The Phenomenology of a Day At The Beach

Remember when your parents took you to the beach on summer holidays? How the days lasted forever with a huge gap between breakfast and tea? I'll bet you're thinking "ah the innocence of childhood, wasn't it great?". Going by some recent experiences, it has nothing to do with being nine years old, and everything to do with the circumstances and the way we felt.

I found it happened when we were, or I am, on the beach. Some of it is the sunshine, the blue skies, the sound of the waves, the sand and the process of playing or walking on the beach, which requires you to surrender to the present moment. Living in the present for even a couple of hours puts the past way, way behind, and the sunshine, sky, sea and sand make it easy to live in the present. I suspect sailing does something similar and for the same reason. Walking across a moor or through a park or zoo does not have the same effect, even if the weather is the same. Perhaps because moors and fields are already human spaces, colonised by our herd animals and crops. Cows and sheep are always someone's cows and sheep and they are there to provide milk and ultimately beef; fields of corn or flowers are always someone's fields and there to be picked and sold. A wild moor might be different, but it the beach has one huge advantage: turn around and there is safety, familiarity, the car, the hotel, the resort. In the middle of a moor, you're a long way from help or an ice-cream.

I think it's something to do with the uniformity of the colours at the beach and the white noise of the waves - which is why I don't lose touch with time on the Mediterranean or the Caribbean the same way I do on the Atlantic. We can gaze at the seaside, experience it, but we don't need to understand it, interpret it, ask what parts of it are called. Every moment it is different, but the difference does not signify. Until the tide surprises us. And then all it takes is a quick scamper up the beach. A surfer may experience it in another way, with the sea as a source of waves, becoming disappointing, or tremendous, as it does not or does provide waves.

All this is true. Unless, of course, I was sulking or having a family squabble. Then time tick-tocked by. Emotions don't so much create the awareness of time as create something to remember. This is another hour I am hungry, angry, lonely, tired, bored, sad, aroused, excited, lustful, intrigued, interested, puzzled. Sensations by contrast provide a distraction from an otherwise bland or unpleasant episode, or enhance a pleasant one. This is why ice cream never tasted so good as at the beach, or why a whisky is so potent in a tense moment, or why in an hour of tedium, the sudden appearance of the sun from clouds may be so absorbing. 

Happiness and contentment are a kind of satisfaction, of fullness or repleteness, just not necessarily caused by consuming something. This is not what we feel at the beach. Strictly we feel nothing there, except for the sensations of sand, waves, heat and breeze, because we are distracted from ourselves and the world by being there. This is not being in the zone, that much-hyped state of productive nirvana, because we are not productive at the beach, and the in the zone we so occupy ourselves with the task that we cease to notice the world, whereas at the beach, we are so occupied by the world that we cease to notice ourselves.

I Have Nothing Coherent To Say... so here's a song

One of the few bright spots near the new location is that Rough Trade Records (East) is about three hundred yards away and is full of stuff that Fopp and the high street stores of the West End don't have, and I wouldn't think of looking for on Amazon. So I've paid that a couple of visits, picking up three samplers and the John Maus album. This is "Copkiller"

I've also switched from French Radio London to Amazing Radio, which plays a lot of stuff that Rough Trade has. I switched to FRL because I was tired of the sound of English voices and for a while it reminded me of Biarritz and general French-ness. They play cover versions of any song you care to think of and their mixes can be eclectic and yet at the same time French.

It's winter, it's dark, it's cold. It's week three of the move and it's still not home. I have too many ideas for entries that need time I don't have and concentration I don't have. It's also near sodding Christmas, and I don't like this time of year. Only the dog days of January (Britain closed, opens again in February) are worse. I may have a cold. Bleeuuugh.

"Living In The Day" - Don't Do It Unless...

There's a spiritual practice known as "living in the day". It's generally taken to be a part of the AA Programme, but I can't recall it being mentioned in the Big Book. It's one of those phrases I heard in my early days and wondered what they were all talking about, and at sometime over the years, I stopped wondering, because I was doing it. I can't explain what it is, and it's nothing like any of the quotes you may find if you google the phrase, but this may give you an idea.

