Ever attended a standup comedy show? The Jokester is on stage with a mic in hand. She’s pacing back and forth, eyes cast downward, maybe shooting a furtive glance at the teleprompter, or otherwise trying to conjure the next lines of her delivery all on her own. Either way, when eventually that next Funny Thing enters her brain, the first thing that happens is a constellation of motor neurons fire. This causes her mouth and tongue and vocal chords to activate in a just-so way, producing a sound wave in air, which is detected by the eardrum of the listener, there converted into a mechanical impulse, followed by conversion in the cochlea to an electrical impulse, which is conducted along the auditory nerve to the brain stem (initial processing), and from there relayed through the thalamus and on to the temporal lobe where it is finally – finally! – converted into the meaning of the Funny Thing spoken. Phew! I bet you thought hearing was simple.

What happens next? Pop quiz

A. You cry
B. You laugh
C. You cheer, like when your team scores a point
D. You experience a profound feeling of dread
E. None of the above

The correct answer of course is B. When someone tells a joke, unless you don’t find it funny, or don’t get it, you laugh (or chuckle, whatever, depending on the concentration of the Funny Thing. Because let’s face it, just like Love, Comedy is a drug). Hold this thought.

Now let’s turn our focus to an apologist for tRump. Say he accepts an invitation to participate on a prime time CNN news show, to give his take on the show’s topic du jour, namely: An assessment of presidential readiness for office. He’s joined on this panel by five hostile pundits, all of whom are all ideologically opposed to tRump (and by association, to our apologist as well). In this context, we’ll call the apologist the token republican punching bag. Feel free to imagine his appearance however you’d like. He and the five pundits are seated around a long and wide, boomerang-shaped, see-through glass table. Seated at one end of the table is a middle-aged, attractive black woman, necklaced in a plain string of pearls, who holds a law degree from a credible college and has professional creds working as a DA in under-served communities in Louisiana, and is said to have modeled her career on the same of VP Harris’ in California; seated next to her is another woman, white, also attractive, freshly primped in makeup, a young up-and-comer in the punditry circuit who’s cut her teeth as an embedded reporter to the Assad atrocities in northern Syria, so she’s come to understand the importance of a clear-eyed commander in chief in matters of foreign policy; next to her we have the roly-poly boomer, now a lecturer in academia, who’s old enough to recall he served as an advisor to an advisor to the Clinton administration, oh, and he’s also co-authored some bestsellers about politics; next to him we have the show’s lead, an attractive, high-cheek-boned news anchor, recently promoted to the role for her uncanny ability to cut to the heart of any issue and bring out the best of her guests through bitingly challenging questions – she’s dressed professionally in a blouse, jacket and skirt, with her stocking’d legs strategically crossed and visible through the glass tabletop, where she can be seen distractedly dangling a stylish nude pump; to her right is a retired military general wearing the jacket of his rank, replete with insignias running the length of his arm, staring directly at the camera, steely-eyed and humorless; and lastly, to his right, as if exiled from the discussion, our republican punching bag. Having a two-hundred-fifty pound, retired, four-star general who’d served multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, seated between the punching bag and the show’s lead is seen as no coincidence.

This is all made up by the way. You should not have the impression I’ve described a real CNN panel of pundits and guests. OK, with the table set, let’s move on.

After a commercial break the camera focuses on the lead. After she issues the boilerplate caution to viewers – that some viewers may be disturbed… – she queues several clips taken from tRump’s recent stump speeches. The panel turns to watch the clips on the studio monitor, the same thing TV viewers watch. Once the clips finish, focus returns back to the studio where all five pundits are aghast, their heads bowed and shaking in disgust. The punching bag is unmoved, stoic. The lead finally raises her head and turns to face the punching bag, and puts the questions to him, “Are you not horrified by this misogynistic bile that tRump spews at his rallies? Do you really think this is consistent with the character we want our president, the commander in chief, to possess?“

The punching bag straightens in his chair, casts a disappointed glance at each of the pundits, pauses briefly, then turns again to look at the lead. He smirks and says, He was joking!

