Last week Sunday and Monday, I cried, episodically. Altogether, for an hour or more, probably more than I’ve cried in the past ten years, combined.

The Friday before, we got Chloe comfortable in the backseat and drove south five-hundred miles to attend a celebration of life. One nice thing about having relocated from Alaska to the lower 48, is that we’re back on the road system, no need to fly to most places we want to go to now. We over-nighted somewhere about halfway to our destination, got up early the next day, exercised Chloe at a nearby dog park in the rain, then we all piled back into the car and drove the rest of the way. It had stopped raining by the time we arrived at our destination and checked in to the hotel. I didn’t sleep well that night (no fault of the hotel).

The next day HW was up early to feed Chloe. After that they were out the door, descending three flights of antique wooden stairs together into the lobby, where Chloe, I’m sure, paused to revel in the fawning remarks of many hotel guests (she gets that a lot), and from there the two of ’em ventured outside into the sub-freezing morning. Chilly yes, but sunny at least. Chloe preferred the urban oasis of green grass by the Wells Fargo bank to do her business. A couple hours later it was probably pushing fifty degrees. By then Chloe and HW had set out again for a long walk to explore the town. I finished a second Americano, put on a coat, slid my phone into my rear pants pocket, left the room and closed the door behind me. I avoided the elevator and took the stairs to the lobby. Outside the hotel, I phone-navigated to the venue. Turned out it was only a few blocks away.

It was there where we would gather the next day, with others, for the celebration of life. For the wife, soulmate really, of perhaps the only real mentor I’d had coming up as a young (and very green) professional in big oil, almost forty years ago. He had e-mailed me a month earlier to say she died suddenly after a short illness, and to invite us to a celebration of her life, which he’d arranged to be held at her favorite brewery in town. Beer and pizza will be provided, and please come prepared to share whatever memories of her life you care to. Reading that the first time, I cried, so I should probably add that to the tears total. I didn’t think twice; I was going. When I shared the news with HW, she said she wanted to be there with me. In the ensuing days I began to consider what story I might like to share. More tears flowed.

I’ve stayed in touch with these two all the years since we last worked together (his very talented wife also worked at the company), mostly via e-mail and holiday cards, though we hadn’t seen each other in over two decades now. As I shared with HW, it feels strange to me in a way that I could still feel so close to both of them, as you do with friends you frequently spend time with, even as we were separated by thousands of miles all the time I’d lived in Alaska, then in Cleveland, and then back in Alaska. Pretty clearly the connection I feel with these two was undiminished by time and distance. It’s because they were more than just friends and colleagues all those years ago; whether they knew it or not at the time, I looked up to them, because character matters to me, and as I said to my friend just yesterday in a follow-up email after our trip there, you two had it in spades.

After I confirmed the location of the venue, I continued walking about town, checking things out. I’d never been there before. I stopped at a bar and had a martini. The place had your ordinary local bar vibe. I imagined how many times my friends might have sat there on those very bar stools. Planning their next camping trip, or maybe pondering a meandering drive down the west coast (they enjoyed their road trips and munching sunflower seeds), or whatever else two irrepressibly-in-love retirees talk about when the sky’s the limit. And my god she could laugh. A thunderous laugh. And swim; she’d been a tireless, and at times, competitive swimmer much of her life. Loved her Coors Light, too. Also smart as a whip, a widely acknowledged good geophysicist. And in a flash, long before her light was out, this cold and uncaring world took her from us. My friend’s soulmate.

HW and I split a Ribeye dinner and a bottle of Cabernet that night at a really good steakhouse in town. I think I drank most of the bottle. I knew it later when I tried to get to sleep but couldn’t. A bad headache kept me up most of the night. I’m not a frequent sufferer of headaches anymore, and HW asked me more than once in the middle of the night if this one was the worst I’d ever experienced (a common symptom of someone with a brain tumor), to which I answered, No. Then I thought back to that martini, plus the wine, and the high elevation of the town, and knew it must be one of those low-pressure, dehydration headaches I’d suffered in the past. HW made me drink a ton of water. I finally drifted off. The next day I was better.

