Is Free Will an Illusion?

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Mar 212012
 

Is Free Will an Illusion? »

The Chronicle Review has an excellent collection of short articles on this topic. Of the selected authors, the neuroscientists dismiss the possibility of free will; the philosophers deny that realism effectively invalidates free will; and the lawyer is just pragmatic about what affect an absence of free will might mean in our society.

For myself, I’m decidedly against the idea that we have any free will. Apart from compelling arguments of physical determinism, there is foremost the matter of the Self. Considered both from a philosophic standpoint, that is my belief in a non-dualistic reality (i.e., consistent with Advaita Vedanta and Zen Buddhism), and from an evolutionary biology perspective (e.g., Dawkins explains that, as with all organisms, we are merely vehicles for the survival of our immortal genes), I see no individual Self to which free will can be attributed; our sense of self is simply the manifestation of mental (i.e., neurological) processes in the brain.

As philosopher Thomas Metzinger puts it: “if it is true that the self is not a thing but a process … then it is also true that the tragedy of the ego dissolves because, strictly speaking, nobody is ever born and nobody ever dies.” — http://goo.gl/PWhHC

The Self would be an illusion if there were an Ito hold it; where there is no Self there can be no free will.

Is Free Will an Illusion? – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education
Free will has long been a fraught concept among philosophers and theologians. Now neuroscience is entering the fray. For centuries, the idea that we are the authors of our own actions, beliefs, and de…
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A year later

 Civics & Polity, Mind & Spirit, Personal Life, Sustainability  No Responses »
Jun 252011
 

When I started this blog I stated that it was to be about world issues and not personal matters. Well, with this posting that’s about to change somewhat. Yet, there’s still not going to be any teen-girl drama. ;-)

I had intended to write a blog post last summer, after the G20 fiasco in Toronto. I was appalled at the heavy-handed conduct of the police and government authorities then and the lack of remorse, contrition or even serious introspection since. I was also quite disappointed in the acceptance of these actions by a large contingent of the population, reflecting a profound political disengagement and apathy that warrants a reminder of “First they came…” However, I just couldn’t find the words to express my outrage any better than many others who were echoing my sentiments.

The issues of the G8/G20 meetings being protested were sidelined by the policing issues, many details of which I won’t delve into here as they are well documented elsewhere. That is not to say the latter were not important; indeed, they are (especially, given the billion dollar price tag!) and there needs to be a serious inquiry into how this was allowed to happen as it did and why there has been so little done to assure it will not happen again. Unfortunately, the mainstream media dwells not on what is most important but rather (to them) what is most urgent, that is to say, they instead cover what’s sensational. Sadly, there is very little investigative journalism anymore.

For instance, the Harperialist agenda of the G8 meeting in Muskoka prominently featured the funding for maternal health initiatives in the developing world. Significant media attention was (justifiably) drawn to the fact that such funding did not include some family planning initiatives that were at odds with Conservative ideology. However, little attention was given to the larger smoke-and-mirrors issue that this funding announcement was nothing new; it was just the reaffirmation of previous commitments to fund United Nations Millennium Development Goal (MDG) initiatives. Yet, what was left unsaid (or at least under-reported) in the mainstream media is that many of the other previous MDG commitments were left unfulfilled by the G8 countries.

At the time of the G20, Toronto was in the midst of the pre-election mayoralty race and an already unbelievable amount of attention was being paid to a comic fringe candidate running on a Palinesque populist platform. In the fall, Toronto elected right-wing buffoon Rob Ford as mayor and he set about immediately to undo much of what good had been done by his predecessors. Not long thereafter, Canada re-elected the Harperialist federal government, only this time with a majority after years of wheedling an electorate that is largely disengaged, apathetic and disgusted with political maneuvering. We can expect the government to continue, now unhindered: kowtowing to the economic interests of industrial-age resource-based industries; attacking social programmes while ensuring tax breaks for the wealthy; avoiding, indeed deriding, scientific and fact-based policy development, especially anything to do with climate change; imposing more oppressive surveillance, policing and tough-on-crime sentencing, likely including a step-up of the widely repudiated War on Drugs; and enforcing even more draconian intellectual property laws than the United States. Coming in the fall of 2011, I fully expect Ontario will elect a Conservative government, having grown tired of the lackluster performance of the Liberals, whereupon more attacks will be visited upon social programmes and green initiatives will be curtailed, particularly in the energy sector. Oh, and south of the border the Republicans have assumed a majority in both the House and the Senate.

In the year prior, I had been seriously dismayed by the collapse of the climate change talks in Copenahagen, after which the green movement seemed to give up pursuing geo-political solutions, while climate denialism continued to flourish. Obama, who had been elected on the audacity of his platform of Hope was fighting an economic collapse and a rear-guard action against Republicans during the mid-term elections, did little to address any of these larger issues. Of course, he was reflecting the mood of the people, who were more concerned with their own immediate economic situation than the seemingly abstract issues of climate change, peak oil, etc.

