Grim Rhapsody

I do not endorse the application of the term “illusion” on overly broad scales. “Life is an illusion”, “the universe is an illusion”, “everything is an illusion” — these are naught but tautologies, clarifying nothing and rendering rather pointless the concept of an illusion (something that appears to be real but in fact is not) by equating it with what we already define as the most basic elements of “reality”. I also refrain from contending that consciousness is an illusion; while I may be conflicted on what it is, I have no doubt that it is real.

That said, there is an aspect of my own — and by conjecture, all human — existence that I believe to be an illusion. It is the idea of a “unity of mind”, the seemingly-obvious presumption that whatever we are, we are “whole” and “singular”. While I do recognise a singular entity, that entity is the entirety of my body, a permutation of shifting matter disconnected from the ground and air with a clear boundary. But I do not recognise any grounds to equate my conscious experience with this singular entity. Rather, my faculty of awareness is merely one of a multitude of simultaneous processes combining to form not a coherent experience, but a coherent existence.

The vast majority of my body operates without my knowledge, and without any sort of conscious consent. Even things I might consider to be under my conscious control, such as scratching an itch, cannot be said to be as “conscious” as the deliberation with which I craft this paragraph. The exact manner in which I “consciously” respond to any stimulus is strongly regulated by non-conscious activity elsewhere in the brain, and changes constantly. I cannot consciously influence my memories, unlearn deeply-ingrained skills such as language comprehension, or force my muscles to stretch further than they are capable. In short, I do not have anywhere near as much control as this part of my brain would like me to believe. The “executive control function” is an illusion, and the unity between my body and my self-aware processes is an illusion.

So what can I consider “me”? What singular entity do I refer to? Really, the closest thing I can consider to form the individual as whom I perceive myself is my memory. Without it, I would be nothing; I could not recognise my own existence. My consciousness is like a PC’s desktop. The thousands of background processes are invisible to me, but here I acknowledge their existence. Is each process an individual in its own right? Should I call myself Legion, for we are many? For now, I will continue to refer to myself as a singular entity; I hope the rest of my brain doesn’t mind my conscious faculties grouping everyone together under the word “I”.

I mentioned in my previous post that there are no meanings not created by the human brain. As far as I am aware, other animals and forms of life on Earth do not have the capacity nor need to ascribe “meanings”, at least not in the way humans do, and abiotic matter most certainly does not. It’s no surprise then that those who believe in the existence of other human-like deities often dispute this, as any “intrinsic” meanings separate from humans can then be traced back to those deities.

I raise the point again because it’s related to a widespread example of redundant wishful thinking: the search for “the meaning of life”, or “the meaning of the universe”, or “the meaning of everything” (or perhaps all three, as brilliantly satirised by Douglas Adams). It has never been clear to me exactly what form these meanings are supposed to take, even if they exist only as realisations. A dictionary purports the meaning of life to be “the answer to all of life’s questions”, but personally I don’t recall ever asking or hearing a question that couldn’t be met with either an answer, or an explanation as to why the answer is unavailable. Will the meaning of life tell me what a square circle would look like? Should I stop guessing lottery numbers?

Of course, I’m being facetious, but it really does confuse me. Can the meaning of life be kept in a box? Can it be shared, or told to someone else? If it originates from a deity, why hasn’t the deity told us? The only deity I can imagine that would harbour such a holy grail and not grant anyone access to it would be a maltheistic one – that is, a nasty god.

The real reason I’m writing this is actually because I caught a glimpse of the back cover of Expelled, a piece of virulent creationist propaganda disguised as a virulent creationist satirical documentary. It condescendingly states that “educators and scientists are being ridiculed, denied tenure and even fired – for the crime of merely believing that there might be evidence of design in nature, and that perhaps life is not just the result of accidental, random chance.” Many of my like-minded fellows would say that meaning/randomness is a false dichotomy, but while I agree the language is a blatant appeal to emotion, I consider it accurate in essence. “Design” is a word carrying the meaning of living intention. That creationists can see it beyond our planet (ignoring landrovers and probes) is telling of the life-like deity almost all of them already believe in.

Likewise, “random” is a word to which we have ascribed (in part) a meaning of not having intention, and without life, intention does not even exist. The Earth hardly “intends” to continue orbiting the Sun, and neither was “intentionally” formed. That said, I would also not describe the Earth’s motion as “random” – it is very predictable – but predictable is not synonymous with purposeful.

