Humainologie creative dialogue Amor Fati this Wednesday April 14

“I believe in love. I believe in hard times and love winning. I believe marriage is hard. I believe people make mistakes. I believe people can want two things at once. I believe people are selfish and generous at the same time. I believe very few people want to hurt others. I believe that you can be surprised by life. I believe in happy endings.” - Isabel Gillies, Happens Every Day, an All Too True Story

“And I know what I have to do now. I got to keep breathing. Because tomorrow, the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?” - Chuck Noland, played by Tom Hanks, in “Cast Away”

“No one is without troubles, without personal hardships and genuine challenges. That fact may not be obvious, because most people don’t advertise their woes and heartaches. But nobody, not even the purest heart, escapes life without suffering battle scars.” - Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, and Grumblings for Every Day of the Year

Life is very wabi-sabi. Therefore, amor fati. Love life not just in spite of its setbacks and challenges, but exactly because of them.

There have been very dark chapters in my life. Now, in the winter of it, looking back on the other seasons, I can see its beauty.

There have been many things that helped me weather the storms. There was one specific glimpse of Stoic wisdom that I caught before I reached twenty years of age. Here it is, in the passage from Marcus Aurelius, with the phrase that stayed in my memory in bold italic font. Knowing this much, I knew there would always be storms ahead.

“In the human life, time is but an instant, and the substance of it a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of certainty. And, to say all in a word, everything that belongs to the body is a stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and vapor, and life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after- fame is oblivion. What then can guide a man? One thing and only one, philosophy.” – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

There will be storms and dark times ahead. Old age is no exception. But I just have to keep breathing. Because tomorrow the sun will rise. And who knows what the tide could bring?

I have appended below this message my synopsis of a book by Sam Harris on “free will.” And here is the Zoom link from Shinobu for our creative dialogue on amor fati this Wednesday April 14:

Topic: Humainologie creative dialogue Time: April 14, 2021 06:30 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada) Every week on Wed, until Apr 28, 2021, 9 occurrence(s) Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83720756307?pwd=WVU2OGo3ZjMzWVMwdlVZUzY1RVMwdz09 Meeting ID: 837 2075 6307 Passcode: 12345

Arthur

Book: (Sam Harris) Free Will (2012)

In this remarkably concise book, Sam Harris asserts that “free will” (as the term is usually understood) is an illusion. And yet, he writes, paradoxically: “Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic – in fact it has increased my feelings of freedom.”

In his chapter entitled “Choices, Efforts, Intentions,” Harris emphasizes the importance of choices we make, even though we cannot understand the origins of those choices. In that chapter, referring to his statement that thoughts arise “unauthored and yet [they] author our actions,” he writes: “This is not to say that conscious awareness and deliberative thinking serve no purpose. Indeed, much of our behavior depends on them. I might unconsciously shift in my seat, but I cannot unconsciously decide that the pain in my back warrants a trip to a physical therapist. To do the latter, I must become aware of the pain and be consciously motivated to do something about it.”

Thus our conscious choices are tremendously important, but they are the outcome of processes that lie deeper, in what might be called subconscious prior programming. In his words: “Human choice, therefore, is as important as fanciers of free will believe. But the next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being.”

If we believe that none of us has free will, then how can we hold anyone accountable for his or her actions? Sam Harris raises this question in the chapter “Moral Responsibility.” He mentions the United States Supreme Court case, United States v. Grayson, 1978, in which the Court “called free will a ‘universal and persistent’ foundation for our system of law,” and rejected determinism, which would be “’inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system.’” In other words, Sam Harris adds: “Any intellectual developments that threatened free will would seem to put the ethics of punishing people for their bad behavior in question.”

In the same chapter, he presents the reader with a thought experiment, a series of five scenarios, in each of which a young woman is killed. 1) A four-year-old boy playing with a loaded gun accidentally killed a young woman. 2) “A 12-year-old boy who had been the victim of continued physical and emotional abuse took his father’s gun and intentionally shot and killed a young woman because she was teasing him.” 3) “A 25-year-old man who had been the victim of continual abuse as a child intentionally shot and killed his girlfriend because she left him for another man.” 4) “A 25-year-old man who had been raised by wonderful parents and never abused intentionally shot and killed a young woman ‘just for the fun of it.’” 5) “A 25-year-old man who had been raised by wonderful parents and never abused intentionally shot and killed a young woman he had never met ‘just for the fun of it.’ An MRI of the man’s brain revealed a tumor the size of a golf ball in his medial prefrontal cortex (a region responsible for the control of emotion and behavioral impulses).”

An accident; an outcome of physical and emotional abuse in childhood; the capacity for self control that should increase between the ages of 12 and 25; psychopathic behavior; brain damage to a cortical region known to control behavioral impulses: “How can we make sense of these gradations of moral responsibility when brains and their background influences are in every case, and to exactly the same degree, the real cause of a woman’s death?” Harris points out that the perpetrator in case 4 seems to be a psychopath. A psychopath is a horrible thing to be. And yet “The more we understand the human mind in causal terms, the harder it becomes to draw a distinction between cases like 4 and 5.” Like the man with the brain tumor, the psychopath has been “profoundly unlucky.”

Nonetheless, in his chapter titled “Might the Truth Be Bad for Us?” Harris (who practices martial arts) says that if he were teaching a self defense class for women, his emphasis certainly would not be on the fact that rapists are driven by impulses they cannot control and that they need forgiveness. His emphasis would probably be more along the lines of “Just gouge the bastard’s eyes.” He opens that same chapter with this: “Many people worry that free will is a necessary illusion – and that without it we will fail to live creative and fulfilling lives. This concern isn’t entirely unjustified. One study found that having subjects read an argument against the existence of free will made them more likely to cheat on a subsequent exam. Another found such subjects to be less helpful and more aggressive.” Harris adds “However, I’m not especially worried about degrading the morality of my readers by publishing this book.”

Harris raises questions about the role of punishment and of rehabilitation in the criminal justice system. His book provides an argument for rehabilitation rather than punishment. However, he also emphasizes that retribution can be a huge relief for the victim of the wrongdoing. Moreover, the threat of punishment may serve as a deterrent from some kinds of criminal acts. Inevitably, these will remain complicated issues.

In his chapter “Politics,” he points out that liberals tend to be much more aware of the effects of good or bad fortune on a person’s behavior than do conservatives. In that chapter, he adds: “… we continually influence, and are influenced by, the world around us and the world within us. It may seem paradoxical to hold people responsible for what happens in their corner of the universe, but once we break the spell of free will, we can do this precisely to the degree that it is useful. Where people can change, we can demand that they do so. Where change is impossible, or unresponsive to demands, we can chart some other course. In improving ourselves and society, we are working directly with the forces of nature, for there is nothing but nature itself to work with.”

Noam Chomsky has a way of thinking about free will that is somewhat different from Sam Harris’s way of thinking. These two recordings of Chomsky’s commentary on the subject are about twelve minutes in total: Noam Chomsky, Free Will I: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3fhKRJNNTA and Noam Chomsky, Free Will II: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py-PJQKzQIw A much longer presentation by Noam Chomsky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0 “The Machine, the Ghost, and the Limits of Understanding,” adds some fascinating historical background.

Our conscious decisions come from prior programming, part of which is previous conscious decisions we have made. It also seems important to me that when we try to achieve excellence in something, that process involves hours of practice with the intent of making conscious decisions more automatic, and less conscious. That’s what James Clear’s book Atomic Habits is about. If we have bad habits, on the other hand, we might be working to make the tendency to behave in a particular way more conscious so that we can change our pattern of behavior. These are things you can decide, making your own conscious choices.