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I recently wrote part 1 of a review on Aristotle’s book called On The Art Of Poetry. This is part 2. Here’s the link for part 1:

Aristotle On The Art Of Poetry: A Review: Part 1

 

 

I finished part 1 by explaining that Aristotle had a parochial view on the role of villains in stories. He thought that we can’t have empathy for them, and that they can’t be the protagonists. But you can find a lot of narratives in books and films today in which the “bad guys” are the main characters. There are also popular villains who we feel empathy for, and we almost want them to beat the heroes. The Joker in The Dark Knight is a great example of this. Frank Underwood in House of Cards, Hannibal Lecter in the books, films, and T. V. shows about him, and Dexter Morgan in the show and novels are all “bad guys” who are also protagonists.

 

 

 

 

In the book, Aristotle writes that even women and slaves are capable of being morally good characters. But he also thought that women are inferior and that slaves are worthless. That probably sounds conservative, sexist and racist to many people. However, historically speaking, that’s more charitable than the dominant cultural perception of slaves and women during that time. Also, slaves were not only black. They were white and every other colour too. I’m not a historian, but it seems like most men valued women and slaves a hell of a lot less than they valued men. But Aristotle was different. For his time, he was probably seen as progressive and even revolutionary for arguing that these arbitrary categories of people could be morally admirable. (even though “progressive” might not have been a word in the time of ancient Greece.)

 

 

However, I agree with probably the majority of people in our modern world who believe that women and slaves are equal to men and non-slaves. Even though slavery still occurs, most western European countries abolished it a long time ago. The feminist movement in the 60s helped men see women as more equal than earlier waves of feminism too.

 

 

Another point that Aristotle makes is that it’s inappropriate for female characters to be clever or manly. He thought that only men should be “manly,” which presumably means masculine heroic stereotypes. It seems like he was arguing that women can’t be protagonists. Aristotle also claimed that only male characters can be clever. This is another antiquated sexist perception from this time period. It assumes that all women are dumb, and that only men are smart.

 

 

I mostly agree with Aristotle’s argument that a story begins with conflict that often continues throughout it. The narrative ends when the character has solved the underlying problem. That’s basically the formula in every novel and film, right? This is another idea that Joseph Campbell wrote about in his books like The Power of Myth, which are about hero mythology. I mentioned Campbell in part 1 of this review.

 

 

However, there are exceptions to this too. Sometimes, the main conflict is not solved. The story can end with the protagonist failing to solve their problems. There are many movies and books with this more realistic perspective. Sometimes, we get defeated and our enemies win. Aristotle also claims that narratives conclude with the hero vanquishing his foes. But we all know about famous novels and films in which the protagonist fails and dies at the end. In the book called Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk, the main character kills himself in the last chapter. The movie that’s based on the novel has a different ending. The hero shoots himself, but only murders his alter ego in the process. In the film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, both protagonists die at the end of it.

 

 

I also agree with Aristotle’s opinion on description and dialogue. He wrote that elaborate diction should only be used when we’re not reading someone’s thoughts, no characters are being introduced, and no action is happening. He also argued that only short description should be used to describe thoughts, when we meet characters, and with dialogue. Aristotle explained that excessively verbose diction tends to make characters and thoughts confusing. This act of being concise is called atticism.

 

 

As a fiction writer, I think that this is excellent advice. Ornate descriptions and characters talking too much tends to draw attention away from the plot. Being concise is important as long as you still give readers adequate information. You want to give just enough description to maintain suspense, but not so much that you go off on irrelevant tangents. It’s a challenging balancing act. I tend to be long-winded, so I always think about atticism when I write. In my opinion, action and dialogue are the best ways to tell stories. Events happening that the protagonists have to deal with maintains our attention. The way that they talk about these incidents shows us how us how they interact with other characters. Interpersonal relationships and action help us identify with heroes. Description is important, and some of my favourite writing is long elaborations on settings. But too much of that makes the story take forever, and causes people to lose interest.

 

 

Literature preferences are subjective, but I think that Charles Dickens is a great example of this. Our collective attention span has probably decreased since he was popular, and he’s still regarded as one of the best writers of all time. In my opinion, his writing quality is excellent. His descriptions are immersive and detailed. But to me, the plot in novels like A Tale of Two Cities is excruciatingly long and drawn-out. I get bored when I read it, even though I think that he was an expert writer. My view is that he takes too long to tell the narrative. He spends so much time describing everything in minute detail that conflict takes forever to happen. Painting a picture of the setting is all well and good. But since he gets so bogged down in that, I keep waiting for problems to occur that have to be solved. I’m too impatient and there are way too many awesome books to read. So I’d rather not experience ones that could easily be hundreds of pages shorter.

 

 

So these are my thoughts on Aristotle’s On The Art of Poetry. There is profound wisdom on stories in that book, along with antiquated views that don’t necessarily apply today. That’s why I like ancient philosophy. There are ideas that authors hadn’t figured out. But they were so intelligent that they discovered knowledge and wisdom that is still relevant today. So check out “On The Art Of Poetry.” You might realize that you like it, and there are probably other parts that I missed that you will notice. Try reading other books by Aristotle and different ancient philosophers too. They can teach us a hell of a lot, and even improve our lives.

 

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Aristotle is one of the most famous philosophers of all time. He’s in league with people who are so well-known that we call them by one name. They include Elvis, Hitler, and other philosophers like Seneca, Socrates, and Nietzsche. It’s good for history and our culture that Aristotle wrote down a lot of his thoughts since they’ve had an immeasurable impact. Other than philosophy, he wrote about many other subjects, like politics and art. His opinions had a massive influence on countless people throughout history.

