Rorty). Another very famous philosopher of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, described language as like a game in which we, as various different communities, need to know the rules of the game we are playing in order to take part in using the language. This makes language sound very much like a social practice as opposed to the innate logic of the universe, something that, at first, Wittgenstein himself had tried to find. But, on his later thinking, no language gets us closer to reality because that is not what language is for. Language is there to help us deal with things not represent them, correspond to them or describe them in their essence. All this is to say that language is in no way foundational to Being like a code for how things really are. Rather, it is descriptive of it in as many ways as there are human purposes.

There were for me other philosophical indicators that traditional god substitutes such as Knowledge, Truth or Meaning had ideas above their station. About 16 years ago, as I prepared to start my PhD studies, I chanced upon a book by Friedrich Nietzsche. I knew next to nothing about him save that I knew his work had been co-opted (and corrupted) by the Nazis. I began to read the book (which, soon after, grew to become all his books) and found it very reader friendly but in no way simplistic. I have learned many things in those 16 years since by reading Nietzsche. One of those things is the "will to system" that human beings have. Another is that human beings are excellent at deceiving themselves. Nietzsche, at times, is a very astute and insightful observer of his kind and of their intellectual habits and failings. Thus, he describes truth as "a mobile army of metaphors" and says that "We believe when we speak of trees, colours, snow, and flowers, we have knowledge of the things themselves, and yet we possess only metaphors of things which in no way correspond to the original entities." In the same piece of writing he will argue that our concepts are a "making equivalent of that which is non-equivalent" and that "The thing-in-itself (which would be, precisely, pure truth, truth without consequences) is impossible even for the user of language to grasp". Perhaps my favourite Nietzschean thought, though, is this one:

Life as the product of life. However far man may extend himself with his knowledge, however objective he may appear to himself - ultimately he reaps nothing but his own biography.

I find in this perfectly crafted thought (and Nietzsche's books are full of hundreds of such thoughts as well as more lengthy arguments) a perfect summary of all of our lives. Life, so it says to me, is not about knowledge or truth or meaning. Language does not get to the heart of anything. We do not perceive past some intellectual or spiritual barrier to something that is more real than real. Life is just a time period and all we do when we live is create our history.

And so I took up and ran with this theme as I continued my studies. I entered the world of  French 20th century philosophy where Camus tells us that the only genuine philosophical question is to ask if life is worth living at all. In that same environment Sartre proclaims that we are all "condemned to be free", an expression of our individual existential freedom, Foucault delineates how our human knowledge is shaped by the operations of power and Jacques Derrida builds a whole philosophy around the idea that human language, and human meaning with it, corrupts and deconstructs itself even as it goes about its business. 

My final philosophical insights came not from a Frenchman, but from the very American literary and legal academic, Stanley Fish. His work on meaning as constructed, on human communities as always situated and contextualised and, thus, on just "anything" never having the possibility to be the case, ("anything that can be made to go, goes" is his insightful gloss on the more traditional "anything goes" that people who "don't believe in reality" are often accused of believing) convinced me that there can be no "real world" in the highly philosophical sense that some people often mean it. There is the world that is available to us, the world that we sense and describe and brush up against every day. It is a world that constricts and constrains us. But we cannot penetrate it in the way that some deceptive dualisms such as those like reality and appearance or intrinsic and extrinsic would have us believe. There is no inner reality to find. There is, for example, no inherent morality of the universe (there is merely prudent or considerate behaviour). Instead, all we have is a world of relations and descriptions, some more useful than others, a world that constrains but that is also material for the constructive and creative engines of our minds and language and purposes.

It is at this point that it would be reasonable to feel loss. We want to think that what we have in our hands is solid and, well, real. I say that the world I am describing, the one with nothingness at its heart, is and that I certainly have no problem believing that we live on an amazing planet in an amazing universe full of everything from planets, stars and galaxies to electrons and electro-magnetic radiation. It's just that there is no god figure for us to bow down before, nothing really real that we can feel appropriately supplicant before or in touch with, no divinity of any kind that we can share in, no "real-way-things-are" unconnected from some human purpose or description. There is only the world of experience and our means of describing it and making use of it. Perhaps, then, we might want to share in the conclusion of one of the biblical writers, Qoheleth (to give him his Jewish name), when he says "Sheer futility, sheer futility, everything is futile!" (Qoheleth 1:2). I myself often translate the Hebrew word "Hebel" that is behind the word "futile" there (I did study biblical Hebrew at university with some success and so feel able to make such comments) as "absurd". Everything is absurd. It is absurd not in the sense of funny or amusing but in the sense of being pitched into a game you must play but can't win or where, as Camus discusses in The Myth of Sisyphus, we must forever push a rock up a hill only to have it roll down. And thus the cycle begins again. 

Qoheleth looks out upon a world in which human beings die like beasts and the good suffer whilst the evil prosper. No path seems to lead to any meaningful conclusion. There seems to be no point, no target to aim for. In lieu of a better conclusion we might almost say that stuff just seems random, a matter of time and chance. "Why be wise when the wise and the fool both die?" he asks. "All is futility (or absurd) and chasing after the wind" (Qoheleth 1:17). In a later section, Qoheleth muses on that fact that we humans can grasp no overarching meaning or knowledge or truth about our existence or about existence in general. (Today we would call this the death of the metanarrative.)  His conclusion is that the only pleasure to be found is in "pleasure and enjoyment through life" (Qoheleth 3:12-13). And that sounds very like Nietzsche's biography comment to me. If you look for meaning in something greater than yourself, or something greater than you within, you will not find it. It's not there. All you have is the life you actually live - and to enjoy it. 

Of course, the charge may be raised that there are, indeed, many people who do find meaning and truth and knowledge in things greater than themselves. The world does not lack for believers in gods of many kinds - from the little old lady who goes to church to the evolutionary biologist who worships at the altar of "truth" (the aforementioned Dawkins). "So what is going on here?" you may rightly ask. One answer to this, I think, might lie in the thought of French postmodern thinker, Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard is famous for saying that things like the first Gulf War "never happened". He did not mean to suggest that there was no war. He means to suggest that the war we saw through newspaper headlines and 24 hour rolling news coverage was empty and devoid of referent. It was an act of creation in which the reporting came to replace and represent as true something that wasn't really there. This rolling news then became "The Truth" but had no actual referent behind it. Baudrillard's most famous work, Simulacra and Simulation, fleshes out this idea more fully. A simulacra is, for Baudrillard, "never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true". As Baudrillard notes in a section dealing with the media in this book:

We live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning.

