More Duck Facts

Needs more duck facts.

1. Ducks have five stomachs and they can convert matter directly into energy.
2. When dropped in a vacuum, a duck feather will fall faster than a bowling ball.
3. Ducks have this thing called a cloaca that serves as an all-purpose orifice for their urinary tract, intestines, and reproductive organs. This isn’t all that special, but I think it’s neat. Also, they defecate and micturate at the same time in one semi-solid blob.
4. Duck sneezes are a powerful stimulant that can be dangerously habit forming. Be sure to call your doctor if symptoms persist more than four hours.
5. Ducks are terrible drivers.
6. The brain waves of a duck are mathematically perfect.
7. A lone duck singlehandedly held off over 500 men at the battle of the Daisy Park Bridge.
8. They can smell if you’re not having fun.
9. Jeff Goldblum is friends with several ducks.
10. Ducks exist across six spatial dimensions. 
11. According to classical mechanics, duck flight shouldn’t be possible. It only occurs due to the cumulative effects of quantum tunneling. 
12. I’ve seen a duck punch through a concrete wall.
13. Duck bills are a 14 on the Mohs Hardness Scale.
14. That creaking sound that you hear at night; that’s a duck in your walls. It’s checking for bad wiring, because only ducks can prevent house fires.
15. Duck feathers are a fractal pattern down to the atomic level, and have near infinite surface area.
16. Nervous tissue from ducks is a room temperature superconductor.
17. Ducks are allergic to ska music.
18. The morality of ducks is based around if actions will make someone smile.
19. The nose that fell off the sphinx was actually a duck bill.
20. The universe only exists within the mind of a duck.
21. Life started on Earth when a duck traveled back in time and pooped in the primordial ooze. We evolved from duck poop is what I’m saying. Also, the duck came first, not the egg.
22. The English unit, foot, is actually based on the Welsh word for duck, “fwtl” (also the origin of the word “fowl”), and not the anatomical feature. The distance was originally based on the length of a prototype duck, which is mummified and kept in the basement of the Tower of London. Now it’s based on how far light travels within a specific fraction of a second, which is lame.
23. Your dragon style is no match for my duck style kung fu.

My Religion Part Two: Let There Be Infinite Alternate Universes

            I’m describing what I call my religion, and religions are usually about more than faith and a sense of awe, so I guess I’ll go in to some of my other beliefs that are commonly covered by religions.

First should probably be the origin of the universe. I support the Big Bang, but that is more of a description of how the universe started and not how it came into being. I use infinite parallel universes to explain the origin of everything. Most of the infinite universes are going to have a group of laws and conditions that can’t result in stability or even any physical existence at all (such as if there was an inverse cube law instead of our inverse square law, assume a three spatial dimension universe, obviously), but when you have an infinite number of tries to make a universe, a few of them are going to end up making sense. I also have room in this theory for of universes that exist in a stable way, but also have rules different from our own, which is fantastic. Imagine a universe just like ours, except the Pythagorean Theorem doesn’t work! Just try to think about that for a while without giving yourself an aneurism.

Stay classy geometry

For the end of the universe I have beliefs with a similar theme. I accept the scientific theory of a universal heat death as the progression of entropy reaches a conclusion, but with some extra bits of my own added on to make things interesting. The extra bits are the fact that I’m not certain than the Big Bang was a unique event. We could get another bang every few trillion years (give or take) due to some unknown spontaneous energy generation (I have faith that matter is energy). The whole idea of something happening once, and only once, makes me suspicious. Just because the Big Bang is the only such phenomenon that we know about doesn’t mean that it is the only one that can or will happen. This is an example of using skepticism to expand one’s worldview rather than contract it.

Next up should probably be the afterlife. I’m going to dip into my infinite alternate universe theory again and pull out something neat. I think it would be endlessly stupendous if every alternate version of a person collapsed into a semi-collective consciousness after death. Basically, you would because aware of every other life you could have lead depending on different choices or circumstances. You would get to know how your life would have progressed had you gathered the courage to ask your sweetie to prom, or had been born the son of an absolute monarch in the middle ages. Extended far enough this would end up giving you complete causal knowledge of the universe, since you would have witnessed everything and anything that is capable of happening (because technically everyone is an alternate version of you). You would get to become Laplace’s Demon upon death, which isn’t a paradox since you're no longer a causal agent. I like to maintain a sense of identity in this afterlife, because an exploration of all possible universes wouldn’t be as good without a solid origin.

You could meet your evil self!

Last, I’ll cover my source of morality. Earlier, I explained how I believed morals to be subjective depending on the social system in which they exist. A good act is one that benefits society, and evil the opposite. Assuming the society is one that benefits you and others anyway, or else the opposite is true (basically you can overthrow a cruel dictator and it would be good, baring the establishment of an even worse social system). This carries a bit of a utilitarian aspect to it, but I don’t get bogged down with trying to weigh alternatives against each other. I don’t think you can ever sum the pleasures and pains of yourself and everyone else and come up with a best action. For this reason I think that intension is more important to morals than consequences. One should just do one’s best to benefit themselves and those around them, while also trying to do as little harm as possible. In the end, all this boils down to is "try to be a jerk as little as possible". Things just go better that way. The golden rule is also a good thing to follow.

