The greatest happiness to the greatest number of people.

There’s so many problems with calculating utilitarianism. For a start, the nature of happiness is confusing. I think most people would probably start talking about distribution of wealth. It was certainly my first instinct, but does money equate to happiness? Absolutely not. We’ve built a society where survival is equated to money directly, and then we train ourselves to believe everything beyond that is funded by the same. Money, as something exchangeable for any physical item becomes a mnemonic for everything we ever wanted. But there are not just things that money can’t buy, but trying to buy your way upwards is generally only going to make things worse.

But this is a digression. Albeit a relevant one.

Beyond the specifics of happiness, you have the fundamental trickiness of utilitarianism. It’s nigh on impossible to work out the outcomes of something before it is done. Particularly with regard to a complex system like a government, a country, or a world. It seems clear to me (as a radical of sorts) that a lot needs to be changed to make this world right. But can I decide what the right ways to do it? Would any of my instinctive decisions pan out anywhere near how I expect?

You can’t calculate utility until after it has worked.

Or not.

But it’s a positive principle to start with. It’s a better way of thinking of things than whatever we have at the moment. (I’m not quite sure what philosophical system we are currently governed by, I don’t think ‘Win elections and keep your friends sweet’ really counts as a philosophical system).

Of course, the greatest possible happiness to the greatest number of people would actually mean ending exploitation. Britain is still built on the poverty of others. The way we spend, the wealth we have, is stolen and exploitative. It would not be enough to equalise this country, we would have to remove the reliance on oil and cruelty on which our happily cheap lifestyles currently depend.

Get rid of that and we need to find a way to make our own land work for us all. Fairly shared, and people working on things that make them contented. Worry less about pursuit of money, look after each other. Build real things that help real people. Bring communities together. Smash down fences and share the spaces, share the work and focus on everyone. End greed and poverty at the same time.

Is this even utilitarianism?

The government wouldn’t be able to control most of this. It needs a fundamental shift of attitude. Government would have to tear apart industry, preserve our environment, and give us all the freedom to work together. A government needs to stop people killing each other, and find a way to share.

A government that does that wouldn’t look like a government.

And a country that did that wouldn’t look like a country.

It looks like a dream.

But not forever.

—

Illustration by Emma

There is no point attempting to make me an arbiter of cool. To be honest, you’re better off relying on a fictional Time Lord who historically has been defined by a ludicrously recognisable appearance (except for Christopher Eccleston, who was made intentionally bland (but sexy) to provide the reboot with a little gravitas).

We are, technically, talking about a man who used to wear celery as a fashion accessory.

Not me. The Doctor. Obviously. I’m 80% certain I’ve never used a vegetable as an accessory.

Anyway, I think bow ties are tricky to pull off, but anything can be cool in the right context.

The ‘bow ties are cool’ line, actually manages to make bow ties cool as long as the Doctor is wearing them. This despite it obviously being a joke about bow ties being uncool. The trick doesn’t work with Fezes, but it doesn’t hinder the coolness of Cowboy hats.

If you don’t watch Doctor Who, this probably doesn’t make sense. But I’ll be honest with you, if you don’t watch Doctor Who, I’m not entirely sure how your life is supposed to make sense.

This is, perhaps, the biggest exagerattion I’ve ever made.

Or that was. It’s hard to tell.

If you can look good in a bow tie, you are a hero. I suspect that’s the point. But then, top hat and tails always looks great, and would need a bow tie, so maybe you’re just posh. Which isn’t cool, but looks good a lot of the time.

Cool is tricky, see.

And like I say, I am no arbiter. At least beyond the way that everyone is. Everyone makes their own decision about the world of imagery that is presented around them. I find the people that look the coolest are the people who are just short of actually looking credibly cool. There’s a line of coolness after which you become what I would probably term ‘too hipster’.

But all of these words are meaningless. Completely and utterly meaningless, and a distraction from anything important.

I’m actually worried I’m damaging mine and your days by spending this time considering what looks cool and what doesn’t.

Yet every morning, I piece together an outfit to make myself look good (and 90% of mornings, I get out of the door, and immediately regret every decision I’ve made).

Looking good is just about important to us, in that it gives us our confidence, but it shouldn’t.

Our lives and happiness should not depend on bow ties. They should depend only on love and compassion and friendship.

Sure, call me a hippy, and that’s never going to be cool, but it’s really true.

We spend most of our lives obsessing with the bow ties of the universe, and ignoring the time lords underneath.

The Doctor is cool. But mostly because he tries to make a difference. He was even fairly cool in the beige and celery outfit. Because he still gave a shit.

