Yes, I had a very unusual upbringing… at least, back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, it was unusual.

I watched a lot of television, an amazing amount in retrospect, an amazing variety of shows – my parents didn’t seem to exert much control over my intake of cathode tube rays in the beginning. And my mother loved certain movies – Hitchcock, in particular. I remember seeing The Birds a number of times (starting around age 4) and being utterly fascinated and terrified.

I especially loved Westerns, war movies, and detective shows. More of my personal ethical inclinations owe more to John Wayne and Clint Eastwood’s work for Sergio Leone than to sermons and The Good Book.  Then there was The Fugative and its healthy dark fear of authority; and Ephrim Zembalist, Jr. on The FBI, who just seemed trustworthy, and the flatfoots on Dragnet, the patrolmen of Adam 12; Mannix, Cannon, Barnaby Jones, Columbo, Banacheck, McMillan and Wife, McCloud; later, there’d be Quincy, ME.

But above all there was The Rockford Files, with the maverick law-bending, hard luck, happy-go-lucky, barely making ends meet Jim Rockford/James Garner. I think he was my supreme archetype for what a man was supposed to be like – the guy who tries to do the right thing, screws it up, gets punished for it, tries to do the right thing again, and so on until, at the end, he’s as broke as he started the day. But he did what he was supposed to do: stood for something worth standing for, regardless of the price, and outwitted the opposition, sometimes with the help of some dumb luck (and a sympathetic scriptwriter).

I learned about all the great and not-so-great movies of the ‘70s as they came out in the then black and white inky pages of MAD Magazine – I was introduced to the not-so-subtle arts of parody and satire and caricature, and to a bit of New York sarcasm and Yiddish cursing, all a providing a view of the world new to me. Later on I discovered the originator of MAD – Harvey Kurtzman – through reprints of the ‘50s issues, which were utterly amazing, especially the pieces with the artist Will Elder. It was like looking at William Hogarth prints made for 20^th century sensibilities. As an aside, it was because of Elder and Kurtzman that I became interested in Hogarth, and thus in the 18^th c. and its satirists, such as Voltaire, its philosophies and ideas.

As I became a little older in the late ‘70s and hung around other degenerate young boys, we regularly got our hands on issues of Playboy by various means, most nefarious, others hilarious. Stories for another day. The direction I’m heading here is a little strange – while the other boys immediately went for the centerfolds (“My name is Candy and my biggest turn-on is a warm smile and my biggest turn-off is nose hair.”), I discovered that Kurtzman was writing a comic for Playboy called Little Annie Fanny – sometimes Elder did the illustrations, at other times other teams worked on them, but overall they were as hilarious and socially pointed as anything Mel Brooks did in his earlier movies (though I did not know this at the time as it would be years before I got to see a Mel Brooks movie). Not that I didn’t get around to looking at the centerfold (“My name is Candy…”) like everyone else, but I had to check out what was happening in the topsy-turvy world of innocent and moral -- and curvaceous and barely or non-clothed, big blue-eyed – world of ol’ Annie. My sense of humor, warped as it is, was being shaped, right along with my view of planet Earth – warped as it is, too. I mean, the planet, not my point of view.

Star Wars came out around this point. My life was, to say the least, a little unsteady those years due to an ongoing family crisis, and, for some reason, I experienced Star Wars as some sort of redemptive event, as if my seeing it would somehow make everything turn out alright, open doors to new worlds, brighten my horrible and bleak Appalachian-bound existence, heal the unhealable. I fell head over heels for Carrie Fisher, whom I love even more today as a fiction writer, social commentator, and activist for mental health and addiction issues. And she’s still pretty, too.

It was the first time a movie affected me – the first time I actually asked my father to break the 11^th Commandment: “Thou shat do no commerce with the infernal arts of Mr. Edison.” I suppose that was 1977 and I was 11. I begged, literally, I worked up elaborate and, actually, good counter-theological arguments to my father and his religion on this point. He did not relent. I questioned my faith, began to ask exactly how much any of it made any rational sense. Thus began my interest in philosophy of religion and comparative religion. 

