Devonism

Not long after I received my degree in philosophy, someone glibly introduced me to the idea that a philosopher can end up in one of two places: They can become cynics, bitter that the world does not revere the importance of their work, or they find god. I found god.

Someone once asked me what my religion was, and I jokingly responded: “Devonism”. But that led to a followup question: What are the fundamental tenets of Devonism? What do I believe?

That’s a difficult question, not least because saying you believe something is fraught with baggage. Saying you believe in something is almost like saying you know better but believe anyway. “Do you believe in god?” is a loaded question, and the answer is political: It’s more about identifying with a group than about god.

Belief also operates on a deeper level. One of the problems that philosophers face is the problem of how we know the things that we know (this is an entire branch of study, called epistemology). When we say we know something, we generally mean there are good reasons to believe it is true. The problem is, you can the ask the same question again: How do you know the reasons are true? You have other reasons. And how do you know the other reasons are true? You can keep asking why indefinitely, chasing the chain of reasoning back forever.

Eventually, if you want to claim that you “know” something, you have to justify that knowledge, and there are only a limited number of unsatisfactory ways to do that. You can assume that the chain of reasoning is infinite. But, it’s impossible to follow an infinite chain of reasoning; proving it would take forever. Since we don’t have forever, we have to take it on faith that the chain of reasoning is correct. You can assume that the chain of reasoning is cyclical, which means putting faith in the correctness of a very special case of circular reasoning. You can assume that the chain of reasoning isn’t a linear chain at all (a position known as coherentism). This requires having faith that a greater truth can arise from a web of otherwise unrelated facts. Or, you can assume that the chain of reasoning is justified by certain foundational beliefs. This requires having faith that foundation is self-evidently correct.

All of these possibilities involve some form of faith, and that faith is where we tend to identify god. We can even identify different types of gods with different faiths: Judeo-Christians tend to put their faith in foundational reasoning. Scientific, empirical minds tend towards coherentist views. Buddhist and Hindu cultures see the universe as cyclical, and the oldest, mystical religions put their faith in the infinity of the universe.

At the end of the day, we can’t avoid faith; no matter what we try to explain, we have to put our faith in something. Everything we know about the universe, about ourselves, everything we know about this planet and everything on it, depends on a leap of faith that is unjustified by logic. This is the deeper level of belief that I mentioned; the one we can’t avoid; the one that is truly being asked about when we ask “What do you believe?” This is the domain of the “big” questions: “Why are we here?”, “Where did we come from?”, “What are we here for?”.

So, what do I believe? My big insight after studying philosophy in depth for four years was that human knowledge is a better mirror of the ways that we think than it is of reality. We understand the universe in terms of atoms and energy because those are the terms under which we can understand it, not necessarily because the universe actually contains those things. This understanding is the consequence of a fundamental axiom of science: That there is a rational explanation for everything.

I don’t mean to denigrate the power of science. Our understanding of nature allows us to do amazing, terrifying, wonderful things, and that would not be possible if our ideas of the universe did not correspond to reality on some level. What I’m saying is that we frequently confuse our understanding of things with the way things are; we assume that our explanation constitutes everything we need to know about reality. And we don’t recognize that our explanations depend on the unsupported beliefs that make up the foundational axioms of science: Beliefs in empirical data, in testing hypotheses, and in the power of rational explanation. These are useful beliefs; they are beliefs that I share. But, they are not all I believe.

This is where I think Devonism begins: In the space beyond explanation and rationality. Kant called this space metaphysics and concluded that there was nothing useful to be said about it, but I’m not so sure. The foundations of science are beyond explanation, but that doesn’t stop science from being useful to us. I think the same is true of spirituality. It is a space where nothing can be proven; instead, how we see the world is literally up to us. It can’t be proven true or false, but what we choose to believe has just as much effect on our lives as science does. Unlike science, which is a description of the reality outside of us, spirituality is about the part of reality that we create for ourselves.

One of the most important abilities we have is the ability to choose what is important to us. Science and rationality are very useful tools for understanding what the outcome of a particular action will be, but they are silent on the question of whether doing it is a good idea. Science tells me that launching a nuclear missile will result in widespread destruction and possibly the end of life on earth. It is silent on the matter of whether or not that is a good thing. I cannot empirically test for good or evil. Instead, this is a matter of what values I hold, and this is something I get to choose.