Bow ties don’t give a shit.

—

Illustration by Henry

Yes.

But readers/listeners/viewers of popular fiction have every right to ignore them.

It’s one of the points that is missed in the geekier debates about the nature of canon. Any creative project is actually a collaboration between the creator and the reader. Fiction doesn’t particularly exist on paper or television, or any other medium, it’s just a mode of transmission. The thing that makes it any kind of true, all takes place in the brain. The thing that makes unreal ideas into actual people, is in your brain.

Of course, it doesn’t make them that actual, but the nature of this sort of canon is the idea that there is ‘truth’ in fiction.

This is the true version of Batman. This is what actually happened on the Serenity. This is not the real Harry Potter having sex with three clones of himself.

The literary canon is about importance and credibility. Geek canon, different for every universe, is about some strange notion of truth. Which of these fictions are truer?

The debates are unnecessary, but then, so are the fictions, and it’s the false reality we project into them, that makes them so important to us. I can understand how people spend hours arguing about the truth of these lies, because to each individual, the truth is obvious.

We are passionate about imaginary worlds because our imagination is real to us. We recognise the worlds as being other from ‘reality’ but we see the as possessing their own weight of truth.

Which makes it feel like a betrayal when a certain kind of inconsistency is introduced. The retcon is the changing of history impossible in the real world. Suddenly Darlene is played by yet another actress, and we are supposed to pretend she was there all along.

That’s not quite the same thing as a retcon, when narrative ‘truths’ are overturned by newer ‘truths’, but it gets across the mental gymnastics required.

Doing some hasty research on the font of all geek knowledge, we find that a lot of  the best retcons are revealed to be one character’s unreliable narration revealed as a lie. People lie, everyone has a different story, so sometimes facts are fudged. If you’re used to omniscient narration, which is what we default to except in the first person, this can still jar, but it’s the classy way to do things. Possibly.

Mostly because, well, it flags up that stories are lies that we have collaborated in. It shows us how even the characters in the story have their own worlds in their head. It reminds us that it is our point of view that creates the truth.

And there are hundreds of truths in any story. And some of them are real to you, and some of them are real to me, and some of them are real to somebody else.

Story telling is about lying to tell the truth.

And I’ve managed to get through this whole piece without reference the Death of the Author.

—

Illustration by Michael

Technically, I already have.

If everyone drops to four, I’d probably end up living ‘the dream’ and dropping down to three. (I realise that sentence is probably somewhat offensive/insensitive to people who remember the three day week and the pain that bought to a lot of people, but I would advise that things are different now, and should be even more different in the future).

I’m no economist, so I probably haven’t looked into all the ramifications of this. But then as far as I can tell, economics is built on assumptions that don’t make real, practical sense, and don’t take into account the matters of ethics toward people and the world. If they did, our world wouldn’t look like it does out of the window.

Dropping to a four day week would have a good chance of giving everybody a job. You’ve just solved unemployment. Then everyone would be earning. Some people would be earning less, but there would be earning happening.

Feasibly, and debatably, at that point, the balance of power shifts some between employee and employer, and it becomes easier to unionise, or otherwise win battles with employers. This means that a living wage could easily be negotiated.

We’d probably all have to spend less money on stuff, but we’d also have more time to spend making our lives better for ourselves. Learning to sew or garden. Volunteering at local organisations.

The right mix of all of that, and quality of life for the worst off would improve immeasurably. The best off would probably notice a few priveliges shrinking. And the squeezed middle would probably initially feel a little squeezed. But everybody would be in it together, genuinely. People would be quite good at finding ways of making it work.

That’s what I believe, but then, I’m a lefty hippy.

The right (and possibly all of the less wafty) would probably tell me that companies would start making not enough profit and failing. Increased workers rights means companies fall apart. Small business can’t drive the economy. Share-holders suffer. The economy stagnates and dies.

They might be right. But actually, I think all of those things come down to expectation.

If businesses expect to have to treat their workers like people, and still make a profit, they’ll find a way of doing it. If people find they’ve got more time and less money, they may find ways to make up for this gap. They say time is money. I think time is much more valuable than the money you can earn with it.

An hour spent with a love one is worth more to me than my hourly wage.

I just can’t get over that bit of the equation. That bit that is missing from the economists equation.

The value of life is ignored.

This is only magnified when we switch to a global perspective.

We would have to buy less shit, but it is our buying shit lifestyles that is killing people, right now.

We need perspective.

—

Illustration by Jaime

Open eyes.

