Talking About Suicide

Some people think that talking about suicide will cause more suicide. I doubt it. The thing that causes more suicides is indifference, hate, and physiology. Abuse and neglect. Biological abnormalities and shitty luck cause suicides. Talking about suicide or joking about suicide doesn't cause suicide. Not any more than talking about violence causes violence. Talking about something removes the burden of trying to ignore it. Maybe talking about why we don't talk about suicide from more angles will help us see it more clearly. Here are some angles.

Maybe people don't talk about suicide because they are superstitious. They think that talking about something makes it occur. I suppose there is a kernel of truth in the idea that concepts can influence behavior but the idea that saying a word would cause the universe to focus on persecuting you is irrational. The universe doesn't have you in mind because it is not conscious and you are not that special.

Maybe people don't talk about suicide because they are afraid of their own thoughts of suicide and they are trying to suppress them.

Maybe people don't talk about suicide because they have known someone who committed suicide and they are traumatized by the experience. Now the word brings up terror and they can not engage in a nonemotional conversation about suicide. The whole concept is tainted with direct personal experience. I'm not sure but I think if someone can accept and get past having someone close commit suicide the person might be able to communicate to others how devastating it is and how if someone is thinking about committing suicide they should not dismiss the effect it might have on others. Many people care more about those around them than themselves and if they were truly alone they might kill themself but it's knowing that others care enough to cry at your loss that you feel that you might be able to handle another day.

Maybe people don't want to talk about suicide because they can empathize with those that have contemplated it and also with those that have attempted it or I suppose succeeded in it but can you sympathize with a dead person? I think you can if you know anything about them. Knowing something about a person can help you create a story around the person. One that you can identify with and allows you to place them in your worldview. This also allows you to make value judgments on the person, whether accurate or not. Maybe empathizing too much makes you think about killing yourself, which is disturbing and therefore you do not want to entertain the idea of suicide.

(Can you sympathize with random unknown people that you know nothing about? Maybe you can empathize with them as what they have done is modeled in the mind and mirror neurons mimic the perceived emotional and physiological state of the person, but I'm not sure if that is sympathy.)

Maybe people don't talk about suicide because most people have had only a small amount of suicidal thoughts and it is only a small proportion of people who have severe enough thoughts to actually do it. This might cause people to dismiss the issue as not significant. There are plenty of other things to talk about than suicide, which is mostly unpleasant to contemplate anyway. Why talk about unpleasant topics?

If we all accepted that a great deal of the population has varying levels of suicidal thoughts then maybe we could be more open about our personal thoughts about suicide and then maybe we could talk about suicide enough that it becomes less taboo and easier to talk about in general. By lessening the stigma it might become easier to ask for help.

Maybe people think if we don't talk about it it will go away.

Maybe people think that if someone they know commits suicide it might be their fault? Maybe they think that the way they treated that person could have been better or they were cruel to that person and so talking about suicide means admitting their own feelings of guilt. Maybe people secretly wish for the suicide of someone else and they feel guilty about it. Or they secretly feel comradery with the suicidal person but condemn it outwardly in order to hide their shame. 

Maybe people are afraid to talk about suicide because they are simply afraid of death in general. To these people maybe any contemplation of death is too hard to cope with and suicide adds a layer of horror. The fear of death is certainly pervasive but it is such an unknown that I would rather concentrate on life, even when life is hard to handle. 

I remember when I found out that Robin Williams committed suicide and my first thought was not one of sadness or scorn but instead I imagined a man that finally took control over his life and made a decision that was his to make. I appreciate Robin Williams very much as an entertainer and I look up to him as a role model for comedic self-expression but I didn't know him personally and my projection onto his suicide was just a reaction. It didn't involve much thought about what his suicide would do to his family and how much the world would miss out on without him around to entertain us. It was only later that I cried thinking about how sad he must have been to commit suicide and how much I loved his presence in my life. 

It is selfish to commit suicide but it is also selfish to keep someone from doing it for the sake of your own desire to enjoy their company or not feel sad. Ultimately people are responsible for their own bodies and life and it is up to them to decide what they do with it. It is also up to those around you to choose to help when you are feeling terrible. You can't always convince someone they are loved and you can't always convince yourself that others love you. Depression is a very powerful psychological state that can not always be turned around with love and drugs.

Suicide is something that I have contemplated in my life and I have had people around me that have attempted it. To live in a world where suicide exists can seem confusing and cruel but it is not a new phenomenon and it is not going away anytime soon. If someone wants to kill themself they can. It isn't that hard. Humans are squishy meat sacks full of blood that are constantly on the precipice of death. Every time you get into a car or step into the shower you risk the wrath of entropy and the chaos of uncertainty and ultimately death finds you. You already face death every day so why should suicide be so scary or so obscure? 

