Weblog

I’m having a little bit of difficulty focusing on anything, here. Last night I finished reading The Great Gatsby and now my mind is awash with the Next Great Choice for Value-Based Entertainment. What shall it be?

The Open Society and Its Enemies?

Outdated DHTML for the World Wide Web Circa Y2K?

Teach Yourself SQL in Ten Minutes and Use the Rest of Your Free Hour Shredding This Book into Thin Strips to Build a Shrine out of Paper Maché?

How-to Use Macromedia Flash 5: Now twice as heavy as the manual for Flash 4, and five times that of Flash 3?

A Developers Guide to Flash and XML: Pretend you’re fluent in two languages you don’t understand and fake your way across Europe?

Mountaineers – The Freedom of the Hills and the Depths of Depression Brought on by Immobility?

M’eh. Whatever. One of these days Dane Corp., LLC will be walking ‘gain and they’ll all be sorry. They’ll be so sorry. Especially once my home plague-breeding kit arrives in the mail and I can start getting some real work done.

At their most basic, autonomy and determinism will be defined by our concept of causality. Pure determinism claims that, in some way or another, the course of our lives has already been decided for us and we are powerless against it. Determinism can be governed by whatever force or entity you want. Perhaps it is a Deist watchmaker God that created the whole darned universe in one fell-swoop fifteen billion years ago, and now He is merely watching the show and eating some divine popcorn or pretzles or Milk Duds and shuffling His feet on divinely sticky floors. In this model, the entire casual course of history (as well as the future) was decided at the moment the universe was created.

Or perhaps an intervening God is calling the shots, a rowdy little fellah who built the universe way back when, but finds himself intervening at particular intervals as things unfold. The rate and degree at which God intervenes is a hot religious debate of hotness and religicity, and can be viewed as a continuum that exists from the non-intervening Deist god to a God that intervenes at every second of every day.

The notion of relative time really puts a monkey wrench in this one… if a man is travelling at close to the speed of light, time nearly stands still for him when compared to his twin brother on earth. Does this mean that God will intervene more often with his life than with his brother’s? Or does God’s influence transcend time? Transcendence conveniently sidesteps the issue, but in turn complicates how God’s influence would affect the lives of creatures that do exist in time.

A moderate view (and one I believe most religious people would claim to adhere to, but please, tell me if I’m way off on this as I am not a religious person and don’t quite know how these things are wired up) would be that God intervenes only for major junctions in our lives: whether to get married, move to another state/country/continent, chicken or beef, dedicate our lives to science, donate our bodies to science, etc. But then, if this is indeed the case, you still run into the problem of time versus God’s intervention. If God isn’t always intervening, through perceivable time there will be a period where his intervention increases, peaks and decreases, like a killer wave ripe to be torn up for surfin’. Or, God’s intervention may not be wave-like but binary and absolute, with exact starting and ending points.

So then. What of our twins, one on earth and one traveling near the speed of light? Does one get more of God’s attention than the other? That hardly seems fair, but fairness isn’t necessarily part of the game. For the purposes of our discussion we won’t get into the morality of playing God, and where his responsibilities lay in a fair distribution of divine intervention for all. For the twins one could argue that each gets as much intervention (as much determinism, as much fate) as his life allows. If twenty years pass for the light-speed twin but only a minute passes for the Earth twin, they get twenty years and one minute of God, respectively.

However, this introduces a troubling anthropic dilemma. If time passes only as we perceive it passing, and God distributes his intervention respectively, then that means human perception is determining the influence of God. As far as fate goes, God doesn’t interact with the universe just for the sake of interacting with the universe, but in order to to push and prod people along their intended path. Because the intervention necessarily involves humans, though, it occurs along the perceived human time-scale, not along some ethereal, universal time. The most interesting upshot of this consequence is that human perception is determining determinism.

So here’s what we’re left with, as far as determinism goes. If you ask the Deist, God wound up the universe long ago and is now merely a passive observer. The deterministic consequence of this model (if we are to deny the existence of free will) is that everything, all of history, our lives and the future, was casually determined at the creation of the universe. If you ask an absolute interventionist, God is always influencing our lives. This is effectively the same absolute determinism as the Deist, only here it requires God’s constant attention. If you take the middle ground, that God lets us roam until those critical junctions and then steps in to show us the way, you run into the problem of reconciling human time and perception with God’s changing degree of influence.