Seriously. I believe in the malleability of personality. Of course, that may not be our ‘nature’, but then, if it is, then it’s by definition the unchangeable, incomprehensible core notion of selfness, which makes the question kind of useless.

One of the classic ‘things that upset Alex’ is people saying ‘I can’t change that, it’s just the way I am’. It’s most often heard in arguments in which someone is being hurt by their partner. I’m fairly certain I’ve said it before, and it’s one point in a long list of reasons why I hate myself.

And the thing is, it is possible to recognise it as a lie. When you say ‘that’s just the way I am’, you are attempting to close yourself off to the obvious nature of the universe.

Has anyone ever seen or heard of anything, beyond the realm of the spiritual and unprovable, that lasts forever and never changes?

Even stars burn out and explode. Even universes are expanding. Even rocks erode.

Nothing is permanent and fixed. Especially not life. Especially not people.

Once you recognise that the nature of the universe is change, impermanence and constant flux, you can hopefully extrapolate down. As above, so below. Humanity, along with anything else, is change, impermanence and constant flux.

As an indivudal, we are a story that links together an infinite array of people that we are, from one instant to the next. We tell a story to keep us coherent, to make our past fit our present fit our future. We join the dots.

Sometimes we make that story so rigid that we think it is all we are, we become trapped in the old patterns of our lives, and become rigid. At that point we are unlike life.

I’ve heard it posited that reincarnation is a metaphor for this. We are not born as a new person when we die (or at least not just). We are dying every instant, and in that same instant, we are reborn anew. I’ve similarly heard karma described as the notion that everything we have done builds us to where we are now, but what we do now is the only thing that builds our future.

Every moment is an opportunity for change.

The question, as written, comes from a computer game, Planescape: Torment, you should play it, but mild spoilers follow. The protagonist is nameless, and immortal. Fixed and unchanging in one sense, but without memory, and digging up traces of his past. It becomes clear that he’s lost his memory repeatedly, and is being toyed with by an antagonist, trying to work out what can change his nature.

You discover past lives as killers, and others as noble goodness.

As a player, you can play as any sort of character you like. The answer that the game provides, on a meta level, is that you can change the nature of a man.

As below, so above.

You can change your nature.

Change is nature.

—

Illustration by Helen

I mean. If I can’t remember, then I can’t be frustrated. How do I even know that that ever happens? It’s an unprovable and unexperiencable experience. If a dream occurs only in my mind, and is not remembered by my mind, then, unless dreams have some unknown effect on our mind (which I believe there is evidence they do) then it may as well not have happened. Consciously, it does not exist.

Is it useful for me to sit here getting angry about dreams I may never have had?

I mean, I guess I could try and wonder at what they actually consist of. Sit here, for the rest of the day, fabricating the realities of the dreams I never had. But in my day to day life (unless I am fabricating the apparent realities that surround me) my imagination never conjures anything as intense, insane, and inscrutable as my dreams.

Apart from that odd occasion where I dream I spend the day at work doing nothing much interesting.

Having said all that, I don’t often have ‘good’ dreams. I’m possibly that little bit too damaged. My dreams (at least the ones I remember) almost always have enough of an edge of anxiety that they can’t be enjoyed for the wonderful worldviews they represent.

My dreams of this morning have already escaped me, for example. Mostly because I don’t want to give too much voice to the worry they represent.

Even at night, it appears I am always terrified, if only mildly.

Even my ‘best’ dreams, which come in two flavours (passionate sex, and the returned dead) are normally imbued with a haunting sense of ‘this isn’t right’ that takes me out of the joy of passion or the sheer happiness of seeing a loved one I dearly miss.

Yes. In my dreams, I see dead people. Not very often, but my heart leaps in those instants. Being told reassuringly, ‘don’t be ridiculous, I just went away for a while’ and getting to go on some sort of adventure with a beloved but lost friend. It’s true wish fulfillment, but there’s always a colour washed over it. A niggling, uncanny sensation of ‘this is not okay’.

I think even my dreams seem to have a notion of what the world should be like. There is an order of things, that sadly includes the notion that the dead are gone, and can never be bought back. I can never see Will, Edie, Julie and the rest ever again.

When they visit my dreams, it is only a precursor of waking up to another bout of grieving. It makes my heart bounce, but I remain aware that these things must pass.

Dreams also pass. You can’t hold on to them. You’ve just got to let them take you for their rides, show you their things and plump you back in the reality you usually inhabit again.

You can learn from them, but you can’t take them with you.

Such is life.