Living in the day lets me feel emotions. Joy, irritation, frustration, exhilaration, calm, pleasure... all these are emotions that pass in a fairly short time, leaving me able to get on to the next thing I need to do. I wake up the next morning feeling whatever my physical condition is - rested, horny, creaky, tired - but starting emotionally from zero. I don't feel anything else until I load up the diary for the day, when I may then feel various shades of anticipation, dread or irritation. Sounds good so far?

For that to work, yesterday must leave little or no emotional traces. Now think about that for a moment. Imagine not carrying over any emotions from yesterday. No, I don't just mean anger, frustration, irritation and all that other bad stuff we are exhorted to leave outside the bedroom door. I mean, not carrying over any emotions. LIke, you know... Love. Affection. Ambition. Fascination. Absorption. 

Because it turns out that practising the techniques that let me leave behind the bad stuff and the small stuff also leaves behind the big stuff as well. I don't even really remember what it is I feel for whoever's in bed with me: I just give them a chance to show what mood they are in, and react and deal accordingly. That's how you will feel about the woman you're married to or the kids you created, if you "live in the day". And if you're wondering, no, that's not how you are supposed to feel. Not at all. Those emotions about those people are supposed to be always with you - whichever emotions it you'e feeling at the time. 

Love, hate, ambition, despair, enthusiasm, hope, desire, lust, care, revenge, affection, friendship, competition... The emotions that make life worth living, that give it structure, colour and flavour, do so because they infuse our bodies - literally, with hormones - and create continuity and memory, linking the days together, linking this hour with an hour four days or four weeks ago. When I live in the day I feel none of these, not because I don't want to, but because whatever it is that lets the insults and pleasures of the day roll off my back like a duck, also means that the meaningful emotions won't stick either.

One of the things that happened to me as I recovered was that I understood that all I ever really felt was variations on that sick neediness, pain and emptiness that comes with the territory. These are also meaningful emotions that create memory, but none have anything to do with other people, other specific people, as love and hate do. For screw-ups, emotions are endless loops inside our own heads, hearts, bodies and memories. Dump those emotions, deal with the resentments and guilts in the Steps, and it's quite easy to live in the day. 

In the early years, it's a helluva an improvement on being hungover, withdrawn, flooded with pounding adrenals, ridden with undeserved guilt and hearing punishing voices in your head. But in the same way a Japanese stone garden is an improvement on the brambles and weeds that were there. It's clean, it's simple, it's low maintenance, and it's pretty vacant. I'm not sure I have much of choice, just as you don't have much of a choice about never knowing what a co-homology group is (because you gave up maths well before you went to university and you haven't got the time or background to read it up now). Which doesn't stop my body telling me from time to time that it's missing some stuff it needs to function really well, which leads me to feeling a tad empty, directionless and generally de-motivated and lacking sparkle and vigour. That passes, given enough time, but the last few weeks have been just a little empty.

Living in the day, like a lot of the other "spiritual"-sounding practices, is not for ordinary folk. It's for people who are or were severely fucked-up for an extended period of their lives: heroin addicts, alcoholics, children who passed through The System or who were abused or mistreated, not to mention people who have been through extended traumatic experiences that the rest of the world knows nothing of. That is unlikely to be you, gentle reader, and you'll screw your life and soul up if you try it. 

"Workwise" = "Work Dumb": How Not To Move Your Staff

We were moved to a new office a couple of weeks ago. Right next to Liverpool Street station. Some people think that means that we're now in "the City", but we're not. "The City" means insurance, law, merchant banking, some shipping and commodities trading. It does not mean retail banking. I prefer to say I work in Liverpool Street.

The office itself is cheap and slightly nasty. We will pass over the toilets that you would not accept in your home, the dirty telephones we all had to spend time cleaning, the flimsy keyboards that haven't been cleaned since purchased and don't always work, the floors that move slightly if someone heavy walks by, the weak-ass cafe, and the as-high-as-legal people density. The ceilings are about two feet too low, and the soundproofing so poor that the usual level of office chat, informal meetings and telephones calls generates a permanent background noise about the same as a cinema full of kids at half-term. Earphones and some music won't really do it - over-ear noise-cancellers might, but would look a little odd. 