We attended the celebration in the late afternoon. I didn’t know if I’d recognize my friend after twenty plus years. But there he was, looking no worse for his years, standing among a small gathering of folks who’d come to celebrate his wife’s life. He was unmistakable. And, evidently, I to him. We instantly locked eyes and walked toward each other. I threw my arms around him and started to cry. He did too. Imagine: two “mathy, techy” guys all their lives, in a bear hug, bawling their eyes out. When the time came, I stood up, went to the front of the room, and shared a little story about the first time I met his wife, at the company. I nearly made it to the end of the story when I turned to look at him sitting at the table with HW, tears streaming down his face. And then it was my turn, again. All the while hundreds of photos of her, living her vibrant life of sixty-seven years, cycled across an overhead screen.

The next morning before heading back home we had breakfast together, at a local diner my friend had said had great biscuits and gravy. More sharing and crying at the table, but with a side of hope and an offering of good will. We hugged again outside the restaurant, and yes, cried some more. Finally, with Chloe settled in the back seat, we were off. I cannot get the memory of the look of grief and despair on his face out of my mind. And maybe I shouldn’t even try.

…

Her Highness, showing off at a rest stop between here and there.

Like the new byline?! It’s a hat tip to all the doggos who’ve companion-ed me over the past four decades, and in doing so have in a way I’m sure I don’t entirely understand shaped my worldview and inner monologue. Therapeutically speaking, they’ve been the curbs I’ve needed to stay centered in my lane. In this way, all dogs are service dogs. You cannot spend tens of thousands of hours in the company of dogs, walk, run and ride with them for thousands of miles, and be left unchanged by their company in a very important way. You can’t avoid learning something about yourself. And dogs’ company is one hundred percent judgement free, a feature rarely if ever observed even in relationships with our conspecifics. No matter how good or awful you’ve been, when you walk in the door the tail wags all the same.

Not saying dogs are unique in this way – equine therapy also offers real benefits for a lot of people. And like dogs, horses also are judgement free in their relation to us. Think about Mister Ed. That hapless and klutzy Wilbur was the only one in the world who heard and understood that rapscallion Palomino speak. But even a child knows horses can’t talk. And even if they could, they’d speak horse thoughts. Because “Of course, of course, a horse is a horse.” I think the real genius of Mister Ed may have been the use of a domestic animal to give voice to one of the two voices in Wilbur’s head, an entertaining device to share with the audience the tragicomedy of Wilbur’s ongoing inner dialogue. Mister Ed isn’t about a talking horse, that’s just a gag. It’s really a story about Wilbur’s inner struggle, at times his feelings of low self-esteem and self-consciousness over how others perceive him, as goofy. Because just as a horse is a horse, so a man is a man – we all engage an inner dialog with ourselves. It’s a feature of the human condition. Which can be absurdly funny sometimes! Would the show have been as successful with a talking dog? Probably not. Though a talking Lama Alpaca might’ve worked. Lamas Alpacas have a look of wisdom and erudition about them, like Lydia up there. On the way home we like to drive by the local farm to check in on her. This day she was out patrolling the fence line with an Emu. We usually roll down the window to say “Hi.” Never once have we heard her say Hi back. Not that nobody has.

Ever attended a standup comedy show? The Jokester is on stage with a mic in hand. She’s pacing back and forth, eyes cast downward, maybe shooting a furtive glance at the teleprompter, or otherwise trying to conjure the next lines of her delivery all on her own. Either way, when eventually that next Funny Thing enters her brain, the first thing that happens is a constellation of motor neurons fire. This causes her mouth and tongue and vocal chords to activate in a just-so way, producing a sound wave in air, which is detected by the eardrum of the listener, there converted into a mechanical impulse, followed by conversion in the cochlea to an electrical impulse, which is conducted along the auditory nerve to the brain stem (initial processing), and from there relayed through the thalamus and on to the temporal lobe where it is finally – finally! – converted into the meaning of the Funny Thing spoken. Phew! I bet you thought hearing was simple.

