No photo, unfortunately, but you can easily picture it and, no doubt, have seen this broken pattern many times. As I have. But sometimes, for no apparent reason, it hits home, as it did for me last evening.
Sitting in a sheltered courtyard at dusk, I happened to look up at a patch of sky and saw a ragged V-formation of birds (ducks?), very high up, flying north-northwest.
Then, a few seconds later, a single bird flying in the same direction.
It had started out with the others, I supposed, and was slowly falling behind, lacking the required strength or coordination or stamina. If the journey were a long one, the laggard would inevitably be lost to the others.
Evolution at work.
My point here is not political. But you could say that how one responds to these particular facts of life determines the broad tenor of one's political views. Some deny the facts, of course, but those who accept them can clearly respond in very different ways.
In general terms, you could say that the Social Darwinist or the radical right-libertarian positively embraces the dark truths of the evolutionary process; that the moderate conservative accepts the facts and tries to mitigate their worst social and human consequences; and that the socialist seeks to create a sacrosanct social sphere in which these particular facts just don't apply.
Showing posts with label life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label life. Show all posts
Thursday, October 3, 2013
Friday, May 4, 2012
Can we dispense with ideology?
It has been the case for many, many years, and is now, of course, even more so the case, that humanity's knowledge-base is so vast and varied that an individual is capable of understanding only the tiniest fraction of it. Specialists devote a lifetime to their little corner, and even then, at least in the sciences, will only make significant contributions by working collaboratively with others.
And yet we (or at least some of us) still hanker for a general understanding of things, a synoptic view. This is what religions and various secular ideologies have provided - something to satisfy our instinct to get to the bottom of things and to situate ourselves within the whole; to make sense of our fleeting lives.
Crucially, we need to integrate our feelings and values with our practical and objective knowledge of the world, and this is what religions and ideologies have done so successfully in the past.
Unfortunately, the most potent forms of religion today are completely divorced from modern science. Islam is locked into a medieval worldview, and the forms of Christianity (and indeed Judaism) which are currently flourishing rely on a blinkered and literalistic interpretation of scriptures composed thousands of years ago.
More intelligent forms of religion (like the views put forward by Erwin Schrödinger to which I recently alluded) are also problematic, in my opinion, largely because they tend to lack content. Rereading Schrödinger, I am annoyed both by the vagueness of his religious claims and by the patrician, sage-like tone. Just a bit too self-conscious. And of course the science is old.*
Political ideologies are not much more satisfactory. The complexity of the social realm makes it impossible to pin down the essentials in a creed or text, and attempts to do so - and apply the creed - have been spectacularly unsuccessful, often resulting in much unnecessary death and suffering.
But one can take the word 'ideology' in a broader sense, denoting a general set of beliefs about the nature of things and about social life and about what is important. In this sense, ideology is a good and necessary thing.
We need to make choices, we need to act, and to do so we need to integrate objective knowledge with feelings and values. I don't think we need to turn to religious traditions for help here (though many do); and of course we should be modest in what we claim for our view of things. But we need something like an ideology if we are to have a synoptic view, and certainly if we aspire to give a coherent and principled account of our actions.
* Interestingly, Roger Penrose contributed a brief preface to the reprint of some of Schrödinger's non-technical writings which I have been reading. Penrose writes that when he was a young mathematics student in the 1950s he didn't read a great deal, "but what I did read - at least if I completed the book - was usually by Erwin Schrödinger." It is no surprise that Schrödinger's mystical view of life and consciousness would have appealed to the man who was to write The Emperor's New Mind.
And yet we (or at least some of us) still hanker for a general understanding of things, a synoptic view. This is what religions and various secular ideologies have provided - something to satisfy our instinct to get to the bottom of things and to situate ourselves within the whole; to make sense of our fleeting lives.
Crucially, we need to integrate our feelings and values with our practical and objective knowledge of the world, and this is what religions and ideologies have done so successfully in the past.