There are deliberately not enough desks for the people based there. At the end of every day we have to pack up all our crayons and colouring books, laptop transformers and laptops, into a plastic box and put it in a locker. Each morning we have to set it all out again, and not always at the same desk either. Any alleged cost-savings are tiny compared with the twenty minutes a day per person to set-up and pack-up. Because you have to re-arrange all the wiring, computer screen and chair to suit you. We have to log into the telephone on our new desk every day as well - but many simply don't. Within the area allotted to a team, we can sit anywhere, and if someone from outside sits at one of "not-our-desks" we can ask them to move if there's no more "not-our-space". They would rather you didn't have your Amazon deliveries sent to the office, but will live with it if you don't overdo it: though you have to go to the post room to ask. Since you don't have a desk, they can't deliver. And they won't notify, either. Leave a jacket on the chair overnight, the cleaners will take it away. No personal effects, no baby photos, funny cartoons, toy animals, special mouse, technical manuals... nothing. Not even the management have dedicated, lockable offices. Yes, that's right, I'll say that again: not even the management have dedicated, lockable offices. 

This alienated condition is called "Workwise" and has the motto "Work is something you do, not a place you go". Not only does nobody "of weight" buy it, they can't even be bothered to pretend to buy it. Taking dedicated offices away from senior management is one gesture too far. Taking their pay rises away, so that they all face a five per cent pay cut, isn't the most sensible move either. 

It feels fake, only this time, it feels like people can't be bothered to pretend it's real. Not even the management. It's occurred to nobody except the workers that if work is what we do, not the place we do it, then it doesn't matter where we do it, or for whom. Way to go encouraging employee engagement there. 

And of course, then there's the Liverpool Street area. Packed. Everyone rushing everywhere. And they're all indistinguishable, no matter what shape and size they are, mere office canon fodder. The CIty / Liverpool Street is a huge industrial estate that doesn't actually make anything. It has a sense of history - you have to chuckle at "Frying Pan Alley" - but largely in the names and the churches. The best thing that can be said for it, is that I can be back in Soho in about twenty-five minutes door-to-door via the Central Line.

Free-Will, Identity, Decisions and Choices

Let's start with the nature of the "I" I'm saying is free.

I don't know about you, but I'm not a ghost of identity passing through the walls of my brain and body, wondering why my material manifestation does so many silly things. The "I" I feel I am is no more one unified process than my body is one unified process. My body is a rag-bag of inter-connected parts, each with its own function, each monitored, loosely controlled and crudely co-ordinated by the autonomic nervous system, and sometimes consciously, and with no guarantee that all of them will work well together. Since the brain is part of the body, this applies to the brain as well. I see, hear, taste, estimate what is about to happen in my world (do I have time to cross the road before that slower-moving car gets here?), judge the people and things in it ("ugh, what a Spring 2003 office block") and a dozen other things, all at the same time, in what used to be called a "stream of consciousness". The human brain is a motherboard with many special-purpose CPU's, only one of which is there to have that conversation in our heads we call "consciousness". All the real work is done in the background, as it should be. The flaw in the traditional way of thinking about ourseleves and our identities, and hence of the nature of our freedom, is to suppose that we are in some way One, that there is one process - a soul, mind, spirit -  that "is" us. We are a bundle of processes, many of which can communicate with each other but might not on occasion.

One of those processes has priority over the others, when it is engaged. This is the process which chooses the other processes get to use my body and the other resources I have. Sometimes that choice is made on a whim, or out of habit, or under the spell of a strong emotion - wisdom literature and guru books, and every book about being an effective manager, stress keeping the decision-making process conscious: do nothing without considering its effects, and do nothing in the heat of the moment. Some people do this better than others, I do it badly, and for most people, you can see the wheels turning when they try. That process is where freedom lives: it is the part of "I" which chooses and decides.

When I choose or decide I am influenced by what I have learned, experiences I may or may not have mis-interpreted, by what I have seen, heard, tasted and felt, by rumours, facts and thousand-year-old ideas, and my thinking is flawed, messy, incomplete, as deductively fallacious as valid and full of leaps and non sequiters. I limit my choices to what is possible, affordable, legal and acceptable, and that perhaps of all the choices, none are what I would do if I had the money, nerve and courage. Some of the thinking is conscious - feels like a conversation in my head, like reading without moving my lips - and some of it, perhaps the bulk of it, goes on silently. Just because I can't hear it doesn't mean it isn't happening, and it doesn't mean it isn't me who is doing it. The idea that thinking must be conscious or it is not thinking is a silly prejudice. I don't know about you, but I need as much thinking as possible to be going on silently, so I can concentrate on listening to music, or gazing at a blue sky. I want to know I will figure out the solution to a work problem without it interrupting my enjoyment of the present moment.

