Category Archives: Philosophy

Fueling the creative spark.

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Lately, a topic percolating in my mind has to do with the question of how to keep the creative embers burning. I have some sense, as I enter into my fourth decade, that this is becoming more difficult.

I’ve mentioned in the past how, when I was in the midst of the lethargy and dizziness brought about by my labyrinthitis type symptoms, I underwent something of a creative surge. I was depressed, fatigued, and constantly anxious, but I also composed what is without doubt the most sophisticated music I’ve ever written (soon to be available on my upcoming CD release) while also writing what I think is some of my best acid logic material. I had a sense of an increased ability to connect disparate properties found in both music and writing; in terms of writing, I had an ability to chase tangential ruminations down labyrinthine mental corridors to their fruition (I’m not sure what that means either, but I like how it’s phrased.)

Now, two or three years later, the fatigue, dizziness and anxiety are largely gone. But so is a certain creative spark.

I don’t think it’s simply that the creativity followed the disappearing anxiety of illness off into the sunset. I think getting older is part of it too. There’s a certain cliché, though no less true for being cliché, that the hunger, desire and ability to achieve artistic success tends to diminish with age (I’m aware of the numerous exceptions to this, but as a general rule, I think it does stand.)

However, at least in terms of guitar playing, I actually think I’m becoming more finessed a player, and am increasing my technical mastery of the instrument. This reminds me of players I used to see up in the Americana scene in Los Angeles — guys in their 40s, 50s and 60s who were absolute masters of the instrument. However, as I look back on it, I realized there was very little risk or experimentation in their playing. You didn’t have the sense they were particularly excited by what they were doing, you did have the sense that they were playing riffs and solos and ideas they had played 1000 times before. Now, there was a certain advantage to this repetition — they were capable of playing these parts very well, and the audience rightfully took pleasure at that. But you didn’t get the sense that this performer was playing all that differently than they had five years previous, or would be five years in the future. And there’s something dead about that to me.

One can theorize about the neurological or hormonal reasons for this. As people get older, maybe they experience a decrease in neurotransmitters or hormones that fuel creativity. It’s an interesting area of exploration, but not directly pertinent here.

So the question becomes, how does maintain one’s youthful hunger for experimentation? Perhaps by studying the exceptions to the rule — the Picassos, the Beethovens? Perhaps by forcing a steady diet of novel stimulus into one’s brain? Perhaps by consuming vast amounts of LSD and cocaine? I’m not sure.

As a somewhat ironic way to end this, I should note that I wrote a piece wrestling with many of these very same issues close to 10 years ago. So maybe it’s just all in my head.

The Mental is Physical!

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I’ve been thinking a bit on some of the issues modern science raises in regards to free will. One issue, a big one, can be described as follows: Science, particularly neuroscience, has shown that all of our mental processes – thoughts, emotions, decisions, the willing of actions – have physical correlates in the brain. So, if I think about my dog, or my job, or my upcoming date with Scarlett Johansson, electricity shoots down nerve pathways in my brain and chemicals leap across brain synapses. Without these activities happening at a molecular level, I would have no mental life. Therefore, the mental is physical.

However, as Isaac Newton showed, the physical world operates according to set laws. Various forces in the physical world (gravity, magnetism etc.) act upon objects, be they mountains or atoms. There is no random chance in the physical world because it is subservient to these aforementioned, immutable laws. As a result, any activity in the universe is preordained, part of an infinitely complex game of billiards kicked off at the dawn of time.

However, if our mental lives are the result of physical activities then our mental lives – our thoughts and decisions – are also dictated by Newton’s observed laws. And if the activities of our brain are simply a part of the great billiard game in the universe then they are also preordained and as a result we have no free will.

Of course, Quantum Physics disputes the Newtonian Universe and does postulate the existence of randomness in the universe. Maybe that randomness allows for free will on the part of man? Maybe, but it seems more likely to me that seemingly random actions in the Quantum Physics realm are merely caused by non-random events we simply can’t see or understand with our meager science tools.

What then are the ramifications of an ordered universe with no free will? Let’s say you came home and found me boning your sister. You would become enraged and would attempt to assault me as I leapt, pants-less, across your living room. I would say, “Dude, I understand you’re pissed because I’m boning your sister but you have to understand that the decision was not mine to make. It was ordained eons ago when the universe was born and steaming hot projections of matter were sent shooting outward into a space that had not existed just moments before. As the second hand of the cosmic clock first ticked it was inevitable I would eventually bone your sister.”

