Apologia

Post-post-posting, I found that I am not the first person ever to interpret the stone soup story in a religious context. In fact, it seems to be a relatively common metaphor for social generosity, with the stone being seen as the religious catalyst. Thus I have failed in my duty to make this blog a true content provider; despite my best intentions, it turns out that in this case I have merely regenerated pre-existing content.

That's my first apology.

Though in my defense, for me the stone soup metaphor still does imply that the townsfolk were fooled, or were at least fooling themselves. The story wouldn't be any fun if the guy had used a magic potato - it's crucial that the stone be obviously doing nothing except fooling people into doing what they should have been doing in the first place. Maybe a thoughtful religious person could recognize this aspect but still see it as making a positive point about religion anyway, namely, that due to some quirk of human nature, people only due the right thing when magic is involved. Many atheists, though, would see the same story as revealing an embarrassingly inefficient system, and hope that the townsfolk could be educated not to need the stone at all, like the vagabond character (and atheist hero) .

Hm, I guess it's this ambiguity that makes this metaphor so thought-provoking (albeit apparently only unoriginal thoughts).

My second apology is for searching the web for other people using stone soup metaphors. I can't be doing this with every post, or I'll get discouraged at how unoriginal I am. Who knows, I might even stop posting for a while!

Or maybe - just maybe - this blog is the stone, and the townsfolk are all those other things I've heard or read before, and nobody is really ever totally original, but that's OK because....

The famous stone soup metaphor

Stone soup only tastes good because of all the other things the villagers allowed the vagabond guy in the story to put in there (carrots and stuff), but they wouldn't have put anything in at all if the guy hadn't said that stone was the main ingredient.

I think it's a shame that this story is usually told merely as a "smart guy outsmarts the not-smarties" story, when it seems to have a lot more metaphorical potential than that.

For me, the story is really about how the good things in society come about through shared beliefs that aren't actually doing very much by themselves. Yes, like religious beliefs. The goodness of Christians, say, doesn't come from Christ, but from what Christians give of themselves.

So what role does the clever vagabond play in this metaphor? The cynical priest? Not really, since everybody wins in the end, and he never really lied about the stone being essential, since without it no soup could have been made at all. Maybe he's more like Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, a metaphor of the self-emergent catalyst.

The qualia of lust

I don't know if this is original (a defining feature of this blog, besides utter neglect, is the ban on links and references - this being a content provider, not a content repeater), but I think it's odd that evolution has to bribe people to have sex. Reproduction is supposed to be the thing that evolution cares about more than anything else - sexual animals and plants should just have sex without thinking about it, or more importantly for this post, without feeling about it. So why does sex have to feel fun? Obviously the plan is to motivate people, or whatever other animals (or plants) have lustful qualia, into having sex voluntarily.

So lustful feelings only make sense if free will already exists (or co-evolved with the feelings). But isn't this pretty risky on evolution's part? If at some point in evolutionary history sex doesn't feel quite fun enough, a being with free will could just decide not to have it, and there goes the species. I guess this supports the co-evolution idea: if the being is already a stubborn free-willer before sex becomes fun, the species will die out, and there's no point in making sex fun if there's no free will involved. (Even nausea, another candidate for earliest qualia ever, provides a useful guide to behavior, if only to get you ready to set aside some alone time, maybe so you don't infect people - I dunno.)

Maybe that's why sex is so over-the-top fun (at least for many, maybe more males than females, since females can reproduce without having much fun at all). Lustful qualia is the result of an evolutionary arms race with free will, which maybe was becoming ever more aware how not-fun raising a baby can be. (Hm, but males don't help to raise the baby in all species - maybe in the species where they abandon the kids sex is less fun...?)

Lust doesn't seem to be a very sophisticated sort of qualia - the usual philosophical examples concern stuff like the "feeling of the color red" and such. So it should be relatively easy to trace the neurology, genetics, and evolutionary history of lustful feelings. This, in turn, might make it easier to trace the neurology, genetics, and evolutionary history of qualia more generally, and consciousness more generally than that.

There's one mystery solved. Don't say this blog doesn't give the public what it wants.