So at about the time of the G20, I was undergoing some personal stress, a sort of existential crisis. I had become extraordinarily anxious about many of the global issues (about which I’ve previously blogged) that we confront as a civilization, indeed as a species, as the sustainability of our way of living becomes more untenable on a finite planet.  A sense of futility exacerbated my cynicism of the political process and I was beginning to succumb to a feeling of deep depression and despair. I think I’ve posted about how I had become disillusioned with my software development career, how I’d abandoned some of my early environmental ideals to pursue the manufacture of bits, which arguably did little except improve the efficiency of capitalist interests. (Of course, having to deal with entrepreneurial psychopaths didn’t help!) I felt a personal guilt for having been part of the Hippie generation that first embraced and celebrated environmentalism, then turned our backs on it as we grew up, took up careers, settled down to raise families in the suburbs and commute in SUVs. It has only been over the past few years I’ve re-awakened to many of these issues and I’m now dealing with the psychological fallout.

I can’t say it was the events or aftermath of the G20 per se, or my disillusionment about them, but it was about that time that I realized that I needed an awakening of a more profound kind to shake me from my neurosis. So, for the past year, I’ve been pursuing an inward journey of personal development along a more spiritual path. Oh, I’m still an avowed (agnostic) atheist, although I’m less militant about it, now. I’ve been reading about Advaita Vedanta (a non-dual form of Hinduism compatible with atheism) and Buddhism (which originally derived from many of the same concepts), although I’m still wrestling with how to reconcile their metaphysics with what I know and believe about the reality in which we live. This also led me back to reading more science, especially cosmology, psychology and philosophy. I’ve also taken up reading literature  — and not just my favourite existential authors (Camus, Dostoyevski, etc.)! — which is quite a departure from my strictly non-fiction diet. I think it’s working.

All in all, I’m fairly happy with life and have a more positive outlook than last year at this time. I’m back to work on a voluntary basis with a not-for-profit organization that is a clearinghouse for information on social justice and environmental issues. In the short-term, I’ll be leveraging my IT skills to upgrade their infrastructure and I hope to develop a new website or, at least, enhance what is already there. Afterwards, I hope to do more in the area of writing and editing of articles to be published online. Apart from joining a career networking meetup group recently, this is the first concrete step, after some considerable time not working, I’ve made towards rebuilding my career. I had thought of abandoning the IT field altogether but I’m reconsidering that now and think that I’ll keep it as an option going forward, at least in terms of seeking out transitional opportunities.

The journey continues…

Great books

 Arts & Culture, Personal Life  No Responses »
Apr 072010
 

[Note: Since this post was originally published, I've created an account at Goodreads, which is where I shall maintain such lists.]

My late uncle once asked me what I enjoyed reading. I responded that I quite liked most non-fiction including science (cosmology was especially fascinating to me at the time), philosophy (I’d read almost everything Ayn Rand had published, although I had by this time long since repudiated my earlier attraction to Objectivism), etc. but that I didn’t really take to fictional novels at all, as they seemed rather pointless to me — an opinion I’ve since recanted with respect to classic literature — and science fiction seemed more interesting, as it allows broad stage for thought experiments, especially into questions of ethics and morality. I’ve always been a goal-oriented concrete thinker and I wasn’t sure what purpose fiction served other than as a distraction from life, which seemed kind of antithetical to the way I wanted to live mine. I now know that fiction, classic literature in particular, provides a way to explore what it means to be human. When he asked whether I had considered reading history, I think the only books that I’d read which might qualify were Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, both brilliant works. Although I have fond memories of chatting with my mother about history as a kid, I think the subject was killed for me by my high school history teacher who appeared as though she had lived through most of it and had sadly reduced it to a litany of names and dates.

My uncle lent me a copy of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamatous 14th Century, a brilliant tour de force of historical literature that explored the human dimension of society at that time, not just a recitation of mundane facts. Tuchman considered herself a writer first; history was her subject. I was hooked, becoming a voracious reader of anything I could find by Tuchman: (Pulitzer prize-winning) The Guns of August; The Zimmermann Telegram; The Proud Tower; Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour; The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam; and Practicing History: Selected Essays. She opened my eyes to a wealth of history that I had never before fully appreciated and did so with such eloquence and wit as to keep me hanging on every word.

Looking back, that conversation with my uncle was a seminal moment in my life. Since then I’ve read many other great books concerning history (among others and in no certain order): Frances Gile’s The Knight in History; Norma Lorre Goodrich’s Medieval Myths; Trevor Royle’s Civil War (of 17th C. England); T. M. Devine’s The Scottish Nation and Scotlands’ Empire; Arthur Hermann’s How the Scots Invented The Modern World; Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Robert K. Massie’s Dreadnought; John Keegan’s A History of Warfare and Intelligence in War; Alex de Toqueville’s The Old Regime and The French Revolution; Alistair Horne’s The Age of Napoleon; Gwynne Dyer’s Future Tense and The Mess They Made; Howard Zinn’s Original Zinn and A People’s History of The United States; Martin Meredith’s The Fate of Africa; Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse; Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress; and Clive Ponting’s A New Green History of The World — the book that re-kindled my concern for the environment and issues of sustainable living.

