Auxiliary Memory

The Significance of the Spotify Revenue Model–A New Social Promotion Paradigm

Spotify is popular European streaming music service that has come to America. It’s not that we didn’t already have American streaming music services from Rhapsody, Rdio, MOG, Napster, Microsoft, Sony and others, but Spotify is different, it has a free, ad-supported option besides it’s two paid options.

Allowing people to listen to music for free is significant. Lala.com, also offered a free option, but Apple bought Lala and killed it. I wonder if Apple will buy Spotify? Free is a threat to the status quo, but legally free means a new paradigm in promoting music.

Would-be rock stars dream of riches so how will free music help them? To become an actual star means finding a million fans – it’s all about promotion. If your songs sucks, no amount of promotion will help, but if they are great, without listeners no one will know. And the best way to promote a product is word of mouth. And social networking on web pages, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, or even email, is word of mouth promotion on steroids.

It used to be radio airplay created hit songs. But who listens to radio anymore? Now-a-days people use YouTube. Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” is at 106,083,210 plays on YouTube. Of course that could be 10 million fans listening 10 times each, or 1 million fans listening to the song a hundred times, or it could be me listening for 10 times before I bought the CD, and another guy out there listening to it for 106,083,200 times. But this is the kind of promotion that payola can’t even touch. Free is more contagious than the common cold.

Most people I know who want to share a song with a friend checks YouTube to see if there’s a video so their friends can hear it for free. But what if there’s no video? Bummer. There’s always finding a pirate copy, but that’s a pain and could be dangerous.

Spotify is the new kid in town that could replace YouTube’s as the go-to place to have friends try out songs. But there’s a minor hitch. You have to be a Spotify member and install the client software before you can play songs for free. Now that’s not much more work than getting Acrobat Reader so you can read PDF files, but it is some extra work. If Spotify gets the kind of market penetration as Flash then it will be a snap to share songs.

Spotify will replace Billboard as the definer of Hit Lists. But this depends on everyone using Spotify. It would help if they had a web client. It would also help if they had an embeddable player so web pages and blogs could just add a play button so when someone writes about a song they could press a button and listen while they read.

WordPress does have a MP3 player I could embed in my writing here, but I’d have to load the song onto the WordPress server first, and since most songs are copyrighted, that’s illegal. But Spotify, and other streaming services, could legally arrange to stream music to such embedded buttons, and they and the record companies would want such buttons if they also had a button next to the play button to return you to the album page where you’d see ads and more promotions for the artist and their albums.

Now this assumes Spotify remaining the only music streaming service with a free option. What if that’s not the case? What if they all offer ad-supported listening? This will cause terrific competition for membership. People will chose which service from a variety of features. Price has always settled down to $5 a month for computer streaming and no ads, and $10 a month if you want to hear music on your mobile device (smartphone, MP3 player, tablet). I would expect the Spotify competitors to come out with free ad-supported versions soon. The ad supported version is like getting heroin for free. Anyone who loves music will pop for the $10 deal eventually.

What the artists and record companies will want is the most efficient way to create massive audiences for songs. I would guess royalties from subscription music is based on plays. If no one listens to your album, you don’t make any money. So they game switches from how many songs you can sell, to how many people can you get to play your song on the various subscription services. Money from subscribers and ads are out of your control – everything is about getting people to listen.

And since anyone can listen for free, this should wipe our piracy – at least for songs on subscription services.

I’d love to be able to write album reviews and be able to embed a player for each song I review so people could play the songs while they read what I’m saying about them. Right now I can do this: “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele. If you have Spotify you can click the link to play that song. What I want is a graphic with CD controls and a play button so if you pressed it the song would play right in the browser where you are reading this. WordPress offers that feature if I pay $19.95, but I couldn’t legally upload the song for you to try it. If I could, I would gladly pay the $19.95 – but then the artist wouldn’t earned royalty credits. It would be much easier for all concerned if streaming music services just offered embedding controls that WordPress, Facebook, etc. could incorporate like they do when I embed a YouTube video.

If such subscription music players were widely used, artists would get more play credits.

By the way, Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” gained 26,000 plays as I wrote this blog.

JWH – 8/5/11

Would You Hitch a Ride on an Alien Spacecraft?