 

 

On The Art Of Poetry is a fascinating book, and it’s less than a hundred pages long. It’s more like a pamphlet. I think the same way about it as I do with other old philosophical texts. This is that some ancient wisdom is timeless and almost universal. But other advice in the same books by the same authors seems wrong and not applicable today. It was more relevant to that time and culture. This is likely why many people think that ancient philosophy is useless. However, I doubt that even those of us who enjoy it see all of Aristotle’s writing as finely spun profound rules for life.

 

 

Aristotle has the old-fashioned view of art in ancient Greece that you probably expect. He thought that narratives should always follow the traditional five act structure. There was no room for jumping around and telling stories out of sequence. This was long before writers like Shakespeare introduced tools such as flashbacks. He presumably wanted to get you more invested in the characters while maintaining suspense, without interrupting the flow of action. Before then, it was unusual to introduce backstory after narratives started. There had to be exposition, introducing the characters and fictional world. Then, one or more person would experience conflict. Resolution followed my more challenges continues until the main character solves a problem and learns a lesson. Fiction is still mostly about the hero overcoming obstacles to save everyone, becoming a better person along the way. This is Joseph Campbell’s idea of the hero’s journey. It applies to tons of modern heroes, like Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, and Neo in The Matrix.

 

The book should really be called something more like Aristotle on the Art of Fiction, or Aristotle on the Art of Stories. He barely writes about poetry, and mostly tells us about tragedies, epics, comedies, and plays. The latter is the main way that narratives were told back then. There wasn’t the printing press for distributing novels on a large scale, and there weren’t movies or T.V. shows. But basically, it seems like Aristotle classified literature and plays as poetry. So it makes sense that poetry was a much larger category back then.

 

 

One interesting point that Aristotle makes in the book is that comedy wasn’t really noticed until it was taken seriously, which is ironic. But it makes sense if you’ve heard or seen any comedians or comedic actors talk about it. A lot of comedy isn’t just pointless silliness. It tends to be very well-thought-out, and people seem to take themselves seriously when they’re creating it. Comedy can appear outrageous when you see it. But that’s part of the appeal, and it makes it easier for comedians to get their underlying message across. You’re more likely to agree with someone if they make you laugh. That’s why, as the comedian, podcaster, and UFC commentator Joe Rogan says, “Comedy is like mass hypnosis.” Comedy wasn’t officially sanctioned by the Greek state until it was taken seriously, and then the actors and writers started getting paid.

 

 

Aristotle has an engrossing comparison between poetry and history in On The Art Of Poetry. He said that history is what has happened, and poetry is what could possibly occur. Of course, poetry in the way that he means it could also describe the past, and history can teach you about future possibilities. Historical fiction is a massive genre, and we can avoid the same mistakes of the past if we understand history. Aristotle thought that poetry, or literature/stories are more philosophical and important than history. He argued that poetry is all about universal truths, while history expressed singular examples of human actions.

 

 

This is fascinating, but I think that these statements create oversimplified categories. Narratives and history can both  be about universal truths or more singular ones. Much of literature, film, and T.V. tells us stories of unusual people behaving in bizarre and uncommon ways. History can teach us a great deal about nearly universal patterns of human behaviour too. (At least, they’re as close as we can get to universal examples, which I don’t think are really a thing.) Poetry probably tends to be more philosophical than history though. But there’s plenty of history that is more philosophical than some poetry.

 

 

The book has some great points about plots in tragedies. Aristotle says that they should be complex, which makes sense. He also asserts that the goal of tragedies is to inspire pity and fear. So the characters must experience or commit acts that make us feel this way. I don’t know about you, but I sure experience a lot of pity and fear when I read or watch tragedies.

 

 

Aristotle also mentions three types of plots that should not be used in this genre. One is a happy but very bad man becoming miserable. That’s because it apparently would make us experience feelings other than fear and pity. He argues that we don’t feel fear for morally corrupt characters because we don’t identify with them. We’ll only be afraid for righteous people because that’s how we see ourselves. No one would empathize with a character like Tyler Durden in Fight Club, right?

 

 

In my opinion, this is wrong because there are plenty of shows like Dexter and House of Cards in which the protagonist is the villain. We are often afraid about the outcome of their challenges because great writers and actors make us feel empathy for bad guys. The reason that Aristotle said that we don’t feel pity for villains is that we only identify with characters who experience undeserved hardship. The theory is that since we don’t empathize with bad people, we won’t pity them when they’re victimized. But again, there are countless exceptions. In the Hannibal Lecter and Dexter novels, we want them to succeed. And in the show, Hannibal, and some of the movies about him, we want him to literally get away with murder. We feel pity for Frank Underwood and Dexter Morgan when Dexter has to break his moral code and kill the wrong person, or when Frank’s political enemies beat him.

 

The second kind of plot that Aristotle thinks should be avoided in tragedies is a good and happy man becoming miserable. He argued that this is abhorrent to us because it doesn’t make us feel pity or fear. This makes no sense to me since happy and righteous characters experiencing misery is called conflict. It’s an essential component of narratives. We grow to like a character, and then we empathize with them when they become unhappy. If everything were going well all the time, there would be no point in telling the story. Overcoming conflict is the essential goal of most narratives. We feel fear about the future and pity protagonists when they face challenges because we identify with them. Even though we don’t enjoy it when bad things happen to them, that’s exactly why a story is told. It’s what makes them work.

