It depends (and so do I)

Click to read the Carl Sagan
quotation (photo source)

For 47 years, I've known that I didn't create myself and do not have the power to sustain my existence for a single moment. I know it has been forty-seven years because I was twenty-two years old when I had a dream that seemed to confirm the dependence, and I'm sixty-nine now. (I described the dream a few years ago, in a post titled "Creatures.")

Sam Harris, in his latest book, Free Will,¹ describes a similar situation with respect to what he argues is the illusion of free will:

Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn't choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime—by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from? [p. 40]

Why does Harris argue that free will is an illusion? The main reason (aside from considerations like those above) seems to be that brain activity that signals awareness and initiation of action precedes our conscious awareness of it. When we become aware of an intention, for example, the intention has already happened, and we had nothing consciously to do with it.

How can we be "free" as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware?...People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about. [p. 31]
    ...From the perspective of your conscious awareness, you are no more responsible for the next thing you think (and therefore do) than you are for the fact that you were born into this world. [p. 36]
    If you pay attention to your inner life, you will see that the emergence of choices, efforts, and intentions is a fundamentally mysterious process....
    You are not in control of your mind—because you, as a conscious agent, are only part of your mind, living at the mercy of other parts. You can do what you decide to do—but you cannot decide what you will decide to do. [p. 38]

Even before reading Harris's book, I had written here about watching myself to see what I would do next, and writing to find out what I thought about something. I had already discovered, from my own personal experience, that what I did and what I thought were things that happened. Harris's book not only serves to confirm this, but also explores some of the implications of it, such as its effect on morality and criminal justice.
    What about its effect on me—or on you if you choose to adopt this way of thinking (or even just experiment with it)?
    I'm still observing its effect(s) on myself. On the one hand, they are, ironically, liberating. I am more accepting of other people (and of myself) the way they are, the way I am.
     But on the other hand, I wonder at times whether I'm missing out on something by giving up the option I thought I had of "using my will power." So far, at least, I haven't missed a day of blogging since my retirement began (one month ago today).
     The jury (the various parts that constitute "me") are still out.

This morning I observed a young woman who lives down the street walking her dogs and letting them defecate in someone else's front yard—fairly near the front door. She didn't pick up the poop, but blithely turned around and led the dogs back home.
     Blithely, did I say? Well, I'm not sure. I think she has to know that not scooping her dogs' poop is unneighborly (and expressly prohibited by the neighborhood covenants), for this has been discussed at some length on our private social network (on the web), of which she and her husband are members. But this is what she does (my wife and I have observed her doing it on a number of other occasions).
    Could I have gone out and let her know that I'd observed her, and reminded her that what she had just done (and had done many times) was wrong? Could I have? I did consider it.
    Some reasons why I think I didn't do it are, first, the prevalent reluctance to "confront" a neighbor, which the people who live in our neighborhood very rarely do. (I'm sure that the vast majority of them have never confronted one of their neighbors—judging by numerous discussions on the neighborhood network. I'm very reluctant to do it myself.)
    Second, I supposed that the young woman has her own reasons for what she did, and that they probably aren't trivial or negligible—doing that seems to be her routine.²
    Third, I was ambivalent about what my motives would have been. If they would have been to "make" her stop leaving the poop (or to stop letting her dogs go in other people's yards), I had little confidence that that would have been the result. She could as easily have become defensive and tried to justify her behavior [see Wednesday's post]. If my motives would have been to demonstrate my "superior neighborliness," what would have been the point of that?
    These considerations passed through my mind. According to Harris, I didn't choose for them to do so; they just did. And I didn't choose not to go confront her; I just didn't.
     It all depended on so many things, one of which apparently wasn't my free will (or hers).
_______________

1. Free Will (2011: Sam Harris) [A belief in free will touches nearly everything that human beings value. It is difficult to think about law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, morality—as well as feelings of remorse or personal achievement—without first imagining that every person is the true source of his or her thoughts and actions. And yet the facts tell us that free will is an illusion.
        [In this enlightening book, Sam Harris argues that this truth about the human mind does not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom, but it can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life. (–The Free Press)]
2. What if someone had observed Jeffrey Dahmer luring a boy home and gone over to confront him? "That's wrong what you're doing, Jeffrey—you shouldn't kill people or eat their flesh." Might the young neighbor woman have been as unlikely to mend her ways as Jeffrey Dahmer his? Or you or I ours, whatever they are?
        Maybe the answer is "no," but how sure are we?

