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Esquire has an article about Radical Honesty, a movement founded by psychotherapist Brad Blanton.

He says everybody would be happier if we just stopped lying. Tell the truth, all the time. This would be radical enough — a world without fibs — but Blanton goes further. He says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you’re having fantasies about your wife’s sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It’s the only path to authentic relationships. It’s the only way to smash through modernity’s soul-deadening alienation. Oversharing? No such thing.

Is it possible to have too much honesty?

1. It’s 10:30 at night. You’re watching TV, when someone knocks quietly on the front door. Do you:

1. Answer the door.
2. Ignore it.
3. Yell “Go away.”
4. Pretend you’re not in.
5. Call the police.
6. Fetch your gun.

2. Imagine you open the door. It’s dark, and a light rain has recently stopped. There’s a man at the door. He’s reasonably well dressed, but has torn the pocket of his trousers on something. He’s not obviously drunk or high. He starts to tell you a somewhat confused story involving a broken down car. Do you:

1. Listen politely.
2. Shut the door on him.
3. Tell him to go away.
4. Threaten to call the police.
5. Close the door and actually call the police.
6. Fetch your gun.

3. Imagine you have allowed him to finish his story of woe. He tells you that he was at a restaurant with friends, but that his car broke down, and that it seems the battery is cracked and he doesn’t have the cash to go to the nearest store and get a replacement. He begs you for some money, promising to give it back as soon as he can. He offers to leave his military ID with you as some kind of collateral.

Suppose for the sake of this exercise that the amount he’s asking for is of no consequence to you; that you could blow that much on CDs and not have to think about it. Suppose you also have a pretty good idea that his story doesn’t really hold up, and that you’re very unlikely to see the money again. Do you:

1. Give him the money anyway.
2. Give him the money, but insist on collateral.
3. Shut the door on him.
4. Tell him that you know he’s scamming you, and that he should go away.
5. Threaten to call the police.
6. Close the door and actually call the police.
7. Fetch your gun.
8. Dear god, please don’t tell me you actually gave him money, you idiot.

You don’t have to give your reasoning, and there are no prizes.

[Update: Looking for a more positive story about ubiquitous cameras?]

David Brin wrote about the coming social revolution at length in his book The Transparent Society. Momus provided some handy tips in his song The Age of Information. Now Dog-Shit-Girl has demonstrated the dangers of not picking up the courtesy cluephone.

We live in a world where increasing numbers of people have digital cameras. In fact, in a few years the majority of people will have a mobile phone with built-in camera and Internet connection. This means that if you are going to be an antisocial ass in public, there’s a good chance that you will be recorded, your antics will be publicized, and you will be mocked. The worse your behavior, the more widespread your infamy. If what you do is bad enough, you might get threats; you might find that people recognize you, point at you in the street and yell at you.

You can whine all you like about privacy and rights; it won’t do any good. The Internet and digital cameras are not going to go away. Legislation won’t stop it, the transparent society is coming. My advice is to learn to live in it. People will be able to publish facts about you to a massive audience, so it’s probably a good idea to make sure the facts on offer are favorable ones.

In a way, it’s a return to the past. When we lived in villages where everyone knew everyone else, the antisocial would become outcasts. Now we’re headed back that way; the only difference is the size of the village.

Theodore Dalrymple writes about the German psyche, and how even now Germans find it hard to feel national pride, or even anger at what was done to them in Dresden. My German roots are distant enough that I’ll have to take his word for that. However, he then goes on to diagnose a deep malaise in modern Germany:

The urban environment of Germany, whose towns and cities were once among the most beautiful in the world, second only to Italy’s, is now a wasteland of functional yet discordant modern architecture, soulless and incapable of inspiring anything but a vague existential unease, with a sense of impermanence and unreality that mere prosperity can do nothing to dispel. […] Nor are the comforts of victimhood available to the Germans as they survey the devastation of their homeland.

Of course, that pre-supposes that modern architecture is “devastation”. Apparently Dalrymple feels that the proper response to the end of World War II would have been to replicas of the destroyed classical architecture and make Germany a kind of Weimar Disneyland with compulsory lederhosen for all.