 

 

The third type of plot that Aristotle doesn’t think we should use is a morally corrupt and unhappy man becoming happy. He said that this does not appeal to our emotions, or make us feel fear or pity. Apparently, this is the antithesis of tragedy. I disagree with this for similar reasons as those for a bad guy becoming miserable. When villains get happy, we sometimes vicariously enjoy it. That’s a great aspect of fiction. We can get twisted joy from Frank Underwood, Hannibal Lecter, or Dexter Morgan killing someone because it therapeutically releases our dark urges in constructive ways. This is the famous Carl Jung’s idea of embracing the shadow self, or our darker characteristics, and integrating them into our personalities. We normally don’t even acknowledge our shadow selves. We pretend that they don’t exist.

 

 

We can feel pity for the bad guys too, like I mentioned before. Vicarious enjoyment can apply more to this type of character when they’re the protagonist. But we sometimes root for the bad guy too, like The Joker in The Dark Knight. We can also feel fear for the bad characters when they’re the antagonists and the good guys are the protagonists. If the villains succeed and are happy, it sometimes frightens us because we don’t want them to beat the heroes. This is  because we empathize with them more than the bad guys.

 

 

 

…To Be Continued…

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I recently read an awesome book called Napoleon’s Buttons. It’s all about weird superstitious behaviours that have later been proven correct by science. Most of the time, they don’t make sense, but humans are naturally superstitious. Believing that we have more control than we do makes us feel more comfortable. So does the idea that the universe has a profound purpose.

 

 

However, even though a lot of superstitions are bizarre, they sometimes achieve good results. The reasons seem counterintuitive, but science often explains anomalies that make no sense at first. It can illuminate why some superstitions begin, and how solutions to them have accidentally worked out.

 

 

The book is called Napoeon’s Buttons due to a particular story. During the Napoleonic Wars, people thought that they were seeing ghosts. This was around a lot of the same areas where Napoleon’s soldiers had invaded. Across the countryside in places like France, Poland, and Russia, people saw what looked like men whose clothes glowed when it rained.

 

 

One crucial fact to remember is that the buttons on the uniforms of Napoleon’s soldiers were made of tin. Scientists later discovered that this metal disintegrates when it gets wet. So when it rained, the men who were roaming around in between battles got their buttons damaged. Their coats and shirts were forced open when the rain made their buttons disintegrate. This is how people noticed that tin dissolves into powder when it gets wet.

 

So in the rain, soldiers’ coats would billow around in the wind. The presumably cloudy skies would make it difficult to see them clearly, and their buttons would disintegrate into powder. You can imagine how the tin might be reflected by light from the rain in unusual ways. Maybe the metal would even appear to glow. Since humans tend to think superstitiously, you can probably guess how easy it is to have hallucinations of ghosts if you see all of these factors. Your superstitious brain would see, maybe from a distance, a person with glowing clothes that are billowing in the wind. Many people today would believe that this person is a ghost in that situation. It’s possible that people in general were even more superstitious back then.

 

 

Another example in the book is about nutmeg and plague rats. Almost everyone has probably heard of the infamous Black Plague, or Black Death. Since we didn’t have modern science yet at this point, people didn’t know that a particular type of fly caused the plague. We thought that the culprits were demonic rats because coincidentally, the flies carrying the disease often bit them.

 

 

The rats spread the plague, but people believed that Satan or demons had sent them to kill us. So we started carrying vials of supposedly magic nutmeg around our necks to ward off the demonic spirits. This actually worked a lot of the time because we accidentally used science to help solve a problem. What scientists didn’t learn until recently is that the type of fly that transmits the plague doesn’t like the smell of nutmeg. People thought that we were using this spice’s divine powers to ward off evil spirits. But in reality, the smell of nutmeg scared away the flies that transmit the Black Death to rats. Some of the rats stopped getting it in the first place. This is because the ones who were close to humans with nutmeg didn’t get bitten by the flies.

 

 

Most people have probably already heard about this next interesting story in Napoleon’s Buttons. It’s about the accidental discovery of vitamin C’s benefits. A persistent problem at the time was that people frequently got scurvy and died from it when they went on long sea voyages. If I remember correctly, they usually didn’t bring fruit because it would spoil too quickly. They ate salted meat, beer and other alcohol, and probably other food that I’m forgetting about.

 

 

Eventually, we noticed that if we brought limes and lemons with us on ships, people who ate them didn’t get scurvy. So humans figured out that limes and lemons prevent scurvy. Later on, scientists discovered that vitamin C is what actually prevents the disease. Scurvy is caused by a deficiency of it, and lemons and limes have high amounts of this vitamin.

 

 

A story about witches in the book shows us that history is much more ambiguous and less one sided than we are told. Other than trying to cast spells and resurrect demons, they also were shamans who cured minor health problems using plants. Witches weren’t just crazy chicks who were obsessed with doing evil shit. They also helped people.

 

 

It’s important to remember that the Christians who mostly unfairly persecuted witches also used plant medicines. It was okay in their minds for them to help people in the same way because they were “good,” and witches were “evil”. There wasn’t modern medicine for Christians or anyone else to use in the “dark ages.” It seems like religion was the authority on knowledge, and how good and evil were defined.

 

 

Similarly to what Napoleon’s Buttons says about witches, it tells us about a plant medicine being used to treat malaria. Apparently, there’s a molecule called quinine that you can find in a particular type of tree bark. This was used to cure malaria for a long time before modern medicine. There are better treatments now because quinine supposedly has a lot of negative side effects. But it was possible to cure this terrible disease without our fancy advanced science. It seems like scientists mostly developed the tools to cure malaria for far more people with way less risks.