You instantly see the problem with that answer, right? We’ve just reviewed the basic biology of a Joke as it passes from one brain into another, and the typical emotional response the average hearer of said joke would have. And the answer was not C. (cheer). And yet, when tRump spews at his rallies – I love women! Why I’m going to be the Bestest Protector of Women Ever. I’m going to protect them good and hard (whether they like or not) – how did His Followers respond? Like it was a joke? No, they cheered, uproariously they cheered. So unless His Followers are biologically atypical human beings, and I’ve no reason to presume they are atypical human beings in terms of their basic biology, then tRump could not possibly have been joking there. An audience doesn’t cheer when they hear a joke. To hear tRump’s promise that he’ll be the Grand Protector of women – like it or not! – and respond by cheering, that is consistent with approval of a point tRump scored, not the feeling of amusement. Cheering and laughter have very different emotional activators. And that’s a statement of biology, not prejudice.

But our (hypothetical) panel of very serious pundits at CNN didn’t swing when slow-pitched a softball. Why not? When the republican punching bag declared tRump was merely joking about what he spewed about women, a couple of them may have rolled their eyes, sure, but that was it. Why on earth did no one on that panel quickly respond as I did here? Why acquiesce like that when, surely to a one, each of their bullshit detectors was pegging? I hope it wasn’t due to a misplaced nod of collegial respect for a fellow pundit. Good grief, the man made a claim that was unequivocally false! That’s professional misconduct undeserving of anyone’s respect. He makes a fool of you, and all you do is abide it with a disapproving eye roll. Seriously, that’s it? You wouldn’t see the liberal punching bag on FOX’s The Five skate by unmocked were she to dismiss as a joke some Democratic candidate’s nonsense. No, to a one they’d be champing at the bit to have their turn with her. I am not a fan of allowing others’ putrid ethics guide my own, but for chrissake in a battle of wits try arming yourself next time CNN.

I recently heard what sounded like a credible report that the Joe Rogan Experience podcast has more subscribers than CNN & FOX combined. In addition to podcasting, Joe Rogan is also a comedian. Joe’s jokes make comedy club audiences laugh. I’ve personally watched only a couple of those performances online, though I feel confident that not once has his audience ever cheered when he cracked a joke. Whereas his breezy interview style on his podacst has gained him a gazillion likes, the online equivalent of a cheer of approval. Audiences respond differently to Joe depending on the context of his performance. On his podcast he is respectful of his guests, some say to a fault. Yet when he hosted tRump and challenged tRump’s belief that he won the last election, Joe laughed at tRump. He laughed because tRump is joke. I did not laugh when later Joe endorsed tRump. I also did not cheer. The human emotion of anger has different triggers entirely.

Oh, do tell, from here, we go
unknown, the wilds, in time
will tell
lead, or follow, where friend be foe?
come to us, wisdom
let us know, for now
we wither, the past, undone
the folly, yet sewn, has-
not won

What do you do when you have no relevant life experiences to inform the stories you want to write? Stories that readers will want to read?

Asking for a friend.

Make it up!

Sounds good, except you can travel only so far outside your own mind crafting a story. Science fiction writers travel the furthest. I read Zelazny, Spinrad, Heinlein, Asimov, Niven & Pournelle, and many others when I was young. Possibly because I wasn’t a very patient reader back then, most Sci-Fi stories didn’t grab and hold my attention. Some were ok, good enough that I finished the book, but overall, meh. I read a lot of science fiction, many of the titles were recommended to me by friends who absolutely devoured Sci-Fi books. I didn’t much care for the writing style, though, it too often felt stilted to me. Too much telling. As a reader, I want to experience the character’s thoughts, not the author’s. And even more than that, I want what I read to express… big word alert… verisimilitude. For me a story needs to feel true or real. I want one that shows me something about the authentic human condition, preferably a condition foreign to me before I picked up the book. That’s mostly why I read fiction.

