“Composer Artisan” ISFP. Socially and economically libertarian for reasons having nothing to do with Ayn Rand. Current fields of study:Playboy, A Course in Miracles, building a new life in Humboldt County.
Hollywood, California, is my spiritual hometown. I actually grew up in three other communities in California, but it hardly seems to matter which three. How could my heart take root anywhere under the tyranny of American public schooling?
I don’t have to work for a living. After my father died in December 1997, my family and I won a legal settlement.
The Blog About
Nothing: Sudheer of Hyderabad, India, is a big fan of Playboy and an
even bigger fan of Seinfeld. In this blog, he composes humorous
dialogues for the show’s characters.
Hit & Run: the official
blog of my other favorite magazine, Reason: Free Minds and Free
Markets; winner
of the 2005 Weblog Award for Best Group Blog; “the best
libertarian blog” according to the October 2005 issue of
Playboy.
Scoobie Davis Online: a self-described “filmmaker, surfer, and party crasher” in southern California. He’s also a Playboy fan, a left-leaning political gadfly, and a connoisseur of Jack T. Chick religious tracts.
The Search for
Health in Decadence: poetry and philosophical writings of Will, who has
engaged me in lengthy, good-natured debate through comments on my
blog.
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven
Pinker. With stylistic flair, a Harvard cognitive scientist
refutes myths about human nature underlying a multitude of political
beliefs—including many of those that would either favor or
oppose the sexual revolution.
God in Popular Culture by Andrew M. Greeley. A liberal Catholic
priest sees quasi-Christian messages of grace abounding in the
allegedly soulless realm of commercial pop culture. For all I know,
Greeley is not necessarily a Playboy fan. But his
interpretation of Madonna’s song “Like a Virgin” has
influenced my impression of Playboy. (In case anyone wonders, my religious heritage is Lutheran on my father’s side and secularist on my mother’s.)
At 1:10 in this video of a Playboy Mansion party, the March 2008 Playmate shows her good judgment and good taste.
I was there for that party. Click here for the embarrassing details of my encounter with Miss March.
The hot brunette in the video embed freeze frame is mistress of ceremonies and Playboy model Adrianne Curry (February 2006 and January 2008)—technically not a Playmate, though not for lack of beauty, as you can see.
Ysabella Brave is a smart enough performer to understand the relationship between silliness and sexiness. True to her name, she takes rather bold risks in this arena that pay off marvelously. I’ve never seen anything quite like this next video in all my research on the history of pinups, cheesecake, exotic dance, and glamour (the song is one of her own):
Off-site spoiler alert:this* blog post by another Playboy fan reveals the identity of the new Playmate of the Year. You won’t read it at my blog in advance, though.
At 36, I’m just old enough to remember the slower travel of information before the Internet. Naturally, being a blogger, I wouldn’t go back to those days. But spoilers were somewhat easier to avoid then. The “Next Month” page at the end of the May Playboy brought a smile to my face by avoiding the mistake of showing a spoiler photograph of the new Playmate of the Year. I want to honor the spirit of that choice by imitating it here.
*Point of style: I happen to agree with The Chicago Manual of Style that the first word after a colon is not necessarily capitalized. Hmm. Is Chicago known for any other publications that one could describe as manuals of style?
If you live in the U.S., your tax return is due tomorrow. While the price tag of our overreaching federal government has your attention, please watch these videos on good things that the government wastes money to save us from, respectively immigrants and marijuana.
“Thank you for calling Reason.tv. Please press one for English.” Say, I wonder whose voice that is at the very beginning of this video on immigration. (That reminded me to update my blog post on the women of Reason magazine to include the lovely and talented Virginia Postrel, by the way.)
Please crank up your computer’s audio before visiting my MySpace. Since I first added music to the page the other day, I’ve been intending the musical selections to complement my status messages.
As a senior editor of Reason, Howley (pictured above) deserves better than the leering she gets from us libertarian horn dogs. But since it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission, I’ll go ahead and be part of the problem. She’s yummy! Fellas who wonder about her voice, her mannerisms, and her mind can sample them at Bloggingheads.tv. They won’t be disappointed.