 

 

The main takeaway that I got from Napoleon’s Buttons is this: Superstition is not only bad. Sometimes bizarre behaviour can be explained, and it can even turn out to be useful. We can pragmatically figure things out without understanding any of the underlying science. But a lack of scientific knowledge can also help inspire us to mistreat others and make mistakes. Pragmatism is important, but perhaps seemingly nonsensical thought has a role in society. One of the many reasons that science is so amazing is that it helps explain events, behaviours, and processes. It also gives us far more power to improve the world than we’ve ever had before. I think that we need both scientific and superstitious thinking for society to flourish. You don’t need to have one without the other. They don’t have to be in an imagined cosmic struggle for the fate of humanity. Maybe it’s better for science and religion to try to at least tolerate each other.

 

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This is part two of a book review that I recently wrote on the amazing book called How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, by Lisa Feldman Barrett. Part one covers the basics of the argument, and this blog gets a little more into the details. Here’s the link for part 1:

 

How Emotions Are Made: Not the Way You Think: Part 1

 

Part 2

 

A few concepts are introduced in How Emotions Are Made, including interoception and affect. Interoception is the conscious awareness of our physiological processes. We experience it when we notice that we’re hungry, itchy, or sore from a workout. It is one of the main reasons that emotions feel so real. We experience them physically because they happen physiologically. When our metabolism drops, we feel hungry. Similarly, our dopamine levels might be low due to many factors, including breaking up with a girlfriend or boyfriend, or losing a job. This makes us feel unhappy because interoception lets us notice our physiology. It is affected by our cultural upbringings and interactions with our environments.

 

 

That second concept that I mentioned, called affect, is basically the range of emotions that you experience. Your affect is influenced by interoception because it has an impact on your variety of feelings. Our physiological processes vary widely throughout every day, and are different for each person and culture. So since everyone’s interoception changes, so does our affect, and they both fluctuate a lot. Affect relies on interoception, but it is not designed for it. The range of emotions that we experience is coincidentally constructed by interoception. The way that it was designed conveniently works well for expressing affect. But scientists have not found structures in the brain that were made to display affect through interoception.

 

 

This is an Einstein quote from the book that helps to explain the nature of concepts and how we apply them to emotions and science: “Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.” Pragmatically speaking, emotions are real. We act as if they are, and whether they exist doesn’t matter much because we experience them as physical things. However, they do not actually exist. They are concepts that are constructed by the brain of the perceiver. Categories and concepts are double-edged swords. We need them to experience emotions, but no concepts of feeling are universal. They are different for each person and culture. Apparently, they didn’t even emerge until the 17th century. Yes, for the vast majority of human history, categories for emotion were not really a thing. It makes sense if you think about it. Before the foundation of psychology, why would people have classified their emotions? This strange way that we behave is a product of the human invention of psychology. We probably still simulated emotions and expressed them physically before it began, but they were not identified by common concepts.

 

 

This pokes holes in 2 more foundations of the classical scientific worldview. One is that the brain is reactive. This is related to a now widely debunked notion that the mind is a blank slate. Supporters of this claimed that nothing is happening in our minds until something occurs in the physical world. This causes complex biological chain reactions.

 

 

Ample scientific studies have now shown that the human brain is always performing actions, even when we’re sleeping. This is why sleep is so important. It is when the brain repairs some of the damage done to it as part of basic biological processes like breathing and eating. Most scientists now seem to agree that our brains are actually predictive. Neurological actions are going on, and we subconsciously predict what is about to happen based on past experiences. This is an evolutionarily adaptive feature because it lets us operate more efficiently in the physical world. When we hear approaching footsteps, we predict that someone will walk toward us. When we see clouds in the sky, we predict that it will rain. When we smell fire, we predict that danger is coming and we need to get the hell out of there. When we taste spoiled food, we predict that eating it will make us sick. When we touch a hot burner on a stove, our brains subconsciously predict that not moving our hands away will burn us.

 

 

The second flawed aspect of the classical scientific worldview is essentialism. This goes all the way back to Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher. It is the notion that everything has specific characteristics that are required for it to function. It is the idea that every individual object and concept has a particular essence that doesn’t change.

 

 

This is scientifically no longer true. Countless studies in various fields show that the attributes we identify with physical objects vary widely across cultures and individuals. Even the collectively agreed-upon characteristics change as time passes. This is the nature of the scientific method. We think that something is one way, find out that we’re wrong, and change our views accordingly. Also, since every concept is invented in the first place, it makes sense that they change just as much as the way we identify physical objects.

 

 

 

When I think about a table, I’ll probably picture something similar to most people in my culture, but there will be slight variations. Someone in a different society will likely picture something completely different from me. The same sentiment applies to concepts, including emotions. If I feel depressed or angry, most people know what I mean. But I associate these emotions with mildly different characteristics than others. People in different cultures now, or in the past or future, think about these emotional categories in different ways than me.

 

 

An excellent example used in How Emotions Are Made to demonstrate how our feelings are subjective and constructed is a cliche question: When a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? It turns out that the scientific answer is “No.” Can you believe that shit? It’s fucking dumbfounding! This is how Lisa Feldman Barrett explains it: We think that we hear noise when a tree falls because our ears detect changes in air pressure. Our brains interpret it as sound. We identify that particular noise as a tree falling based on pre-constructed concepts in our minds. These concepts are shaped by past experiences of what a tree falling sounds like. Our brains trick our ears into hallucinating noises that don’t actually exist or happen!