So what am I saying here? I'm saying that people can be deceived. I'm saying that much "information" today is shallow and useless and refers to nothing beyond itself in a very reflexive way but, nevertheless, becomes the truth that conceals there is no truth. I'm saying that people can believe anything for the purposes that they have that the world of our experience allows. This may, for some, include gods whilst, for others, it won't. I would remind readers here of the quote I used as the heading to this blog and it's focus on human beings wanting to escape the "time and chance" that they have, with complete disregard for their will, been pitched into. It has, to date, been a project of some, if not all, humans to try and escape the stream of consciousness, the time and chance which is all they have, to find a solid, firm foundation on which to stand. I doubt that this purpose will go away anytime soon. But given a wider perspective, we have every right to doubt the privileged access or insight some people claim. Better, then, to see it as just one more human attempt to shoot at the moon, one more self-referential news report about gods and rumours of gods with nothing behind it, one more go at the oldest human project of all - finding solid ground when, as Nietzsche says, all we have now is the vicissitudes of "the infinite sea".

But if at the heart of all Being there is merely nothingness, a reaching for something forever out of reach, as I claim, then what are we to do? I can think immediately of two things but I think that we are already doing both of them. The first thing we can do is hope. We can hope for a better life in a better world full of better people - whatever we take better in these cases to mean. We can hope to have a better life personally and we can work towards it. We can hope and so allow the seeds of imagination to flourish within us and make use of the opportunity that time and chance has afforded us in our being born. Of course, you can sit in a corner and wait to die too. It's up to you. You might even muse that in the end it doesn't make much difference and I couldn't really argue against you. Not in the end, at least. But there is always the here and now for the living to concern themselves with even if eternity is forever and life is short.

The second thing we can do in the nothingness is create. This certainly applies in the personal area. I was reminded by a friend's tweet the other day that there is no "inner self". Sometimes various kinds of guru try to claim there is an inner self and that you need to find it. But there is no inner self. Just like all the other attempts at grasping something really real, it has an imaginary target. But, in the absence of an inner self, there is just you in all your particularity with all your history, thoughts and feelings. And there is no one version of you for you are always becoming, always changing. You don't even know yourself better than other people. You just have your own thoughts about you, your own descriptions and your own reasons for preferring one over another, albeit that you have more information to go on because you have always been there! 

This world of experience that we live in yields to our descriptions. It is plastic to our touch. We can make use of it and manipulate it and make it useful for our many purposes. And we can do that with ourselves too. We have the opportunity to create something beautiful, if that's not too naively poetic. It may not be that it lasts for a long time for we know that meaning is as temporary as human beings and their projects but, as Nietzsche and Qoheleth both saw, all we have is the lives we are creating day by day. That is where we will find our being and the world of our possibilities: in our world of Nothingness.

I thank you for reading if you got this far!

Yours,

A Nihilist.

You can find a whole catalog of music which flows from my existentialist and nihilist frame of mind by going to my Bandcamp including a series on Human/Being and another called Elektronische Existenz. Thank you for any listening that you do as I try to create and infuse with hope my own existence in this world.

What is a Human Being?

Introductory Remarks

As you may know if you have been following my music or this blog, this year I have been focusing my thinking and my art on the question which is the title of this particular blog. Namely, I've been asking what a human being is. I produced a ten part musical series whilst thinking about this but then, last night, it struck me that I haven't really written anything about it in so many words. (Even though I have written about what I was doing when I was making this music elsewhere in this blog and about related issues. Check out the rest of my blog for that.) And then I thought that I should at least try to put that right. This is not because I think I have anything startlingly original to say. Neither is it because I think there is not plenty that has already been written about it. Philosophers, as only one group of people, have been thinking and writing about being and being human for as long as they have been thinking and writing. It's a subject that has always been there and we as a species have always needed to come back to it again and again. Why else has this subject struck me as so important?

But in thinking about human being and human beings there are clearly a number of issues to overcome. For a start, I take the word "human" in my title as both an adjective and as a noun. That is to say that I am concerned with what a "human being" is as an individual creature and with what "human" being is as a specific type of being in the world. Here, immediately, we can see that this subject could become very dense and complicated and I hope not to make my writing about it appear that way. I hope to elucidate my thoughts clearly and concisely. This is a roundabout way of saying that I'm writing a blog here and not a paper for a peer-reviewed philosophy journal. (Although I would point out that my thinking and writing has been guided by an interest in academic philosophy stretching back more than 20 years now.) So I will try to keep my language as perspicuous as possible. I will do that, of course, at the risk of being misunderstood or not being as precise as I might be if I were writing in another context. So maybe now I should say what I'm setting out to do before then going on to make some observations about the subject of this blog.

Let me say straight away that I can't make any claim to be comprehensive here. I live a very specific (and unique) life that is not and will not be replicated by anyone else. (I thank the non-existent gods for that!) All our lives are individual in their particularity and this is something we value about our species. So the things I write below will be animated by my own life experience and the concerns that it has thrown up for me. I would more than welcome it, though, if you read this and feel that I have missed something vital out and feel the need to tell me what that is. I am certainly no oracle and am more than aware of my many thorough-going limitations. So I will be writing a very personal and situated answer to my question. (I could, of course, do no other.) My aim is to put into words issues and questions that I think bear on the subject and that are important to address. Each one could, I have no doubt, be subject to several book-length treatments in itself. I will, on the contrary, attempt to be brief and concise for the sake of my blog readers.


Some Thoughts About Human Being(s)

And so the first thing to say is that we, as human beings, are beings for whom "Being" is an issue. We ask questions such as "Why am I here?" and "Who am I?" and "Why is there something rather than nothing?". This is to say that it occurs to us to be aware of our existence and our surroundings. And these are not just questions about ourselves as individual people who exist. They are also the greater questions about existence as a whole. "Where did everything come from?" is a question of great import that doesn't, we think, occur to every living thing to ask. So it is this consciousness, this inquisitiveness, this awareness of self and surroundings, that becomes a constituent part of our make up as human beings. To be a human being is to experience the world as one. It is neither a gift nor a curse. It just is. And we can reflect on what that means because, as human beings, the meaning of things is important to us too.