Speaking of yummy, Reason associate editor Katherine Mangu-Ward (above) holds the alluring promise of culinary adventure for those with politically incorrect appetites. A couple of years ago, she read a passing reference to antelope steak in an O. Henry short story, she tells us:
Why are there no antelope steaks at my supermarket?, I wondered. An innocent beginning to an obsession.
Bird watchers keep a life list of every species they have ever spotted. My life list is of species I have consumed. Both hobbies have the same root: It’s the impulse of a born collector who doesn’t like to have stuff lying around. All that remains is the memory of a flavor, wrapped—as taste memories always are—in the sights, sounds, and smells of the meal, the company, and the conversation.
Since that fateful day, I’ve nibbled on caribou filet, alligator jambalaya, elk medallions, yak dumplings, buffalo burgers, crocodile stir fry, ostrich burgers, emu jerky, and kangaroo loin. These memorable meals have all been interspersed with the merely interesting—frogs, ducks, rabbits, turtles, and deer—and the downright domesticated—cow, pig, and lamb.
I’ve had more than my fair share of eel, as well. Most of it was barbequed [sic] at sushi bars, though once I tried ordering it in a dim Russian restaurant in Boston. (They were fresh out of eel that night. Go figure.)
True to her magazine’s libertarian mission, she calls her hobby, among other things, “an exercise in enjoying the most notable fruits of globalization.” Her article ends with two recipes: kangaroo with fig sauce, and Tibetan momo (yak meat dumplings). Boy, oh, boy. What guy can resist the simultaneous charm assault on the brain, the heart, and the stomach?
Last but not least, Shikha Dalmia, a senior analyst at the Reason Foundation, deserves a place of honor here. Besides her beauty, I admire her excellent taste in stand-up comedians. Hot damn, any of these three ladies would be loads of fun on a date!
As devotees of free minds and free markets, we spend our nights pining for a major-party politician who not only looks dreamy while reading a Teleprompter but shows some passion for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.
“Why are Russian women so hot?” asks Radley Balko at my source for the above photo of beautiful Maria Sharapova, the libertarian blog Hit & Run. To answer his own question, Balko approvingly cites Anne Applebaum of Slate, who credits the collapse of communism and the opening of markets in the former Soviet Union.
As a libertarian, I’ve been falsely accused of admiring Ayn Rand. Her novels reportedly have some kinky sex in them, but even so, I haven’t been motivated to read them after reading her March 1964 Playboy Interview (complete transcript; paid subscription required). Her assertion that “man does not possess any instincts” and her belief in “Objectivism” as a viewpoint structurally incapable of turning into fanatical dogma tell me that her view of human nature isn’t refined enough to merit serious study. As an alternative, I recommend a careful reading of the libertarian implications of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
I don’t necessarily speak of libertarian literature in general, but Reason has been sexing up its act for a while. More power to it, I say. Playboy and Reason are two magazines that can benefit mutually from a willingness to resemble each other a bit from time to time.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain is superficially charming, and he showed admirable courage in his ordeal as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Other than that, don’t expect to hear a good word about him from me. If you like the military misadventures of George W. Bush, you’d love a McCain presidency. Mr. “Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran” believes so firmly in preemptive war that this video exaggerates only a little comparing him to the 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb:
The essential problem with McCain’s philosophy of government is that he loves his country fanatically while failing to understand his country’s distinct virtues. He loves the power of the government, through either military force or the force of law, to muscle its way to public virtue and “national greatness.” But individual liberty, the idea that made the United States a truly grand experiment in world political history, is always expendable for the sake of those goals. In 2006, for the Los Angeles Times, Matt Welch did the research on McCain that most journalists have shirked:
Liberals and conservatives alike fail to truly reflect his views, McCain writes, because “neither emphasizes the obligations of a free people to the nation.” His main governmental inspiration is Teddy Roosevelt, the “Eastern swell who became a man of the people,” whose great accomplishment was “to summon the American people to greatness.” In Roosevelt’s code, McCain writes approvingly, it was “absolutely required that every loyal citizen take risks for the country’s sake.” This is an essentially militaristic view of citizenship, one that explains many of McCain’s departures from partisan orthodoxy. Unlike traditional Republicans, he will gladly butt into the affairs of private industry if he perceives them to be undermining Americans’ faith in government; unlike Democrats, he thinks the executive branch generally needs more power, not less.