It was also when I learned the lesson that it is probably better to ask forgiveness than permission. To this day I wish I’d just gone to see that movie and taken the punishment.

Plus, had I been allowed to see that movie, I’d probably be a respectable pillar of the community today instead of the trouble-making, anti-authoritarian bastard I am.

Parents, take a lesson.

So I began reading magazines of any sort that featured horror movies, fantasy, sci-fi, special effects. I began reading comics voraciously; the Start Wars comics adaptation of the movie by Howard Chaykin was how I learned the whole story, coupled with still photos from every scrap of print media that mentioned the movie. (Chaykin later became one of my heroes and is one of the finest storytellers and illustrators who’s ever slung ink – see his old American Flagg comics from the ‘80s for an example of parody, satire, and good writing mixed with fantastic comic art.)

The comics were my gateway to higher literature, politics, and a fair vocabulary. Most of the folks who wrote the better comics, of course, were frustrated novelists with university educations. They were probably bored, so there were references galore to the classics and various important issues in the '60s and '70s. My introduction to mythology came through Marvel's Thor, for example, and I initially learned of The Rev. Sung Yung Moon and religious cults and the utter strangeness of the American political scene from Steve Gerber's Howard the Duck (those of you who recall the fiasco of a movie based on that comic should wipe it clean from your mind and go get some old issues of the Gerber/Gene Colan--there's some nice satire there; and redheaded Beverwy, with her ridiculous lisp, is enchanting). 

Somewhere between Howard the Duck and the Nixon fiasco, my nascent political sensibilities were incubated.

My fascination with the morally ambiguous (aside from an obsession with the works of Edgar Alan Poe and a few others) came through the comics of the early '80s, especially Claremont and Byrne's New X-Men. Anyone who knows that comic via the movie versions should go track down the John Byrne run to get the full effect (or reprints, as they are extremely valuable now and you cannot have my copies).

The relationships between the characters is complex, their motivations are mixed... the most violent character, Wolverine, is genuinely the most sensitive and honorable, and wrestles with who he is and what he does. Phoenix is a mass murderer, but by accident (the Comics Code of Authority dictated she had to be punished, i.e. killed, eventually, even though her death itself was ethically questionable: a suicide).

There was more human drama in those books than the usual costumed morons doing silly nonsense. Chris Claremont performed an exploration, for about 25 issues, of what it means to be a human with human problems – and this is just what I needed at the ages of 13 and 14, living a life rife with similar questions.

The book also stressed what it was like to live as an outsider, feared and disliked by the larger community, and yet choose to live a principled life: For a boy-too-fast-becoming-an-adult without proper adult supervision, artistic, with uncommon tastes, in a small rural community where “different” equaled “evil” (by the age of 14 I was accused of witchcraft at high school by an assistant principle because of some of my other reading habits), these books provided role models of a sort. They were part of my education that intolerance should be met by decency and a proper sort of pride in one's differences and talents. They taught me to be slow in making judgments of others simply on the basis that they were not like me.

All for pennies a month.

Long story short: eventually I became a philosopher and have taught the subject. I read the classics. I received a fair university education and use it to continue educating myself, filling in the gaps in what I learned. Such is part of my life.

I also became an adult and had to choose how to live, which values to put into effect and instantiate in my actions – just as everyone else has to. I had to learn how to exercise my own judgment, to agonize over my choices, to care about others, to struggle to forgive when possible and attempt to show that fine mix of mercy and justice a person must to live in this world. I also had to learn how to admit when I'm wrong or have done badly, ask for forgiveness and try to make some sort of repair when I can.

I had to learn the value of being creative in all aspects of existence while savoring the same in the lives of others.

Yes, I had to grow up.

