Up Against the World

… My novelist’s version of sensation, of being up against the world, is to keep my nose pressed similarly up to the palpable, mutable, visible, audible, smellable, and for the most part disorderly world, flooded as it is with exquisite, intractable, irresistible details.

… Thoreau might have been right when he said that a writer is a man who, having nothing to do, finds something to do. Surely one of the sublime allures of literature, and a reason people want to know more about its origins and to draw near to them, is that part of literature’s breathtaking miracle is its sheer unlikeliness in the hands of its makers, the chance that, given all, it just might never have happened.

Both of those quotes are taken from within an essay, Nobody’s Everyman by Richard Ford in the Apr/May 2009 issue of BookForum. Here is more:

… In nearly forty years of writing stories of varying lengths and shapes and, in the process, making up quite a large number of characters, I’ve always tried to abide by E. M. Forster’s famous dictum from Aspects of the Novel that says fictional characters should possess “the incalculability of life.” To me, this means that characters in novels (the ones we read andthe ones we write) should be as variegated and vivid of detail and as hard to predict and to make generalizations about as the people we actually meet every day. This incalculability would seem to have the effect of drawing us curiously nearer to characters in order to get a better, more discerning look at them, inasmuch as characters are usually the principal formal features by which fiction gets its many points across. These vivid, surprising details — themselves well rendered in language — will, indeed, be their own source of illuminating pleasure. And the whole complex process will eventuate in our ability to be more interested in the characters, as well as in those real people we meet outside the book’s covers. In my view, this is why almost all novels — even the darkest ones — are fundamentally optimistic in nature: because they confirm that complex human life is a fit subject for our interest; and they presume a future where they’ll be read, their virtues savored, their lessons put into practice. (I should add, as a counterweight to Forster, that I have also taken to heart Robert Frost’s advice meant specifically for writers: that what we do when we write represents the last of our childhood, and we may for that reason practice it somewhat irresponsibly.)

Neither of these two directives seems to mean that human beings are really just muddles and that writing about them can be pretty much a frolicsome crapshoot. Forster and Frost each took life and writing more seriously than that. But together these prescriptions do suggest to me, anyway, that imaginative writing should admit to the dazzling particularity and indeterminacy of life-as-a-subject, and that to act on this perception of life — by representing it as it is— can actually be pleasurable and produce very interesting results.

… The art critic Robert Hughes once wrote of Cézanne that instead of possessing a theory about painting, Cézanne relied on sensation, “the experience,” Hughes wrote, “of being up against the world — fugitive, and yet painfully solid, imperious in its thereness and constantly, unrelentingly new.” I conceive of writing novels in something of the same way. Regarding my own writing habits, I try to play down the part about the world being painful, unrelenting, and imperious — even though it can be all these things. But I do not play down the raw sensation part. My novelist’s version of sensation, of being up against the world, is to keep my nose pressed similarly up to the palpable, mutable, visible, audible, smellable, and for the most part disorderly world, flooded as it is with exquisite, intractable, irresistible details.

… I set about trying to intuit that unruly language into a linear shape that was clear enough to make a reader temporarily give up disbelief and suppose that herein lies a provoking world with interesting people in it. And I did this with the certainty that even if I were working straight from life, and was trying to deliver perfect facsimiles of people directly to the page, the truth is that the instant one puts pen to paper, fidelity to fact — or to one’s original intention or even to sensation itself — almost always goes flying out the window. This is because language is an independent agent different from sensation, and tends to find its own loyalties in whimsy, context, the time of day, the author’s mood, sometimes even maybe the old original intention — but many times not. Martin Amis once wrote that literature “is a disinterested use of words. You need to have nothing riding on the outcome.” Another way of saying that is: The blue Bic pen glides along the page, and surprising things always spill out of it.

… If it seems that fear played a large part in conceiving these three books, it might just be that fear plays a large part in any work that aspires to the lofty condition of literature. Fear of the unknown. Fear of failure, again. Fear of not, at least, trying to meet the challenge of one’s youthful aspirations. Fear, of course, might be the wrong word, or maybe an indelicate word. Another writer might describe the same experience differently — for instance, as the excitation of the protracted creative moment. I’ve already insisted, though, that fortuity played a part, and idleness, and lucky availability. So it seems that all kinds of less-than-majestic human impulses have played their part, and that Thoreau might have been right when he said that a writer is a man who, having nothing to do, finds something to do. Surely one of the sublime allures of literature, and a reason people want to know more about its origins and to draw near to them, is that part of literature’s breathtaking miracle is its sheer unlikeliness in the hands of its makers, the chance that, given all, it just might never have happened.

