I'm a great fan of the British actor, writer, comedian and just generally tweedy person Stephen Fry. I recently came across a quite an interesting interview with Fry at Big Think, a web site I might want to have a closer look at. One part I find particularly worth underlining is the following:

The most important philosophy, I think, is that, even if it isn't true, you must absolutely assume there is no afterlife. You cannot for one second, I think, abrogate the responsibility of believing that this is it. Because if you think you're going to have an eternity in which you can talk to Mozart and Schopenhauer on a cloud and learn stuff and, you know, really get to grips with knowledge and understanding, and say you won't bother now — it's a terrible, terrible mistake. May be that there is an afterlife and that I'll look incredibly stupid, but at least I'm going to have had a crammed pre-afterlife, a crammed life. So, to me, the most important thing is, as Kipling to it, to (…) fill every unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distant run. So, that's all I'm saying, I suppose, it's that there's no point wasting time … being lazy

I am a geek, and this is my week.

I considered entering the Global Geek Week video contest, but, in the end, I came to the conclusion that I'm not that good at vlogging, the prize would probably be relatively useless to anyone living outside the US (like me), and that a nice lengthy blog post would do just as good a job at conveying the thoughts I would have presented in the video.

So, the obvious question is, what is a geek or nerd ? I think it is fair to consider these terms synonymous: some people see differences in the nuance of the terms, and the origins are, obviously, distinct, but nowadays, they mean essentially the same things. Originally, geek is an insult applied by non-geek teenagers to peers who are actually intelligent, know how to read, and get better grades at school. The term is most popularly applied to boys with no social life worth mentioning since these are that tiny bit more alien and scary to the kids that hang around at train stations and smoke all day. Nowadays, the term is most commonly associated with the type that spends all day in front of the computer.

Most of the kids insulted as geeks are actually, or at least potentially, geeks in the way that I'd use the word, which is, I believe, a way that most geeks, at least computer geeks, on the internet would agree to. Geeks are intelligent people that think for themselves and get excited about using their own intellect at the risk of venturing outside the social norm. Geeks are not only intelligent. They actually enjoy it.

As per this definition, quite a lot of people deserve the label “geek.” Let's start with the usual suspects:

The video shown below contains the beginning of J. S. Bach's St. John Passion, a very baroque piece of music. I am not asking you to watch it all, there's a lot of repetition in it.

This post isn't really about music. It is about certain ideas that can be expressed through music.

To be perfectly honest, this beginning chorus scares me. Of course, the music is meant to be somewhat creepy, what with the restless, quick dancing of the strings and the dissonant woodwind melodies. The music effectively creates a certain mood, but there's much more to it than that. Let's have a look at the text(1):

Herr, unser Herrscher, dessen Ruhm
In allen Landen herrlich ist!

Lord, our ruler, whose glory
is magnificent everywhere!

So basically(2), we are dealing with some kind of disembodied “lord” who is evidently, judging by the way the composer stresses the word „Herr”/“lord”, rather important. In fact, he is being completely and utterly glorified. Obviously, they(3) love him a lot. However, if we just glance back at the mood the music creates, that sinister, dark, mood, we must conclude that something doesn't quite fit. This disembodied “lord” person can't be all that great and lovely. If he were, the music would certainly be cheerful.

Now, I happen to know that this music, or at least the fact that is is so sinister, is all about the death of a certain Jesus (as the name is popularly transliterated from Hebrew to Latin via ancient Greek) of Nazareth (Palestine). Depending on how you interpret this, you could conclude that either they are glorifying death, glorifying and worshipping a dead guy, or glorifying some kind of “lord” that made sure aforementioned Jesus was murdered.

Anyway, what we can see is a great amount of glorification and love of some kind of “lord” that has a profound connexion to death, and I think we can agree that death is, in general, not a very nice thing. Natural, yes, but we do, as a culture, or as a species, have a certain amount of dislike for it. All of that is perfectly okay. A bit strange, maybe, but, in essence, okay. But then they start calling this “lord” a “ruler”. To recap, they love him, they might be a little afraid of him,death connexion and all, they hold him to be fabulously glorious (just listen to that melisma...), and they might do just about anything for him, this lord-ruler.

Of course, “lord” refers to a deity also known as “God”, or, more precisely, one deity that be three deities all at once, actually worshipped all around the planet. This deity is supposed to be all-powerful (no wonder they sound a bit scared), all-loving (no wonder they love him?), and glorious (umn, yeah). Also, even when this deity is around, at least two thirds of him tend to be invisible. All of this story sounds rather unlikely, and in fact, there is (you guessed it), not so much as a scrap of scientific evidence around to support any of it.

Yet, it appears that there are still people who glorify this “lord”, would do anything for him. The fact that he almost certainly doesn't exist doesn't help a whole lot here: there are plenty of people that claim to be his representatives. Or representatives of his representative. (a well-known claimant is Joseph Ratzinger, who styles himself Benedict XIV, which sounds like something a mediæval lord might be called) The thing is, they (or at least a number of them), the people glorifying this fantastic “lord” tend to believe some of the people claiming to represent that same lord-ruler. It would appear they have quite a devoted army behind them. Dangerously devoted. Dangerously devoted to somebody who (almost certainly) doesn't exist.

Does that not scare you ?

In European philosophy, idealism is the counter-viewpoint to realism, which assumes the existence of a single “real world” that we all exist in, to an equal measure, at the same time. The way we actually perceive the world may, nonetheless, differ; nature and perception are not equal. Modern philosophy is mostly realistic; natural philosophy (a.k.a. physics, science) as we know it is based completely in realism.

