A Couple of Stray Notes from Uppsala

Uppsala. At breakfast there was a biker whose jacket said he was from the Uppsala chapter of the Ards Vikings. I didn't know they had clubs for them. He looked pleasant and friendly despite the build, the tattoos and the facial hair and it occurred to me that they might be a bit like elk. Having no natural predators they are calm, clumsy and mostly harmless.

At the river we walked along the bank a few hundred yards. It was full of young people, students I suppose, doing what young people do, hanging out, drinking beer, trying to impress the girls. Being young. I miss being young.

A few predictions for the next decades

When the mind is not busy with professional obligations, it starts thinking about other things. Mine has not settled down yet to anything specific but it's floating around looking for things to attach itself too. These are some idle thoughts it has had about the future:

The whole concept of 'carcinogen' will be completely reconceived. The current understanding of how specific substances cause uncontrolled cell growth will turn out to be so completely misunderstood that we might as well have ignored everything said about the subject (cause, not treatment, which is understood rather better).

Abortion will go the way of slavery, which it resembles in many ways, in terms of the arguments used to defend it. This will not be because of anything new discovered about the neurophysiology of the foetus, but as a result of changes in orthodox  thinking. In other words, it will be 'liberals' who reject it.

The red Indians will turn out not to be the first humans in the Americas and there will be a social revolution  of some kind in the USA as people realize they owe them nothing that they don't owe to others. In S America it is harder to say, given the politics of the region.

There will be a revolution of some kind in professional sport. People will lose interest in the sports which are constantly being exposed as corrupt. This will affect the Olympics as well as politicians distance themselves from those sports that have become unpopular and stop funding them.

Speaking of politics, stability and prosperity will appear in unexpected areas of the world, and in some of the most stable countries the governments will take one too many liberties with the freedom and patience of their electorates. Specifically, the EU will collapse and some governments will not survive it.

And more immediately, England will win the Ashes.

Things to do Before I Die

I seem to have stumbled on several of these lists recently, and it has made me think. There are things I intend to do one day, things I should like to do, things that I imagine would be worth doing, and things which, thinking about it carefully, I believe I will be glad I have done when I reflect on my life as it ends. The items on this list make up a collection of aspirations old and new that may be fitted haphazardly into these or other categories.

Some people seem to copy each other, rather than thinking how they themselves would respond to the experience in later life. And some of the things that regularly crop up are surprisingly mundane. Why does everybody want to swim with dolphins? Or eat at the world’s best restaurant, or stay at the world’s best hotel? Or appear as an extra in a film, or just appear once on the television? I expect all of those things are fun if you get the chance, but I don’t see them as justifying existence in the mind of the moribund. But on the whole they show how different we all are, how individual are our dreams and aspirations and fears, and that fact alone makes life a fascinating adventure. So here are my ideas:

Buy a microlight plane (and fly it, because I find the idea of moving around the country by air and seeing it from above very compelling)

Learn to ski jump (because it looks like tremendous fun and I want to feel it)

Cross Siberia by train (the journey must be very beautiful, and the sense of being lost in a place that is far more interesting than you yourself could ever be must be wonderful)

Travel in northern India (because I think there are things there worth seeing, things to learn about what people have been and can be)

Understand Sanskrit literature as well as I sometimes pretend to (a genuinely satisfying intellectual achievement)

Understand the origins of humanity and human consciousness (I rely on other people to provide the information that I will then try to understand, and at the moment they still have a lot of work to do)

Own a shark (not that I need great pick-up lines anymore, but that one takes some beating. And I like sharks)

Open the bowling for England (overtaken by events many years ago)

Have a passionate affair with Goldie Hawn (also overtaken by events many years ago)

Discover whether there is such a thing as spiritual enlightenment

If there is, achieve it (contingent on previous)

Win a Nobel Prize for (preferably) Literature (this is more something to work towards than to achieve. A kind of distant reference point for my little scribblings)

Learn to accept death (useful in itself)

Learn to play a mean game of chess (I used to be a mathematician, I’m supposed to be good at chess, but I have never got beyond not-quite-embarrassing)

Express something worthwhile by drawing (I would discover something about the world that I had not imagined)

Likewise through music/the guitar, for the same reason

Make a parachute jump (because it is the single most terrifying thing I can think off, and to overcome the irrational fear would be very satisfying and beneficial)

Walk around the world (if that is rather impractical, I would settle for walking across Africa from Port Said to Cape Town, or the Americas from The Magellan Strait to Alaska)

Nº 1 on any such list: Live. Many people forget to do this. They are too busy not dying, or doing other things of minor importance.

Comments, additions, ideas, other people’s lists, are very welcome.

A Bad Night in a Bad Inn

St Theresa of Ávila described life as a bad night in a bad inn. If you expect eternal paradise afterwards, I imagine worldly existence can seem rather inadequate, but to most of us it is all there is. Which doesn’t stop us making ourselves far more miserable than is strictly necessary.

I happen to derive pleasure from knowing and understanding things. Reflecting calmly on my deathbed, if I have that extravagance, I might well look back and wish I had bothered less about the higher arithmetic and Sanskrit poetry, and spent my time having children or saving the whale or just gossiping about nothing with people I had spent my life close to. It is perfectly possible, although I cannot know it now. I will know when I am there.

I don’t expect to agree with the Saint of Ávila, who seemed to suggest that we should be glad to die and get out of this ghastly place. I rather like it here. Perhaps I shall go somewhere which is much better than this, but in any case I want to believe that I haven’t wasted my life. How can I know what is waste and what is not waste?