How do I make that choice? This is the question at the heart of most religions, Devonism included. In my case, I think the deciding factor is this: Does the choice bring me closer to god?

Now I’ve done it. I brought up god. I use this word quite deliberately because, whether you are Christian or Pastafarian, the concept of god serves a common purpose. I’ll do my best to describe this purpose in the language of Devonism, but the purpose is the same whether it is described in my language, the language of the Holy Church, or your own internal language.

Let’s use the Christian tradition as starting point. The Christian God is described as omnipresent (god is everywhere) and omnipotent (god is all-powerful). This is a reasonable way to look at god, but I think Devonism can be simpler. I say this: God is everything. Literally everything. God is the word that we use to describe what’s around us when we don’t feel like being specific. It is the ultimate generalisation.

That makes it a very frustrating concept to grapple with, because human thought is fundamentally about being focussed and specific. If you want to say something meaningful, the way to do that effectively is to distinguish what you are talking about from every other possibility. There is literally nothing useful we can say about god because it’s impossible to narrow things down. God is every possibility, so the answer to any possible question we can come up with relating to god is “yes”.

The heartfelt “waaaahhhhhhh” of a newborn baby is just as profound a comment on god as any of the 1,200 or so words I’ve written here so far. Possibly more so, since the waaaahhhhhhh is literally the first thing that baby has ever said, and it’s difficult to imagine what a newborn could be expressing other than a comment on his or her newfound separation from god.

“Separate from god”? But … didn’t you just say god is everything? How can you be separate from god? Well, you can’t. But, you can experience separation from god. Each one of us has a separate viewpoint, a separate consciousness. That consciousness is a part of god, like everything else, but my consciousness is uniquely mine, and yours is uniquely yours, and I have no way of accessing your consciousness or knowing what it is like. All I can do is appeal to god. God knows what it is like, because your consciousness is a part of god. But, I will never know what it is like, because I am something separate from you.

And, really, that’s what makes me me. I am a point of view, an infinitesimally small part of a much, much larger whole. With that point of view comes the ability to see selectively. I see only what is around me, not the whole of everything that is god. My point of view comes with a consciousness, which means as I grow up from being a newborn, I learn to separate out the parts of my point of view that are important to me, and I give them names. I make them separate, independent entities that my limited consciousness can understand. I start to see the world as a collection of things, rather than an undifferentiated mass of god. I start to see things happening, and this helps me to see relationships between things. As I grow up, I start to reason and make sense of the things in front of me.

All of this happens as a consequence of my consciousness having a limited point of view. The way that we think is dictated by the fact that we need to make sense of the world around us, and thinking provides us with a way to identify what is important in our field of view. This need is a survival need; if my consciousness is going to continue as a separate piece of consciousness, I need to assert myself as a separate entity. This means taking care of the physical shell that holds my point of view. It means feeding my shell to keep it strong, and it means identifying predators so my shell doesn’t get eaten. All of this requires the ability to identify separate parts of the world and to make judgements about which parts are food, which parts are friends, and which parts are frightening.

This is what I mean when I say that human knowledge is a better mirror for the way we think than it is for any objective reality. Objective reality is god; it is undifferentiated, an unordered collection of countless individual points of view, none of which is really independent of any of the others. Atoms and energy only exist once there is a point of view for these things to matter. They exist to help us understand the world as seen from our individual points of view, not because they are fundamentally separate from anything else. We see them because it is useful to us that we see them; because separating them out from the rest of reality helps us accomplish something.

I don’t mean to say that the knowledge we hold about reality is false. What I mean is that the truth of our knowledge rests on whether our knowledge is useful from our point of view. Our knowledge is an interpretation of reality that serves a purpose. A consciousness with a different point of view might well divide things up differently (or not divide things at all) and be equally correct in its interpretation.

Now that we’ve talked in depth about separation and division, let’s go back to the choice I was talking about: How do I make a choice that brings me closer to god?

For the most part, we do not have a choice in our knowledge of reality. The earth really is a globe, and I cannot simply choose to make it flat. Life really does progress according to the principles of evolution; I cannot keep the world static by refusing to believe in change. Those particular parts of our knowledge are bound to our particular point of view (a point of view that is broadly shared by humanity). That knowledge more-or-less accurately describes reality from our points of view, even though it says nothing about reality from any other position.

