My “Russell’s Teapot” design. I hadn’t seen any real good-looking, clean, accurate, designs for Russell’s Teapot so I created my own. The teapot is zoomed in for you so you can see it, otherwise it would be too small to see as it is supposed to be, it is in an elliptical orbit around the sun and lies between earth and Mars.

Sometimes also called the “Celestial Teapot.” It is a term coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell. It is an analogy to show the fallacy of an “argument from ignorance,” and to point out where the burden of proof lies. Here you have a china teapot revolving around the sun in an elliptical orbit between Earth and Mars and is too small to be revealed by even our most powerful telescopes. The flaw in the logic this analogy represents is - if you can’t prove this teapot doesn’t exist, then I can conclude that it does. It is often used to point out the fallacious logic of a creationist when they say, “since you can’t prove god doesn’t exist, then he does.”

Without further adieu, I present to you my latest track, the “Planetary Chronicles of New York”

Click play to listen to the Planetary Chronicles of New York

I present to you, “Flight of the bumblebee” like you have never heard it before. I orchestrated many different real bee sounds to create this symphonic bee journey.

Click play to listen to Flight of the bumblebee

Laws and penalties are in place to condition us to act a certain way, if one doesn’t act that certain way anyways because other conditions have determined them not to, then they are determined to face the penalties. Them having to face the penalties is designed to reinforce and strengthen the stimuli to increase the conditioning effectiveness of these laws for others. When a person is found guilty, they are guilty of breaking a law in which they had no choice but to break (no free-will). The real failure is on the deterrence systems part as the conditions set in place didn’t work. However, even the systems failure was determined, so it can’t be blamed either. However, the result is that when the law punishes someone, the person being punished is just collateral damage in a cause that has a greater agenda then just the individual.

Take one who has murdered another. In a deterministic environment, the murderer didn’t choose to think those thoughts nor choose to act on them. The thoughts were determined by the conditions of his environment, and the determined thoughts determined his actions. “He” is just the product of his biology’s reaction to his accumulated experiences with his environment. We can’t blame him for being determined to that course. What we are in effect doing with laws and consequences is conditioning people to behave in a way we have deemed appropriate. If they act against the conditions we’ve set forth anyways, we know that there were conditions greater then the ones we’ve put in place that caused that individual to behave the way they did. By making them faces the consequences we strengthen the effect of the conditions we’ve put in place as it serves as a model for others and that individual for future incidents. But was he really to blame, probably not.

This is how laws function from a determinist point of view. However, as you can see in court, People are held responsible for their actions as though they had free-will, as if they had a choice. Some people are thought to be bad people, while others are thought to be good or ordinary people who simply carried out “bad” actions. Carry out too many “bad” or “very bad” actions (”bad” as determined by society) and you may be considered a entirely “bad person.” Because, you are thought to of had control, had free will to choose to be good or bad.

Where from a deterministic point of view, there are no good or bad people or good or bad actions, just actions and reactions, no value. Just as your being came to exist as determined by the conditions of the environment, your action are determined by the conditions of the environment. Everything moved by cause and effect. Not by some mysterious, uninfluenced, uncaused, personally controlled free-will.

Determinism doesn’t give a squat about the meaning of something. It simply acknowledges that the motion of events\actions are due to a perpetual cause and effect relationship.

Those who think there is free-will on the other hand, they claim they have control and choices, that they are free from causality, and have control to work towards some seemingly meaningful purpose. It seems more meaningful to the individual specifically when they think they have control. So among other motives, I think that people are attached to the illusion of free-will because they are also attached to wanting to be able to create their own meaning, or have control of finding some sort of meaning or purpose to their lives.

I hear so often, those that believe they have free will, when faced with the deterministic viewpoint, they often respond, “what would be the point of that?” or “what’s the point if I don’t have control” So you see, ones search and drive towards meaning and purpose, is a primary motivation for people to want to believe they have free will. This is one of the many reasons why I am skeptical to believe that we have free will, people have ulterior motives to want to believe they have free will.

I often hear people speaking of how they want to be able to reach their “full” potential, as if they were currently operating at some lesser capacity. How I see it is, we are always operating at our full capacity because we only have one potential. Given the nature of causality, the engine of our deterministic environment, ones actions are determined by the conditions of the environment. There are no choices or options, only illusions of choices. There is only one path, one potential. Out of all the seemingly alternative paths or choices we think we see, we are determined by the conditions to only go down one. The other seemingly alternative paths or choices that we did not go down were not really options at all, only further conditions that contributed to determining the path we did take. To speak of “full” potential is to suggest there could have been alternate paths, and choices. But there are not. So, we are always operating at our full potential.

The paradox of perfection is that imperfection is perfect.

The determination of what one feels is “better” is based on one defining a direction of ultimate completeness or “perfected” state of that in which one is trying to better. So betterment must recognize an idealized perfected state in order to determine one is in fact going in the direction of improvement.

But these improvements are just mans idea of how things “ought” to be. If you take man’s discrimination of things out of the picture, is everything not perfect? Everything is as it is, with or without man, despite man’s opinion(s) of it.

Let’s say a tornado rips through your city and destroys it, and so you’d rather it “ought” not of done so. It made a big mess, people died, etc… Your idea of the city being a “mess” is based on how you think the city “ought” to be and look. Because you think the city is no longer how you think it “ought” to be, then you conclude it is now a mess which is by your standards, imperfect. And the tornado caused this imperfection. But this is all based on your perspective of you think things “ought” to be.

When people think that things “ought” to be different then they are, they label the current state of these things as imperfect. When defining perfection, we have to leave man’s idea’s of how things “ought” to be out of the picture or else we run into relativeness and perspectives.

If we just look at how things are without our discrimination of these things, without our opinions of them, and cease to place value on them, then perhaps we can see that the snowflake falls perfectly in place. Or it just simply falls in place, neither perfectly nor imperfectly.