Trust the Ferret, the Ferret is Wise

So, I was re-reading the Dresden Codak Dungeons and Discourse comics, where they're fighting p-zombies, so I googled it, and yes, they are what I've also heard called "Chalmers' zombies". To quote, "A philosophical zombie, p-zombie or p-zed is a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. When a zombie is poked with a sharp object, for example, it does not feel any pain. While it behaves exactly as if it does feel pain (it may say "ouch" and recoil from the stimulus, or tell us that it is in intense pain), it does not actually have the experience of pain as a putative 'normal' person does."

And, yeah, I'm not really impressed. First, I know it's philosophy, but if something looks like a duck, acts like a duck, reacts like a duck, then we should probably treat it like a duck until we've got reason to do otherwise. Since we can't read minds and find out if something's "really" feeling pain, if it acts like it is, we should act like it is too. But I think I agree with Marvin Minsky's criticism of the whole idea as circular, too. That assumption up there that it's "identical except it doesn't really have sentience, or feel pain" is carrying all of the weight in the argument.

I'm always interested in trying to figure out things like the fundamental nature of reality, but bad arguments don't help, and this sure looks like a bad argument to me. Is there something I'm missing about it?

...is to write a self-help book and fleece a bunch of people who need help out of their money.

Okay, context. I've started reading The Secret, this book that's been on Oprah at least twice and a couple of the other daytime talk shows and we've been selling a zillion copies of it, the DVD, the audiobook, and the CD soundtrack. I'm only about 30 pages in, because I can't keep reading it that long, because it's crap. Seriously. It fills almost every cliche of crappy new-agey self-help books. But as far as I can tell, "the Secret" is "What you think is what you get". Which is crap. And now as I read this, I feel worse and worse about all the people we sell it to. But let me get back to "the Secret" they're talking about, and why it's crap.

Basically, it takes the power of positive thinking and dresses it up in a lot of pseudo-mystical and pseudo-scientific gobbledygook without caring about the accuracy of either. They talk about the "law of attraction" which means what you think about is what you draw to you, and try and couch it in terms of "frequencies" or "magnetism" or even more fun, quantum physics. And so by this theory, everybody who's ever died in a natural disaster or through something like say, war, violence, heart disease, or having a piano dropped on them is responsible for their own deaths. What a crock of shit. Not just because it shares the same flaw as the whole idea of karma, which is to blame the victim, but because it denies the existence of any sort of objective reality. Yes, I know the arguments that our entire world we see is created by our brain interpreting the messages from our senses, so we can't REALLY know, etc, blah blah blah. And that's stupid too. Not something you can disprove with formal logic (or even by smacking the True Believer sometimes), but it's absolutely no help. If the rest of the world's an illusion, how do you know you're not too? Or it's not all just a giant simulation using you as a battery (or co-processor, in a slightly more scientifically plausible version of The Matrix). You can't. But since pretty much all of our observations match up to the idea of their being a real objective world outside of ourselves that we can touch and influence but don't have complete control over, that sure seems like the best bet. Or at least the best bet to act like.

So with objective reality as a working hypothesis, that nullifies the whole "Secret" right there. Yeah, positive thinking is good to an extent, especially for people who continually undermine themselves with their own actions because they expect to fail (not that I'd know anything about that, personally, of course), but just thinking doesn't do anything. Thoughts are just patterns in your brain until and unless you act on them. So they only have any effect in how they get you to act. By their deeds they shall be judged.

So, I might force myself to finish reading the rest of The Secret and see if there's anything at all useful in there, but I'm not expecting much. And it's sad, it's not even entertaining crackpottery, or anything new and interesting that can make me think "Man, that's not true, but it'd be kinda cool if it was." Everything The Secret tries to do has already been done better, like by Mage: The Ascension.

This probably doesn't deserve to be called a philosophy yet. That, or somebody else has already come up with it. But I'm getting used to that happening, so here we go.

Most people only live a few days out of the week. If that. The other days are just sort of there, a blur of sameness. I know it's one of the things that makes me least satisfied with my job and my life. My job is really pretty pointless in the larger scheme of things, and it's neither interesting or enjoyable. So it makes the weeks go by fast and slow. Slow, because it takes forever to get through all the regular boring crap. And fast because when I stop and look back over the week, it seems like it passed in an instant since I spent all of it looking forward to the few times I got to do something cool, and basically fast-forwarded through the rest. That's pretty depressing.

Part of the rest of the problem is of my own creation, and this is where the Awesome comes in. Too much of the rest of time is spent doing stuff that's just okay. Or just interesting enough at the time, but not really that interesting in retrospect. Part of it is because no matter how cool something on the Internet is, 99% of things on the net just involve sitting at the computer and typing or looking at things. Video games are all joysticks and buttons and looking at pictures on the screen. Etc.