If any of this seems close to the truth, then consider yourself to have encountered something about human beings, of which writers are a subspecies: that we go on being human even when we want to be better; and also something about the habit of art, that great, intense, optimistic, and forward-thinking seduction that seeks magically to change base metal into gold.

It’s a good essay. Read it all if you enjoyed the above. [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Onion Science

MANASSAS, VA — According to a study published Monday in The Journal Of Experimental Biology, a rare species of tree frog found only in a small section of the Amazon rainforest may give hope to millions suffering from…oh, wait, forget it. It’s extinct. “A biochemical compound present solely in this species could be used to create an inexpensive, readily available medication that will all but eliminate the devastating…wait, what?” said Dr. Prianka Chadha, a research biologist at George Mason University and lead author of the likely Nobel Prize–winning … well, probably not now. “Really? All of them? Shit.” Chadha urged the public not to lose hope, because her research team is prepared to clone the gene responsible for the frog’s curative … oops, scratch that. They just had their funding pulled.

The above is from Rare Species of Frog May Hold Cure to … Ah, Never Mind, It’s Extinct from the Onion (March 5, 2009)

And the below is from San Franciscon Historians Condemn 1906 Earthquake Deniers (March 6, 2009):

… “On Apr. 18, 1906, an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale killed 3,000 San Franciscans and devastated a growing metropolis,” Professor Richard Kasper of the University of California, Berkeley, told reporters Tuesday. “It was a massive, massive earthquake. To say otherwise is to callously ignore not only the suffering of the disaster’s victims, but also a mountain of photographs, video footage, and eyewitness reports.”

Added Kasper: “And I find it personally offensive to suggest that a single malfunctioning trolley car could have wiped out 490 city blocks.”

The last words of the article, from the earthquake deniers:

“San Franciscans need to wake up and smell the lies and deceits they’ve been fed for the last century,” Earthquake Denier Jared Meeder said. “If a giant earthquake did actually occur, why would anyone in their right mind rebuild a city knowing full well that another earthquake could easily come along and destroy it again?”

“Think about it,” Meeder added.

Addendum: Ray Girvan has an excellent follow-up post about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. In particular, the (genuine) photos found in his linked page, Lawrence Captive Airshop Over San Francisco, are amazing. Also, be sure to look at the ‘Onion in History’ links that he has provided at the end of his post. Especially the one for 1963.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Transform to Clarify

Most of all, the journeys allow us to glimpse the mutability of nature and our role in it. The journeys teach us that nature could be otherwise — that it was otherwise for us until a moment ago, and for all we know it could change in the future. In such instances, we experience a transcendent moment in which a higher thought emerges in the middle of an existing one.

That quote and the first extract, below, is taken from an article, Journeys to greatness by Robert P. Crease in Physics World (Feb 2, 2009) in which he is talking about his own book, The Great Equations:

… the journey metaphor does capture one important aspect of the birth of these equations, which is how their originators’ ideas about what was important changed during the course of their research. Newton, Maxwell, Schrödinger and others each inherited a “landscape” or view of how knowledge about nature was organized. But during their research, new concepts — such as mass and force, entropy and displacement current, quanta and wave equations — appeared on the horizon, grew in importance and displaced others to assume positions as indispensable landmarks in the conceptual landscape.

For the ultimate destination of such scientists was not a particular location that they saw beforehand, but clarity. They were dissatisfied with what they had, perceived a vision of what might take its place, and were able to carry out the inquiry needed to realize it. At each step, they found the world to be somewhat discordant — not fully grasped — with hints of another, deeper order just over the horizon. This discordance is what makes newly realized equations seem, strangely, to be both discovered and invented.

Oliver Heaviside, who transformed Maxwell’s then-convoluted equations into their now-familiar versions, once remarked that “it was only by changing its form of presentation that I was able to see it [electromagnetism] clearly”. The sense of that remark — you transform to clarify — could have been said by any of the scientists mentioned in The Great Equations.

… The scientists who took those journeys were never blasé, never disinterested. They were infused with curiosity, consternation, bafflement, frustration and wonder. And each scientist had what might be called a particular style. Some succeeded because they were only satisfied when they found what they were looking for, while others succeeded only because they were prepared to see something more than they expected.