I had to learn to try to live with meaning – and how to get up in the morning and start over when I blow it. My life's no model of goodness by any stretch of the imagination; that's not the point of all this. The writer's no saint and has no illusion he could be. 

The point: The foundations were not laid in a school. They did not arrive with the diplomas. They were absorbed over time, as a child and young person, paying attention to the characters in stories on television and in comics, learning to interpret texts in many ways, paying attention to the attitudes of the writers and the artists, learning to see the world from a variety of cultural perspectives, and learning that my own individual perspective, though odd and out of step with my surroundings, was at least as valid and valuable as that of others.

Pop culture helped me learn to go my own way, helped me learn it was good to be my own person.

Perhaps that isn't the only value of pop culture – certainly it isn't. But for a boy in the backwards backwaters of America, it was a godsend. Maybe I found more in it than is, in fact, often there objectively. Maybe my imagination and mind used those things as a sort of Rorschach Test that invoked all sorts of thoughts and ideas that have little specifically to do with “what is there.” Maybe. But perhaps that in itself is of tremendous value and shows pop culture can have a level of significance and a use beyond simple entertainment, just as all works of art can feed the soul regardless of origin.

There is always more to human creations, no matter how common, than meets the eye.

In A.I. Research, the stopping problem is a particularly important one to solve. Humans have an innate ability to step back and wonder about the purpose of their actions, but machines so far have no such ability. Give a machine a problem and it will continue to solve that problem until the problem is solved. This is all very well for problems that have a definite ending – but how do we teach them to stop for a moment and wonder 'for what purpose am I doing all this?'

Obviously, we do not want personal computers suddenly stopping halfway through rendering a photoshop effect and asking itself this question – but in the future we may want intelligent automatons or androids to have the capacity to stop. Someday we (humanity) may be all gone, leaving only androids to remember us, and it would be a shame if they were locked in the same task forever more because we had not given them this talent. It would be good if the androids could reason that there was no point in continuing with their tasks if we were gone. It would be a perfect ending if the machines then sought purpose for themselves.

Now the stopping problem ties into philosophy. It is possible to get carried away with philosophy, and spend too much time on philosophy for philosophy's sake, when in fact there are other routes to knowledge which have been far more successful at answering particular questions. Take a step outside philosophy itself. Instead of thinking about thinking, you should be thinking about thinking about thinking. If philosophy is meta thinking (above thinking (because from above all its limitations should become clear)), then you should be meta meta thinking (or above thinking about thinking). Never forget the stopping problem.

So, when I say, "America is Dead," I am not issuing a threat or a warning. All I'm saying is the ideals of the Framers, freedom, diversity, unity, truth, justice, "The American Way", "The American Dream", and all the other things that made us Americans is dead. Sure, we went to war to prevent the use of "weapons of mass destruction," in an act of self-defense. That is the key word, self-defense. America went to war to protect itself, and only itself, from destruction. We didn't send soldiers to foreign lands when others were in danger, but when our skins are threatened we're Johnny On-The-Spot. Even more to the point, America invades countries to rid the world of nuclear weapons and yet, we have thousands. The American Dream becomes the American Hypocrisy, and we are no different than the "terror" we claim to be fighting. You, as readers, may notice that I use "we" when referring to America in the above paragraphs. When 9/11 occurred, I had no complaints that we had nukes to defend ourselves. That is because I find myself just as hypocritical and no better than those who pull the trigger.

A colleague of mine met my argument with his own theory that America was never born. That the promises of freedom and unity were "empty promises" and the ideal of the American Dream was a complete hoax. I agree with him indefinitely. But, there in lies the rub. If the American Dream is not real, why do our leaders impose it upon the general public so much? They use the American symbol to win you over to their side, democrat, republican, liberal, conservative, and independent alike. Despite the empty promises of freedom and unity made by our forefathers, they created a symbol, the American symbol. Today, that symbol is manipulated to serve some men, not all men.