You would doubtless become calm realizing the irrefutable logic of my argument.

Can LSD save your soul?

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The LA Times has an interesting article on recent experiments using hallucinogenic drugs to treat various ailments.

Janeen Delany describes herself as an “old hippie” who’s smoked plenty of marijuana. But she never really dabbled in hallucinogens — until two years ago, at the age of 59.

A diagnosis of incurable leukemia had knocked the optimism out of the retired plant nurserywoman living in Phoenix. So she signed up for a clinical trial to test whether psilocybin — the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms” — could help with depression or anxiety following a grim diagnosis.

… With two researchers at her side, she embarked on a six-hour journey into altered consciousness that she calls “the single most life-changing experience I’ve ever had.”

Let me state the obvious: only the lamest of hippies would not dabble in hallucinogens until the age of 59.

The article continues…

Delany said her “trip” awakened a deep and reassuring sense of “knowing.” She came to see the universe and everything in it as interconnected. As the music in her headphones reached a crescendo, she held her breath and realized it would OK — no, really easy — not to breathe anymore. She sensed there was nothing more she needed to know and therefore nothing she needed to fear about dying.

And that, paradoxically, has allowed her to live.

This notion that hallucinogenic drugs stimulate the experience of an interconnected universe caught my eye, because it’s very similar to the experience neuroscientist and author Jill Bolte Taylor had upon having a left brain stroke. (Details here.) This opens up an interesting question: does LSD operate on the brain in the same way as a stroke? Does it release certain neural networks from the inhibition put upon them by other neural networks? (In Taylor’s case, her more free-flowing nonsequential right hemisphere was released from the inhibitions of the left hemisphere.) Someone should investigate this fascinating question, if they haven’t already.

Bankers do it better

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Years ago, I had a discussion with my girlfriend at the time in which I postulated that if a person really wanted to make the world a better place, they should work towards finding a job where they’re paid vast amounts of money which could then be invested charitably. She refused to the logic of this insight, arguing that taking such a job would somehow corrupt your soul or some nonsense. Well, the “Practical Ethics” blog offered by the University of Oxford agrees with me.

In fact, there are reasons for thinking that, if you spend your money wisely, you can do much more good by taking a lucrative career such as banking than by pursuing a conventional ‘ethical’ career such as charity work.

First, as a banker, you could earn well over £6million. By donating 50% of those earnings, you could pay for several charity workers. So you’d do several times as much good than if you were a charity worker yourself.

Second, if you decide not to be a charity worker, someone else will take your place, and so the benefit you provide would have happened anyway. In contrast, if you take a lucrative career and donate your earnings, your donations provide a benefit which would not have happened anyway.

Third, as a philanthropic banker, you can put your money anywhere. So you can fund only the very best causes. In contrast, as a charity worker, you are much more limited in your choice of where to work. Some causes are thousands of times more cost-effective than others, so this can be a big deal.

My girlfriend was guilty of a common supposition — that money itself is evil as opposed to being a neutral tool that can be applied in a variety of ways. She probably wanted to break up with me after I delivered my flawless argument, but knew that were she to do so, she would be denying herself access to my vast repertoire of sexual skills.

Wil on free will, for free

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The question of whether man has free will seems to have resurfaced in the blogosphere as of late, prompted partly by a new book (reviewed here) on the subject. As a result, I’m tempted to comment on it. (Or, perhaps I am “ordered” by my brain and mind to comment on it, and I am helpless to resist.)

The debate over free will has, of course, been fought by philosophers and scientists for centuries; I’m not going to solve it in one blog post (though I might in two or three.) Let me simply offer some thoughts.

Let’s start off with the optimistic supposition that man does have some kind of free will. With that said, there are certainly actions that cannot be considered to be free. Physical reflex actions would be the most obvious — someone throws a ball at me, and my hand instinctively leaps up to deflect it.

There also seems to be something automatic about emotions. You see a snake, or an enraged girlfriend holding a knife, or a panther in your living room (or all three) and you reflexively feel the experience of dread — your stomach tightens, your muscles tense, cold sweat dampens your palms. At that moment, you have no control over these bodily reactions (in the long-term, there are techniques one can pursue — meditation etc. — that seem to mitigate these bodily responses in moments of fear.)

But these are all reactions of the moment, so to speak. It would seem that we certainly have free will when making more thoughtful, important decisions — where to go to college, where to eat lunch, whether or not to ask so-and-so out on a date.

