Facebook took down a 1,000,000+ follower page belonging to high-protein / low fat Crossfit guys and gals. It was critical of government health and diet advice, as it should be, since all government diet and fitness advice has to be made with an eye to how much it costs compared to the minimum and median wages in the country. Since there are a lot of poor people in the USA, the US government diet and health advice is dreadful.
The user page went back up pretty quickly, but not before the central Crossfit organisation read Facebook the riot act and closed all its pages.
The commenterati saw Facebook’s take-down of the Crossfit as censorship: how dare the sheeple criticise the government and offer diet advice that Big Sugar, Big Carb, Big Farming, and Good Vegans Everywhere don't like?
Here's a much better explanation. Facebook is in dire need of decent middle-managers who know how to do this stuff properly.
Facebook offshores the censorship function. Many of those people regard eating meat, especially the meat of the cow, as a Very Bad Thing. My guess is that Offshore Guy saw a page a) criticising received dietary advice, and b) advising much consumption of the meat of the cow, and took it down as obvious crankery and for saying Bad Things. A while later, when the sticky stuff hit the fan back home in the USA, Offshore Guy was soundly beaten around the head and told that this wasn’t Bad, and even though it did say people should eat much of the meat of the cow, that is not Bad In America.
If Facebook had any actual decent middle-managers working there, they would have set up some rules like:
For the Offshore Team:
a) Pages identified by the software as frauds, bots and other junk: immediate take down.
b) Beheading videos, massacre videos, (add other obvious horrors here): immediate take-down, pass on to Head Office
c) pages with 500 (or whatever number counts as ‘a small number of followers’) or less: ignore
d) pages with 1,000,000+ (or whatever number translates as 'a large number of followers'): refer to Head Office if it meets the criteria
e) pages belonging to anyone on this long list of big corporations, political organisations, Celebrities and Very Important People; or anyone followed by more than twenty people on that list: refer to Head Office
f) Other pages: follow the guidelines and act accordingly. Send summary of the day’s banning to Head Office in time for opening of business wherever Head Office is
For the (Onshore) Head Office team:
a) Anyone on this list of Heads of State, Central Bankers, Facebook Shareholders, EU or UN officials, Major Stock index board members, religious leaders, or Friends and Relatives of same: to be decided by Mark or Sheryl personally
b) Anyone else on the Offshore List of Important Poeple and Organisations, or anyone worth more than (enter Facebook-related financial criteria here) or with 5,000,000 or more followers (or whatever number makes sense): to be decided by the Facebook Deliberation Committee
c) Anyone followed by more than twenty people on the list in criteria a) or b): also to be decided by the FDC
d) Anyone else: use your best judgement
This works if you can get a large enough bunch of people who might loosely be described as well-informed grown-ups with good judgement and a sound understanding of the politics, culture and PR environment of the language-users and main audience for the page.
Good luck finding enough of those people. And even more luck keeping them for more than, oh, six months.
Facebook cock-ups.
No conspiracy. No grand plot to censor free speech.
Just business.
Done badly.
Monday, 27 May 2019
Monday, 20 May 2019
Thursday, 16 May 2019
65 and Still Going Strong
The government shifted the age at which I could claim State Pension by eight months. The official retirement age at my employer is 60 - but the law says they can’t push me out and have to show cause, or I can retire myself. My chequered employment history has left me without a nice final-salary (or defined benefits) pension, or indeed a consistent record of payments into a laughably-titled defined contribution scheme. I’m still working.
I remember reading a man saying that he did manual, but not back-breaking, work, and at 60 was still in there humping. To the point where he thought he would go on way past 65. He got to 65, he said, and he was wrecked. The body’s strength recedes no matter how much we eat well and exercise.
That story stuck with me, and may have set up some expectations I don’t need. I’m not doing manual work, but I do have to get up at crazy hours, commute and keep up with the 20/30-soemthings I work with. I do not want to work with people my age - I don’t look, think or feel my age.
For most of our lives, my generation believed we would be able to stop work at 65 and live reasonably well, if quietly. They came for the blue-collar workers in the 1970’s and 1980’s, but we were students and then white-collar, then they came for the white-collar workers in the 1990’s and got me, and then they came for the final salary pension schemes. Very few people now are going to retire on a decent fraction of their salary, and I’m not one of them. Retired people have to pay Council Tax unless we get an exemption, and we don’t get discounts on water, gas and electricity. This is a chunk of overhead.
As 65 looms up like a lamp-post I’m going to hit, I’ve felt a change of mood that I can’t quite describe.
One small part of it is the £15 movie ticket, the £20 mid-quality evening meal, the £50 stalls seat in the West End, £10 or so for a ticket to the current show at the Tate or the RA, £40 for a decent seat at the Wigmore, £35 for a chamber concert at the QEH, and £150 for a stalls or dress circle seat at the ENO for The Marriage of Figaro. WTF?! This is bonkers, because there just isn’t the quality of work coming out now. There isn’t one artist in any media now creating anything new worth those prices.
Some of it is slower recovery from physical exercise. I do at least three sessions a week at the gym and walk five-six miles on a working day. I’m not bouncing out to get to the gym Saturday morning.