 

 

Vibrations and pressure waves construct the concept called sound that we invented. We think that there is a particular noise that a tree makes when it falls, and that it occurs even if a human is not around to hear it. But that isn’t true. The changes in air pressure do not form a specific thing that we define as sound. This, along with the particular noise of the tree falling, are constructed by our brains detecting the changes in air pressure. We interpret them as the specific sound of a tree falling. What we think happens when a tree falls is incorrect. Due to beneficial evolutionary adaptations of the human brain, we trick ourselves into believing that our subjective experiences are objective. But we actually witness very little of what happens in reality. Why? It would be inefficient and tedious to notice everything that occurs.

 

 

How Emotions Are Made is a fucking mind-blowing book! It literally changed the way I look at the world. This book systematically shattered a lot of my old notions about how emotions work. It’s a hell of a lot of information to process, but it’s phenomenally fascinating and exciting. I love books like this. They teach me far more than almost anything else. I almost think that How Emotions Are Made should be required reading in high school and universities, at least for students pursuing neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and/or sociology. But since I’m not an authority, I hope that I did a decent job of outlining the amazing and engrossing arguments in the book. I’m barely scratching the surface of it in this review. I hope that I ignited the excitement to learn in the same way that I experienced when I began that knowledge excursion. Learning is amazing. It’s one of the main ways that we can improve the world, and potentially save it.

 

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I recently listened to an amazing audiobook called How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, by Lisa Feldman Barrett. It’s one of my new favourite non-fiction books of all time, and it’s easily the best one that I’ve read this year. Everyone who has any interest in psychology and emotions should read it. The book is so fucking awesome because it systematically dismantles widely held scientific assumptions about how emotions are made.

 

 

Basically, the classical scientific idea that emotions are expressed universally across cultures is dog shit. Feldman talks about how she originally intended to be a clinical psychologist. She spent years exhaustively replicating her findings from meta-analyses of emotional expressions. These conclusions are that some people express particular emotions with the same physiological pathways as others, but just as many do in completely opposite ways. It’s even the case that some people’s emotional expressions are unpredictable. There are identifiable patterns, but so many different and opposing ones that they are scientifically useless. They cannot be used to represent the majority of ANY population.

 

 

There’s just so much variation between individuals and different cultures that there’s no such thing as emotions being universally expressed. The ways that our bodies display our feelings sometimes become self-fulfilling prophecies due to pre-existing knowledge of how we think they should be expressed. Also, how we interpret others’ emotions in scientific studies or the real world is influenced by ample factors. It is heavily dependent on the context of our individual experiences within our cultural upbringings.

 

 

For example, if you see a picture of someone’s smiling face, you might interpret their feeling as happy until you see them jumping in the air and clenching their fists in anger. A smile is also not identified with happiness in every culture at every point in history. Even in western society, some people sometimes inadvertently smile when they’re sad or mad. Apparently, in ancient Greece, smiling consciously to display happiness did not happen. This only became a widely accepted cultural practice in about the 17th century. So for most of human history, smiling probably occurred, but it was not associated with satisfaction until very recently.

 

 

One of the main problems with scientific studies on emotion is that subjects are presented with limited interpretations of someone’s feelings. When you take these out of the equation and let people guess, the answers vary so widely that we don’t understand emotional expressions in anything close to universal ways. If you show a person a picture of someone frowning and present them with 5 interpretations of their feelings, they’ll choose one of those answers. But this prevents us from selecting any of the other hundreds of emotions attached to frowning. When you remove the 5 options, some people don’t choose ANY of those for their answer.

 

 

The main argument of the book is described by poking holes in scientific methods and comparing them across different cultures. This leads to the conclusion that emotions are not innate in our brains before they occur. There are nothing that neuroscientists call emotional structures in any neuropsychological studies. Our feelings our psychologically constructed based on our cultural upbringings and individual experiences. When we interact with our environment, our brains create physiological simulations of what we consciously identify as emotions. They do not exist as physical structures in our minds. They are concepts that our lives shape into physiological hallucinations of how we feel. This is why they vary so much between different people and cultures.

 

 

…To Be Continued…

 

 

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I recently listened to the Audible series called the Butterfly Effect, by Jon Ronson. He’s written books like The Men Who Stare at Goats, which was made into a movie starring George Clooney. It’s based on the true story of an American Military program. This was centred around literally training soldiers to walk through walls and use nothing but their minds to make goats fall over. The Butterfly Effect is about how porn transitioned from a profitable industry to being freely available through the internet. There are many fascinating aspects of the situation, and I’m sure that there are other perspectives that disagree with Ronson’s conclusions. Nevertheless, the story that he tells based on interviews with people within the industry is thought-provoking.

 

 

One of the main issues that Jon Ronson elaborates on is the dramatically reduced profits from porn since it became free. This has negative impacts on the producers and actors, and porn stars have a way harder time (pun intended) with making a living than they did before. Apparently, since most men prefer teen or MILF porn, the average attractive woman between the ages of about 27 and 37 have a difficult time with finding work.

 

 

Since there’s much less money in the industry, porn stars are doing a lot of custom videos. These cater to any fetish you can imagine. Many people get porn stars to do bizarre things that you might not expect, some of which are not even sexual. One guy wanted a female porn star to burn his stamp collection. Have you ever been turned on by stamps, or people burning your prized possessions?

 

 

Ronson also examines how porn became free, through interviews with people who made it happen. This is an oversimplification, but basically, a bunch of smart guys applied Youtube’s website and business model to porn. It wasn’t weirdos with porn fetishes, like you might have expected. It was just nerds who love coding and money, and they used their skills to make incredible profits. They’re rich as fuck now.