“Our greatness,” he wrote in Worth the Fighting For, “depends upon our patriotism, and our patriotism is hardly encouraged when we cannot take pride in the highest public institutions.” So, because steroids might be damaging the faith of young baseball fans, drug testing becomes a “transcendent issue,” requiring threats of federal intervention unless pro sports leagues shape up. Hollywood’s voluntary movie-rating system? A “smoke screen to provide cover for immoral and unconscionable business practices.” Ultimate Fighting on Indian reservations? “Barbaric” and worthy of government pressure on cable TV companies. Negative political ads by citizen groups? They “do little to further beneficial debate and healthy political dialogue” and so must be banned for 60 days before an election if they mention a candidate by name.
If his issues line up with yours, and if you’re not overly concerned by an activist federal government, McCain can be a great and sympathetic ally. But chances are he will eventually see a grave national threat in what you consider harmless, or he’ll prescribe a remedy that you consider unconscionable.
McCain is arguably even less libertarian than Hillary Clinton. That’s impressive, but not in a good way.
Welch has done it again for today’s LAT, saying, “The most pro-war presidential candidate in a decade is winning the 2008 GOP nomination thanks to the antiwar vote.”
Six degrees of Playboy: One of the Turner TV networks once had a series called Our Favorite Movies. Various celebrities hosted movies, periodically interrupting them to explain what they especially like about them. If I recall correctly, Hugh Hefner hosted Dr. Strangelove (in which one character is seen gazing at a Playboy centerfold). I wish I hadn’t missed that presentation. Does anyone have a video bootleg?
At Hit & Run, Radley Balko reports that the Federal CommunicationsCommunist Commission has fined ABC $1.43 million for showing an “indecent” episode of NYPD Blue five years ago.
Be sure to consult your physician before viewing this YouTube of the offending portion of the show, in which a woman’s bare buttocks are clearly visible:
FCC indecency investigations begin when the agency receives a viewer or listener complaint about a program and can drag on for months or years. The lightly staffed FCC enforcement bureau must go up against broadcasters, which have more legal and financial resources to battle the proposed fine and have a vested interest in dragging out the proceeding. After the enforcement bureau makes a finding, it must be voted on by the FCC’s five commissioners, who were occupied with cable television and wireless spectrum issues through much of 2007.
Never mind that the FCC is violating ABC’s First Amendment rights under a crypto-Marxist rationale of “public ownership of the airwaves.” Never mind that the government is acting on behalf of a tiny number of Church Ladies to punish a television network for placing adult content in a characteristically adult—and very popular—evening drama. Never mind that the authority of the FCC to impose the fine at all depends shamelessly on a time zone technicality (only ABC affiliates in the Central and Mountain zones are being fined, because that’s where the show ran at 9 p.m. instead of 10). In spite of all this, the public-morality bureaucrats are the underdogs in this fight.
Defenders of the FCC policy seem to fear that, some Saturday morning, TV networks might suddenly replace kids’ cartoons with pornography if they weren’t threatened with fines for indecency. On this particular issue, conservative culture warriors resemble the left-wing Adbusters crowd with their talk of amoral corporate greed. But networks have no more economic incentive to make stupid programming choices than a supermarket does to put wasabi in my milk.
If you’re as pissed tinkled off as I am about the FCC, don’t miss this unforgettable song from Family Guy. (I thank local friend Matt for encouraging me to link to the song here.)
Addendum, January 31, 2008, 9:32 a.m.: Since I’ve placed this post in the “Non-Playboy Hotties” category—and since the scene was obviously shot without a body double—I feel negligent if I don’t mention the name of the actress, Charlotte Ross.
I proudly present this unsolicited email I received the other day:
Hi,
Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Johnny Testa, and I am writing to you on behalf of AskMen.com, a unit of FOX Interactive Media. As the world’s largest men’s web portal, AskMen.com is a free lifestyle content provider that attracts more than 5 million readers each month.
I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know that AskMen.com recently published an article entitled “Top 10: Playboy France Centerfolds” that I think would be of particular interest to your readers.
Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions as to how our two sites can work together in the future.
I look forward to hearing back from you.
