The Truth Doesn't Always Need to be Depressing

Bob Seger- Night Moves

And we'd steal away every chance we could
To the backroom, to the alley or the trusty woods
I used her, she used me but neither one cared
We were gettin' our share
Workin' on our night moves
Tryin' to lose the awkward teenage blues

Another great photo by Kevin Drum, who graciously allowed a different photo to be used in Losing My Religions. Story of this one here.

I was listening to a podcast about consciousness, and on it, the neuroscientist was down on determinism. He said:

If I was imagining myself--this is back to the question of why am I studying the brain? Why am I a neuroscientist? Why do I care about consciousness? If I thought I was on the road that ended at determinism, if I thought I was on the road where I'm just going to spend my life incrementally increasing the amount of knowledge in the world that we have about the brain, because I know that at the very end it's all going to be explained and it's all just going to be simple determinism, and there isn't free will: I just wouldn't do that. I would find that extremely depressing.

Um ... sorry?

How is this a scientific attitude? "I only want to learn things that support what I want to believe." Might as well be saying, "I want to believe in God, so I won't investigate anything that might challenge that."

But I can tell you that realizing that there is no free will, that everything was determined by the initial conditions of the universe, is not inherently depressing, let alone "extremely depressing." Anne and I are pretty happy. And as discussed in Losing My Religions and on this blog, I think that fully internalizing determinism is the central key to enlightenment.

Related: people often complain that science removes the wonder and beauty from the world. I think just the opposite is true. A great treatment of this is Dawkins' Unweaving the Rainbow (regardless of any other problems with him).

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