Unfortunately, the most potent forms of religion today are completely divorced from modern science. Islam is locked into a medieval worldview, and the forms of Christianity (and indeed Judaism) which are currently flourishing rely on a blinkered and literalistic interpretation of scriptures composed thousands of years ago.
More intelligent forms of religion (like the views put forward by Erwin Schrödinger to which I recently alluded) are also problematic, in my opinion, largely because they tend to lack content. Rereading Schrödinger, I am annoyed both by the vagueness of his religious claims and by the patrician, sage-like tone. Just a bit too self-conscious. And of course the science is old.*
Political ideologies are not much more satisfactory. The complexity of the social realm makes it impossible to pin down the essentials in a creed or text, and attempts to do so - and apply the creed - have been spectacularly unsuccessful, often resulting in much unnecessary death and suffering.
But one can take the word 'ideology' in a broader sense, denoting a general set of beliefs about the nature of things and about social life and about what is important. In this sense, ideology is a good and necessary thing.
We need to make choices, we need to act, and to do so we need to integrate objective knowledge with feelings and values. I don't think we need to turn to religious traditions for help here (though many do); and of course we should be modest in what we claim for our view of things. But we need something like an ideology if we are to have a synoptic view, and certainly if we aspire to give a coherent and principled account of our actions.
* Interestingly, Roger Penrose contributed a brief preface to the reprint of some of Schrödinger's non-technical writings which I have been reading. Penrose writes that when he was a young mathematics student in the 1950s he didn't read a great deal, "but what I did read - at least if I completed the book - was usually by Erwin Schrödinger." It is no surprise that Schrödinger's mystical view of life and consciousness would have appealed to the man who was to write The Emperor's New Mind.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Betrayal
Walking home last evening, deep in a city park, I passed a couple smooching on a park bench. I heard just a few words.
"He's working," she said. "All night. On night shift."
Poor chap.
And then I wondered, why did she not invite her boyfriend to her home and cuddle in comfort?
Of course, the neighbours.
And the risk, as in countless movies, of leaving clues, two wine glasses on the table instead of one, his umbrella in the corner, that kind of thing.
"He's working," she said. "All night. On night shift."
Poor chap.
And then I wondered, why did she not invite her boyfriend to her home and cuddle in comfort?
Of course, the neighbours.
And the risk, as in countless movies, of leaving clues, two wine glasses on the table instead of one, his umbrella in the corner, that kind of thing.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Ten ways to enhance your economic security
1. Education and professional training is the single most important factor in determining one's level of income, so obviously a lot of attention has to be given to making good choices in this regard. Unfortunately, choices need to be made before most of us are capable of choosing wisely, and bad early choices usually have a negative impact which lasts a lifetime. But such is the price of freedom.
2. Cultivate a taste for frugality and saving. See saving in a positive light - as deferred gratification, for example.
3. Aim to pay half of what your spendthrift twin would pay for anything you do buy, from food to clothes to larger items.
4. Pay off loans. The fashion for living on credit is solely for the benefit of lenders. So lend.
5. If you don't have capital or a satisfactory job, use all your spare time and brainpower to figure out what kind of paid work would be acceptable to you; and then try to find it. If you fail to find it, adjust your expectations and try again. Simply and steadfastly 'following your dream' is, more often than not, a recipe for disaster.
6. Beware of business partners.
7. Don't go into business at all unless you have extensive experience. Work for someone else.
8. Don't keep pets, and especially not a horse.
9. The rewards of having and raising children should be balanced against the fact that the fewer children you have, the more prosperous you (and they) will be.
10. Distrust all financial advice which is not blindingly obvious.
2. Cultivate a taste for frugality and saving. See saving in a positive light - as deferred gratification, for example.
3. Aim to pay half of what your spendthrift twin would pay for anything you do buy, from food to clothes to larger items.
4. Pay off loans. The fashion for living on credit is solely for the benefit of lenders. So lend.
5. If you don't have capital or a satisfactory job, use all your spare time and brainpower to figure out what kind of paid work would be acceptable to you; and then try to find it. If you fail to find it, adjust your expectations and try again. Simply and steadfastly 'following your dream' is, more often than not, a recipe for disaster.