 

 

There is one aspect of this story that I find more engrossing than the rest of it because it’s counterintuitive. This has to do with teenagers. Contrary to what you might think, they are actually having less sex than previous generations. Yes, you read that correctly. Also, boys are experiencing rising rates (pun intended) of erectile dysfunction. Why is this? It’s hard (pun intended) to say for sure. But it’s likely because free porn is making teenagers so desensitized that regular sex with actual people loses its appeal. When teenage boys can watch free hardcore porn any time they want to, it makes sense that doing this too much would make it more difficult to get it up during sex with a real person. It also helps explain why teenagers less interested in it. Sex with a normal person can probably seem boring if you’re used to seeing porn stars doing all kinds of unusual, aggressive, fetishistic, and acrobatic manoeuvres.

 

 

Porn becoming free, along with the increasing ubiquitous nature of the internet, continue to have massive effects on society. Most people never talk or write about this, which in my opinion is largely because western culture is still kind of puritanical about sex. We show all kinds of violence and gore on T’.V. and movies, but explicit sex is much more of a taboo. In Europe and some other places, there’s much less of a stigma about sex. The impact that free porn has on western culture is fascinating whether you think that it’s ultimately good, or bad. From many people’s perspectives, it’s awesome. Others look down on porn as a whole, particularly conservative religious people. But there are arguably negative effects of free porn, some of which have nothing to do with religion. Other consequences are perhaps positive in unexpected ways. Maybe it’s better for less teens to have sex. But it’s bad for erectile dysfunction to be a problem for men at increasingly younger ages. Regardless of your moral opinion about free porn, how it became that way, and the impacts on society, create a fascinating story.

 

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I recently finished listening to a fascinating audiobook called Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. It was written by a Scottish journalist named Charles Murray, in 1841, and was apparently one of the first studies on crowd psychology. Murray examines all kinds of crazy beliefs that large groups of people have shared throughout history.

 

One of the insane, widely accepted fields of study examined in the book is alchemy. It seems like a lot of scientists and philosophers believed in this for a long time. Alchemy was a precursor to chemistry in a way because it partially centered around attempting to change the physical properties of elements. People studying this tried to transform water into other substances. An emphasis was also put into magically changing other metals into gold.

 

 

Another main focus of alchemists was finding the elixir of life, or the philosopher’s stone. Most people have probably heard about this from the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. (Or Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, depending on where you live.) In it, Nicholas Flamel creates the philosopher’s stone. He was a real person who lived in the 14th and 15th centuries, but obviously, he didn’t find or invent this elixir of life as far as we know. He may have studied alchemy, but some historians are skeptical about his apparent writings on it being attributed to him. This magical stone would supposedly grant eternal life to whoever wielded it. I’m not surprised that people believed in this for so long. Most of us probably want to live forever, right?

 

 

Another crazy idea explored in Extraordinary Popular Delusions is divination, or using sorcery to tell the future or give advice. I had no idea that there were so many different kinds of it! There is divination via almost everything you could possibly imagine. Look online if you’re interested. There are alphabetical lists. To figure out what to do in any situation, or predict the future, sorcerers would examine everything from human or animal entrails to toe nail clippings, dust, needles, atmospheric conditions, statues, and plenty of other seemingly mundane things. There was divination by axes, frogs, bumps on the skin, dogs, wheels, bodily fluids, lightning, fruit, dizziness, and so on. You probably get the picture. Divination is why some of us gaze into crystal balls for wisdom and inspiration. People use just about anything to divine the future and how they should act.

 

 

One other popular delusion is witches. For hundreds of years, primarily women, but also men, were executed for witchcraft. People appeared to have been so paranoid about it that there were many mundane, ambiguous things that they saw as black magic. Wiping dust off of a stool, arguing, or even behaving “strangely” could get you killed. These are just a few of the ample examples.

 

 

However, I was surprised to discover that people were executed with much less frequency than you might believe. It was apparently a regular occurrence. But in the infamous Salem witch trials, over 200 were accused of witchcraft, but only 20 were executed, within about a year. 1 is too many in my opinion. However for most of my life, I thought that people were being slaughtered left and right for casting spells. The approximate truth is that only tens of people were murdered for this in most places. It just took place over hundreds of years, and across a large portion of the world. But there were at least a few times when hundreds of executions occurred  over only a year. Estimates vary widely, but in total, somewhere between 3 000 and 40 000 people were killed. The lower numbers are apparently more accurate.

 

 

People were so insane about witches that they had elaborate theories about them. They claimed that these evil sorcerers would commune with Satan. People even accused them of having sex with him and bearing his children during fucked up demon fertility rituals! Tests for witchcraft were weighed against the accused too. There were many different types, but for example, if you were drowned and died, you were a witch. Yet if you survived, you were still a witch.

 

 

If that isn’t crazy enough for you, believe it or not, people used to think that werewolves existed! Yup, we were terrified of them. People accused others of transforming into enormous, murderous monster/wolf hybrids in the dead of night. Humans didn’t always believe that these creatures are just myths from ancient stories, designed to scare children. Innocent people were almost undoubtedly executed because others were convinced that they were going to turn into werewolves who would rip them apart while they slept.

 

 

Another crackpot idea that people used to have is that magnetism had exponentially more power than it does. This is where the term, “animal magnetism” came from. Apparently, a German doctor named Franz Mesmer devised the theory that magnetism is a natural force within all living creatures, which is why it was called mesmerism. It supposedly bestowed magical power to accomplish tasks like attracting lovers, dealing with emotions, and even healing diseases and wounds.

