Friday, January 12, 2024
In bed at 9:10 and up at 4:15 to let Lilly out. 34°, high of 34°, wind ESE at 14 mph, 1-28/46. WINTER STORM WARNING from 6 a.m. today until noon tomorrow. 3 to 7 inches near the lake, 7 to 12 inches inland. Wind chills 16 to 25°°. Sunrise at 7:22, sunset at 4:38, 9+15. Went back to bed at some time and woke up at 8:15 with considerable wet snow coming down and some tree damage already.
Treadmill; pain. My right wrist is hurting badly as I wake up. Is it simply arthritis or do I strain it in my sleep? 30:09 & 0.65 at 1:30 while watching a YouTube English piece on the Great Fire of London and Samuel Pepys descriptions of it in his 1666 diary. Also I rewatched episode 3 of Carol and The End of the World, trying to get the point.
I'm grateful to be in my warm, lovely home with my warm, lovely wife and my warm, lovely dog on this cold, blustery, stormy day. I'm thinking of those living in tents, or under bridges and viaducts today, and of the migrants arriving in Chicago today to weather like they have never experienced before. counting my blessings and feeling some guilt, Robert Sapolsky notwithstanding.
Robert Sapolsky and Determinism: A Science of Life Without Free Will. I've watched a few long interviews of Sapolsky on YouTube and wonder whether, or perhaps how, he is correct that free will is an illusion, that everything that happens is an inevitable consequence of the laws of nature and what the universe was like at one point, that we are bound to do what we in fact do. The social, religious, and political consequences of this kind of thinking would be revolutionary. Without free will, there is no sin and no culpable crime on the one hand and no praiseworthy conduct or achievement on the other. All conduct is foreordained.
Sapolsky is a neurobiologist at Stanford who has written a lot, lectured a lot, been interviewed a lot, and appeared a lot on YouTube. He is on the faculty in the Biological Sciences Department, the Neurology Department, and the Neurosurgery Department at the medical school. He spent a year and a half studying in Africa and another 25 entire summers studying the same group of baboons for 8 to 10 hours a day. He characterizes himself as a primatologist, an expert on primates, including humans. He argues human actions are determined by neurobiology, hormones, childhood, and life circumstances. He is an engaging, entertaining, and persuasive speaker. He is a Brooklyn-born Jew, raised in an Orthodox family, and an atheist. His conferences and talks are published on Stanford's YouTube channel and elsewhere.
Sapolsky relies a lot on biochemistry for his conclusions, as in "“Lots of glucocorticoids from Mom marinating your fetal brain, thanks to maternal stress, and there’s increased vulnerability to depression and anxiety in your adulthood,” but he also relies on physics, anthropology, sociology, and culture to support his arguments. “All these disciplines collectively negate free will because they are all interlinked, constituting the same ultimate body of knowledge.” “[T]here’s not a single crack of daylight to shoehorn in free will.”
Sapolosky's critics generally do not dispute his evidence of determinism but argue that determinism is compatible with freedom and moral responsibility. This theory is called "compatibilism," a theory at which Sapolsky scoffs, treating as sort of the equivalent of the last part of OWH's quote about being 'tattooed in our cradles": I don't believe in ghosts but am afraid of them nonetheless. Saplolsky himself admits that despite his conviction of the truth of his belief in determinism, he doesn't act like it. “It’s been a moral imperative for me to view humans without judgment or the belief that anyone deserves anything special, to live without a capacity for hatred or entitlement, and I just can’t do it.”
I can't hope to resolve these issues but the discussion makes me think about myself and the significant others in my life. To what extent has my long life been simply a long series of predictable, indeed inevitable, responses to whatever cluster of causal predicates preceded them? Did my cousin Doug live the troubled life he led, so different from his brother's and his sister's, because he was foredoomed from the moment of his conception? Was the Second World War indeed inevitable, as was the First World War and all the wars before and after? Were my little family's post-war miseries in our little basement apartment at 7303 S. Emerald Avenue all 'in the cards' long before any of us was born? Every night and every morn / Some to misery are born. / Every morn and every night / Some are born to sweet delight. / Some are born to sweet delight. / Some are born to endless night. Is this a way of understanding the belief that "God has a plan for me"? Are we all indeed MacBeth's mere actors on a stage, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? Are all our ideas of freedom, of sin and vice and virtue, free will and free choice, of commendability and culpability - is all of this illusion?
Curiously, we've watched a few episodes of an adult animation on Netflix called Carol and the End of the World. The premise is that an asteroid is hurtling towards the end and will collide with it/us at a known time certain, some months, days, hours, ahead. Everyone knows they will die come the collision (or before), so most people say 'fuck it', quit working at their jobs, and do whatever they want to do with the discrete time they have left - except Carol. Her aged mother and father become flabby nudists and live with their male nurse as a "throuple." Carole goes to work as an "administrative assistant" in the Accounting Department of a firm where all the other departments have closed, i.e., no workers, no work. The people in the Accounting Department sit at their desks pounding away at their keyboards, staring at their computer screens, avoiding contact with the other workers, i.e., drone-like. As with Sapolsky's Determinism treatise, this cartoon series has some pretty heavy existential messages - none very pleasant to think about.
A year ago this date we were experiencing an internet outage, just as we are this morning. My journal entry:
Capabilities, dependencies, and vulnerabilities. Each morning for many years now I get out of bed, fix my coffee (now herbal tea), sit on my recliner, open my laptop and check on the world outside my home. This morning: no internet, no wifi! I restarted my MacBookAir a couple of times, but no luck. OMG, I'm alone with only my wonderful (sleeping) wife, hundreds of great books, multiple televisions and radios, local channels plus HBO Max, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, AppleTV+, Criterion, OVID, the PBS app, and oodles of food and water, but no internet😱😨😲😳😰 What's a person to do?!?! (I'm reminded of the W. C. Fields poster in Doloris McCrimmon's living room: "There I was, stranded in the jungle with nothing to sustain me but food and water.) As Geri woke up and asked me to 'push the button' on Mr. Coffee, I gave her the startling news, repaired to the basement, pushed the 'reset' buttons on our modem and router and voila!, problem solved. 😁😂😄😅😇 The experience reminds me again of how, with all the new technological capabilities we acquire, become habituated to and become dependent upon, we acquire new vulnerabilities. Computers, the internet and cyber world are the most prominent examples. How often have I thought that the retirement funds that we rely on are only digital data stored in some huge mainframes somewhere. Not money, not currency, not a means of exchange, not a precious metal, just digital data somewhere, capable of being hacked, capable of being embezzled, capable of being destroyed by software or microchip failure, by a solar superstorm or by an electromagnetic pulse e-bomb triggered by a hostile nation or terrorists. Not comforting thoughts but accurate. Ditto the effect of a forced national debt default caused by 'do or die' Republicans collapsing both equity and bond markets. Vulnerabilities abound in our 'advanced' world.
Related: Yesterday the young ophthalmologist who examined me and my cataract asked "Do you drive?" and I thought 'uh oh, is my driver's license in jeopardy?' I admitted I have trouble driving at night, and avoid it, especially in the Fox Point/Bayside area with no street lights and road construction going on with lane markers obscured or difficult to read, especially when the ground is wet.
CPP is acting up all morning.
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Plus ça change, plus le meme chose.
LTMW Still no birds. ????
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