6. Beware of business partners.
7. Don't go into business at all unless you have extensive experience. Work for someone else.
8. Don't keep pets, and especially not a horse.
9. The rewards of having and raising children should be balanced against the fact that the fewer children you have, the more prosperous you (and they) will be.
10. Distrust all financial advice which is not blindingly obvious.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
The market for truth
John Cleese was asked in a recent interview why so many people profess a desire to be famous.
"I think it's to have a sense of significance," he said. "Now most people don't want an ordinary life in which they do a job well, earn the respect of their collaborators and competitors, bring up a family and have friends. That's not enough any more, and I think that it's absolutely tragic - and I'm not exaggerating - that people feel like a decent, ordinary, fun life is no longer enough."
"One of the things I've discovered ... as I've got older," he continued, "is that almost nobody knows what they're talking about. Of course, we're still talking and we're having fun but you have to realize that, in terms of truth or reality, most of it is completely valueless."
It's easy to make fun of this sort of celebrity wisdom, but I think Cleese may have a point. Three points, really.
Firstly, the point about people not being satisfied with an ordinary life. This has a lot to do with the decline of a rich culture (customs, religion, etc.) which provided the sense of significance which is now lacking.
The second point is, if not literally and simply true, then only a slight exaggeration: "... almost nobody knows what they're talking about."
And the final point Cleese makes I would put another way, and say that the market for truth and reality is vanishingly small.
"I think it's to have a sense of significance," he said. "Now most people don't want an ordinary life in which they do a job well, earn the respect of their collaborators and competitors, bring up a family and have friends. That's not enough any more, and I think that it's absolutely tragic - and I'm not exaggerating - that people feel like a decent, ordinary, fun life is no longer enough."
"One of the things I've discovered ... as I've got older," he continued, "is that almost nobody knows what they're talking about. Of course, we're still talking and we're having fun but you have to realize that, in terms of truth or reality, most of it is completely valueless."
It's easy to make fun of this sort of celebrity wisdom, but I think Cleese may have a point. Three points, really.
Firstly, the point about people not being satisfied with an ordinary life. This has a lot to do with the decline of a rich culture (customs, religion, etc.) which provided the sense of significance which is now lacking.
The second point is, if not literally and simply true, then only a slight exaggeration: "... almost nobody knows what they're talking about."
And the final point Cleese makes I would put another way, and say that the market for truth and reality is vanishingly small.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
The meaning of life
A cause also gives one allies and adversaries – even, in some cases, a sense of excitement and adventure. Think of communists (and fellow travellers) in Western countries during the Cold War. Just the right amount of secrecy and excitement, and no real danger to life and limb. (Professional agents on both sides did, of course, face great dangers. But then they were paid for it.)
The onetime MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service) agent David John Moore Cornwell (writing as John le Carré) depicted that world as one in which the moral and political issues were dark, complex and ambiguous, but his great creation, George Smiley, managed nonetheless to retain a simple sincerity and goodness.
In The spy who came in from the cold (1963), Smiley makes only a brief appearance as a colleague of the main character, Eric Leamas. Leamas also stands for certain moral values. There is a passage in which Leamas, waiting for an important and fateful meeting on the Dutch coast, thinks about a girl called Liz (a member of the Communist Party in Britain and so technically opposed to Leamas's cause) who had recently looked after him when he became ill in a rented room in London.
... At about eleven o'clock the next morning he decided to go out for a walk along the front, bought some cigarettes and stared dully at the sea.
There was a girl standing on the beach throwing bread to the seagulls. Her back was turned to him. The sea wind played with her long black hair and pulled at her coat, making an arc of her body, like a bow strung towards the sea. He knew then what it was that Liz had given him; the thing that he would have to go back and find if ever he got home to England: it was the caring about little things - the faith in ordinary life; the simplicity that made you break up a bit of bread into a paper bag, walk down to the beach and throw it to the gulls. It was this respect for triviality which he had never been allowed to possess; whether it was bread for the seagulls or love, whatever it was he would go back and find it ...