With this in mind, it is an easy mistake to see meaning, design, and purpose everywhere – even in the shape of a banana. Conditions on Earth seem generally well-suited to our survival, yes, but that is why we exist. Throw a bunch of different shapes at a hole, and only the ones that fit will pass through. Earth is the hole, and everything that exists on it, from rocks to trees to water to humans, are the shapes that fit. That’s privilege enough for me.

The television and film industries love to remind us: there’s nothing more awesome than having genuine human feelings. I first started thinking about the popular view of feelings and emotions when I was inducted into Star Trek, in which the Vulcans provide a big “what if” exploration of emotionless, logic-driven humans (they are human in every other way, apparently including DNA compatibility). Star Trek does it with genuine grace, but there are a plethora of other (alien-lacking) shows that emphasise emotion as the most fundamental aspect of being human, and display those without it in a blatantly negative light. Now, as a rooted relativist and materialist, I’m immediately suspicious of questions such as “What does it mean to be human?”, and purported answers to it even more so. In my view, things have meaning if and only if we have subjectively ascribed meaning to them. There are no meanings beyond those that we create. Similarly, nothing has presupposed intrinsic value.

From this, it’s probably fairly easy to gather that I place no inherent value on human emotions beyond the purposes of survival they have served for millenia. I can imagine no decision better made with feelings than logic. If I sound like a Vulcan, fear not — I’m still human (though I’d probably convert to a Vulcan if I could). My point is simply that these story protagonists who teach us to “trust our instincts” place more faith in the abilities of a single human brain than I’m comfortable with. Of course, for them, everything works out fine and the world always comes out in one piece, but in reality I sincerely hope Spock comes to my rescue rather than Qui-Gon Jinn (an ironic example of incompetence, even with genuine superhuman powers).

Even considering humans in general, I remain as anti-patriotic as ever. (Patriotism being the view that people and places you are familiar with are superior to those with which you are not.) Genetically, the variation between any two humans is incredibly miniscule. Most differences are bred out of patriotism and prejudice. Morality frequently requires that we ascribe value to everything — would we save a human or a Vulcan? A flower or an ant? An adult or a child? There are no “correct” answers. The values are arbitrary and come from these bred differences.

I hope my point has not gone astray here. I value each individual based on that individual. People are slowly learning to leave generalisations where they belong — outside preconceptions, in statistics. The list is growing: gender, background, sexuality, appearance, location. The statistics are irrelevant to a specified individual. My point is that I am very much prepared to add “species” to the list. I still generalise between, say, humans and cats, but only because the number of scenarios in which I would choose to save a cat over a human is very, very low (a judgement based on empathy). If any Vulcans appeared, I would not generalise between their species and my own simply because I belong to the human one.

Granted, this will probably remain a theoretical point rooted in expressed frustration over fictional humans’ attitudes towards fictional humanesque aliens, but nevertheless, I’m not the person you should ask to design any sort of human banner.

Am I doing things that help people overall? Am I being the best person I can be? Simply put, are my actions making this a better world? Am I doing the right thing? It’s really not that complicated. People have an inherent sense of right and wrong. You know when you’re doing something you shouldn’t. It’s where the essence of guilt comes from. Down deep you know when you’re doing something you shouldn’t.

Imagine living life by a set of rules, rules you know to be intrinsic to every living person, a tablet of engravings resting at the core of every mind. These rules are clear in both nature and purpose. Their nature is absolute. Their purpose is to provide the foundation for a functioning society, the framework for a civilisation, limited only by the number of its denizens who choose not to follow these rules.

I have previously said that “black and white” was a concept strongly engrained in the latter, and absent from the former. The color White (a color of the card game Magic — see my previous posts in this series), at its purest,  sees a monochromatic moral world: contrast exists only between those who follow the rules, and those who do not. Thus comes the distinction between good and evil — right, and wrong. Good people know that it is wrong to kill, and wrong to steal, because these things come at the expense of the whole, while evil people are not interested in the whole and act only in their own interest. These parasites and criminals cannot be reasoned with, and must be punished. White knows that a society of murderers, smugglers, and delinquents would never see the sun rise — only through the protection of basic freedoms, and a citizenry that understands them, can great empires rise and perservere.

Of course, a strong base of morality is not the only prerequisite for a functional society. A thorough and effective method of enforcement is also important, just as good weed-killer is vital to the success of any garden. No one regrets the necessity of this more than White, which dreams of the day when the weeds are gone, and the garden can grow without the dangers of the corrupt and the selfish. This is why White works so hard to purge evil and corruption — while its threat exists, no matter how far off it may seem, White’s dream of paradise can never come to fruition.