Most of all, the journeys allow us to glimpse the mutability of nature and our role in it. The journeys teach us that nature could be otherwise — that it was otherwise for us until a moment ago, and for all we know it could change in the future. In such instances, we experience a transcendent moment in which a higher thought emerges in the middle of an existing one.

Below is the last paragraph from a book review, Experimental Nonfiction: Science can’t solve the mystery of life, but it can make it a lot more fascinating by Jennifer Fisher Wilson in The Smart Set. The book that she is reviewing is The 10 Most Beautiful Experiments by George Johnson:

When reading about scientists, I am often struck by how much confidence — as well as intelligence — is required to do the job. So much of the work that goes into great discoveries is based on an anomalous idea, conducted in lonesome obscurity, and carried out through the repetition of small tasks — titrating liquid, measuring output, tracking results. There seems to be so much room for mistakes and so much time to lose faith. Johnson seems similarly awed by how it all happens, wondering how the scientists who conducted these “beautiful experiments” kept from confusing their instincts with their suppositions, “unconsciously nudging the apparatus, like an Ouija board, to come up with the hoped-for reply.” As he asserts, “the most temperamental piece of laboratory equipment will always be the human brain.”

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

I Would Prefer Not To

All that follows is from a long series of loosely connected ruminations — by Jon Thompson in Identity Theory – about Herman Melville’s story, Bartleby the Scrivener. Thompson’s piece is titled, Bartleby: Facing the End of an Audience; it was published Feb 18, 2008. It’s very long; I have chosen only a few that I thought were interesting:

• Bartleby never argued with anyone; he never tried to prove a point, win converts, vanquish foes. What does this lack of rhetorical aggression signify? The fruitlessness of conversion via argumentation? The failure of rhetoric? The contamination of rhetoric by a culture in which most “disinterested” expressions cloak naked self-interest? Bartleby’s “I prefer not to” exists as an assertion of will — but not will-to-truth.
• Everyone, everything must be faced, categorized, reported upon. To be unknown and unknowable is to incur the wrath of custom and law that demands a modest amount of submission.
• The voice of doxa is the voice of comfort and reassurance. It speaks — not in terms of certainties, but givens. It refuses its own name.
• The narrator says he feels a “bond of a common humanity” with Bartleby, yet his actions do not acknowledge the sanctity of any such bond. This then is the fate of the liberal mind: to feel one thing, but to have that feeling, that liberal sentiment, overborne by the “more practical” demands of class and the conformities a market society exacts.
• “Pallid,” “miserable,” “silent,” “pale” “cadaverously gentlemanly”: Bartleby is not only deathly in appearance; he is death. Death to social convention, death to social custom, to normative expectation, to social behavior. Negating social expectation, Bartleby is negated. That is, he becomes more like who he is. He approaches the horizon of his identity, which is paradoxically nothing as well as being the unspeakable form of his resistance to social law. This is why the narrator pities him, hates him, loves him. As an object of pity, Bartleby’s unspoken critique of everything that narrator stands for (professionalism, class, respectability, tolerance, etc.) does not have to be engaged. Indeed, once made an object of pity his unspoken condemnation can be dismissed as eccentricity or lunacy.
• The laws of property permit all kinds of plunder, invasion, appropriation. Because the narrator observes that Bartleby’s desk “is mine,” it, too, can be penetrated by him. He has in law, if not in ethics, a right to rifle Bartleby’s desk. The narrator possesses a will-to-truth vis-à-vis Bartleby: his mysteriousness, his reserve, his enigmatic taciturn character mustbe made explicable. That it is not defies the narrator’s complacently bourgeois worldview, which demands attribution, causal hermeneutics, simplicity, clarity. Bartleby gives this will-to-truth, which is also a will-to-power, no relief. What knowledge cannot know it must dismiss, pity or deligitimize as contemptible or a mere object of curiosity.
• From valued employee to recalcitrant employee to enigma to apparition: by the end of the story Bartleby is made to metaphorse again: in a final incarnation he is seen to be an “intolerable incubus.” This is no exaggeration; he is an incubus. He haunts the living by his mere being. Merely being in a nonconformist fashion becomes an affront to bourgeois propriety, to professional decorum, to normativity itself. Bartleby becomes burdened with the socially unsaid in America, particularly the gap between our idealistic image of the American body politic and the harsher reality. Bartleby is — the worst sin of all — an embarrassment. He embarrasses the narrator’s notion of himself as a generous individual; he embarrasses society’s pretense to be a society in which action is grounded in principle. His mere presence mocks the American claim to have established a uniquely free polity.
• “Bartleby” is about the magical power, the horrific power, of representation to transform lives. The narrator defines Bartleby’s life; his definition of Bartleby as an outsider, an “intolerable incubus,” becomes material, actual, in the body of Bartleby, wraithlike in prison, by the wall, awaiting death. In representing others as inhuman, supernatural, mythical, fantastic, they are metamorphosed into fiends, spirits, ghosts, devils, diseases, witches. Via this magic they can be annihilated, burned, slaughtered, converted, exorcised, chained, imprisoned, starved and mocked — made to gabble, made to flee, made to fly.

