The Third Dialogue

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The third dialogue exists between you and the forecast, projections and conclusions of more than a hundred experts in their respective fields. An expert has a better chance than you of being correct when talking about their own fields of expertise. So why are their ideas so hard to believe?

We are not persistent, but an ever-changing mass of beliefs, perceptions and attitudes. It seems impossible even for a thought to maintain its identity over time. We are bacterial in nature and we are not created equal. We have cultural and genetic differences between people that are quantifiable and measurable. Human equality is a commitment to equal individual rights rather than group rights, and not a statement that all groups are indistinguishable. Our brains and bodies are evolving and we aren't the same people we were in recorded history. We are freak accidents, able to reflect on our own existence. Even our countries are not permanent and persistent. No US president has died under the same flag he was born under. The nation-state will disappear.

Nature abhors a gradient. Air fills a balloon evenly. Water flows downhill. Life's role is to store energy to reduce the solar gradient. The discovery of a life-creating combination of a monomer (a naturally occurring light connection of molecules) and energy would help the idea that life is almost inevitable. If the laws of physics were different, we wouldn't be here to ask why they are what they are. The laws of physics are the result of evolution by natural selection. They may not be permanent throughout the universe, but local environmental conditions.

Science will probably not ever be able to explain the origins of life. We won't even understand animal navigation without a whole new scientific field. Every possible known mechanism for how homing pigeons navigate has been tested against. Our scientists don't really understand plutonium either, and we have lots of aging weapons in storage.

Our brains and minds are pattern-matching drug factories. They react when they detect sensory or logical connections. They produce drugs when stimulated with certain experiences, like sexual play. Oxytocin creates feelings of social bonding, dopamine creates pleasure, and adrenaline creates feelings of excitement. Safe behaviour is a way to discover novelty without taking risks - dopamine without adrenaline. The long-term effects of mood-stabilising drugs are unknown, but they are being prescribed indefinitely. Serotonin-enhancing anti-depressants may lead to less love in the world and hence more social and political atrocities. But the brain can handle a very weird future.

Mental discomfort requires new beliefs for alleviation. When a person's behaviour is unjustified, cognitive dissonance occurs until their beliefs are moved into line with their behaviour. Weaknesses in our ability to think analytically are being discovered in behavioural economics and evolutionary psychology and are being exploited in advertising.

Ideas can be dangerous, and the ground should be prepared before letting them out. Ideas are capable of destroying everything we know. Expressing unspeakable ideas may help uncover more truth. False ideas like racism can spread and be dangerous, but true ideas like how little free will we have can also be dangerous. Maybe considering that ideas can be dangerous is a dangerous idea. Creativity is natural selection operating on ideas. There are not enough minds to house the modern explosion of ideas, so people will feel more alienated as common knowledge decreases over time. But if we live in a society where all the public discourse is reasonable and agreeable, it might be time to get out of there. Giving equal time to opposing points of view is also farcical. Time should be apportioned based on the likelihood of each divergent view.

The differences between humans and non-humans are quantitative, not qualitative. We do not have a soul that survives death. The soul is an illusion perpetuated only by our belief in it. Spiritual and unprovable beliefs are biological and inevitable. For many people, personal death must be denied in order to go on living. Accept that life begins at birth and ends at death. When the mind is considered a universally distributed quality and not a pinpoint in our own heads, loneliness fades and death matters less. Seeing chance and necessity as the causes of the appearance of design in creation is not a stupid viewpoint.

We suffer from an "illusion of seeing." When we look at a whole scene with our eyes, we think we have taken the lot in, but many items can be swapped in and out of it without us noticing. Our brains complete incomplete pictures, end incomplete sentences, and complete incomplete thoughts. They create reasons for absurdities, draw conclusions from incomplete evidence and put words and feelings into the mouths and minds of everything around them – sometimes even into inanimate objects.

Eye contact creates and stimulates a relationship between two living things. But we don't know for sure if certain creatures on this planet are self-aware. For all we know, the internet may already be self-aware.

Based on how complex the brain is, we probably can't even trust the science we perform. Scientists, economists and psychologists often use a single “bell curve” to show the probability of events. But most bell curves should be given thicker tails than they are. This means that unusual events are not as unusual as is often predicted. The brain is not able to completely understand the universe, but if we give up trying we will be giving up basic research that has provided us with so much technological advancement.

We were shocked to find out that the Earth was not at the centre of the universe. We were shocked to discover that we descended from apes. For those unable to even accept these discoveries, the next shock will be even greater. It could be the dissolution of the distinction between reality and fiction. However, a surprising or shocking statement does not imply anything about its accuracy. Existence is non-time, non-sequential, and non-objective. Time, sequence and objectivity could all be mental illusions. The need for the brain to survive does not lead it towards objective truth, except by accident.

Authenticity is becoming less required than ever before. A movie or a picture has become enough to satisfy ourselves that we have experienced reality. Reality is an ever-evolving network of relationships. We play computer simulations of historical times for enjoyment. This suggests that there is a chance that we are living further in the future than we realise – that we are inside a historical simulation of the twenty first century.

We continue to learn that we are less in control of ourselves than we thought. Everyone has a different amount of free will. Free will is exercised by the brain before we are conscious of it. Most cognitive processes that occur in the brain do not even enter our consciousness. Conscious deliberation doesn't drive our behaviour nearly as much as we think. Advertisers already understand this. They smile when young people see themselves as media-savvy, cynical and in control of their purchasing. Learning about free will helps those threatened by it to undermine it.
 