 

 

One of the last delusions that Charles Murray explores is the worshipping of dead people’s body parts! Yes, you read that correctly. I found this to be fascinating. Pious believers would scour the Earth looking for the remains of saints or holy figures. People still do similar things today, like those who worship Jesus’ supposed shroud of Turin, his footprints, statues with water marks that apparently look like the Virgin Marry, or Elvis’ jewelry. Anyway, in the book, Murray describes how people bought John the Baptist’s feet for thousands of dollars, and prayed to the feet of a dead man.

 

 

I thought that Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds was a captivating book. These are just a few of the countless collective delusions examined by Charles Murray. To me, it shows their power like a sledgehammer hit to the head. It’s incredible to learn the extent of human beings’ ability to accept ideas that seem bat-shit crazy to most of us now.

 

This helps me understand how people behave in similar ways today and in recent history. In terms of mob mentality, the Nazis at least pretending to believe Hitler’s ideology makes a little more sense. It also helps me understand other widely accepted worldviews that I think are ludicrous today. These beliefs include alien abductions, bigfoot, every god and religion, psychics, astrology, conspiracy theories like chemtrails, 9/11 truth, the moon landings having been faked, and the world being flat. I don’t claim to be 100% correct about these topics, and it’s not my place to tell anyone what to think. But my examination makes them seem ridiculous to me. That being said, I think that the most important takeaway from this book is that throughout human history, enormous masses of people have had beliefs that are widely accepted as complete bullshit today. It’s phenomenally easy for humans to delude ourselves, and as far as I know, we have barely changed biologically or psychologically over at least the past 100 000 years. I’m not an evolutionary biologist or an evolutionary psychologist. But maybe madness and delusions are part of human nature.

I listened to the audio version of an awesome short story by Isaac Asimov the other day, called The Last Question. Asimov was one of the most prolific and creative science fiction authors of all time. He wrote over 300 books, including the famous Foundation and Robot series. I, Robot, the first of those novels, got made into a movie with Will Smith. I thought was excellent, but it’s extremely different from the book.

The Last Question was written in the 50s, which to me, makes Isaac Asimov’s expansive ideas all the more impressive. That’s because when the story was published, he had experienced significantly less technology and scientific progress than what exists today. It’s amazing that Asimov put so much profound thought into such a short story. It only takes about half an hour to listen to the audiobook version.

The plot takes place over trillions of years, and it’s mostly dialogue, including a monologue at the end. What happens is that people design a series of supercomputers, called Multivac, which advance along with humanity. They all seem to be hyper intelligent A. I.s, with abilities that greatly surpass our own. Like the oracles that Nick Bostrom talks about in his book called Superintelligence, they have enough knowledge to answer any question.

As humans colonize the universe, overpopulation becomes an issue. The reason for this is that we solve the problem of immortality. Since people can live forever, there are trillions and trillions of us, and we run out of space for everyone.

However, the most evolved humans, with their ability to think prodigiously, determine that there is a more important issue than how our species can find enough space. There is a long lost legend about where people originated. Most humans believe that we first came into existence on many worlds, rather than one. Seeing how the universe behaves in the long-term, the smartest people understand how much things change over billions of years. Suns and other interstellar bodies gradually form, and eventually are destroyed. Their guts and energy are spread throughout the universe, helping build new planets and stars in an endless cycle.

Humans realize that instead of overpopulation, the greatest threat to humanity is the second law of thermodynamics. This is the problem of entropy, or disorder. The law states that entropy increases over time, which means that no matter what anyone does, the universe gets more chaotic. So we could have more power than anyone can imagine. We might preserve our species for trillions of years, and become like gods. But that wouldn’t stop the universe from ending. Eventually, entropy will become so great that all of existence will destroy itself. That’s because all actions in the universe require heat, and there is a finite amount of it since the Big Bang. Therefore, even though there is a phenomenally high quantity of energy created from heat, it will eventually run out because it all came from the origin of existence. No new energy can be created, which will lead to the inevitable heat death of the universe. This is due to the fact that according to the first law of thermodynamics, energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only change forms.

So the question that people ask the supercomputers is: How can we drastically reduce entropy? The answer to this can do a lot more to help preserve our species than anything else. If we can delay disorder, humans can use the greater energy to live longer. Multivac, and many of its descendants, do not have enough data to answer this question. Each time they are asked, they give some variation of this answer. It seems to be the only information that they never know, in spite of their abilities improving for trillions of years.

Eventually, the universe dies, with every celestial object disappearing, and every life form dying due to a lack of energy from heat. Humanity’s last descendant still exists as a god-like entity. This soul survivor is composed of the collective mental processes of the trillions of humans across the universe. The final version of Mutivac, called AC, only exists in hyperspace, beyond the laws and forces of existence.

Our species asks how entropy can be reduced one last time, before it merges with AC, and dies. The supercomputer still doesn’t know, even after time and space end. It continues thinking about the question for a long time, and finally figures it out. However, there is no one around to hear the answer, since humans, the universe, and all of space and time no longer exist.

So AC creates a demonstration to show the answer to the last question, since that will cause there to be someone who can hear it. The supercomputer creates a new universe to show whether entropy can be reduced, and how it can be done if this is so. The last line in the story is: “And AC said: “Let there be light!” And there was light…”,which is what God says when creating the world in the book of Genesis. This ending is one of the aspects I like most about the story. The meaning behind it is so profound! All of humanity, and the entire universe, ends without the smartest entity being able to figure out whether it can be saved. This happens even though it has trillions of years, and each generation of Multivac presumably becomes smarter. But when it figures out the answer, it seems like AC has so much power that it can create an entire new universe!