Memento mori. If I remember my Latin correctly this is an injunction to remember our own mortality, with the implication that if we do so we will have a greater sense of proportion about ourselves and our lives. That is, we will value ourselves less and our time on Earth more.

I am constantly aware of my own mortality, and of the fact that, however much time I have left, it is less than I had yesterday. An astonishing number of people seem completely unaware of the fact that one day there will be no more days, and they spend their time in ways that are not only unproductive and apparently pointless, but are quite clearly unfulfilling, even by whatever standards they might have themselves.

I know people who can spend an entire day in some combination of heroic sleep, inane entertainment from the television, and inane and ignorant conversation about nothing. Such people are not at all unusual, I understand. In fact, it appears to be those of us who do things we do not have to do, things that are more difficult and require more effort than is strictly necessary, who are considered strange. Do they feel, at the end of the day, that they have lived it to any purpose? Presumably they would not even understand the question, because if you can seriously ask it, the answer must be no.

Remembering that one day you will have done all you can ever do, regardless of what you have and have not done, is a good way of making the most of the day, and of feeling some form of satisfaction at the end of it. But does the same thing apply to life? Can we know what we will care about at the end? Probably not. But I am almost certain that, unlike the Saint of Ávila, I shall not be glad to see it go.

On The Proving of Negatives

Longrider and others both at his place and at Orphans of Liberty have been arguing about the existence of God. They were supposed to be arguing about whether religious people are entitled to proselytize and exactly how much tolerance they should be granted. At least, that’s what the original post was about, and the hosts made a couple of attempts to get it back on track. Inevitably it became an argument, almost a slanging match, about God yes, God no.

I didn’t get involved in the argument. I tried that recently and, as a wise man pointed out at the time, ‘These things never get anywhere, do they?’ So I didn’t intervene. But there are a few points that are worth making about how these arguments are conducted, and why they don’t get anywhere, all of them exemplified in that discussion.

It was asserted several times that, ‘You can’t prove a negative.’ Longrider himself, on the side of the non-believers, said that he could not be expected to demonstrate the non-existence of God, because to prove a negative is impossible. It probably is impossible in practice to demonstrate the non-existence of God, but not for that reason. This is often heard, in this and many other types of argument, and is stated as though it were an iron law of logic. In fact it is complete nonsense. It is folk logic, and it matters here because Longrider, particularly, makes frequent appeals to logic when criticising the arguments of others.

That it is nonsense becomes clear when you consider that any proposition in logic, and most in natural language, can be expressed as a negative. The proposition itself, ‘There does not exist a proof of a negative statement,’ is expressed as a negative, and thus, if it were in fact true, could not be proven. This isn’t just a quibble, and it’s more than an example. It is perfectly simple to state negative propositions which can be proved to be true.

The confusion stems, I think, from the fact that it is often difficult, or impossible, in theory or in practice, to prove the non-existence of some postulated entity. I can prove that there is no albino parrot in my living room by simultaneously observing every subset of space in which such a creature could be. In practice it would involve moving some furniture and fending off men in white coats (it’s quite all right doctor, I’m just looking for a non-existent white parrot), but it can clearly be done. To prove that there is no albino parrot in the world cannot be done by the same means, due to practical limitations, but it is possible in theory. To prove that there is no horse with 21-trisomy in the world is possible, however, through the observation that the same mutation which causes Down’s syndrome inevitably causes spontaneous abortion.

To prove the non-existence of God is certainly possible in theory. If it’s true, of course.

On the Absence of Everything

Regular readers will have noticed that every time I try to analyse something recently, I end up discovering that it doesn’t exist outside ourselves. I shall soon become convinced that I am a product of my own imagination and that I am in fact projecting myself into being from a rarely-used area of the mind of some small green creature from Alpha Centauri who is experiencing a particularly dull Sunday afternoon. All of this is achieved without the use of mind-altering substances. Perhaps philosophical enquiry in itself alters the mind in unpredictable ways. Perhaps I should just watch the football. It would be much easier, I stand a better chance of understanding it and, unlike philosophical enquiry, you can drink beer while you do it without changing the result.

What is it We love When We Love

Every part of the person we love changes, but we still love them. So what is it we love?

Everything about the person we speak of loving changes over time. Every cell in our body is replaced over a period which depends on which source you refer to, but there appears to be no doubt that any given person’s body contains none of the molecules it did some years ago. The few cell types which change over longer periods are not involved in inspiring love.

 

But the slow mutation of tissue is the least of the tricks the world can play on our sense of identity. The person we love can become a physically different person in very immediate, perceptible, tangible ways, as a recent of severe illness, serious accident or by fire, for example, and we don’t necessarily cease to love. A father might discover that his daughter was in fact sired by a passing vacuum cleaner salesmen, but he will still love her, even though that love was initially based on their shared genes.

Emotionally and psychologically a person can experience, again through illness, accident or the degeneracy of age, perhaps, changes so profound that they become, literally, a different person. We love this new person. In some cases there is no consciousness left, and so we love the non-person. We love the dead, who are nothing. When their mind has ceased to work, their senses have stopped perceiving and their body has been dissolved among the five elements, we still love them

In other words, there exist a number of ways in which whatever we imagine led us to love the person in the first place, can be completely destroyed, and yet we do not cease to love.

 We create love within ourselves. That doesn’t mean it isn’t real, but it doesn’t seem to reflect any external reality.