 

Take the case of electricity, it's so much a part of our everyday existence that we take it too much for granted. Just imagine a brownout that last for 10 hours. What do you feel when electricity is restored? We used to complain when our internet processing is slow. But imagine 3 days (or a week) without internet? I guess we will be all smiles when service is resumed. What about water shortage? How many times have we complained about this or that, then when it took a leave of absence (electricity, internet, water), it was then we realized how much we missed it and how good things were for us. Some people just never learned because when they got it back they return to their old habitual indifferent approach (and the same misery awaits them again once they lose it). But for some, after getting that something back, they begin to see things in a different light.

So what's the message here? When you are feeling down and depressed that things aren't going the way you want them to be, just go out and look around you because blessings are really everywhere (plentiful and overflowing).

Some we see (material stuff and all), some we feel (love, attention, care, good health). Still some others are so much part of our life that we never even think of them. The mere fact that we wake up every morning is something to be thankful already. The mere fact that we can stand up and use all our faculties in our everyday activities is another reason to be happy. Heck, just close your eyes for 3 minutes and grope around until you become frustrated and lost, then open them again. You'll realize how good it feels to see again.

One of the best ways to be happy is to always remember and count our blessings.

• Common sense is genius dressed up in work clothes. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
• Confidence, like art, never comes from having all the answers; it comes from being open to all the questions. (Earl Gray Stevens)
• Confrontation doesn't always bring a solution to the problem, but until you confront the problem, there will be no solution. (James Baldwin)
• Consider how hard it is to change yourself, and you will understand what little chance you have trying to change others. (Anonymous)
• Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. (Ambrose Redmoon)
• Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen. (Winston Churchill)
• Criticism should always leave people with the feeling that they have been helped. (Anonymous)

There are so many of life's lessons in these quotes that one can learn from. The Native Americans had a way of making sure the story's and saying of our ancestors was not forgotten. They told story's to remind everyone of the old ways and the old teachings of our people.

We have truly lost so much by not passing some of these quotes down from generation to generation. Some of the morals and values that this country was founded on come from the same quotes and story's passed from one generation to the next.

So the next time the adults of your families are sitting around telling story's from childhoods long gone, do not send your children out of the room telling them to go play. Include them so that they too may one day tell their children and their children's children the stories you have come to know.

Who knows what wonderful lessons they will learn at the knees of their elders. Just make sure that any jokes that are told are not the colorful kind. Or you will find your child repeating that story word for word and not misquoting it. Somehow they always get those stories right.

Yet, there is a problem, and the problem has yet to be resolved. If you believe in God, then you would probably also accept the fact that God is omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient. The problem comes with the fact that God is omniscient. If God is omniscient, that means that he know everything. Then, it would also follow that he knows to an exact certainty everything that is to happen in the future. If he knows exactly what is to happen in the future, doesn't that mean that the future is predetermined? For free will to exist, it seems to be that there needs to be this notion of uncertainty. If my friend John has gotten an A on every mathematics test so far, then it would be reasonable to believe that he will also get an A on the next test. However, I cannot know that to a certainty. He might suddenly decide to fail the next test just for the hell of it, so he is not compelled to earn an A. But, to know a future event to an absolute certainty must mean that the event is predetermined.

Well, you can easily brush that off by saying, “I don't believe in God anyways.” That, however, does not solve the problem of free will. If God does not exist, science still poses a problem for free will. One of the major “laws” of science is that everything has a cause. If my car breaks down and I ask an auto mechanic what happened, he is not going to go very far by saying, “Well, it just happened. There was no cause, it just broke down.” There was cause, like everything else in science, and that cause was governed by the laws of science. Additionally, that cause was caused by something else, which in turn was caused by something else, and so forth. So, through science, it is starting to seem as if everything has a deterministic cause. It is as if the Big Bang set up the initial conditions and everything else followed like dominoes. If the world functions in such a causally deterministic manner, what room is there for free will?