What happens next? Pop quiz

A. You cry
B. You laugh
C. You cheer, like when your team scores a point
D. You experience a profound feeling of dread
E. None of the above

The correct answer of course is B. When someone tells a joke, unless you don’t find it funny, or don’t get it, you laugh (or chuckle, whatever, depending on the concentration of the Funny Thing. Because let’s face it, just like Love, Comedy is a drug). Hold this thought.

Now let’s turn our focus to an apologist for tRump. Say he accepts an invitation to participate on a prime time CNN news show, to give his take on the show’s topic du jour, namely: An assessment of presidential readiness for office. He’s joined on this panel by five hostile pundits, all of whom are all ideologically opposed to tRump (and by association, to our apologist as well). In this context, we’ll call the apologist the token republican punching bag. Feel free to imagine his appearance however you’d like. He and the five pundits are seated around a long and wide, boomerang-shaped, see-through glass table. Seated at one end of the table is a middle-aged, attractive black woman, necklaced in a plain string of pearls, who holds a law degree from a credible college and has professional creds working as a DA in under-served communities in Louisiana, and is said to have modeled her career on the same of VP Harris’ in California; seated next to her is another woman, white, also attractive, freshly primped in makeup, a young up-and-comer in the punditry circuit who’s cut her teeth as an embedded reporter to the Assad atrocities in northern Syria, so she’s come to understand the importance of a clear-eyed commander in chief in matters of foreign policy; next to her we have the roly-poly boomer, now a lecturer in academia, who’s old enough to recall he served as an advisor to an advisor to the Clinton administration, oh, and he’s also co-authored some bestsellers about politics; next to him we have the show’s lead, an attractive, high-cheek-boned news anchor, recently promoted to the role for her uncanny ability to cut to the heart of any issue and bring out the best of her guests through bitingly challenging questions – she’s dressed professionally in a blouse, jacket and skirt, with her stocking’d legs strategically crossed and visible through the glass tabletop, where she can be seen distractedly dangling a stylish nude pump; to her right is a retired military general wearing the jacket of his rank, replete with insignias running the length of his arm, staring directly at the camera, steely-eyed and humorless; and lastly, to his right, as if exiled from the discussion, our republican punching bag. Having a two-hundred-fifty pound, retired, four-star general who’d served multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, seated between the punching bag and the show’s lead is seen as no coincidence.

This is all made up by the way. You should not have the impression I’ve described a real CNN panel of pundits and guests. OK, with the table set, let’s move on.

After a commercial break the camera focuses on the lead. After she issues the boilerplate caution to viewers – that some viewers may be disturbed… – she queues several clips taken from tRump’s recent stump speeches. The panel turns to watch the clips on the studio monitor, the same thing TV viewers watch. Once the clips finish, focus returns back to the studio where all five pundits are aghast, their heads bowed and shaking in disgust. The punching bag is unmoved, stoic. The lead finally raises her head and turns to face the punching bag, and puts the questions to him, “Are you not horrified by this misogynistic bile that tRump spews at his rallies? Do you really think this is consistent with the character we want our president, the commander in chief, to possess?“

The punching bag straightens in his chair, casts a disappointed glance at each of the pundits, pauses briefly, then turns again to look at the lead. He smirks and says, He was joking!

You instantly see the problem with that answer, right? We’ve just reviewed the basic biology of a Joke as it passes from one brain into another, and the typical emotional response the average hearer of said joke would have. And the answer was not C. (cheer). And yet, when tRump spews at his rallies – I love women! Why I’m going to be the Bestest Protector of Women Ever. I’m going to protect them good and hard (whether they like or not) – how did His Followers respond? Like it was a joke? No, they cheered, uproariously they cheered. So unless His Followers are biologically atypical human beings, and I’ve no reason to presume they are atypical human beings in terms of their basic biology, then tRump could not possibly have been joking there. An audience doesn’t cheer when they hear a joke. To hear tRump’s promise that he’ll be the Grand Protector of women – like it or not! – and respond by cheering, that is consistent with approval of a point tRump scored, not the feeling of amusement. Cheering and laughter have very different emotional activators. And that’s a statement of biology, not prejudice.