Elements of White I have already described will no doubt rouse thoughts of real-world law and order. This should not come as a surprise: the vast majority of the world’s nations and governments function on a white foundation, for the same reasons I have described. White’s scope is group-oriented — individual actions must be restricted for long-term and large-scale benefit. Some see this as treading on toes, but White sees it only as treading on the toes of those rearing to crush someone else’s.

Almost as noticeably, White pervades on a personal level, especially in childhood. All major religions and most minor ones contain sets of rights and wrongs, rules that exist beyond physical origins, usually in the realm of the divine. One of these rules always instructs parents to pass on the rules to their child. Studies of infant development have shown that children at age four understand that stealing is wrong — but they do not understand that stealing arouses guilt until age eight, when they might be able to fathom why stealing is wrong. Thus White’s rules originate not from personal experience, but from a system much grander than any individual life.

What ensues when a child fails to obey the rules? Punishment. In a white society, this holds true past childhood, and in stronger white communities, questioning the rules is tantamount to disobeying. For any individual to question absolute morality is dangerous, because it may be the first step toward evil. It casts the system’s knowledge and ability into doubt: a single person, thinking they know better than a vast conglomerate of minds and an expanse of lives stretching back centuries? The severity of punishments varies, usually with the severity of the crime,  but typically a stronger root in White philosophy correlates with more permanent punishment.

How strongly do I adhere to White? Not very. Like all children, I was raised into a pre-existing set of rights and wrongs,  and it is interesting to consider if children need this (leading to the major difference between conservative and liberal standings). However, White is not static — freedoms that may have been detrimental to isolated, warring historical societies are now being unlocked. White is loosening its grip in light of a more globalised and diverse community, and is being coloured more and more vividly with Blue and Green (its neighbouring colours), like a white shirt in the wash. Traditional, fundamentalistic White is on the fall in parts of the world (whether the rest will follow remains to be seen). This does not mean every one of White’s moral guidelines will disintegrate — rather, they will continue to exist if people want them to, and not simply because they always have.

The exceptions, of course, lie with Black and Red, colours that never really cared for White’s rulebook in the first place. White’s relationship with Black is as antipathic as their namesakes suggest. Those familiar with Black’s philosophy will probably already understand why: Black does not comprehend “morality”, which it sees as a naive attempt to force rules on others. A disciple of Black would break a white society’s code in a heartbeat if it led to personal gain, because there exists no genuine reason not to. Black is amused by White’s faith in history and inherent goodness. On the flipside, while Black cares little for White and will bother with it only if it serves another purpose, White actively seeks to destroy Black for exactly this reason. Black sees White as a pest and a nuisance; White sees Black as a parasite and a threat. But this isn’t to say they can’t co-exist — positions of power in a white infrastructure are of great interest to a black-hearted individual, and thus lies the danger of corruption, because the only solution is for the system to tear off its own head.

White and Red also clash vigorously, and again it is due to rules. But while Black would consider playing along with a rule if it meant some gain in the future, Red outright rejects White’s desire for obedience without further consideration. In this sense, White prefers a red target, because it never fails to make itself obvious. But what Red lacks in subtlety, it makes up for with passion, and passion can quickly spread. Riots, hysteria, chaos — all manifestations of Red rebelling against White’s authority. Red takes pleasure in the act of rebellion, and as I have already emphasised about Red’s general nature, does not give extensive thought to the consequences. And so while a red “criminal” may be caught more easily than a black one, it will also make more of an impression and perhaps inspire others to do the same. Oddly, martyrdom is also a definitive trait shared by White and Red: history is filled with empires flaunting Red as their secondary colour, and these empires were fiery, war-mongering, and very fast-moving in their expansion. Red is also eager for a spectacle of punishment, and gladly condones any public executions that the law might conduct. The masses are quick to anger.

On the topic of White’s enemies, it also commonly comes into conflict with a third: itself. It is not difficult to imagine how two societies, equally white yet differing in their rules to some extent, could easily clash. Both believe they are serving the world’s best interests, and both believe this just as powerfully — they both view each other as misled. Religious wars are up there alongside battles for land in leading causes of war, and when you think about it, “war” can only occur between two sufficiently large sides — almost always White in principle.

Lest you take away nothing from this but White’s tendency to see only enemies, I should bring up its friendly relationship with Green. In White’s eyes, Green is just as sincere, warm, and group-oriented as White. Though Green may look to nature for guidance rather than a clear-cut moral system, they share the view that life’s guidelines exist above life itself — White just prefers to tell its children, rather than let them discover it for themselves as Green would have them do, and this active versus passive difference in their philosophies is an extenuating one. Despite this, Mark Rosewater has expressed his opinion that White and Green are more alike than any other pair of colours, and I tend to agree; ultimately, they share the goal of an ordered world, a peaceful world, and a world free of upstarts and scourges.

