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I had always intuitively considered marriage — not pair-bonding nor economic contracts, but marriage — as a silly, cultish, sentimental ritual: largely harmless but mostly ridiculous. By the same token, I had the same opinion of same-sex marriage.

But when I noticed the kinds of people who were opposing same-sex marriage, how and why, and what else they opposed (which included the values I hold the most dear, such as kindness, fairness and tolerance towards all) I realized that same-sex marriage (despite its silliness) was something to be resolutely defended against such opposition.

In much the same way, although I am, like most decent people, resolutely opposed to murder, including infanticide, pre- and post-partum, I noticed that the kinds of people who were opposing abortion were not vegans, defending the life of all sentient organisms, but again pretty much those same people who were against same-sex marriage (along with kindness and tolerance)

Just bought and watched Active Measures.

Quite remarkable to see it all put together like that. Nothing we haven’t seen in the news, but the news has a short attention-span, and this overview shows the pattern — of Putin trolling the world to divide and conquer, with the brainless buffoon, Trump, as his deeply compromised and indebted strohman — puts together what has come to light so far, and the story is still shocking. A few years ago I would have sworn that 1/1000th of this would have been enough to bring Trump down, or, rather, prevent him from ever rising. Putin’s formula is obvious: cyber-troll whatever divides people, and let the global mafia divide the spoils.

I used to think that the online media and computation had found their way to the Achilles heel of democracy, but now I think it is the Achilles heel of language itself, and the human brain’s default option of unreflecting credulity.

(Worth watching the movie, though it would have been much more effective without the edgy TV docu-drama-style background “music,” and if the text clippings had run more slowly and not been put in competition with the soundtrack. A bit like an over-busy powerpoint presentation. Yet you can still make out the woods as the trees flick by… But is it enough to counter rampant rival narratives from conspiracy theorists and con-men? Even when it takes the form of Mueller’s Report? Look at the way EU funds keep flowing to Orban despite what everyone knows…)

Les activistes et les sympathisants:
Activists and sympathizers:

Please make a donation, even if small.
SVP faire un don, même si c’est petit.

This documentary by François Primeau is made in the hope
of sensitizing decent human beings
— in Quebec, Canada and the world —
to the unspeakable agony of the victims,
uncountable and defenceless,
of humanity’s most inhumane crime
against nonhumanity.

Ce documentaire de François Primeau est fait dans l’espoir
de sensibiliser les humains décents
— au Québec, au Canada, et au monde —
envers l’agonie indescriptible
des victimes indénombrables et sans défense
du crime le plus inhumain
de l’humanité
contre les non humains.

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On Apr 24, 2016, [deleted] wrote:

Dear Professor Harnad

I would be very pleased to know your opinion about a type of reductionism coming from a scientific point of view as the book ‘Every Thing Must Go’ by J Ladyman and D Ross.

In a letter of condolence to the Besso family, Albert Einstein wrote: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” I’m a medical doctor and every day I see the time’s effect over human bodies. Is Einstein saying time is an illusion ? For who ‘believe in physics’ is the death an illusion? Don’t we lost our dears and will they continue to live in an ‘eternal world’?

I understand that no physical theory should have to accommodate common sense, but it there remains a great problem: if all our intuitions and experiences about the world and ourselves are ‘illusory’, then what is the mean of all, of the same scientific enterprise? All we have we get from the universe (is this same statement not our?): intuition, sensorial experience, mathematical ability, etc.; the universe does not have to follow anything of these abilities. Then why some scientists consider intuition and experiences human *illusion*. but abstract human theories *real*? The success of a physics’ theory doesn’t mean it is real: the Newton’s force of gravity at distance is not real in Einstein’s Relativity. Other than this, all human characteristics (qualia, thinking, feelings, social relations….) that are not measurable are secondary or illusory, when our lives (scientific enterprise included) are made essentially of these. It remains this paradox: our knowledge begin from intuitions and experiences, over these we build mathematical theories that say our intuitions and experiences are illusory, but theonly way to control them is by experiments, indeed experiments that are based on our intuitions and sensorial date. Is possible the scientific enterprise without conscious human beings? Some physicists say qualia -as colors- are not *real*, they are present only in human brains and not in the physical universe. Is not the same for the physical theories? In a now-famous passage from his justly acclaimed The First Three Minutes, physicist Steven Weinberg provides a rather dismal assessment of the human drama:

“It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning…. It is hard to realize that this all [i.e., life on Earth] is just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

I hope I’ve not abused of your kindness and your time, but I’ve always esteemed the scientific (physics in particular) knowledge a wonderful adventure, but in the last years I feel a growing gap (‘sadness’) between it and our human life.