Over at the Classic Science Fiction book club a member said she would gladly go off with an alien visitor to see their world. We were reading Calculating God by Robert Sawyer last month, and the main character has to make that decision. Other members in the club also said they would go if they didn’t have wives and/or children. The original replier even said she’s take an anal probe if that’s what it took to hitch a ride as long as the aliens provided her with the necessities of life. She thought it would be the grandest experience possible.

I’ve seen this discussion before and many people claim they would hitch a ride on an alien spacecraft. But why? When I was young I would have said the same thing because I had space fever so bad, but now that I’m older it doesn’t seem wise. Don’t get me wrong, I want to know about life on other planets, and I’d love to see other worlds, but HD video will be plenty good for me.

Has science fiction oversold the romance of space travel?

Now this discussion is for a one way trip only. All or nothing. And it still get takers. When NASA was first planning trips to the Moon there was even discussion of one-way trips, and one-way trips to Mars have also been discussed, and there’s always folks claiming they would volunteer in second.

How bad do people want to go into space? How much do they want to see another habitable world? Evidently quite a lot.

Now in the book Calculating God the main character is dying of cancer and his decision is whether to die on Earth or out in space, so the hardest part of the decision was whether to leave his wife and kid, losing his last few months with them. But I’m hearing from people they would go even if they weren’t dying.

I have to compare this to Christians who want the Rapture to hurry up and come. It seems some people want certain answers very badly. In Calculating God the whole world knows about the alien visitors. They are scientists who come to Earth to work with other scientists, and when they leave they ask a few human friends if they’d like to come along exploring with them. Under those circumstances my questions about life on other planets would already be answered. The aliens brought lots of data and video with them about their worlds and the worlds they had already explored, so that would have been good enough for me. So why do some people just have to go no matter what to see for themselves?

Do some people need a deeply mind-blowing adventure to make their lives worthwhile? Is a portion of our population totally dissatisfied with a normal life on Earth? Or is there a travel gene that makes some people want to roam?

Or has science fiction sold us a romantic view that’s irresistible to some?

Or consider the reverse, maybe we love science fiction because we have genes that want to explore the universe and we can’t go.

I’ve always compared science fiction to religion, and outer space is the modern substitute for heaven, and aliens are the angels.

A couple of book club people mentioned they’d like to be ambassadors for the human race. And one member said if he was the only one going it would be more important than if he was one of hundreds, so the desire to have a unique experience is a factor. Another member reminded us of Close Encounters of the Third Kind where the Richard Dreyfuss character leaves seemingly without thinking about his wife and children. That implies a very strong desire to go joyriding with aliens.

This overwhelming desire to go to an alien world reminds me of love and sex. How often have you been overwhelmed with love and sexual desire and then got lucky with the person of your desire, only to discover that the sex and relationship wasn’t everything you dreamed it would be?

Is travel to the stars so irresistible because it’s something we can’t have? What if we got to consummate this love and the aliens turned out to be annoying as hell, and you became jaded over their beautiful exotic world after six weeks?

This desire to go to the stars seems very powerful. I wonder if Freud or Jung ever examined it?

JWH – 8/2/11

Why People Who Should Be Democrats Vote Republican

It has always puzzled me why middle class and poor people vote Republican and support conservative ideals. Don’t they know which way their bread is buttered? Republicans mainly help the rich and special interests, which are the corporate rich. If you don’t have a pile of money to protect, or a business that you want the government to bestow special favors upon, then why go Republican? Well, this article from The New York Times, “Why Voters Tune Out Democrats” explains it very well. Stanley B. Greenberg has analyzed polls about voter attitudes and he sees trends why people are supporting conservatives, not just in the United States, but all over the world.

Republicans have always been anti big government, but it seems that people who previously voted Democratic are now developing their own anti-government bias, and they are moving to the Republican Party to join their anti-government stand. Greenberg suggests for the Democrats to fight back they need to deal with issues their voters are upset about. Even though a majority of voters support most of the policies of the Democrats, including social programs and rejecting tax-cuts, they are mad at the Democrats for several particular issues, and that’s making them swing to voting Republican. Those issues are:

The government bailed out failing companies without punishing their executives
Wall Street gets a free pass even when it brings down the economy
Big businesses can get help from the government but not small businesses
The banks and bankers were saved but not home owners
The government is rigged for special interest groups
The government supports globalization over American workers
They don’t like illegal immigration
Congress helps itself more than it helps the people (my cousin emailed me as I write this a protest promoting a 28th amendment advocating no pension/no tenure for congressmen)

Greenberg sees these as a trend. People resent the government acting unfairly, supporting special interest groups, and rewarding the unjust, privilege, incompetent, and underserving rather than helping the common American. Whether this is true or illusion doesn’t matter, it’s the perception in polls. And because Republicans, especially Tea Party voters, are so anti-government, that people who normally votes Democrat on other issues are moving into the conservative groups because of these perceptions.