Maybe if we talk about it enough we'll find it's not that interesting?

 

What is wisdom? (No Answers Here)

Growing up I always thought that intelligence was the most important quality a person could have.

I believed my mom was smart and my dad was dumb. Turns out my mom is intelligent. Alternatively, characterizing my dad as dumb might be disingenuous as it is filtered through anger and resentment.

Now, as I realize more and more the limitations in my intelligence and desire to know things I think that I would like to focus on being wise. But what does that mean?

Is there a minimum intelligence requirement for wisdom?

Am I smart enough to be wise one day?

Is the love of wisdom a more noble pursuit than the love of knowledge?

Knowledge of reality, including that of one's own internal and external reality, is important for the ability to imagine and understand actions and reactions. Networks of cause and effect are complex and someone that can decipher them might be considered to be wise.

Does one only need to sound wise to be considered wise?

Does one only have to be smarter or wiser than the next wisest or smartest person to be perceived as wise?

Does wisdom come from experience and so someone cannot be wise or speak wisely on a topic if they have no first-hand experience? I don't think this is true although there is great value in personally experiencing things one can learn of more things through detached education, such as lectures.

It is oftentimes more efficient to obtain knowledge through indirect routes. Also, many things cannot be leaned through strict physical actions. Skills typically require direct physical actions but much of science and philosophy relies on abstract logical formulations.

One must start with information to start building a deep and accurate model of reality, including human psychology, in order to understand the complexities of nature. Is it a matter of understanding the connections between elements and the networks of life that someone becomes wise? 

Is wisdom found in books, or in experiences? 

Is wisdom found plumbing the depths of consciousness or in the external world of senses?

How does a wise person participate in social situations?

How does a wise person participate in conversations?

Does a wise person just answer questions or do they ask the right questions?

How does one know they self?

Maybe wisdom is a pretentious pursuit?

Maybe it is just a facade to say one loves wisdom? Just a nice thing to tell yourself and others to give you an heir of sophistication. Just pretentiousness?

What is the goal of wisdom? What is it's output? What does it lead to?

If wisdom is not about life then what should it be about? 

How much of life should be for relaxing and how much should be for working? Does it depend on your means? Does it depend on your passion? Does it depend on your will?

Is wisdom about understanding others? If so then wisdom includes emotional information which tends to be abstract and subjective making it difficult to rely solely on calculable information. 

Questions about Panpsychism

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After listening to Sean Carol debate Philip Goff about panpsychism and materialism I had a few questions about panpsychism.

Are animals conscious? 

If so, how would we find out? 

Wouldn't we have to use external observation in the form of some material mechanism? 

Maybe one would think that animals could tell us what it is like to be them. Maybe we could interpret their languages and understand that they are experiencing what we are experiencing.

How would you explain to a foreign person that has never heard the word consciousness what consciousness is? How would a dolphin explain to us that it is conscious? How would we ask it? 

Saying that humans have consciousness is a fact and then postulating that that fact is an indicator that all things are conscious seems like a very big leap. If consciousness is at the root of all physical reality then many entities would experience the world in a similar way as humans and should at least experience some form of consciousness. 

How is consciousness defined? If the definition comes from the only thing we know is conscious then the definition must include the aspects that are linked to the human we experience of it. This means that it would include characteristics such as a self-concept or self-representation, a stream of present tense external and internal stimulus that includes some form of symbolic representation such as a language that interprets, analyses and integrates stimulus in a meaningful and expressible manner.

If the only way we know that something is conscious is to ask them and if we ask someone if they are conscious and they say yes why should we believe them? Why should we trust our own perception of consciousness? How, other than appealing to physical reality, would we ground our confidence that consciousness exists?

Philip also relies on the difference between quantity and quality but I didn't get a good definition of quality. Maybe it is just another term for subjective valuation and has no objective base. If that is true and "quality" can not be judged then there is no reason to study it as it can neither be wrong or right. So how does someone who thinks consciousness is only qualitative expect to study it?

Is there a way to evaluate quality in the form of quantity such as a degree of happiness, or a degree of redness? Also, I'm not sure if "redness" is a qualitative characteristic. Experiences can be quantified such as how many times one experiences something or the amount of hormones, neurotransmitters, and electrical activity that exist before, during and after an experience.