Millions of very fine readers loved the Hobbit series. Many more the same for Harry Potter. I’ve read neither, but I get it. I’m in awe of writers who travel far outside their own life experiences, fantasize while aboard a delayed London train and craft a story with the power to hold millions of readers rapt for hundreds of pages, and maybe hundreds more in sequels. If you enjoy reading stories about human-like creatures, or worlds of magic, carry on, enjoy your book. I am not some member of the gatekeeper’s guild of superior fiction here to tell you what you ought to be reading. Or to diminish Sci-Fi and other genres (e.g.romance novels) by saying they are to “literary writing” what food trucks are to Haute cuisine. Although even within genre there are so-so writers (storytellers) and really good writers, it’s not a flat distribution. Peruse the shelves of “best sellers” at an airport bookstore next time you’re there, read the first few pages of some of those books, you’ll see the difference. The quality of a novel (or short story) is not entirely subjective, is all I’m saying.

Back to my query about writing outside your experiences – research is one way. Especially useful for the writer of historical fiction, of course. These days as a writer you gotta be careful what sort of people and places you invite to your fiction. You don’t want to be accused of “cultural appropriation.” Or imagine a male author writing a story from a female point of view. Gender appropriation! Naive rebel that I am, I’m actually working on such a story, told from a female, first-person point of view. I’ve never existed as a female, never had female experiences, so I’m left trying to conjure the “voice” of a woman. She may not survive revision, or maybe the story won’t end up being about what I now think it might be. Which is a nice and flexible feature of the creative process, especially edition – you can’t necessarily predict (and good advice has it you shouldn’t try) which parts will stay and which will go, or even where the story will end up. The science guy in me resists proceeding without intention, or a plan, but little by little I’m engaging the right half of my brain.

Moral: Write what compels you, advantage life experiences where relevant, do some research, and creatively make the rest up. Write well, revise, revise, revise, and it will all come together in the end. Keep at it.

To have lived an ordinary life is to have existed insignificantly in this world. Put another way, my irrelevance is widely known. If this is your predicament, think about trying to write your way out of it. And the better trained you are the more likely you’ll succeed.

One writer who did succeed, a guy I’d never heard of until last week, in eloquent prose held forth on his Substack blog about a neat trick he believes can avoid the pathology of a xenophobic mind – Read. And not just any old thing. Compile a list of the great works of western culture, he said, and get started. (His post began with the strong encouragement to not die before reading Anna Karenina – “It’s not worth it,” he said. (Note to self: Better get going then!)) He seemed confident that by reading the great works of literature written in the western tradition by very smart and insightful people, that that would open the reader to a permanent transformation of her worldview. I believe this is true. I also believe it is true that regardless of the endeavor we set ourselves to, we stand on the shoulders of the giants who’ve preceded us. So if you want to write well, start by looking back, reading the works of the great writers who’ve come before you. My only caveat to that advice would be to look back, yes, but don’t stare.

What I mean by don’t stare is this (stay with me): In the language of mathematical modelling there’s a concept referred to as “over-training.” Say you’ve conceived a model to detect cancer based on genes. First, you’d “train” your model on all the genes measured in an independent set of samples (biopsies) taken from real cancer patients. You can think of this training phase as saying to your model, See here, this is what cancer looks like, got it? Roger that, your model replies, and it studies the samples very closely to produce a list (ideally small) of only those genes required to accurately sniff out cancer. Lastly, in order to find out if your model is any good – to see how well it’s learned – you’d challenge it with a new sample, one that was not in the training set, and then prompt it, Hey model, does this patient have cancer?

Over-trained models are notorious for getting the answer wrong. When a new cancer sample doesn’t reveal a gene pattern “mathematically close” to any of those it trained on, and it miscalls the sample – maybe it replies, nope that ain’t cancer (when it really was) – and it’s wrong too many times, then we’d say that model is likely over-trained. The most common cause of an over-trained model is “staring at the training data for too long.” By analogy, if you train your brain on the great works of literature, fine, but if your goal in reading is to gain a wider, more nuanced worldview (i.e. a better model of the world), and not have your worldview “over-trained” on only the great works in the western tradition, maybe put some modern works of literature on your list and/or in other ways read around more (i.e. expand your training set).