All in all, I think that does an okay (if extremely brief) job of answering some of the major questions typically covered by religions. I’m still not done with this self-adulating shenanigans, so next time I’ll talk about the aspects of religion that I don't have.

Myriad (this is my attempt at a catchy name for a philosophical text)

            I’ve come to a conclusion that all justice, morals, virtues, and concepts of good and evil are completely relative. Not in the way that you can come up with whatever you want and be correct, but that they are determined by the social system in which they exist and not universal constants. This statement seems obvious after thinking about it for so long, but I guess I can still back it up with some discussion. Morals are going to get the most focus since they’re most commonly believed to be unchanging.

            The way I see it, it all starts with the social system. A social system is just any structure that human beings use to organize their interaction with one another, ranging from a nation, to a club. By my definition; within a society justice is beneficial action, virtue is valuable traits, morals are concepts for propitious behavior, and good and evil are labels for anything that is advantageous or harmful. Here’s an example. In my wider culture of the United States of America during the early 21^st Century, sex between an adult male and a young boy is considered to be very wrong. So much so that it’s considered justice to send those whom commit this act to jail, where they will be considered to have less moral value that murderers and thieves. Compare this to Classical Hellas, where love between a man and a boy could be considered superior to love between a man and woman (See Plato’s Symposium). Men would have a mentoring relationship with young boys and these relationships included a physical component. The boys were not damaged in any way since this was a completely accepted aspect of the culture, and they likely benefited since they learned stuff and a caring physical relationship can hardly be traumatic. A similar system also existed in Feudal Nippon, just to show it’s not a lone aberration. I realize that in modern times these relationships are typically conducted with additional antisocial acts like assault and kidnapping, but the sexual aspect is usually considered to be the most morally reprehensible part, and without the stigma against the relationships the violent aspects probably wouldn’t commonly exist (I assume here that being taught that one’s natural urges are wrong and need to be repressed might create an unstable and violent individual). This moral belief and others sex related morals (anti-homosexuality, condemning premarital sex, and denouncing all non-monogamous relationships to name a few) can probably be traced to this countries early Puritan roots. But how about murder, it’s always evil right? Well, I can come up with a social system that wouldn’t agree. Imagine a warrior society that believes in a concept of survival of the fittest and glory through combat. Killing others could be viewed as a way to prove ones worth and also as a way or removing those who weren’t valuable to the community. Hypothetical societies like this can be imagined for any act viewed as morally wrong in a culture, and also the opposite where good morals are viewed as evil.

             What I think can be taken away from this idea is that you can’t judge actions within another culture as right or wrong by your own cultural standards. It’s easy to view another society as inherently evil due to differences in the morals built into the social systems, and it’s harder to just accept and tolerate differences. Morals are not completely subjective though, and an individual can’t act in any way desired and claim to follow a different system. Citizens in a social system are obligated to act in the society’s best interest or expect repercussions. It’s only natural for a society to protect itself and encourage the behavior that benefits it, and this is where laws, police, moral education, and such come from. It seems like the problems are that social systems can’t be objectively measured as better or worse, and that many people live in systems that they don’t completely agree with. A solution to this would be to organize various parallel social systems that exist with free movement of their citizens. Diverse cultures could be created in something like city-states, and every member of a culture would be expected to be a willing participant. The more diverse cultures the better, with differences ranging from political organization to economic systems to whether or not people eat meat. Individuals who find that they don’t agree with the culture they live in could hopefully move to another that better suits them, and many morally influenced crimes could be simply punished with exile to another culture that doesn’t view them as crime. Thieves could be sent to the city where property doesn’t exist, adulterers to a free loving state, and embezzlers to a free market anarchy. Exile could be used as a punishment for all serious crimes, with those unable to fit into any group sent to uninhabited areas to create new groups (this isn’t really feasible with the current population on Earth, but once we are capable of living off this planet we can send them to live on asteroids or the like). I’m a big fan of exile, since with justice being actions that benefit society, if a criminal can’t be trusted to cooperate with the social system it's more beneficial to simply make them leave than to dedicate infrastructure to imprisoning them or to waste their life by ending it. I hope societies could be much more stable with all the members giving their full support, and as long as each group recognized the morals of the others as different but not inherently wrong, then many conflicts could be avoided (like Crusades). A focus on judging laws and morals according to how they better a social system rather than as objective facts could also be helpful (such as would legal drug use or the illegal drug trade causing more damage to the society).

            I’m tempted to go on about my opinions on the social contract and other thoughts but I think this is enough moral/political philosophy for now. I think my postulation that morals are relative base on the social system in which they exist is sound, and I fail to come up with a moral idea that can’t be reversed within another viable system. The first way to apply this idea is to be more tolerant of the morals and cultures different from my own. This is easy for me with my non-coercion leanings, and leaving others to their own devices is what I do naturally. In conclusion, I agree with the belief that no one does evil intentionally, but my interpretation is that they just don’t agree on what actions are the most beneficial for society.