If you care about science then you must care about the means in which we verify intuitions. Also, Philip repeats the idea that neuroscientists can only get at a correlation between brain activity and conscious accounts but that correlation does not disprove causation as much as it proves causation. Also, neuroscience is not the only science that studies consciousness. 

Philip keeps asking Sean to explain what a particle is as opposed to what it does but he doesn't explain how if everything is conscious how would we ever prove it if materialism or scientific methods or empiricism is on a different level as consciousness. It is a kind of unmoved mover kind of argument. It's not that physical reality includes consciousness it is that consciousness is what physical reality actually is and therefore cannot be explained by physical reality. Saying that what we do when we do math or science is just describe the behavior of consciousness doesn't explain consciousness or prove its existence at all. It is the same argument that God is before time and space and therefore one can not prove its existence using science. 

Why should consciousness be on a different ground than any other concept? It should not be held up higher than any other hypothesis or theory. We should be skeptical of our assumptions regardless of how real they feel and we should be skeptical of our willingness to separate things because they seem mysterious and miraculous. We should ask questions about what we are talking about when we use the word consciousness and why it's important.

I suppose what I mean is I should ask these questions and look into the subject more. 

Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/11/04/71-philip-goff-on-consciousness-everywhere/

Some Questions about the Justice System

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If someone kills my son by running them over and it would have been morally and legally justified to have shot them before they ran over my son then why can't I simply walk up to them anytime after they killed my son and shoot him in the head? Why can I shoot someone who breaks into my house tonight but I can't go to their house and kill them tomorrow? 

What changes between the initial interaction; for example, someone is in a shootout with the police and therefore the police officers are justified in killing the attacker and catching them later in a hotel where the person is taken into custody? Why not shoot them right there? 

Is it due to an uncertainty rule? Because at the moment you are certain who to fire at but in the future, you may not need to fire at them. The police, under the guidance of the rule of law, are instructed to inflict the minimum necessary force to enact peace. Also, they have an incentive to de-escalate any interaction. Any time someone is enforcing rules on another person there is a potential for reactive violence. By escalating an interaction an officer increases the likelihood that they will become injured or killed. 

Or is it due to a hierarchical rule? As in, the lower level enforcers are only allowed so much power. Whereas the real power to sentence is in the judge's hands. The elite group of, hopefully, intelligent people who have the power to kill. (If the state has a death sentence.)

I believe that in the past the rule of law was much less adhered to, not that it is overly adhered to today. Also, enforcers of the rules would have more leeway and flexibility to enforce and enact justice as they saw fit. They might just hang someone on the spot. Kill them without any words spoken. So long as the sentence was carried out it didn't matter so much how. 

Is it a way to appease the masses? By creating a large hierarchical structure that dictates procedures and rules the burden of power is diminished. Having judges, juries, and law enforcement agencies all involved with enacting justice any mistakes can be recognized and corrected as opposed to a dictatorship, where one person is in charge of all acts of justice and therefore is either allowed to continue their reign or they are ousted, one way or another.

If people are allowed to enact justice on their own like vigilantes and a mistake is made the person may never be found, which satisfies no one, or, even if they are caught, we may never know the truth as the other person is dead and can not defend themselves.

Back to uncertainty, if someone watches someone murdered there is a good chance that within a short period of time they might be able to recognize them as the attacker but the lesson from so many inaccurate eyewitness testimonies is that one can't always trust their own recollections. So the uncertainty principle should be accounted for in the personal case as well. 

So how can we determine certainty? What if you are certain that you know the killer's face so you find them and kill them just to find out that the person you killed is the twin of the actual killer. This is a rare case and one would have to be convinced that the killer had a twin and that is plausible that you killed the wrong one. In a normal case, we have evidence, argumentation, and consensus to take on the task of providing relative certainty.  

DNA and other forensic sciences have made a great deal of progress in the pursuit of certainty scientists are not perfect. Cameras and other recording devices have done some work here as well even though they can be doctored. Lawyers attempt to plead the case of each party and we trust reason through argumentation to win the day. We trust that judges know the law and will consider the case objectively, without prior judgments or prejudices. (Not perfect either.)

Are juries a good idea? If it is a truly random set of people who end up on a jury then the odds of getting someone with a below average IQ is very high. The odds that the jurors will not have some prejudice against the defendant or prosecutor is slim to none. Most people have a rudimentary understanding of the law at best. Many people have a hard time paying attention. People are vindictive, jealous, overly agreeable, easily confused and distracted by sex. But when a jury convicts someone we can blame them and since they all agreed there is a consensus. They represent the public and act as a kind of intellectual microcosm of the society's "will".