Many of the sociopolitical and ecological issues explored in these historical books prompted me to expand my reading horizons. I also read (again, not in any particular order): Sun Tzu’s The Art of War; Carl von Clauswitz’s On War; Niccolo Macchiveli’s The Prince; Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards, Reflections of a Siamese Twin, and The Unconscious Civilization; Voltaire’s Candide; Noam Chomsky’s Language and Politics, Pirates and Emperors: Old and New, 9-11 plus other writings and interviews; Robert D. Kaplan’s An Empire Wilderness and The Coming Anarchy; Niall Ferguson’s Colossus; Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myths, Myths to Live By and The Inner Reaches of Outer Space; Homer’s The Iliad; Camille Paglia’s Sex, Art and American Culture; Northrop Frye’s Words With Power; Martin Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics; Albert Camus’ The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel; Karl Marx’s and Frederick Engels’ The Communist Manifesto; Alexander Berkman’s What is Anarchism; Jane Jacob’s The Nature of Economies and Dark Age Ahead; John Stackhouse’s Out of Poverty; Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea; Jeffery Sach’s The End of Poverty; Muhammad Yunus’ Creating a World Without Poverty; C. Ford Runge et al.’s Ending Hunger in Our Lifetime; Amartya Sen’s Development As Freedom and Identity and Violence; Naomi Klein’s No Logo; George Monbiot’s Bring On The Apocalypse; Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy; Gwynne Dyer’s Climate Wars; Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto; Lester R. Brown’s Plan B 4.0; Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid; and Derrick Jensen’s subversive Endgame: Volume I – The Problem of Civilization & Volume II – Resistance.

For a more complete catalogue of books I’ve read and want to read, visit my LivingSocialGoodreads profile.  I may periodically update this post.

Out of the shadows

 Personal Life  No Responses »
Mar 032010
 

About a year ago, I came out on Facebook with a personal profile attributed to my real identity. Yet, I continued to maintain a ‘more subversive’ pseudonymous profile but after realizing that I was using it less and less as I grew more comfortable with my new online voice, I eventually consolidated these personae and disclosed my true identity to my online friends. (As my alter ego alias may still some useful purpose when I’m concerned with shielding my identity, I won’t disclose it here.)

I have over the past couple of years become increasingly concerned with issues of ecological sustainability. My long-standing concerns were re-ignited with a heightened sense of urgency by the recent fervour over climate change. I’ve been an avid reader of history and upon reading Clive Ponting’s Clive Ponting’s A New Green History of the World I came to realize that the threatened impacts of impending climate change bring into sharper focus a nexus of many related environmental issues and their underlying causes. In short, our modern lifestyles in this industrial society have wreaked havoc upon the environment proportional to the extent that we consume products. Compounding this issue is global population growth and matters of global social justice, which will result in dramatically increased deterioration of our environment. Our planet imposes natural limits to growth and, if not already exceeded, we are on a trajectory to over-shoot its carrying capacity.

For most of the past 25 years I have been an investor in The Hunger Project, a strategic not-for-profit organization committed to ending chronic world hunger and extreme poverty by empowering women and men to end their own hunger. Whilst I remain a strong advocate for their work, I’ve since come to believe that it is at the risk of becoming moot unless we can address some of the larger issues that confront us, some of which — at the risk of sounding alarmist — might, as some believe, be potentially civilization-ending if not simply risking the extinction of the human species. Yet, I remain a strong advocate for social justice; I believe that we cannot create a sustainable future without being inclusive and fair in considering the wants and needs of all people. Even apart from worse-case collapse scenarios associated with climate change or carrying capacity over-shoot, there will be an increasing risk of civil unrest, mass migrations and wars arising from population pressures, depletion of resources and an overwhelming sense of injustice related to growing gaps in wealth and opportunity, both regionally and world-wide. In this age of globalization, our interconnected world is much smaller than it used to be and will offer no refuge to isolationists who may want to ignore the plight of the increasingly resentful disadvantaged.

For the South, the earliest significant impacts of climate change, for instance, will likely be direct affects, such as droughts, crop failures, etc., while in the North we are more likely to be indirectly impacted by related global and regional security threats. The so-called War on Terror that has captivated much international attention over the past decade may just be a taste of what will come, with concomitant further erosion of civil liberties as corporate-nation states hunker down to protect their vital interests.

These topics and related matters are some of the subjects I intend to write about. I will undoubtedly write about other concerns and interests, too, in the areas of social justice, civil liberty, politics, popular culture, philosophy, privacy, security, information technology, free/libre open source software, (so-called) intellectual property, etc. Yet, I promise it won’t be all doom and gloom. While I won’t be blogging like a teenage girl about my personal life, I don’t intend to ignore what is good in the world. Nor will this blog always be so serious (I often feel compelled to express my sardonic sense of humour, not that you can tell from this post! ;-p) and I’ll also post photos as I re-kindle a long-neglected interest in photography.

I’m looking forward to this; it should be fun! :-)