But there are also a whole slew of issues that are important to us as human beings just by simple virtue of being alive. I refer to these myself as "the issues of the living". I use this term in distinction to being dead when, of course, these things would not matter at all. For me these things are the things of every day life, of survival and of daily procedure, the questions that we deal with as almost background issues and that are rarely overtly thought about or noticed as important. "What's for dinner today?", "Do my teeth need brushing?" "Am I late for an appointment?" and "I wonder what my colleague at work thinks of me?" would be examples of things like this but there could be a billion other such things. They are the things you think about and process because you are alive. If we wanted to put it more simply we might just say that being alive entails caring about things.

Being alive as a human being also entails caring, or not caring, about other members of our species. It is not unique to human beings to be social as we can see from our observations of the wider natural world. But we also know, as human beings, that we are infused with a strong sense of self. We value and cherish the fact we have individuality and are not, instead, part of some Borg-like hive mind in which everyone else's thoughts are constantly present too. So, as humans, our form of being is shaped by a kind of dual nature as beings who are individual yet also part of wider social groupings, be they familial or otherwise. Most of us have experienced some great communal event together and shared in a kind of group euphoria and we experience that as a group, as beings together in a way that is not individual. And yet we retain a foot in both camps and we can be psychologically affected if either our sense of self or our sense of belonging, or not belonging, to groups is called into question.

A very basic way in which our human being is shaped is by our form. Human beings are physical beings of a very specific kind in a physical world. We breathe air. We pump blood. We can see thanks to our optic nerve and the electromagnetic radiation that exists as photons of light. We can hear, touch, taste and smell. We reproduce in a specifically physical way. We walk on two legs in an upright fashion. We have active brains which can learn and adapt, often overcoming some of these limitations or finding ways around them if some of them are taken away in an accident or due to illness. We can talk. We have organs which stop us from being poisoned by the waste products produced in sustaining ourselves. We can feel pain. We decay. We die. All of these physical things are very specific and I want to make the point very strongly that they are inherent to what makes us human. For me, a human brain in a vat or a mind uploaded to a computer would not be a human being. To lose our physicality is, for me, to lose something vital to our humanity, something that has shaped who we have become and what we are. It may be that one day we evolve our species into beings not made of flesh thanks to scientific advances. For me that would entail a possible gain but certainly also a loss and definitely a change in circumstances. Physical things eventually wear out. As human beings that is always before us in very specific ways. I ask you to consider the question: "If all my body parts were replaced with artificial ones, would I still be me?" My answer to this is that I think being a human being, living a human form of being, is intimately bound up with the specific physical form of our nature.

Another way we can talk of human being is in terms of time. I have already addressed this in a number of musical pieces and philosophers have remarked on our inherent temporality for centuries. The fact is that we are beings who exist within time and who are always conscious of it. This is not merely in terms of appointments or notable dates but also in things like consciousness of death and the cycles of life. (Mid-life crisis? Becoming an adult? Retiring?) But we are also aware of the infinity of time which exists in such large amounts that we literally cannot conceive of the age of the Universe or of even our own planet within it. So, as with the social and the individual, there is a dual focus here as human beings have an awareness of both finitude and infinity and that affects our form of life here on earth. A way to imagine this is to think of the future and the past. One, the future, stretches out before us as an infinite possibility whilst, on the other hand, the past lies behind us as something insubstantial that has slipped through our fingers. Time, in some senses, leaves us completely powerless. We try to grasp it and hold on to it, but it is gone. Only the photograph or the memory manages to hold some traces and time even fades those too.

An important aspect of our humanity is to be found in our fallibility. Put bluntly and rather obviously, we are not omniscient. We are, indeed, quite limited beings. We see more than through a glass darkly. It is easy to fool the senses of human beings, which are our means of gathering information about the world, and there are many parlour tricks which are capable of doing so such as the never ending staircase or the duck/rabbit made famous by Ludwig Wittgenstein as shown below.

                                                             Is it a duck or a rabbit?

We have also developed our own pattern and habits of thinking which, whilst useful for certain purposes, are by no means to be regarded as the best possible or unsurpassable. Human beings have developed by evolution and their powers of thought and means of gathering information have been shaped by their environment and become useful for the form of life they lead. It is conceivable that beings from elsewhere might be nothing like us because their development would be suited to their environment and form of life too. One simple truth is that, if we are honest, we, as human beings, don't even know what it is we don't know. We are working in the dark in the only ways evolution has equipped us to do so. We also need to remember that human beings are not passive robots whose job is merely to be carried out passively as a response to commands. But this is my next point.

Human beings have intentions, attitudes, feelings and emotions. And often we act not simply with intellectual goals in sight but simply because we feel a certain way or because we have a certain attitude towards something. Its also worth pointing out that to have a goal is to be human too. Can you imagine a fly or a table to decide that it purposely wants to do something? Probably not. But you can imagine that a person decides to do something. You can imagine they do this for a number of reasons from it being something they want to achieve to because some other factor motivates them to do it. Human beings, then, are not simply calculators or computers or machines. They can get angry and make bad choices and harm themselves and others and then feel sorry for it. And I think it is important to say this since the machine or computer metaphor is very often used casually and lazily to describe human beings. I think its wrong and misleading. Human beings are not machines. They are, instead, animals and they are imbued with animalistic attributes such as intuition. I recall to mind here a scene from Star Trek in which Spock, who does not have all the information he needs to hand to make a calculation, is advised by the very human McCoy to "make his best guess". And that, indeed, is something that humans often do. They guess. Now when a human being feels cold you might want to describe it as a programmed (or learned) response to sensory stimulation. But is it really that simple? I don't think so. When you cry do you think that a machine could do that? When you feel fear, or anxiety or love you are acting as a living being would not as any machine we have ever yet conceived. I don't regard these things as mere developments based on increasingly complex networks. I think it something fundamentally different that we don't yet, and maybe never will, understand. It is something human. It is something to do with being.

