Anthropomorphism is Sixteen Letters of Positive

It's human nature to anthropomorphize. We do it with almost everything we come into contact with, often times without an awareness of the act. I'm sure it's an offshoot of our social natures. Seeing ourselves in others helps us relate to them. But anthropomorphism isn't just a social construct, or, at its worst the ultimate act of vanity. I think anthropomorphism is the root of empathy and compassion, and it's nature's ultimate evolutionary behavioral accomplishment.

It goes like this. We care for ourselves. We look after ourselves. Our survival instinct makes sure we protect ourselves from harm. We don't vary too much from every other species on the planet in this, especially our mammalian cousins. But what sets us apart is our ability, almost our compulsion to project onto other's our own traits, fears, desires and behaviors. Even, and especially non-human creatures and inanimate objects. And, as we protect ourselves from harm, we tend to protect those we consider similar to us. Kin and friends alike. If you are one of us you are part of the protected fold. Anthropomorphistic behaviors allow humans to extend their circle of protection beyond themselves and their close kin groups. They grant us the ability to feel empathy in general, and specifically toward creatures and objects completely unlike ourselves. We can even extend the empathy to concepts like justice and freedom. We see ourselves everywhere, and everywhere we see ourselves we have the innate desire to protect.

This gets short-circuited often, no doubt. But at its root, apart from other external factors, anthroporphism is the foundation of human ethics. Treat others as you would be treated. Look at ancient animistic religions. Their adherents saw spirits and gods in everything. In plants and animals. In the cycles of the seasons. In the sun, stars and moon. Why? Because they saw themselves in everything, and therefore everything became sacred to them as they were sacred to themselves. Everything around them was an extension of their culture, their circle of community. And they protected it as best they could.

Next time you find yourself imbuing something external to you with human attributes try and catch your motivation. Are you trying to understand it better? Are you trying to forge a connection? Attempting to get inside its mind (or imagine it has one)? Generally speaking I think you'll find that whatever your motivation is, it's a positive one. It's all about extending your sphere of connectivity within the world. Making positive attachments to meaningful things.

Anthropomorphism isn't a human failing, and it most certainly isn't a human vanity. It's the doorway to inclusiveness, kindness and acceptance of everything around you.

The End...of Everything

I was having a really interesting conversation with my sister earlier this evening. We were talking about what it is to "be". She said that she often, at unpredictable moments, finds herself trying to work out what existence is. I know...it's a heady question, and one that doesn't have any easy answers. But it's a question I concern myself with pretty frequently, too.

I like how Steph phrased it. She said (and I paraphrase), "Sometimes I find myself thinking about what it is to be by considering what it would be like not to be." Can an existent being fathom not existing? And has there ever been a time you and I didn't exist?

From your perspective, you'd say no. You've always been here, as far as you can remember. In a very real sense you could say that the entire universe effectively came into existence the moment you were born and were conscious enough to understand your surroundings. Because, at least for you, nothing existed before you did. You, and the world around you has always existed. For you there has never been a time that you weren't here and that the world wasn't as it is for you.

But of course that's an illusion. We cannot experience the universe without being here to do the experiencing, so it appears that we've always been here. But of course before each of us is born, we don't exist. In fact, for the entirety of human existence, really for the entire lifespan of the universe, from the Big Bang up until the moment you were conceived, you didn't exist. That's about thirteen and a half billion years that didn't include you. You don't remember any of that time because you weren't there. But it happened. That much is clear.

So if we perceive the world as having always existed as it does, with us as the central player in existence, and that's clearly an illusion, where are we left? Our lives are, at a maximum, about 100 years. The universe existed for 13,000,000,000 years before us. Whether we care to believe it or not, the universe will carry on for billions of years more after we die. But will it carry on for us? If we don't exist than our experience of that time will be just like our experience of the time before we were born. We won't experience it. Again, in a very real sense, when we die the entire universe ends. Period. We are the only observers watching the universe from behind our eyes. When that observer is gone, as far as each of us is concerned, the entirety of existence disappears along with us.