Days later, after considering that blogger’s advice, I streamed a discussion (podcast) with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Wherein he said a lot of things. There was one thing, though, that he was emphatic about that caught my attention – Write. More specifically, he paid forward the advice he’d gotten from a writing mentor shortly after he’d entered Brown University, which was that if you want to write well, then get out in the world and experience as many things as you can, directly, then write about those experiences, concisely. Or to quote George Orwell: the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. Right about then Chloe was tugging at the leash, eager to introduce herself to a passerby who’d snuck up behind me (I was streaming the podcast on my earbuds). Earlier in the walk, Chloe had done the very same thing to another woman who I’d spotted walking toward us. This time I permitted her enough leash to greet the woman, so it was all good, and as I had paused the podcast when I saw her approach, I was able to hear her say her name, and that she knew HW, and then…”I enjoy your blog.” And that just made my day.

Anyway, an interesting kind of yinyang thing that writing well and reading well are dependent on each other. Writing involves reading your own mind, and translating it to the page, whereas reading is just training your brain on the experiences of others, via their writing, which is nothing more than the result of them reading their own brains! Either way, the point is the more variety you admit to your training set, the better your model of the real world will be, and in turn the better your own writing will be? That sounds about right to me.

Not long ago people worried that nobody writes anymore. They recalled an era when friends and colleagues poured their hearts out to each other in letters. Even today, the unfathomable word count of the Internet notwithstanding, discovery of a handwritten missive in the snailbox from a friend or loved one continues to stir in its recipient anticipation and wonder. Other letters, those thick ones requiring two postage stamps, may sometimes raise a quiescent sense of dread. It turns out that conveying sadness and regret (and other frailties of the human condition) takes more words. For the writer who’s merely writing to thank you for a good time had, well, the space of a three by five card may be all that’s needed.

Yet as personally felt as a handwritten letter may be, it’s too often its own problem. Some writers cursive style I simply cannot read. Misspelling doesn’t bother me; words or whole phrases crossed out doesn’t put me off; if the ‘^’ character appears mid-word to correct a spelling, fine; or if the writer feels the need to shout in all caps, I can excuse that. What I find difficult to brook is penmanship that looks like it was trained on the Dead Sea Scrolls! If I hear one more person pine for the return of cursive writing instruction to the classroom…I can’t predict my behavior. Marshall McLuhan once famously claimed that the communication medium itself is more important than the message it carries. This would suggest that writers writing in the “medium” of glamorous cursive styles believe their flowery “Qs” and indecipherable loop-de-loop letters encode their own meaning. It’s like saying in the spoken word that dolphin-speak is its own meaning. If you’re a dolphin, maybe. Or a crackpot republican (fun begins around 40 seconds in). For the rest of us old schoolers, if you want to reach out to us hand-writers, yes! by all means. But please print next time. Your words mean things, not your penmanship.

Beautiful, innit? The brain of a fruit fly, showing neurons (~ 140,000) color coded by the circuit they operate in. See the full report here.

The entire brain of a fruit fly is no larger than a sesame seed. This is a breathtaking accomplishment, about a decade in the making. I mean c’mon, you don’t need to be a neuroscientist to have your mind blown by this. Better yet, read the report and you’ll see the scientists, having captured the full map of the fly brain, used it to create a virtual brain which they then installed in a virtual fly. Then they stimulated the specific neurons that sense a sugar taste, and viola! the toy fly’s proboscis (nose) extended toward the sensation, just like the proboscis would on a real fly intending to feed. As if that weren’t cool enough, they then figured out the specific neuronal pathways involved in sensing sugar on both the right side and left side of the proboscis, different pathways. And here’s what they found

The simulated brain did what a real brain would: It commanded the proboscis to stick out so that the fly could eat. And if the virtual fly tasted sugar only on the right side of its proboscis, the brain sent commands to bend it toward the right.

And you know what they didn’t find? Not a spec of evidence for a “conductor” of the fly’s thoughts. Imagine that – a brain that animates its host all by itself. The heresy!

And below is the animated 3-D image. See the article for the toy fly in action. More of this please, scientists 😉

People, I beseech you, that’s A LOT of interconnected ganglia to make a fruit fly work, no? Think about this next time you carelessly swat and kill one.