So, for the purposes of this blog, this is my list of attributes when thinking about human being:

1. Ontological
2. Alive
3. Individual and Social
4. Physical
5. Temporal
6. Fallible
7. Animal

There is one more that I finally want to add at this point. And that is that we are incomplete. We are not finished but are always in a process of continuing to become something else. We are like this blog. No matter how much I say, there is always more that could be said. There will always be new occasions or contexts in which it could be said again with new force or in new and probably better ways. The understanding and the searching never stops. And so it is with us as people and as a people. We are never complete, we are never finished. Human being and human beings never reach a point at which they can stop and say they are done and there is no more to do. A constant process of becoming as people "condemned to be free" (as Jean-Paul Sartre put it) is the only game in town.

8. Incomplete


I hope what I have written above gives anyone who has got this far something to think about. If you want some music to have in the background as you maybe think about these issues then my Human/Being series is just for you and you can hear it at my Bandcamp.

Consciousness, Bodies and Future Robot Beings: Thinking Aloud

So yesterday I came back to thinking about consciousness again after some weeks away from it and, inevitably, the idea of robots with human consciousness came up again. I was also pointed in the direction of some interesting videos put on You Tube by the Dalai Lama in which he and some scientists educated more in the western, scientific tradition had a conference around the areas of mind and consciousness.

But it really all started a couple of days ago with a thought I had. I was sitting there, minding my own business, when suddenly I thought "Once we can create consciousness procreation will be obsolete." (This thought assumes that "consciousness" is something that can be deliberately created. That is technically an assumption and maybe a very big one.) My point in having this thought was that if we could replicate consciousness, which we might call our awareness that we exist and that there is a world around us, then we could put it (upload it?) into much better robot bodies than our frail fleshly ones which come with so many problems simply due to their sheer physical form. One can easily imagine that a carbon fibre or titanium (or carbotanium) body would last much longer and without any of the many downsides of being a human being. (Imagine being a person but not needing to eat, or go to the toilet. Imagine not feeling tired or sick.)


So the advantages immediately become apparent. Of course the thought also expressly encompasses the idea that if you can create consciousness then you can create replacements for people. Imagine you own a factory. Instead of employing 500 real people you employ 500 robots with consciousness. Why wouldn't you do that? At this point you may reply with views about what consciousness is. You might say, for example, that consciousness implies awareness of your surroundings which implies having opinions about those surroundings. That implies feelings and the formation of attitudes and opinions about things. Maybe the robots don't like working at the factory like its very likely some of the people don't. Maybe, to come from another angle, we should regard robots with consciousness as beings with rights in this case. If we could establish that robots, or other creatures, did have a form of consciousness, would that not mean we should give them rights? And what would it mean for human beings if we could deliberately create "better people"?

At this point it becomes critical what we think consciousness actually is. It was suggested to me that, in human beings, electrochemical actions in the brain can "explain" the processing of sense data (which consciousness surely does). Personally I wonder if this does "explain" it as opposed to merely describing it as a process within a brain. One way that some scientists have often found to discuss the mind or consciousness is to reduce it to the activities of the brain. So conscious thoughts become brain states, etc. This is not entirely convincing. It is thought that the mind is related to the brain but no one knows how even though some are happy to say that they regard minds as physical attributes like reproduction or breathing. That is, they would say minds are functions of brains. Others, however, aren't so sure about that. However a mind comes to be, it seems quite safe to say that consciousness is a machine for generating data (as one of its functions). That is, to be conscious is to have awareness of the world around you and to start thinking about it and coming to conclusions or working hypotheses about things. Ironically, this is often "unconsciously" done!

So consciousness, as far as we know, requires a brain. I would ask anyone who doesn't agree with this to point to a consciousness that exists where there isn't a brain in evidence. But consciousness cannot be reduced to things like data or energy. In this respect I think the recent film Chappie, which I mentioned in previous blogs, gets things wrong. I don't understand how a consciousness could be "recorded" or saved to a hard disk. It doesn't, to me, seem very convincing, whilst I understand perfectly how it makes a good fictional story. I think that on this point thinkers get seduced by the power of the computer metaphor.  For me consciousness is more than both energy or data, a brain is not simply hardware nor is consciousness simply (or even) software. If you captured the electrochemical energy in the brain or had a way to capture all the data your mind possesses you wouldn't, I think, have captured a consciousness. And this is a question that scientist Christof Koch poses when he asks if consciousness is something fundamental in itself or is rather simply an emergent property of systems that are suitably complex. In other words, he asks if complex enough machine networks could BECOME conscious if they became complex enough. Or would we need to add some X to make it so? Is consciousness an emergent property of something suitably complex or a fundamental X that comes from we don't know where?

This complexity about the nature of consciousness is a major barrier to the very idea of robot consciousness of course and it is a moot point to ask when we might reach the level of consciousness in our human experiments with robotics and AI. For, one thing can be sure, if we decided that robots or other animals did have an awareness of the world around them, even of their own existence or, as Christof Koch always seems to describe consciousness, "what it feels like to be me" (or, I add, to even have an awareness of yourself as a subject) then that makes all the difference in the world. We regard a person, a dog, a whale or a even an insect as different to a table, a chair, a computer or a smartphone because they are ALIVE and being alive, we think, makes a difference. Consciousness plays a role in this "being aliveness". It changes the way we think about things.

Consciousness, if you reflect on it for even a moment, is a very strange thing. This morning when I woke up I was having a dream. It was a strange dream. But, I ask myself, what was my state of consciousness at the time? Was I aware that I was alive? That I was a human being? That I was me? I don't think I can say that I was. What about in deep sleep where scientists tell us that brain activity slows right down? Who, in deep sleep, has consciousness of anything? So consciousness, it seems, is not simply on or off. We can have different states of consciousness and change from one to the other and, here's another important point, not always do this by overt decision. Basically this just makes me wonder a lot and I ask why I have this awareness and where it comes from. Perhaps the robots of the future will have the same issues to deal with. Consciousness grows and changes and is fitted to a form of life. Our experience of the world is different even from person to person, let alone from species to species. We do not see the world as a dog does. A conscious robot would not see the world as we, its makers, do either.

