by Tully McCarroll

Reprinted from the July-September, 2006 BASIS

Who writes these chunks of mindless fodder? They are usually lists of “thought provoking” nonsense on the order of a Hallmark commercial. I hate it when people try to manipulate me and evoke false emotions using triggers such as “a true friend touches your heart.”

OK, it’s a feel good thing. I get it. The ether is heavy with want-to-be philosophers spewing their cheap useless emotional blather to those who will pass it on. I receive some of these from good and well-meaning friends. I suppose they want to tell me that they regard me as their friend. I love them too.

My biggest objection to most of these things is the prediction of “good luck” if you pass it along and/or “bad luck” it you don’t. They are especially offensive when they go into detail stating the number of emails that are required to be sent or exactly what kind of good or bad luck there will be. Is the author a “self proclaimed psychic?” Must be.

Well, I say: Rubbish!

I refuse to be a party to the proliferation of these lies. You should refuse to be also. If you find the email particularly insightful, funny or interesting and must pass it on, delete the good luck-bad luck portion and send it on. You can take what you like and leave the rest. And not spread the falsehood as a consequence for your choice.

I read them and take them with a grain of salt. But their flawed wisdom offends me. Statements are made as though fact. Even a warm and fuzzy sentiment needs to ring true or it’s just “fluff.” I admit that some of the statements are thought provoking. Most are unsolicited advice.

Remember free advice is worth exactly what you paid for it. Woops, there I go spewing my wisdom on you. Well, “think about it for a second or two” and then take it or leave it.

Below is one I just received and felt compelled to add some responses: (I don’t claim anything I wrote to be fact.)

Read Each One Carefully and Think About It a Second or Two

Waste some time on this bull that someone, who thinks they are clever, is trying to pawn-off on you as wisdom.

1. I love you not because of who you are, but because of who I am when I am with you.

   Who you are doesn’t matter. It’s all about me.

2. No man or woman is worth your tears, and the one who is, won’t make you cry.

   That’s right, sorrow should be avoided at all costs. Let’s delete it from the list of emotions.

3. Just because someone doesn’t love you the way you want them to, doesn’t mean they don’t love you with all they have.

   Some people have no capacity to love.

4. A true friend is someone who reaches for your hand and touches your heart.

   But he really didn’t mean to brush my breast; it was just in the way.

5. The worst way to miss someone is to be sitting right beside them knowing you can’t have them.

   You can’t have anyone; you don’t even “Have” yourself. All you really have is time and it is slipping away while you read stupid lists like this.

6. Never frown, even when you are sad, because you never know who is falling in love with your smile.

   Always hide your emotions. Never frown, it gives you more unattractive wrinkles than smiling does.

7. To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.

   You may be many people to yourself; you may have multiple personality disorder. Seek help. .

8. Don’t waste your time on a man/woman, who isn’t willing to waste their time on you.

   See # 5. Don’t waste time.

9. Maybe God wants us to meet a few wrong people before meeting the right one, so that when we finally meet the person, we will know how to be grateful.

   So, God wants us to suffer?

10. Don’t cry because it is over, smile because it happened.

    Everything ends; get over it.

11. There’s always going to be people that hurt you so what you have to do is keep on trusting and just be more careful about who you trust next time around.

    Don’t trust anyone. Everyone is out to get you.

12. Make yourself a better person & know who you are before you try & know someone else and expect them to know you.

    You aren’t good enough, so don’t even try. No one would want to know you. Don’t expect anything.

13. Don’t try so hard, the best things come when you least expect them to.

    ... Except when the best things come to those who work for it.

Remember: Whatever Happens Happens For a Reason.

Remember: after things happen, you may as well accept them and say they happened for a reason since you can’t change the past, anyway. Then, you don’t have to keep wondering why they happened or have any accountability for the consequences.

You have been Tagged by the Green Dog!

You will Have Good Luck For Two Years if you send this to 8 people or more.

You will have both good and bad luck whether you send this to anyone or not.

And if this is sent back to you then you are a true friend......

If this is sent back to you, it would indicate that way-too-many people are afraid of not having good luck and like to send useless sappy ridiculous emails to make themselves feel good.

If not, you must not be a true friend, sorry.

Hope you can send the green dog back to ME!

The dog illustration is cute.

by Yves Barbero

Reprinted from the July-September, 2006 BASIS

Morality certainly exists, but only as an artifice by which we organize our societies. (I’ll leave it to others to explain spirituality.) We are a species like any other. Since we use tools, we are the most powerful (so far) of species. But the idea of “better” or “superior” gets in the way of understanding. In any case, there is always the possibility that some species might prove more powerful in the near future – a microbe, for instance.