What we can choose is how we apply that knowledge. And, when we do that, we can choose actions that cause us to be more or less separate from everything else. We can narrow our point of view so that it is harder to connect with other people, or we can grow to appreciate other points of view. The choices that connect us to other conscious beings — other points of view — are the choices that bring us closer to god.

Something seems impossible about this. We are fundamentally restricted to our own point of view, yet, we experience god when we transcend that point of view. It is here that we reach the limits of what our choices can achieve. We cannot choose to step outside of ourselves. It is beyond us to voluntarily touch god. But this is not true both directions. God is not restricted to a point of view. God is everything, and sometimes, that everything imposes itself into our consciousness. So, although we cannot choose to reach out of ourselves, we can choose to be open to god and to put ourselves in situations where god can touch us.

When god does touch us, the experience is unmistakable. We get a taste of the whole of reality, transcending our limited point of view. The experience is fundamentally beyond explanation, because explanations are an expression of thought. To explain something is to frame a thought within a point of view, which is obviously incompatible with trying to frame the whole of everything. The divine is spontaneous; it cannot be predicted and it appears without cause. No explanation is possible; we can only take in the experience and expand our consciousness to accommodate it. And, if we are wise, we will use that experience to create new understanding for our newly expanded point of view.

Just like god, spontaneity is everywhere. Getting closer to god means opening yourself to spontaneous experiences. There are lots of paths to the spontaneous. Art is a common one; it is impossible to create without allowing yourself to try things for no reason other than whim. We experience the divine in each other every time we act with conscious intent. Intent expresses a desire that bubbles up spontaneously within us; we act on our desires, but the desires themselves come seemingly from nowhere. This is free will: We do things for no reason other than it is our wont to do them. We may be aware of motives within ourselves that affect our actions, but we are oblivious to other people’s motives, which makes their actions seem spontaneous: an expression of the divine.

This gets us to the core of Devonism. I’ve written 2,500 words to explain these two words: Seek spontaneity. And, even those 2,500 words are inadequate, because, like any religion, Devonism is beyond the realm of explanation.

Which says something about my degree in philosophy. I spent four years thinking intensely about the nature of reality, and the best I could come up with is that it is beyond explanation. You can see why so many philosophers end up as cynics. And, hopefully, you can also see why, given the choice, philosophy led me to god rather than disillusionment.

Devonism by Devonavar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Copyright extension does not benefit documentary filmmakers like me

Posted on February 25, 2021 by Devonavar

Copyright is a long-standing interest of mine, so when Michael Geist noted that the Canadian government was consulting on the topic of copyright extension (from 50 years after the death of the author to 70), I decided I would write in to the consultation.

A couple points that make it easier to understand what’s going on here. One, the copyright extension is required by CUSMA — the updated NAFTA treaty that was re-negotiated amid much Trump-related drama a couple years ago. The decision to make the extension has already been made; the consultation is basically on how Canada should implement it. Two, the government has already consulted on this topic recently, when The Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology (aka INDU) recommended that recommended that copyright extension accompanied with a registration requirement. For whatever reason, the current consultation is ignoring that recommendation.

Ok, get ready to get down in the copyright weeds. This is what I submitted:

I would like submit a response to the government’s consultation on how to extend copyright terms to 70 years after the death of the creator, as required by CUSMA.

I am a documentary filmmaker based in Vancouver. I both create and make use of copyrighted works as part of my profession. I care deeply about Canadian culture, which copyright is ostensibly intended to protect and nurture.

Before I respond to the question of what limitations should be placed on the extension of the general copyright term to life + 70 years, I would like to make some pointed observations:

