A Humbling Point of View

Recently, I stumbled upon a grading system for civilizations, know as the Kardashev scale. The Kardashev scale is a highly theoretical way of measuring a civilization's advancement, both technologically and expansively, and is useful for putting the recent leaps that humanity has made into a cosmic perspective.

Overall, there are 6 official types of civilizations, and they range from Type 0 to Type 5. Type 0 is
when the civilization in question extracts it's energy and resources from crude organic based sources, and is capable of orbital flight. Natural disasters such as tsunamis and hurricanes, as well as self-created mass genocide are all risks to the Type 0 civilization. At Type 1, the civilization is still planetary, but now gets it's energy from sources such as fusion reactors and other high-density energy sources. But they must also be capable of interstellar flight travel, interstellar communication, planetary engineering, world government, and megascale engineering. Type 1 is still prone to extinction, but it is now mostly limited to supernovas or black holes. Type 2 goes even further, as a multi-system civilization, and is now also capable of terraforming and stellar engineering. Type 2 is now theoretically immune form extinction from natural phenomena, as well as some of the artificial genocides. Type 3 is a galactic empire, and is now also able to travel via wormholes. Type 4 has the ability to colonize numerous galaxies, and is effectively immortal, as well as mastering time warping and theoretical time travel. Type 5 dominate the universe, and are supposedly able to create custom, parallel universes or alternate time branches.

So, yeah. We're still a Type 0 culture, but that is changing. We have met all criteria for a Type 0 civilization, and are beginning to try our hand at becoming a Type 1. I mean, look around! We're sending rovers to Mars and they're sending data back. We've launched equipment to the farthest reaches of the solar system. And yet, we still have a long way to go. We still rely heavily on organic sources of energy such as oil and coal. Not to mention our mindset and our culture. We have yet to see planetary government, although the UN is a step in that direction. And as for interstellar travel, well... we have yet to send a man to Mars, but that future isn't far off. I just hope I live to see it.

But we have to remember, this scale is not an outline of how humanity will progress. We will see things that deviate, or the whole thing could be wrong. We don't know. I mean, if you where to ask the most learned person a thousand years ago to come up with such a scale, I don't doubt that we would scoff at it in distain as we smile smugly in our own superior knowledge of events to come for humanity. People have been erroneous to a point of being ludicrous before, and for all we know, we could be too.

Ethics, where art thou?

Shakespeare once said; "There is nothing that is good or bad, but thinking that makes it so." And there really is no better way to put it. Good and bad are merely perceptions, and our perceptions are influenced by our heritage, our religious beliefs, our experiences, our hopes, our doubts...

So, really, if you where to mold people differently, they could have completely opposing opinions on good and bad. It happens all the time. Politics is the epicenter of that debate over what is good and what is bad. So, people never do anything they believe to be the worst decision. They always pick the best option available to them. Now, I'm not saying that people always pick the right option, or the option that benefits the most people, but they do turn down the road that they believe will allow them to get to their personal goals. Tolkien knew this when he wrote his famous Lord of the Rings books. There is no character, besides Sauron, who is truly evil. They always have some conflict with the protagonists not because their sole purpose is to get in the way, but because their goals don't align with the goals of the "good" guys.

But it is hard, to understand people and their decisions. It takes a considerable amount of understanding to really grasp someone's motives. But understanding breeds empathy, and empathy breeds sympathy. And so, in order to really, truly, unquestionably understand someone, you have to first love them as they love themselves.

The Shackles of Categorization

There are many types of people whom I find insufferable. People who lack any amount of empathy. People who automatically judge other people without getting to know them. People who say you owe them because they are your "friend". But even though I would never actively or consciously seek out their company, it is still my duty as a human being to interact with them, at least passively, and allow them a chance to better themselves through real human interaction (I'm not saying that people who interact with me always come out better for it, that's way to narcissistic for even me, but that social interaction is always a chance to pull yourself up the ladder of your life).


And people who just brush off these people who they deem "strange", "weird", or "undesirable" are merely humans in a biological sense, and they never actually look past themselves to help that girl who sat next to them in Biology for a whole semester and a half until one day she didn't come back and now she's gone and they could have helped her but they didn't. And who defines what is strange anyway? I think we can all agree that categorizing people never works. I mean, come on. You can't slap a generic label and neatly place everyone into nice little categories. That's just a few steps away from the feudal system, and there was only massive cultural, economical, political and scientific oppression for about a thousand years. And we continue to do it. Look around. Labels like "Democrat"and "Republican", "rich"and "poor", "smart" and "dumb" are prolific, and immensely destructive to any cross-class social bonding.
            