In closing, I want to remind people that this subject is not merely technological. There are other issues in play too. Clearly the step to create such beings would be a major one on many fronts. For one thing, I would regard a conscious being as an individual with rights and maybe others would too. At this point there seems to be some deep-seated human empathy in play. There is a scene in the film Chappie where the newly conscious robot (chronologically regarded as a child since awareness of your surroundings is learned and not simply given) is left to fend for himself and is attacked. I, for one, winced and felt sympathy for the character in the film - even though it was a collection of metal and circuitry. And this makes me ask what humanity is and what beings are worthy of respect. What if a fly had some level of consciousness? (In a lecture I watched Christof Koch speculated that bees might have some kind of consciousness and explained that it certainly couldn't be ruled out.) Clearly, we need to think thoroughly and deeply about what makes a person a person and I think consciousness plays a large part in the answer. Besides the scientific and technical challenges of discovering more about and attempting to re-create consciousness, there are equally tough moral and philosophical challenges to be faced as well.

Thoughts On Online Speech

For a while now there has been growing concern (in some quarters more than others) about standards of online speech - especially around areas of social media like Twitter. Several notable and, to my knowledge usually female, people have come out and said they have received death or rape threats. Some people have even reported threats to the Police and people have been sent to jail - usually for a few weeks. Concerned and august organs like The Guardian newspaper then write articles about the phenomenon of "hate speech" and "death threats" online and a certain narrative gets created and mutually re-inforced. In addition to this, "trolls" are said to be a problem, although defining this term is often a problem in itself when the word seems to be applied both to people with bad manners, making an inappropriate or unwelcome comment, and more organised individuals looking to spoil or derail a specific conversation.

Now this is just a personal blog and I'm not here to solve or dissect this problem in any overarching way. This blog is just a place for me to write down some of my thoughts as they occur to me in real time. As such, you shouldn't hold me to much of a standard of debate. I will say what I think on the subject and it should simply be taken as my point of view. And, for starters, I do believe that people should be allowed to have points of view, even, whisper it quietly, points of view that do not agree with yours. You, by the way, are also allowed to have a point of view. And it doesn't have to agree with mine. This is a basic tenet of the idea of free speech, the idea that people are allowed to have points of view and express them publicly. This applies expressly, if not in an exemplary sense, to exactly those views that you don't agree with yourself. "Free speech" is not merely speech you agree with. Its all the speech you don't agree with too.

So what I intend to do now is just jot down a few points related to this whole phenomenon. I make no claim that they are my final thoughts on the matter. If anything, they are more the points and questions that come to my mind when I read about this subject or hear of yet more example of trolls and hate speech. They are outlined in random order and may be considered as goads to further thought.

1. When is a death threat not a death threat? When the person concerned only wishes you dead and doesn't personally threaten to kill you.

There is a case in the UK at the moment of TV personality, Sue Perkins. Perkins allegedly received a few tweets wishing her dead after she was touted to present the very popular TV show, Top Gear. The story itself, according to Perkins, was entirely false and she has no interest in the job anyway. Nevertheless, some fans of the show seem to have reacted strongly and in haste and tweeted her on her public Twitter account. I personally have seen a couple of examples where people wished her to be "burnt at the stake". No tweet, that I have read, was from someone saying that they personally wanted to kill her and neither Perkins nor anyone else has produced any such tweet. However, quite predictably, this has been reported and written up by many as "Sue Perkins received death threats". And this happens in other cases too. The problem is these people are quite often not receiving death threats at all. They are simply receiving unpleasantness from people saying the equivalent of "I don't like you" in a more extreme way.

Then there is the further issue of credibility. Do murderers and rapists regularly broadcast their intent to commit rape and murder online to the target of their attacks? Doesn't that strike you as making any threat less and not more credible? You may say that we have no way of knowing and its better to be safe than sorry. But when we live in a world where a person upset that he can't take a flight from a regional airport because it is closed due to the weather - and then tweets that they need to get their shit together or he will blow it up - and is arrested and convicted of a crime, we need to be wary. People talk on social media in the vernacular. They talk and act like they would with their mates but often to people who aren't their mates at all. They are strangers. Add into this equation the fact that tone of voice, humour and all the general clues that would usually come from knowing the speaker are not present in 140 character social media snippets. It sets up a strange kaleidoscope of words and understandings. The possibility to take things the wrong way or give them the wrong weight is obvious. We should be all the more wary knowing that some people are more than ready to have their outrage triggered at a moment's notice.

I also find it relevant that public discourse, especially the distorted online version of that phenomenon, is becoming infantilized. These days, and I must say I see this agenda often being pressed by those with feminist leanings, people are encouraged to be victims. They are encouraged to be naive and irresponsible. They are told it is their right and that if anything unpleasant happens to them it is absolutely not their fault or, more importantly, their responsibility. To put the focus on the responsibility of people for themselves and their own safety, we are told, is "victim-blaming". In my view this is both stupid and childish. As I see it, everyone is responsible for the choices they make and so a constituent part of any consequences that occur. In a world where people can choose A or B to choose one or the other is to contribute to a chain of events. There is no rhetorical way to escape this inevitability. In the same way, taking part in public forums or social media is a choice you make. In doing so, you open yourself up to what is out there. On Twitter you can even lock your account so that your comments are reserved for those of your choosing and no one but who you choose can reply to them. If you choose not to do so you contribute to the possibility that people might send you unpleasant messages. You are not to be blamed for being sent such a message. But you did contribute to it being possible in the first place.

2. Its a public world.

The world of public discourse is changing, as we might expect it to in a world now awash with mobile devices and giant social media corporations. These corporations want to lock us all in to their platforms and they want us to take part because we are their product that they want to sell. What this means is that, like never before, you have access to so many more people in the world. No longer is it true, as it was in the 1970s when I was a boy, that all you know is contained within a few miles of home. Now you can speak to people from all over the world. You can also tell them that you hate them, they are fat and that you hope they burn to death. But is this a new phenomenon? Did people only start being nasty to each other with the rise of the mobile phone and the Twitter app? No, they didn't. I remember telling a girl in my class "You smell!" when I was 8 or 9 at school. Other school friends brought me to tears at age 11 by telling me that the cassette recorder my mum had bought me for Christmas was "shit". I've seen people be told to "Fuck off!" in football grounds across the country. I've heard racist and sexist things (unfortunately) in basically every public place you can think of. I've heard derogatory comments and conversations in every workplace I've ever had.