But let’s consider the nature of decision-making. You are presented with a dilemma (say, choosing between four colleges) and have to choose a course of action. (In this example, you really have five or even more choices — the four colleges, plus not going to college at all which in and of itself represents innumerable possibilities.) Most people would, of course, attempt to make this decision “logically” — they would add up the pluses and minuses of each college, balancing factors of academic esteem, location, geography, weather, closeness to friends. But each of those factors is weighted by a person’s emotional response. There’s no really logical reason to avoid snow, but there can be an emotional one: you really hate snow! Maybe you’re particularly antiauthoritarian and are turned off by academic esteem. Maybe you have certain friends you’d actually like to distance yourself from. These are not logical reasons, they are emotional ones, and as we’ve noted, emotions “tend” to be automatic. Can a decision made under the influence of emotion really be called “free”?

The more I think about it, the more it seems the question “do we have free will?” is the wrong question to ask. I’m not quite sure what the right question is, however.

Yet another great injustice befalls me

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A couple days ago, I went to the library. I parked in a pay space. I was fumbling around to get change for the meter, then got distracted by something and ended up leaving the car without putting money in the meter. About 40 minutes later it dawned on me that I had forgotten to pay. So I hurriedly left the library and went to the car.

As I was going back to the car, I thought about the whole situation. It wasn’t that I had willfully refused to pay the meter; I had simply forgotten. You might say a certain part of myself — the conscious, practical left brain — had simply ceased to exist as I was lost in thought. Is it morally right for the state to impose taxation for actions not willfully avoided, but avoided because the psychological/neurological component responsible for such decisions has temporally ceased to exist? I would argue no, no, a thousand times no. This was an action I had no control over; it was simply the failure of an overworked brain.

I think until our legal system properly considers the various psychoneurosemantical issues raised by this kind of situation, we will never see true justice.

Fortunately, it turned out that I had not gotten a ticket.

My plan to destroy the world

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Isaac Newton was, I believe, the first to describe the notion of an entirely deterministic universe. The idea being that if I pitched a marble at a group of marbles, and could somehow account for the temperature in the air, the density of the individual marbles, and physical objects around the marbles, I could predict where each marble would end up. Such calculations are beyond the human brain, of course, but perhaps with computers, could be eventually performed.

I’m reading a book called “Emotional Intelligence.” In it, the author tells a personal anecdote of being in a grumpy mood and getting on a bus driven by a cheerful, chatty bus driver. As the bus driver pointed out the highlights of the trip, the author felt his mood rising. And he noticed the same thing happening with other passengers on the bus. And he presumed that as his fellow passengers got off on their individual stops and went through their day, they passed off their good mood to others. The bus driver was “infecting” people with cheerfulness.

Let’s consider the idea that people’s mental state is also entirely deterministic in a fashion similar to the physical state of marbles. If you could account for my entire mental and emotional history, and place me in front of a happy bus driver, you could with total accuracy predict my resulting behavior. Again, such calculations are beyond the individual human brain, but perhaps aided by computers, could be performed.

I’m sure you see where I’m going with this… what if we took advantage of this mental determinism for the forces of evil? Could I perform the right calculations in such a way that I could make an offhand comment to someone that would darken their mood enough that they would then insult someone else whose temperament would be similarly be darkened leading them to insult someone else with greater force, eventually leading to a fight, perhaps a murder, which would set various social groups against each other, building to an all-out class/race war, which eventually drives an individual or group towards amassing biological and nuclear weapons and using them to destroy all life on earth? Is this possible?

I don’t know. But it would be fun to find out.

The perils of being unique

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A while back I was reading about an interesting study where people were subliminally exposed to a certain image, and then asked to choose their preferred image from a series of images. As you might suspect, they tended to choose the image they were subliminally exposed to. In academic terms, they were “primed” for the image. Generally speaking, we’re just saying people like what is familiar to them, even if they don’t know that it’s familiar.

This, of course, is a concern to anyone who wants to make non-derivative art, be it paintings, music, writing, movies etc. If you look at the marketplace, it’s easy to see that people prefer what they are familiar with. Musically speaking, you can separate Katy Perry from Lady Gaga or Ke$ha, but the difference between them isn’t equal to the distance between the Beatles and Beethoven. From a broad view, those pop artists basically sound the same. Similarly, you can buy three dozen different watercolor paintings of a sunset, and, while there will be some differences, generally speaking they’re all the same. Pop music, almost by definition, isn’t made to challenge the viewer. Neither are nature paintings designed to be consumed by rich middle-class housewives who want to feel like they understand “art.”

