Maureen - Two Treats in One
Hey Folks,
The column below says a few things philosophical as well as political. The politics are contemporary; the philosophical question is ancient: Do we have free will? Or are things predetermined? Are we in charge? Or are we like "a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.”
This has always been a vexing question for me and a seriously important one. The whole notion of freedom rests upon it. Finding purpose in life rests heavily upon it. Hope for a better future world rises or falls on this question.
If everything is predetermined, all our supposedly free actions are imaginary; we're just shadow figures cast on the wall by some controlling god-magician. I see no reason to believe that, however. I don't believe in god, but even those who do - as far as I know - don't say God wrote the entire script and just has us reading lines.
But perhaps free will is just self-delusion; we have reason to believe in it. As Dowd reports:
William James wrote in 1890 that the whole “sting and excitement” of life comes from “our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.”
But as someone else has said, "Wishing doesn't make it so." Feeling good by thinking it doesn't make it true.
The notion of a monkey riding a subconscious tiger and making up stories that he is in control seems more likely and a bigger threat to our claim of freedom. Even without recent experiments, it seems obvious that monkey-humanity rides that tiger and never hesitates to tell stories of control.
To the extent this occurs, we are not free. Rather we are the helpless, self-deluded puppets, not of a god-magician, but of our own unexamined subconscious. Under this scenario, as Dowd reports:
we are, as one philosopher put it,“nothing more than sophisticated meat machines,” doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over
Under this scenario, consciousness is a dead end. That is, if one knows that one is doomed, what hope is there? what motivation to keep on keeping on? The only possible sancuary is ignorance or skill in self delusion and denial.
Judging from the incidence of these defense mechanisms most of the world falls easily into this category. Religion is everywhere; it saves us from the threatening perception of reality - it allows us to feel we are free by giving up our freedom.
Ignorance is everywhere; it is propagated and nurtured by the culture in order to maintain the culture; we need to freely believe and value what the culture wants us to believe, even while that belief enslaves us.
For me, as I said, this is a vexing consideration. As a young man I had faith that humanity was "free." As I've aged, that position has become more and more untenable. I can no longer hear that Santayana quotation (roughly: "Those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them")without wretching. More and more it seems obvious that all our mistakes will be repeated forever.
I still have a sliver of hope that freedom is possible. Perhaps some of us can become aware of the tiger we ride and consciously begin to tame it. To whatever extent we are successful in that I think it can be claimed that - at least in some small way - we are free.
- Uke Man
January 6, 2007
Monkey on a Tiger
By MAUREEN DOWD
(a ukethanks to Phyll)
Washington - There was a touch of parody to the giddy Democrat takeover this week:Nancy Pelosi indulging her inner Haight-Ashbury and dipping the Capitol in tie-dye, sashaying around with the Grateful Dead, Wyclef Jean, CaroleKing, Richard Gere, feminists and a swarm of well-connected urchins.
The first act of House Democrats who promised to govern with bipartisan comity was imperiously banishing Republicans from participating in the initial round of lawmaking. Even if Republicans were brutes during their reign, Democrats should have shown more class, letting the whiny minority party offer some stupid amendments that would lose.
Perhaps the Democrats’ power-shift into overdrive is a neurological disorder, or neuropolitical disorder.
If free will is an illusion — if we are, as one philosopher put it,“nothing more than sophisticated meat machines,” doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over — that would explain a lot about the latest trend in which everyone is reverting to type.
William James wrote in 1890 that the whole “sting and excitement” of life comes from “our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.”
But in Science Times this week, Dennis Overbye advised Dr. James to “get over it,” observing that “a bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.”
As Mark Hallett of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke told Mr. Overbye, “Free will does exist, but it’s a perception, not a power or a driving force. ... The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don’t have it.”
That would explain why, after voters insisted that the president wrap it up in Iraq, he made a big show of pretending to listen, then decided to do a war do-over.