In the universe's own image

Lynn Margulis,
mother of her co-author,
science writer Dorion Sagan,
the son of Carl Sagan 

I've found reading harder and harder of late, not sure why.Visually, it's a bit challenging. I get fidgety trying to sit still. There's so much more I'd rather be doing, even trying to sit still enough at my computer to do my "daily blog."
    But what a difference to pick up a book that compels me to read it. Such is Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan's book Microcosmos, which I introduced yesterday. From Chapter 1, here's a paragraph that begins below a simplified table labeled "Geological Time Scale," which names the aeons, eras, periods and epochs from 4,500 millions of years ago (when Planet Earth was formed) to 0 millions of years ago (an interesting way to characterize "now"):

Over the first million years of expansion after the Big Bang, the universe cooled from 100 billion degrees Kelvin, as estimated by physicist Steven Weinberg, to about 3,000 degrees K, the point at which a single electron and proton could join to create hydrogen, the simplest and most abundant element in the universe. Hydrogen coalesced into supernovae—enormous clouds that over billions of years contracted from cosmic to submicrocosmic densities. Under the sheer force of gravity, the cores of the supernnovae became so hot that thermonuclear reactions were fired, creating from hydrogen and various disparate subatomic particles all the heavier elements in the universe that we know today. The richness of hydrogen is in our bodies still—we contain more hydrogen than any other kind—primarily in water. Our bodies of hydrogen mirror a universe of hydrogen. [emphasis mine; pp. 40-41]

That image reminds me of the haunting final paragraph of Lewis Thomas's foreword to Microcosmos, a meditation on language, with which his 1974 book, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, was well supplied:

Perhaps we have had a shared hunch about our real origin longer than we think. It is there like a linguistic fossil, buried in the ancient root from which we take our species' name. The word for earth, at the beginning of the Indoeuropean language thousands of years ago (no one knows for sure how long ago) was dhghem. From this word, meaning simply earth, came our word humus, the handiwork of soil bacteria. Also, to teach us a lesson, humble, human, and humane. There is the outline of a philosophical parable here; some of the details are filled in by this book. [p. 12]

    I would enjoy reading The Lives of a Cell again.

Spiritual connectedness

Riding with Bill yesterday to join Ralph for a walk at Johnston Mill, a couple of miles from where my wife and I lived for twenty-five years before moving to Mebane, I took the opportunity to try to find out whether Bill's term spiritual applies to me. I asked him how he would characterize it.
    "Connectedness."
    I instantly saw that indeed, in Bill's sense of the term, I am spiritual. I acknowledge, intellectually, that I am related to all other living creatures and to very "star stuff," as cosmologist Carl Sagan (1934-1996) termed the matter of the Universe. And I feel the connectedness, sometimes profoundly, but more often only latently, out of the neglect of taking for granted. And I mean to honor the connection by humility and compassion.

Ralph and his dog arrived at the entrance to the trail a minute after us. On the walk, we all three chatted about no fewer or less significant things than Ralph and I alone would have done. Bob Dylan. Yoga instruction. The logic of grammar. Growing old, losing one's memory. Julie Christie (from her 2006 movie, Away from Her, in which she played a woman being institutionalized because of Alzheimer's disease). Zen Buddhism. Philosophy scholarship (Ralph had discovered Peter Kingsley, a new name for me). Later, Bill told me that Ralph had demonstrated his own spirituality by picking up a piece of paper on the trail.
    And of course spirituality and religion came up. I told them about Mert's retort Friday to my statement that I didn't believe any of that about the Good Lord's working in mysterious ways. "And I don't believe that!" Mert had said.

    I mentioned that my wife and I had the night before watched a film about the child evangelist Marjoe Gortner on the tent revivalist circuit. I was surprised to learn that I had apparently never told Ralph that in my childhood my mother had taken me to the same sorts of church events at which Marjoe as a child and young man had preached.
    But it wasn't until this morning that it occurred to me that, since Marjoe was starting to preach in 1948 (at age four), precisely when my mother was beginning to take me to revivals, where I witnessed people apparently ecstatically "speaking in tongues," it is likely my mother had heard of him. Could it be that my mother's oft-spoken wish that I would "become a preacher" was influenced by reports of that fabulous child preacher?
    Perhaps Marjoe, with whom I only just became familiar from the movie's being mentioned in a book I'm reading by Daniel Dennett¹, influenced the very trajectory of my "religious life." I told Bill on the ride home that I've always thought I majored in philosophy because of my desperate "search for God" informed by those early church experiences. In fact, I likely chose to apply to Yale because of that interest, since it was Yale's catalog of undergraduate academic programs that most appealed to me because of its "Directed Studies" program, then centered around philosophy and the humanities.
    What a world.