Our concept of free will, currently based on a lack of understanding, will be destroyed by research into brain mechanisms. This will threaten the underpinnings of democracy, because our vote will lose its meaning. Brain research could lead to direct control of perceptions, memories, decisions and emotions. Our society will need to re-evaluate personal responsibility in a social and legal context. Media experiences can unconsciously create mirrored behaviour. Violence experienced in media creates violent behaviour. Every human has a dark side which is evolutionarily advantageous.

We cannot fully know ourselves through introspection. Self-knowledge may not change our behaviour anyway. We are bad judges of our own motives, especially when considering actions in the past. Intuition may be a poor guide to moral truth. Morality evolved biologically and psychologically, but it didn’t evolve from an ethical basis. Self-interest can be altruistic. We have different rules of behaviour for treating "us" and "them." These evolved in the past for survival purposes. It’s OK for us to kill them, but not to kill ourselves or our families.

Assigning blame and responsibility is a useful fiction that we may grow out of and learn to laugh at. When wrongdoing is considered the same way that we consider the faulty behaviour of a mechanism, the solution will become the fixing or replacing of the broken part. Without society fostering the desire to be a hero, we are just as likely to do evil. Our evolved nature is only good and right for our environment.

Culture evolved through natural selection. At present, the desire for monetary profits, combined with limited targeted funding, is preventing the research, alleviation and elimination of basic diseases, poverty and hunger worldwide. After immediate needs are met, people only need to feel relatively wealthy, not objectively. The free market is a political and intellectual scam that benefits the rich at the expense of the poor. Extreme Islamic views about Western decadence might be accurate. Our young generation's values might be too empty to help. An anthill relies on the behaviour of its ants to function. If every ant wants to be the queen, the anthill will collapse. Tribal people don’t have a monopoly on wisdom, though. They often damage their own environments and make war, too.

Free and unrestricted trade is the surest path to world peace. Global goals of health and exploration have a better chance of stopping people from fighting each other than ideological compromise. Societies with steep gradients of wealth show higher death rates and disease, also among the people at the top. However, longevity may have a huge cost to society.

Marriage is conducive to healthy adults, thriving children and flourishing communities. It has not been proven that a child's development is influenced by its parents. The studies that purport to show it lacked proper controls and statistical analysis. The concept of parents having total control over a child’s development is dangerous, especially if it is not true. But parental licences should be awarded to people who are twenty one, married and self-supporting in order to create a happier society. Incidentally, if we could choose the sex of our children, the world will fill with men.

Government control and security must be increased before we will be ready for new, powerful technologies. People are becoming less and less well-informed about science. Schools should be abolished as a waste of time, or totally overhauled.

The internet and mobile phone technologies have created a large increase in the ability to communicate and interact anonymously. This removes the inhibition experienced when two people communicate face to face. Most systems with increasing anonymity fail. Technologically developed anonymity and depersonalisation could cause social problems that our brains have not evolved to handle.

Art's effect on humanity cannot be measured or anticipated. But artists are leading scientists in risking everything by exploring the unknown in order to gain deeper knowledge. Humanity is not defined by its limitations, but by its ability to transcend them.

Politics works by rewarding friends and punishing enemies. Our current political systems are based on combat, both in getting power and in making laws. Politics based on empathy and not adversity would make for better government. Policy makers should be forced to engage historians and vice versa. Bigger governments are harmful to society.

It is undesirable to believe in a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it is true. The probability of your god being the actual god is very small. God is a superset of emergent properties with downward causality, like societies are to a human.

Religious tolerance is a logical farce. Religions should limit their articles of faith to an un-testable and un-provable body of statements. Only then will they be truly free of the threat of scientific discovery. Calvin considered obedience to tyrants to be putting one’s trust in God, but Franklin considered rebellion against tyranny as obedience to God.

Science should become a religion so it can be commonly accepted and gain political curry among believing voters. Confrontation between science and religion might end when science takes on all the trappings of religion. But then it may be even more threatening. Science must destroy divisive religious myths, or replace them if necessary. It actually encourages religion in the long run.

But the scientific method is not perfect. Consistency does not equal proof. Evolutionary psychology can be used to explain any behaviour, but doesn't clearly differentiate guesses and conclusions. Much of today's grand scientific speculation does not take quantum mechanics and relativity seriously. Science is becoming impossible to explain. We will have to fall back on dogma. Research can be an escape from reality. Science is a language and is therefore limited in what it can describe. Modern science is natural - a product of biology and therefore limited in its scope and content. The multiverse as a scientific explanation may prematurely end research into various phenomena. Relativism has the potential to derail scientific progress and human well-being. When everything is explained, humanity will atrophy.

If aliens exist, they haven't made contact with us yet because they are at home playing computer games that more easily meet their biological cues for sex and success - reproduction and survival. Successful families, not indulgent individuals, will meet across the stars. But as we look out into space, nothing may be staring back. Discovering that we are alone in the universe will drive us back to religion.

Technology can dissolve a nation by separating an under-represented technologically savvy group from the technologically poor. Educated people have fewer babies, so the more people you represent, the less education and economic power you have. This makes democracy unfair to the educated few who may have different goals to the uneducated many. There may be a political system which is better than democracy. Technology and brain limitations combine to push human usefulness to two poles - creativity and manual labour.

The planet Earth is not in peril, but humans might be. Our long-term desires may not overcome our short-term desires, bringing humanity to an end. When biotechnology is domesticated in fifty years, children will be able to use toys to create diseases. For quantum field theory to remain consistent, it is possible to fit a one thousand megaton bomb in a car boot. But at the end of time, man will still be standing.