I read this passage and disagree. Well, I don't disagree with the final point. It is true that nothing matters to the universe. There is no 'god' thing watching us all. Our universe, I am convinced, is one of zillions constantly popping into existence as the physics of dark energy and virtual quantum particles continue their work.
But contrary to the implied bleakness suggested by this Weinberg guy assertion that it's "pointless", this vast multiverse idea seems to me to give our lives even greater meaning. The infinite course of the multiverse might not care about us but we still exist. Our lives matter to us and to those around us.
That there is no grand external 'meaning' says to me, that our actions are the only thing that really do have meaning. It tells me that what we do is the only thing that is really important.
The reality we construct, our actions in our society and culture, our reliance and support for each other, are not pointless. With the realization that we are less than a speck in the grand reality where nothing is any more important than anything else, we become the most important thing in the universe.
All the rest is nothing, vast and empty. Only we are full of life and joy and love and hate and humor and meaning. As far as we can tell, that's all there is. That makes it infinitely more than pointless. It is everything.
It makes me think about those who say life can have no meaning without a god. In their view, their god has meaning. Our meaning is purely derivative, just as our liver cells are important to our getting an award. We just come along for the ride. Our liver cells didn't kill us by getting cancer and we didn't stop the god's glory by failing to worship it.
This reality of the universe says that our glory is not subsumed by anything else. No other meaning is greater than our own. Our meaning is all there is. For twenty thousand years, humans have been fabricating meaning from whole cloth. With luck, we will continue for twenty thousand more.
The multiverse might not care but we do and, apparently, that is everything.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/24/science/scheinert-kwan-film-multiverse.html
We all accept that a man has a right to expect an evening of pleasant company if he buys a woman a nice dinner. It's a reasonable expectation that makes sense.
We are all creeped out, despite the fact that it's ubiquitous, when a man assumes that the woman will have sex with him because he bought her dinner. We are downright angry if he acts on that it either by forcing her or by being mean to her if she does live up to his expectation.
Which is to say, there is an implied obligation incurred when we accept free stuff but that obligation is not unlimited. The distinction between 'pleasant company' and 'assumption of sex' is level of personal intrusion. They are divided over a boundary that all decent people understand as intrinsic to the natural human rights of a person.
I claim that it is reasonable to expect me to see advertisements but that it is creepy and makes me angry when they share my personal information with anyone if they feel they can benefit. I think it's wrong. I think it's dangerous and intrusive.
There are people who focus on the supposed benefit of targeted ads. "Why wouldn't you want the big old internet figuring out just what you want? It showed your new favorite band. What's wrong with that?"
To me, that's like saying, 'the guy was clean and a considerate lover. She even had an orgasm. Why are you mad that he coerced her into having sex with him?'
I am a huge fan of Europe's GDPR. It recognizes information about you as yours. Their constitution explicitly asserts that privacy is a fundamental human right, just as we all understand that we all have a fundamental human right not to be raped. (And no, I'm not saying that privacy violation is the same, or as bad, as rape, or murder. I am saying it is analogous.)
I would add that I think that the level of coercion is worse than expectations for after dinner. These corporations are holding my friends and livelihood hostage.
If I do not make myself vulnerable to their depredations, I do not get to talk to my friends on Facebook. I live in a remote location. I have very little social contact without it and its ilk. I would be alone. I need to use Google a hundred times a day to do my work. Practically speaking, I would be out of business without it.
These corporations are essentially saying to me, "You choose, starve and be lonely, or let us sell your information to anyone we feel like selling it to. You live your life seeing your secrets [one time I googled breast cancer about a friend; for the next couple of weeks, corporations made clear they knew about it in ads] spread all over the internet. Don't like that, Tough shit."
I am pissed. I do not grant them permission to share my information and consider their doing so to be unethical and when I notice it, I feel violated.
I did a false start where I considered the idea of 'faith', per se, as the culprit and I will, after I think about it for awhile, probably conclude that faith, per se, is a bad thing.
But, I set that aside for now, party because I have to think it through and partly because it misses the point.
All religions have bad actors but only one has an organization embodied, for nearly two thousand years, in a global network of pedophiles and murderers. I readily concede that there has also been much good done but am very, very skeptical about the cost.
