Pollution as a form of theft and property destruction

Free markets are great, but they will create a society that is not desirable if some principles aren't kept in place. One principle is not being allowed to steal from people. If one can steal items without consequence, it's an efficient, low cost way to get them. But thefts messes up good business. Even a relatively free and capitalist society usual has some publicly funded police in place to stop theft.

Environmental destruction is a form of theft or property destruction. We split the earth up into geographic regions, but these divisions are arbitrary. The ecosystem, the air, and the water are interlinked. There's a network of interactions between them that stretches over the earth like a web. When components are removed, the effects are often felt in other places. Here's an extreme example to make a point: one person sets off a bomb that causes nuclear winter and kills off most of the large mammals on earth including most humans. Here's a less extreme example: an industrialized nation pumps enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to change the climate where poor people live in Africa, altering to less livable conditions. It's roughly equivalent to going to Africa and damaging the people property, but the law doesn't take that into account. In order to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, companies should be obligated to pay for the consequences on the network of interactions that forms the global system of "life." The typical free market system is that entities have to pay for land, not pay for the chunk of the global network of life that they are affecting.

All this said, it really makes sense for government to step in with environmental issues. They are roughly equivalent to theft or property damage.

Humans

Humans as a species have a unique opportunity to live an die with universe because they can understand the events that will destroy them, like the scheduled explosion of the sun. A bacteria could maybe survive, as a spore, deep in a rock, protected from cosmic rays, until it lands on another habitable planet somewhere, and is freed from the rock on impact. But that would be just insanely random chance survival.

Humans model the world around them, and they can build tools to accomplish goals that they could never achieve bare handed. (They'll get in a ship and move to another planet rather than getting blown up by the sun.) Turns out that a brain for making sharp rocks, spears, and nests is pretty much enough to make a spaceship. Seriously, because we were in the stone age just a million years ago... and that's not enough time for a brain to evolve very much physically. Although it's definitely full of different information these days.

And, I mean no disrespect to the cavemen. Making a spear from rocks and stuff really is an advanced skill - both for somebody today or way back then.

We build layer upon layer, a machine to help build a machine, to help build a machine, until we can build 42 inch LCD screens and stuff. With the brain power that would have gone to figuring out how to survive in a jungle or a dessert, we figure out science, engineering, etc. And, we pretty much forget how to survive in the jungle or the dessert ... sort of OK because so few of us need to.

Obama

I was listening to Obama talking about creating jobs. Obama's pretty cool. But I want to take issue with the whole idea of "creating jobs" as an end goal. We want to create *happiness*. Sometimes jobs make people unhappy.

Economist talk about "growth" as the goal. This is also flawed. Economic growth means bigger GDP, the market values of goods and services we produce. If one works really hard to produce stuff, one might make the GDP bigger, but again one might not be happy.

Happiness is achieved when the standard of living is high. It's achieved when people are efficient. People need more than just jobs, they need jobs that do important stuff efficiently... jobs that are well matched to the people doing them so they enjoy it.

How to achieve happiness in jobs... Does anybody enjoy cleaning toilets?... Cleaning toilets should be worth about $200 an hour really... because it's so fucked up. Just like people get extra pay for danger, they should get extra pay for gross-out factor.

Separate from happiness there's an innate force within the living (organisms) to take control of matter and reorganize it into a device that behaves in a similar way. It's religious preaching, manifest destiny, reproduction in general. These forces often go against the happiness of one group in favor of the happiness of another.

The classic example to me is in the Bible (old testament). Israelites are displacing other people from fertile land, taking over resources, and using the land to reproduce. But they describe it in terms of removing people who don't love God. Really their actions only make sense* from a biological perspective, and from a distance they are similar to certain bacteria, engaging in war for control of resources.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/access/id/39584/title/WARRING_BACTERIA

When I say sense, I don't mean they are doing any kind of good. I just mean they are doing what many biological organisms do - sort of blindly try to expand their species.

It's so odd for me to live in a brain that tries to guide me (with signals of pleasure and pain) toward its multiple often conflicting goals: to understand stuff, to reproduce, to survive, to care about others, to gain power, to create art, to eat, to sleep, etc.

The Human Brain wasn't Meant to be a Calculator

The brain is a very powerful computer. A computer with equivalent computational power would still fill up rooms (even with today's technology)*.

The irony:

 Regardless of that innate power, I (and many others) usually make an arithmetic error if we work out a few problems. Whereas a tiny calculator can add millions of numbers flawlessly in practically no time.

And why? Why does our brain that's so powerful make so many mistakes? Because arithmetic exercises is not what our hardware was built to do. Our brain hardware was built to make us survive and reproduce in the jungle.

Of course the sword cuts the other way; a pocket-calculator-brain would be pretty inept for survival and reproduction in the jungle.


*Clearly there's no software yet that can replicate what a brain does (even if the computational power is available), but that's another topic.