So do I fear non-existence? No. What's to fear? I already handled non-existence just fine for thirteen billion years. It's even silly to say that "I" handled it, because there was no "I" to handle anything. And once non-existence is thrust on me again I won't be there to realize it happened. Am I looking forward to it? No. I can't even conceive of it. But I know it's inevitable. One day me and my universe will cease to exist, just like for everyone else on any planet in any galaxy at any point in the cosmos.

Why fight it? Acceptance is the first step.

I Just Saw a Face

So I'm racking my brain for an entry topic today, unsuccessfully, when I absentmindedly look off to my right and see one of Kate's hair clips sitting alone on a small white table. At the angle it's sitting it looks very much like a fairly unattractive human face.

Entry idea.

Our brains are wired to look for patterns, and one of the most iconic images our minds scan our environments for is the human face. I, and probably most of you, tend to see faces everywhere. In scribbles, the backs of cars, and dirty blotches on the sidewalk. Anywhere there is a random assemblage of shapes or patterns, my eye sees a face.

And that's positive because it shows that not only are we wired to recognize the human face, which you'd expect, but we also have a strong tendency to seek that pattern out. Meaning we have a strong, innate desire to find others of our own kind. To be social creatures.

Try paying attention to the patterns you recognize in random assemblages. I'd be willing to bet more often than not you'll see a face.

Thoughts on Power

What's more important, sheer power, or complexity of use? I'd argue the latter almost every time. It's brute force versus planned attack. Consider a bolt of lightning and the human brain. In sheer voltage, wattage, size and destructive power the lightning seems the clear winner. And in the first three I think you'd be right (considering the last, look at the nuclear weapons.) But lightning, while a massive expression of electrical power, is brief. The human brain lasts much longer. It's a slow burn expression of electrical complexity.

An average bolt of lightning delivers 65 million volts of power and roughly one terawatt (10¹² W), or one trillion watts of energy in a scorching 30 microsecond burst. The human brain consumes roughly 20 watts of power every second, or 1,728,000 watts a day. At that rate, the wattage contained in bolt of lightning could power a human brain for 1,585 years, far more than any of us will ever get the chance to use.

But look at what a human being can accomplish in under 100 years. Einstein. Gandhi. Darwin. Mozart. Etc, etc. The list is almost limitless. So less physical power is far more powerful when funneled into complex systems. One lightning bolt has the potential to change very little. 1,585 years worth of human generations can literally remake the world.

You also end up with the comedy stylings of Carrot Top, but you have to take the good with the bad.

Simulate This

I was just reading this interesting article I found through a blog I randomly discovered called The Late Night Library latenightlibrary.wordpress.com. The article they were commenting on was originally published on Boing Boing here:

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/01/29/your-brain-on-fictio.html

Here's the not-so-short and nearly skinny. Researchers from the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis have found through brain imaging studies that, as we read narrative stories, our brains simulate the events. The same areas in the brain that would activate if we actually performing the actions being narrated fire in response to simply reading about those actions. Your brain makes little distinction between you do, and what other people tell you they did.

For my part I know that when I read, especially when I get lost in the narrative I sometimes forget that I'm reading and, in short bursts, I instead feel like the story is happening around me, or, indirectly, to me. I think this brain reaction is the reason why we enjoy reading so much. And it helps explain why communication in general is so important in human culture. We communicate to share experiences. And our brains are wired to simulate those experiences, so that, quite literally hearing about an event is almost as good as being there.

It makes sense. Our early hunter-gatherer forebears had no written language. They had no way to document important information. Anything that had to be passed from person to person, generation to generation, had to be passed through the spoken word, and had to be remembered. Hence our brains evolved to, upon hearing (or reading) a given narrative, simulate that experience as if it were our own. Experiencing, even indirectly a story personally makes remembering it that much easier, because your brain remembers it as if you were there.