But our (hypothetical) panel of very serious pundits at CNN didn’t swing when slow-pitched a softball. Why not? When the republican punching bag declared tRump was merely joking about what he spewed about women, a couple of them may have rolled their eyes, sure, but that was it. Why on earth did no one on that panel quickly respond as I did here? Why acquiesce like that when, surely to a one, each of their bullshit detectors was pegging? I hope it wasn’t due to a misplaced nod of collegial respect for a fellow pundit. Good grief, the man made a claim that was unequivocally false! That’s professional misconduct undeserving of anyone’s respect. He makes a fool of you, and all you do is abide it with a disapproving eye roll. Seriously, that’s it? You wouldn’t see the liberal punching bag on FOX’s The Five skate by unmocked were she to dismiss as a joke some Democratic candidate’s nonsense. No, to a one they’d be champing at the bit to have their turn with her. I am not a fan of allowing others’ putrid ethics guide my own, but for chrissake in a battle of wits try arming yourself next time CNN.

I recently heard what sounded like a credible report that the Joe Rogan Experience podcast has more subscribers than CNN & FOX combined. In addition to podcasting, Joe Rogan is also a comedian. Joe’s jokes make comedy club audiences laugh. I’ve personally watched only a couple of those performances online, though I feel confident that not once has his audience ever cheered when he cracked a joke. Whereas his breezy interview style on his podacst has gained him a gazillion likes, the online equivalent of a cheer of approval. Audiences respond differently to Joe depending on the context of his performance. On his podcast he is respectful of his guests, some say to a fault. Yet when he hosted tRump and challenged tRump’s belief that he won the last election, Joe laughed at tRump. He laughed because tRump is joke. I did not laugh when later Joe endorsed tRump. I also did not cheer. The human emotion of anger has different triggers entirely.

Oh, do tell, from here, we go
unknown, the wilds, in time
will tell
lead, or follow, where friend be foe?
come to us, wisdom
let us know, for now
we wither, the past, undone
the folly, yet sewn, has-
not won

What do you do when you have no relevant life experiences to inform the stories you want to write? Stories that readers will want to read?

Asking for a friend.

Make it up!

Sounds good, except you can travel only so far outside your own mind crafting a story. Science fiction writers travel the furthest. I read Zelazny, Spinrad, Heinlein, Asimov, Niven & Pournelle, and many others when I was young. Possibly because I wasn’t a very patient reader back then, most Sci-Fi stories didn’t grab and hold my attention. Some were ok, good enough that I finished the book, but overall, meh. I read a lot of science fiction, many of the titles were recommended to me by friends who absolutely devoured Sci-Fi books. I didn’t much care for the writing style, though, it too often felt stilted to me. Too much telling. As a reader, I want to experience the character’s thoughts, not the author’s. And even more than that, I want what I read to express… big word alert… verisimilitude. For me a story needs to feel true or real. I want one that shows me something about the authentic human condition, preferably a condition foreign to me before I picked up the book. That’s mostly why I read fiction.

Millions of very fine readers loved the Hobbit series. Many more the same for Harry Potter. I’ve read neither, but I get it. I’m in awe of writers who travel far outside their own life experiences, fantasize while aboard a delayed London train and craft a story with the power to hold millions of readers rapt for hundreds of pages, and maybe hundreds more in sequels. If you enjoy reading stories about human-like creatures, or worlds of magic, carry on, enjoy your book. I am not some member of the gatekeeper’s guild of superior fiction here to tell you what you ought to be reading. Or to diminish Sci-Fi and other genres (e.g.romance novels) by saying they are to “literary writing” what food trucks are to Haute cuisine. Although even within genre there are so-so writers (storytellers) and really good writers, it’s not a flat distribution. Peruse the shelves of “best sellers” at an airport bookstore next time you’re there, read the first few pages of some of those books, you’ll see the difference. The quality of a novel (or short story) is not entirely subjective, is all I’m saying.