All that training and walking gets my pulse to around 65-75 and my blood pressure to 125 / 75 when resting. (This is astonishingly low for a man in his sixties.) It’s even lower if I’m on a warm Piccadilly Line train at the end of the working day. It takes me five minutes of treadmill to get pulse and blood pressure up to operating level. So when I’m resting, suddenly bursting into action can be quite scary.
Some is the consequence of having to go to bed so darn early, so I can wake up early, work 8-4 and avoid the worst of the crowds on the commute and in the gym. I stopped going out on Saturday, except very early, because I cannot stand the crowds of parents pretending to be civil to each other and having fun taking their children to whatever it is.
I need my five sleep-cycles. This stops me going out in the evening. I have to be getting ready for bed when you’re thinking about having the next pint, or Nandos, or whatever you’re doing at 21:00 on a weekday evening.
I have to watch what I eat, so I can’t have enjoyable chocolate binges.
Everything I do is about what I’m going to do after that, and it’s been that way for a very long time.
If only I was having a bit more fun.
I don’t mean dodgems at the travelling-fair fun, or fancy-fress party fun. As an ACoA, I have a doctor’s certificate exempting me from that stuff. I don’t even mean watching-The-Marx-Brothers fun. I mean what I think of as fun. Which is more about the way I react to things than what I’m doing.
I feel I have to drag myself everywhere. It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything with a light heart and a sense of will-it-won’t-it anticipation.
Fun for me would be to do things that aren't about something else.
Self-improvement makes everything about something else. Will what I am about to do contribute towards better health / fitness / knowledge / skills / whatever? It’s easy to slip into the idea that self-improvement has to be earnest, protestant work-ethic-y.
That’s where most of what this mood comes from.
Curing it is mostly about attitude. And of course, there’s the whole bit where I stop beating myself up because I’m not a Frisky Fifty anymore.
But get this straight: I would far, far rather be this 65 than my father’s 65. Or a lot of other men’s 65. Or the 65 I would be, if I was even alive, if I had not found AA and gotten sober. I really, really am glad I’m not that 65.
So, yeah, 65 and still going strong.
I remember reading a man saying that he did manual, but not back-breaking, work, and at 60 was still in there humping. To the point where he thought he would go on way past 65. He got to 65, he said, and he was wrecked. The body’s strength recedes no matter how much we eat well and exercise.
That story stuck with me, and may have set up some expectations I don’t need. I’m not doing manual work, but I do have to get up at crazy hours, commute and keep up with the 20/30-soemthings I work with. I do not want to work with people my age - I don’t look, think or feel my age.
For most of our lives, my generation believed we would be able to stop work at 65 and live reasonably well, if quietly. They came for the blue-collar workers in the 1970’s and 1980’s, but we were students and then white-collar, then they came for the white-collar workers in the 1990’s and got me, and then they came for the final salary pension schemes. Very few people now are going to retire on a decent fraction of their salary, and I’m not one of them. Retired people have to pay Council Tax unless we get an exemption, and we don’t get discounts on water, gas and electricity. This is a chunk of overhead.
As 65 looms up like a lamp-post I’m going to hit, I’ve felt a change of mood that I can’t quite describe.
One small part of it is the £15 movie ticket, the £20 mid-quality evening meal, the £50 stalls seat in the West End, £10 or so for a ticket to the current show at the Tate or the RA, £40 for a decent seat at the Wigmore, £35 for a chamber concert at the QEH, and £150 for a stalls or dress circle seat at the ENO for The Marriage of Figaro. WTF?! This is bonkers, because there just isn’t the quality of work coming out now. There isn’t one artist in any media now creating anything new worth those prices.
Some of it is slower recovery from physical exercise. I do at least three sessions a week at the gym and walk five-six miles on a working day. I’m not bouncing out to get to the gym Saturday morning.
All that training and walking gets my pulse to around 65-75 and my blood pressure to 125 / 75 when resting. (This is astonishingly low for a man in his sixties.) It’s even lower if I’m on a warm Piccadilly Line train at the end of the working day. It takes me five minutes of treadmill to get pulse and blood pressure up to operating level. So when I’m resting, suddenly bursting into action can be quite scary.
Some is the consequence of having to go to bed so darn early, so I can wake up early, work 8-4 and avoid the worst of the crowds on the commute and in the gym. I stopped going out on Saturday, except very early, because I cannot stand the crowds of parents pretending to be civil to each other and having fun taking their children to whatever it is.
I need my five sleep-cycles. This stops me going out in the evening. I have to be getting ready for bed when you’re thinking about having the next pint, or Nandos, or whatever you’re doing at 21:00 on a weekday evening.
I have to watch what I eat, so I can’t have enjoyable chocolate binges.
Everything I do is about what I’m going to do after that, and it’s been that way for a very long time.
If only I was having a bit more fun.
I don’t mean dodgems at the travelling-fair fun, or fancy-fress party fun. As an ACoA, I have a doctor’s certificate exempting me from that stuff. I don’t even mean watching-The-Marx-Brothers fun. I mean what I think of as fun. Which is more about the way I react to things than what I’m doing.
I feel I have to drag myself everywhere. It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything with a light heart and a sense of will-it-won’t-it anticipation.
Fun for me would be to do things that aren't about something else.
Self-improvement makes everything about something else. Will what I am about to do contribute towards better health / fitness / knowledge / skills / whatever? It’s easy to slip into the idea that self-improvement has to be earnest, protestant work-ethic-y.
