Show Notes for Ep. 4 "What Are... Humans"
What does it mean to be human? What do we mean when we call ourselves humanist? And what does secularism and the idea of God have to do with it all? This episode represents Mary Anne and Ben’s attempts at clarifying what they mean by being humans.
Content note for a comparison (in passing) of meat-eating to baby-killing.
Recorded 24 May 2020 / Published 12 April 2021
Contents
- 0:30: This episode’s intended topics: humanity and humanism.
- 1:35: Sri Lanka’s colonial religious history and Mary Anne’s family’s Catholicism.
- 7:15: The problem of evil, and free will. “Omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent: choose two.”
- 11:00: Mary Anne’s Confirmation and St. Kateri.
- 13:00: Mary Anne is now agnostic.
- 13:40: Ben is not a secular humanist.
- 16:10: The realist world and the supernatural world, and science as a tool for predicting recurring patterns in nature.
- 19:50: Diane Duane’s Star Trek novel The Wounded Sky, in which the characters encounter a “protoGod.”
- 24:45: Supposedly-but-not-really secular aspects of Christian-focused cultures.
- 27:00: What counts as supernatural.
- 31:10: More on the supernatural, and on God and science.
- 37:05: Humans telling stories to try to make sense of things.
- 38:35: The rise of subjectivity; understanding the universe as subjective reality; our mediated/filtered view of the universe.
- 41:45: Ben doesn’t mind having many worldviews, as long as they’re useful.
- 46:30: Brief intermission, featuring an ad for the Speculative Literature Foundation.
- 47:05: An addition from Ben in April, summarizing his earlier argument.
- 47:50: Treating humans as more important than animals. [Mary Anne and Ben seem to be using the word humanism here to refer to this concept, though that’s not the usual meaning of humanism.]
- 52:05: The ethics of animal testing and human testing.
- 1:00:30: Willingness to sacrifice far-away people for the benefit of oneself or people one is close to; also, the trolley problem.
- 1:05:45: Trolley problems, the Kobayashi Maru, and Cold Equations; and how oversimplifying can get in the way of considering complexity.
- 1:13:50: What kind of person do I want to be? “What is the next right action?” Setting up structures that produce habits.
- 1:20:10: Benjamin Franklin’s plan to establish better habits.
- 1:21:50: Posthumanism and bodies. “Do I want to be uploaded? I don’t even want to be on Twitter!”
- 1:28:25: The effects of human bodies on human systems.
- 1:31:15: Credits.
Works Mentioned
- Steven Barnes: “The Woman in the Wall,” in Dark Matter.
- Ted Chiang:
- Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim.
- Cory Doctorow and Ben Rosenbaum: “True Names.”
- Doctor Who s11e9: “It Takes You Away.”
- Diane Duane:
- Tom Godwin: “The Cold Equations.” See also:
- Richard Harter’s thorough critique of the story.
- James Nicoll’s related but less thorough critique.
- Cory Doctorow’s impassioned critique of this story and of Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold.
- Jack London’s story “To Build a Fire.”
- Kelly Jennings’s heartbreaking story “In the Cold,” published in Strange Horizons in 2012, which may or may not have been partly in dialogue with “The Cold Equations” but I (Jed) find the Jennings story much more compelling.
- Daryl Gregory: “Second Person Present Tense.”
- CS Lewis: The Magician’s Nephew.
- Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath: The Prometheus Design.
- Jim Munroe: Everyone in Silico.
- Annalee Newitz: Autonomous.
- Ben Rosenbaum: “The House Beyond Your Sky.”
- James Tiptree, Jr: “The Girl Who Was Plugged In.”
- Martha Wells: The Murderbot Diaries series.
Other Clarifying or Explanatory Links
- Humanism.
- Novena.
- St. Christopher, patron saint of travelers (though not of lost travelers per se).
- Holy Cross Catholic school in Connecticut.
- The problem of evil.
- Or as Archibald MacLeish put it in his modernized reworking of the story of Job, J.B.: “If God is God He is not good / If God is good He is not God.”
- St. Kateri.
- Doubting Thomas.
- Rösti, Fasnacht, Verein.
- Maimonides.
- The metaphor of God as a potter.
- Hans-Georg Gadamer.
- Steven Weinberg.
- Evolutionary computation (genetic algorithms, etc).
- Occam’s razor.
- The trolley problem.
- Kobayashi Maru.
- Factory farming. (Content warning for mistreatment of animals.) See also:
- Ruth Ozeki’s novel My Year of Meats.
- Piers Anthony’s Dangerous Visions story “In the Barn.” Probably not worth reading the story itself, but you can read about it online. Suffice it to say that it vehemently critiques humans’ mistreatment of cows. (Anthony is a vegetarian.)
- Chocolate and slavery:
- Roughly 2 million children in West Africa work harvesting cocoa.
- Many of them are unpaid, were lured to the work under false pretenses, and cannot leave. They are slaves. Child slave labor goes into producing about ⅔ of the world’s chocolate supply, including chocolate from most major brands.
- Most major chocolate companies promised around 2000 to gradually stop using child slave labor. They have not fulfilled those promises. A 2019 Washington Post article says: “The world’s chocolate companies have missed deadlines to uproot child labor from their cocoa supply chains in 2005, 2008 and 2010. Next year, they face another target date and, industry officials indicate, they probably will miss that, too.”
- In February, 2021, eight former child slaves filed a lawsuit in US court against several major chocolate companies, including Nestlé, Mars, and Hershey.
- If you don’t want to support child slavery, consider buying only ethically sourced chocolate. Here are a couple of lists of companies: Slave Free Chocolate’s list; Food Empowerment Project’s list. (The latter is specifically focused on vegan chocolate.)
- Chocolate from the Americas is more likely to be slavery-free than chocolate from West Africa.
- Labels like “Fair Trade” are a good first step, but not necessarily good enough.
- You can also contact major chocolate companies and add your voice to the voices of those who have been calling for the companies to end the use of child slavery.
- Benjamin Franklin’s attempt to make virtues habitual.
- John Wesley and the Quakers.
- The Musar movement in Lithuania.
- Posthuman sf. (See also the SF Encyclopedia entry on posthuman, but at the time of this writing, SFE is having some issues and that entry is unavailable.)
- Self-explainable AI: AI systems that can explain why they make their decisions.
- Vingean technological singularity.