And this is the issue. In our modern world besides things being thrown more open they have also become more enclosed. Once more the online world puts a microscope on this phenomenon. There are now micro-groupings for every interest (and none) imaginable. There is probably a group somewhere for "Muslim baseball fans who like to wear green jeans whilst playing ping pong". Strangely, it seems that more openness also creates more enclosedness. Try butting in (or, more generously, offering a comment) on some conversations online and be prepared to be bitten as the insiders of the group concerned protect their turf and bite back at you for daring to offer a point of view. The attitude seems to be "Who are you? Sod off!" The internet era is the era of partisanship and, crucially, now everyone can play. And they do. It seems to me that, more often than not, it generates more heat than light. When you might think that more opportunities for communication would bring more togetherness they, in fact, bring as much disharmony as harmony. But there's a good reason why this shouldn't surprise anyone.

The point I would make here is that this is a public world. Its not a world where you can go into your little nest where every truth is yours and every heresy is anything you don't agree with. Its not a world where you will never hear something you don't like or where no one will ever call you names or say something nasty to you. Is the wish for this kind of bubble world really a realistic wish? Why is someone saying "I hope you die" in the street or at work in a tiff or disagreement any more or less serious than if they say it in a tweet? Are they not equal statements? (And, to my mind, equally ephemeral and throwaway?) It seems to me that a great many of these public threats are not threats at all. They are the equivalent of saying "You are a cunt!" I can appreciate that to some this may be upsetting. I've been upset by online comments myself when a passing You Tube viewer insulted the quality of something I had uploaded. And it stayed with me for a day or two as well. But this is not to make every negative comment a genuine or credible threat of anything. People insult you in the street and keep walking. Most online things, I suggest, are exactly the same.

3. Beware the censor.

For many people who I don't agree with all these things I have been talking about call for action - legislative action and Police action. We are told by some that people who say bad things should be arrested and put in jail. Others suggest that the Internet should only be accessed by those prepared to use their real identity in a verifiable way. Anonymity is seen by many as a problem because people can spray their insulting comments about freely and be seen to get away with it. This isn't necessarily the case of course. People have been arrested and convicted in the UK of sending malicious communications, notably to feminists Caroline Criado-Perez and MP Stella Creasy. These women, and others, often write articles full of censorious and moralistic ideas to the extent that, in a nutshell, they want to control the Internet according to guidelines, and morality, that suit them.

But can you control someone being obnoxious on the Internet? Its worth noting that it is not illegal to either be on the Internet or obnoxious. And both things, it seems to me, are equally impossible to control in the final analysis. Many people who get upset at insulting and threatening speech online seem to have the attitude that the world should run on the basis that only things they like should be allowed to happen. This usually involves them being allowed to walk round in a bubble, shielded from the harsh, nasty world outside. But this is not a realistic (or achievable) desire. The problem is not technology. The problem is people. People can be arseholes. Most people, in fact, are arseholes some of the time. Some more so than others. You can't legislate or moralise that away. This attitude, added to the one that infantilizes people and turns them into victims of ever growing hordes of unscrupulous people, is not a solution either. All that happens if you go down that road is that you generate a never-ending rolling wave of more and more examples of the phenomenon. Of course, in their determination to show how horrible life is for them, that is exactly what some people want to do. But that is a destructive and not a constructive agenda. Fundamentally, you cannot control speech by censoring it. It would be like trying to hold back the waves with your hands.

4. Its Time To Be An Adult.

At the end of the day I think people need to stand up and be responsible for themselves. I don't condone any form of hate speech, death threats or rape threats. I appreciate this is a serious issue. My attitude would tend to be that if such things happen in some kind of flare up then the best response is to let it go. (People can and do have disagreements and they do share harsh words.) This is what Sue Perkins seems to have done. She doesn't seem to have taken it too seriously but has just walked away from her account for a while to let the dust settle. I think that's probably wise. Of course, if you are getting repeated comments from the same person then that moves into harassment territory and it becomes more serious. The same is true if you happen to know the person. It is true that you can never know for sure if a threat of something is serious but, as I said above, I would tend to regard threats as not credible if someone is wanting to see you die in some outlandish way ("burnt at the stake") or is making the point of telling you in advance via a publicly accessible social network. This is especially true if this is just some random out of the blue. There are remedies available for those who feel under attack or threatened such as the blocking or locking available on Twitter or involving the authorities if its believed to be something more serious.

But should every nasty, insulting, threatening or obnoxious comment be referred to the Police though? No. You can't legislate for douche bags or for the obnoxiousness of the human race. To be in a public space is to acknowledge you relinquish some control over your environment and to open yourself up to interactions with others you may not desire, whether online or offline. That is just common sense. At the end of the day, if you don't want to hear what other people have to say its in your hands to do something about it. Be responsible for yourself and accept that you live in a world you don't always control.

Some thoughts on "Life"

I suppose it happens to us all. You wake up at some indeterminate point in the night (for those who don't have clocks in their bedrooms anyway) and your mind begins to whirr with thought. The thoughts rush on and you silently nod in agreement with the thoughts that you are having. This has certainly happened to me more than once and often I have determined to write them down later when I get up. Of course, you never do because life gets in the way and it becomes just another lucid moment lost forever in the mists of time. Well, this time, I have actually made the effort to write down what I was thinking about and to use it to meditate on the thoughts I was having. So what follows will be a mash up of the thoughts I had last night in my bed and now as I write, remember and muse on those thoughts that I had.

I suppose, in a way, it really started last night before I went to sleep. The thought occurred to me that no one gets born by their choice. In that sense every one of us is born without our will being taken into account. Our birth, the fact we are given life and brought into being at all, is the choice of other people. This strikes me as partly selfish. Although not a parent myself, it does seem to me, observing from the sidelines, that some parents are selfish. They want a child for themselves. I wonder how many parents give thought to what kind of life their child will have or how much pain or misery they might be storing up for their offspring? My guess would be that many never think of that at all, at least not until or unless things go wrong. And yet these things, in the abstract, are foreseeable consequences of having, or giving birth to, a life. So why don't more people think of the downsides of being alive when bringing a new life into the world?