These influences are not constraints, just as reasons are not restraints and faulty reasoning is not a symptom of being human. These influences are, in fact, part of me. I am defined in part by my education, my experiences, what I heard from my parents, at school, on the radio and television, what I read, what I taught myself. Part of "who I am" is someone who can understand a proof in mathematics, identify the major 1950's jazz musicians after one chorus, and absolutely refuses to take part in fancy dress parties. It makes sense to say that "I" make a decision before I become conscious of having done so - actually, I thought everyone did that, it's how you know it's the right decision for you - but it makes no sense to say that the decision is not therefore my decision, as if only what I do consciously is "me". We are what we do, and what we intend to do, and we are the the gap between the two as well.

Reasons, arguments, influences and reasoning are important. It's not a decision unless there are reasons. If there are no reasons, it's an impulse, or a whim, and if being free isn't one thing, it's being at the mercy of every whim that passes through our pretty little heads. An adult may have all sorts of odd ideas flitting through her head, but she decides which one she will act on, if only by rolling a dice, and then deciding to abide by the dice's "decision". (The Dice Man decides to follow the dice, and part of that story is just how much self-control and will it takes to do so. Random living can be as demanding as routine living.) 

(One reason that neuroscience seems so determinism-friendly is that it only looks at, as it must, toy decisions made in falsely simple circumstances. It doesn't look at the long decision-making processes of businessmen, or jurors, or me when my mobile phone contract is coming to an end. In these processes there may actually not be a point where anyone "decides" to do a particular thing, rather there is a drift towards the eventual choice as one by one the alternatives are eliminated for cause. Long-process decisions may include short-process decisions but are not resolvable into a series of them.)

So where's the freedom? You're staring at it: it's right in front of you. Papa Hegel said it, in his Aethestics. Freedom arises because my consciousness stops paying attention to the outside world and looks inwards at itself. (I had to read it over a number of times to make sure I hadn't been dreaming or misunderstood. Is it that simple?) Only the external physical world, including the people in it, can compel and constrain, so when I turn my back on it, I become free - even if I can't put my decision into action for fear of the Secret Police or for sheer lack of energy and money.

I'm free when I stop trying to do what you want me to do. This doesn't mean I act selfishly, become self-centered and ignore the rules and the needs of other people, it means I don't have a knee-jerk reaction to satisfy your every whim and demand. It means I  "stop and think". Learning to stop and think, to not do as we're told or as we think others expect, to ignore our first impulse, and decide for ourselves, is part of becoming an adult. The teenager who doesn't "feel" as if they are free is quite right: they haven't achieved these disciplines yet.

The beauty of this is that it doesn't matter how I do it, or what does it, or even if I'm aware of much of it. It doesn't matter how you got your ideas of why I should do, or how I wound up thinking that what you think I should is so darn important. What matters is that I stopped responding to your priorities, and started responding to mine. The hardware and software I use to do it doesn't matter. It's that I do it that matters, not how I do it or which exact part of my anatomy passed what chemicals and electrical impulses to what other parts. In programming, we call that last bit "implementation" and everyone knows there are a hundred ways of getting the same result from the same inputs. 

Freedom is not, in other words, a relationship I have with the Universe, but one I have with other people. I am not free because somehow I can dodge an hypothesised universal Laplacian causality with some Heisenbergian indeterminacy, nor because I can shake off all my schooling and indoctrination and choose freely. I am free because I briefly ignore everyone else and make up my mind to do what I want, which may or may not suit you, depending on how suiting you suits me. My guess is that there are many people who are so caught up in the race for power and influence, or the search for love and reassurance, or so bound up in their relationships with others, or in the endless reflecting mirrors of second-guessing and people-pleasing, that they really do not experience themselves as choosing, and whose consciousness has yet to turn away from the world, look inside itself and summon the courage to say their first "YES" to themselves.

