Dissonant Reality
There is a persistent belief among both scientists and non-scientists that good theories must be somehow beautiful or elegant or something similar, because reality itself is ultimately – in some relevant sense – harmonious; or in other words, that science must be beautiful/simple/elegant/etcera because the laws of nature are beautiful/simple/elegant/etcera. This belief is particularly influential in physics and mainstream economics (which likes to mimic physics or an image thereof as much as possible). Sabine Hossenfelder has written an interesting book about how this belief “leads physics astray” rather than that it provides useful guidance. For an illustration of how deep...
Carbon-neutrality by 2050 (version of December 2020)
(Some corrections were made in this article on March 2, 2022. The most recent version of this article can be found here.) This year several governments announced that their countries will be carbon neutral by 2050. This is a cheap promise, as the target is so far in the future that it doesn’t commit them to do anything significant now, but even if the commitment would be real, one may wonder how probable it is that the target will actually be reached, and whether it will be enough. These are two different questions, of course, and I will try to...
A Right to Hate?
In August, French blogger Pauline Harmange published a booklet titled Moi les hommes, je les déteste (Me, men, I loathe them), which caused quite a stir in France (and a little bit outside France as well). The book – supposedly – is a protest against misogyny (hatred of women), by taking up the opposite point of view of misandry (hatred of men). “Supposedly”, because I’m not sure exactly about the book’s arguments as it is no longer available and I have thus been unable to read it. In any case, it is not this book itself that is the topic...
On the Idea of an Unconditional (Moral) Rule
In his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals Kant argued that the moral law (assuming there is one) must be unconditional and universal. As part of that argument he made a famous distinction between categorical and hypothetical imperatives. Imperatives are “ought” (or “should”) statements, such as “you ought to tell the truth”. The difference between the two kinds of imperatives is that hypothetical imperatives depend on a specific kind of condition, namely a desire, while categorical imperatives are universal, unconditional, and absolute. Thus, “if you want human civilization to survive the 21st century, you ought to eat the rich” is...
Uchiyama, Marx, and Gramsci on Ideological Superstitions
In 2019 typhoon Hagibis destroyed part of the railroad that leads to Hakone, a small town near a volcanic lake in Japan that has a long history as a resort town. One of the stops on the line that can no longer be reached by train is Ōhiradai. About fifty meter south of the station there is a small and inconspicuous temple named Rinsenji. In 1909, during the railroad’s construction, the police searched that temple. They found dynamite used for building the railroad that was temporarily stored there. They also found an illegal printing press under the main altar. That...
Lessons from the Ongoing Disaster (for the Next One)
Presumably, you are aware that we’re in the middle of a disaster. That’s unpleasant – to say the least – but it’s also quite instructive. There is much we can learn from the ongoing disaster and humanity’s responses to it. But whether we can use those lessons to avert the even bigger disaster looming on the horizon is questionable. Rather, it seems that the most important thing that we can learn from the corona crisis is that we as a species may very well be incapable of avoiding catastrophy. ignore and deny For months, the general attitude of most governments...
Human Extinction
Apparently, an increasing number of people say that they believe that climate change will cause human extinction. To what extent all of these people are genuinely convinced about this I don’t know, although, for reasons explained elsewhere, I expect that for most of them it is a desperate attempt to find meaning and make sense of an increasingly meaningless and senseless world more than a genuine conviction. Regardless, the topic of human extinction is an interesting one. How likely is human extinction really? And would human extinction actually be a bad thing? These are the two questions I will focus...
A Theory of Disaster-Driven Societal Collapse and How to Prevent It
(abstract) — One of the effects of climate change is an increase in extreme weather and natural disasters. Unless CO₂ emissions are significantly reduced very soon, it is inevitable that the effects of disaster will exceed many (and ultimately all) societies’ mitigation capacity. Compounding unmitigated disaster effects will slowly but surely push a society towards collapse. Because no part of the planet is safe from the increase in natural disaster intensity and because some of the effects of disasters – such as refugees and economic decline – spill over boundaries, this will eventually lead to global societal collapse. Furthermore, just...
On Secular and Radical Buddhism
In a number of influential books and articles, Stephen Batchelor has proposed, developed, and defended something he has called (among others) “secular Buddhism” and “Buddhism 2.0”. The idea of such a secular or scientific or naturalistic or otherwise not traditionally religious kind of Buddhism isn’t new – it has been especially popular among 20th and 21st Western converts to Buddhism, but there have been Asian precursors as well. Nevertheless, the idea is also somewhat controversial. Adherents of “secular Buddhism” like Batchelor typically consider it a return to the roots of Buddhism and to the original teachings of the Buddha, but...
Some Remarks on Truth and Justification
The notion of truth is probably one of the most central notions in science and philosophy, if not in humanity’s engagement with the world in general, but it is also a somewhat problematic notion that is prone to confusion. And consequently, not all talk about “truth” is really about truth. A couple of years ago, I wrote a paper titled “Recognizing ‘Truth’ in Chinese Philosophy” on the difficulty of recognizing concepts of “truth” and philosophical theories about truth in non-Western philosophy, focusing on ancient Chinese philosophy. I argued there and elsewhere that the ancient Chinese didn’t have theories of truth,...
The Lesser Dystopia
(This is part 3 in the No Time for Utopia series.) In On the Fragility of Civilization, I argued that due to the slowly compounding effects of an increasing number of relatively localized “natural” disasters caused (directly or indirectly) by climate change, a vicious circle of failing disaster management, economic decline, civil unrest, and hunger will trigger a cascade of collapsing societies, eventually leading to global societal collapse in roughly 25 to 30 years from now (give or take a half decade). The world during and after collapse will be very different from what most of us have ever experienced,...
The Stories We Believe in
We all believe in stories. Stories about ourselves, stories about the world around us, about the societies and communities we are part of, about our histories, and so forth. We tend not to think of these stories as “stories”, however, because we hold them true – that’s what it means to believe something: to hold it true – and we tend to think of stories as untrue. But at least some of them are untrue. We don’t all believe the same things, so at least some of us must be wrong. Furthermore, many of the stories we believe in –...