That’s where most of what this mood comes from.
Curing it is mostly about attitude. And of course, there’s the whole bit where I stop beating myself up because I’m not a Frisky Fifty anymore.
But get this straight: I would far, far rather be this 65 than my father’s 65. Or a lot of other men’s 65. Or the 65 I would be, if I was even alive, if I had not found AA and gotten sober. I really, really am glad I’m not that 65.
So, yeah, 65 and still going strong.
Monday, 13 May 2019
Do It, Don't Say It, and Other Ways of Not Hurting Delicate Feelings
Hot Guy is doing the rounds of the girls at a party. He spends some time talking to Wendy, an attractive woman with bright blue eyes. At some point she says something about childcare, and Hot Guy asks dead casual about the husband, who, Wendy says is no longer around’. Hot Guy nods in what looks like sympathy, and about three minutes later tells Wendy it’s been a pleasure meeting her, and moves on. Never talks to Wendy again. Next up is Wanda, another attractive woman with braids and a funky vibe. She mentions a club she goes to, which Hot Guy knows is a favourite of guys called Tyrone, and he nods and says he’s heard it’s a cool place, and she smiles and says she knows so many of the regulars there, and about three minutes later he tells Wanda it’s been a pleasure meeting her, and moves on. Never talks to Wanda again. There was an overweight girl with a deep chuckle there, but Hot Guy didn’t even look in her direction, same way he passed by the unemployed woman, and nixed his approach to the Princess when he overheard she worked in Publishing, and would therefore be chronically underpaid.
Now read this guy who says: no single moms, no mudsharks and no lazy bums. Outraged? Think he’s a douche? (Edit: you can’t. Heartiste was de-platformed by WordPress on the 11/5/2019.)
Which is odd, because he’s Hot Guy. And you weren’t outraged by Hot Guy’s behaviour.
To channel Dick Cheney: there are things you can do and say; things you can say but can’t do; things you can do but can’t say; and things you can’t say and can’t do. Some of those lists come from social conventions, and the rest each of us makes up according to our precise degree of snowflake.
Red Flags can be acted on but not talked about.
Why? Because Red Flags are used to filter out. Filtering out is discrimination. People with Red Flags say so.
We are supposed to select in. As if you can hire the skill but not the character. The hand but not the worker.
Absence of Red Flags is one of the things we look for in anyone. Unless we are being very unscrupulous.
Why do we screen out Red Flags? Red flags indicate poor judgement and bad decisions. The consequences of poor judgement and bad decisions are permanent, irreversible and mark our lives forever. I have lived that life and I approve this message. The consequences of good decisions vanish in our sleep. Good decisions have to be made over and over and over. Bad decisions only have to be made once.
Red Flag people need some solid shaming on their side. Selecting-in is meritocracy, selecting-out is prejudice. You should focus on the Good In People. Everyone Makes Mistakes. Look, people deserve a second chance. Not douche-bags, or creeps, or Invisible Guys, or that bitch (insert name of Worst Enemy Forever here), or Hitler, or Trump or…. but you know, people. Meaning, as always, the speaker. After all Good People can do Bad Things, and Nobody’s Perfect, and like, gimme a break, I was nineteen, okay? You’re so judgemental.
Yep. Unlike Douchebag Guy, I don’t get judgemental out loud. I do what all sensible people do. Do it, don’t say it. It’s better mannered, but it’s just as exclusionary.
Red Flag people don’t need to hear they made a bad decision. They live with it every day. They expend huge amounts of energy rationalising it every day.
Like you don’t? they may retort.
Hey, Nobody’s Perfect, and like, gimme a break, I was fifty-five, okay? You’re so judgemental.
Now read this guy who says: no single moms, no mudsharks and no lazy bums. Outraged? Think he’s a douche? (Edit: you can’t. Heartiste was de-platformed by WordPress on the 11/5/2019.)
Which is odd, because he’s Hot Guy. And you weren’t outraged by Hot Guy’s behaviour.
To channel Dick Cheney: there are things you can do and say; things you can say but can’t do; things you can do but can’t say; and things you can’t say and can’t do. Some of those lists come from social conventions, and the rest each of us makes up according to our precise degree of snowflake.
Red Flags can be acted on but not talked about.
Why? Because Red Flags are used to filter out. Filtering out is discrimination. People with Red Flags say so.
We are supposed to select in. As if you can hire the skill but not the character. The hand but not the worker.
Absence of Red Flags is one of the things we look for in anyone. Unless we are being very unscrupulous.
Why do we screen out Red Flags? Red flags indicate poor judgement and bad decisions. The consequences of poor judgement and bad decisions are permanent, irreversible and mark our lives forever. I have lived that life and I approve this message. The consequences of good decisions vanish in our sleep. Good decisions have to be made over and over and over. Bad decisions only have to be made once.
Red Flag people need some solid shaming on their side. Selecting-in is meritocracy, selecting-out is prejudice. You should focus on the Good In People. Everyone Makes Mistakes. Look, people deserve a second chance. Not douche-bags, or creeps, or Invisible Guys, or that bitch (insert name of Worst Enemy Forever here), or Hitler, or Trump or…. but you know, people. Meaning, as always, the speaker. After all Good People can do Bad Things, and Nobody’s Perfect, and like, gimme a break, I was nineteen, okay? You’re so judgemental.