Absurd, provocative, true, false or completely nonsensical … thought-provoking. [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

What We Never Do

reason: What would you say to people who say that progress is simply unsustainable, that the Africans and the Indians and the Chinese will never be able to live at the same living standards as we do?

Ridley: I’d respond to that by saying that in a sense they’re absolutely right. If we go on as we are, it’ll be very difficult to sustain things. But we won’t go on as we are. That’s what we never do. We always change what we do and we always get much more efficient at using things — energy, resources, etc.

That’s from the ending of ‘Chiefs, Thieves, and Priests’ (Feb 2009) in which Reason magazine’s Ronald Bailey interviews science writer Matt Ridley. Here are more extracts from earlier in the piece, all by from Ridley:

… Human beings have progressed in material living standards, on the whole, since the Stone Age, but they’ve also progressed enormously in terms of the number of people on the planet. That’s because we got better at turning the energy available into people, and the denser the population has got, the more things we’ve been able to invent that we wouldn’t have been able to invent with a sparse population. For example, if you’re going to smelt metals, you need a fairly dense population of customers before it’s worth building kilns.

Population density can also lead to reductions in the standard of living. There must be cases in history where people have tried to live at too a high a density for the resources that were available to them. They’ve either then suffered one of Malthus’ positive checks — war, famine, and disease — or, and this is a slightly more original point, they’ve reduced their division of labor, i.e., they’ve returned to self-sufficiency.

… The English Industrial Revolution had been bubbling along very nicely in the 18th century, with fantastic increases of productivity, particularly with respect to cotton textiles. We saw a quintupling of cotton cloth output in two consecutive decades, in the 1780s and 1790s, none of it based on fossil fuels yet but based on water power.

At some point, you run out of dams. You run out of rivers in Lancashire to dam. At some point England would suffer the fate of Holland, or Venice before that, or of China, Egypt, or Japan. What did England do that others didn’t? It started using fossil fuels.

By 1870 Britain is consuming the coal equivalent to 850 million human laborers. It could have done everything it did with coal with trees, with timber, but not from its own land. Timber was bound to get more expensive the more you used of it. Coal didn’t get more expensive the more you used of it. It didn’t get particularly cheaper either, but it didn’t get more expensive, so you don’t get diminishing returns the more you use of it.

The rest include the interviewer’s side of the conversation:

reason: What institutional environment favors progress?

Ridley: It’s very clear from history that markets bring forth innovation. If you’ve got free and fair exchange with decent property rights and a sufficiently dense population, then you get innovation. That’s what happens in west Asia around 50,000 years ago: the Upper Paleolithic Revolution.

The only institution that really counts is trust, if you like. And something’s got to allow that to build. Property rights are just another expression of trust, aren’t they? I trust you to deliver this property to me. I trust somebody else to allow me to keep this property if I acquire it from you.

But human beings are spectacularly good at destroying trust-generating institutions. They do this through three creatures: chiefs, thieves, and priests.

Chiefs think, “I’m in charge, I own everything, I’m taking over, I’m going to tell everyone how to do it, and I’m going to confiscate property whenever I feel like it.” That’s what happens again and again in the Bronze Age. You get a perfectly good trading diaspora and somebody turns it into an empire.

A classic example is the Chinese retreat in the 1400s, 1500s. China got rich and technologically sophisticated around the year 1000 A.D. That’s when it’s working at its best.

