Rational Philosophy

While we live in the moment we must accept the uncertainty of the future… and the past.

“Prophesy is a good line of business, but it is full of risks,”
– Mark Twain (who may lose his house twice over…)

Back in the dark ages of last November I wrote about a stockbroker who, in anger, jostled the stationary bike of a fellow spin-class member. Frustrated by the man’s grunting and shouting, he grabbed the handlebars of the offender’s bike, lifted it off the ground (while he was still on it) and dropped it. My blog post on the subject sports a photograph of the purportedly injured party, Stuart Sugarman, a partner at an investment firm, wearing a neck brace. Here we are in sunny June and I read that a jury has acquitted the stockbroker of assault, having found Mr. Sugarman to be an unreliable witness, and deciding that the incident didn’t, beyond reasonable doubt, result in Sugarman’s injuries.

When I wrote my original post I was convinced that the stockbroker, Christopher Carter, was guilty of something — perhaps not a crime, but certainly of unreasonably losing his cool. The current news story casts a somewhat heroic glow on Carter’s vigilante act, blaming Sugarman for being a boar in the class, and a liar to boot.

Where does the truth lie?

Some scientists have apparently decided that wherever the truth about dark energy lies they are not going to find it. Current calculations indicate that the universe is 4% regular matter (stars, planets, pencils), 22% dark matter, and 74% dark energy (not related to dark matter as far as we know). Despite a lot of attention and investigation, dark energy isn’t yielding its mysteries, and some scientists are worried that it won’t.

Such pessimism seems unwarranted at this point in time. After all, the future could last a long time. Why give up now?

I’m reasonably sure that Ray Kurzweil, noted futurist, would concur. Kurzweil has been making predictions about the future for over thirty years, with impressive results. In the ’80s he predicted that a computer would defeat the world chess champion by 1998 (it happened in 1997). Some of Kurzweil’s current predictions:

• Within 10 years, a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.
• Within 20 years, all energy will come from clean sources.
• In 15 years… your life expectancy will rise faster than you age.
• And then, by 2050, the Singularity, when humans and/or machines begin to evolve into immortal beings with ever-improving software.

Still doubtful? “Two decades ago he predicted that “early in the 21st century” blind people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. On Thursday night at the festival, he pulled out a new gadget the size of a cellphone, and when he pointed it at the brochure for the science festival, it had no trouble reading the text aloud.”

From a philosophical perspective, an interesting aspect of all of this is that time, as we perceive it, is all in our minds. The past and the future, as we commonly conceive of them, don’t exist. All of existence rests on the current moment. Reality is transitional. Causality creates our perception of time. The predictable changing of things, the nudge of being from one moment to the next. Without this, time would be meaningless.

(This, as a digression, is the clue to understanding our existence. Once we have accepted that the rules of causality shape the universe we live in, we can begin to understand why we live, think and feel the way we do.)

This morning when I woke up I was the proud owner of an idea for a sure-fire business opportunity. By 9:30am, that sunny feeling of certainty had been toppled as I found out that someone already held the copyright to my idea. All was lost. By 3pm, after a brief nap, I’d regained my optimism after dreaming up a revision to my idea… Time, you faithless lover, revise me again.

On avoiding work and making false distinctions.

After I swam this morning, I got into a locker room discussion about the supreme wastefulness and poor management of the NY City Transit system. (Coincidentally, the subject of a recent post.) There we were, a former Transit employee (me), a current Transit employee, and a contractor to the Transit Authority, quickly finding common ground on the subjects of inefficiency and ineptness. The discussion began when the current transit employee joked that his job required him just to show up.

Barack Obama showed up when Ted Kennedy couldn’t (because of his brain tumor) to make the commencement address at Wesleyan University. Obama took the opportunity to urge the graduating class to consider the call of public service. William Kristol chastises Obama for omitting from his list of worthy public services that the Weslyan grads might consider a career in the armed forces .

Um, William, who in his right mind would encourage young people to join the armed forces right now? And particularly Obama, who opposed the war, and who wants out of the war, and who probably believes that drawing down on military spending is a good long term goal.

The report of another commencement address underscores the weakness of Kristol’s unconvincing piece. We read that President Bush gave the commencement address at Furman University in South Carolina. Bush also called for students to consider public service… and also left out the military from his list.

At the pinnacle of his rhetorical powers, Bush exhorted the Furman graduating class to adopt a “culture of responsibility” avoiding the inevitably un-fulfilling temptations of “alcohol, drugs and promiscuity.” (A bit late for that advice probably, Mr. President.)

And, speaking of alcohol, whenever I read Stanley Fish’s column it makes me want to tackle a shaker of Martinis. There’s something so depressingly negative about Fish’s way of thinking. He’s the worst kind of academic, it seems, seeking out reasons to accept the inevitability of problems rather than find ways to see past them.

This week Fish writes about “norms and deviations.” In a nutshell he argues that any group can be defined as a deviation from a norm, and that that group can legitimately claim that the norm is artificially determined. Deaf people, once defined as disabled, now seeks recognition as a community that rejects the term disabled. Fish rattles through the spectrum of differences from sex distinctions to the distinction between serial killers and non-serial killers. He concludes, rather smugly, that there’s no better way of looking at the endless recursive meaninglessness of these situations than to accept its endlessness and meaninglessness.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to do any work in rebutting Mr. Fish — someone else had already done it for me. A poster called malnicore added this comment, which cannot be improved upon (or, maybe it can, but I’m not going to try):

Oddly, I now notice that malnicore’s last sentence echoes Bush’s call to release ourselves from any attachment to “alcohol, drugs and promiscuity.” To which list he might usefully have added “abuse of power.”