Pulling his own strings

Puppet-Einstein illustrates a version of free will: when you form good habits, your choices habitually coincide with your intentions and you're "free."

For instance: I'm a habitual walker. On Saturday afternoon, typically a time of relative immobility for me, I happened upon this article on the importance of moving. So I did. Could I have done otherwise? Pretty sure I could, but the habits of a lifetime converged with the impulse to get up and go. So I went, and I enjoyed my walk. It felt like a free choice to me.

free willy

Much talk in class yesterday of free will as an explanation of evil and suffering in the world. Jesus and Mo need to be heard, on this:

And Colin McGinn, too:



And Bart Ehrman. We'll hear from him on our campus in Murfreesboro, TN on Feb. 18, 2011... God willing.

Superman

In class yesterday we heard an earnest, sensitive, respectful explication of why, from the perspective of Islamic piety, we should not grouse about suffering. The linchpin of the argument was familiar: free will, coupled with interesting observations about gratitude, overcoming impossible adversity, and the deity having no "openings." At first I thought that meant the economy was tight all over, but it turned out to be a point about His non-animality (giving the lie to this children's book).

More seriously, the last point is one Karen Armstrong makes in The Case for God. We cannot imagine what the Deity really is, or even that He/She/It shares any attitudes or attributes in common with us. God is an enigma, a transcendent, transplendent mystery. A black box. This line of thought runs into its own brick wall. Why worship an enigma? Especially one that tests and tortures the faithful? (Michael Shermer's thoughts on the problem of suffering... George Carlin & "Mr. Deity"... theodicy & crummy dorm analogy)

The adversity and gratitude angles really are more compelling to me, personally. The human spirit is indomitable. Watching the presentation's video clip I was reminded of Chris Reeve ("Superman") and his heroic chin-up way of facing his own impossible challenge, near-total paralysis after a horse-riding accident.

But what does that have to do with God, unless believing in God is what enables the hero to persevere? I don't know if that was this amazing man's situation. It does not appear to have been Chris's, said by his brother to have been a devout atheist:

Q: Do you believe in the Lord?

A: Even though I don't personally believe in the Lord, I try to behave as though He was watching.

James bio - 4

Last week, in Robert Richardson's James bio, our budding philosopher "just about touched bottom." He'd lost his dearest friend, possibly the love of his life. He couldn't commit to anything. He couldn't envision his own future. He needed something solid and reliable to hold onto, something to embolden his will and get him up and doing.

On the last day of April, 1870, young William James recorded a new diary entry: " I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. [He's been having a lot of those!] I finished the first part of Renouvier's 2nd Essay and saw no reason why his definition of free will-- the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts-- need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present-- untl next year-- that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will."

And: "Today has furnished the exceptionally passionate initiative... needful for the acquisition of habits." Young Willy already knows what older William will make so much of in Principles of Psychology, where habit is christened "the enormous fly-wheel of society."

And, explicitly rejecting suicide as an un- "manly" choice, he writes: "(I will) believe in my individual reality and creative power... I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world. Life shall be built on doing and creating and suffering."

He's firmly rounded the corner on his darkest days, and is moving towards the light-- or at least trying to talk himself into it.

"Rapt" and free

Winifred Gallagher writes, in Rapt, of hauling herself out of despondency in the ugly grip of cancer:

When I woke up in the morning,” Ms. Gallagher said, “I’d ask myself: Do you want to lie here paying attention to the very good chance you’ll die and leave your children motherless, or do you want to get up and wash your face and pay attention to your work and your family and your friends? Hell or heaven — it’s your choice.

Dad made his choice last year, when he received a terminal diagnosis of leukemia not long before Mom died. He chose to accentuate and attend to all that had been good and right about his eight decades on Earth. He was experiencing a great deal of the physical pain that inevitably accompanies that horrible affliction, and no doubt a lot of the normal psychological distress that any honest and reflective person who loves life must face, as the end nears. But he exhibited no fear. From May to September his loved ones basked in the glow of his incredibly positive and grateful attitude. Now we know how to die. If there is such a thing as a "good death" he showed us what it can look like.

That was William James's point: our choices frame our attitudes, motivate our actions, shape our experience, become our lives, and can light the lives of others. I keep telling myself: Pay attention...

Evil, & Free Will

As anticipated, there were lots of interesting conversations in class today. No new insights on the problem of evil, and surprisingly little evident reaction to the Simon Blackburn analogy I like to relate when first introducing this topic to undergrads: suppose, Blackburn proposes, you live in a dorm that's falling apart, where the food is awful (people sometimes die from it), and where the "management" (though rumored to exist) never actually appears. Would you infer from this state of affairs that the management nonetheless exists, is aware of your predicament, cares deeply about you, and possesses infinite resources for fixing things? No? Not even if one of your fellow students aggressively insists that she is privy to the mind and heart of the management, and can assure you that you are loved and cared for by management and that all is for the best in the dorm just as it is? No -- no more than you'd buy the claim that the "infirmities of Windows" ever persuaded anyone that Bill Gates is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent.

Interesting discussion this evening on free will and determinism, the latter being an example of a "weird" belief that my adult student found irrefutable, though unpopular. I remain unpersuaded, being a Jamesian on this issue ("my first act of free will shall be to believe in free will"). I recall the undergraduate demonstration of free will I was treated to many years ago, when my classmate destroyed a perfectly fine glass of beer by violently dashing it against his own cranium. "I'm free, Q.E.D." Nope, just crazy -- and, I came to realize as I got to know him, predictably crazy. This randomly weird demonstration was just the sort of thing he might have been expected to do, hence more a demonstration of determinism than anything else.