Idealism, on the other hand, assumes reality to be formed by ideas, where an idea might be rock, flame, libervisco or death. We are presented with a projection of part of what one might call an “idea pool”. This would pretty much mean that every other person is also an idea, whereas it's thinkable that you yourself are an idea that can both perceive and be perceived, so to speak.

Of course, you can give ideas defining importance while believing in a single, solid universe. Take the sophist Πρωταγόρας (Protagoras), for example:

Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not.

We have no way of knowing what he meant, but that won't bother me, I'll just make some assumptions, because, in philosophy, I can.

Picture a red beetle. Man or no man, there is really a solid molecular substance containing quite a lot of carbon that, when hit by electromagnetic radiation of a wavelength between about 400 and 700 nm, will absorb quite a lot of waves with a wavelength not between about 625 and 740 nm. Realistic science tells us that that is the case. However, we're talking of a beetle, a red beetle even. We, humans, shape the reality we perceive by giving it character, by giving it spirit. We say something is red, and it's only red because we say so, because we have the idea that it's red.

Imagine a sound. Would there be a sound if no-one was there to hear it ? Of course, the air would still move, but air moves when there's wind as well. What makes it a sound ? Simple: Man does. Without human ideas, reality is nothing.

Oh, and I don't think Πρωταγόρας would really like the various ways in which we interpret what he may or may not have said

Danijel Orsolic has been argueing for a capitalist anarchy a lot. You might have gathered that I disagree with him on these subjects, so let's start taking apart his well-argued piece. First off, I cannot disagree that such a society could work for a while, but I don't believe that anarchy can ever sustain a long-term peace.

Danijel makes some reasonable definitions and explanations at the beginning. I won't dispute any of them, although I dislike the separation of human and nature, which is actually a useful device in his argument. However, human property n^o 4, “What one human sees as a value can differ from what another human sees.” is, in my eyes, a grand oversimplification. I'd rather say “What one human values can change rapidly and differ from or be in conflict with another human's values or their own values at another time.”. No matter how improbable society makes it, the combination of value conflict, strong human emotion, related instincts (like protection instincts) and possible drugs or mental illnesses will always result in some violence (of any sort), coercion or no coercion. Of course, we have been offered a solution which is, essentially, revenge. Let's take Danijel's coercion example: Assume that B (the victim) resists A (the aggressor) and, for some reason, gets killed. If B has friends and family, they will probably be angered and will want to “seek the aggressor and force him to pay the reparations” (sic, emphasis mine), where the force is, of course, non-destructive, since we all agree that violence is unnecessary and stupid. Well, Danijel and I agree on this, and nearly everyone in Danijel's utopia would have realized, but I believe we have already established that violence could still occur.

I think we can agree that A murdering B would probably result in a mental conflict between B's friends and A (and his friends/family). Add to such antipathy a situation of value conflict and a couple of glasses of wine and you have another opportunity for violence to occur. Mightn't B's thirteen-year-old son (yes, I'm adding adolescence as a complication) break A's twelve-year-old son's nose after losing a rugby match (emotions running high anyway) ? Young people have a habit of being rebellious anyway, and a second- or third-generation citizen of such an anarchic realm might disagree with some of the principles the founding people agreed on. I'm not saying that this would be commonplace, but can you dispute the possibility of A-ists seeing counteractions by B-ists as unjustified and retaliating, and vice versa ? Given time, this could escalate and get ugly.

If all humans acted logically and thought through the consequences of their actions, anarchy as Danijel describes so nicely would probably work well, though certain problems, such as long-term large-scale poverty, might easily stay unfixed forever like that (We're not really on any better way to fix them right now, though)

I'm not saying governments now are doing a good job at keeping some sort of peace and order. I'm only saying that peace and order can only be maintained for so long among humans without any authority.

Every now and again, questions like “What religion are you ?” pop up. Some say that they're not “religious”, implying that religion is a human quality represented in different quantity in different people. Religion is a difficult subject too discuss simply because the descendants of the Latin word religio are not really clearly and uniformly defined — even the Latin word's meaning changed over the millenium of Roman autonomy. Many definition might define religion through the belief in certain gods. Since Buddhism tends to be considered a religion, the belief in some grand system or entity that governs all our lives might be a closer guess.

Years ago, I was asked by a Christian boy how I could live without God. In retrospect, that was probably of immense value for me, as an atheist (I'll come to that later), to understand the nature and importance of religion. According to the Wiktionary, the word religio was used in the sense of respecting general rules of society in the old republic — a meaning that is related to my own definition of religion (which I created before the linguistic research):

A religion is a set of fundamental truths that enable a person to understand and especially judge themself and their surroundings.

I believe that everything usually considered a religion fits this definition that really makes those who have no religion (if they exist) very poor and confused souls — without a religion like this, there can be no ethics, no good and bad in the world, no conscience to judge our actions. Without a religion like this, the world just is, and in a way I can't really imagine. One could say that religion is the point where the search for answers ends — and gods have always proven good at answering difficult questions

My religion

What I would, for myself, consider “religion” is rather short and simple:

The methods of science, above all the rules of logic, define truth.
Each and every human individual is immensely important and valuable.

The first truth is the very essence of European Enlightenment and an important cornerstone of our societies. The second truth is directly derived from the ancient concept of charity as represented by the Bible and Christianity.

Many religions are a lot more complex, but I don't need any more. I don't need any form of god, thank you very much. I consider myself an atheist, since I take the stance of “A god that cannot be proven to exist is unsupported by principles of logic — its existence, assumed to be absent, is irrelevant.”. Some might classify this differently, and I won't stop them.

Feel free to discuss in comments or follow-up blog posts.