Thank you very much for your attention and best wishes

[Deleted]

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Dear [deleted],

I do not share Einstein’s view (if that was indeed his view, rather than just a verbal attempt to console someone for bereavement) that “time is an illusion.”

I am of course not speaking of physicists’ “real” (objective) time but of our sense of time (a subjective state) — which is of course also related to our sense of bereavement (also a subjective state).

The same observation, but this time made about bereavement, points out the absurdity of calling it an illusion: “The ‘loss’ of a loved one is an illusion, because we know from the conservation laws that matter is neither created nor destroyed.” That’s rather like saying “Your pain is an illusion because it is really just the jangling of C-fibres.”

In fact, we just have to go back to what Descartes pointed out to the skeptics with his Cogito: “You can be skeptical (uncertain) about the truth of anything (other than the formal mathematical truths that are proven true on pain of contradiction), even the regularities (laws) of science, the minds of other creatures, the existence of the palpable world, etc. That could all be mistaken. But you cannot be skeptical about the fact that whatever you are feeling while you are feeling it is indeed being felt. (In particular, whilst you are feeling that time is passing, or that a loved one has passed away, it is absurd to say that that feeling is an illusion.)

An illusion is a felt state. It may be wrong about the world — and in that sense an objective error, rather than an “illusion”. But it cannot be an illusion that that feeling is indeed being felt (now). That’s the gist of the Cogito.

And after all, is it not feeling rather than objective truth that matters to us? Isn’t that what “mattering” even means? (Someone may reply: “I am a scientist. The only thing that matters to me is objective truth.” That may be (partly) true of that scientist, as a matter of taste. But that too is just a feeling. (And even determined scientists — and mathematicians — have other feelings too, feelings that can get the better of them just as they can with everyone else. And, as you point out, even the objective truths of science have to make themselves palpably — i.e. empirically — felt so that we can come to know them.)

I might add, by way of reply to Stephen Weinberg or any other scientistic wag inclined to overstate his tastes: Anyone who tries to draw the conclusion that agony is a farce is speaking nonsense as surely as if he is saying “P is not P.” (And, yes, this “insight” has to be based on negative feelings; it does not have the same force when stated as “orgasm is a farce,” which is rather closer to the truth…)

Perhaps a milder way of saying what I’ve just said is that scientists are not really being serious when they discount feelings as illusions, even though they feel they are being their most serious when they are doing so. Even nonsense can feel serious (and true)…

Best wishes,

Stevan Harnad

P.S. This is not a defence of “analytic metaphysics.”

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The exigencies (and nuances) of certitude (as opposed to mere truth)

“All this talk about time and subjectivity etc being an illusion is patent bullshit. If I am an illusion, then whose illusion am I? And if time is an illusion, then why am I getting unpleasantly older?”

I’d actually say that the (cartesian) “I” in all this is not at all as indubitable as the feeling itself.

Yes, the nature of feeling is that it is felt, and that feeling seems to call for a feeler of the feeling; at least that’s what it feels like.

But we know that there are problems with the notion of continuity of personal (or, for that matter, any) identity; and that the only infallible thing about feeling is what it feels-like right now (not an instant later).

So both time and I are moot. The only sure thing is that THIS feeling is being felt right NOW (and perhaps that what it feels likes that it is being felt by a persistent me)…

Industrial farming is one of the worst crimes in history — Yuval Noah Harari

Not “one of the worst crimes”: the worst, by orders of magnitude. It’s true that there is no horror we inflict on animals that we don’t also inflict on humans. But if inflicted on humans it is illegal, pursued, and punished, and most people condemn and would never dream of committing or condoning it. Yet when it is inflicted on animals, most people are willing and active accomplices. I choose to believe that it’s not because most people are psychopaths but because they don’t know the two essential facts — about (I) the agony of the animals and that (II) the consumption of animals is not necessary for human survival and health. The victims’ only hope now is that in our online era of pervasive citizen media, ag-gag laws will be defeated, the truth about the horrors will be transmitted everywhere, and the decent majority will at last outlaw and abolish humanity’s worst crime

Je dirais que c’est le pire des crimes humains, pas seulement pour le nombre et l’agonie inimaginables de ses victimes, mais parce que ce n’est même pas considéré un crime.