All moral judgement goes out the window once you accept the world as it is. I didn’t choose to write that sentence. It arrived in my brain, unbidden, all on its own. Same for this sentence, and the next. Imagine the experience of the feeling of freedom that comes from accepting that all that occurs in this world is as it is, that every single outcome (the future) could not have been otherwise. Next, consider putting this proverb into practice in your daily life. Start simple. Try it for one day. Monitor your thoughts closely. Each time you note yourself wanting to render moral judgment of any kind (“that was wrong, and so…“; “it was your responsibility to…“; “you should have instead done…“; blah blah) – stop yourself and consider that whatever this person did or said was not of her “choosing,” and then you might understand why any moral rebuke from you would be silly. After all, if she can’t choose her thoughts, then she can’t choose her actions either, so how can she be held “responsible” for causing the future? And withholding moral judgement cuts both ways. When what someone says or does aligns with a good outcome, to paraphrase Barack Obama, “You didn’t do that.” Withhold your praise. Same goes for someone whose action aligns with a bad outcome. Withhold your admonition. When you come to accept that you don’t think your own thoughts, and come to accept that you can’t do otherwise, then the moral judgement of any human actor (yourself included) is easily seen as a pointless exercise, like shaking your fist at the rain.

Also consider that the qualities of good and bad do not require the prior of a moral constitution. There are plenty of books of philosophy wherein the authors provide a secular basis for good and bad. Smart people have been thinking about this stuff for a very long time now. And I’m not saying good and bad are not subjective. Any given future state of affairs may be good (or bad) for you, consistent (or not) with the purpose of human flourishing, and simultaneously be the opposite for another person, surely. So if the action a person takes directly causes you to experience a bad state of affairs (e.g., she steps into the crosswalk and you hit her with your car), it seems to me it would be a natural and fair human response to say so (fuck, this is bad), just avoid any moral accusations directed at the pedestrian, implying that she could have thought or acted otherwise. This is a really hard way to think about this; I know, I’ve tried. I keep trying. Although I can report that, each time I’ve responded to a person absent the tone of moral judgement, I feel better about myself, like I’ve experienced a kind of positive feedback, even if it’s short-lived.

Personally, I don’t much care what the roots of moral sentiments are in human psychology. Evolution! Maybe. Although I find the conclusion that all physical and mental traits of an organism (humans included), viewed as they are by evolutionary biologists as being nothing more than in service to reproductive success, deeply unsatisfying. While it doesn’t really matter to my point here what the source of morality is, when I have paused to think about the root cause, my conclusion, more a hypothesis really, is that all the moral sentiments expressed by humans are grounded in some way in the religious traditions they practice, and have practiced in one form or another since we started to walk upright. I imagine that when the ancients looked into the night sky, they were both humbled and terrified. Terrified because unlike any other animal, they were self-aware of their own mortality. They thought themselves special. Different from the other animals in some important but hard-to-describe way. So they made up stories regarding their origin, which over time gave way to creeds for proper behavior within the groups they formed, and to guide their various modes of worship. In time, nearly ever human alive became convinced he was special in some way, came to believe all were endowed with free will, that each person had an author up there that directed his thoughts, an author which could realize any possible future, among many, that the free-willer desired. But before long people started suffering moral opprobrium for doing or saying (or not) things they couldn’t possibly do or say otherwise, all because of this ancestral, mythical belief that they could. The rest of it is explained by inheritance, the passing down of these stories and their creeds to subsequent generations of people, right up to today, including the underlying belief that humans can somehow “choose” the future with their minds. And when they screw up, the bad outcomes are their fault, because of course they could have done otherwise, right? And where their supposed “choices” align with good outcomes, well, atta-boys are used to reinforce the myth that I chose my future!