What Greenberg recommends to the Democrats is they also get on a Fix Washington campaign too.

I’m against unfair practices too, but I’m not going to join the conservatives.

Personally, I blame all these issues on the Republicans anyway. I believe they are the party that set things up in Washington so special interests control the government. Of course the Democrats are not without blame. When they wanted the Republicans to vote on social programs they made deal with Republicans to support their big business goals. Now the Republicans are saying no more deals, no more compromises, because they have sensed they’ve got more of what the people want than the Democrats.

I think this New York Times article is very perceptive. I think we liberals need to see which way the wind is blowing, and WHY. This explains why so many Tea Party voters, many of which are ironically on social security and Medicare, are so riled up about big government politics at the moment.

I find our current political climate very unsettling and depressing. But maybe there’s a silver lining. Maybe all of this will lead to governmental reforms that will make us feel better about our rulers in Washington. Maybe I don’t really hate Republicans, maybe I just hate how big money has corrupted the government and special interest groups with money get more representation than they are due.

JWH – 8/1/11

1959 by Fred Kaplan and Kind of Blue by Miles Davis

If you have a Spotify account you can listen to Kind of Blue while you read my review. Visit this link and it will launch Spotify and play the album. If you don’t have Spotify, request a free account here. Having at least the free Spotify account means you can always try a new album when your friends rave about a new album discover. Kind of Blue was first released in 1959. I’ve included YouTube versions of its five songs below.

I am becoming more and more fascinated and entertained by history – but not the history they teach in school, but the everyday history of people, inventions and art. We take every new thing for granted, as if it sprung fully formed new on the scene. Take the hit gadget of the moment, the iPad. It was far from the first tablet computer, and the concept goes back to at least to the Dynabook imagined by Alan Kay in 1968. Nor could the tablet computer exist without the integrated circuit which was patented in 1959 by Jack Kilby, hence the connection to the book I want to talk about, 1959 by Fred Kaplan.

In 1959 Kaplan writes several related essays about how 1959 was a pivotal year for all of us who have been living since. Essentially, you can do this for any year, but Kaplan makes a good case for 1959. Whether it’s birth control, jazz, Fidel Castro, atomic warfare, Beat writers Kerouac and Ginsberg, Motown, integrated circuits, Malcolm X, Vietnam, Grove Press, or any of the other happening events of 1959, they all impact on us today. Everything evolves, and everything trails a history, and the past gives birth to the now.

Never heard of Grove Press? Well, it took on U.S. censorship and since then we’ve had sex and dirty words in books and movies. Now you might not think that’s a good thing, but it is a pivotal change in society. What Kaplan is getting at is you could experience pop culture before 1959 it would be much different from anything you know now. Not unknown, because everything before is still around, but it would be missing a lot of stuff that’s come out since.

This is hard to explain. I lived before cell phones were invented, in any form. People who grew up with cell phones can’t imagine what life was like without them. What Kaplan is trying to explain in a series of essays is what life was like before 1959, and what came out that year that has changed everything since.

One of the essays that really stood out for me was the one on Miles Davis and his sextet recording Kind of Blue. It’s easy to understand the impact of technology. Kaplan writes about the invention of the integrated circuit and we’ve been living with the technology it generated ever since, from computers to high definition TVs. That’s obvious. But can you understand the impact of a kind of “new technology” in music? I struggle for that, but it’s pretty obvious if you spend time listening to Kind of Blue. Most young people today will not understand the roots of their favorite music, but their favorite musicians who create the music will.

I find it tremendous fun to time travel via pop culture. For most of us baby boomers, we were kids in the 1950s, and our memories of the times are fleeting and tainted by TV. It’s easier to remember Leave It To Beaver than the politics of Dwight Eisenhower. I was born in 1951, so I lived through most of the decade, but I have few memories of it. I do remember the 1960s vividly, but putting the puzzle pieces of the 1950s together makes the 1960s make more sense.