Many would argue that structure and order are vital to human communities on larger scales. All but the blackest of people would concur that it is mutually beneficial to look out for close friends and family, and that it is natural (i.e. beyond personal preference) to want to do so. White’s core philosophy can be seen as an expansion of this — White makes sure that this kind attitude continues beyond acquaintances, to complete strangers. Like my opinion of Green, I do not reject the notion that a perfectly White society — the one that becomes free of wrongdoers, and hence forgets the word — would be a good one to live in. But until then, I must fall back on my existential blue/black outlook and accept that until this community exists, a white society is as flawed as its human authority. Next time, I wrap up my five-part Colours of Magic series from a detached and inquisitive point of view. Join me then as I talk about the pool of information we swim in, and how we can learn from it.

Otherwise, perhaps you should also take the time to consider exactly how many absolutes we need in our lives, and where they should come from.

I was recently involved in a long discussion with a good friend of mine, who is also an atheist and was a major factor in my transformation from religious apathy to atheism. The fruit of the discussion was strongly related to our differing reasons for deconversion: while my friend was disgusted by the indoctrination and brainwashing that religion inspires (especially Western monotheism) and was led to recognise it for what it was, I instead approached atheism from the road of science and reason. I simply identified religion as the most prominent example of an inherently flawed thought process entailing a breakdown of critical thinking and the hypocrisy of selective skepticism. The differences in our viewpoints throughout our recent discussion arose from those different paths. After leaving theism behind, my friend was attracted to the calming benevolence of more Eastern spiritual teachings and philosophies, whereas I continued my study of science and continued applying active skepticism and scientific enquiry to everything I encountered. Meeting after a year of these branched-off roads, the collision between our evolved viewpoints was inevitable, and inspired this post, which will clarify why the scientific method is the only legitimate means to establish the existence of any relationship in the observable universe. At the end, I will include examples from our discussion which highlight where that method breaks down.

First, I should state that my friend and I still share common ground on many matters. His ideas frequently display a fascination with the workings of the human brain, which I also possess; however, his ideas lie in the realm of philosophy, whereas I focus only on psychological phenomena that can be demonstrated scientifically. If an idea cannot be tested, then it can exist only as a philosophical question. I have often insisted that we must always apply skepticism to things we hear or observe – were we to believe anything, we would quickly suffer. Everyone knows this, and believes it to be true about most things. They just find it difficult to apply it retroactively, to their pre-existing beliefs.

Like skepticism, science is universal. If a relationship exists – for example, if being born in a certain month determines one’s personality – a scientific enquiry will find it. This is something that people often fail to understand. A correlational study would look at a wide range of randomly selected people, examining their personalities and comparing this to each person’s “star sign”. If there is a significant pattern – that is, if the probability of an actual effect is much larger than the probability of it occurring due to chance (something calculated statistically) – then the enquiry will inevitably detect it. In this case, there have been a plethora of studies investigating astrology and no relationship has been detected. Obviously, no one can spare the time to scientifically investigate every single claim, and this is where skepticism comes in. Considering that constellations are arbitrarily created by humans, that every astrologist will predict something different (and ludicrously vague) based on them, and that the idea conflicts with well-established physical laws, one’s threshold of skepticism does not need to be immensely high to toss the idea out on principle. It is only the disturbingly large number of its subscribers and its prevalence throughout ancient history that makes astrology worthy of a scientist’s time. Again, I reiterate: if there is a relationship – that is, if something is at play other than random chance – a proper scientific enquiry cannot fail to detect it.

If a proper scientific investigation does not detect a relationship, then there are only two possibilities. Either the relationship does not exist, or the investigation needs to be improved. While the latter occurence is rare, it is nevertheless claimed disproportionately often by subscribers to unjustified ideologies, usually in an attack on the experiment’s validity. Validity is how well-equipped the actual investigation is to detect the relationship it is attempting to detect. Since investigations use samples to extrapolate results to a population, it is important that this sample is representative – “investigations” carried out by pseudoscientists frequently fail at this first hurdle (for example, testing homeopathic remedies on  fifty people who already strongly believe in homeopathy). Validity is also more obviously relevant in the choice of variables, if the investigation is an experiment rather than just a correlational study. If your hypothesis is “Prayer to the Christian God can influence an outcome”, your independent variable would be whether or not a group prayed, and the dependent variable you would go on to examine would be how often the prayed-for outcome occurred for each group. If no relationship was detected, a believer might claim that it didn’t work because the people praying were not clutching a crucifix. In that case, the variables were not valid – but one finds that believers do not point these things out until after the experiment, and only if it fails to support their already-held views. In any case, this constant adding of conditions can continue indefinitely until the supposed requirements for the prayer’s success are ludicrously specific – hence validity actually decreases, as the results of the investigation can no longer be applied across any reasonable population. Validity in experiments is also boosted by methods such as double-blind experiments (which rule out possible placebo effects) and randomized control trials (which assist in eliminating unwanted variables).