Instead, the influence of the bauhaus is everywhere. Though a few old Gothic typeface street signs remain, minimalist sans-serif typography is almost ubiquitous. And why not? The bauhaus is a piece of 20th Century culture Germany can be proud of; it profoundly influenced the entire world—and Hitler hated it.

So, I say better to look forward with modern architecture, than to build faux reproductions of the medieval Germanic buildings that Hitler loved.

Collective pride is denied the Germans because, if pride is taken in the achievements of one’s national ancestors, it follows that shame for what they have done must also be accepted.

What can I say? Apparently Mr Dalrymple hasn’t spent much time in the company of ordinary Americans. Even now, US torture is being written off as the responsibility of a few “bad apples”, as the architect of the policy gets moved into the Attorney General’s office, and SUVs sport magnetic “God Bless Our Troops” ribbons.

A young German once said to me, “I don’t feel German, I feel European.” This sounded false to my ears: it had the same effect upon me as the squeal of chalk on a blackboard, and sent a shiver down my spine. One might as well say, “I don’t feel human, I feel mammalian.”

Hyperbole aside, it’s not surprising that a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph would be horrified by the thought of identifying as European. But what’s wrong with saying “I don’t feel human, I feel mammalian”? Am I the only person to have thought that while reading the newspaper?

Coincidentally, National Geographic reports that scientists have successfully fused human and animal cells, and that plans are underway to engineer mice with human-style (albeit very small) brains. There’s an obvious joke about chimp/human hybrids, but I don’t really need to spell it out, do I?

The news from the House of Pain led one person on Slashdot to ask: if we can “uplift” animals to a more human-like state, why shouldn’t we do so? My response was that if we do, they might start thinking and behaving like humans. If you want to know what’s wrong with that, ask a German.

Don’t get me wrong, I know a number of wonderful human beings. I’m just not wild about humanity as a whole. In that respect my philosophy has something in common with that of Bill Hicks (authentic Texan): as he put it, “We’re a virus with shoes”

In answer to a question from Dan

What does marriage mean to you? What baggage do you carry about the concept?

I think that there are at least three different things people refer to using the word “marriage”.

The first, obviously, is the process of civil union as described in law. This gives the married individuals certain rights and obligations to each other—and to the tax man, unfortunately.

The second is the religious ceremony of marriage. I don’t have much to say on this subject; I gather it’s quite different depending on the religion. Even Christian sects seem to have some major differences.

The third is what, to me, is the important thing: the relationship and commitment between the people being “married”. This is really down to the individuals to define for themselves.

I think one reason that there are so many divorces is that people are distracted by the legal and religious aspects of marriage, and they don’t really put in enough thought about the individual, personal aspects—what they want it to mean to be married. The average American marriage, according to MSNBC, costs just over $22,000. People spend a lot of money getting married, but they don’t seem to spend much time seriously defining it first. Which brings me back to the original question.

It’s hard to say what marriage means in a few words. It’s much easier to say why I married sara: I realized that she was the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. I’d never met anyone like her, I’d never got on with someone as well as I had with her. I realized that she had become my closest friend ever.

So I suppose marriage is the process of living your life in association with another person. I see it as primarily about finding a life partner, and I feel your spouse should be your best friend. Of course, that’s just my definition of marriage; maybe you’d prefer a trophy wife.

As to baggage… I’ve seen marriages—and serious unmarried relationships—fail badly. I’ve seen people get divorced in less than a year. I’ve seen friends go through a string of drama-filled relationships they can’t sustain beyond a year. Then, on the other hand, I’ve seen people suffer decades-long on-again-off-again almost-marriages where they couldn’t quite commit. I don’t think it has given me any particular baggage, other than a determination to do better myself.

Question from Dan

Do you believe in life/consciousness/existence/etc. after death? Whether you believe or not, do you find yourself with a clear picture of what “the afterlife is like”?

I don’t believe in life after death… but I wouldn’t say I believe it’s impossible either. I officially Don’t Know.

I will say that the “soul” model of life after death seems staggeringly unlikely to me. The Buddhist ideas make much more sense, and seem to fit very well with some of the ideas about consciousness that science is starting to come up with. (There was a recent Scientific American that covered scientific theories of consciousness.)

