Wednesday 23 February 2011

Me with the best thing I have ever done

Little things

It is a commonplace observation that misery is more prevalent in the affluent West than in the East, in Africa or other places materially less blessed. It also seems to be true that my generation in the West wallows in misery with greater enthusiasm than my father's generation. Sometimes this is taken as evidence that we miserati are degenerate, weak and somehow inferior to those that have been unhappy before us.

About three weeks ago the windscreen wipers on my Land Rover broke. Since then, I have been driving around in the rain, mud and slush barely able to see where I have been going. Yesterday the vehicle was serviced and the wipers replaced. Today I drove up to Guildford and back and, I swear, the first half hour of the journey I turned the wipers on and off and repeatedly pressed the screen wash button, just for the hell of it. Nothing has given me as much pleasure, for a long time.

Tuesday 22 February 2011

Free will - Part II

Thinking about free will is like talking about music. I console myself that the problem of free will has flummoxed some of the greatest minds that genetic recombination has thrown up in the sorry excuse for a genome that we call 'Homo sapiens'. Hume, Berkeley, Descartes, Nietsche and even Darwin made a complete pig's ear of it. The basic problem seems to be that the brain (and its shadow, the mind) is a mechanism, an engineered clockwork toy. It's current state is determined by it's antecedent states.

This determinsitic position can't be evaded, either through an appeal to chaos theory (which just says that predictions are too hard to compute, in practice, but not in principle) or to quantum uncertainty (random past events determine our present states just as surely as non-random events). If free will exists, where does it enter? Where is the backstage door through which it slips, un-noticed, while the scenes change?

Since Libet performed his experiments in the 1950s, showing that our brains and bodies act about half a second before we 'decide' to act, it has become increasingly clear that our feeling of agency is an illusion. We do things and these things are then recorded by our consciousness. This perspective is deeply disturbing. That thing you just did, the keystokes you just made on the computer, even the mistakes, were not made by 'you'. They were made by your brain, which then reported them to you.

One response to this might be to deny it, laugh it off as the fantasy of mad scientists. Unfortunately, you can only go down this route if you remain determinedly ignorant of the relevant evidence. Philosophers and scientists who actively study and think about this problem get around it in a variety of ways. No-one who has really thought about it hard seems willing to deny that free will is an illusion but most seem to defend the position that freedom somehow emerges from the fact of our evolution against a background of a deterministic world. Personally, I don't get it. The philosopher Susan Blackmore claims that, when she goes to a restaurant, she finds herself thinking 'I wonder what she'll order?'. Sometimes I find myself contemplating the question of when I'm going to drag my fat arse out of this chair and into bed and I sort of know what she means but it is really hard (impossible?) to get this third person perspective.

What I think at the moment is that I lack freedom on three levels.

1. Genetic. I am predisposed to behave in a certain way. My genes exert an extraordinarily poweful influence over what I think, say and do.

2. Deterministic. The state of my brain a moment ago determines it's state now.

3. Alcoholic. Even if it turned out that I were free under 1. and 2. above, my alcoholism would emprison me in a vice at least a bad.

So what is to be done? Well, nothing obviously.

More anon, when I've figured out all the shit that Hume, Berkeley, etc. missed.

Sunday 20 February 2011

The price of snowdrops

Much has been made, in the relevant media, of the price recently paid for a bulb of the snowdrop 'E.A. Bowles'. The anonymous bidder paid £357 for a single bulb, news that made the front page of the Daily Telegraph. I can't remember the last time I saw a front page Telegraph headline reading 'Gucci handbag sold for £357 at auction' or 'frock by French fashionista fetches £357'. I'm fairly sure it wouldn't be news. Yet, when someone pays £357 for a plant that, in fifty years' time, when the handbags and frocks being bought today will be moth-eaten and forgotten, will still be giving pleasure to its owner, journos feel obliged to repeat with mind-numbing tediousness, the idea that the current enthusiasm in the UK for snowdrops is just like the tulip bubble of the Dutch 'Golden Age'. Why can't these well-paid, so-called professionals think before they hit the 'send to editor' button?

Things you can buy for £357.

Two hours and ten minutes with a top-flight psychiatrist (http://www.harleystreetguide.co.uk/doctors/psychiatrists/pardeep-grewal/)

A flight half way to Australia (http://book.qantas.com.au/pl/QFOnline/wds/OverrideServlet)

One handbag.(http://www.handbagleague.com/Hermes-Bags/Hermes-birkin/30Cm-Birkin-Pink-Ostrich-With-Gold-Hardware)

Nine hours with the cheapest prostitute in Amsterdam (http://www.ignatzmice.com/RLD_Walking_Tour). Don't ask me what customers do with the last eight hours and fifty five minute of their alloted time.

Four hundred pot noodles (http://www.potnoodle.com/pier/)



45 minutes with a good divorce lawyer (http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2007/jul/15/familyandrelationships)

The most interesting comment on this affair, in my opinion, was made by a journalist on John Grimshaw's blog (see here). After admitting gracefully to repeating innuendo, she said that 'my lot' (i.e. her editor) had enquired '£357? Is that a lot?' In other words, the metropolitan elite, who decide what we should think, haven't the slightest ability to measure value, once the object under consideration falls outside the miniscule cross-section of the interest spectrum they cater to.