Other ways to improve an investigation are increasing reliability and power. Reliability, as I have already alluded to, is simply the probability that the effect was due to a causal relationship rather than chance. It is much easier to improve – simply repeat the experiment. If you get the same results, then those results are more reliable. If the results fluctuate every time the investigation is conducted, then they are not reliable. In a similar vein, power is the investigation’s actual ability to detect an effect, and usually refers to the size of the sample being investigated. Increasing power increases your chances of finding a real relationship. However, this is just as double-edged as it sounds, because if power is increased sufficiently, some sort of tiny relationship will always be found, though it may be irrelevant to the investigation. Essentially, if you look hard enough, you will find something, though it will be so miniscule that it is useless and completely irrelevant to any single individual. As a famous example, studies have detected a correlation between height and intelligence – but height is responsible for something on the order of 4% of the variation in intelligence. While validity can never be too high (within reasonable effort), power most certainly can. In the case of supernatural claims, this is rarely a problem as the relationships are usually completely non-existent, but let us imagine for a moment that the aforementioned astrology study was expanded to a sample size of 100,000 randomly selected people, and an extremely small correlation between being born in winter and having a quieter personality was found. “Star sign” is hardly the most rational explanation for this, and in any case, the relationship would be so small that you could not conclude anything about one particular person who was born in winter.

Once more, I will say it: a proper scientific enquiry cannot fail to detect a real relationship. I repeated it because we are going to move into the realm of phenomena that science cannot detect. Claims of phenomena that cannot be detected are commonly referred to by scientists as non-falsifiable. Supernatural phenomena that do not begin in this realm always end up being pushed back into it by believers who refuse to interpret an investigation’s failure to detect something as evidence of its non-existence. I use the image of a “realm” with caution, because it is also effectively the “realm” of things that do not exist. If science cannot detect something, then a human most definitely cannot, and we should not even bother considering its existence. Investigations into the existence of ghosts always fail because the ghosts eventually gain characteristics such as “invisible” and “immaterial” until they can’t interact with the physical world at all and are equivalent to something that does not exist within our senses or the detecting ability of any device in existence. Deistic non-interventional gods also fall into this category by default; numerous other things like “paranormal” abilities always end up there. The essence of the matter is: if science cannot detect it, then no one and nothing can distinguish it from something that does not exist.

I commonly hear responses to this such as “My god lies in a different, non-physical realm”, but this just shifts the problem, because this “non-physical realm” is just as non-falsifiable and undetectable as anything supposedly contained within it, and both it and its occupants may as well not exist. Even claims such as “My god used to intervene in the physical world, but has now retreated to his own realm” can never ultimately be falsified, though the evidence we do have about this supposed “age of intervening gods” can be examined (note that this is not a scientific procedure, merely the much more fundamental processes of skepticism and reason). Proponents of “non-overlapping magisteria”, who claim that the scientific method and faith are just different foundations for “different sorts of beliefs” also fail to recognise this. Reason leads to conclusions based on evidence, by its definition. Faith leads to conclusions not based on evidence, by its definition. We do not need to make sappy concessions that both are equally legitimate, because they very obviously are not. Faith cannot possibly help us decide which of the literally endless beliefs not based on evidence are correct – it is the fallacious double-standard of selective skepticism that allows this.

Faith does not necessarily relate to theism, and this was one of the major points of the discussion I shared with my friend, who went so far as to use the term “scientific faith”. My friend is very willing to believe things that “feel right”, like the holistic eastern teachings to which he subscribes, yet he accepts that the human brain is only as good at perceiving reality as was necessary for survival on Earth before higher brain functions such as self-awareness were naturally selected. I would be perfectly willing to accept that practices such as acupuncture, chi kung and chakra healing could improve health beyond the influence of a basic placebo or calming effect, but they must jump through the same scientific hoops as every other idea before I lower my skepticism gate, and this is an important point. There are no exceptions to skepticism, no absolute truths about the universe that every person is born with locked away in their heads. Most people believe they hold the absolute truth, and so this obviously cannot be considered a factor in deciding who to believe. My friend also leapt to many “natural” conclusions about the human brain and the entire universe, based on things that are “obvious to anyone”, many of which conflicted with the lifetimes of research conducted across numerous areas, including cosmology, biology and even mathematics.