Interestingly, it’s just come out of a period when it’s not unified. Once you’re unified, people keep imposing monopolies and saying there’s only one way of doing things and you’ve got to do it this way. Whereas when you’re fragmented, as Europe remained throughout this period, people can move from one polity to another until they find one they like.

If you want a recipe for how to shut down an economy, just read what the early Ming emperors did. They nationalized foreign trade. They forbade population movements within the country, so villagers weren’t allowed to migrate to towns. They forbade merchants from trading on their own account without specific permission to do specific things. You had to actually register your inventories with the imperial bureaucrats every month, that kind of thing. And they did the usual idiotic thing of building walls, invading Vietnam.

Thieves — one of the reasons for the growth of the Arab civilization in the seventh and eighth centuries must be the fact that the Red Sea was increasingly infested with pirates. It became increasingly difficult to trade with India. Byzantium was having a real problem doing it, and the Arabs had come up with a great new technology for crossing the desert called the camel train. So the rule of law to prevent thievery is also important; but the rule of too much law, to allow chiefs to take everything, is equally a risk.

Priests — well, I must admit I don’t think one can necessarily blame religion for shutting down trust, trade, and exchange. But there’s little doubt that it didn’t help in the Middle Ages, surely. I won’t go further than that. [Don't you love how he dances away from this one like it was a red-hot poker? J.H.]

………………………………..

reason: I was at a Cato Institute function where the British development economist Peter Bauer was giving a lecture, and I had a really smart-ass question: Isn’t the problem with a lot of poor countries, Africa in particular, that there’s corruption and we have to get rid of corruption? And he leaned back on the podium and smiled and shook his head, no. And he said when the United States and Britain were developing in the 19th century, their governments were as corrupt as anything you’d find in Africa, but the governments in Britain and the United States had control of 1 percent or 2 percent of the economy when those countries were growing. In many African countries, the government controls over 60 percent of the economy. That’s the difference.

Ridley: Very nice point. I find myself completely surrounded by pessimists, people who think that Africa is never going to get rich, that it’s deteriorating rather than improving, that living standards are about to get worse. And they’re not convinced they have been getting better in the last few years because things like congestion at airports have gotten worse. There’s a tremendous tendency to take improvements for granted and to notice deteriorations.

There are a lot of people who think, “Ah, we are in a uniquely dangerous situation in my generation. Back in my parents’ generation, they looked forward to the future with confidence and happiness.” That ain’t true either. If you go back and look at every generation, it was dominated by pessimists. There is this wonderful quote from Lord Macaulay in 1830, who says, why is it that with nothing but improvement behind us we anticipate nothing but disaster before us?

………………………………..

reason: How would you describe your politics?

Ridley: I’m a good old-fashioned 19th-century liberal. I love progress, and I love change. What makes what I’ve just said seem right-wing, particularly in Europe, is that it seems to be more concerned with wealth creation than social justice, i.e., with baking another cake rather than cutting up the existing cake. Actually, to some extent, I am an egalitarian. I think that there are ways in which you have to keep equal opportunities in life in order to generate the incentives for people to generate wealth. But I think I’m that classically underrepresented voter, the person who believes in economic freedom and social freedom, too.

I lived in America for three years, which is not a long time, but it was a very influential time for me. I arrived there a pretty standard statist in my views of the world and left a — not a completely convinced libertarian but a person who had suddenly started thinking about politics from the individual’s point of view much more than I had before.

There is a lot more in the full interview. I expect some of my readers will disagree with much of what he has to say. Or maybe not. In either case, it’s an interesting and thought-provoking read. [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Real Mistakes

This is an excerpt from an interview with David Gordon Green (filmmaker) by George Ducker in the March/April 2009 issue of The Believer:

BLVR: In All the Real Girls, there’s a scene of Paul Schneider’s character in a clown costume. He does a silly kind of dance for children at a hospital. At the end of the scene, he turns and looks dead into the camera — the music is still playing, people are still moving — but the scene fades out on Paul’s face, on his expression, which is very much like, “Haven’t you had enough of this? Can we just stop this for just a second?”

DGG: It’s a bold decision. People don’t even consider that an option.

BLVR: I thought about how that could be seen as a kind of mistake. I kept thinking about how mistakes become the finished product. How, when all is said and done, it becomes difficult to tell what’s intended in a finished cut from what’s not.

