Rational Philosophy

On work and self: Wesley Snipes, Tom Daley, Anna Quindlen, Rene Descartes

I’ve spent the past eleven years and ten months — more than half my working life — at the same firm. Today was my last day. I’m going to be writing more, and making more music, and probably a whole lot of things that I have no clue about just yet.

As I said goodbye to my colleagues this afternoon I was aware of how much the experience of working with them and doing what I’d been doing had changed me, how much I’d learned, how much I’d unlearned, and how much I’d grown and shifted. I was moving on, but not without taking the experience with me.

Actor Wesley Snipes, convicted on tax charges, has been sentenced to the maximum of three years in jail. As I read the story I was fascinated by the extent to which a movie star’s life must be affected by his or her sense of self as reflected by public opinion. Denzel Washington had written a letter of character reference to the court. I found myself sad for Snipes; excerpts from the letter seemed to describe the image of a man rather than the man himself.

Thirteen year old Tom Daley, a British diver who will compete in the Beijing Olympics, explained his approach to maintaining a balanced perspective like this: “I try and keep it all separate because when I’m not diving and doing media stuff I’m just a normal kid.”

And as I rode on the elevator in the office today, I saw this quote from Anna Quindlen:

“Don’t ever confuse the two, your life and your work. That’s what I have to say. The second is only a part of the first.”

It read like a personal message.

The philosophy of self is as old as the phenomenon of consciousness. It took several million years for this idea to be neatly framed and attributed to Descartes who coined the famous phrase: “Cogito ergo sum” trans. “I think therefore I am.”

To twist this idea into a framing of the concept of self we can say: “I am what I think.”

Some would immediately argue that we do many things without reflection, without thinking them through. Which is true. But the concept of “self” requires reflection. Once I have acted, my acts affect my sense of self according to the way that I process them.

I could have walked away from my job thinking that I was unchanged by it. Had I done so, my sense of self would have been quite different.

Actor Wesley Snipes (and others in the public eye) must process his immediate thoughts about himself as well as processing the opinions expressed by the world at large. Public opinion must place a tremendous strain on one’s ability to maintain a consistent and accurate sense of self.

Young diver Tom Daley demonstrates an admirable compartmentalization of private and public space. (It seems perhaps that children often have a greater aptitude for this than adults.) Daley prefigures Quindlen’s advice in years if not in time.

We can achieve great things. We can inspire great respect or admiration. We can, likewise, achieve little, or inspire no one. But we captain our sense of self over these waters as if it were the QE2, or a tug boat, or a kayak. We might never know or care that the QE2 is really a kayak, or vice versa.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On the concept of free will and its application to personal development.

As I watched March of The Penguins with my family the other evening my wife asked whether the penguins, who spend months of each year huddled together in freezing conditions, gradually starving, ever wonder whether there’s something better out there. The film’s accompanying commentary (narrated by Morgan Freeman) often wanders into sappy projections of human psychology, ascribing human thoughts and feelings to the penguins, spoiling to some extent a fascinating documentary.

We can say with some degree of certainty that penguins do not conceive of choice in the same way people do. But how do people conceive of choice and is it an illusion?

As a teenager I was sure that there was no such thing as free will, no such thing as choice. It seemed obvious to me that any response to any stimulus must be pre-determined by environment and instinct. At the most fundamental level, our minds are complex but absolute mechanisms, sets of synaptic switches, and every “choice” is simply the next configuration of these switches determined by the configuration that came before as influenced by a new set of external stimuli.

In a way I still believe this, but I now think that it skips over an explanation for the concepts of free will and choice, and in doing so lets us abdicate responsibility for our actions or inactions.

Perversity, I think, provides one of the clearest ways to conceive of free will: Imagine someone sitting in a temperature-controlled room with a thermostat. The person can raise or lower the temperature in the room by adjusting the thermostat. If he’s cold he can make it warmer. If it’s hot, he can make it cooler. But, if he’s feeling perverse, he can make it colder when he’s cold or hotter when he’s hot.

It’s at this level that free will and choice have meaning. We conceive of a set of choices and decide to act or not act either according to what we feel we should do, or according to what we feel we shouldn’t do. (This is why perversity provides such a good mental template for the concept.) Being conscious and having access to abstract concepts, we can conceive of doing things that counteract our physiological and emotional instincts.
At the next level down a conscious choice may well reflect a pre-conditioned set of psychological and environmental switches, but that’s not the point. We encounter free will and choice as we conceive of an action or inaction and consider them abstractly, consciously.

Now, here’s the trick. We can train ourselves to reset our switches, essentially changing the current conditions of our psychology. You can read this post and go away with a newly set switch, a switch that will permit you to decide to change a behavior that you don’t like. You have then exerted free will and contributed to your own personal development.

The most important part of this insight is that the results of these changes can be cumulative and can snowball. A choice to practice yoga or start therapy or quit drinking, for instance, can lead to a whole new set of experiences that reset a whole bunch of switches in our minds. Small choices can lead to big changes.

This, I believe, is the level at which we experience free will. Acknowledging the power of choice, even if it is mechanistically illusory, can lead to profound and powerful changes that help us get more out of life.

(My book LIFE! contains a more searching discussion of these ideas.)