Il n’existe pas une horreur qu’on inflige aux animaux qu’on n’inflige pas aux humains aussi. Pas une. Mais envers les humains, c’est illégal et la vaste majorité de l’humanité condamne ça et ne le ferait jamais — tandis qu’envers les animaux la vaste majorité de l’humanité est complice de ce crime indicible.

Je choisis de croire que c’est grâce à l’ignorance, et non pas à la psychopathie que la vaste majorité devient complice de ce pire des crimes: l’ignorance de la non-nécessité de la consommation des animaux et de l’échelle monstrueuse de leurs souffrances.

Il faut que ça soit vrai que la sensibilisation — à l’aide du pouvoir des outils numériques et réseautés à enregistrer et diffuser les preuves des horreurs — donneront à ce crime son propre nom, et le rendra enfin illégal, poursuivable et impensable.

C’est le seul espoir pour les victimes.

The frustration of democrats with the Orban depredations in Hungary is understandable, but their fatalism is neither warranted nor helpful.

I’ve looked for a suitable emotional analogy, and the closest recent one that comes to mind is Trump.

His vile, vulgar, vicious antics are outrageous in much the way Orban’s are. Trump has money, Orban has power (and steals money). The styles are different, but the ethics are the same: nil. Both leave decent people dismayed that so many people can not only put up with it but embrace it, for so long.

Both are sad signs about the demography of decency in our times. But their support comes from the tail end of the normal distribution, meaner than the mean. And time’s tail is longer.

Le Pen was upended in France. Let’s see whether Trump gets dumped in the US.

Then comes the turn of Orban and his clan…

DOING THE RIGHT THING

This is why people need to be informed that what they are wearing is the body of an innocent victim that has suffered terror, agony and slaughter just to decorate someone’s collar. Most people are decent. They simply don’t realize the horror; they believe the lie that it’s “fake fur.” Once they awaken, they will realize not just that, but much more. Till then the torment and terror continue unabated, and Canada Goose keeps counting its receipts.

FAIRE CE QUI EST JUSTE

Voilà pourquoi il faut chercher incessamment à informer et à sensibiliser ceux autour de nous. La plupart des gens ne savent pas qu’ils portent le corps d’une vraie victime innocente qui a subi la terreur, l’angoisse et l’abattage impitoyable juste pour décorer leur collier. La plupart des gens sont décents. Ils sont tout simplement dans l’ignorance concernant les horreurs; ils ne se posent pas de questions; ils croient les mensonges que leur racontent les vendeurs et même les etiquettes à l’effet qu’il s’agit de la «fausse fourrure». Une fois réveillés, ils réaliseront non seulement ça, mais beaucoup plus que ça. Jusqu’alors, le tourment et l’agonie persistent sans relâche, et le Canada Goose continue à compter ses quittances.

Interview of Stevan Harnad by Tracie Hotchner (Part 1 of 2):
http://192.168.62.113/harnad/Temp/HumaneTalkSH.mov

Tous les jetons qui tombent, tardivement: « Cowboy » — jamais un concept sympathique — se révèle maintenant dans sa vraie forme diabolique.

Heart-breaking and hard to watch
but if you drink milk, eat cheese, eat veal, eat beef,
you owe it to yourself (and to them) to watch.
Then if you have a heart,
you will never touch them again

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C’est sûr que le mot « innocent » n’est pas le descripteur exact pour les victimes. Mais il communique quand-même le sens d’une injustice, d’une souffrance déplorable, d’une victime à pitier, à protéger. Tout ça c’est important pour réveiller l’empathie et la défense (ainsi que le désistement, si c’est moi-même qui cause la souffrance à la victime). Donc ne faisons pas trop de reproches à ce mot inexact mais quand-même efficace.

La confusion provient en partie du fait que — contraitement à l’inexactitude de « innocent » soit pour décrire la victime soit pour définir le crime — « coupable » est certes le descripteur précis du perpétrateur des crimes que nous commettons envers nos victimes. Et bien qu’on commet ces crimes envers toutes les espèces d’êtres sensibles, envers les humains ces crimes sont déjà illégaux et poursuivis — et rejetés et considérés odieux et aberrant par la vaste majorité des humains — tandis qu’envers les animaux, s’est l’inverse.

Ce qui fait que nos crimes envers les victimes animales sont de loin les plus monstrueux et abominables, quantitativement ainsi que qualitativement.

La poursuite et la consommation de sa proie par un prédateur affamé sans choix est cruelle mais pas un crime. C’est quand la prédation n’est pas impérative, quand il y des options innocentes que ça devient un crime indicible.