DGG: The reality is, that probably was a mistake. Like, I was talking to him while he was dancing and he just turned to the camera and had this kind of weird reaction to what I was saying. That’s what you find in the editing room. We all sit around and dig through the mistakes and incorporate a shitload of them.

BLVR: When the movie’s finished and it’s in the theaters, who’s to say that it’s a mistake?

Have you ever had this happen to you in your (real) life? You’re in the middle of something; you realize it’s not working, or you don’t like it, or they don’t get it, or the whole thing is just a complete fucking waste of time; and you just . . . leave?

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Interfused

… Looking at a photograph, we see first its outer covering, a shell that can offer an immediate aesthetic gratification, then, searching further, we can find detail, the particulars of which mark not only its deeper significance but also its absolute involvement with the photographic medium. And if we venture further, we begin to encounter the true richness that the photograph can offer. Hidden deep within it lies an image of the person who made it, that promises contact on a level that I find impossible in any other form of expression. This is my true excitement with photography — the photograph is not simply a window on the world through which we may stare with a vision borrowed from its maker, it is more a mirror that reflects back the demands we make of it together with this image of the photographer. In viewing Robert Frank’s work, for example, I can slip behind the social insight, visual dexterity and structural dynamism and share in the experience of being Robert Frank. The same is true with Lee Friedlander, whose camera-constructed vision of the urban scene has done so much to enlarge the visual vocabulary of the medium — within his images exist clues to the nature of being Lee Friedlander. The same is true, in fact, of all those pictures that I regard as being ‘good’ or ‘great’ by photographers known and unknown.

That’s from an essay, Photographs – Demands and Expectations, by Peter Turner at the end of the book, Reading Photographs: Understanding the Aesthetics of Photography by Jonathan Bayer (1977).

– above, untitled photo by Bruce Davidson

From a different essay, Photographic Time and “The Real World” by Ian Jeffrey, also at the end of that same book:

… [A photograph] is an image but one in which the subject remains interfused and this is the principal sense in which photographs differ from paintings. It follows that, in certain respects, a photograph, or what appears in it, exists for us as the original subject once existed. This makes it natural, in front of a photograph, to wonder both about the moment at which the image was taken and the setting from which it was taken [both spatial and temporal].

… In everyday experience, time appears to be articulated by the transition from darkness into light and back again. This has its spatial equivalent in the monochrome of the photograph. Time can thus be transformed and gathered into the black and white of the image. This is true of any monochrome photograph, although it is not always evident except in those images where the extremes of black and white are set out and connected by a plenitude of half-tones. Such photographs can be said to embody those transitions between darkness and light which are the transitions of the day and of time in general. Edward Weston is the great example of a photographer intent on the space-time transformation attainable in monochrome images.

… By contrast, Walker Evans shows the intact in conjunction with the particular. He was just as interested in and responsive to the tonal continuum as Edward Weston. Evans’ photograph of Richard Perkins’ corrugated tin facade is as full of nuanced half-tones as anything printed by Weston but in addition the picture is rich in indices of moment and place. Cast shadows mark the fall of the light, the road marks the extension of the place and the setting of the facade as a frame within the frame marks both Evans’ choice of viewpoint and composition. Thus he demonstrates the inter-dependence of photographer, moment and place. The image is made in response to the conjunction of the three; it shows a view of the world and something of how that view arises, whereas Weston shows the vision largely without its ground and its moment. Although both find and acknowledge order and harmony, the difference is that Evans finds this to be manifest in the world and demonstrable through photography, whilst Weston finds and understands exactly the reverse.

I’m not sure I agree with any of this, especially the second, but I find them both to be interesting.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

An Anchor, Not A Wheel

What if determinism requires free will?

In a response to a post on Dr. C’s blog (about the Libertarian postion on free will which is that we have free will and are not determined), I briefly mentioned the three other options:

free will with determinism
no free will and determinism
no free will with indeterminism

In the comment, I described that last one as “nonsensical” — because, off the top of my head, it seemed that if we lose both our will and determinism then all would be random and there would be no causation of any kind. As we seem to be obviously ensconced in causation of some kind, that seemed silly. We are logical beings. But, just because I had called it nonsensical, it became a Bluebeard’s door for me. Was it necessarily off the table? Why shouldn’t I have a look? Combine that with the trump card that those who don’t believe in free will can so easily play: the conundrum that says, if you have determinism, then you can’t have real free will and if you have indeterminism then all is random and . . . you can’t have free will. What else is there? — and I get interested in door number 4 even if it does seem “nonsensical.”