The point is, life shouldn't be like that. It shouldn't be fast-forwarded through. Life should be Awesome. Every day should have things that make you glad you did them. At least one. Really glad you did them, something you'll remember. Or something at least worthwhile. Whatever it is, as long as you're glad you did it. I can't tell you what's awesome for you to do. You have to do that.

I don't think I'm explaining this well. Dave, over at Dave's Long Box refers to "FUCK YEAH!" moments in comics (and movies), when you just want to yell "Fuck yeah!" because it was so awesome. Life should be more like that. Not all the time, because the human brain is a marvelously weird thing, and gets used to things really quickly. So then the amazingly awesome would become commonplace and boring as you became desensitized to it. Kinda like a drug, where you build up resistance to it, only this would be resistance to Awesome, which would be stupid.

And I think, perhaps, that might be part of the problem. At least in the US and the "West" in general. We're surrounded by marvels and so used to them we don't notice the kinds of Awesome permeating our every day lives. Hmm. That's a topic for another time, with the appeal of "natural" stuff because it's different than the normal Awesome we have, and the genesis of X-TREME! with Awesome junkies trying too hard to get ever-increasing doses of Awesome as everything becomes normal and boring to them. But that's for another topic, this is an attempt at a practical philosophy to make people's lives more fulfilling. Well, mine at least.

There's elements of Zen in this I guess, but it's more from Discordianism, because one of the whole points in that is to appreciate the moment. You're here, live it. Not to ignore the future, or the past, but not to focus on either or both so much you forget the rest. There's Awesome all around, and if there's not enough Awesome for you, then you should add more. If you're bored? Find something interesting to do. Don't just keep flipping through the same TV channels that bored you in the first place. There's a lot of Awesome things out there as it stands. Some people think they need to add magic or demons or High Weirdness to life to make it Awesome, but I don't think those are really any more than dressed up versions of the Just Barely Interesting, balloons of little substance with just a thin layer of Awesome on the outside. At least for me.

And the idea of Awesome is part of how I've become pickier. 90% of everything is crap, goes Sturgeon's Law. Probably even more. But there's a LOT of stuff and people out there, there's more than enough to keep to the good or great almost exclusively. If you're only reading something out of habit, or because it's Kinda Neat, is it Neat Enough to spend your time on? That's up to you. If it's not Awesome or Neat enough, ditch it.

I still don't think I've explained this very well at all, because it went a totally different way than I'd planned. My central point I was trying to make is this. Life should be Awesome. There's not enough time to waste on the Just Barely Interesting. Be picky. Go for the good stuff. Go for the Awesome. Don't let the Almost Interesting keep distracting you.

I'm going to keep trying to flesh this out and organize it into... something. I dunno. Maybe an Awesome Manifesto at some point. Or something. So I'm seriously requesting feedback, so I can try and figure out where I'm going with this, because just talking to myself only gets me echoes.

The game system I have the most books for I've never used is probably GURPS. Mainly because GURPS takes so damn long to make characters, I always lose patience, so I've never tried to run anything with any of my groups. But I have them more because a lot of the books are good reference for other things, and I've used them for that. And I used to work at a hobby shop, so I could get RPG books at a good discount.

No, my favorite RPG I've never played has to be Mage: The Ascension, by White Wolf. I've barely skimmed through the new WoD Mage book, I got kinda turned off by all the talk at the beginning about Atlantis. So I haven't really given it a fair shot, but I don't have $50 to blow on RPG books these days.

If I'm being honest, probably one of the biggest reasons I like Mage is it's as if Cyberpunk, Magic, and Superheroes had a kid, and it shared some of the awesomest parts from each. (1) It was the Matrix before the Matrix. It hits all kinds of fanboy buttons. I am nothing if not a nerd. Plus two of the Traditions are steampunky mad scientists and nerd mages who work their magic through computers. How could I resist?

But aside from my fanboy-isms, part of it was the timing. I started picking Mage books up shortly after I actually read the Principia Discordia through and my mind was Aflame With Possibilities. And Mage has plenty of possibilities. And a dozen or so different ways of looking at the universe, too. Most of the game that wasn't about flipping out and doing crazy stuff was philosophy. An RPG might seem a weird place to learn philosophy from, which it might be. But they also had a really cool section of bibliography showing books they'd gotten ideas from. Some of them were gobbledygook and bullshit, and some were interesting, like Finite and Infinite Games, which I actually found at the library a while before I picked one of the Mage books that referenced it.

