Modern Obscenity

When the word 'obscenity' runs through your head, what do you think of? Vulgar words? Crude acts of behaviour? Uncouth insults? Perhaps those were obscenities in the old sense of the word, wouldn't actions that actually have meaning to them and have long lasting ill-effects be considered even more obscene than the meaningless taboo acts that we so often refer to as unacceptable? Let me give you a tour through modern obscenity.

First, you have to ask yourself, what is the worst possible thing that you can do to a person without resorting to violence? Lock him up in a room? Maybe. But what is worse than doing the worst possible thing you can do to a person, surely it must be doing that same thing to a child who doesn't even understand what is happening, and whose mind is not sufficiently developed to know how to interpret what they are seeing. Now, if you think that I'm going to talk about child molestation by priests, then you're wrong, that is an offence, and it is almost universally recognized as such, and would be dealt with severely. (Unless you're the pope, in which case you would just place that criminal into another church.) There would be no point in telling you something that you already know is wrong, what I want to call to your attention is more widespread, more common, and certainly equally, if not more, horrifying.

Now, let me direct your attention to a well known disney movie - Peter Pan. I think you would recognize the plot of the story as nonsense, the characters as superfluous, and the concepts presented in it as absurd. It was already bad enough that this roll of indecent film had been screened in theatres, published in books, and featured on the television over and over and over again, yet someone had the nerve to make it into an "interactive" play for children. I'm not sure if you still remembered that one of the most blatantly stupid idea the story portrayed to children was that whatever you believe will come true, and it so happened that the protagonist did not believe that fairies exist and so the puny fairy in the story was dying, the flying boy than had to try to convince the protagonist to believe in fairies. Ignoring the fact of the countless times that this concept had sorely disappointed children all over the world, the meddling director of the play just had to add in one extra portion. The play actually required the children watching it to affirm their belief of fairies at a more than audible volume. The children were actually reciting the phrase "I believe in fairies" over and over again, like some kind of newly found cult. Now, if you really think that there is nothing wrong with the situation, you seriously need to consult a psychologist before you start abusing children in the same manner.

Well, some of you might argue, why shouldn't we let children believe what they want, let them have their fun and not spoil it for them, soon or later they would grow out of ridiculous beliefs such as fairies. Besides the doubt I have that such a fervent affirmation of fairies would in no ways have permanent long-lasting effects on a child's mind, and besides the fact that there is no direct link between fun and what actions we consider ethical, the very real problem is why do we treat kids as if they are somehow unfit to handle the real world? Basically, why do we treat kids as if they are living in a separate world from us? We tell them about preposterous stories about Santa Claus bearing gifts, about Easter bunnies that lay chocolate eggs, about the bogeyman who kidnap children who don't go to bed, about tooth fairies, about monsters and dragons and talking animals... Treat children like that and they would think that they are never expected to grow up.

Perhaps what is worse than feeding children misinformation about the real world that you one day hope they grow out off, is feeding them such information that they never quite fully grow out. Take for example the portrayal of animals, most books usually make animals appear harmless and cute. Many even make the natural predators, such as lions and tigers appear as enemies to the particular kind of animal the story focuses on, rather than showing them as the natural population control agent. There are some few stories which even involves elaborate plans taken by a democratic community of difference species of animals in a forest to counter an impending threat. We almost never once see the blood and gore and suffering so characteristic of the natural world, the tooth and claw ways in which evolution drive species into expansive arms race that strains their resources, making certain food chains of competing species more vulnerable to breaking down. This fairy tale world of animal kindness and affection and democracy is something children find difficult to grow out off, becoming characteristic of the animal rights movement, chasing a dream so idealised that it becomes ridiculous, and blinded to the natural order of things in which animals obey.

The thing about stories is also that children have a difficult time interpreting what the stories mean. In the past, real accounts of the misfortunes of people are told so that others are wary of not committing the same mistake. Then, someone had to invent fiction, but we still in some sense see if there still is anything to learn from those fictional stories. With children, it is worse, they can't understand that what you're telling them is not true, and try to derive some moral to apply in the real world. The best example of this I can think is of the story of Cinderella, when I first heard the story, what I took away from it was that all stepmothers are evil. Luckily I never met any stepmothers in my life, and luckily I realised my error soon enough. However imagine what would happen if someone under the care of a step-parent actually got that idea from the story.