Set all that aside for a minute and indulge me in this thought experiment:

In my previous post, was a story about a misplaced embryo. It ended up, by mistake, in the wrong woman. Imagine that. Babies floating around ending up who knows where; maybe in their biological mother; maybe not. Now, also consider the recent news item about a clinic in Los Angeles that was offering to make “designer babies.” Never mind that the only choices available were eye color and hair color. Pretend that they could offer everything, buffet style.

You should now be imagining 1) babies not necessarily belonging to mothers and 2) individual babies made up of selected bits and pieces.

Suppose that two hundred years from now, there is the technology to take the human genome, put it in a blender and, from the pieces, build, at random, multiple babies. A prospective parent goes to the baby store and, from a hundred babies, picks out the one he or she wants. Most likely, he or she would pick one that was like himself or herself, but regardless, he or she would choose one for some causal reason. The babies are constructed randomly; the parents choose causally.

Now shrink that whole scenario down to be in your own mind right now. If the world is indeterministic — and there is a fair amount of evidence that suggests that it may be so at the micro level and even at the macro level in the sense of emergent properties — then the sensory input to one’s mind as well as the way that already-conformed thoughts surface to consciousness may be indeterministic. Your ideas (“babies”) are randomly generated out of the bits and pieces and because it’s in “your” mind, you assume that you are its “mother”; from them, you (the “parent”) choose the one that is “most like yourself,” i.e. suits your (causally generated, willfully deterministic) requirements.

What if free will is not about making free —  in the sense of uncaused — choices but about what its name says it’s about: free will. Will to hold a logically consistent deterministic line against an indeterminate world. To be a causally consistent being in a system where causal consistency is not naturally maintained.

An anchor, not a wheel.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Determinism

In New York City, in the spring of 1999, a story hit the newspapers of a Long Island woman who had given birth to twins — one white and one black. The woman and her husband were white and the black baby was not theirs, at least not biologically. The embryo that became that baby had been accidentally implanted in the woman’s uterus with the embryo of her biological son, but it belonged to a black couple who were clients at the same fertility clinic, and they wanted their son back. After a DNA test, a custody battle, a state supreme court ruling, and an unsuccessful appeal, it was decided that the black baby was the child of the black couple, legally and entirely.

The story had its peculiarities, like the fact that the fertility clinic had notified the black couple that some of their embryos had been mistakenly implanted in another woman, but did not tell them anything more, so they eventually learned of the birth of their son through a private investigator. But even odd facts like this took on the sheen of metaphor, pointing, for those of us who were looking, to further evidence of a systematic failure of any number of services to reach black people intact, in the form in which they are typically enjoyed by white people. If both babies had been white, I doubt the story would have become the parable it became — playing out in the newspapers over the next few years as an epic tale of blood and belonging.

That’s the beginning of a wonderfully interesting exploration of race in an essay, Relations by Eula Biss in Identity Theory magazine (March 17, 2008). It’s fascinating in itself, but I’m also going to be using it in my next post as a conceptual source, so I hope you’ll enjoy it in both senses. From later in the essay, here is more, about the author’s own family:

… “I feel like an unknown quantity,” my cousin remarked at some point during the year that we lived together. She was referring to the algebraic term, the unknown quantity x, which much be solved for, or defined, by the numbers in the equation around it. I remember, when I first encountered algebra, feeling the limits of my own comprehension break around the concept that one number in an equation could be unknown. And what baffled me most was that the answer, in algebra, was known, but the question was incomplete.

… The census taker asked us to report the highest degree or level of school we had completed, how well we spoke English, and whether we did any work for pay. For every question he asked, my cousin asked one back. It became a kind of exchange, which is how we learned that our census taker was an artist when he wasn’t taking the census. I laughed when my cousin asked him why he needed to know the address where she worked, and she cut her eyes at me. “It’s not for him,” I said, trying to help, “It’s for the government.” She pursed her lips. “I come from people,” she informed me, “who have learned not to trust the government.”