To me, this idea that one person can simply gain a sudden understanding of the universe without taking much more than a glance at (and even in complete opposition of) the work of thousands of other sincere thinkers across hundreds of years, let alone conduct any serious scientific research of their own, approaches nothing short of arrogance. I see this depressingly often – rather than show a sense of genuine curiosity and compare their own ideas to the scientific enquiries of thinkers past, these steadfast subscribers instead go through life believing that through some sense of faith, or “higher sense of being”, they can uncover any truth that they wish with a few hours’ thought. This holds as true for Eastern practices as it does for anything else – subscribers limit their search of knowledge only to sources they know to agree with their pre-subscribed belief system. (And it’s just icing on the cake of irony when these people utter the words “You need to be more open-minded.”)

My studies of psychology have revealed wondrously fascinating facets of the human mind and the behaviours it entails – uncovered, debated, and tested by countless dedicated thinkers worldwide over the course of the last hundred years. We no longer need to ascribe to such broad, unsubstantiated vitalistic concepts as “energy”, or “karma”, or “divine intervention” in our efforts to explain what we see and why we see it. The scientific method assists in eliminating the flaws of the human brain as factors in deciding what is real and what is not; our need to attribute things to cause, our need to seek only confirmation of our beliefs and ignore conflicting evidence, our need to insist that our perception and memories are infallible.

Why seek out psychics and fortune-tellers to predict the future when psychology can predict human behaviour far more reliably (something “psychics” know perfectly well)? Why believe ancient Mayan calendars have predicted the apocalypse when physics can predict the motion of celestial objects thousands of times larger than our planet to within a fraction of a millimetre? Why resort to deliriously vague, impossible-to-fail concepts such as “natural balance” when mathematical game theory can actually predict patterns of behaviour in animals? Why believe mythical, dusty books’ accounts of creation when biology has demonstrated the incredible ability of evolution to explain life as we see it in our insignificant time on Earth? Why leave your life in the hands of useless homeopathic remedies and “energy healing techniques” when chemistry, biology and neurology have united to provide medicines that save millions upon millions of lives every year?

And this is the last thing I wish to discuss: health. Of all the human attitudes and behaviours that belief systems inspire, it is those relating to health and wellbeing that are of most significance, because this is where they do the most literal physical damage. I imagine that my readers will not need reminding of the horrors medical doctors go through every year when Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse treatment and – more disgustingly – refuse it for their children. Parents of children who have died from lack of treatment have been let off extremely light in the US, facing “criminal negligence” charges rather than the more substantiated murder charge, simply due to their fatal actions being religiously inspired. Here, I wish to talk about the “alternative medicine” practised by subscribers to “new age” and Eastern philosophies.

I should state that these divisions of “Western” and “Eastern”, “conventional” and “traditional”, etc. are blatantly meaningless, giving no indication of actual remedial ability. These terms reveal only the (very historical) geographical locations where the respective methods have practised, and how widely accepted the methods are. A much more fitting division would be “scientific” and “pre-scientific”, which clearly indicates which treatments have been rigorously and scientifically validated and which treatments were simply ancient guesswork refined into tradition through natural selection – two categories that are not equally legitimate. Treatments that were observed to work rather than scientifically proven were passed on, and those not observed to work were (eventually) disused – vague guesses at why these treatments appeared to work could then be postulated (“chakras”, “vital energy”, even “demons”) based on pre-scientific false understanding of nature and the human body. For the most part, these treatments appear to work only because they do nothing at all. For example, the body’s immune system is perfectly capable of fending off the common cold virus, and relaxation (which seems to be the major part of most “traditional Eastern treatments”) will naturally assist this. There is no need to invoke an explanation like “energy is allowed to flow” – this energy is as unreal and ultimately pointless as the alien souls (“thetan” is the proper term) of Scientology. When these practitioners learn of documented biological phenomena such as homeostasis, they are often quick to leap to claims that this is exactly what they meant by “energy” – apparently just with none of the predictive ability of homeostatic imbalance or roots in physical phenomena.