For convenience, I divide intelligence into three types, none of which is superior to any other. They are simply a short-hand explanation to structure thought.

The first type of intelligence is animal intelligence, that is, non-human intelligence. For ants, it might simply be the instinctive way they organize themselves. For chimpanzees, it might be that they use rudimentary tools such as a stick to “fish” for tasty termites. In addition, chimps and other primates, with human help, can be taught to be advanced tool users and possibly, users of symbolic language.

If you tell a dog to “fetch,” he may not have the same concept you have, but he will get the stick. Tell the same dog to “fetch” in a foreign language, and he might still do it if he is watching the stick waving in your hand. It doesn’t matter what you or the dog internally understand: the fact that the stick is “fetched” is all that matters.

I remember staying at a friend’s house one Thanksgiving, and waking up the next morning to see the family dog chomping away on the unfinished turkey. He had pulled it from the table. On seeing me, the golden retriever went into a corner whimpering. The dog immediately knew he did something that might merit punishment. But I’d hesitate to attribute a motive like shame or guilt. It could just be fear. The humans at the gathering all laughed, but the dog didn’t get it. After everything was cleaned up, a short time later, it was as if nothing had ever happened. There he was, wagging his tail, as we had our morning coffee and muffins, waiting for a treat.

Human intelligence, the second type of intelligence, is us. We ask how it came about, and we decide that we evolved as a hunter-gatherer species. This formed society, that is, groups that hunted and, once we were human in the modern sense, fished, and later grew things (this order of human activity is widely, if not universally, accepted). I’ll leave it to the physical anthropologists to get into the nitty-gritty of the details. I only have a layman’s understanding. But our intelligence formed around this. We have stereoscopic color vision and selective hearing (any city dweller will hear a dime drop over city noises – that comes from evolving as hunters).

There are fortunate accidents in this evolution. Our superior vision, combined with hands free to manipulate tools, and our long learning period (hanging out with, or onto, mom) is probably responsible for our ability to remember the past and project into the future. This requires symbols and soon, readin,’ writin,’ and ‘rithmetic.’

The downside is that we tend to take it too far, as in attaching a symbolic meaning to death. The word “death” is straightforward enough, but we tend to project a future beyond it for the individual, and have built rituals around it that can negatively affect life before death. A symbol, combined with the ability to project a future (even if flawed), and raw fear, builds frightening institutions.

It makes us different, but not ‘better.’ Still we arbitrarily define ourselves as ‘better.’ Even Charles Darwin separated beasts from humans in his “The Origin of Species” (1859) and the Decent of Man” (1871) by twelve years. It had more to do with cultural wisdom than scientific necessity. Darwin was not without shrewdness.

Hierarchical worthiness is an idea that is strictly human. If you tell your house cat, “I’m better than you,” it will purr, since it has your attention, and manipulate you into opening a can of cat food or having itself stroked.

The third type of intelligence is theoretical since, like string theory, I have no way to prove it exists. It is an intelligence that perfectly understands the mechanics of the natural order. I cannot imagine any species, however different from us, evolving on any other planet, developing it. But it is a convenient device, which, like the assumption that the universe operates under the same rules everywhere, can be a useful anchor for our goals in science. (I am, however, intrigued with the notion that an alien species might have a completely different approach to intelligence. Until we meet such a species, we are hermits in a cave in the definition of intelligence.)

Being in the middle, and recognizing that we’re no better, we can now humbly communicate with our fellow primates. We understand that the gorilla playing with a doll is not undergoing the same thought processes as a human girl doing the same thing. But in the interchange (we, watching), the gorilla gets fed, groomed, and has company, and we get to write a scientific paper that gets us next year’s grant.

Going in the other direction, we can mathematically grasp eleven dimensions (well, maybe you can), and visualize space-time bend. Is this truly how the universe is organized? Only some being possessing that third type of intelligence truly knows. But why not try? It’s interesting, and it puts groceries on the scientist’s table.

As I said, the division I suggest is only one of convenience, not hierarchy. There is some obvious crossover. As a case in point I once exchanged stares with an older orangutan at a zoo. I was wondering what he was thinking. During my learned exchange with this senior primate, I got my first inkling that intelligence should not be thought of as the equivalent of a superior “soul,” but just be part of the non-hierarchical natural scheme of things.