Back to my query about writing outside your experiences – research is one way. Especially useful for the writer of historical fiction, of course. These days as a writer you gotta be careful what sort of people and places you invite to your fiction. You don’t want to be accused of “cultural appropriation.” Or imagine a male author writing a story from a female point of view. Gender appropriation! Naive rebel that I am, I’m actually working on such a story, told from a female, first-person point of view. I’ve never existed as a female, never had female experiences, so I’m left trying to conjure the “voice” of a woman. She may not survive revision, or maybe the story won’t end up being about what I now think it might be. Which is a nice and flexible feature of the creative process, especially edition – you can’t necessarily predict (and good advice has it you shouldn’t try) which parts will stay and which will go, or even where the story will end up. The science guy in me resists proceeding without intention, or a plan, but little by little I’m engaging the right half of my brain.

Moral: Write what compels you, advantage life experiences where relevant, do some research, and creatively make the rest up. Write well, revise, revise, revise, and it will all come together in the end. Keep at it.

To have lived an ordinary life is to have existed insignificantly in this world. Put another way, my irrelevance is widely known. If this is your predicament, think about trying to write your way out of it. And the better trained you are the more likely you’ll succeed.

One writer who did succeed, a guy I’d never heard of until last week, in eloquent prose held forth on his Substack blog about a neat trick he believes can avoid the pathology of a xenophobic mind – Read. And not just any old thing. Compile a list of the great works of western culture, he said, and get started. (His post began with the strong encouragement to not die before reading Anna Karenina – “It’s not worth it,” he said. (Note to self: Better get going then!)) He seemed confident that by reading the great works of literature written in the western tradition by very smart and insightful people, that that would open the reader to a permanent transformation of her worldview. I believe this is true. I also believe it is true that regardless of the endeavor we set ourselves to, we stand on the shoulders of the giants who’ve preceded us. So if you want to write well, start by looking back, reading the works of the great writers who’ve come before you. My only caveat to that advice would be to look back, yes, but don’t stare.

What I mean by don’t stare is this (stay with me): In the language of mathematical modelling there’s a concept referred to as “over-training.” Say you’ve conceived a model to detect cancer based on genes. First, you’d “train” your model on all the genes measured in an independent set of samples (biopsies) taken from real cancer patients. You can think of this training phase as saying to your model, See here, this is what cancer looks like, got it? Roger that, your model replies, and it studies the samples very closely to produce a list (ideally small) of only those genes required to accurately sniff out cancer. Lastly, in order to find out if your model is any good – to see how well it’s learned – you’d challenge it with a new sample, one that was not in the training set, and then prompt it, Hey model, does this patient have cancer?

Over-trained models are notorious for getting the answer wrong. When a new cancer sample doesn’t reveal a gene pattern “mathematically close” to any of those it trained on, and it miscalls the sample – maybe it replies, nope that ain’t cancer (when it really was) – and it’s wrong too many times, then we’d say that model is likely over-trained. The most common cause of an over-trained model is “staring at the training data for too long.” By analogy, if you train your brain on the great works of literature, fine, but if your goal in reading is to gain a wider, more nuanced worldview (i.e. a better model of the world), and not have your worldview “over-trained” on only the great works in the western tradition, maybe put some modern works of literature on your list and/or in other ways read around more (i.e. expand your training set).