Prehistoric man, upon finding a new watering hole, would have to describe its location to his tribe mates. Their ability to mentally experience the trip as it was described to them made remembering and following those directions later infinitely easier. Today is no different. We've all had the experience of visualizing roads, signposts and landmarks in our mind's eyes as friends are describing driving directions to one place or another.

Our brains are wired to shared experience. We're social creatures. You learn something, we all benefit. You experience it, you describe it to the group, and it's as if we all participated. Isn't the human brain a remarkable thing?

Us, Relative to Everything Else

This is an entry I've been wanting to do for a very long time, but I've been putting off because I knew writing it the way I wanted to would take a good four or five hours. But it's a topic that's very meaningful for me, so I knew one day I'd make the investment. It's a bit long, but worth it. I hope you'll invest the ten minutes or so it might take to read it. It may change the way you view the world.

You may have seen the images I'm using in this illustration before. They've been floating around the web for a while. I'd credit them, but they apparently appeared anonymously originally, so there are no credits to be given. I'll just give heartfelt thanks to whoever created them.

We humans imagine ourselves to be very important, our problems and issues of vast significance. And some of us imagine themselves better than their fellow humans, or more enlightened than the rest of humanity, and sometimes commit horrible atrocities for either personal gain or to propagate their view of the world to other people. So let's try and find out, in the grand scheme of things, how important we humans really are.

To begin, let's take an average human. A single, solitary individual. Now imagine that single individual in the company of 6.772 billion other individuals, the entire world population, as estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau. Each of these individuals, weight averaged between the sexes, weighs, on average 150 pounds. That gives a total mass for our species of roughly 1.015 trillion pounds. That's a scale breaker.

But compare that to the planet we all live on. The earth, measuring at one earth mass (obviously) weighs roughly 1.317 x 10 to the 25th pounds, or 10,317,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. A bit bigger. The weight of our entire species, every member of our population combined is a sneeze in the ocean of our planets mass. Now let's compare that planet to it's cosmic kin.

Here's earth, relative in size to the other planets (or dwarf planet, in Pluto's case) in our solar system smaller than earth. Impressive, aren't we? We could punt Pluto into next week.



Okay. Now here we are relative to all the planets in our solar system, the larger bodies included.



Not quite so impressive anymore. Earth's equatorial radius (ER) is 7,926 miles and has an earth mass of one. Pluto looks tiny relative to earth, with an ER of only 1,429 miles and an earth mass of .0026 (meaning it's 26 ten thousandths as massive as earth), it barely exists in our comparison next to Jupiter. Jupiter has an ER of 88,731 miles and an earth mass of 377.833, meaning it's 377 times more massive than earth. This shrinks earths place in the cosmos significantly, and we have a long way to go. Here we are relative to our sun.



The sun has an ER of 432,163 miles (earth, if you remember had an ER of only 7,926 miles) and an earth mass of 332,830. The sun accounts for more than 98% of the total mass of our solar system. It would take 109 earths, end to end, to stretch the distance of the sun across and 1.3 million earths to fill it's entire volume. It takes light, traveling at 299,792,458 meters per second 8 minutes and 19 seconds to travel from the sun to earth. The sun's core reaches temperatures of 27,000,000° F and has an atmospheric pressure 340 billion times more intense than Earth's air pressure at sea level. Beginning to feel a bit puny? Maybe a little bit insignificant? That's good. Let's forge on.

As big as our sun is, relative to us, it's tiny compared to some of its compatriots. Here's our sun compared to other known stars.



The small print that's hard to read says, "Jupiter is about 1 pixel in size" and "Earth is invisible at this scale." Incredible, right? Our sun, our massive star, 332,830 times more massive than our planet is a ten pound weakling next to the size of other stars. Sirius, the Dog Star, part of the Big Dog constellation, is 8.6 light years away from us, meaning it takes light 8.6 years to travel from Sirius to earth. Compare that to the 8.25 minutes it takes our sun's light to reach us.