The reason I have a trouble separating the Christian wheat from the organization chaff is that, when Christians finally overthrew the pure tyranny of Catholicism, they chose Martin Luther to become a movement where bigotry replaced pedophilia while the murder and power mongering continued with zeal.
I might still be able to find a way around my distress over the singular damage Christians have done by comparing it to Islam, also a religion that uses it's 'prince of peace' concept as a shroud to conceal it's bloody minded attitude about those who resist its power. After all, it's not really just Christians.
But today, we have American Christianity showing huge support for every vile oppression the right-wing wants to put upon us. Anti-choice. Anti-vax. Pro-Trump. Pro-1/6. Pro-white-supremacy. Anti-environment. Anti-immigrant. Anti-science.
More than half of America Christians voted for Trump and all the vile practices he embodies as the leader of the most powerful country on the planet. The Moslems have done nothing that compares. Their influence in the world overall is small. Had Donald gotten another term, the Christians would have been the largest identifiable group that put him in a position to ruin the world.
Is it because of Christianity? Correlation is not cause. I still think that Christianity is a pretty doctrine. It is said that humans can mess anything up and with that, I emphatically agree. But, some things are easier to mess up than others. Nobody every committed genocide in the name of loving quantum physics.
I am of the opinion that life is probably common, an inevitable property of resource availability, like rust where iron and oxygen are present. I suspect it is *everywhere*.
I also think that the variation we see on Earth is an indication of both how varied life forms are and how parochial our perspective is. We live in a place that got DNA. All the life has DNA and we think that means that 'life' means DNA. Considering the fact that those lifeforms range from humans to bacteria to lichens and that we can only communicate with mammals tells me that 1) we are stuck in a local paradigm and, 2) we are not taking the lesson.
The Fermi Paradox seems apparent because we imagine that life out there resembles us but, there could be a thousand trillion civilizations of dolphins and we would never know because their life habit makes the sky and stars and radios irrelevant. There could be lichen civilizations that develop and communicate at glacial speed and, having no thumbs, don't build tools, only communicating by chemical signals.
There are forests of thousands of acres that are a, genetically, a single individual connected by their roots and chemicals they secrete into the air. There is absolutely no reason to think that the interactions among them are not some amazing form of poetry.
The final piece of the puzzle, in my view, is the fact a mobile, tool building lifeform stands a really good chance of killing itself off well before it could make itself apparent to us.
The Fermi Paradox reflects a failure of imagination based on an arrogant belief in our own superiority and importance.
The notion that higher minimum wage discourages hiring is entirely unproven. In plenty of places, employment is up in the years after an increase. In general, a few years later, you cannot see any difference.
This notion is a conservative canard without merit. There are two huge flaws in addition to the superficial inaccuracy. First is the notion that employment at the current minimum wage is something that should be encouraged. Spending forty, fifty or sixty hours a week at an activity that does not provide enough money to support even one person, let alone a family, is a bad thing for everyone except the employer, both society and the worker are worse off.
The worker is deprived of almost everything that people claim to believe makes us human. Time with family, opportunity to learn, fun, self-improvement, child and elder care, exercise, you name it never happens. Add food insecurity, no preventative health care and it is slavery.
Society still has to cover much of the cost of support for that person and his or her family. Minimum wage workers require subsidized health care, subsidized food and subsidized rent. People at that wage level are often forced to engage in criminal activities to supplement their income so that children can eat so society is also required to spend more on policing and social services. And, where there is crime there are gangs and that adds to the social burden, too.
But, corporations win so we stick with the canard. Somehow we are convinced that there are tons of unskilled workers being employed to do things that the business can live without. The theory is that a business will spend large amounts of capital money to automate jobs rather than give more money to poor people. It is a ridiculous idea. Most low wage jobs are not really subject to automation (have you ever seen a robot janitor?) and, of course, the research does not support this idea anyway.
It is another conservative effort to make sure that workers are poor and afraid. Paying them a decent wage will only make them prosperous and unafraid. Better conditions, better benefits, better hours, better lives. The horror!