Days later, after considering that blogger’s advice, I streamed a discussion (podcast) with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Wherein he said a lot of things. There was one thing, though, that he was emphatic about that caught my attention – Write. More specifically, he paid forward the advice he’d gotten from a writing mentor shortly after he’d entered Brown University, which was that if you want to write well, then get out in the world and experience as many things as you can, directly, then write about those experiences, concisely. Or to quote George Orwell: the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. Right about then Chloe was tugging at the leash, eager to introduce herself to a passerby who’d snuck up behind me (I was streaming the podcast on my earbuds). Earlier in the walk, Chloe had done the very same thing to another woman who I’d spotted walking toward us. This time I permitted her enough leash to greet the woman, so it was all good, and as I had paused the podcast when I saw her approach, I was able to hear her say her name, and that she knew HW, and then…”I enjoy your blog.” And that just made my day.

Anyway, an interesting kind of yinyang thing that writing well and reading well are dependent on each other. Writing involves reading your own mind, and translating it to the page, whereas reading is just training your brain on the experiences of others, via their writing, which is nothing more than the result of them reading their own brains! Either way, the point is the more variety you admit to your training set, the better your model of the real world will be, and in turn the better your own writing will be? That sounds about right to me.

Not long ago people worried that nobody writes anymore. They recalled an era when friends and colleagues poured their hearts out to each other in letters. Even today, the unfathomable word count of the Internet notwithstanding, discovery of a handwritten missive in the snailbox from a friend or loved one continues to stir in its recipient anticipation and wonder. Other letters, those thick ones requiring two postage stamps, may sometimes raise a quiescent sense of dread. It turns out that conveying sadness and regret (and other frailties of the human condition) takes more words. For the writer who’s merely writing to thank you for a good time had, well, the space of a three by five card may be all that’s needed.

Yet as personally felt as a handwritten letter may be, it’s too often its own problem. Some writers cursive style I simply cannot read. Misspelling doesn’t bother me; words or whole phrases crossed out doesn’t put me off; if the ‘^’ character appears mid-word to correct a spelling, fine; or if the writer feels the need to shout in all caps, I can excuse that. What I find difficult to brook is penmanship that looks like it was trained on the Dead Sea Scrolls! If I hear one more person pine for the return of cursive writing instruction to the classroom…I can’t predict my behavior. Marshall McLuhan once famously claimed that the communication medium itself is more important than the message it carries. This would suggest that writers writing in the “medium” of glamorous cursive styles believe their flowery “Qs” and indecipherable loop-de-loop letters encode their own meaning. It’s like saying in the spoken word that dolphin-speak is its own meaning. If you’re a dolphin, maybe. Or a crackpot republican (fun begins around 40 seconds in). For the rest of us old schoolers, if you want to reach out to us hand-writers, yes! by all means. But please print next time. Your words mean things, not your penmanship.

Beautiful, innit? The brain of a fruit fly, showing neurons (~ 140,000) color coded by the circuit they operate in. See the full report here.

The entire brain of a fruit fly is no larger than a sesame seed. This is a breathtaking accomplishment, about a decade in the making. I mean c’mon, you don’t need to be a neuroscientist to have your mind blown by this. Better yet, read the report and you’ll see the scientists, having captured the full map of the fly brain, used it to create a virtual brain which they then installed in a virtual fly. Then they stimulated the specific neurons that sense a sugar taste, and viola! the toy fly’s proboscis (nose) extended toward the sensation, just like the proboscis would on a real fly intending to feed. As if that weren’t cool enough, they then figured out the specific neuronal pathways involved in sensing sugar on both the right side and left side of the proboscis, different pathways. And here’s what they found

The simulated brain did what a real brain would: It commanded the proboscis to stick out so that the fly could eat. And if the virtual fly tasted sugar only on the right side of its proboscis, the brain sent commands to bend it toward the right.

And you know what they didn’t find? Not a spec of evidence for a “conductor” of the fly’s thoughts. Imagine that – a brain that animates its host all by itself. The heresy!

And below is the animated 3-D image. See the article for the toy fly in action. More of this please, scientists 😉

People, I beseech you, that’s A LOT of interconnected ganglia to make a fruit fly work, no? Think about this next time you carelessly swat and kill one.