Pollux is an orange giant star 34 light years away from earth in the constellation of Gemini. It has 8.8 times the radius of our sun and is 32 times brighter. Arcturus is a red giant star in the constellation Boötes, 36.7 light years from earth with a total power output 180 times that of our sun. You can see that the relative size difference between our sun and Arcturus is larger than the relative difference Jupiter and our sun. At Arcturus's scale the earth is invisible, and there are 6.772 billion of us living on that invisible mote. Ever read Horton Hears a Who? Continuing on.

Here's where Arcturus, and our sun by proxy, sits relative to some even larger stars.



That tiny little orange circle just to the left of Rigel is Arcturus. We see Pollux, Sirius and our sun further to the left. It's hard to read, but the small print says that our sun is only one screen pixel at this scale, and Jupiter is invisible. That's our massive, life-giving sun, a mere dot compared to Antares. Antares, a neighbor 600 light years away in our Milky Way galaxy, in the constellation Scorpius is classified as a Class M Red Supergiant star with a diameter 800 times that of our sun, with 65,000 times the total power output. Our sun gives off enough power to warm our planet at a distance of 92.5 million miles. That alone is a staggering amount of power, and Antares gives off 65,000 times more power than that. At 600 light years away, more than 18 times further away from us than Pollux or Arcturus it still ends up being the sixteenth brightest star in the night sky.

And Antares isn't even the biggest star known today. That title goes to VY Canis Majoris a red hypergiant star more than 5,000 light years away from earth that was recently calculated, at its upper size to be 2,100 times the size of our sun! That's a little more than two and a half times the size of Antares. Massive by ANY definition.

Compare yourself to VY Canis Majoris. And then consider that VY Canis Majoris, as big as it is, is just one star amidst the estimated 200 to 400 billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, a galaxy which is estimated to be roughly 100,000 light years across. Remember from earlier that light from our sun takes 8.25 minutes to get to earth? It would take that same light 100,000 years to cross our galaxy, passing billions of stars and an innumerable number of planets. Our sun is estimated to be only 26,000 light years from the galactic center, and it takes 225 to 250 million years for our solar system to complete a single galactic orbit. Compare yourself and the sun you orbit to the space required to fit 200 to 400 billion other stars, many much bigger than our sun. Is the fact that your neighbors lawn is bigger than yours really all that important by comparison?

Now realize that our Milky Way Galaxy is only one of an estimated 80 billion galaxies in the observable universe, containing 30 to 70 sextillion stars (that's a 3 or a 7 followed by 21 zeroes). We are orbiting a small sun, an afterthought amidst the 30 to 70 sextillion stellar relatives we share in our observable universe, the edge of which is 46.5 billion light years away.

But the universe is only 13.7 billion year old? How can we be seeing something whose light took 46.5 billion light years to travel to us? I quote wikipedia:

The age of the universe is about 13.7 billion years, but due to the expansion of space we are now observing objects that are now considerably farther away than a static 13.7 billion light-years distance. The edge of the observable universe is now located about 46.5 billion light-years away.

I know. Things are starting to get a bit mind-bending. I'll close with one further calculation. The observable universe consists of everything out there, the light of which has had time to reach us. That's why our observable universe centers on the planet earth. Not because we're especially significant, but because we are here, observing. Light from all around the expanding universe has been traveling towards us (and every other point in the universe) since it was first emitted. The light that has been able to reach us creates the outer sphere of the observable universe for us. Life on another planet at another point in the universe would have a different observable universe. Which begs the question, how much bigger is the universe than what is observable for us? There is stuff beyond that threshold. One scientist has estimated that the rest of the universe is 24 times the size of our observable universe. That's potentially another 80 billion galaxies 24 times over.

So here we are, feeling important and superior because of our microwave ovens and great literature. But we are a completely insignificant dot of nothing against the cosmic background. I mean really. Try and let the depth of what you just read sink in. We're a brief hiccup against cosmic space. Our entire civilization is a fraction of a blink of an eye against cosmic time. Our entire power output since the dawn of man wouldn't light a candle in the universe. We are so fragile compared to the monstrously violent, enormously powerful vacuum we orbit inside of.