There has to be an unsettling consequence to the conscience of people who really deep down have come to believe the future is fully determined, and the notion that human beings cannot do (act or speak) otherwise to change it (cause it). Because even as I have tried to sustain my responses to people as though this is true, is has set me to experience a kind of cognitive dissonance in my mind. For example, when I speak my order to the ice cream store person – I’ll have chocolate, please – how is that not me changing the future state of affairs from what it otherwise might have been, i.e. a future where I had chosen vanilla or strawberry? The answer, I think, owes to a cultural myth, handed down from my ancestors, reinforced during my upbringing, which gives rise to the intuition that, as a human, I am special in some spiritual way. This is evidently so deeply felt it’s very hard for me (and likely you as well) to try and force my brain to relearn what, in fact, is really going on – understood through modern neuroscience that my brain output (thoughts) cannot, and do not, determine the future. But here’s the thing: If the act of my speaking “chocolate” was fully determined before I spoke it, if that instantaneous state of mind did not produce the future (chocolate vs another flavor), if it only represents the future after the fact of it, ok, but then what is the most immediate prior cause of any future state of affairs? The underlying laws of physics? I’m a science guy, I admit that makes my brain hurt.

A parting thought…

If we humans are merely amoral agents whose brains represent predetermined states of reality – what I call experience – instead of the widely held belief that we are the author of our own thoughts which determine the future, then all our moral sentiments are up for re-consideration. Take pride and forgiveness. Both are sentiments that entail a moral judgement. If a person can’t think her own thoughts, if I’m right she may only experience and respond to the thoughts that come to her unbidden, then whether some future state of affairs is good or bad makes no difference, she is both an acausal and amoral agent with respect to that state of affairs, no different than, say, a tree. And who is proud of a tree for the shade it provides, or forgives it for falling on a car.

Stars change state, too. They don’t choose to change state. Stars have existed much longer than life has. Now and then a star will go super nova, and there are no ifs, ands or buts (or choice) about it. Study any matter in the universe you’d like, at any level of order or organization. You’ll find it works automatically – that is, to the best of our knowledge, according to the immutable laws of physics. What you won’t find evidence of is a mysterious controller.

So how could it be that the matter between our ears fundamentally works any differently? I’m not saying it’s not Metamathemagical in its function. Hell, if you ask me, the common garden spider in our front yard is Metamathemagical! But it didn’t choose to spin its web today. Any more than I just now raised my arm to reach for a cup of coffee.

Or maybe you believe that the state of the entire universe might have been different – otherwise – at some point in time, merely because it’s unpredictable? Who’s to say what might happen tomorrow! Nobody can predict the future state of the entire universe, right? I mean, c’mon. Hell, you can’t even predict the precise 3-D state of your own body one hundred milliseconds from now! OK, sure, but here’s the thing, the fact of unpredictability doesn’t mean any future state of the universe is undetermined. Even as our present-day knowledge of the laws of physics is incomplete, it’s not like any future state of the universe could be otherwise, any different than exactly how it came to be. Quantum indeterminacy would seem to suggest that, at least at the quantum level, predicting the precise future position and direction of sub-atomic particles is not possible. But still, wherever a particle is, whatever its travel vector is, we’ve no evidence of, and thus no reason to suspect, a ghost-like chaperone particle exists, operating outside the realm of physics. That’s mysticism. If you believe that, I’ll kindly ask you to show your work! And since everything in the universe is part of it, including us, including every time-sliced state of mind, there’s no evidence of a ghost in the machine (brain) either. The organization of atoms and molecules in the brain versus a star is different, for sure, but unless you can show how that organization produces agency (choice), well, I’ll continue to prefer the principle of Occams Razor.

There is nothing in there controlling our states of mind, nothing making undetermined choices from alternatives. There are no alternatives when it comes to the future – there’s only one outcome in reality, the one that occurs. There is memory, and reasoning, and emotion, and a lot of other features of the human brain, but in the end it’s all really just experience. I don’t choose what memories to store; I don’t choose how to solve a puzzle; I don’t choose if and when to cry. I don’t choose my successes, I don’t choose my failures. I don’t choose anything because there is no I in there. I don’t think my own thoughts. None of us does. So far as we can tell, it’s the laws of physics doing all that. We merely experience it.

Or maybe you’re still unconvinced, maybe you think our spider up there might have done otherwise and taken the day off instead?