Yep. Unlike Douchebag Guy, I don’t get judgemental out loud. I do what all sensible people do. Do it, don’t say it. It’s better mannered, but it’s just as exclusionary.
Red Flag people don’t need to hear they made a bad decision. They live with it every day. They expend huge amounts of energy rationalising it every day.
Like you don’t? they may retort.
Hey, Nobody’s Perfect, and like, gimme a break, I was fifty-five, okay? You’re so judgemental.
Monday, 6 May 2019
Sabine Hossenfelder On Free Will
And by total contrast with the last post, some good old-fashioned philosophy. Sabine Hossenfelder, a physics dissident in the mould of Peter Woit, has a blog you should be reading, and recently posted an article about how she lived without the idea of free will. I’ll quote the full opening.
Determinism appears in its modern form with a popularisation of Laplace’s Celestial Mechanics, the first modern book of modern theoretical astronomy. Laplace derived the motions of the planets, it seemed, from Newton’s laws and the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction, and famously did not need God to keep the whole thing running smoothly or from flying off into the rest of space. This was hype: with the techniques Laplace had, it is impossible to solve for the orbits of the Sun, Moon and Earth simultaneously, let alone all the other planets. Today it can be done with computers, and we have a qualitative understanding about the prevalence of unstable orbits as against stable ones, but we don’t have a neat solution to the three-body problem.
This didn’t stop the hype merchants. Given Laplace’s equations, they said, and the initial position and momentum of all the bodies in a system, the future behaviour of those bodies could in principle be calculated, and even if it couldn’t in practice, the fact was that the future behaviour of those bodies was already determined by the present conditions. Hence determinism.
This is kinda okay for planets and vibrating bridges, but once you add in the idea that people are merely particles of change…orbiting around the sun and so equally the subject of determinism, you get materialist determinism, which says it’s to nobody's fault or glory that they do anything, because it was all arranged at the start of the universe. It’s a tough one to dispel.
So what’s the flaw, and why is it hype, not fact? Let’s deal with those Laplacian differential equations first.
The mathematics says that, for a system of differential equations to have an unique solution between two time periods, and hence determine one and only one world between those points, these boundary conditions must be at the start and the end of the time period. If there are only conditions at the start, we get a whole bunch of solutions, any one of which is possible. At the moment of the Big Bang, to speak in metaphors, the Universe might know where it is, but it doesn’t know where it’s going, so it can’t travel along an unique path to get there. If the Universe depended on looking at differential equations to know what it should be doing, it would have too many choices, and wind up in the physics department at Stanford talking about multiverses.
Fortunately the Universe does not depend on differential equations: it uses the laws of nature. Differential equations are not laws of nature. The wave equation, the telegraphy equation, the Schrodinger, Dirac, and other equations are derived from a description of a physical system and the actual laws of nature. These are, roughly and incompletely:
1. The first two of Newton’s three laws (the third is an scheme for model-construction)
2. Noether conservation laws derived for whatever fields we think the universe has in it
3. Lorentz-Firzgerald co-ordinate transformations for local physics
4. Co-ordinate invariance for General Relativity
All of these describe constraints on spatio-temporally local interactions. Laws of nature determine what happens to certain quantities in individual interactions involving those quantities. There are no consequences for the future.
Speaking in metaphors again: after the Big Bang, the universe carried on as it was, and every time an interaction came along, sorted itself out according to the relevant laws of nature. But there never was a Grand Plan or a Final Destination. The Universe just kinda bumbles along. Sufficiently isolated systems with periodic behaviour will repeat themselves, but the journey of a piece of cosmic dust across the universe is an adventure, not a train ride.
This disposes of the everything-was-already-decided-at-the-Big-Bang (or any other later time) claim. Which leaves materialism.
Materialism insists that this is a material world, and hence that free will can only exist if there is within us something which is a) the seat of our identity, b) can cause us to act, c) cannot be acted upon by the material world, but d) can receive and process information. Sometimes called a mind or a soul, but always assumed to be immaterial. In a material world there are no immaterial minds, and hence no free will.
Materialists prefer to denounce free will, decision-making and other mental acts, especially those playing a role in rational action and thought, as illusions, delusions and confusions. Or at least the ones writing pop-science best-sellers do.
If this is only a material world, then what we thought were immaterial mind-acts like remembering, deducing, judging, guessing, and all those other thinking- and feeling- acts, are still done, but by the body and brain. Some philosophers get very snotty about brains, which are after all organic computers, doing anything mental, because someone programmed the computer and so that doesn’t count. They forget they were trained to know where A-sharp is on the top string of a violin, and to calculate zero-th cohomology groups, and that training and learning is the model for ‘training’ AI programs. That means they might be computers, which makes them feel a bit squirmy.
Descartes and those mad white-coated scientists in black-and-white 1960’s Sci-Fi TV programmes regarded the body as a useless hindrance to the mind, which if put into this glass dome would be able to think unthinkable thoughts… okay. You get the idea. The mind-body duality is silly, and entrenched in our culture. As enlightened materialists, we don’t think like that. Brains are part of our bodies, and our bodies are, like the book title said, our selves. The ‘I’ that learns, considers, has goals, and makes decisions, is my brain-body.