Some of you know I'm an atheist. For me, compared to the awesome majesty which is just our observable universe, our small concepts of god can be a little petty and silly. Please keep reading. I don't mean to insult any of you that do believe in god. I just want to explain why this topic is so dear to my heart. In a universe so much mind-bogglingly bigger than us, the need for a creator god goes out the window. Our god concepts and religions have simply been us trying to understand our place in the world. Now we know our place, and it's much smaller and insignificant than we ever could have imagined. Just 400 years ago, prior to Galileo, the dominant view of the cosmos was that earth was directly at the center, with the sun orbiting the earth. We've learned quite a bit since then. As our significance in the universe decreases, the idea that an all powerful god would somehow stake his entire career on us gets less sensible.

The "my god is greater than your god" game is meaningless when placed against a backdrop 30 to 70 sextillion other stars. Why do none of our religious texts mention the entirety of god's creation? Because we didn't know about it when we wrote them. For me, all our religious beliefs do is separate us. Create "us against them" mentalities. They are harmful to human life, as is any divisive philosophy. Especially given how insignificant we are on the cosmic stage. Instead of laying a supernatural realm over our reality, just try and step back. Our universe is bigger, more complicated, and more amazing than anything man could ever dream up. And we are so unimportant in that context. The star Antares doesn't know we're here, and wouldn't care a whit if it did.

I've been asked by a few people, indirectly, (you know who you are) how I could possibly not believe in god. This is how. Human civilization has come, and will go, in an instant compared with the age of the universe. No story we can ever tell, no religious text we can ever formulate will be able to infuse meaning into such a brief stay on a such a infinitesimally tiny swath of universal real estate. The universe is far more than any human mind could ever encompass, and I'm happy to be forever entranced by that beauty. For me, having to involve a creator god simply diminishes the grandeur of the universe, in a desperate attempt to create meaning that just isn't there.

We humans are meaningless, except to each other. So instead of fighting over ancient beliefs, trying to dominate each other for no good reason, let's work together to better our world and our lives. No one's going to do it for us. Not the universe, for sure. We barely exist as far as it's concerned. There is no god entity out there to save us from ourselves. It's us and us alone. Let's make the best of our time here and stop arguing over meaningless philosophies.

Our place in the universe is a positive because it shows us that life is meaningless, except for the meaning we give it. Let's make that meaning universally good for once.

One planet, one people.

Hope Springs Eternal

I think one of the more admirable qualities of our species is our never-ending wellspring of hope. Even in the worst of circumstances humans have the capacity to belief that things will get better. We're always imagining our situations resolved, our circumstances changed for the better, and we pine for those better realities. It's great that, and you'll never hear me say this in any other context, even in the face of facts, even beyond any reasonable assurance of a positive resolution, we can still hold out hope for change.

It's a reaction to a threatening world that could be reduced to a simple survival mechanism. But I prefer not to think of it that way. I imagine more as an offshoot of the same cerebral processes that allow us to perceive beauty. To create art. To see objects as more than just their physical mass. To imbue an essentially meaningless, purposeless universe with both of those properties, based on our own unique brain chemistries. Hope represents the imposition of the concept of "beauty" on life situations, seeing even difficult, painful situations from the best possible perspective and imagining tidy conclusions.

Whether hope is fused with action toward the realization of that imagined better existence is only peripherally important to this discussion. Hope, even apart from action, is a sustaining force for people in the face of adversity, and is responsible for humanity's long march of progress.

But yes. Hope buoyed by action is more potent than either element separately.

As a side note, I'll say that hope is only positive when applied toward positive ends. Just like any human attribute hope can be twisted and used for destructive purposes. One can hope for exceptionally ugly things just as easily as good. And that hope can motivate people toward ill intents just as quickly as positive ones. So the benefits of hope are metered by purpose.