Regards,
Johnny Testa AskMen.com
Thank you, Johnny. Regrettably, the AskMen article has no nudity. But it’s agreeably mind-boggling to think that the rich, elaborate history of the American edition of Playboy is paralleled by the histories of the numerous foreign editions. Trippy! Countless galaxies of fashion, fiction, and gorgeous ladies!
Pedantic nerd that I am, I can’t resist the urge to say that most, maybe all, of the women who made the AskMen top-ten list were never on the centerfold proper, even though they’re described as “centerfolds” in the article title. Having browsed the French edition of Playboy on newsstands, I notice that it imitates the U.S. edition by reserving the Playmate du mois title (i.e. the monthly centerfold) for budding non-celebrities. I hope I don’t annoy my new friends at AskMen, but I just don’t know how to turn off the nerd switch. Oh, well. Sorry about that.
(And since I’ve already made a nuisance of myself, I’ll go ahead and point out that the current Playboy Mobile campaign has the 2007 and 2008 Playmates of the Year mixed up. Sara Jean Underwood became the 2007 PMOY last year. What is she, chopped liver?)
For all the obvious reasons, I’m disappointed that presidential candidate Paul allowed racist and homophobic content to be printed on his own official newsletters. Although it’s clear that someone other than Paul wrote the offensive passages, they still reflect poorly on Paul’s ability to manage public relations, a crucial skill for any candidate for president.
are not libertarian words. Maybe they reflect “paleoconservative” ideas, though they’re not the language of [Edmund] Burke or even [Russell] Kirk. But libertarianism is a philosophy of individualism, tolerance, and liberty. As Ayn Rand wrote, “Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.” Making sweeping, bigoted claims about all blacks, all homosexuals, or any other group is indeed a crudely primitive collectivism.
Libertarians should make it clear that the people who wrote those things are not our comrades, not part of our movement, not part of the tradition of John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and Robert Nozick. Shame on them.
If principled, freedom-loving Californians act quickly, they can register as Republicans in this closed-primary state in time to help Paul become president. On the immigration question, he sinks to panicky pandering, and I disagree with him on the admittedly challenging ethical question of abortion. But he is certainly the best Republican candidate this year.
Unlike Andrew Sullivan, for instance, I’ve never liked John McCain. He has always creeped me out. But I’m certainly glad to see a conservative with Sullivan’s cachet choosing Paul over McCain. If conservatism as a distinct political movement isn’t completely overshadowed soon by Reason-style libertarianism, it will only be because intellectual giants like Sullivan come up with a convincing enough “yes, but” to keep the two philosophies separate in enough people’s minds.
With all due modesty, I’m not even sure he’ll do it, though. We’ll see.
I appreciate it when an artist in any medium describes appropriate self-consciousness and deliberateness about craft. It reassures me that I will be well taken care of as part of the audience. In the January 2008 “Playbill” section introducing the major items in the magazine, fiction artist John Updike says, “Short stories now seem to just end, as if the writer ran out of typewriter ink or paper or something. I have this old-fashioned notion that stories should snap shut in the last line and throw light back to the first sentence.”
These words gave me hope of enjoying an Updike short story, for a change. But it didn’t happen for me with his January contribution, “Blue Light.” All I could do was skim it—with boredom punctuated by mild disgust at the elderly protagonist’s bigotry against young people and fat people. I’m charitable enough not to accuse him of racism, although the hoity-toity symbolism of his WASP skin problem serves mostly as a vehicle for dreary identity politics. My generation of entertainers (Quentin Tarantino, Seth MacFarlane) doesn’t care anymore, and neither do I. As a Gen-X white boy living under the glorious First Amendment, I feel little compunction about dropping an N-bomb here and there for rhetorical purposes[time-sensitive link].
As for the promised end-of-the-story zinger, there’s no there there. If only Updike had been a little more old-fashioned about the art of the short story, he would have put a plot in that thing. Paradoxically, at the same time, Updike displeased me by failing to be hip enough in his manner of writing. Novelist Jamie Malanowski, for example, knows what the written English language has to do to compete with television and YouTube in the twenty-first century. One of Malanowski’s friends and associates, Rebecca Lavoie, gives his novel The Coupfive stars at Amazon, yet she complains in passing that “the prose is so tight as to provide almost no exposition at all.” What she calls lack of exposition, I call appropriate pacing to tell a good written story these days.