Memories on Paris Metro Line 11

During the days in Paris, I took the 11 line a couple of times. It goes through the Marais, which is why I took it, to get to Rambateu, but the reason I remember it especially is that it has a stop called Telegraph. And Telegraph is near the rue du Borrego, and that's where, back in the day, Susan Dawn lived, in a one-room apartment in a huge modern block of flats overlooking a courtyard. She had garden furniture in the room (which was nomad-style at the time) and the bed was on the floor (ditto) opposite the large window.

How do I know the geography of her flat? I have mentioned that I was once a Nine. You may rightly be sceptical. So hear this. Before the Eurostar, to get to Paris, we took a train to Dover, a ferry to Calais and a train to Paris. That's what I did one week. I was drinking then, so I made my way to the buffet car and found myself talking to a middle-aged wiry American of dubious abode and solvency, and a very attractive blond English girl about my age. I have no idea what we talked about, though I do remember the train made an odd noise that suggested something had fallen off, and stopped for a while in the middle of nowhere. By the time we reached Paris, I had Susan's number and the promise of a date if I called. Yes, I was That Guy. Not often, but I had my moments.

I don't remember where I was staying, though I think it was somewhere in the 9th. I may have spent the first night in the hotel, but I didn't spend the second, or the third there. One morning I went out for croissants and cigarettes, and I'm not sure if it was the two croissant and pain au chocolate that raised eyebrows, or my choice of cigarettes, which was Boyard. (Boyard make Gitanes taste like Silk Cut). Ah, those were the 80's! Susan made the rent as a tour operator contact - the person who meets you within a day or so of arriving, talks about the location, books any outings and gives you a free drink on the hotel? That was Susan. Minus the carte de sejours, which meant she was off the books. She had a pretty spectacular figure and by today's standards was a bit messed up. Given that she was a 70's teenager like me, that made her ordinary. We spent the free part of her day wandering around Paris, had supper in Montmartre, where frankly the food was as awful as the location was allegedly picturesque. We always took taxis back to her place - she had this formula to describe her address "(something) rue du Borrego, c'est pres de la Metro Telegraph (and something else)". Somewhere along the line we drank a rose Cote de Provence, a wine which has never tasted quite as good as it did then.

I went back out to Paris for a weekend a few weeks later, through Charles de Gaulle, and we had supper Friday on the Left Bank and stayed at her place. I can't remember what we did Saturday night, but I'm pretty sure we went out. Sunday was lunch and flying back. It went okay as I recall.

We met in London that November and it was the disaster that every movie ever says it will be. We saw a play. The weather was cold. Very cold. No connection, no romance, no sex when she stayed over at my place, and looking back on that attic flat in Wimbledon, I don't blame her. That was that.

And that's the bit of my past I left on the 11 Line - a bit you will notice I remember in some detail. I don't reminisce about it every time I travel on it, but I did this time.

Free-Will, Neuroscience, Emergence And All That PR Jazz

What is it about free will that makes it such an attractive target? Perhaps because it's all we've got left now that God has gone. Just as there was a ton of publicity to be had attacking God and every last sentence in The Bible, so there's a lot of publicity to be had saying that we don't have free will or that we're so dumb and easily manipulated we don't deserve it.

Determinism - the thesis that everything but everything in the Universe was pre-destined to happen from the moment of creation because the development of the Universe is governed by the Laws of Nature and the disposition of the particles at the start - was really a PR stunt by Laplace Associates ("We Have No Need For That Hypothesis") for their Celestial Mechanics product. It's not a serious idea and was never intended to be. If you wonder how it was ever taken to be one, remember, you think that bottled water is better than the tap water in a first-world country. That was a PR stunt as well, and boy did it work.

Reductionist materialism - the thesis that everything you value is "merely" a bunch of atoms / whatevers, does not really exist ("Love ain't nothin' but oxytocin talkin'") and you're a fool for taking it so seriously - is just a playground wind-up. It's one thing to say that "emotions are caused by the release of hormones as a reaction to what happens to you" and another entirely to say "there are no emotions, merely hormones released into the blood stream". If there are no emotions, why go looking for hormones to explain them? To reduce X to Y is not to deny that X exists, but to claim that X is caused by Y and can be relieved by an antidote to Y. It's not necessary for me to convince you that your new girlfriend is trouble on stilts - all I need to do is to give you a dose of the anti-love hormone and you'll be free of your unhealthy fascination. Love may be hormonal, but that doesn't make any less all the things every poet in history ever said about it. Unless, that is, you're looking for a reason to be bitter and twisted.