Is this just the baked-in stubbornness of one man, or is W.’s behavior evidence that he has no free will? Is the Decider freely choosing another huge blunder or is he taking instructions from his genetic and political coding, fearing that if he admits what a foul hash he’s made of Iraq, he’ll be labeled a wimp, as his dad was?
If W. is trapped on a tiger, he’s not the only one.
John McCain can’t get beyond seeing himself as a maverick now that he’s become a nonmaverick, a right-wing Republican urging an escalation of a hopeless war, even though he’s already lived through an escalation of a hopeless war.
“There are two keys to any surge in U.S. troops,” Senator McCain told an appreciative audience at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday. “It must be substantial, and it must be sustained.”
With the letter she and Harry Reid wrote to the president yesterday, warning him that “we are well past the point of more troops for Iraq,” Speaker Pelosi tried to exert her free will to stop the Surge. But the Democrats aren’t willing to take real action and cut off money for the Surge. They’re predetermined to want to have it both ways: not to be blamed for the war and not to be blamed for pulling the plug on the war.
Iraq has become a snake pit of factions failing to escape fate. Shiites and Sunnis have been fighting and killing each other for about 1,400 years over who was the rightful heir to Muhammad, and yet the entire American high command was somehow taken aback that Shiites and Sunnis can’t muster the free will to keep their country from disintegrating.
Could it have been kismet that there were Shiites taunting Saddam at his hanging? Maybe it was preordained back in the days when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and the British diplomat Gertrude Bell drew the boundaries of the modern Iraq that a security guy with a cell phone would capture the spectacle.
Despite all the talk back in the 2000 campaign about a robustly experienced foreign-policy dream team, it may have been destined that the Bush administration would be asleep in the run-up to the insurgency, just as it was asleep in the run-up to 9/11, to Katrina, to the occupation and to the refugee crisis in Iraq. Either all that was predetermined, or the administration was preternaturally negligent.
Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher who said a man can do what he wants but cannot will what he wants, would have understood W.’s nonsensical urge to Surge.We don’t know if human beings have free will. We just know that human beings in Washington appear not to.
The column below says a few things philosophical as well as political. The politics are contemporary; the philosophical question is ancient: Do we have free will? Or are things predetermined? Are we in charge? Or are we like "a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.”
This has always been a vexing question for me and a seriously important one. The whole notion of freedom rests upon it. Finding purpose in life rests heavily upon it. Hope for a better future world rises or falls on this question.
If everything is predetermined, all our supposedly free actions are imaginary; we're just shadow figures cast on the wall by some controlling god-magician. I see no reason to believe that, however. I don't believe in god, but even those who do - as far as I know - don't say God wrote the entire script and just has us reading lines.
But perhaps free will is just self-delusion; we have reason to believe in it. As Dowd reports:
William James wrote in 1890 that the whole “sting and excitement” of life comes from “our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.”
But as someone else has said, "Wishing doesn't make it so." Feeling good by thinking it doesn't make it true.
The notion of a monkey riding a subconscious tiger and making up stories that he is in control seems more likely and a bigger threat to our claim of freedom. Even without recent experiments, it seems obvious that monkey-humanity rides that tiger and never hesitates to tell stories of control.
To the extent this occurs, we are not free. Rather we are the helpless, self-deluded puppets, not of a god-magician, but of our own unexamined subconscious. Under this scenario, as Dowd reports:
we are, as one philosopher put it,“nothing more than sophisticated meat machines,” doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over
Under this scenario, consciousness is a dead end. That is, if one knows that one is doomed, what hope is there? what motivation to keep on keeping on? The only possible sancuary is ignorance or skill in self delusion and denial.
Judging from the incidence of these defense mechanisms most of the world falls easily into this category. Religion is everywhere; it saves us from the threatening perception of reality - it allows us to feel we are free by giving up our freedom.
Ignorance is everywhere; it is propagated and nurtured by the culture in order to maintain the culture; we need to freely believe and value what the culture wants us to believe, even while that belief enslaves us.