The two things from Mage that've stuck with me the most are these. The first is part of the Virtual Adepts, the computer nerd mages. Who I always identified with, naturally enough, since they were made of writers, computer programmers, and so on. Their specialty in magic is/was Correspondence, which is looking at the connections between things. And for the longest time, I thought "lame," because it wasn't as flashy or obviously powerful as the other schools, even if it did have cool things like teleportation. It wasn't as obviously powerful or flashy or neat as the other schools got. But since I never played it, it never really came up.

Then, a couple of years ago, I was driving to work, and thinking about utterly random stuff. I don't remember the train of thought, but I realized, basically, things only exist because they interact. If they don't interact with anything else, they might as well not exist. How do we know what color something is? By how light interacts with it and our eyes. How do we know how hard something is? By how it interacts with our hands. How do we know what properties oxygen has. By how it interacts with other chemicals. If something doesn't interact with anything, it doesn't exist. And that's when I realized that's what they were getting at with Correspondence, and I felt dumb for not realizing it all that long ago.

The other is in Mage, one of the signs of advancement for your character was they'd stop needing to use a focus or special preparations to do things. Partly I just think it's a really cool effect, since as you get better, you don't really need the tools, though they may make things easier. And it also works the same kind of way as the witches in Discworld, where Granny Weatherwax could use a dented kitchen spoon as the Sacred Steel Knife, as long as she convinced the universe it was. And parts of life work that way too, as you get better, you don't need the tools and tricks nearly as much. They might make it easier, sometimes, but you can learn more by doing it without them, and sometimes they hold you back. A good artist can do as much or more with just a pencil as a newbie or a decent artist, even with all the best computer tricks.

And philosophically, it appeals, because it leaves open all sorts of different ways to end up the same general place. The tricks and tools are there to help you, and make you feel like you know what you're doing, the universe doesn't care.

My Mage books are still sitting up on the shelf, I haven't really looked through them in months. Writing this made me want to again. I wonder now if they'll live up to the awesomeness I remember and have projected on them, or not. And I wonder if I'll ever actually get the chance to run (or play in) a cool Mage campaign, and if it'd live up to the awesomeness I'd expect. Probably not, but letting things sit around as abstract ideals that never get implemented is way too Platonic and stupid. An idea of something isn't nearly as awesome as that actual something doing things. Even if it is more perfect.

So what're you people's favorite RPGs you've never played? And maybe I should look for a group for Mage.



1: There's a theory out there that all of White Wolf's games are about superheroes, really. When characters in most of them can shrug off bullets or just dodge them, and throw cars, I tend to agree.

In the aftermath of much frenzied shopping nationwide and the subsequent giving (and inevitable returning) of many of these gifts, I figured I'd try and narrow down what makes a good gift. I have a theory.

The ideal gift is something the person you're getting it for needs and wants, but wouldn't buy for themself. Ideally, it's something they've never even heard of until they get it.

Obviously, ideal gifts don't happen often. It requires knowing somebody well (or a great deal of dumb luck), plus another dose of dumb luck by running across that exact thing. And the knowledge to recognize it, and the ability to acquire it. But any good gift is going to share some of those factors.

The most important is certainly the person needing and/or wanting it. If they don't want or need it, they're not going to get any benefit from it, and probably would just end up returning it. That's why people make gift lists, and it tends to work fairly well. But unless it's a truly expansive gift list, it narrows down the options a lot and removes much of the surprise from gift getting. Which is part of the fun. And it takes away the recognition of "wow, this person really knows the kinds of things I like."

And it should be something they won't buy for themselves, because otherwise they might already have gone and bought it. And that's no good. But even if they haven't already gone and bought it, they would have eventually. Probably. So if they haven't, either they're holding off on buying things, thanks to imminent gift-giving, or they don't really want it that badly. Or it's too expensive for them. So while it'd still be appreciated, it's not so much of a surprise, and it's not THAT important to them, usually.

Something new isn't really that important, but it adds to the surprise value and the knowledge of the person parts of gift giving. Think of it like frosting. Cake is acceptable without it, and by itself it's not that great, but by their powers combined...

Personally, I'm a big fan of utility of presents too, because something that makes itself useful and does something is usually better than something that just looks pretty. Looking pretty is doing something, yes, and is important, but too much just pretty stuff and it goes from stuff to crap and clutter and that's no help to anyone. Form and function combined. Which is why I say the ideal gift would be something they need AND want.

And... that about sums it up, actually. Anything obvious I missed? It's certainly possible, it's 12:30 here and it's been a long Christmas. Even if it is Boxing Day now. There's your unattainable Platonic Ideal of a Gift though, for what little bearing Platonic Ideals have on the actual real messy world.