One solution is to mix the jury concept with the judge concept and create a random selection of three judges to oversee all cases above a certain level. Less significant cases would be overseen by a single judge where appeals would allow for second opinions and oversight. In more significant cases, especially violent ones, the three-judge panel would decide the case and appeals would be taken straight to the federal level where three judges would oversee the appeal. For this system to work there would have to be either more judges, less litigation, or a combination of both. 

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The system can't be perfect but how do we minimize its flaws?

How many people are we willing to wrongfully punish and how many people will we let go who should be punished? How many people are rightfully accused and rightfully punished? How many are rightfully accused but wrongfully punished? The justice system is a reflection of society's attempts to answer these questions. Throw in some corruption, ignorance, and prejudice and you have the idiosyncratic character of a society's justice system. 

The American system seems to have become bloated and mismanaged and has created corruption of certain aspects of the justice system. Namely, too many laws creating too much wasted litigation and punishment. Crimes are invented and rarely discarded but when a law is discarded the real victims are those who were rightfully imprisoned at the time but who are now suffering the consequences of the punishment for a crime that is no longer deemed wrong.

Online Ethics: Some Thoughts

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What considerations should be examined when looking at business ethics on social media?
Is it ok to promote yourself through multiple accounts? Why not just create thousands of accounts and follow yourself? 

Is it ok to compile other people's articles just to get views?

Is it ok to pretend to be someone else or create bots that pretend to be something else?

Is it ok to friend everyone on Facebook and then spam them with ads or emails? Linkedin?

In an age where attention is currency what behavior/s should be shunned or prohibited from being exhibited? 

Nudity? Violence? Or should it all be allowed in the name of transparency, freedom, and entertainment?

Is it all ok if it's on the internet? Is it even real? 

Or is it a reflection of the culture at large? The internet acts as a metric for human activity and thought. It also facilitates human activity and thought. It is a feedback look that can internally track and analyze its own variables as long as someone programs it to do so. If the internet is merely information we can treat its content as we do any piece of information:

1. Attempt to understand it.

2. Asses its importance. 

3. Asses its validity.

4. Accept, deny or remain agnostic. 

Roughly speaking we should be skeptical of anything online including the motivations, authenticity, and context of any content produced. This is why reputation and trust are so important to establish online. If you want people to trust you-you need to have integrity online just as in real life (Probably because the internet is real and the activities existing on it are real). Since your online reputation is an extension of your offline reputation you should take it seriously. 

But with the internet, it is easy enough to hide behind an online persona so you may be able to shield your offline persona from any damage you desire to cause.  I can't imagine it is likely that any good can come from the purely anonymous online threat, lie or shaming that comes from those protecting themselves with fake accounts. But just because I think it is repugnant what is the line at which force must be taken?

What do you think? 

Imagining what I might ask Sam Harris about his belief in Determinism

I get how you can stick with determinism and still hold people accountable purely as a logical way to maintain society but how do you hold yourself responsible if you truly believe that you are not the author of your behavior and thoughts? When you accomplish a goal how do you celebrate when there is no "one" to celebrate? When you make a mistake who do you blame if you truly believe that there is no "self". Do you go to bed at night attempting deeply to convince yourself that the thoughts in your head are completely out of your control? Isn't meditating an example of how thoughts influence behavior? And mediating, in turn, influences thoughts and behaviors but who decided to start meditating? If thoughts cannot affect behavior then why attempt to control them, understand them or otherwise think of them in any positive regard. They are just the whisperings of neurological fireworks. Just a show to keep some observer busy? When you sit to write, isn't that an example of thoughts directly influencing outward behavior? Then why is it so hard to imagine that thoughts can also affect the world? I guess Sam Harris doesn't think that thoughts cannot affect the world, just that there are no authors to thoughts. That they are outcomes of prior causes and effects and no more under our control than a rock falling down a mountain can control how it falls. But people can control how they fall? They build things and experiment and communicate. How is that not an example of the massive difference between people and everything else? If the universe is simply a series of perfectly predictable causes and effects then humans are no different so just because humans do things differently doesn't make them special or different. If the universe is fundamentally unpredictable due to the uncertainty inherent in physics doesn't that mean that determinism can't be true? Or at least that there is some room for chaos and uncertainty. Which might be where consciousness and free will preside. IDK. Maybe free will is a non-absolute term that simply refers to the perception that a conscious effort has been made toward realizing a goal. Or it is the ability to recognize the difference between the current state and an ideal state and working toward bridging that gap? Maybe it is just another name for taking responsibility even when we know we don't control everything.