However the brain-body is constituted, it must be able to adjust itself to what it receives by way of information. In some cases, that adjustment can be huge (birth of children, adolescence) and in others it can be small but significant (not going near chicken again for a while after that food poisoning), and in others can be almost instinctive (way too cold out there, get the coat and scarf). What the materialist determinist claims is meaningless causation, the brain-body sees as information on which it will or won’t act. My material body deals with facts, sets goals, decides what to do, learns from mistakes and changes its behaviour to better achieve those goals. Explaining how that happens is the real challenge for brain psychologists.
So what is it to decide? It’s a brain process, shaped by our brain’s training and learning, which we would call experience, education and any number of other things. Because I am my brain-body, those processes are what it is for me to decide, not some evil bit of mechanics that then fools my conscious mind it did the thinking.
Is my decision free? There’s a thing about ideas like ‘free’, ‘real’, ‘genuine' and some others. What these kinds of words signify is the lack of their opposites, rather than any particular quality. Something is genuine if it isn’t a fake: what it is to be a fake is clear. A decision is free if it isn’t forced: if it wasn’t influenced by external factors we would think of as constraints, restraints, threats, and other undue influences? If it wasn’t forced, it was free. Some people find that unsatisfying, but that’s how the concepts work.
In summary:
Were our lives set out in the instant of the Big Bang? No. A unique solution to the hypothetical Differential Equations of Everything relies on a given end-state, which isn’t given. Only the start state is.
Do we lack free-will because this is a material world? Yes, because free-will as defined by an immaterial soul cannot exist.
Does this mean we are the puppets of our immediate circumstances? No, because the human brain can learn and adapt. Sometimes within the moment of an interaction, sometimes when it is thinking of the wisecrack as it goes down the stairs afterwards, or sometimes a lot later after discussing what happened with someone else.
If you want a puppet of its circumstances, think of a tree. It’s got to put up with whatever happens to it, from the moment the seed hit the ground, to the moment a lightning-induced forest fire burned it down. That’s not having free will.
It’s not easy, getting a PhD in physics. Not only must you learn a lot, but some of what you learn will shake your sense of self.Philosophers, to quote Bordieu, loathe determinism. It’s true. I will discuss this some other time.
Physics deals with the most fundamental laws of nature, those from which everything else derives. These laws are, to our best current knowledge, differential equations. Given those equations and the configuration of a system at one particular time, you can calculate what happens at all other times.
That is for what the universe without quantum mechanics is concerned. Add quantum mechanics, and you introduce a random element into some events. Importantly, this randomness in quantum mechanics is irreducible. It is not due to lack of information. In quantum mechanics, some things that happen are just not determined, and nothing you or I or anyone can do will determine them.
Taken together, this means that the part of your future which is not already determined is due to random chance. It therefore makes no sense to say that humans have free will.
I think I here spell out only the obvious, and use a notion of free will that most people would agree on. You have free will if your decisions select one of several possible futures. But there is no place for such a selection in the laws of nature that we know, laws that we have confirmed to high accuracy. Instead, whatever is about to happen was already determined at the big bang – up to those random flukes that come from quantum mechanics.
Determinism appears in its modern form with a popularisation of Laplace’s Celestial Mechanics, the first modern book of modern theoretical astronomy. Laplace derived the motions of the planets, it seemed, from Newton’s laws and the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction, and famously did not need God to keep the whole thing running smoothly or from flying off into the rest of space. This was hype: with the techniques Laplace had, it is impossible to solve for the orbits of the Sun, Moon and Earth simultaneously, let alone all the other planets. Today it can be done with computers, and we have a qualitative understanding about the prevalence of unstable orbits as against stable ones, but we don’t have a neat solution to the three-body problem.
This didn’t stop the hype merchants. Given Laplace’s equations, they said, and the initial position and momentum of all the bodies in a system, the future behaviour of those bodies could in principle be calculated, and even if it couldn’t in practice, the fact was that the future behaviour of those bodies was already determined by the present conditions. Hence determinism.
This is kinda okay for planets and vibrating bridges, but once you add in the idea that people are merely particles of change…orbiting around the sun and so equally the subject of determinism, you get materialist determinism, which says it’s to nobody's fault or glory that they do anything, because it was all arranged at the start of the universe. It’s a tough one to dispel.
So what’s the flaw, and why is it hype, not fact? Let’s deal with those Laplacian differential equations first.
The mathematics says that, for a system of differential equations to have an unique solution between two time periods, and hence determine one and only one world between those points, these boundary conditions must be at the start and the end of the time period. If there are only conditions at the start, we get a whole bunch of solutions, any one of which is possible. At the moment of the Big Bang, to speak in metaphors, the Universe might know where it is, but it doesn’t know where it’s going, so it can’t travel along an unique path to get there. If the Universe depended on looking at differential equations to know what it should be doing, it would have too many choices, and wind up in the physics department at Stanford talking about multiverses.
Fortunately the Universe does not depend on differential equations: it uses the laws of nature. Differential equations are not laws of nature. The wave equation, the telegraphy equation, the Schrodinger, Dirac, and other equations are derived from a description of a physical system and the actual laws of nature. These are, roughly and incompletely:
1. The first two of Newton’s three laws (the third is an scheme for model-construction)
2. Noether conservation laws derived for whatever fields we think the universe has in it
3. Lorentz-Firzgerald co-ordinate transformations for local physics
4. Co-ordinate invariance for General Relativity
All of these describe constraints on spatio-temporally local interactions. Laws of nature determine what happens to certain quantities in individual interactions involving those quantities. There are no consequences for the future.