All moral judgement goes out the window once you accept the world as it is. I didn’t choose to write that sentence. It arrived in my brain, unbidden, all on its own. Same for this sentence, and the next. Imagine the experience of the feeling of freedom that comes from accepting that all that occurs in this world is as it is, that every single outcome (the future) could not have been otherwise. Next, consider putting this proverb into practice in your daily life. Start simple. Try it for one day. Monitor your thoughts closely. Each time you note yourself wanting to render moral judgment of any kind (“that was wrong, and so…“; “it was your responsibility to…“; “you should have instead done…“; blah blah) – stop yourself and consider that whatever this person did or said was not of her “choosing,” and then you might understand why any moral rebuke from you would be silly. After all, if she can’t choose her thoughts, then she can’t choose her actions either, so how can she be held “responsible” for causing the future? And withholding moral judgement cuts both ways. When what someone says or does aligns with a good outcome, to paraphrase Barack Obama, “You didn’t do that.” Withhold your praise. Same goes for someone whose action aligns with a bad outcome. Withhold your admonition. When you come to accept that you don’t think your own thoughts, and come to accept that you can’t do otherwise, then the moral judgement of any human actor (yourself included) is easily seen as a pointless exercise, like shaking your fist at the rain.

Also consider that the qualities of good and bad do not require the prior of a moral constitution. There are plenty of books of philosophy wherein the authors provide a secular basis for good and bad. Smart people have been thinking about this stuff for a very long time now. And I’m not saying good and bad are not subjective. Any given future state of affairs may be good (or bad) for you, consistent (or not) with the purpose of human flourishing, and simultaneously be the opposite for another person, surely. So if the action a person takes directly causes you to experience a bad state of affairs (e.g., she steps into the crosswalk and you hit her with your car), it seems to me it would be a natural and fair human response to say so (fuck, this is bad), just avoid any moral accusations directed at the pedestrian, implying that she could have thought or acted otherwise. This is a really hard way to think about this; I know, I’ve tried. I keep trying. Although I can report that, each time I’ve responded to a person absent the tone of moral judgement, I feel better about myself, like I’ve experienced a kind of positive feedback, even if it’s short-lived.

Personally, I don’t much care what the roots of moral sentiments are in human psychology. Evolution! Maybe. Although I find the conclusion that all physical and mental traits of an organism (humans included), viewed as they are by evolutionary biologists as being nothing more than in service to reproductive success, deeply unsatisfying. While it doesn’t really matter to my point here what the source of morality is, when I have paused to think about the root cause, my conclusion, more a hypothesis really, is that all the moral sentiments expressed by humans are grounded in some way in the religious traditions they practice, and have practiced in one form or another since we started to walk upright. I imagine that when the ancients looked into the night sky, they were both humbled and terrified. Terrified because unlike any other animal, they were self-aware of their own mortality. They thought themselves special. Different from the other animals in some important but hard-to-describe way. So they made up stories regarding their origin, which over time gave way to creeds for proper behavior within the groups they formed, and to guide their various modes of worship. In time, nearly ever human alive became convinced he was special in some way, came to believe all were endowed with free will, that each person had an author up there that directed his thoughts, an author which could realize any possible future, among many, that the free-willer desired. But before long people started suffering moral opprobrium for doing or saying (or not) things they couldn’t possibly do or say otherwise, all because of this ancestral, mythical belief that they could. The rest of it is explained by inheritance, the passing down of these stories and their creeds to subsequent generations of people, right up to today, including the underlying belief that humans can somehow “choose” the future with their minds. And when they screw up, the bad outcomes are their fault, because of course they could have done otherwise, right? And where their supposed “choices” align with good outcomes, well, atta-boys are used to reinforce the myth that I chose my future!