Kind of Blue is a transition marker in the art of music. If you like to play the six degrees of separation game, it will link you to many cool people. It’s both a tipping point and a crossroads. You can listen to the music, but it’s also fun to read about its history.

Kind of Blue is considered to be one of the best jazz albums of all time, and the best selling jazz album. A 2001 NPR report claims it sells 5,000 copies every week. There are no words to describe how beautiful this album is, that’s why I provide the link to Spotify above. The album has a fascinating history that you can read at Wikipedia or listen to on this NPR documentary – I won’t try to rephrase that history since these sources do it so well.

As I read 1959: The Year Everything Changed by Fred Kaplan, a columnist for Slate magazine and also columnist on jazz at Stereophile magazine, I realized the Kaplan had a gift for music history. I thought the chapter on Kind of Blue in 1959 was full of wonderful historical details and the his descriptions of music are very precise and vivid. It’s very hard to describe music in words. Check out Kaplan’s video introduction to the book in this video clip at Amazon. It opens with music from Kind of Blue, Kaplan will give you a better idea of his enthusiasm for writing about 1959.

I turned eight in 1959, and I was living in New Jersey, out in the country, where I was oblivious to the world at large. I’m not sure we even had a TV set at the time. Kaplan covers a quirky view of 1959, but one I can identify with because all the topics later impacted my life. I didn’t discover Kind of Blue until the late 1980s. I was reading Kerouac and Ginsberg in the late 1960s. Fidel Castro took over Cuba in 1959, and I spent most of my youth growing up in Miami living with the results, so I’m like one degree away from that chapter, plus I spent the 1960s loving hits from Motown which was started in 1959. I never knew I had so many connections to 1959 until I read this book.

Kaplan is right about 1959, people and inventions from 1959 have slowly weaved themselves into the fabric of my life over the last 52 years. I wished I had been given a record player and the LP of Kind of Blue when I was 8, because I grew up with AM rock n roll and that has shaped the musical tastes of my lifetime. I wonder if I was exposed to jazz at 8 if I would have been a different person. For the most part I don’t even like jazz, but I love Kind of Blue, and Time Out by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, another masterpiece of jazz from 1959.

I have been able to travel back in time to enjoy the jazz of the 1920s and 1930s, and through the swing era of the 1940s. Then came Bebop, which was beginning of modern jazz and although I can admire it intellectually, I don’t feel it. I feel the same way about most classical music. Neither kind moves me emotionally.

Miles Davis worked with Charlie Parker, one of the pioneers of Bebop, and then Davis moved on to Hard Bop, which brought R&B, gospel and blues into jazz. I bought several Art Blakey and John Coltrane CDs in the 1980s trying to get into this era of jazz. Again, I could semi-enjoy this kind of jazz, but something was missing. Why?

Why was Jack Kerouac and his Beat buddies so blown about by jazz of the 1940s and 1950s? It drove them insane with excitement, but it’s all too cool emotionally for me. Then comes 1959 and Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck produce two albums that turn me on, but also turn on a zillion other people to jazz again. When I read Kaplan’s chapter on Miles Davis I wanted to go back and try to get into those jazz years I can’t connect with. My friend Mike who got into jazz about the same time as I did broke the barrier and left me behind.

For those of you who didn’t take the time to join Spotify, here’s “So What” the first cut off of Kind of Blue. It really helps to have good speakers to enjoy the textured loveliness of these tunes.

Maybe the reason why I dig this new direction in jazz is because it jettisons so much of the old forms of jazz. Miles Davis and Bill Evans prepared very little in the way of musical notation for the musicians to follow. Fred Kaplan explains what they are doing in words, but these seven musicians are improvising from very little structure, mainly just the mood of the piano. I wish I understood music to know what they are doing, but I don’t.

All I know is this music lights up my mind. I highly recommend getting a copy of Kind of Blue and play it when you are ready to just relax and listen. Let your mind go with the music. It’s very different, yet this album has influenced many artists since. I really got into The Allman Brothers in 1969, and even got to see them before Duane was killed. Duane Allman loved Kind of Blue and claims it influenced his music. In can feel “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” in “Freddie Freeloader” which you can play here:

“Blue in Green” is so moody that it feels more like a soundtrack for a story, or music for a modern dance piece. This third track was the final song recorded in the March 2, 1959 session. Give it a listen:

The final two cuts were performed on April 22, 1959.