One of the major reasons that we continue to shackle ourselves to the raging machine of society is because stereotyping is such an affective marketing tool. I'm not saying that it's entirely the company's fault. It's ours too, for standing, oblivious to the walls being built and gaps being made between human beings. It's gone a little too far.

Now, I'm not calling for total anarchy. I'm not a pot-smoking 70s hippie holding up a peace sign. A little class distinction is ok. It allows us to think subjectively, and therefore to focus on the bigger picture. But to allow it to overcome us to the point where Hollywood uses class separation as one of the key elements in it's movies is a bit much. A proper balance should be found, met, and sustained. Where that balance is is for each generation to decide. They should just know what to look for first.

A Colorful Monochrome

Sometimes I think there is something genuinely wrong with me. My world view sometimes fluctuates so rapidly, and over such little things, that it scares me. I go from seeing the world in a depressing black and white to blindingly colorful and bright with hope so much that it hurts. And then back aging. Several times a day. It's exhausting.

And the affect this has in not just making me appreciate when I am truly happy, but it also distances me away from people. I'll be laughing along with them, making small talk and such, when all of the sudden, something someone says or does reminds me of all those dark corners of my mind. I'll trail off in mid-sentence and I won't be able to look away from the wall as I try to drag myself out of the deep, dark, suffocating pit in my soul. Why this happens, you ask? I don't know. I try to continue the conversation as if nothing happens, but my voice sounds false to even myself, my smile feels as plastic as rubber tires. All the while I'm still reeling form the sudden reminder of how lonely I really am.

I realize that now. That pit is loneliness. I once tried to think of someone I was truly open with. To my twisted amusement, I couldn't think of anyone. Certainly there are people who think they know me, maybe even understand me, but they don't realize that all they see is side of me I choose to present to them.

And then I remember how petty my problems seem. I'm a healthy white male middle class american who's never really been deprived of a meal or had to face any real loss. That makes my loneliness seem like a child whining for candy compared to the people who worry whether or not they will get a good meal and a safe place too sleep. Knowing his gives me perspective. And perspective is the thin rope that I desperately grasp in order to keep me from falling into the reach of that monster in my mind.

Descartes vs. Hume

Recently, I found myself, once again, wasting time on the internet. And one of my favorite pastimes is to watch youtube videos made by people like Vihart and John and Hank Green and Michael Stevens and Derek Muller and so on. And in doing so I occasionally find other channels of similar ideas and subject matter. I stumbled across two videos, each discussing the epistemological views of Descartes and Hume. The opposing forces struggling for supremacy is made funny by the fact that their views on epistemology are so similar, but they each oppose the other so directly it makes the image of Hume and Descartes arguing humorous.

Who where they? Rene Descartes is famous for spreading the use of the Cartesian plane, and also liked to dabble in philosophy in addition to mathematics. He bagan to wonder (probably during his midlife crisis); "How do we know anything?" All our knowledge seems to be based on previous knowledge. Because you couldn't, like, figure out the Pythagorean theorem without first knowing what a right triangle is and so on. So he did a thought experiment where he cleared his table of knowledge. He pretended that he knew absolutely nothing. And then he tried to find the fundamental facts of existence by putting things back onto his table of knowledge. He tried and failed with many pieces of information, but the only thing he could get back onto the able was:

"I think, therefore I am."

Meaning that you are experiencing things, and therefore you must be real. Everything else's existence is questionable at best.

Hume, on the other hand, liked to believe that all our experience was built on sensory inputs, and that everything is merely a string of sensory inputs and nothing is really real. Like we're in the Matrix or something.

So Hume's argument was that nothing was real, not even yourself. But Descartes is all like; "Yeah, nothings real, but I am experiencing these things, so therefore I must be real." And Hume's all like; "Nope! Sorry, you don't exist either, at least not on this plane of reality."

And this is funny because while they arrived at similar conclusions, their own conclusions were fundamentally opposed to each other by design. And thinking about two long-dead European philosophers bickering on whether or not they really exist while the rest of us are just like; "I just want the next Downton Abbey episode to air. I really don't care about epistemological quandaries pertaining to the existence of consciousness."