For me, as I said, this is a vexing consideration. As a young man I had faith that humanity was "free." As I've aged, that position has become more and more untenable. I can no longer hear that Santayana quotation (roughly: "Those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them")without wretching. More and more it seems obvious that all our mistakes will be repeated forever.
I still have a sliver of hope that freedom is possible. Perhaps some of us can become aware of the tiger we ride and consciously begin to tame it. To whatever extent we are successful in that I think it can be claimed that - at least in some small way - we are free.
- Uke Man
January 6, 2007
Monkey on a Tiger
By MAUREEN DOWD
(a ukethanks to Phyll)
Washington - There was a touch of parody to the giddy Democrat takeover this week:Nancy Pelosi indulging her inner Haight-Ashbury and dipping the Capitol in tie-dye, sashaying around with the Grateful Dead, Wyclef Jean, CaroleKing, Richard Gere, feminists and a swarm of well-connected urchins.
The first act of House Democrats who promised to govern with bipartisan comity was imperiously banishing Republicans from participating in the initial round of lawmaking. Even if Republicans were brutes during their reign, Democrats should have shown more class, letting the whiny minority party offer some stupid amendments that would lose.
Perhaps the Democrats’ power-shift into overdrive is a neurological disorder, or neuropolitical disorder.
If free will is an illusion — if we are, as one philosopher put it,“nothing more than sophisticated meat machines,” doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over — that would explain a lot about the latest trend in which everyone is reverting to type.
William James wrote in 1890 that the whole “sting and excitement” of life comes from “our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.”
But in Science Times this week, Dennis Overbye advised Dr. James to “get over it,” observing that “a bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.”
As Mark Hallett of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke told Mr. Overbye, “Free will does exist, but it’s a perception, not a power or a driving force. ... The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don’t have it.”
That would explain why, after voters insisted that the president wrap it up in Iraq, he made a big show of pretending to listen, then decided to do a war do-over.
Is this just the baked-in stubbornness of one man, or is W.’s behavior evidence that he has no free will? Is the Decider freely choosing another huge blunder or is he taking instructions from his genetic and political coding, fearing that if he admits what a foul hash he’s made of Iraq, he’ll be labeled a wimp, as his dad was?
If W. is trapped on a tiger, he’s not the only one.
John McCain can’t get beyond seeing himself as a maverick now that he’s become a nonmaverick, a right-wing Republican urging an escalation of a hopeless war, even though he’s already lived through an escalation of a hopeless war.
“There are two keys to any surge in U.S. troops,” Senator McCain told an appreciative audience at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday. “It must be substantial, and it must be sustained.”
With the letter she and Harry Reid wrote to the president yesterday, warning him that “we are well past the point of more troops for Iraq,” Speaker Pelosi tried to exert her free will to stop the Surge. But the Democrats aren’t willing to take real action and cut off money for the Surge. They’re predetermined to want to have it both ways: not to be blamed for the war and not to be blamed for pulling the plug on the war.
Iraq has become a snake pit of factions failing to escape fate. Shiites and Sunnis have been fighting and killing each other for about 1,400 years over who was the rightful heir to Muhammad, and yet the entire American high command was somehow taken aback that Shiites and Sunnis can’t muster the free will to keep their country from disintegrating.
Could it have been kismet that there were Shiites taunting Saddam at his hanging? Maybe it was preordained back in the days when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and the British diplomat Gertrude Bell drew the boundaries of the modern Iraq that a security guy with a cell phone would capture the spectacle.
Despite all the talk back in the 2000 campaign about a robustly experienced foreign-policy dream team, it may have been destined that the Bush administration would be asleep in the run-up to the insurgency, just as it was asleep in the run-up to 9/11, to Katrina, to the occupation and to the refugee crisis in Iraq. Either all that was predetermined, or the administration was preternaturally negligent.
Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher who said a man can do what he wants but cannot will what he wants, would have understood W.’s nonsensical urge to Surge.We don’t know if human beings have free will. We just know that human beings in Washington appear not to.
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