For someone such as myself, interested in creating unique and unusual artistic projects, this notion spells doom. People will always gravitate towards mediocre and predictable drivel, as opposed to my cutting-edge offerings. Thus I will live my life in the shadows of obscurity and probably die from syphilis.

I hate everybody.

Education in the Internet age

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I had an interesting conversation with someone a few weeks ago about the role of education in the Internet age. My view is that education needs to be rethought. With the arrival of the Internet, there has been a vast transfer of wealth from educational institutions, such as schools and libraries, to the public. It used to be, if you wanted to learn about a particular topic — say, chemistry — you had to go to the library and check out some books (and, often, they were already checked out so you had to wait) or take a class. Now, reams of material on chemistry are available for free on the Internet. You can even see video lectures and classes on YouTube.

Basically, there is more educational material out there than there was 30 years ago. Now what happens when there’s more of something? It becomes devalued. Education, or at least educational materials, are simply worth less than they were in the past. (I freely concede that a lot of this is due to blatant violation of intellectual copyrights, but we are where we are.)

To give another example: about six months ago I got interested in writing a fugue — the fugue being a particular form of classical composition. Back in the day, I probably would’ve had to go to the library or scour used bookstores for some treatises on the subject. I also would’ve had to purchase numerous CDs for musical examples. However, I simply went online and found a number of written materials which diagnosed the structure of the fugue in great detail. They also referenced some notable examples of classic fugues, which I was easily able to listen to on YouTube.

One might offer one defense of education. You could say, “Sure, Wil, education might be devalued for people, such as yourself, who take the initiative to educate themselves. But what about the scores of common idiots who need to feel the lash on their back to better themselves?” Well, this is an interesting point. Perhaps we need to reconsider our entire society. We have heretofore been bound to arcane notions of egalitarianism — the notion that everyone should have the same opportunities as everyone else. Perhaps we should concede that some, perhaps most elements of society are inferior, and time should not be wasted trying to educate them. An elite class of individuals, such as myself, can utilize these common rabble as our slaves, employed to attend to our personal and sexual needs. Once we have tired of them, they can be dispensed with, perhaps by being ground into hamburger and fed to farm animals. And thus, society, no longer bound in attempts at educating the uneducatedable, could truly progress.

It’s certainly food for thought.

The tricky math of morality

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I think we all have some sense that our perception of numbers when applied to things like people killed or money lost is somewhat out of whack. If we hear about three people killed by crocodiles, we might feel a certain sympathetic twinge. But if we then find out that 3000 people were killed by crocodiles, we don’t feel 1000 times worse. And if it’s 30,000 people killed by crocodiles… well, that doesn’t seem much worse than 3000. Our ability to apply numbers to tragedy is skewed.

A recent Discover Magazine (July/August 2011) looks at the work of moral scientist and philosopher Josh Greene. The story comments on this topic.

Another moral quirk is the tendency to value human lives less when more of them are threatened. A few years ago, the nation was riveted by the plight of the little boy thought to have been carried away by a weather balloon, but often we barely register the many victims of foreign wars. Or to use the chilling words often attributed to Stalin (but probably apocryphal), “The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of 1 million is a statistic.”

Green and his cohorts set up a series of experiments where they presented subjects with tricky scenarios where they had to choose between saving one man with certainty, or sacrificing that man to possibly save greater numbers of people. The subjects’ brains were MRI’d while they struggled with these conundrums.

… Greene… observed that as the subjects made their decisions, they tapped a fascinating selection of brain areas: the insula, normally used to manage probability and risk, and the ventral striatum which tracks magnitude. Mammals generally rely on these regions to find food and sex. For instance a squirrel might use them to consider how many nuts are lying on the ground and his odds of grabbing a bunch of them before being chased by dog. “You’d like to think that when Truman was deciding to use nuclear weapons and thinking about how many people would be killed and whether the decision would make the war even worse, some special voice of conscience was informing that decision,” Greene says. “But it seems that for decisions involving numbers and probabilities, we default to a system for figuring out how to find the most nuts.”

That’s an interesting, albeit nutty, hypothesis. In essence, our moral decisions are not purely logical because we simply can’t appreciate the math of these situations. Intellectually, we understand that 40 is four times greater than 10, but morally, we do not.