Paying unskilled labor a decent wage would demonstrate that people have value beyond the value of their work. Americans don't want that. Americans hate poor people.
So don't clothe your moral distaste for those less fortunate in economic theory. Stick with the real reason: People who don't have important economic skills are worthless and deserve shitty food and bad lives.
An essay written by some anonymous Smarty Pants:
Chickenpox is a virus. Lots of people have had it, and probably don't think about it much once the initial illness has passed. But it stays in your body and lives there forever, and maybe when you're older, you have debilitatingly painful outbreaks of shingles. You don't just get over this virus in a few weeks, never to have another health effect. We know this because it's been around for years, and has been studied medically for years.
Herpes is also a virus. And once someone has it, it stays in your body and lives there forever, and anytime they get a little run down or stressed-out they're going to have an outbreak. Maybe every time you have a big event coming up (school pictures, job interview, big date) you're going to get a cold sore. For the rest of your life. You don't just get over it in a few weeks. We know this because it's been around for years, and been studied medically for years.
HIV is a virus. It attacks the immune system and makes the carrier far more vulnerable to other illnesses. It has a list of symptoms and negative health impacts that goes on and on. It was decades before viable treatments were developed that allowed people to live with a reasonable quality of life. Once you have it, it lives in your body forever and there is no cure. Over time, that takes a toll on the body, putting people living with HIV at greater risk for health conditions such as cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, diabetes, bone disease, liver disease, cognitive disorders, and some types of cancer. We know this because it has been around for years, and had been studied medically for years.
Now with COVID-19, we have a novel virus that spreads rapidly and easily. The full spectrum of symptoms and health effects is only just beginning to be cataloged, much less understood.
So far the symptoms may include:
People testing positive for COVID-19 have been documented to be sick even after 60 days. Many people are sick for weeks, get better, and then experience a rapid and sudden flare up and get sick all over again. A man in Seattle was hospitalized for 62 days, and while well enough to be released, still has a long road of recovery ahead of him. Not to mention a $1.1 million medical bill.
Then there is MIS-C. Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children is a condition where different body parts can become inflamed, including the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes, or gastrointestinal organs. Children with MIS-C may have a fever and various symptoms, including abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, neck pain, rash, bloodshot eyes, or feeling extra tired. While rare, it has caused deaths.
This disease has not been around for years. It has basically been 6 months. No one knows yet the long-term health effects, or how it may present itself years down the road for people who have been exposed. We literally *do not know* what we do not know.
For those in our society who suggest that people being cautious are cowards, for people who refuse to take even the simplest of precautions to protect themselves and those around them, I want to ask, without hyperbole and in all sincerity:
How dare you?
How dare you risk the lives of others so cavalierly. How dare you decide for others that they should welcome exposure as "getting it over with", when literally no one knows who will be the lucky "mild symptoms" case, and who may fall ill and die. Because while we know that some people are more susceptible to suffering a more serious case, we also know that 20 and 30-year-olds have died, marathon runners and fitness nuts have died, children and infants have died.
How dare you behave as though you know more than medical experts, when those same experts acknowledge that there is so much we don't yet know, but with what we DO know, are smart enough to be scared of how easily this is spread, and recommend baseline precautions such as:
The more things we can all do to mitigate our risk of exposure, the better off we all are, in my opinion. Not only does it flatten the curve and allow health care providers to maintain levels of service that aren't immediately and catastrophically overwhelmed; it also reduces unnecessary suffering and deaths, and buys time for the scientific community to study the virus in order to come to a more full understanding of the breadth of its impacts in both the short and long term.
I reject the notion that it's "just a virus" and we'll all get it eventually. What a careless, lazy, heartless stance.
A POSTSCRIPT:
This essay is floating around the web along with the assertion that it is written by Anthony Fauci. That is not true.
When I first saw it, I wanted to examine the original because "how dare you" did not sound like Fauci. I could not find the original anywhere. I did find an article that compared the it things Fauci has actually said. The language and style do not match.
I encourage everyone to spread this far and wide. It is really important for people to understand that we simply do not know what this virus does to people.
But don't attribute it to Fauci. It's not and saying so just diminishes this important message.