“All Blues,” the first cut on the back side of the LP, picks up the tempo and is the longest cut on the the album (11:31), and my favorite, but sadly it’s cut short here on YouTube because of the 10 minute limit.

The last track, “Flamenco Sketches.” This is so far from modern pop music that I’m not sure if young people will be able to get into this kind of music at all. I think one reason why I love this Miles Davis over his earlier work is because the music is slower. I couldn’t handle the frantic tempo of Bebop, nor did I relate to the old tunes being blended into Hard Bop. This music is as modern as NASA, the agency that was created just a year before in 1958. This music is light-years away from the teen idols I was hearing on the radio at the time.

Is this really the sound of 1959? The music of bomb shelters and revolutions in Cuba? It certainly sounds like music for books by Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg, but how many regular Americans listened to this album? I’m sure its as esoteric as Zen Buddhists to mainstream America, yet it was significant to our culture.

Us baby boomers can’t let go of the 1950s. Look at TV shows like Mad Men, that started with 1950s ad men confronting the beginning of the 1960s or the film The Tree of Life, which tries to put the 1950s in context of the whole history of the universe. Or read a book like The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, which is a nostalgic memoir of the times by Bill Bryson.

I wonder what people from generations after us baby boomers think of the 1950s. It must be as alien as the 1920s are to me, the decade my parents were children, or the 1930s, the decade they were teens.

Kind of Blue was a musical experiment. A few other albums after it pursued the same techniques, but as far as I know, it’s a dead end for a trend, yet fleeting pieces of its sound show up in music all the time. Modern pop music is almost a rigid formula – I almost ache to hear something new and different. What musical experiments are going on now in 2011 that will be written about in the 2060s?

JWH – 7/30/11

The Challenges of Living in a Meaningless Reality

We live in a meaningless reality. By that I mean we have no prescribed purpose. There is no God telling us what to be, nor does the universe expect anything from us. Our awareness of the universe is an accidental byproduct of evolution, and when we die that awareness will cease to exist. I know religious people will strongly object to the assertion that our lives are without purpose and there is no God that’s personally involved with each of us. But religion is a psychological response to not understanding reality by a developing consciousness. Once a critical level knowledge of reality is attained it becomes obvious that God and religion is all in our heads and not part of the external reality.

Beliefs in gods are universal in the human condition because psychologically we do not like living without a sense of purpose, but with enough education it become abundantly clear that we’re living in a universe in which our species has no special purpose or protector. Once we accept that it becomes obvious that we face a number of challenges. People can live perfectly happy lives knowing there is no meaning in the universe but the very first challenge we deal with is wanting to define our own meaning. We have a deeply seated need for meaning.

Challenge #1 – Existentialism

Existentialism is the philosophy of living in a meaningless universe. It’s mostly an atheistic philosophy, but there is a theistic branch, which says God created the universe and then walked away, but in ether flavor, existentialism is about existing in a universe with no prescribed purpose. Existentialism basically says everyone has to invent their own purpose. This is both good and bad because people can choose very selfish pursuits, or even amoral pursuits. Counter to what religious believers think, atheists tend to be more moral and ethical when we work at creating our own rules about living rather than accepting them from imaginary beings.

The universe does not demand that we don’t kill – if you look at nature, the rule would seem to be: thou shalt kill or be eaten. We have decided that we shouldn’t kill – and that’s deeper than religion. Even atheists believe murder is wrong. Even without a God defining right and wrong we can instinctively develop morality. The faithful fear a meaningless universe because they fear absolute chaos, but even without God we can find order.

Existentialism succeeds for the individual but not for the human race. There is no universal system of belief that all people accept. If we want law and order it must be created by consensus that’s not tainted by any belief system. As a species we all want order, justice, security and civil rights in society, and they require a consensus to achieve. We could collectively pursue a delusion. If everyone was a pure Muslim or Mormon we could create a clean orderly society where most people were happy, but we’d be living a delusion. Thus the first challenge is to create a society that allows all its citizens freedom to pursue their own created purpose, but still protects the rights of all other citizens.

Challenge #2 – Delusional Imperialism

We all have a psychological defense mechanism to impose meaning onto reality. If we are poorly educated about reality, we will make up an explanation that makes sense to us and then share our delusion with others as a way to rationalize we’re right. This is an extremely common neurotic behavior. This is not a problem when populations of shared delusions stays small, but when they grow very big like the over billion Christians clashing with the over billion Muslim it becomes quite a danger. Historically it has always been a danger when one delusional group tries to rule the entire population. No mass delusion has ever achieved 100% penetration because the desire for personal freedom is always stronger, and the fact that no delusional system has ever explained reality correctly. True details of external reality always brings inner and outer criticisms to a delusion.