I am currently nearing 40 years old. If I’m lucky, I expect to work for another 25-30 years, and live for another 40. Assuming I do, the proposed copyright extension for works I create in my lifetime will not take effect until sometime around the year 2110.
Extending the general copyright term is immaterial to my ability to make money off of my work. An additional 20 years of copyright protection that takes effect 50 years after my death does not benefit me in any way. I’ll be dead long before I can take advantage of it.
In the same vein, an additional 20 years of copyright protection is immaterial to the commercial negotiations I make with the distributors and broadcasters that exploit my work. The expected commercial life of the documentaries I create is 10 years at best. It’s a bonus if my work has a commercial life beyond that time frame, but no distributor I’m aware of makes a business plan for a documentary that counts on receiving revenue in the year 2110. An additional 20 years of copyright protection that takes effect 50 years after my death does not benefit them in any way. They’ll be dead long before they can take advantage of it.
With the above points in mind, I hope it is clear that the proposed extension does not benefit *current* creators like me in any way. It is unlikely that the currently proposed extension will be in force unchanged by the year 2110. Perhaps it will be, but more likely a different regime will be in place, as legislation, including copyright, is typically revisited every few decades. It is quite implausible that any current stakeholders are making business decisions based on a potential benefit that is 90 years in the future — no one is planning that far into the future, and trying to do so would be foolish.
Thus, the primary benefits of the extension accrue not to current creators, but to the owners of works that were created at least 50 years ago (1970), but given that most works are created mid-life, the average is more likely in the ballpark of 90 years ago (1930).
The percentage of copyrighted works that have a commercial life lasting 90 years is exceedingly small — 1% is likely an overestimate based on percentages of books that remain in print at the time their copyright expires.
Thanks to the fact that copyright is fixed on creation, the percentage of copyrighted works that are created for commercial purposes is also very small. The vast majority of copyrighted works are private, unpublished works.
For the sake of argument, let’s say the percentage of commercial works is 10%. Based on the previous two points, that means the percentage of total copyrighted works that are likely to benefit from the proposed extension is in the ballpark of 0.1%, or one in a thousand.
Put another way, this means that 999 out of 1,000 works covered by the proposed extension would likely qualify as “orphan” or “out-of-commerce” works. Obviously, this is a ballpark estimate.
The proposed copyright extension has the effect of creating a commercial benefit that is useful for approximately 0.1% of copyrighted works. This benefit comes at the expense of making it harder to access and make use of the remaining 99.9% works.
Part of my work as a documentary filmmaker involves researching Canadian history, and re-using the copyrighted works that make up our history and culture in a way that makes them interesting and relevant to present-day audiences. I am a creator of Canadian culture, and that necessarily means that I build on our cultural heritage, much of which is under copyright.
The vast majority of the works I re-use in my work are “orphan”, “out-of-commerce”, or “noncommercial” in nature. The most common type of “commercial” works I use are old newscasts that are primarily factual in nature, but are nonetheless copyrighted and licensed by commercial entities.
The costs of clearing copyright — finding out who owns a work, when it was created, whether it is under copyright, and whether I can license it — form a significant portion of the time and money I spend creating. This is particularly true of the time involved in tracking down and clearing non-commercial works that are not owned by professional copyright holders.
Due to the fact that Canada’s cultural industries were nascent and small until the rise of CanCon in the 1960s, the vast majority of commercially significant copyrighted works that stand to benefit from the proposed extension (i.e. those created in the first half of the twentieth century) are not Canadian in origin. Most are likely American, British, or French.
This means that the primary benefits of the proposed extension are likely to accrue to non-Canadian entities — there are simply far more foreign works dating from the first half of the twentieth century that are commercially viable than there are Canadian ones.

Aside from it being a requirement of CUSMA, the stated benefit of the proposed extension is:

Canada’s implementation of its commitment to extend its general term of protection to life-plus 70 years will provide certainty that Canadian rights holders will benefit from this extended term in each of these countries, contributing to a more level global playing field and providing new export opportunities for Canadian creative industries and Canadian-made content.

Based on my observations above, I hope the following is clear:

The number of Canadians, and Canadian works that can benefit from the proposed extension is miniscule. There simply are not many Canadian works produced in the first half of the twentieth century that have commercial value.
I would reiterate that the expected benefit for current creators is in the ballpark of 90 years in the future, and is not a relevant factor in either creating or commercializing works created today. There simply are not very many “export opportunities for Canadian creative industries and Canadian-made content” that are enabled by the proposed extension, because the works that primarily benefit were created nearly a century ago, and most of those works are not Canadian.
A “more level global playing field” in fact removes a competitive advantage that Canadians have benefited from up until now: Creators like me have more certainty about whether we can use works from creators who have been dead for 50-70 years, and we do not bear the time and labour costs of clearing them. Creators in countries that have adopted life+70 must bear these extra costs.