Obviously, these sorts of treatments are not actively harmful. Being relaxed and calm is a well-documented boon when recovering from illness, which is why doctors recommend bed rest and inactivity. If one feels that rituals such as meditation are a more effective method of relaxation, then so be it – but there is no need to create ethereal concepts or invoke mystical causes to explain this. Perfectly tangible, biological reasons already exist. If one wants to actually learn more about the human body, and perhaps even assist in hypothesising and testing new treatments, then “conventional Western medicine” is the place to do it. Granted, there are flaws in health systems and infrastructures, but this is true of anywhere, and needs to be addressed rather than avoided. To nurture contempt of these flaws into a misled opposition to scientific medicine to the point where one actively forgoes it is a dangerous and possibly fatal delirium. Repeating anecdotes and relentlessly professing “______ really works!” is not a convincing argument, nor is it legitimate at all in light of the unreliability of individual experience. Anyone who resorts to stories rather than research in their claim of truthfulness fails to understand the most basic rule of skepticism: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. For further reading, I suggest Science-Based Medicine, a wonderful scientific blog. Of particular interest is its response to a letter from a reader who criticises the “Eurocentricism” of scientific medicine.

Science is self-deprecating, self-improving and universal – a construct more reliable at discerning reality than any single human mind. It holds nothing sacred, gives no worth to the labels “tradition” and “convention”, and most important does not stray beyond its boundaries, which is less than can be said of human imagination. It is nonsensical to oppose it, and ludicrous to fear it, for it can only ever find the truth, and I for one will embrace that goal as long as I live.

All the colors’ philosophies seem to dwell on creating the perfect world, at least the perfect world as they see it. The irony is that the perfect world is already here. Just take a moment to step back and look at nature. It is horribly complex yet surprisingly simple. It is harsh yet gentle. It’s functional yet beautiful. Nature is an odd mix of opposites living in harmony. And it sits right here under our noses.

To what end should the leaves on the branches of a tree attempt to change the tree itself? How can an engine tinkered with throughout a century of human industry possibly subvert a global, and perhaps even cosmic, engine perfected over billions of years? For how long can we blunder along, thinking ourselves the ultimate pinnacle and purpose of this cosmic engine, advancing in technology at a vastly accelerated rate while not understanding the weapons we wield, before a machine misfires and the leaves fall scorched to the ground?

Those are the questions Green puts forward. If you have no idea who or what Green is, I advise you strongly to read my article ‘The Stirring Shadow‘ and the series’ second part, ‘Damn the Consequences‘ to discover my thoughts on applying the philosophy of colors of Magic: the Gathering to the real world. As for here, I won’t waste any time before diving into the forest of the universe.

Green, essentially, can be best summed up by its unique viewpoint on change: while the other four colors are busying themselves trying to change the world, Green sees no need. Every organism, every drop of water, every planet – everything carries a purpose refined over billions of years since the beginning of the universe. We are all pieces in a cosmic puzzle – and the mere fact that we evolved self-awareness mere millenia ago does not give us free reign to change this ancient universe as we see fit. Every step towards a rigid, artificially-changed world is a step away from the rhythmic balance that our species was born into. We are gifted, yes, but our intelligence also blinds us to the fact that we are still only marginally different from the other animals we live alongside, and makes us too sure of ourselves. Were we to obliterate ourselves in nuclear war next week, we would be replaced by nature without a moment’s pause, and the universe at large would feel not a ripple. But at the same time, nature has given us a place here and now, and we should not waste time and energy on making bigger televisions and faster cars when we should be improving ourselves as individuals and, more importantly, as a whole.

No piece of the puzzle can amount to much by itself on the scale of the universe. Aside from water, plants are our single most vital resource, and other animals follow just behind it. However, each piece does have a role – a way to best fit into the puzzle – with which we are born, and rather than struggling to make our individual roles more important than others’, we should each discover the role we were destined for, and make as great a contribution as we can to our community, our species, our planet, our universe. After embracing this philosophy, says Green, and learning the patience to find our place, we would quickly realise that we had been wandering blind in an already perfect world driven by an ancient engine able to resolve every problem that has ever existed.

It is easy to become very emotional when describing a green outlook – moreso than Red, I find, the other color focused on emotion. Note that “emotional” does not mean crying, as contemporary casual usage of the term would imply, but simply feeling what one is writing, and that in itself is green more than anything itself. Green holds the view that we have evolved feelings for a reason, and we should follow them rather than question why millions of years of natural selection would grant them to us today. Green is also the color that we are made to feel guilty for lacking – growing environmental, social and technological concerns in modern society are Green-driven – but at the same time, that fact that one can be made to feel guilty about such issues implies a green conscience under the surface. No color can remind us of our miniscule place in the universe like Green can, and it is this aspect of Green that I appreciate most.