Le Carré seems to be suggesting that the real meaning of life is not to be found in causes and grand designs but in the mundane, apparently pointless details of ordinary life. It is tempting to go along with this line of thinking, but perhaps it is just a bit too facile.
The dichotomy between activism and quietism, between cause- or ideology-driven behaviour and the still passivity of just being, does not in fact demand an evaluative choice – activism bad, quietism good, or whatever. It is not a question of either/or but of both/and.
As we shuttle between conviction and doubt, activity and stillness, sickness and health, a sense of meaning and well-being just bubbles up from time to time.
Monday, July 11, 2011
The ground of being
For almost the whole of human history - until, say, the 19th century - the intellectually curious could expect their culture's deepest and most universal explanatory systems to be not only intellectually but also emotionally satisfying. Mythic, religious or metaphysical systems provided explanations (albeit inadequate as we now see) of both the natural and the social/moral world.
Our best theories of physics, by contrast, omit - as they must - all the things our complex brains seem primarily designed to deal with. And the men (and very few women) at the forefront of research in physics and related sciences often come across as lacking in social awareness.
Writing style (in non-technical contexts) gives a lot away about a person, and so often, when reading autobiographical or semi-autobiographical books by leading scientists, I find myself making allowances for what seems to be a certain childish quality, a lack of critical or social or psychological awareness or sophistication - even sometimes a certain moral immaturity and recklessness. It seems almost as though - as with autistic savants - these people's brains are not 'wasting' any time or energy on the immensely complex processing involved in being socially (and morally?) aware.
There are exceptions, of course. Seth Lloyd's book Programming the universe (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006) is not only beautifully written in a spare and restrained style, but it is also saying something of profound importance. Lloyd takes the tradition of digital physics associated with such names as Edward Fredkin and John Wheeler and updates it to encompass the concept - and the reality - of quantum computing.
Wheeler suggested that the bit (i.e. information) was the fundamental building block of reality rather than the physical particle; Lloyd and his colleagues deal not in bits but in qubits (quantum bits). The cosmos is not a classical computer but rather a quantum computer - computing itself. A more recent work by Vlatko Vedral, Decoding reality (OUP, 2010), makes similar claims.
According to this way of thinking, in order to understand any complex system the most important thing is to understand how information is represented and processed within that system. But underlying all systems are just a handful of simple logical operations. There is something very beautiful about this, and I am sometimes tempted to devote myself in a serious way to learning more about these fundamental processes - and even writing about them. But I'm not sure the payoff would be worth it. Fascinating as these ideas are in general terms, I fear that the deeper one goes, the less interesting they become - except in a technical sense. The puzzles of quantum computing are fascinating - but no more so than any other complex joint problem-solving exercise. The fascination is not the emotionally satisfying fascination associated with a global understanding of one's place in nature.
My provisional conclusion is that ultimately our ordinary lives are more complex and interesting than these fundamental processes. To imagine otherwise is to exhibit traces of theological thinking, the old sense that there is something very wonderful at the heart of reality - God, the Ground of Being. But it's looking increasingly likely that there's just a whole lot of computing going on, willy-nilly, and without a master programmer.
Our best theories of physics, by contrast, omit - as they must - all the things our complex brains seem primarily designed to deal with. And the men (and very few women) at the forefront of research in physics and related sciences often come across as lacking in social awareness.
Writing style (in non-technical contexts) gives a lot away about a person, and so often, when reading autobiographical or semi-autobiographical books by leading scientists, I find myself making allowances for what seems to be a certain childish quality, a lack of critical or social or psychological awareness or sophistication - even sometimes a certain moral immaturity and recklessness. It seems almost as though - as with autistic savants - these people's brains are not 'wasting' any time or energy on the immensely complex processing involved in being socially (and morally?) aware.