In short, although it is clear that Canada is required to adopt some form of extension to meet its obligations under CUSMA, compliance with CUSMA appears to be the main benefit that Canadians are getting; on its own merits, the extension is arguably detrimental to Canadians, and especially Canadian culture, on the basis of the additional costs it imposes on Canadians who want to access the vast majority of non-commercial copyrighted works that will become less accessible during the proposed extension. This is true whether Libraries, Archives, and Museums (LAMs) are bearing those costs, or individuals who simply lose access entirely because the LAMs cannot bear those costs.

I hope it is clear that I disagree with the premise that Canadians are getting anything real of value from a copyright extension. As a Canadian creator, I do not see how I benefit from the proposed extension, despite the fact that the policy is being promoted in the name of creators. I do, however, see cost to me, in that I will have to put more time and money into researching and clearing the old works that are in my work. For some projects, perhaps this cost would be negligible. But for others — particularly those that dig into Canadian history and culture — they could be significant enough to influence whether or not I am able to make a project.

As I see it, the proposed extension offers a benefit to the institutions that happen to own copyright in the most recognizable works of the early twentieth century — most of which are foreign — at the cost of present-day creators, in exchange for a lottery ticket that can’t be redeemed until 50 years after I’m dead. The extension is a transfer of wealth from the present to the past, and it prioritizes access to the 0.1% of commercially viable works at the expense of the remaining 99.9% of our culture. This is the opposite of supporting Canadian culture.

With that in mind, I would like to offer my recommendation that Innovation, Science, and Economic Development Canada adopt the original INDU recommendation of a registration system for works to obtain copyright protection beyond 50 years after the death of the creator. Why? Because this option will cost creators, libraries, archives, museums, and Canadians the least when we want to access the 99.9% of works that are our cultural heritage.

This vast trove of cultural works are not economic to monetize. For out-of-commerce and non-commercial works, that is true by definition. For orphan works it is true due to market failure — any business that cannot be found by its customers is obviously not an economic business Any licensing or clearance regime that is enacted to fulfill the fiction that such works are economically valuable (as opposed to culturally valuable) is almost certain to lose money — for the copyright owners as well as the licensees. The overhead and carrying costs of making such ancient works available is not worth the minuscule demand for those works. They are far more valuable to Canadians when there are as few barriers as possible to their use. They are worthless without the work that creators, libraries, archives, and museums do to re-use and re-contextualize them for modern Canadians.

In truth, it is the 0.1% of commercially valuable works that are the exception, and a registration requirement would codify that exception into law. A $50 registration fee and a few minutes filling out a registration form are a small cost to bear for a work that is expected to produce a commercial return, and in aggregate, $50 for each of the 0.1% of commercially significant works is a far, far smaller economic cost than the time and labour costs imposed by needing to clear the 99.9% of uneconomic works.

A registration system buys clarity: There is a definitive way of knowing which works must be cleared, and who they need to be cleared with. Because of that clarity, the orphan work problem goes away, and no difficult definitions are needed to determine which works are out-of-commerce. Copyright holders can determine that for themselves, and if a work is commercially viable, a $50 fee is no hardship. Such a system will simultaneously satisfy our international obligations, ensure that what economic opportunities there are can be made use of, and most importantly, it does not burden the 99.9% of non-economic works with the cost of allowing the 0.1% to be sold.

Of the “official” options, “Option 3 — Permit the use of orphan works and/or out-of-commerce works, subject to claims for equitable remuneration” comes closest to mitigating the problems of copyright extension. Permitting use by default mostly mitigates the overhead of trying to clear uneconomic works, while still permitting owners of commercial works to negotiate licenses. However, it would need to be modified to allow creators — and ordinary Canadians — access to our cultural heritage, and the non-profit restriction seems unnecessary. Additionally, it allows the value created by creators, libraries, archive and museums to be appropriated by copyright owners. In situations where very old works regain popularity and commercial viability, it is likely that the efforts to re-use and re-contextualize are responsible for the new value that is created, not any value inherent in the work itself.

In sum, Option 3 has its merits, but is still inferior to a registration system that would provide more certainty about what does and doesn’t need to be licensed, impose fewer costs on non-commercial works, and be cheaper to implement. If “following international norms” is the only benefit to avoiding a registration system, that benefit is not tangible enough to outweigh the benefits of creating one. If the Berne Convention is satisfied by a copyright term of Life+50, there is no reason to think that Berne’s requirements should apply to any protection offered past that term.

Devonism by Devonavar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Devonavar

changes the world

Devonism

Recent Posts

Copyright extension does not benefit documentary filmmakers like me