Speaking in metaphors again: after the Big Bang, the universe carried on as it was, and every time an interaction came along, sorted itself out according to the relevant laws of nature. But there never was a Grand Plan or a Final Destination. The Universe just kinda bumbles along. Sufficiently isolated systems with periodic behaviour will repeat themselves, but the journey of a piece of cosmic dust across the universe is an adventure, not a train ride.
This disposes of the everything-was-already-decided-at-the-Big-Bang (or any other later time) claim. Which leaves materialism.
Materialism insists that this is a material world, and hence that free will can only exist if there is within us something which is a) the seat of our identity, b) can cause us to act, c) cannot be acted upon by the material world, but d) can receive and process information. Sometimes called a mind or a soul, but always assumed to be immaterial. In a material world there are no immaterial minds, and hence no free will.
Materialists prefer to denounce free will, decision-making and other mental acts, especially those playing a role in rational action and thought, as illusions, delusions and confusions. Or at least the ones writing pop-science best-sellers do.
If this is only a material world, then what we thought were immaterial mind-acts like remembering, deducing, judging, guessing, and all those other thinking- and feeling- acts, are still done, but by the body and brain. Some philosophers get very snotty about brains, which are after all organic computers, doing anything mental, because someone programmed the computer and so that doesn’t count. They forget they were trained to know where A-sharp is on the top string of a violin, and to calculate zero-th cohomology groups, and that training and learning is the model for ‘training’ AI programs. That means they might be computers, which makes them feel a bit squirmy.
Descartes and those mad white-coated scientists in black-and-white 1960’s Sci-Fi TV programmes regarded the body as a useless hindrance to the mind, which if put into this glass dome would be able to think unthinkable thoughts… okay. You get the idea. The mind-body duality is silly, and entrenched in our culture. As enlightened materialists, we don’t think like that. Brains are part of our bodies, and our bodies are, like the book title said, our selves. The ‘I’ that learns, considers, has goals, and makes decisions, is my brain-body.
However the brain-body is constituted, it must be able to adjust itself to what it receives by way of information. In some cases, that adjustment can be huge (birth of children, adolescence) and in others it can be small but significant (not going near chicken again for a while after that food poisoning), and in others can be almost instinctive (way too cold out there, get the coat and scarf). What the materialist determinist claims is meaningless causation, the brain-body sees as information on which it will or won’t act. My material body deals with facts, sets goals, decides what to do, learns from mistakes and changes its behaviour to better achieve those goals. Explaining how that happens is the real challenge for brain psychologists.
So what is it to decide? It’s a brain process, shaped by our brain’s training and learning, which we would call experience, education and any number of other things. Because I am my brain-body, those processes are what it is for me to decide, not some evil bit of mechanics that then fools my conscious mind it did the thinking.
Is my decision free? There’s a thing about ideas like ‘free’, ‘real’, ‘genuine' and some others. What these kinds of words signify is the lack of their opposites, rather than any particular quality. Something is genuine if it isn’t a fake: what it is to be a fake is clear. A decision is free if it isn’t forced: if it wasn’t influenced by external factors we would think of as constraints, restraints, threats, and other undue influences? If it wasn’t forced, it was free. Some people find that unsatisfying, but that’s how the concepts work.
In summary:
Were our lives set out in the instant of the Big Bang? No. A unique solution to the hypothetical Differential Equations of Everything relies on a given end-state, which isn’t given. Only the start state is.
Do we lack free-will because this is a material world? Yes, because free-will as defined by an immaterial soul cannot exist.
Does this mean we are the puppets of our immediate circumstances? No, because the human brain can learn and adapt. Sometimes within the moment of an interaction, sometimes when it is thinking of the wisecrack as it goes down the stairs afterwards, or sometimes a lot later after discussing what happened with someone else.
If you want a puppet of its circumstances, think of a tree. It’s got to put up with whatever happens to it, from the moment the seed hit the ground, to the moment a lightning-induced forest fire burned it down. That’s not having free will.
Thursday, 2 May 2019
If I Stop Living This Life, Everything Bad Comes Right Back
The Cost of Living Like This is a novel by James Kennaway, published in 1969, and set earlier in the 1960’s. It has a protagonist I identified with immediately. He’s called The Economist and he’s a forty-something married man having an affair with a nineteen year-old secretary in his Civil Service office. He has terminal cancer. The novel is a fine, understated but hard-hitting portrayal of what it is like to carry on a regular life with a pain that won’t go away, and every now and then takes over your whole being with its intensity. When we meet The Economist, even the morphine cocktail he carries with him won’t do the trick. Read the novel.
Why would a young man at university identify with a middle-aged man dying of cancer? I had no idea then, but I do now.
For a lot of my life up to age about forty-something, despite whatever emotions I seemed to be having on the surface, my underlying state was emotional confusion, pain, emptiness, and loneliness. Sometimes it would subside, perhaps for days, but then it would come back as distracting and all-encompassing as ever. Kennaway’s character is the only one I have read who goes through that cycle of feeling.
(Sure, if you want, make rude noises about an old man comparing his indulgent adolescent feelings with the genuine suffering of a cancer patient. You have a point. You’re also missing one. You can stop reading at any time.)