One way out of this free will mess is compatibilism: the idea that free will and determinism are compatible. Compatibilists will argue that although our choices are determined, we could have acted differently if chosen, and that is sufficient for free will. However, the fact that we did not, or could not, have acted differently was in it of itself determined.

Another defense for free will is resorting to quantum mechanics. Some of you may think that quantum mechanics is no better than determinism. Quantum mechanics states that at the quantum level, everything is random, but does that really give us free will? Instead of having our actions follow one another like a series of dominoes, they are now determined by the roll of the die. With quantum mechanics, our actions aren't really free, rational, and voluntary. Instead they are just random.

But the UC Berkeley philosopher John Searle would argue otherwise. He first argues that quantum mechanics shows that actions are not necessarily determined. He goes on to say that although activity at the quantum level is random, that does not mean that activity at the higher levels are also random. The fact that neurons in the brain fires at x hertz does not mean that the brain in general also fires at x hertz. So, he concludes that through quantum mechanics, it is possible that we may have free will.

However, his argument is less than satisfactory. It tells us that it is possible for free will to exist, but how possible is it, we do not know. Not only that, but he seems to be making the same mistake that he criticizes. He says that it would be a logical fallacy to say that because things are random at the quantum level, things are also random at the higher level. But, he himself says that because activity is indeterminate at the quantum level, activity must also be indeterminate at the higher level.

So, now what? Some of you may ignore the problem of free will and ask, “Why does it matter?” After all, whether or not free will exists, tomorrow you will still wake up, take a shower, eat breakfast, and do what you do everyday. But free will does matter. Take responsibility for example: we can only be responsible for things we committed in our free will. Or how about individuality: our individuality is determined by the free, rational, choices that we made. Some of you may be existentialists, which quite a popular philosophy. One of the key beliefs of existentialism is the belief that everybody has free will. But, if free will doesn't exist, it seems that the whole philosophy of existentialism falls apart.

So, the problem of free will is not something that we could just ignore. It is relevant to everything we do and who we are. As of yet, there is no satisfactory solution to the problem. But who knows, in the future, we may find the answer to this age-old question.

The Science of Dreaming

At their simplest, dreams are part of a natural cycle of the brain during sleep. Most people spend around 100 minutes a night in the dreaming or REM phase of sleep, dipping into this dream sleep perhaps four or five times.

Sleeping like a baby.

Dreams Inspiring Big Ideas

There is far more to dreaming than sleep cycles. For one thing, dreams are a powerful source of inspiration and ideas from dreams may be found in unlikely places.

Einstein claims his Nobel Prize-winning theory of relativity came from a dream. A row of cows are leaning against an electric fence. Einstein and a farmer are standing at opposite ends of the fence when it is suddenly switched on and the cows leap away. The two men discuss what they have just seen in the dream only to discover they have witnessed oddly different events. When he woke, the memory and strange resonance of the dream stayed with Einstein. He puzzled over it until he realised that the dream was showing him previously unimagined implications of the nature of light and time.

Otto Loewi also pulled of the dream-a-Nobel-Prize trick, after a little persistence. Having devised a theory in the field of Biology, a way to prove it finally came to him in a dream seventeen years later. He immediately wrote it down, but in the morning all he found it was an illegible scrawl! The next night, the dream came again and in the morning he could still recall the design of a simple but ingenious experiment. He rushed to the lab and following the dream, found he did indeed have his proof.

Dreams Inspiring Society

We've looked at sudden moments of inspiration, but dreams also have an all pervading and unobtainable quality. For most people, nothing will hold back dreams. If we don't sleep enough, our dreams begin to slip into our waking experience. Mystics such as Shaman and Medicine Men are often said to live in the waking world and the world of dreams at the same time. Their inspiration may knowingly or otherwise guide the broad patterns of our lives.

Black Elk, was a Native American Medicine Man and a survivor of the massacre at Wounded Knee. He describes his dream as a child: “I was standing on the highest mountain of them all and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and starlight, and in the centre grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all children.”