There are exceptions, of course. Seth Lloyd's book Programming the universe (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006) is not only beautifully written in a spare and restrained style, but it is also saying something of profound importance. Lloyd takes the tradition of digital physics associated with such names as Edward Fredkin and John Wheeler and updates it to encompass the concept - and the reality - of quantum computing.
Wheeler suggested that the bit (i.e. information) was the fundamental building block of reality rather than the physical particle; Lloyd and his colleagues deal not in bits but in qubits (quantum bits). The cosmos is not a classical computer but rather a quantum computer - computing itself. A more recent work by Vlatko Vedral, Decoding reality (OUP, 2010), makes similar claims.
According to this way of thinking, in order to understand any complex system the most important thing is to understand how information is represented and processed within that system. But underlying all systems are just a handful of simple logical operations. There is something very beautiful about this, and I am sometimes tempted to devote myself in a serious way to learning more about these fundamental processes - and even writing about them. But I'm not sure the payoff would be worth it. Fascinating as these ideas are in general terms, I fear that the deeper one goes, the less interesting they become - except in a technical sense. The puzzles of quantum computing are fascinating - but no more so than any other complex joint problem-solving exercise. The fascination is not the emotionally satisfying fascination associated with a global understanding of one's place in nature.
My provisional conclusion is that ultimately our ordinary lives are more complex and interesting than these fundamental processes. To imagine otherwise is to exhibit traces of theological thinking, the old sense that there is something very wonderful at the heart of reality - God, the Ground of Being. But it's looking increasingly likely that there's just a whole lot of computing going on, willy-nilly, and without a master programmer.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Of mice and men
Last night, as I was walking on a footpath by the river, I felt something softish roll under my left heel. It was a juvenile mouse (or some such rodent) which had fatally mistimed its dash across the path. It was still breathing, its body apparently split, with yellow stuff coming out. I didn't have the stomach to put it out of its misery and gingerly pushed it aside with the toe of my shoe and walked on.
Later in the evening, I chanced upon this passage, this cri de coeur, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, with the section heading, "The world is unfair":
"Is the world that unfair? I have spent my entire life studying randomness, practicing randomness, hating randomness. The more that time passes, the worse things seem to me, the more scared I get, the more disgusted I am with Mother Nature. The more I think about my subject, the more I see evidence that the world we have in our minds is different from the one playing outside. Every morning the world appears to me more random than it did the day before, and humans seem to be even more fooled by it than they were the previous day. It is becoming unbearable. I find writing these lines painful; I find the world revolting." *
*The black swan: the impact of the highly improbable (Penguin, 2008), p.215.
[Something lighter next time. I promise!]
Later in the evening, I chanced upon this passage, this cri de coeur, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, with the section heading, "The world is unfair":
"Is the world that unfair? I have spent my entire life studying randomness, practicing randomness, hating randomness. The more that time passes, the worse things seem to me, the more scared I get, the more disgusted I am with Mother Nature. The more I think about my subject, the more I see evidence that the world we have in our minds is different from the one playing outside. Every morning the world appears to me more random than it did the day before, and humans seem to be even more fooled by it than they were the previous day. It is becoming unbearable. I find writing these lines painful; I find the world revolting." *
*The black swan: the impact of the highly improbable (Penguin, 2008), p.215.
[Something lighter next time. I promise!]
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Man on a mission
I was walking the other night along a riverside promenade in the middle of the city of Melbourne, Australia, where street artists, on hands and knees, draw large chalk or crayon versions of Renaissance masterpieces on the pavement. I saw ahead of me a group of drunken young men who were waylaying passers-by and forcing them to admire and contribute to the retirement plan of an embarrassed artist. So I walked a bit faster and studiously avoided eye contact.
As I slipped past I heard one of the men say to one of the others who was going after me: "Leave him. He's on a mission."
As I slipped past I heard one of the men say to one of the others who was going after me: "Leave him. He's on a mission."
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