I have no idea where that state of confusion, pain and emptiness came from, though there are several candidates: the trauma that happens to some infants when they are circumcised, or a distant father, the family alkie genes, moving schools and homes when young, a bad reaction to the hormones of adolescence… who knows?
What I wanted was for it to stop, and if it wouldn’t stop, then I wanted some distraction or something to make it go away for a time. I didn’t do that consciously, but it was what I was doing.
One distraction is drugs, and I’ve never been near them. Without really knowing it, I realised when I was a teenager that if I ever found a drug that got me out of it, I wouldn’t be coming back in again. Heroin is that drug. So I knew once I started with drugs as a painkiller, I’d wind up on heroin. Junkies aren’t cool. Junkies are, well, junkies. Somewhere in all that pain, I had self-respect enough to not want to be a junkie.
Another distraction is religion, and as a young man I did the Billy Graham thing for a few weeks, until, I think, the guide or whatever they call them, decided that I didn’t really get it. I don’t. I get religion as an intellectual and cultural construct, but not as an emotional experience and certainly not as a social thing. It’s like marriage and following football: I know people do it, I just have no idea why, and never will, because I just don’t understand the words they use when they try to explain it.
Another distraction is people. I did not understand it at the time, but I was using people to try to make the pain, emptiness and confusion go away. People can’t do that for me or anyone else: what I might do with them, from playing Risk! to having sex, might be a distraction, but just hanging with the Bros and Hos can’t. When I met The Crowd at the Dog and Duck Friday night for a drink, The Crowd were just an excuse for the drink. I didn’t know that at the time, but that’s what was happening. After all, only sad alkies drink on their own at home. Using people as painkillers is morally suspect: people are supposed to be treated as ends, not means.
All I wanted was for the pain to go away. That and the practicalities of paying the bills were the two aims I judged everything by. When a combination of sobriety, exercise, ageing, and cultural consumption eases the pain and smooths the logistics of life, that counts as a win.
I have two things I do.
The first is physical exercise. Like all boys of my generation, I thought nothing of a two-hour bike ride in an afternoon, just because. It was what we did. There were a few years I didn’t do any exercise, until I started swimming again in my mid-twenties. This was before gyms were a readily accessible thing. I started weight training when I was thirty-three, and with the exception of about four years or so, when I paid the price in elevated blood sugar levels that turned my head to a fog, I have exercised ever since. Self-respect again.
The second is culture and entertainment: reading, movies, TV, music. I’m good at that. My culture is pretty darn heavy and involving - I have Schiff playing Bach as I write. Jollies the brain up. Not so sure about Bordieu’s book on Manet though, that’s a bit of a wade.
But here’s the thing.
The pain never really goes away.
If I stop living this life, everything bad comes right back. There is no cure for alcoholism, or drug addiction, or poor eating habits, or any of a dozen other things: at best there is a way of living in a way that minimises the impact, denies the habits a chance to get started. Emotional fracked-up-ness is the same.
So when I hear people suggesting that the best thing in life is human relationships, that having sex when I want it will make me feel like a man, that there are other people who can understand what I’m feeling and thinking and that time with them is the best time ever, and all that other stuff… this may all be true, but it doesn’t make the pain go away, and that’s all that matters.
Why would a young man at university identify with a middle-aged man dying of cancer? I had no idea then, but I do now.
For a lot of my life up to age about forty-something, despite whatever emotions I seemed to be having on the surface, my underlying state was emotional confusion, pain, emptiness, and loneliness. Sometimes it would subside, perhaps for days, but then it would come back as distracting and all-encompassing as ever. Kennaway’s character is the only one I have read who goes through that cycle of feeling.
(Sure, if you want, make rude noises about an old man comparing his indulgent adolescent feelings with the genuine suffering of a cancer patient. You have a point. You’re also missing one. You can stop reading at any time.)
I have no idea where that state of confusion, pain and emptiness came from, though there are several candidates: the trauma that happens to some infants when they are circumcised, or a distant father, the family alkie genes, moving schools and homes when young, a bad reaction to the hormones of adolescence… who knows?
What I wanted was for it to stop, and if it wouldn’t stop, then I wanted some distraction or something to make it go away for a time. I didn’t do that consciously, but it was what I was doing.
One distraction is drugs, and I’ve never been near them. Without really knowing it, I realised when I was a teenager that if I ever found a drug that got me out of it, I wouldn’t be coming back in again. Heroin is that drug. So I knew once I started with drugs as a painkiller, I’d wind up on heroin. Junkies aren’t cool. Junkies are, well, junkies. Somewhere in all that pain, I had self-respect enough to not want to be a junkie.
Another distraction is religion, and as a young man I did the Billy Graham thing for a few weeks, until, I think, the guide or whatever they call them, decided that I didn’t really get it. I don’t. I get religion as an intellectual and cultural construct, but not as an emotional experience and certainly not as a social thing. It’s like marriage and following football: I know people do it, I just have no idea why, and never will, because I just don’t understand the words they use when they try to explain it.
Another distraction is people. I did not understand it at the time, but I was using people to try to make the pain, emptiness and confusion go away. People can’t do that for me or anyone else: what I might do with them, from playing Risk! to having sex, might be a distraction, but just hanging with the Bros and Hos can’t. When I met The Crowd at the Dog and Duck Friday night for a drink, The Crowd were just an excuse for the drink. I didn’t know that at the time, but that’s what was happening. After all, only sad alkies drink on their own at home. Using people as painkillers is morally suspect: people are supposed to be treated as ends, not means.