On the flipside, it is easy to misconstrue Green’s inherent spirituality into something like organised religion, which I would identify as the result of a crossover between Green and White. Eastern religions are extremely Green (as are the Jedi of Star Wars), and these religions I have little conflict with. However, extreme personifications of “nature” as a human-like entity or “god” have deviated into the Abrahamic western religions doing so much widespread and personal harm. These organisations have lost sight of Green’s true philosophy, if they ever had it in the past, and I will focus more on them in my White article. As for Green, I interpret it as containing no claims of supernatural forces as depicted in western culture, but rather possessing a reverence for nature, far closer to Buddhism and elements of Hinduism. Influences of these holistic cultures have drifted into the west in recent times, but sadly the length of time the west has been separated from Green results in few people actually achieving close to a full understanding of practices such as meditation. A stronger failure to understand Green can be seen in the mysticism of “new age” spirituality, which essentially consists of genuine, Green-seeking people being exploited by conspicuously Green-lacking con artists such as psychics and astrologists.

While Eastern religions do have practices and beliefs that would be immediately cast off as “pseudoscience” by a staunch supporter of Blue, it is important to realise that there is little comparison with Western equivalents like astrology. Green practices do not originate from a bottom-up study of the brain, like blue practices, but have evolved over thousands of years – practices like meditation still exist simply because they achieve a purpose that Green considers important. Just as “amoral” is a word applied to but not recognised by Black, “primitive” is a concept applied to rather than by Green, usually to imply some lack of advanced cognitive processes. The Australian Aborigines lived in balance with the rest of their world, observing the natural cycles and passing down traditions that proved effective over tens of thousands of years. The blue/black among us may look back at their existence with condescension, but perhaps the Aborigines would have in turn looked upon them with disbelief, and wondering how long before their separation from their world and their own destinies caused their end.

On that note, I now move on to the incongruence of Green and Black, the first example of an enemy-aligned color pair I have considered. To be enemy colors is not to say that the two are the antitheses of one another, for each color actually has two enemies, and all enemies still share some unique similarities. In this case of Green and Black, they reach common ground on perhaps one point: the world is harsh. Beyond that, however, the colors’ philosophies differ as one would expect. Green views the harshness of the world simply as a result of failing to “bend against the wind”, as the proverb goes. If one understands their place in the world, the idea of it being harsh quickly fades into the realisation that we are all just different molecular forms of the same basic elements, and these forms are constantly shifting, devouring and spawning one another in endless cycles. Black, on the other hand, accepts the harshness of the world as a fundamental fact, and believes that it serves to illuminate who has the ability and willingness to survive, and who does not – as different a take on evolution from Green as one can get. Black views the development of consciousness as a potent opportunity for domination, and sees the world as a pool of limited resources rather than Green’s idea of an intricate puzzle-piece engine. Black would never oppose technological advancement or change of any kind, if it served to further one’s own ability to survive, and is the very opposite of the worldwide interdependence emphasised by Green. Black also subverts cycles at its leisure if it means even the slightest profit for itself – bringing about premature death being a significant example.

Red is an allied color to both Green and Black, meaning it shares numerous philosophy characteristics with each. In the case of Red and Green, both are wild and instinctual, and emphasise feelings over thoughts, instincts over innovations. As animals, we evolved instincts and emotions far before we developed self-awareness, and for that reason it makes more sense to follow their lead rather than overthinking things and stepping beyond our boundaries as creatures of natures. Red and Green both recognise that the world is chaotic, beyond our control, and that we possess a bond from just being, rather than thinking. No two colors are exactly the same, however, and Red and Green have their share of differences – Red is closer to Black in its value of the self over all else, as opposed to Green’s dynamic, interdependent, fluidly structured ecosystems. One can also imagine the differences between Red and the green example I gave of Eastern religions, which very often emphasise that obeying every emotional impulse that comes into your head and giving in to base desires is detrimental to self development. Green’s cosmic engine could not function if every piece did whatever it wanted, and at the same time, Red’s very individualistic pieces do not want to be told how to function, but will leap from role to role as they please.

Green is often a misunderstood color, and to me that is a shame. Scientific pursuits and cold objective thought have taught us to ignore instincts and instead employ different techniques to fit into a world very alien from the one that green philosophies envision, and in terms of efficiency, these dismissals are validated – there are so many subversions of green beliefs around, especially in western culture, that it would be a waste of time and energy for Blue to dig up the few genuinely green practices. When it comes down to it, I carry the belief that beneath even the most analytical viewpoint lies a hint of Green and a seed of a belief that were everyone Green, the world would be a lot simpler and happier. In the next instalment, which I have long been looking forward to talking about, I’ll be looking at what our society is rather than what it might hope to be. Join me then as I delve into the human need for structure, for pride, and for doing what is right.

In the meantime, take a moment or two to consider that maybe everything you own is more than anything you need.