When He was in charge, each and every morning, very early, He’d swagger out of the barn, strut to the east facing fence, and like no cock ever before had ever manged to do – impossible as it may seem – this cock would jump to the lowest rail of the fence, gather Himself there briefly, and then, with a vigor never, ever before observed in a cock, jump again to the top rail of the fence. There He would remain, at the ready, for all to see and adore. It really was something to behold. Not one of the farm animals who came from far and wide, to gather below him in a swooning throng, had ever seen a cock quite like this cock. Especially the majesty of his wattle! A feature every cock used to lure mates, sure, but no cock anywhere has ever had a wattle as glamorous and shiny and alluring as this cock’s wattle. Not a Hen in the land could be found who didn’t want to titillate this cock’s wattle. There had never been a cock as beautiful as this cock, ever. All the plants and trees, even blades of grass, sun worshipers in the main, were seen to bend toward His orange glow instead. He really was something to behold, this cock. No one had ever seen a cock like Him, anywhere. There had never been a cock quite like this cock. He was big and beautiful and powerful as ever, this cock was.

And then, as he would do every morning, this cock, a cock the likes of which none of his adorers had ever seen before, to remind them all of his greatness as a cock, would raise his beak skyward and cock-a-doodle-do like no cock ever, anywhere has ever done before. And damn if the sun didn’t rise! For years the greatest cock ever did this every morning. Until, one day, he didn’t. It seemed the greatest and biggest cock ever had left the barn. Yet the sun kept coming up each morning. What’s up with that, the animals wondered.

Then one day, years later, the greatest cock ever known returned to the barn, such as it was. There were holes in the roof, quarters were in disarray, many animals had died or fallen sick since He’d left, and even the plants and trees were at war with invasive species. After He’d left, there was no one to replace the greatest cock ever known, no cock for the animals and trees and plants to adore. Times were tough, the animals bewildered. They feared the sun may never rise as high in the sky or shine as brightly as it had when the greatest cock ever known had perched on the fence and cock-a-doodle-doed, like no cock had ever done before. Ever.

Atheism is not the belief in nothing; it is the acceptance of nothing. The acceptance of the conclusion that we are alone in the universe. Acceptance of nothing must be one of the most genuine expressions of human humility. If an omniscient being exists out of nature, then it’s unknowable to every human conscience constrained by nature. So even if that’s the case (I doubt it is), it would still feel to me that we’re alone, and that’s ok.

Some refer to the connectedness of everything in nature as a kind of fabric, whose state at any moment in time represents the collective experience of all its members, animate and not. The nucleus of an atom is not one thing. A molecule is many atoms connected. A cell is millions of interconnected molecules. And so on, up the hierarchy of order, just so. An individual human being, her conscience constrained by nature, may nevertheless close her eyes and imagine what her existence on the fabric means. But an answer will never come. No entity may come to understand the true nature, or meaning, of the larger natural order it’s part of. And when left unchallenged, human imagination can morph into a malignant belief in the supernatural. The alternative is simply to acquiesce to one’s role in the order and acknowledge the absurdity of our existence within it. That’s how it feels to me.

The wisdom here is not to curb your imagination – it’s part of what makes existence on the fabric fun! – but to try and avoid having it metastasize into an irreversible belief in the supernatural.

And before you call me woo-woo, go ahead, try to provide a definition of meaning that doesn’t make you, too, sound woo-woo. And while you’re at it, try the same for good and evil.

All moral judgement is sort of funny, really, when you accept the absurdity of existence. It’s an axiom of existence that, tabula rasa, no one is better or worse than any other human being on the fabric. I think our desire to judge others may be driven by another kind of supernatural belief, Free Will. Ever had someone tell you that you under-performed, that you could have done better? Next time, smile and reply: No, really, I could not have performed differently, I could not have performed otherwise. Then maybe go a step further, get Socratic on your judger: Can the rock do other than roll (or not). Can the seed do other than grow. Can the heart do other than pump. Might the liver do other than metabolize, or a lung do other than respire. No? Well then, do tell, how could the brain (me) have done otherwise? There are no satisfying answers to that question.

And if you think I’m straying into the woo-woo again, go ahead, provide an explanation in science, or even a convincing thought experiment, starting with the atom and the immutable law of cause and effect, working your way up the hierarchy of material organization, that will show how the outcome of any human action could have been otherwise. (A caution for experts: Quantum indeterminacy doesn’t get around the problem).