And then there was question six: What is this person’s race? The census taker marked the box in front of White for me, with no discussion, but my cousin spent quite a bit of time on this question. “What are my options?” she asked first. The list was surprisingly long for a document conceived by the government of a country that does not readily embrace subtlety or accuracy in just about any form: White; Black, African American, or Negro; American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian Indian; Chinese; Filipino; Japanese; Korean; Vietnamese; Other Asian; Native Hawaiian; Guamanian or Chamorro; Somoan; Other Pacific Islander; or Some Other Race. Our census taker would list all of these options several times, stumbling over the words every time, until he eventually handed the form to my cousin in frustration. Part of the problem was that the list did not include her first choice — Mixed Race. But it did, unlike the 1990 census, allow the census taker to mark more than one race. Eventually, he marked both White and Black.

And here is the ending, which brings it back to where it started:

… “He has two mothers,” the Long Island woman said of the black baby to whom she gave birth, in a brazen refusal of the very terms in which her story was being told. She abandoned this idea only after it was suggested to her that this might be confusing for the child and perhaps even damaging. But she did not abandon her belief that the two boys who shared her womb should grow up knowing each other as brothers. “She wants him to know that she carried him and that she loved him and in the end made the ultimate sacrifice,” her lawyer said shortly after she surrendered the black baby to his parents. “And secondly, she wants him to know he has a brother.”

In the same statement, the white woman’s lawyer also said, “The most important thing to her is that she wants this boy to know when he grows up that she didn’t abandon him because of his race.” If that was the most important thing to her and not simply her lawyer’s bad idea of what needed to be said, then her story was even sadder than it first appeared. She already feared, when he was four months old, that the baby she birthed and held and fed would grow up to believe she was racist. She was giving him up because he wasn’t hers, but the fact that he was not hers was all caught up, for her and for many others, in his race and her own.

Ultimately, it is not at all hard to understand why the baby’s biological parents in New Jersey were so adamantly opposed to sharing custody with this woman. And so it was all the more surprising, all the more touching, when, after the white woman had refused them contact with the baby for the first three months of his life, and after several years of custody disputes and court cases and appeals, the black couple told reporters that they still remained open to having some relationship with the white couple in the future. They suggested that when their son was “mature enough to understand his unique beginnings” they might be able to reach out to the white couple “in friendship and fellowship.” They might be something less than family to each other, the black couple seemed to be suggesting, but they were more than strangers.

This is a very long piece but well worth the time it takes to read it all. Highly recommended. [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Where He Knows What He Knows

Yesterday, as most days, in the afternoon I went for a hike. So, it was raining. One must go out into the mountains nevertheless (or especially …)

As usual, while walking in the lovely quiet of the middle-of-nowhere wilderness that is so familiar to me, I was thinking about whatever I happened to have been reading before I left home. In this case it was two items, the first of which was from a post on Felix Grant’s Growlery blog in response to my question about when a picture is made (in my Deviant Acts post of a few days ago). Felix says (among other things):

… the photograph is made at the moment when I previsualise … whether I actually release the shutter or not. But, while true, that’s not the whole truth.

… And, to be honest, I do (deep down) feel my previsualisation to be provisional, fragile and fugitive until I hear the click of the shutter…

The other thing that I that I was thinking about was this admonishment, this scolding, by Dr. C in comments to my Unsaying post of a while back. He says:

I can find no way to reconcile a style that is both paradoxical and empiric. What are we to believe when we read a statement? Is it “true” or is it “paradoxically true”. It is a defense that many people (one’s self?) uses to avoid the terrible nature of empiric reality. It is a cop out to say something very forward and then to take refuge in paradox rather than face the consequences of your assertion.

Words must mean what they mean in the first instance, otherwise we have chaos.

How to reconcile Felix and Dr. C? Where and what exactly are Felix’s previsualized photographs? How to get to the “empirical reality” of that previsualization?

I needed to have a look inside of Felix’s head to see if and where the pictures were. Obviously, the nose offered the largest portal to the inside.

First, I immobilized Felix by shooting him with a (#2) dart from my Tagmauni blow-gun. Then I recruited Dr. C to help me look up his nose (that’s what doctors do). Not only were the pictures there, there was all kinds of other stuff.

I won’t give you the details of what else was in Felix’s nose (some of it astonishing; some of it quite puzzling) or what else happened with the assembled cast of characters. Suffice it to say that on several occasions during my hike (in the rain), I was laughing so hard I thought I would ‘rupture myself’ (a favorite phrase of local old-timers).

Had I died of such a ‘rupture’, where would the act of killing have happened; what the cause and how would blame be assigned?

It’s not easy being empirical.

 

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

– Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/