All I wanted was for the pain to go away. That and the practicalities of paying the bills were the two aims I judged everything by. When a combination of sobriety, exercise, ageing, and cultural consumption eases the pain and smooths the logistics of life, that counts as a win.
I have two things I do.
The first is physical exercise. Like all boys of my generation, I thought nothing of a two-hour bike ride in an afternoon, just because. It was what we did. There were a few years I didn’t do any exercise, until I started swimming again in my mid-twenties. This was before gyms were a readily accessible thing. I started weight training when I was thirty-three, and with the exception of about four years or so, when I paid the price in elevated blood sugar levels that turned my head to a fog, I have exercised ever since. Self-respect again.
The second is culture and entertainment: reading, movies, TV, music. I’m good at that. My culture is pretty darn heavy and involving - I have Schiff playing Bach as I write. Jollies the brain up. Not so sure about Bordieu’s book on Manet though, that’s a bit of a wade.
But here’s the thing.
The pain never really goes away.
If I stop living this life, everything bad comes right back. There is no cure for alcoholism, or drug addiction, or poor eating habits, or any of a dozen other things: at best there is a way of living in a way that minimises the impact, denies the habits a chance to get started. Emotional fracked-up-ness is the same.
So when I hear people suggesting that the best thing in life is human relationships, that having sex when I want it will make me feel like a man, that there are other people who can understand what I’m feeling and thinking and that time with them is the best time ever, and all that other stuff… this may all be true, but it doesn’t make the pain go away, and that’s all that matters.
Thursday, 25 April 2019
Bye-bye Tidal, Hello FTTC, Bye-Bye Yolt
The Highly Significant Birthday is approaching. I have booked the week before and after off. In case I get some uncontrollable emotions, or just don't want to get out of bed. Sometimes, though, I'm not sure I can tell what is actual emotion and what is pollen and too little sleep. So my posting is going to be a bit erratic.
In other news, I dropped Tidal. Listen, I searched for "Shoegaze" and it came back with about three entries. A colleague at work searched on Spotify, and it returned pages of the stuff. So I cancelled Tidal and signed up for Spotify.
The king of shoegaze compilations on You Tube seems to be the unlikely-moinkered Tabitha Mustang. If you've never heard any shoegaze, try this
I finally gave up on my old-school copper broadband service from Talk-Talk, and upgraded to their FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) service. Which has churned out 40Mbs down and 10Mbps up so far since. I even speed-tested it, and got pretty darn close, even though the route included the wireless-ac to my laptop. 40Mbs down by the way, is slightly more than what we old telecom folk used to call a DS3 (34Mbs). Back in the mid-1990's I am told, selling a DS3 across the Atlantic meant celebrations involving champagne and nightclubs. Now every home can have one.
And then one day my Yolt app demanded my passport number and other KYC (as we in the retail banking trade call it) details. And it would not let me get to the control panel without it. I was upset by this, because I don't like software strong-arming me, found the Contact Us email on their site, and asked them to DELETE MY ACCOUNT several times in all caps. Which they did without any fuss. My suspicion that they were about to launch actual banking services via the app was confirmed a day or so ago in the news.
And over Easter, I listened to Parsifal and Gotterdammerung on Spotify. Probably not quite CD quality, but it confirmed to me why I'm not rushing to get Wagner in my collection. The first movement of Parsifal is musically astonishing, whether you understand German or not. But the second act is a lot of singing, and the music probably means a lot more if you know what Kundry just tried to suggest to Parsifal.
In other news, I dropped Tidal. Listen, I searched for "Shoegaze" and it came back with about three entries. A colleague at work searched on Spotify, and it returned pages of the stuff. So I cancelled Tidal and signed up for Spotify.
The king of shoegaze compilations on You Tube seems to be the unlikely-moinkered Tabitha Mustang. If you've never heard any shoegaze, try this
I finally gave up on my old-school copper broadband service from Talk-Talk, and upgraded to their FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) service. Which has churned out 40Mbs down and 10Mbps up so far since. I even speed-tested it, and got pretty darn close, even though the route included the wireless-ac to my laptop. 40Mbs down by the way, is slightly more than what we old telecom folk used to call a DS3 (34Mbs). Back in the mid-1990's I am told, selling a DS3 across the Atlantic meant celebrations involving champagne and nightclubs. Now every home can have one.
And then one day my Yolt app demanded my passport number and other KYC (as we in the retail banking trade call it) details. And it would not let me get to the control panel without it. I was upset by this, because I don't like software strong-arming me, found the Contact Us email on their site, and asked them to DELETE MY ACCOUNT several times in all caps. Which they did without any fuss. My suspicion that they were about to launch actual banking services via the app was confirmed a day or so ago in the news.
And over Easter, I listened to Parsifal and Gotterdammerung on Spotify. Probably not quite CD quality, but it confirmed to me why I'm not rushing to get Wagner in my collection. The first movement of Parsifal is musically astonishing, whether you understand German or not. But the second act is a lot of singing, and the music probably means a lot more if you know what Kundry just tried to suggest to Parsifal.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)