Challenge #3 – A Delusion Free Government

Whether it’s Christian, Muslim, Confucius, Capitalism or Communism, most governments are tainted by a philosophical system that doesn’t actually explain reality. They always fail. The challenge is to create a government that is not tainted by ideology. Some of the founding fathers of the United States may have attempted this but time and again their plans have been thwarted by delusional groups. Any religious group that can’t understand the concept of the separation of church and state is a threat to a purely free government. There are no exceptions to this.

Throughout the world all governments fail because they are under attack by special interest groups. Our challenge as humans living in a meaningless universe is to create governments that are equally meaningless but offer the maximum freedom and protection to its citizens.

Challenge #4 – Achieving a Consensus about Reality

Because our lives have no prescribed purpose means we can prescribe any meaning we want to ourselves. We become self-programming entities. Ethically there is nothing wrong with believing that Jesus will bring about personal immortality, even if it’s 100% inconsistent with reality. Ethics are the way we define right and wrong, or morality, if you will, in a meaningless universe. The universe has no ethical intent, nor does it care what ethics we create, it’s 100% indifferent. But because we are a social species we’ve invented ethics as a way to create fair play between individuals and groups. However, there are no 100% consensus on any ethical idea. Probably the one ethical ideal that is the most universally held is the golden rule.

In the entire history of the world there has only been one system that seeks to understand reality in a consistent way and that’s science. Science is a system of exploring reality and not a philosophy or belief system. Science is the study of reality by consensus. People study an aspect of reality, create a hypothesis, create more experiments, collect data, and finally propose a theory that is shared around the world, where other scientists will test that theory. If everyone creates experiments that validates the theory, the theory is considered true for everyone. Religious people have trouble with the word theory – they think it means a hypothetical idea. No, it means a proposed explanation about how reality works to be tested. Theories become true after years of consistent testing. The theory of gravity or the theory of evolution or the theory of relativity are now considered facts about reality because they’ve maintain decades or centuries of consistent experimental validation. We keep the name “theory of whatever” as just a label and to give credit to the person who first proposed it.

Through science we know a gigantic amount of information about reality. Yes, we don’t know everything, but we know a whole lot. Most humans have never taken the time to study science so they are suspicious of it, or even consider science arrogant for thinking it has achieved so much knowledge. But science is consistent, and it’s the only system that has explained reality in a consistent manner.

The reason why there is such a tremendous conflict between science and religion is because they explain reality differently. Actually, science explains reality in one way, and religion explains reality in an infinite number of way, all inconsistent. Of course religion is thwarted by other thought systems such as logic, philosophy and mathematics. Any person with a good education in science and psychology will understand that gods and religion are a mental coping mechanism inside people’s heads. The unpleasant reality is the scientific minded must live with the mass of delusional people. The delusional people have inconsistent views about reality and try to impose them onto other delusional believers and non-believers. This means it’s very hard to have a consistent view of reality by all humans living in it.

Challenge #5 – Living with Delusional People

To the faithful, they see reality composed of believers and nonbelievers. To the scientific, we see reality inhabited by clear thinkers and people possessed by delusions. I know that sounds arrogant. However, a really good education just clears away the delusions so it doesn’t feel arrogant, it just feels like the freedom to see clearly. Don’t get me wrong, no matter how smart you are, there are always delusional traps of various kinds. Our minds are not computers. Our thoughts are overwhelmed by biological impulses, and it’s very easy to forget what we’ve learned. It’s like that movie Charly based on the book Flowers for Algernon, about a mentally retarded man who is given an experimental cure and he becomes a genius for a short while, but in the end, it wears off. I can imagine losing my clarity of thinking as I get old and de-evolving into delusional thinking. It’s not arrogance, just fleeting clarity. It would be fantastic if society as a whole was delusional free so I wouldn’t be tempted by delusional thoughts as my mind ages.