Ralph had asked me how, then, I'd become an atheist. I guess I must not have told him before because I had depended on his reading the answer here on my blog—even though he's told me that he spends so much time on the Internet in his work at IBM that he doesn't spend much or any on it outside work. (Because I go onto the Internet both at work and at home, I must not have believed him.)
    So I summarized my Sudoku analogy for him. I had rejected theism as a "forced move" after eliminating the pertinent possibilities.
    Ralph recounted the Zen parable about the fish in water who reasoned logically that water didn't exist.
    I laughed. "Ralph, that's about the same as Mert's retort, isn't it? He didn't believe that I couldn't believe in water."
    Ralph said that Mert's retort was different; it sounded like a trick of the evangelical trade. Mert might have been trying to convert me. Ralph said I was free not to believe, and recommended Zen Buddhism. "Zen Buddhists don't believe in God," he said.
    On the ride home, Bill pointed out that Zen teaches letting go, detachment. "That's the very thing you do when you accept things as they are and laugh."
    I like it.
_______________

1. From Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, pp. 167-168:

   Every good doctor knows that a few simple tricks of self-presentation that compose a good "bedside manner" can make a huge difference. It isn't really dishonest, is it? Every priest and minister, every imam and rabbi, every guru knows the same thing, and the same gradation from knowingness to innocence can be found today in the practices of revival preachers, as vividly revealed in Marjoe, the Oscar-winning 1972 documentary film that followed Marjoe Gortner, a charismatic young evangelical preacher who lost his faith but made a comeback as a preacher in order to reveal the tricks of the trade. In this disturbing and unforgettable film, he shows how he makes people faint when he does the laying on of hands, how he rouses them to passionate declarations of their love for Jesus, how he gets them to empty their wallets into the collection basket.

Intellectual diversion

Having finished reading The Girl Who Played with Fire over the weekend and not yet having a copy of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (the second and third unputdownable volumes of Stieg Larsson's "Millennium Trilogy"), and finding a bit difficult for the moment the final chapters of Richard Dawkins's Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, about the bacterial life of two billion years ago from which evolved all life on Earth today, I've returned to Christopher Hitchens's Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever.
    The excerpt from Bertrand Russell's "Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" (from his book, Atheism; Collected Essays, 1943-1949) was quite diverting. Here's a snippet (more text online):

Other passions besides self-esteem are common sources of error; of these perhaps the most important is fear. Fear sometimes operates directly, by inventing rumors of disaster in war-time, or by imagining objects of terror, such as ghosts; sometimes it operates indirectly, by creating belief in something comforting, such as the elixir of life, or heaven for ourselves and hell for our enemies. Fear has many forms - fear of death, fear of the dark, fear of the unknown, fear of the herd, and that vague generalized fear that comes to those who conceal from themselves their more specific terrors. Until you have admitted your own fears to yourself, and have guarded yourself by a difficult effort of will against their mythmaking power, you cannot hope to think truly about many matters of great importance, especially those with which religious beliefs are concerned. Fear is the main source of superstition and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom, in the pursuit of truth as in the endeavor after a worthy manner of life.

Also diverting were the two poems Hitchens selected from the work of Philip Larkin (1922 – 1985). For your diversion, I've snipped from "Church Going" (complete text):

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.
    ...Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
    Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
...
    ...I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,
    Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built
This special shell?...
    A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

I myself have been thinking about my dead of late. My father, all of his eight brothers, one of his two sisters, my mother, all of her three brothers and three sisters, two of my four sisters, five of six brothers-in-law, two of quite a few nephews, cousins, teachers, friends, former classmates and colleagues, pets.
    And me, in not very long.
    There's no solace in churches, however many dead lie round them. I can find no comfort in the thought of all the wasted effort that went into building monuments to non-existent entities. Parallel efforts went into torturing and murdering people labeled "witches," even if only to be able to confiscate their property after they were done away with. (That from The Portable Atheist's entry from Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Sagan even entertainingly characterizes the whole "go kill a witch" enterprise as an "expense-account scam," since a number of people were remunerated for various activities involved in collecting and transporting and disrobing and examining and probing and torturing and suffocating and drowning and burning the victims.)