Updike’s unforgivable hubris lies in being too cool to want to tell a story. The bitter old fart at the center of “Blue Light” is essentially dying of boredom. But anyone would, with the kind of psychedelic depression that Updike provides for the inner monologue. Lighten up, dude!
I’ll admit that this is species lookism on my part, but don’t judge me before viewing the CNN video. Beavis and Butt-head never jumped the proverbial shark by turning nice, and even they would have said, “Awww.”
Hypothetical date of a lifetime (in a good way) Katherine Mangu-Ward will eat anything—except for these cuties.
In related news, an endangered wild rabbit of Florida, Sylvilagus palustris hefneri, was named after you-know-who.
Try to imagine a sexy Dick Cheney. It’s not easy, of course, but Playboy managing editor Jamie Malanowski starts with that premise and takes us for a hell of a ride in The Coup, his novel of political satire and intrigue.
The vice president of the United States, protagonist Godwin Pope, does as well with the ladies as any other handsome, famous, socially graceful, independently wealthy bachelor. But after becoming lieutenant to his former political rival, President Jack Mahone, he finds himself promoted to his own level of uselessness. The job takes loads of his time while demanding very little of his intelligence or energy. His boredom makes him dangerous. One day, he notices that Jack’s indiscreet womanizing habit—and the gullibility of everyone else—give him an (underhanded) fighting chance for the presidency after all. Along the way, though, he meets Newsbreak reporter Maggie Newbold, who just might be that rare individual capable of outwitting him—and is clearly another Machiavellian sexpot like himself.
Malanowski’s prose has an agreeable trait in common with that of Stephen King: the vivid characters appear against the technicolor backdrop of American mass culture. With both authors, the effect is the literary equivalent of the best experience you could ever hope to have with 3-D glasses. I take pride in noting that bloggers play an indispensable role in the ecology of information flow that Godwin Pope endeavors to manipulate to his own advantage. The blogger’s art is young; the novelist’s art is old. But even as it flatters practitioners of the younger medium, The Coup reminds me that the novel is not due for retirement any time soon.
Does Thanksgiving force you to endure the company of a bunch of bozo relatives? I can feel your anger. It makes you stronger. Everyone who wastes your time during this extended weekend is now an enemy of the Republic. Do what must be done, Lord/Lady (SINISTER WORD). Ignore your next of kin without mercy. Watch these online videos instead of talking to them.
Pink Five is not to be underestimated. Like the illegal Mexican immigrants who become a feature film crew in Bowfinger, she appears politically incorrect at first but turns out rather elegantly empowered.
Update, October 2, 2008, 1:13 p.m.: The new video embeds of Pink Five’s host, Atom Films, start automatically when you load the web page. Since visitors to my blog deserve better than the noise pollution of all four of her films playing at once, I replaced the embeds with a poster JPG link.
The December 2007 Playboy hit newsstands today. But at least one fan site dedicated to the December Playmate, Brazilian-born Sasckya Porto, has already been on the Net for more than two weeks. I discovered it through SiteMeter, which told me that I owe some of my traffic to a link on that site.
Now more than ever, popular culture is made with the audience’s participation. Isn’t it great? The customer is king.
I was relatively green as a writer back then, but in two years, I’ve seen the need for only two minor corrections to my post for Halloween 2005—and one of those was before Reflections on Playboy was a month old. I hope you find it very scary sexy, kids.
But whatever you might do to get scared this Halloween, kids, don’t frighten yourself into a moral panic. The best part of the intellectual dimension of Playboy’s legacy will surely be a tendency to resist moral panic. But at the time I write this, not one single post at the official Playboy Blog mentions moral panic at all. Through Google, I found precisely one comment on the subject—and that was me under a pseudonym. You’re welcome, salaried keepers of the Playboy legacy.
Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy Philosophy”[not work-safe; online transcription not yet complete] of the 1960s predates the sociological term “moral panic” (coined by Stanley Cohen in 1972, the year I was born). But as a phenomenon, moral panic goes at least as far back as circa 428 B.C.: the date of the first production of the Greek tragedy Hippolytus (stress the second syllable, so that it almost rhymes with “hippopotamus”), by Euripides. Since Euripides must have seen self-righteousness around him to be inspired to write it, and since Plato was born around the same time as the first production, we know we can’t blame Platonism—for example—for self-righteousness in general. Since Euripides lived in a polytheistic society, we can’t honestly scapegoat monotheism, as the Sam Harris types do. Blaming either of them for a perennial human tendency is—guess what?—just another moral panic.