There has to be an unsettling consequence to the conscience of people who really deep down have come to believe the future is fully determined, and the notion that human beings cannot do (act or speak) otherwise to change it (cause it). Because even as I have tried to sustain my responses to people as though this is true, is has set me to experience a kind of cognitive dissonance in my mind. For example, when I speak my order to the ice cream store person – I’ll have chocolate, please – how is that not me changing the future state of affairs from what it otherwise might have been, i.e. a future where I had chosen vanilla or strawberry? The answer, I think, owes to a cultural myth, handed down from my ancestors, reinforced during my upbringing, which gives rise to the intuition that, as a human, I am special in some spiritual way. This is evidently so deeply felt it’s very hard for me (and likely you as well) to try and force my brain to relearn what, in fact, is really going on – understood through modern neuroscience that my brain output (thoughts) cannot, and do not, determine the future. But here’s the thing: If the act of my speaking “chocolate” was fully determined before I spoke it, if that instantaneous state of mind did not produce the future (chocolate vs another flavor), if it only represents the future after the fact of it, ok, but then what is the most immediate prior cause of any future state of affairs? The underlying laws of physics? I’m a science guy, I admit that makes my brain hurt.

A parting thought…

If we humans are merely amoral agents whose brains represent predetermined states of reality – what I call experience – instead of the widely held belief that we are the author of our own thoughts which determine the future, then all our moral sentiments are up for re-consideration. Take pride and forgiveness. Both are sentiments that entail a moral judgement. If a person can’t think her own thoughts, if I’m right she may only experience and respond to the thoughts that come to her unbidden, then whether some future state of affairs is good or bad makes no difference, she is both an acausal and amoral agent with respect to that state of affairs, no different than, say, a tree. And who is proud of a tree for the shade it provides, or forgives it for falling on a car.

Stars change state, too. They don’t choose to change state. Stars have existed much longer than life has. Now and then a star will go super nova, and there are no ifs, ands or buts (or choice) about it. Study any matter in the universe you’d like, at any level of order or organization. You’ll find it works automatically – that is, to the best of our knowledge, according to the immutable laws of physics. What you won’t find evidence of is a mysterious controller.

So how could it be that the matter between our ears fundamentally works any differently? I’m not saying it’s not Metamathemagical in its function. Hell, if you ask me, the common garden spider in our front yard is Metamathemagical! But it didn’t choose to spin its web today. Any more than I just now raised my arm to reach for a cup of coffee.

Or maybe you believe that the state of the entire universe might have been different – otherwise – at some point in time, merely because it’s unpredictable? Who’s to say what might happen tomorrow! Nobody can predict the future state of the entire universe, right? I mean, c’mon. Hell, you can’t even predict the precise 3-D state of your own body one hundred milliseconds from now! OK, sure, but here’s the thing, the fact of unpredictability doesn’t mean any future state of the universe is undetermined. Even as our present-day knowledge of the laws of physics is incomplete, it’s not like any future state of the universe could be otherwise, any different than exactly how it came to be. Quantum indeterminacy would seem to suggest that, at least at the quantum level, predicting the precise future position and direction of sub-atomic particles is not possible. But still, wherever a particle is, whatever its travel vector is, we’ve no evidence of, and thus no reason to suspect, a ghost-like chaperone particle exists, operating outside the realm of physics. That’s mysticism. If you believe that, I’ll kindly ask you to show your work! And since everything in the universe is part of it, including us, including every time-sliced state of mind, there’s no evidence of a ghost in the machine (brain) either. The organization of atoms and molecules in the brain versus a star is different, for sure, but unless you can show how that organization produces agency (choice), well, I’ll continue to prefer the principle of Occams Razor.

There is nothing in there controlling our states of mind, nothing making undetermined choices from alternatives. There are no alternatives when it comes to the future – there’s only one outcome in reality, the one that occurs. There is memory, and reasoning, and emotion, and a lot of other features of the human brain, but in the end it’s all really just experience. I don’t choose what memories to store; I don’t choose how to solve a puzzle; I don’t choose if and when to cry. I don’t choose my successes, I don’t choose my failures. I don’t choose anything because there is no I in there. I don’t think my own thoughts. None of us does. So far as we can tell, it’s the laws of physics doing all that. We merely experience it.

Or maybe you’re still unconvinced, maybe you think our spider up there might have done otherwise and taken the day off instead?