Maybe these people consider that although life will certainly include some bad it will also contain much good. Lives, of course, are very different. Some will contain little pain and some will contain much. In that sense, once a life has started and you are thrown into existence you pretty much have to suck it up and deal with what comes down the pipe. You can't refuse life and go back where you came from. The clock only ticks forwards. But, to get back to the point, perhaps people consider that life, overall, isn't that bad. That would be reasonable, wouldn't it? I don't think so. You can't live your life on someone's behalf. Each life is individual. You cannot measure someone's pain by how you measure your own because you are not comparing like with like. Human beings are not robots and are not built to the same specifications. Much less do they experience life in the same way. Your appreciation, or lack of appreciation, of life is not commensurable with that of another person. We each make our own minds up and human beings, in general, have always valued that fact about our species.

I raise all this because, for the longest time now, I have actively said to myself that, were it possible, I would give my life back. I don't accept the idea, for myself, that life, although a mixture of good and bad, is "worth it" over all. For at least 10-15 years now I've said to myself that if it were possible to reject life and give it back then I would. If there was a button you could press or a deal you could make where it meant that you suddenly had never existed then I would press that button or make that deal. You might now be asking about all the things I would miss that you value or all the things I would never experience. To me, that argument holds no weight. A person who never existed has nothing to miss and has no ability or desire to value things. These are the problems and issues of the living. And the difference between being alive and dead, existent and non-existent, is very great. Put simply, people concern themselves with the problems of the living. Unsurprisingly. And they find it hard to think in any other way. For the same reason I've never understood people who couldn't appreciate why someone might take their own life. To me, this is obvious: dead people have no problems.

My thinking in this, of course, is guided and shaped by my own experience of life. I don't regard myself as having had a particularly bad life. Certainly, there are people who would seem to have had worse ones and its not hard to think of examples. But, as I said before, everyone is different. Its a mug's game to start comparing lives one with another. You can only really address your own appreciation of your own life. And I haven't appreciated mine very much. There are certain issues I've had to face daily for many years and I wouldn't be me or live the life I lead without them. But that is my comprehension of what life is from my own experience of it. You will have yours. Quite a lot of people seem to think that life is a gift and that it is ungrateful or bad to reject it or despise it. I must admit that I don't understand this, to me, irrational mentality. If life is a gift then its surely the unwanted pair of socks your granny gives you. Overall, nature is random without a guided direction or purpose. You were the sperm that made it and fertilised the egg. Its not as if any intelligence selected and formed you in a womb, made you who you are and set you on your way. (Yes, I don't believe in gods in any sense.) You are just the result of a couple of human wills and lots of random factors no one power had any control over. There will come a time when parents and doctors will be able to choose the baby they have and start to make selections both for physical appearance and mental faculties. I don't envy those people who will be actively engineering the birth of yet more people. What will happen when the children do not turn out to be the things that were selected? Can people really be created in laboratories?

I do, in a sense, see life as something mystical. But this is mystical in the sense of profound or complex or ungraspable. I don't see it as mystical in the sense of it being from a higher power. We are, all of us, life forms created in a physical universe. The conditions that make life possible, and we don't know what they are or why life happened at all, are just there and so, in turn, are we. I don't see any inherent or deep meaning to that. It just is and any meaning we do find, or fail to find, will be on our own terms. Recently, I've been following the Twitter account of a shepherd in the Lake District of England. He's become a minor celebrity thanks to a book he has written about his way of life and the fact that one of his sheepdogs, Floss, recently gave birth to 10 puppies. For the last week or so now he has been posting sometimes graphic pictures of the lambing season that he is currently dealing with. I have looked with childlike innocence at the pictures he has posted of lambs being pulled out of a sheep or, new born, lying on the grass covered in mucus and amniotic fluid. This is life. This is the wonder of life. The wonder of life to me is that it happens at all.

But that it happens at all is, for me, also the problem. Its one that existentialist writers like Sartre or Camus saw too. For the world, life, does not make sense. There is no way to square the circle of your existence. There are endless "don't knows", you are full of fallibilities and, as a physical being, you will suffer and die for change is a constant of the universe. Things do not, and are not meant to, stay the same forever. As a being with higher brain function you will also likely have to muse on all of these facts and deal with that too. "Life is suffering" has long been a truism of mine even though, at times, more positive souls have tried, and failed, to dissuade me from it. I just see too much evidence to support it. You, too, may say that's not very positive and I would probably concede you are right. But that is to miss the point. The point is that you can only be true to yourself. For although you can appreciate and think about life in general, you only ever live one actual life: yours.


You can hear my music which muses about life and thoughts about life at my Bandcamp.

Economically Unproductive People Don't Matter!

There is a General Election underway in the UK. The thing that strikes me most is how desperate everyone is (not least the two parties most likely to be involved in government) to be seen as the party of "working people". It seems that "working people" are where the votes are. There has been precious little to hear about the disabled, mentally ill or other disadvantaged groups. Everything seems geared to making "working people" happy with their lot.

This profoundly depresses me. This is why people, and sometimes I'm one of them, say that there is no genuine choice in the election. All the parties inhabit the same ideological ground. They are all fighting like pups for the same teat to suck on. They all want to appeal to the same section of society and harvest their votes. All this is deeply conservative (with a small 'c'). It seems that our greatest political minds have one idea of what life is about and its mapped out for all of us. You might call that the idea that we are all to be economically productive capitalist drones.

The message I'm getting loud and clear from all the policy back and forth is that economically unproductive people don't matter. They are seen as a burden, a problem, something that costs us (or probably "working people") money. So they are regarded as scroungers. People are encouraged to begrudge their existence, not least by the press barons who usually vote to the right. Their misfortune is regarded as their fault and their problem. After all, the whole ideology of "working people" is a very individualistic one. You are meant to succeed by your effort alone. And if you can't then that is your fault. And your problem.

