An act of supreme courage

When I should be studying, I often get inspired to do something else. Usually I keep studying. Today I took a break, and here is the result:

Will saw fog coming

The wet rocks stopped looking so shiny

The waves went gray-green

Heaving up on the rocks

Mixing dirty white foam, drift wood and eel grass

Better scramble up and head back, he thought

A warm June day goes to thick cold opacity

In minutes

When the fog’s rolling in

On an island in Maine

Why walk back?

Cold home, cold here

Bean boots wet

Leather seam just above the heal: blister material

Better go

Fog doesn’t wait

For the keeper of a lighthouse

But with reflectors polished, lamps burning, there’s time

Time to brood on hard times

Hard times too hard to mention or forget

Hard times for a long ways ahead

And no hope in sight

Will got up

Scrambled over the rocks

And walked down the path

Black dirt of rotting spruce needles

Puddles, wide and shallow from recent rain

Little dead birch tree, except wait

One branch had leaves ready to bud

Halfway to the lighthouse, he stopped

Then started again, whistling

Softly

Tunelessly

Never could keep a tune

But purposefully

An act of supreme courage

On Carrots and Thoughts

I gnaw my carrot

And thoughts here, there, everywhere

Carrot’s gone, not thoughts

Theology

This week will be a week of intense paper writing. Among other essays, I am writing a reflection on the life and ethics of Bonhoeffer. I dearly wish I had a few months to spend reading Bonhoeffer. Just the few quotes I've come across in one of his biographies have given me a taste for his bold, imaginative, and independent mind. Here's my favorite quote so far.

“Truth is not something which rests in itself and for itself, but something which takes place between two persons. Truth happens only in community.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology, edited by Eberhard Bethge, translated by John Bowden, p. 51

Public Policy

I'm taking a class entitled Bioethics and the Law. In conducting research for my major paper, I ran across an interesting article in the California Law Review by Einer Elhague, entitled Allocating Health care Morally. Here is Elhague's concrete proposal (which he then justifies in over 90 pages of in-depth argument) directly quoted from pages 1453-1454

(1) A politically set annual health care budget with an associated tax not linked to employment

(2) Free access for all individuals to a care-allocating plan

(3) Individual choice about which plan they wish to join for some significant period (I suggest three years)

(4) Competition among care-allocating plans that each receive a share of the government budget based on the number of individuals they enroll, adjusted for each person's health risk, and that cannot retain profits from their budget (other than a possible bonus linked to total number of enrollees) but must instead spend it on those enrollees. Plans must accept all who wish to enroll

(5) Management of those care-allocating plans by professional who have the range of diagnostic expertise to evaluate the health care needs of plan enrollees, who have salaries unaffected by spending decisions (other than a possible bonus per enrollee), and who have a duty to decide how to allocate each plan's budget to purchase those health services that maximize health benefits fro the unit's enrollees. Their sole incentive should thus be to do a good enough job at rationing to keep and attract enrollees

(6) Maintenance of the vast majority of health care providers as private suppliers of procedures, tests, and technologies that compete with each other to sell to the care-allocating plans. This should create incentives for cost-effective innovation because suppliers will now face purchaser who have both the knowledge and incentives to trade off the costs and benefits of care.

(7) A politically appointed agency, the members of which are insulated from removal, that has only two tasks: setting risk adjustments and licensing care-allocating plans by verifying their diagnostic expertise and fiscal soundness. In particular, this agency would not dictate a uniform schedule of covered services because that would be up to each care-allocating plan.

(8) The individual right to purchase additional care outside these plans on the open market

What do you think?

Theology

I'm having an email conversation with Sigve Tonstad, MD, PhD (except the PhD is in theology from the University of St Andrews). He's brilliant, broadly educated, and quite obviously smarter than me. Therefore, I put a fair deal of work into my most recent email and thought it was worth posting a portion for general consumption and critique.

Interestingly, positing free will as an emergent property of the brain offers significant philosophical dividends regardless of the ontological implications. If the free will is an emergent property of the brain yet ontologically indistinguishable from the brain, then one could be a monist and eat his cake too. Allow me to first define the free-will cake and then argue why the emergent property perspective may be the only way for a monist to eat it. (I believe I do understand, by the way, the advantages of being a monist apart from the free-will dilemma)

First, free will must be categorically inexplicable. It must be inexplicable because explicability confers predictability. The degree of predictability may vary from case to case with the degree of inherent randomness, but the link between explicability and predictability is fundamental. The very act of conceptualization depends on recognition of patterns and trends, which in turn provide the raw material for prediction. In other words, prediction is the natural fruit of explanation.

But inexplicability alone is not enough. Free will demands categorical inexplicability. Whether or not there is a "straight line from physics to the brain", and even if "reduction does not work as a model" for explaining the brain's complexity, a strictly material view of the brain must view such inexplicability as a function of limited technological, conceptual, and intellectual capacity, not intrinsically unattainable mystery. For the honest scientist, the material brain is indeed inexplicable, but only temporarily. Therefore, the complexity of the brain offers no ultimate haven for free will.