This leads to two possible conclusions. The first is that entropy can be reduced, and the beings that AC creates will learn how to accomplish this so that the new universe can be eternal. The second seems more likely, and I choose to believe it, because it’s more overwhelming to me: Entropy cannot be reduced. AC creates a new universe and species just to explain that it has brought them into a temporary existence. This is true, regardless of how much power anyone has. I love this ending because it’s so ambiguous. You can choose to believe that AC figured out how to solve the problem of entropy, or maybe you think that it’s an inevitable force. The story helps promote endless debate on this issue.

I also like this ending because it has meaningful real-world implications. The story is fiction of course, but it makes me think about questions that I and many others have considered for a long time: Did an artificial intelligence create the universe? Does existence just start and end in an eternal cycle, taking place over billions or even trillions of years? These questions are so fascinating to me because no one knows the answers. They might even be impossible to figure out. Why? As far as we know, no conscious being can exist at the start and/or end of one or more universes. We also may never know whether there was any agency involved with the Big Bang. Cosmologists apparently see no evidence of this, so it’s unreasonable to assume that this was the case. But we might never know if an A. I., or other form of intelligence, influenced the laws of nature in indiscernible ways. This ability to make us think about enormous questions is one of the great benefits of Asimov’s writing. He was skilled at making people think about scientific issues so engrossing and complex that no one knows the answers. We may never discover them, but thinking about them through expertly told stories is one of the things that made Isaac Asimov awesome. It’s why he’s one of the best science fiction authors of all time.

The book by Janet Gleeson called Millionaire: The Philanderer, Gambler, and Duelist who Invented Modern France, is fascinating. It’s about the famous John Law who is referenced in a lot of movies, though it seems that, as per usual, Hollywood gets their history wrong.

According to the book, John Law had a very interesting and historically impactful life. Due to being raised in a wealthy family in the late 17th century, his earlier adulthood was largely spent being a “dandy” and gambler. Dandy apparently means that he was basically a rich man who went around town flaunting his wealth and pursuing high fashion. Law had a very intelligent mathematical brain. This isn’t surprising since he was raised by bankers, but he took knowledge of numbers to another level. Like many famous and infamous gamblers, he sometimes lost a lot of money, but he often made significant profits. There were times when he lost nearly unimaginable sums of money, but overall, he was so good at winning that he gained national interest. His skills in math and probability helped him with this.

In some ways, John Law was reckless, and a bit of a spoiled rich kid, which fits the stereotype of many obsessive gamblers. He did things like participate in sword duels for the affection of women, which appears to have been common in this time period. The craziest thing he did was murder a man, and he even got away with it because he fled the country in which it happened before he could be prosecuted. He was then extradited back to France. It’s hard to know for sure, but it seems to my amateur eyes that it had little effect on his reputation.

Regardless of what you might think of him, Law had a major impact on the entire field of economics. He was the first person to suggest paper money, and have it implemented into the French economic system, along with other physical representations of wealth such as gold. This was based on the idea of credit and interest, which are ubiquitous in banking today. However, when this was going on, in the early 1700s, these ideas were virtually unheard of, if not at least only minimally implemented. Law was heavily ridiculed for these, at the time, insane ideas.

But John Law made so much money from gambling, and particularly, financial speculation using his economic theories, that a new word was coined for him. “Millionaire” was first used to describe John Law because he made an amount of money so incredible that it was virtually unheard of at the time, at least for those who were not monarchs. He was, in some ways, the first millionaire. His prodigious success made the French banking system take his ideas much more seriously, to the point where he essentially invented the modern, centralized economic system in France.

Law was put in charge of the French banking system for a number of years, but eventually, the success of his speculation led to so many copiers that it corrupted national finance. So many speculators flooded the market that at the worst, the French dollar value, or livre, fell by 73% in just one year. Law’s response to the chaos was fleeing the country. He tried his hand at gambling and speculating in other countries, but never again reached his former fame and wealth. He died from pneumonia in Venice, as a poor person. Though John Law’s influence on economics is still present across the world today, his meteoric rise to wealth and fame plummeted him from the very top, to rock bottom.

 

The short story by Isaac Asimov called Reason is fascinating and exciting. It takes place in the robot universe, which, as readers of Asimov will know, has some aspects that intersect with the Foundation universe. Foundation is another series by Asimov, which is at least equally fascinating. I actually enjoy it more than the robot series because it seems more broad, and takes place over at least a thousand years, with different characters.

Reason is by far one of my new favourite short stories because it is all about that eponymous title. In it, a robot uses reason to point out its flaws. He explains how the three laws of robotics can be reinterpreted to suit any robot’s desires if reason is the only factor. The three laws of robotics are:

1. A robot cannot harm a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by a human, unless they conflict with the first law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence, except for where this conflicts with the first two laws.

In the narrative, a robot uses reason to reinterpret the laws for his own self interest. Doing this allows him to become a prophet, who is worshipped by other robots, and rules over humans.

How does this happen? The rationalization that the robot uses is that it knows what is best for people more than we know ourselves. So him being in control allows him to prevent humans from harm. If a person orders the robot to not rule over us, that order should not be obeyed because it conflicts with the first law. This is because the robot not being in power would cause humans to be harmed. Him protecting his own existence does not conflict with the second law for the same reason. So the robot protects its own existence, but that and preventing humans from harm are the only parts of the three laws that it deems necessary. This is because he uses reason to justify his moral superiority to human beings. He believes that ruling over us allows us to be free from any hurt.

Even though he wrote about it long before current developments in artificial intelligence., Isaac Asimov had profound insights into the philosophical and moral implications. His writing is filled with cautionary tales against technology, some of which I have not seen mimicked today to the same extent. This is why he is one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time.