By the way, whether you leave a comment at the 2005 post or this one, I’ll read it promptly through my automated email notification and publish it. Note also that a Blogger.com account is completely optional—even if you want to leave a URL with your name. After all, there’s nothing scarier than giving up a little of your privacy forever, kids! Ah-ooo, or whatever a vampire is supposed to say, I guess.
I publish this post in the spirit of the unlikely but historically interesting dialogue between Playboy and mainline organized religion in the 1960s. Although I make no excuse for religion as the term is understood by, say, Osama bin Laden or Jack T. Chick, I believe I can defend a certain sophisticated kind of religiosity against the newly emboldened generation of militant atheists, like Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens.
The state of the art in this militancy is represented by this blog post at Jewcy.com (courtesy Reason.tv) inspired by a debate between atheist Hitchens and theist Dinesh D’Souza (unabridged video). First, Josh Strawn explains his problems with D’Souza’s arguments. Then he reveals (accurately) that atheism wasn’t fully spoken for in that debate:
But to Hitchens: why not school people in precisely how the human mind does work at this point in the argument? It certainly does obey laws—laws so material that the notions of subjectivity and consciousness on which the theist’s argument rest get blown to smithereens. If a human subject with a “mind” who makes ethical decisions that transfer to his or her immortal soul suffers a brain injury impairing his or her interpretive systems, ability to read human emotions (key to the brain response we know as ‘compassion’) then what’s happened to the soul? If I can remove the part of a person’s brain that enables ethical judgment, have I not surgically removed their moral soul? This connection between what the religious call the soul and what is known about material brain functionality severely undermines the theist’s notion of the “I” that makes choices that bear on “my” eternal soul. If I’m a neuroscientist, I can plug your immortal soul into a machine and map it’s [sic] electricity.
Descartes believed that somewhere in the brain there was a driver’s seat for the soul—the site where “you” make the decision to act, whether morally or immorally. But the “I” that so many take for granted is known to be nothing more than the brain’s interpretation of its own complex functioning. Multiple things occur in the brain that the “I” isn’t aware of and couldn’t control no matter how hard it tried. The notion of heaven, this place where all the “I”s will someday go because of things they did or didn’t do, is not commensurate with what is known about the brain. The human “I” in other words is little more than the transcendentalizing of an evolved brain phenomenon. If one accepts evolution, as D’Souza does, then one must also accept that these brains once had no ability to conceive of themselves in this way, much less to glorify it so. And so grows a new problem for the theist—not the atheist—to explain, one that isn’t unlike the ensoulment debate regarding abortion. Whence did the soul of the “I” come into being in terms of human evolution? And how can something be transcendent if it can be surgically removed?
Many have charged the new atheists of wearing out an old argument and passing off as if its [sic] new. But these questions are completely current. Francis Crick proclaimed the brain to be the great frontier of the 21st century and it has only been with the advent of computers in the last 20-30 years that the intensive acceleration in learning has taken place. Hitchens, Dennett, Harris, and Dawkins are not beating dead horses by the name of Russell or Nietzsche. They are pushing back the post-everything world’s increasing tendency to accept bullshit. And their rebuttals to this trend stand on foundations that aren’t hundreds or thousands but mere tens of years old. Hitchens could have been a bit more forward with some of this information. D’Souza could stand to be a bit more aware of it. But hey, the best bullshitters are the ones who believe their own bullshit.
Strawn foolishly tips his hand by mentioning René Descartes. Descartes’ framing of the mind-body problem has undeniable flaws. But this does not mean that the essential problem he faced is not a real problem for philosophy, even now. To prove it, I quote at length from How the Mind Works, by an especially smart atheist, Steven Pinker:
If we could ever duplicate the information processing in the human mind as an enormous computer program, would a computer running the program be conscious?
What if we took that program and trained a large number of people, say, the population of China, to hold in mind the data and act out the steps? Would there be one gigantic consciousness hovering over China, separate from the consciousnesses of the billion individuals? If they were implementing the brain state for agonizing pain, would there be some entity that really was in pain, even if every citizen was cheerful and light-hearted?