Of course, the worse case of this kind of obscenity can be seen in nowhere else other than in religion. Baptising people in their childhood, reciting quotes out of holy books, believing in utterly ridiculous ideas like the afterlife or reincarnation, affirming beliefs in a cult like manner every Sunday, taking fictional stories as if it was true, do I need to say any more? By treating children at a level worse than that deserving of a child, is it any wonder that so many people in our society are still so child like (but what I would call "pre-child like") in their thoughts, their beliefs and their actions? Is it any wonder that so many adults just haven't grown up? Usually I wouldn't say this, but maybe there should be a law against this kind of modern obscenity.

The quest for knowledge

The most elusive question for centuries have always been "What is knowledge?" Even to this day it remains unanswered, and even to the extent that different people will point at different things when you ask them to show an example.

Today, I'm am not going to treat the question of knowledge as a philosophical question (whereby people define, redefine and further confuse what words mean, until concluding that sentences have no meaning or some absurd compromise), but true to my personality, I am going to treat it as a scientific question. So let us take a walk down the road of knowledge right from the very beginning, when the first ever useful piece of information was obtained on this planet. When the time was nearer to the formation of this solar system than it was to this present day. Let us stroll back to the origin of life.

3-3.5 billion years ago, the first replicating molecule arose from the ancient soup of proteins formed by the young environment. It finds itself in a world rich in resources for it to multiply, and happily replicate. However after a hundred so replication, it faces a problem, millions of cousins by its side are using up the resources it needs to continue replicating, it comes face to face with a world that is hostile to its continued survival, and environment that can no longer support it. There is some truth in the quote that "adversity builds character", although certainly not in the way the author meant it. Those small handful of replicators that managed to receive a helpful change in structure to adapt to this new environment started outcompeting everyone else. Therein lies the first piece of knowledge in life, and on Earth, the information needed to map conditions to actions.

Now, I can already here the opposition, how can I say that knowledge exist outside a mind, how can I say that a simple mechanical process contain knowledge, but that is precisely what I am saying. Does a windmill have the knowledge to grind grains? Does a printer have the knowledge to give us a legible piece of information? Yes they do, and it doesn't matter who had made them, they possess that knowledge in the way their structures are being arranged and it only take a little more intelligence to reverse-engineer how those machines do their job. Nature doesn't care how you obtained the knowledge you have, it just care on how you use it. And it rewards those who use their knowledge to adapt better to the real world with increased survival. What nature cares about is efficiency all else might as well be thrown into the rubbish heap.

Fast forward about 3 billion years, and we now arrive at the time the first human walked the face of this Earth. 3 billion years of knowledge selection have already been well defined, digestion takes place with a brilliant efficiency of extracting nutrients from food, our faculties of visions have been fined-tune to be able to track the future positions of a trajectory, our feet balances our constantly shifting body weight flawlessly, ... We have knowledge in the sense that we have what is required to survive in a real world, but we lack something too, the ability to predict what the far future had in store. It so happened then that we were forced by nature to then live in social groups of hunter-gatherers (emphasis on the gatherer part), an environment that we are unfamiliar with, and so as with all obstacles in life, we were once again moulded to fit the environment.

50 thousand years passed and we arrive back in our time, thrown again into a different set of conditions, the human species have had no time to adapt yet. And now we once again find ourselves in another quest for knowledge, but this time we have set ourselves a project so vast in magnitude that the knowledge we seek is accurate enough to predict the last decimal place that we can measure of the future world. Today, we take over the job that nature had always been doing, that is the selection of knowledge. Now, 2 questions then arise, how good is the knowledge we have so far, and how are we going to acquire new knowledge? To the first, we can only say that nature had been very diligent in past billions of years, selecting only those pieces of information that most accurately solve the problems we faced. However, it is not very accurate, perhaps not even accurate to a percent. Nature can't afford too high a cost for more accurate information, it is constrained by general rules that tend to work most of the time, and hoping that those exceptions would never come into play. Even so, the process of the natural selection of knowledge is long and tedious, it takes thousands of years before coming up with creative solutions, time that we humans do not have in our life.

So then, how do we get our knowledge? It must be through a system of checks and balance to carefully sieve out errors, it must be based on this world to accurately represent reality to the last decimal point of a percent, but it must also be done in a short period of time. Hence, our knowledge gathering system must both be rigorous as well as fast, a collective network of information transfer and review. In other words, our knowledge must be scientific.

I'll leave you with Carl Sagan's analysis of what separates science from the rest of the world. (The other parts are in the video responses)