The latest passengers on the Knocking Free Will bandwagon are the neuroscientists. But hold on here: when they publish research that seems to show that decisions are the result of brain processes, our reply should be... Gee, who knew? Followed by... and you'd publish it if you found that decisions weren't a result of brain processes? It's the business of neuroscience to find physical correlatives for what we think of as mental processes, so we should not really be too surprised when they say they have done so. Recently they have discovered that there's a brain process that accompanies a certain type of decision that happens before we become conscious of having made the decision. Lawyers are lining up to claim that their clients, criminals and bank CEO's all, are off the hook for anything they did. One way we know an idea is a bunch of crock is that defence lawyers rush to use it in defence of the clearly culpable.

We should be used to the idea that we are physical bodies and brains, with no magical ghosts, souls, minds or spirits interacting with our bodies (presumably via the pineal gland), and yet with free will. This is the twenty-first century, after all. It's sheer laziness to carry on proclaiming that we are but physical beings and therefore have no free will and our mental life is an irrelevant illusion. The real challenge is to explain how we can be wholly physical beings with free will,  making morally significant choices. From the fuss about the recent research on brain processes, it seems like a lot of people have yet to get the message.

I'm going to do is explain what I understand by freedom and free will. See if it makes sense to you. But don't expect me to argue against the determinists and Sneering Reductionists, and don't expect me to explain why free will isn't some massive illusion. All of these are self-consistent positions - sadly - and there's no way out once you step in. So pardon me if I trust my experience over an hypothesis that was only invented as a publicity stunt anyway.


What free will is not is this: that in the situation S there were options X and Y, and though we did X we could have done Y. This makes far, far too many fuzzy metaphysical claims for my taste. What does "could have done" mean? In practice? How does anyone know I could have done Y, especially since I'm a Catholic / Muslim / Vegetarian / Mother / Barrister and it's against my beliefs / ethics / religion and anyway I don't have that kind of money and have no idea where to buy arsenic? What does it mean to say that X and Y were options? For who? Me? Or a Russian oligarch? (Russian oligarchs have so many more options than I do.) Usually when someone says that I could have done Y, they are making a moral judgement, not saying something about the state of the Universe when I made the decision to do X.

There's an idea of free will that's just a little bit Romantic - in the way that Sleepless in Seattle is just a little bit romantic - and it goes like this: are we really free when we're the victims of manipulative advertisers, global brands, the indoctrination of schools and grade-inflated universities, peer pressure, employer's expectations and corporate rules, the censorship of the media conglomerates, the thousands of hoops of the bureaucrat, and the tricks played on us by marketeers informed by the latest research in behavioural psyschology? When artists have to have Masters' degrees and networking skills before they can even be considered by a gallery... are we really free? Or are we just choosing conformities?

You get the idea. Romantic free will must be pure or it is not. Free will is unconstrained, uninfluenced, and uncontamiated by the slightest taint of mundane reason, the unfettered expression of our inner souls, acting in a spirit of love, creativity, autonomy and originality. This isn't my idea of free will.

As a side issue, soul-lovers and mind-merchants will try to convince you that things like decisions and choices are "intentional objects" that cannot be understood in a purely material world, and need minds and other mysterious "emergent" objects. Emergence is a bridging idea - in this case between the rather simple way we thought about the world up to the end of the nineteenth century and how we are starting to think of it now. Back in the day, only the fundamental particles were real, and everything else was some temporary arrangement of them, with decreasing amounts of plausibility the more complex the arrangement became. Today we are starting to understand that it's the arrangements that are real, because the fundamental particles come and go. Your skin is real, but the cells are always falling off it. The Inland Revenue is sadly real, but the staff come and go on their temporary contracts. "Emergence" is offered as a magical process by which complicated things appear from seemingly simple components, as if bread dough "emerges" from its ingredients. It doesn't, of course, because it takes something to mix and knead the ingredients before the dough "emerges", even if in the case of the primordial DNA-creating soup, it wasn't an actual baker. Anyone who offers "emergence" as a serious explanation needs to learn more science and technology.

Free will is making decisions and choices, with an important condition, which I first read in Hegel's Aethestics. In the next post, I'll talk about that.