Suppose the visual receiving area at the back of your brain was surgically severed from the rest and remained alive in your skull, receiving input from the eyes. By every behavioral measure you are blind. Is there a mute but fully aware visual consciousness sealed off in the back of your head? What if it was removed and kept alive in a dish?
Might your experience of red be the same as my experience of green? Sure, you might label grass as “green” and tomatoes as “red,” just as I do, but perhaps you actually see the grass as having the color that I would describe, if I were in your shoes, as red.
Could there be zombies? That is, could there be an android rigged up to act as intelligently and as emotionally as you and me, but in which there is “no one home” who is actually feeling or seeing anything? How do I know that you’re not a zombie?
If someone could download the state of my brain and duplicate it in another collection of molecules, would it have my consciousness? If someone destroyed the original, but the duplicate continued to live my life and think my thoughts and feel my feelings, would I have been murdered? Was Captain Kirk snuffed out and replaced by a twin every time he stepped into the transporter room?
What is it like to be a bat? Do beetles enjoy sex? Does a worm scream silently when a fisherman impales it on a hook?
Surgeons replace one of your neurons with a microchip that duplicates its input-output functions. You feel and behave exactly as before. Then they replace a second one, and a third one, and so on, until more and more of your brain becomes silicon. Since each microchip does exactly what the neuron did, your behavior and memory never change. Do you even notice the difference? Does it feel like dying? Is some other conscious entity moving in with you?
Beats the heck out of me! I have some prejudices, but no idea of how to begin to look for a defensible answer. And neither does anyone else. The computational theory of mind offers no insight; neither does any finding in neuroscience, once you clear up the usual confusion of sentience with access [to information] and self-knowledge. [1997, p. 145-147]
With all the intellectual humility due a subject like this, I dare propose the beginnings of a solution. The philosophical problem of sentience almost literally stares us in the face from every mirror, no matter how hard some thinkers try to wish it away. If sentience is an undeniably real phenomenon that can never be identified as the direct consequence of any particular event at one place and time—not even the workings of a human brain—mustn’t it necessarily follow that sentience somehow characterizes the entire universe all at once?
D’Souza, to name only one, might have reasons to reject my question as a suitable defense of his sense of religion. For all I know, he might even call it an heretical argument leading to pantheism and animism. But as I said, my idea won’t satisfy every religious person’s sense of the value of religion. And, at the same time, if a philosophical debate drives me to the conclusion that the entire cosmos has a mysterious awareness of itself resembling mine, it seems a mild and forgivable anthropomorphism to call that consciousness God.
Of course, I don’t give myself credit for a brand new idea, either. From what little I understand of him, I wonder if Spinoza, for example, has already been there and done that. Anyway, my hat is in the ring, too, for what it’s worth.
This photo and plenty of salacious details of his birthday party come from TheVegasEye.com.
As a senior editor of Reason, Howley (pictured above) deserves better than the leering she gets from us libertarian horn dogs. But since it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission, I’ll go ahead and be part of the problem. She’s yummy! Fellas who wonder about her voice, her mannerisms, and her mind can sample them at Bloggingheads.tv. They won’t be disappointed.
Speaking of yummy, Reason associate editor Katherine Mangu-Ward (above) holds the alluring promise of culinary adventure for those with politically incorrect appetites. A couple of years ago, she read a passing reference to antelope steak in an O. Henry short story, she tells us:
Last but not least, Shikha Dalmia, a senior analyst at the Reason Foundation, deserves a place of honor here. Besides her beauty, I admire her excellent taste in stand-up comedians. Hot damn, any of these three ladies would be loads of fun on a date!
(Photo credit: Rod Dreher at Beliefnet.) Although I didn’t typically read Reason when she ran it from 1989 to 2000, it was sheer ingratitude for me to forget to include Virginia Postrel in this post. She wrote one of the “Intellectual Turn-Ons” in this blog’s sidebar, The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness. Libertarian women appear to be characterized by courage: Postrel not only discusses the politics of organ transplants in this Reason.tv video but actually does something about it for a friend in need. Wow!
If you like Shakespeare in Love, you’ll appreciate this variant on it.