—

Illustration by Michael

I’m not entirely sure what IQ measures. I mean, obviously, it stands for Intelligence Quotient, and is aimed to be a metric of intelligence, but as I understand it, it can only measure a limited scope of intelligence. It is targeted at a small subset of reasoning skills (largely mathematical, verbal and logical, at a guess) and give you a number based on how close to the national or global average you are.

I know that they’ve come under fire before because a lot of the tests are culturally relative (ie you’re much more likely to score highly if you’re a white, middle class American, because many of the questions are geared towards that world), but I’m still not entirely sure what it measures. Or how what it measures is supposed to relate to day to day life.

Also, due to what I suspect is my own state of mental slump, I’m having trouble relating to the word ‘function’ but we’ll get there a bit later. For now I’m going to read some wikipedia. Back in a sec.

That wasn’t particularly fruitful.

There’s some link between IQ and job performance, and some between IQ and likelihood of a life of crime, but not huge correlations, and as always, they don’t necessarily mean anything that we can understand.

So I’ve got to go back to using my own intelligence.

I don’t know how intelligent I am. I tend to think I’m not very, but then, I can see how the amount I read and attempt to comprehend of the world has a tendency to make me unhappy, which in turn has a tendency to make my ability to get through life trickier.

But, well, are those things related, really? Surely I’ve just got a useless emotional brain, rather than a ‘superior intellect’. I’ve seen plenty of happy and contented people that are obviously much cleverer than me. I am increasingly idiot, for a start.

I think thinking about people in terms of intelligence is dangerous, maybe. I don’t think measuring everyone in relation to everyone else is necessarily useful.

Measuring, in fact, is flawed and risky.

As soon as you start qunatifying people’s ability to think and learn, you start giving people an impression of what they are, based on your own assumptions about quality and goodness. You decide what counts as intelligence, and then you tell some people they are stupid, and others that they are brilliant.

Who does that help?

Is a functional life, the life of someone who keeps their head down and does their job happily, day in day out, or someone who pops their head above the parapet, takes a look at the world, and pays enough attention to realise that the whole thing is crumbling.

Are either of these options intelligent? Or even realistic?

I am a functional human being, sometimes it feels like barely so, but other times, I am aware that I can see.

That is probably enough, for now.

—

Illustration by Emma

Buses are big and red. Except when they are other colours.

Buses are full of people who are going to places other than where they first got on the bus, apart from if they just want to keep warm all day and are riding all the way from one end to the other and back, hoping desperately that the bus driver doesn’t notice and decide they are lunatic.

Buses just keep on going.

Buses are great.

I still show off (twice in the last forty eight hours in fact, thrice if you count this typing I am doing now) about the day when I got on enough different buses in one day, on one ticket, that I was only paying 25 pence per journey. It was a bloody great day.

If public transport was better, and we had more localised food networks and sensibly sorted out trains, then we could probably get rid of all those cars and lay soil and turf over at least three quarters of the roads we now have. Our cities would be gorgeous. In extremis.

It’s weird paying an amount of money for a piece of paper than carries you a certain distance. It’s odd paying money to sit down and then be somewhere else. It’s slightly mental to sit in a box with people you don’t know and press a button when you’ve had enough.

But it’s beautiful crazy.

I know that most people think buses are either too expensive or too smelly or too full of people who they don’t like. This is a bad attitude to have to a service that gives you, and those people you don’t like, freedom. Movement is freedom. Getting to the other side of town, or up to the countryside, or to a different country. That’s freedom. Cheap and smelly freedom, but freedom that, on a per person basis, doesn’t hurt as much of the world as buying your own metal box to haul yourself and your stuff around in.

Personally, I prefer bikes these days, for my own proper sense of freedom. Riding through a patch of countryside, with a pair of panniers full of tent and clothes and maybe a snack for later is, frankly, the best feeling I’ve ever had. It’s a bastard load of hard work, but knowing that if I actually get tired or lost enough, I can just pop to the side, build a bed, and sleep until the sun makes me happy again.

Buses don’t quite give you that, but then technically, I’d probably get arrested if I did that exactly as I typed it.

The world works weirdly, but buses are one of those things within them that kind of make sense. A big box comes along, with a place written on the front. You get in the box, and hand over a few chunks of metal. Then you get off at the place on the front, or wherever you needed to be that’s on the way.

Drinking the world.

—

Illustration by Henry

I don’t think I do.  Guesswork and assumption, and some dugg etymology makes me think it’ll mean something like ‘fake wandering’ or ‘apparent sadness’, or maybe ‘pseudo-obsession’. None of these quite make sense as concepts though, so I’m not sure what they’d actually mean.