The delusional in recent years have sensed that science is a powerful tool for understanding reality but without understanding how science works. They have even created fake science in attempt to justify their delusions not understanding that their theories have to be tested scientifically and they always fail. I have even heard of faithful people getting Ph.D.s so they can claim to be scientific in their attacks on science. The sad fact is delusions are extremely hard to escape. It is very hard to accept that reality has no meaning, that we are mortal, and our lives are subjected to the whims of chance.

Challenge #6 – The Meaningless of Life

If you’ve seen many Woody Allen films then you’ve seen many stories about characters trying to deal with the meaningless of life. Living with the truth can be hard, but it can also be empowering. It’s like giving up childhood and living on your own. The universe becomes more magnificent when you get beyond religion. Reality is incredibly far out, and there seems to be no end to discovering more about reality. Once you get past the idea that there is a God telling you how to act and believe it’s very freeing to feel the responsibility of thinking for oneself. Sure, it’s bummer that we’re going to die, but it’s a real miracle that we’re here at all and it’s awe inspiring to contemplate that. Trust me on this, religion has very small ideas about reality, it’s very limiting and tiny compare to the real reality. When a religious person is inspired by the miracle of life they are just seeing the tiniest of the surface of things. It’s a shame they hate evolution because evolution is only an explanation about how the miracle of life works.

If you read a hundred books on evolution and then compare it to the phrase in the Bible “and God created life” you will see there is no comparison. If you want to believe in God, read one hundred books on evolution and think this is how God created life. The theory of evolution is the Bible written with a billion more details, that’s all. Rejecting evolution is the refusal to look at reality directly and in detail. The ironic thing is probably the people who wrote Genesis were more aware of the workings of reality than the true believers in the Bible today who live so far away from nature. Early religions are always nature worshipers. Science is the ultimate form of nature worship.

Challenge #7 – The Evolution of Man

Humans can’t evolve as long as a majority of humans are mired in their religious delusions. Those who are free of delusions are being held back by the people who are possessed by ancient superstitions. Even though reality is without meaning doesn’t mean that humanity can’t decide its own purpose or purposes, but that can’t happen as long as most people cling to their religious delusions. I’d like to think that given enough time we’ll spread stable governments throughout the world and develop ever improving educational systems that will one day lead to a delusional free population, but I have grave doubts. Religions destabilizes governments. However, that might be part of our evolutionary progress. Without chaos in our lives we never would have evolved into such powerful thinkers. Neanderthals lived for hundreds of thousands of years without changing. It’s weird, but religious strife might be the generator of free thinking.

But still I worry that there’s a barrier to total freedom that humanity is incapable of passing.

Conclusion

For us people who want to live in a society where everyone sees reality with a scientific rationality our only choice is to support stable governments that strongly support the separation of church and state, and spends lots of money on education. The Christian and Muslim fundamentalists instinctively know that liberal education is bad for their view of reality. This is why I believe many Americans hate paying for public schools – they see them as attacking their beliefs. It’s also why fundamentalists want to influence the content of school textbooks. And I can’t help but wonder if the conservatives who want a smaller government isn’t because they see a big government spreading scientific knowledge.

Liberals tend to be less religious and assign a purpose to government to uplift all people, whereas conservatives tend to be religious and dislike government being in the purpose business or making what they consider moral decisions that belong to their churches. Essentially, non-religious people see government as the highest form of social organization and purpose, where religious people see their particular religious group being the supreme authority. This is quite a conflict, but it does define the battle lines between the two groups. Atheists want big government and big education. Theists want small government, controlled education and a big universal religion.

Right now most people have to evolve through many delusions stages in childhood before they get enough education to see clearly. I wonder what society would be like if we taught our children right from the start to see reality clearly and never allow them to be confused by the many delusional systems that exist.

I sometimes wonder if fiction is a danger to our development. I love fiction, and we pursue a lot of fiction through novels, movies, TV shows, video games, comics, etc. If we read more non-fiction and watched more documentaries, would that help to free us sooner? I also worry that fiction is the escapism that people pursue when they have given up on faith but do not want to work to understand science. You can reject religion and still find many other sources of delusion. If you want to know how reality works you have to study science, and that’s not very popular.

There are many ways of living in our meaningless universe. Most people cope by believing in various delusions. Others ignore reality by chasing after hedonistic pursuits. Art has always been a major alternative for some. A few can’t take the lack of meaning and kill themselves, which is very tragic. The real challenge is to accept the realities of the reality and find your own purpose that reflects the best knowledge we gained through science.

JWH – 7/29/11