The dream and the philosophy that stemmed from it guided Black Elk and thus the Sioux people for many years. That dream finally came to and end at Wounded Knee. Some time later he said: "I did not know then how much was ended. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. The nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead"

How Big do you Dream?

Are dreams then a moment at night when our intuition opens up? Or are they in fact something huge, the world and the backdrop that our lives are contained within? In the world we are familiar with, we still understand Martin Luther Kings' "dream" and we look for that defining vision in life.

So next time life lacks that little something, perhaps you should take a look at what you're dreaming….

Kant's starting point was the premise that there is a general universal sense of justice and good. He argued that it is by and large applicable to the majority of people. An example of this would be if a person were to see another person being bullied, in the majority of cases, the aforementioned person would feel duty bound or obliged to help the victim. This leads o a general sense of morality throughout the World. Although this morality cannot necessarily be proven it implies existence of God.

Kant's focus is on the aspect of obligation, that a person feels obliged to do good, knowing that it will bring about more good and overall more happiness this search for the higher goo is referred to as the Summum Bonum.. Kant also states that for his proposed theory to be feasible then there must be a universal moral law, that a person must fin through use of reason. Once this universal moral law is found then a person will feel a duty to follow it. This law become categorical, essential and it becomes imperative that everyone should follow it.

Another way of considering this moral argument is that man as a moral being has a duty to strive after the highest good, the Summum Bonum. That is to say that a man should realise happiness through moral perfection. This is arguing that we could not be happy without being morally good people as being morally good is part of the nature of human happiness. Kant argues that evil should be and is seen as dysfunctional, it is generally a universal agreement that evil is something that no one would want for themselves.

Kant moves on to say that if we accept that this instinctive duty of good deeds exists it must be capable of achievement It is fait to say that despite differing opinions of "good" we all have the urge to do it. Kant follows that no such urge could possibly exist for a thing that is completely non achievable.

He continues that it is apparent that humans cannot by their own means obtain happiness. The highest ideals of humanity still fail to accomplish the aim, disagreement within oneself over moral issues would cause conflict and thus unhappiness and thus our inner yearnings cannot be satisfied by human efforts.

Finally Kant summarises that if there is to be an eventual supreme happiness or Summum Bonum then we must postulate a perfect being that can bring about this supreme happiness and a life within which it can be achieved. This missing link that can bring humanity the means to achieve their own happiness fits the form of a perfect God.

1. Discovering

   Discovering a meaning is one of the main meanings of life. after all if we were already told the answer to this question, would there still be a meaning?

2. Finding

   After discovering the meaning of life you need to find it. Use your knowledge of the world around you to search for the hints to put you in the right direction. These signs come in many forms from the common “STOP” sign to a person telling you about their day.

3. Learning

   Learning what the meaning of life is one of the most important steps in operating it. It may exceptionally improve your life or you may lose it and have to go back to step 1. You only get one chance to use each meaning life gives you so use it wisely; for the choices of today can influence tomorrow.

4. Experience

   Understanding the meaning of life involves enjoying the experiences brought forward by life. It is commonly reported the the experience is the most enjoyable aspect of the journey. Most people recommend sharing the experience with another person before starting to find one's own meaning in life. Sometime it even lasts until a lifelong dream comes true.

5. Spread the Word

   Tell others about the meaning of life and spread the link to this document if you must. It is through hard work, dedication, and creativity that the meaning to life is found. Inviting others to join you on your quest will also be an enriching experience for them also. So get out there, and start searching for the meaning. You may have just read a sign, right in front of you.

Choosing just five ancient Western philosophers was not and easy task. Leaving out some, like the pre-Socratics, gives an incomplete picture of others. Explaining the convoluted history of their influences on modern life is the work of a lifetime! Hopefully this little article has gotten you to think about where some of our common themes come from and whetted your appetite for philosophy.