Taking the word apart, we can build a few roots out of it. ‘Pareille’ is a french word, but I don’t know what it means. ‘Dolia’ could come from a similar route to ‘dolorous’, which means heavy or sad (kind of). The word ‘idol’ is in the middle too, if you split it up unintuitively, which I think would turn the ‘pare-’ into something close resembling ‘para’.

The word itself lolls about attractively. I’m imagining it describes some kind of psychological phenomenon, or a mystical occurence. It reminds me of words like ‘glossolalia’ which is the technical term for speaking in tongues (I think). But the roots are odd, pointing back to things I uncommon and so somewhat incomprehensible.

So the answer to the question is no. I don’t, and I probably haven’t guessed right either. I guess I’d better look it up, and see where we go from here.

***

Ahhh. Pareidolia. I was miles off with the meaning (apart from the ‘psychological effect’ stab), but not hugely far off with the etymology (though I did make about eight guesses). Para (beside or with) combines with eidolia (image or shape, and definitely related to idol). So you’ve got a sort of image.

Pareidolia is basically the effect when random or semi random stimulus is arranged into familiar shapes by the brain. This is how you see faces in random textures, or hear words in records played backwards.

The brain is good at picking up patterns, so good in fact, that it tries to make them all the time. The mind is constantly trying to make the world make sense, so it will happily take random stimulus and find a recognisable, if illusory, pattern within it.

Interestingly, this is kind of what my brain was doing when it was trying to make up meanings for the word ‘pareidolia’, despite not knowing the meaning. Without a known definition, a word can be seen as a random structure (it’s not random, it’s built out of bits of other words in other languages, but we can treat it as such, in a way). The letters are arrange, and my brain tries to make patterns out of it. The patterns I picked first were ‘pareille’ and ‘dolorous’.

Language is odd, because it is arbitrary. It has meaning that we’ve applied to it, but the words aren’t inherently anything, they are just structures of letters, which are in turn just structures of lines and curves. That we have ascribed sounds to these, and then ascribed meaning to combinations of those, is unusual, but sensible.

The brain wants to make sense of the world. So we’ll find, build and share patterns.

Because its what we are made of.

—

Illustration by Jaime

Oddly, whenever I think of post, I actually think of W.A.S.T.E., the secret underground anarchist postal service from Pynchon’s ‘The Crying Lot 49‘. Ludicrously, for something that has been functioning (according to a cursory wikipedia glance) to some extent or another since the 5th Century BC in ancient Persia, the idea of a postal service has a post-apocalyptic ring to it.

In Pynchon’s book, my mental imagery shifted abruptly at the idea of secret symbols bidding you to place letters in bins to be picked up by a network of outsiders. Suddenly the monstrous bay area nightmare felt more like it had survived the collapse of civilisation. I can’t tell if this was because of the need for an underground postal system, or simply because the idea of post seems somehow apocalyptic.

Information no longer appears to move at the speed of objects. Letters and books have at least partly been replaced with email and webpages. The exchange of information is happening overwhelmingly fast and often. This is almost certainly a good thing.

Post is no longer simply information, I doubt it ever was. Communication belongs on so many different levels. The presence of a system for distributing objects across the whole breadth of the world is probably one of the finest examples of what civilisation can do. It is also, quite clearly, the pattern upon which the internet was based. Networks of subsystems interlocking and passing packets around constantly. Electrons move faster than postal workers, but can only carry the tiniest amount of weight.

I suspect post will change.

If we end up in a post material world, the the postal service could wither to a gimmick, like a singing telegram, an excessive and old fashioned gift in and of itself. All the real objects will be digital then.

But that world is an incredibly long way off. Our present material culture, and more practical alternatives, require objects. Once the world is connected, disconnecting it seems like a huge loss. I want to be able to send a postcard to the exact opposite side of the world if I want to. I don’t mind it taking time, to know I have touched the same material as a long distant friend.

Stuff will probably need to keep on moving around for a while. As long as people want to share stuff, we’ll need a well organised ferry service. As long as people are used to getting things fast (next time you get impatient with a buffering video, think about going to the cinema to watch a silent film accompanied by a low rent organist, making shit up as they go along).

Until we live in a world where everyone has their own nano-fabricators in their front room, and the CAD skills to send everything digitally, there will be post.

Of course, at that point, the nano-plague will probably wipe out the entire planet, and any survivors will need a way to get in contact.

Mute your post-horns, just in case.

—

Illustration by Helen