Socia 2016, part 1

I spent the weekend listening to philosophers talk about life in the universe. Not metaphorical life, but actual physical life that we haven't found yet. It was a conference on Social and Ethical Issues in Astrobiology, formally organized by two philosophers and a NASA engineer, though the Clemson guy, Kelly Smith, did most of the actual physical work of buying food and finding easels for the student poster session and all that.  

I did not get much sleep while I was there. 

The first night was the first night. Several studies have shown that people sleep less well in new environments. Totally to be expected. The second night I was obsessively rehearsing (OK, mentally rewriting) my own talk – again, pretty normal. The third night I was up until 1:30 in the morning playing drinking games around a campfire with a half-dozen of the philosophers, which might have been normal twenty-five years ago, but is now distinctly not. Then I drove home in the gray daylight and took a nap, and then watched some Disney shorts, and then went to “real” sleep, and then woke screaming from some kind of nightmare that I don't remember, but which scared the crap out of my wife.   

So I am having a strange day. 

I am perched on a stool in the cafe at my wife's bookstore, the B&N at the Friendly Center here in Greensboro, with a big cup of coffee and Sadghuru Jaggi Vasudev's Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy. I can see her ringing up the customers at the font of the store, but mostly I am observing the humans as they move around the store. They are marvelously diverse in their postures and motions. Some of them are fat and some of them are old and all of them are looking at things. The light coming in through the windows is gray, but that's OK.   

At the conference, there was this Japanese researcher named Koji Tachibana who wanted to use MRI-based neurofeedback to help astronauts stay in a good mood to enhance their cooperation and mission performance. There was an actual astronaut there, an MD named Sheyna Gifford, who was freshly back from a year of simulating life on Mars in a grungy little hab on a volcano in Hawaii, and she kind of raised her formidable black eyebrows. But it was the philosophers who seemed much more “concerned” with the spectre of SF-style mind control. I had never before been so struck with the language of “rights” and “duties” and “ethical obligations” that they were throwing around all weekend. We in the West really believe, deep down, that people have to be forced to be good. That we have to force ourselves to be good. I don't know if that's just creepy-ass Thomas Hobbes,   

 [Leviathan frontispiece]

 [zoomed]

or if it goes all the way back to the Bible. But I want to contrast that with a little quote from this dude Sadghuru (p27):   

Why do you need to be pleasant within? The answer is self-evident. When you are in a pleasant inner state, you are naturally pleasant to everyone and everything around you. No scripture or philosophy is need to to instruct you to be good to others. It is a natural outcome when you are feeling good within yourself. Inner pleasantness is a surefire insurance for the making of a peaceful society and a joyful world.   

Clearly it's a little more complicated than that. Competition for limited resources is a permanent problem. DS Wilson and others have done at least some of the math to show that every time we hit a new level of social organization, the problems recur, and we have to invent new methods of solving the new versions of that same basic problem.    

Neither do I want to claim that East beats West, or Buddha is Best and Fuck the Rest, or anything like that. I do want to suggest that maybe this Japanese researcher, whose written English was better than his spoken English, may not have been thinking in terms of our Western pattern of forcing people to obey the social order, but in more Eastern terms of helping astronauts to transform their emotions so that they want to cooperate. Then neurofeedback would be an electronic version of the cognitive behavioral therapy that Dr. Gifford mentioned astronauts already being trained to do to themselves whenever they feel they need it.   Just a thought. 

Like I said, I'm having a strange day.