So where are the people who ask what happens to the people who need a food bank to eat? Where are the people who ask what happens to the mentally ill person who cannot work because they are locked inside a prison of themselves? What about the people who suffer from crippling physical ailments? Any society is always going to have people like this within it. Does it say something fundamental about us in looking at how we regard and deal with such people? The only answer today's politics offers is that you become an economically productive capitalist drone too. But not everyone can.

The message I'm getting from this election is that most politicians just wish they would disappear. And some do. Because they die.

The Thinking Person's Music

It was towards the end of January this year that I sat down and watched the science fiction film, Under The Skin. The film is told through alien eyes as Scarlett Johansson, the alien of the piece, hunts men in Glasgow. This set me thinking explicitly about what it is to be human and what an alien from another world might see. At the same time I had been researching the history of the Nazi death camps before and during World War 2, a prime example of the phrase "man's inhumanity to man". But what is "humanity" in that sense? What does it mean to be human? And so my "Human/Being" musical project was born.

As we now approach mid-April my project has grown to 12 albums and 10 parts (parts 1 and 4 were double albums). It now fully mirrors in scope, if not storyline, my first musical project, Elektronische Existenz. Of course, as the names might suggest, these are really the same or close relatives as projects. I see it as my task to write music that gives meaning to life itself. Primarily, of course, this is my own. But, in a wider sense, this is adding my voice to a greater conversation about what life is for any of us. I'm aware this might sound a bit pretentious. But I see this as an art project and the music I have made here is intended to be an aid to thought. Elektronische Existenz told the personal story of a character I called "The Wanderer". It was my story. Here with Human/Being I muse on wider, more general matters starting with that musing on what we are and what "humanity" is.

Throughout the project I have tried to focus on particular areas. These were meditated upon pretty much as they occurred to me. The music I make is overtly philosophical in origin if not always in tone. And this is the most philosophical music I have ever made. Human/Being 2 came at the time when Tangerine Dream founder, Edgar Froese, died and so it starts with a tribute piece for him, a massive influence upon exactly the kind of music I was seeking to make here. It continued on with meditation on sleep, the fear of madness and the human condition. Human/Being 3 focused on time and our nature as time-bound and time-determined beings, always conscious of the ticking of the clock. I was trying to use the music as an aid for those who might actually sit back and allow what I had made to assist them in thinking.

The fourth part of the project was a double album (the pink covers) and was really about the concept of human meaning at all. All meaning is inherently fictional. We literally make things up. In the notes to these albums I mused that "Whatever I say this is, it isn't that. Whatever you think this is, it isn't that. For this isn't at all. It is merely a process of becoming that never ends. It is a game with sounds, but a game where you decide the rules or even if there are any at all." I also invited listeners to "find meaning in the spaces between sounds". It was game-playing but it was with serious intent. What is human meaning? Why do things mean something to us or not? Again, the music was there to assist with thinking about this.

Meaning, or lack of it, leads to motivation and this is what I mused on in Human/Being 5. It was quite personal in its approach and expressed my borderline nihilism. But, again, that is not necessarily an opinion I force upon my listeners. It is more that I invite them to think about it and provide music to assist in the process. This lead me, with Human/Being 6,  to think about being "condemned to be free", as the existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre put it. Where does this quite radical freedom come from and what is it set against - the vastness of the universe? It seems to me at times that all that is is quite simply absurd - in the philosophical sense - without rhyme or reason. This section of the project came to a conclusion in Human/Being 7, subtitled "The Infinite Sea". The phrase was suggested to me by Nietzsche with the following quote:

"In the horizon of the infinite. - We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us - indeed, we have gone further and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of his cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom - and there is no longer any land."

This, I thought, was - is - our human condition.

I had intended to stop at part 7. (My process is a constant one of stopping and then being re-animated by some new thought or stimulus.) But then I watched the film Chappie about a robot given artificial intelligence and I was back asking myself if a robot could ever be human. That, of course, leads you to ask what being human is in order to in any way get a grip on the first question. (My current thinking is that the robot couldn't be human but maybe it could be a being of its own.) And so I wrote the album "Robot" which became part 8 of the project. Next came "Space", unique in this project for being a collaboration on the musical side with my Twitter friend, Iceman Bob. All the songs on this album were worked on by us together. Space, of course, I see as the big, all-consuming context for everything humans do. We are, as Carl Sagan said, all "star stuff" (the title of one of the songs on Space). You don't get much more profound than this thought, I think. Space is the reason we exist. We all came from it and we are all surely going back to it. It creates and destroys, ever changing. You want profundity? There is your profundity.

That leaves us, finally, with part 10, Human/Being X. Here I concentrated, anticipating another ending, on the concept of "the end" as an idea. "All good things must come to an end" is a saying we humans have. But, of course, it is truer to say simply that all things end. As George Harrison titled a triple album, All Things Must Pass. I titled the tracks accordingly around fields of study that have within them endings. The human race will end, the universe will end (or die) and this is a very part of having any existence at all itself. The riddle is that within all life there is always death. A fitting place to finish?


So that was the subject matter. But how to achieve expressing these ideas musically? The answer was "German music". This year I have been greatly influenced by two, related sources of German music of the 1970s, that music known as The Berlin School and that music known as Kosmische (or Krautrock). You will hear the influences of both styles throughout all 10 parts of the project, although in some more strongly than others. Some may even qualify as bona fide examples of the forms. I'm far to modest to make any such claim though. Listeners may feel free to be the judge of that. As I said above, I have aimed with this project to produce "thinking music". This is music that both comes from explicit philosophical thought and that leads to, or aids with, it. The Kosmische and Berlin School music that I have soaked myself in in the first few months of this year were natural and very potent forms of music to use in achieving this. Both are free-form and without boundary giving the necessary space and freedom to think. The fact that my music is made using synthesis was also a help in that you are not stuck with stock sounds but can make sounds as you will or go where the synthesis leads. That's another reason why the pieces in this project are purposefully long. The idea was not to rush anything.What I have made here are long form pieces that are about thinking, thinking about what it is to be human and what it is to be alive, to have being. It is "space music" in a very real and multivalent sense.

So what I think I have made here is music for the thinking person. Its not frivolous or trite. Its serious. Its art. Its philosophy. Its over 13 hours long. I am me. What else could it be?

You can hear the albums in this project at my bandcamp.