I don’t have any clear picture of what the afterlife is like. I have a model of how a universe with multiple deities might work, which I tend to apply to RPGs such as D&D. I’m also gradually collecting ideas around how the afterlife might work for a possible novel. If I ever write it it could be one of the few theological science fiction comedy thrillers.

The Boston Archdiocese has come up with a new plan: they’re claiming that the First Amendment means that civil laws don’t apply to churches.

Anyone still Catholic at this point? I ask merely out of curiosity.

Secret girlfriends, cocaine deals, sex with young boys, cupboards full of porn… who knew Catholicism was so exciting? Well, apart from Bernard “Cardinal” Law, of course.

Scientific American recently published a special edition titled The Hidden Mind. While a few of the articles were disappointing, the magazine finished with a true gem written by David J. Chalmers. It attempts to address the difficult problem of consciousness; not the problem of how to achieve it on a Monday morning, but the even tougher problem of how to explain it. It’s titled The Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and I recommend that you go read it.

One of the things I’ve often wondered about is why we are conscious and self-aware. I say “we” because I assume other people are conscious too, based on their observed behavior. Cats also behave as if they have consciousness and self-awareness; it’s pretty clear that they have pride, which to me requires that they have some concept of self-image.

Looking at living creatures, it seems pretty clear to me that there’s a spectrum of consciousness. At one end, you have organisms like yeast and ants, which basically behave like blobs of chemicals or little automata. Further along the scale you find birds, mice, and other animals that rely largely on instinct. Then you reach the otters, cats, dogs, and other creatures that appear to experience emotions, solve complex problems, play with things for fun, and communicate with each other.

The most likely hypothesis to my mind is that consciousness is some kind of emergent property of brains of sufficient complexity, which are structured in an appropriate way. Could a machine become conscious? I see no reason why not, though it might require a machine very unlike a regular computer.

All this gets me no closer to being able to say what consciousness is, though. I can’t explain it in terms of electric fields in a network, or quantum patterns of electrons in the brain, and nobody else seems to be able to either.

Chalmers proposes a radical hypothesis: What if consciousness is actually a fundamental feature of the universe, like gravity or electromagnetism? What if it isn’t reducible to other things?

I’ve been pondering this idea, and I think it makes a lot of sense. For starters, it offers a neat way to sidestep the awkward question of what an observer is in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Perhaps an observer is simply a sufficient quantity or density of consciousness that has become entangled with the quantum events in question. Maybe physicists will one day be able to come up with equations specifying exactly how much consciousness it takes to collapse the wave function.

To go back to consciousness-as-emergent-property, perhaps consciousness is a kind of stuff that arises when certain kinds of information processing neural networks get sufficiently complex—just like gravitational fields arise when enough particles with mass group together in physical space.

Chalmers points out that the idea of consciousness as a fundamental property is very compatible with some of the recent theories from people like John A. Wheeler and Stephen Wolfram, who have suggested that perhaps information is fundamental to the physics of the universe.

There’s still another reason why I like Wheeler’s proposal, and it’s even less politically correct (from a scientific point of view) than Stephen Wolfram’s ego. See, it seems to me that consciousness being a fundamental property of the universe is remarkably compatible with Buddhist (and, for that matter, Hindu) cosmology.

Buddhism and Hinduism talk of a universal‘field’ of consciousness which pervades all things. Our individual consciousnesses are described as being like waves on an ocean. When we die, the waves collapse, and new waves are formed. (A common misconception is that Buddhism believes in reincarnation of the Shirley McLaine sort, where the intact soul travels from body to body.) I thought about waves of consciousness coalescing around complex neural networks, and it suddenly struck me how much the whole thing sounded like the Higgs field, and gravitational forces arising near massive objects.

Can I prove any of this? Of course not. But it’s the best working hypothesis I’ve got so far.

So, the Catholic Church in Boston is down 40 clerics, suspended and under investigation for molesting children.

The Krishna movement has declared bankrupcy, unable to fight a series of lawsuits alleging rape, torture and abuse.

[See CJ Silverio’s web site for information about the local Jehovah’s Witnesses.]