“atheism”

From Nick Bostrom’s Golden—a fictional interview of Albert, an uploaded dog. His cheeriness and good disposition are attributed to his being a golden retriever. His wisdom I attribute to Bostrom, who’s one fascinating philosopher (don’t miss the fable of the dragon tyrant!).

Rain season again. Wet and wondrous outside.

My grandfather, Luis Cardenas Chavez, died last Saturday from lung cancer. It was a struggle, a mourning, of many months, many of them at my house, at that room up there ↑.

We buried him yesterday, Father’s day here in Mexico. Next Thursday was to be his 85th birthday.

Maybe it was good that his agony ended but, me, all I see is the many meaningful centuries he could have lived. I don’t say that lightly. He had more life and more lives with him than anyone I’ve known and there was at least that much still inside him. He died young. Never without a reason to wake up every morning, today he won’t.

And I feel like I have to say it because only pleasantries and comforting lies were spoken thick and fast at his most Catholic funeral: he’s dead, absolutely annihilated, choked, nothing left of him. We’ve been robbed, someone precious and irreplaceable has been taken from us, for no reason at all, taken and shattered, and we are never getting him back.^ELZR

We never wrote down his memories as we both once planned.^ELZR Always thought there would be a better time later. There wasn’t. What most disappointed me though was myself and how I reacted to his sickness. Or rather, how I not reacted, how I retracted. Oh I helped along, but I did not fight, didn’t read, didn’t research. I never understood his sickness, his ailments, his medicine. It was the scientific, idealistic, techno-utopian thing to do and I left it undone, I muddled thru.

But, to my horror, on top and despite all the sadness, all the frustration, all the personal disappointment, there’s Christina^WP-frantic, exhilarating sensafreedom thru and thru. At last. Just the six of us.

I felt so trapped in this house for so long. So unhappily submerged in rude relatives that diluted my family in their toxic, stupid undertows. Some days ago I realized sadly it would never be my home again. It was just a place all of a sudden. It’s time to go.

But for now I’m here. And I’m happy to. And it’s rain season again. Wet and wondrous outside.

He was a good man.

The recent (April 16) revamping of TED.com around their famous talks provides the perfect excuse for me to finally write about them. And what I want to say boils down to one thing: watch them. They’re free. They’re one of the most exciting things content-wise to happen to the web of late. They have a cumulative effect. The audio and video quality are superb. They are raw, distilled passion. Their speakers are truly among the world’s most talented, most inspiring people (passion begets passion).

And if you only have time for one talk, let it be Eva Vertes’s—probably the best video I’ve seen, ever. Not only does she (very convincingly) puts forth a fascinating (and, oddly, satisfying) theory of cancer in less than 19 minutes, making it all seem as the simplest, most logical thing in the world, she also does it with a naive, youthful spunk that disarms you right away. I swear if I had seen this in high school I might have thrown it all away and study medicine. She’s that good. Now I’ll settle to try to convince my brilliant med-studying sister to tackle cancer. She too is that good.

Also not to be missed are…

Edgar, far right. Late high school.

Early Saturday morning he was driving back home when he crashed with a light post and a tree. His body almost unscathed (so much so he was a perfect organ donor candidate), his head suffered massive trauma. Yesterday he died. So fragile, so stupid a death.

We knew each other since middle school, when we hung out often. We often did projects together and were at each other houses several times. He was frankly a weird guy, always strangely bothering girls, always quirkily, somewhat affectedly hyperactive. But underneath that you could talk to him and he would listen. And he was always smiling. They started calling him “Tope” (speedbump) back then, I don’t exactly remember why, but I always thought the later “Bamm bamm”^WP, which never quite caught on, was much more fitting. I always called him Edgar, for me “Tope” was the bumbling school persona, Edgar—Edgar Quirarte Munguía—was the keen, sensitive friend I glimpsed occasionally.

We then went to the same high school, where he stayed afterwards and majored in Computer Engineering last December. We met less often in the bigger high school and only rarely at college. Last time I got hold of him he was in the Netherlands but he arranged for her mother to give me the photo CD (that he had compiled for our graduation) with which I started this Flickr high school pool.

So he became for me one of those background people you ask for at parties or hear from mothers or expect to casually meet one day or perhaps, sadly but unconsciously, expect never to hear again. And yet, happily and just as unconsciously, you also expect them to live out lives, to love, to be happy—and you’re happy just to take them for granted, to have them glowing from afar.

Didn’t know what to do at his wake. Postponed the whole thing as long as I could. Angry, that such a stupid thing still happened. That we are still so fragile. That he was just starting to live, just majored. He liked doing websites, we might have worked together. He was always doing some strange business or other, we might have ended up doing something together. He liked hanging out with teachers, they adopted him. He was a good man, the youngest son, impossibly tall, childishly handsome. He may have been DUI that morning, so what? It’s still so stupid. Still so senseless.

I know now what I’m going to do. In Eliezer Yudkowsky’s spirit^ELZR, I’m donating a 100 dollars to the Singularity Institute, a fledgling organization to confront both the opportunity and the risk of a(n A.I.) singularity. They’re currently in the midst of a Matching challenge and a group of donors will match your contributions dollar for dollar until July 6th.

I remember my astonishment when I chanced on Marvin Minsky’s queer idea that there was nothing special about the 21st century for it to be the birth of a singularity—we could have been there by, say, 300 CE; centuries ago at any rate. We should have been.

So I’ll donate a 100 dollars today. And the next stupid time someone close to me dies I’ll donate 200. And 300 the next time. And so on. Till it’s over.

It may only be that my grandfather’s agony has me seeing everything with long-now eyes but these days I’m increasingly aware that I should take precautions in case I die.

I don’t want to die. I don’t shake my head and look away at death, I stand up in defiance. But the fact is our lives are still too fragile and faced with the possibility I would rather think things through.

Which is why I’ve written this short will. I shall edit and refine it as long as I’m living (with the latest version the official one, of course) and so I thought I should start now.

Butt-ugly as always, Edge never fails to be inspiring. Even more so now when Sam Harris has written a brisk, simple essay on 10 myths and 10 truths on atheism, and when the Edge 2007 Question has just been published—What are you optimistic about?.

Hope for the taking.

Ayn Rand’s^{WP, ELZR} Atlas Shrugged^AM is on the wishlist. I’ve read a sketch of the plot and as soon as I get my hands on it, it’ll be the first book I read. It was a tortuous decision though. I tend to anguish over negative criticism and she’s a woman with her fair share of it. People talk jadedly about “growing out of Rand’s idealism.” They compare her with Herman Hesse, good for rebel-without-a-cause teenagers but pity the adult that still believes them. And so on.

The thing is her radical capitalism and love for America are exactly where I am at.

If there was one fragment from Richard Dawkins’s Why There Almost Certainly Is No God that startled me, and that has continued to do so for over a week, is this counterfactual.

Here’s the beginning and end of Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, a 1996 talk by Richard Dawkins^WP on the wonders of science, transcribed and made available online on Edge (which I’m reading a lot these days). What can I say—breathtaking.