Naturally, one might retain a strictly material paradigm by claiming that science will never fully explain the material brain. Such an argument, however, would require a radical rethinking of the nature of material reality. Indeed, such extreme redefinition would almost certainly place the argument just a few semantic steps away from an immaterial construction of free will. Perhaps this approach leads us closest to the truth. Can we be so confident, after all, that immaterial and material realities are actually separate? Exotic and enticing as such holistic thinking may be, it lends itself more to vague mysticism than logical conclusions; it is intuitively satisfying but intellectually slippery (at least to my Western mind),

To summarize, the free-will cake must be categorically inexplicable. A monist cannot eat this cake with a strictly material picture of reality because a strictly material picture of the self inevitably ends up in determinism. Yes, there is one variant picture of the material self which allows for free will, but it requires such a radical redefinition of material reality that the final picture morphs into a material/immaterial hybrid rather than a truly material view.

If free will acted as an emergent property of the brain, its effects would be seen in certain types of mental activity we see in the brain. By definition, we would never be able to visualize the actual interaction between the immaterial free will and the material brain. The interaction could still be observed indirectly, however. In The Brain that Changes Itself, Norman Doidge, M.D., utterly destroys the notion that our brains are sophisticated machines. Though Doidge never addresses free will, he raises the issue by default when he refutes the machine model of the brain. He also provides a highly convincing refutation of localizationism--the idea that brain functions are necessarily limited to delineated areas of the brain. Putting these two observations--that the brain is fundamentally different from a machine and that brain functions are not necessarily limited to localized areas--we can now ask the key question: if the brain changes itself, which part of the brain does the changing? To me at least, hunting for a single brain-changing location in the brain would be ludicrous. Instead, it makes more sense to assume that multiple areas of the brain always work together to affect changes in the brain.

And it is the changes in the brain--particularly in stroke and addiction rehabilitation--where I see evidence for free will acting as an immaterial emergent property of the brain. I find it very difficult to imagine a specific anatomical location being responsible for such change. Instead, the change must arise from the direction of a synthesized interaction arising from multiple brain locations. Such a synthesis is more than the sum of its parts. It is, indeed, an emergent property which I call free will.

On a theological note, I do think that the majority of Biblical texts on this subject seem heavily weighted in favor of a body-soul unity. But I sometimes wonder if my preoccupation with free will has taken me somewhat away from the body-soul question. I do not think, for instance, that the free will and the soul are equivalent. God values all the souls he created but can we say that the infant who dies at birth has a truly free will? Of course not, but surely God values this baby as a living soul!

Indeed, I am very wary of linking the soul solely to the brain (couldn't resist). To me, the breath of life--in my book, an emergent property of the entire body--would be a better candidate for the soul. This would make the soul a property of the body, which I guess would essentially be a monist perspective.

To me clear, my main contention is this: a strictly material view of the self must either redefine material reality in a basically unscientific manner or eventually acquiesce to determinism

religion

The following excerpt from Mere Christianity reminded me of my post entitled God, Galileo, and Grumpy Teddy Bears: part 3.

It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go--let it die away--go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow--and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life. -page 111.

Here is a fine complement to my call for engagement with the ordinary. Lewis points out that the quest for newness--"thrills"--leads nowhere, while I maintain that engagement with the ordinary will ultimately lead to an endless trove of thrills. Both perspectives are important, but I appreciate the reminder from Lewis that thrills are not an end in themselves. Unless, perhaps, the thrill is a true thrill.

What's a true thrill?

politics

For the record, observations in this blog about Democratic and Republican politicians are in no way an indication of my personal political views.

Republican presidential hopefuls are reluctantly beginning to think about the unenviable task of challenging Obama in the next election. Obama is currently riding high, but even if circumstances play in Republican favor (i.e. the economy nose dives) Obama will be formidable. Barring personal scandal, Obama will be formidable no matter what happens.

Trump made some noise and is now bowing out just in time for Gingrich to take over in the noise-making department. I like both men. They just suffer from the terrible political liability of sincerely held and much too openly expressed opinions. The fact remains that they are both highly intelligent and both would probably steer the US economy with skill. Alas, like most Americans, I couldn't bring myself to vote for either.

Romney would make an excellent president of America's economic affairs (can't vouch for his abilities in other areas), but his pragmatic political successes from Massachusetts days now bedevil his wooing of the GOP establishment. This is Romney's basic political problem and goes far to explain why he has been such a disingenuous communicator on the campaign trail.

Ultimately, he's just stuck with a successful past hurting his hopes for a successful future. Although maybe, just maybe he could turn the Massachusetts embarrassment into a selling point in the general election. That would take some gymnastics, however, and I don't think Romney is a good enough communicator (or scam artist, for the Romney haters among us) to pull it off.

I still think Romney has a lot going for him. If we had no political parties and presidential candidates had to individually come up with their own personal solution to our nation's economic woes, I wager Romney would produce the most workable and financially pragmatic plan. Feel free to disagree. You would have good reasons for it, I realize.

Philosophically, the bottom line is that America desperately needs more pragmatism and less dogmatism. Obama actually does quite well on the pragmatic scale, but like Romney he can only do so much wedded to the dogmatic demands of his party.

Practically, the bottom line is that healthcare will be forever more universal in America. How much more can't be said, but Republicans who talk about repealing all of Obama's healthcare package are grandstanding, nothing more. Is this good, bad, or a mixed bag? Probably the latter, but regardless, the meat of Obama's healthcare is here to stay.