And next week, maybe we’ll find time to say somethin’ or two about causality.

“Dude. You really are pathetic.”

“Watch yourself, Erik. I’ll kick your ass.”

“What are ya gonna do? Run me down?”

“You better sleep lightly.”

“Why should I? It’s not like I won’t hear you coming!”

The other day the license plates finally arrived for my Subaru. My new car, that now sits in our driveway under the tree where all the magpies sit and shriek and shit all morning all over my new car. Oregon license plates. The conversion is complete. I must say, Oregon has some of the most beautiful license plates in the country, pure and simple with a lone pine tree and purple mountains. For a price, Oregon will also issue you a license plate that celebrates one of the cornerstones of our western existence. Cultural Heritage features a covered wagon getting shot up and burned by Indians. Crater Lake features deep blue pond surrounded on all sides by traffic jams. Trout features, well, trout.

What I don’t get is how they could get their basic plate so right and go so horribly awry on the special guys. They’re ugly, they’re cluttered and the license digits simply add to the visual carnage. Why the heck would someone want to pay more to taint their fine automobile with this crap?

Whatever. I got the cool plate, and I got cool letterz and numberz, too. 726. My old dialing prefix for UMD, and one still used for all professors and other on-campus contacts. BBS. Bulletin Board Service. Long live geeks! Long live the summer of ’95, which I spent sitting in a chilly basement in front of my 436 DX/33 with eight megs of RAM. Tethered to my Zoom 2400 modem I siphoned an ASCII social existence from a BBS known as PC MegaMall. I remember fragments. Danathan. iNSANiTY. Banger. Wheelie. Aowyn. Puppy. I first met the entire crew in person at the Mall of America, where we saw a stupid movie about France. I got my ass kicked in Doom by Harlequin. Liz had an iguana. I threw my own GT where Banger twisted his ankle on my trampoline.

Wheelie was the PC MegaMall Sysop, and on one rainy day I had my father drive me to the Perkins parking lot down the street so I could fork over some cash and upgrade my user level to SuperShopper. The whole thing felt like a drug deal, but it was necessary because my available minutes were waning and my social life was in jeopardy. Another time Dan and I rode our bikes all the way from Golden Valley to Brooklyn Center for a bunch of girls, an activity which over the coming weeks turned into a junior high drama wrought with love and fights and broken hearts.

It’s weird, the fuss and fight we put up to make our lives flow in a certain direction, and where they actually travel. Since breaking my leg I feel like I have surrendered that control for a moment and am being asked to casually observe my life from the outside. I feel like I’m in a cheesy teen movie, watching a cute and obvious plot weave itself into existence. There are all sorts of loose threads that perchance will find themselves resolved in the coming weeks, and I’m excited to see how this all is going to pan out.

As I have said before I am not a fatalist. I do not believe that there is an invisible force that governs the direction of human life. At the same time, I believe that in highly complex systems there will always be forces at work that are very difficult to account for, even less predict. Even the attempt to detect a force is a force itself that necessarily has an effect on the product of the system (the essence of the Uncertainty Principle). The degree of one tiny force may be minimal, but if you are unable to realize a few million tiny forces the system becomes wholly unpredictable.

Chaos is not the absence of order so much as it is an absence of predictability in a highly complex system (we’re talking Butterfly Effect, here). Every cause has an effect, every effect has a cause, but we haven’t necessarily cornered the market on every cause and its inevitable effect. You won’t hear me say that we have absolute control over the outcome of our lives, because when we make a choice we can’t possibly know every cause that brought us to that point, and every effect that would result from a particular decision. At the same time, it is obvious that free-will is an extremely strong force in determining the direction of one’s life, whether we have a perfect understanding of our place in the universe or not.

A distinction is necessary, I believe, between true autonomy (and true determinism) and functional autonomy (and functional determinism). In a perfectly controlled environment we could test for the absolute truths of autonomy and determinism; the exact point where one finally gives way to the next. As David Hume discovered, however, there can be a large difference between the truths we receive from logic, and the truths we can actually apply to our lives. Too many philosophers suffer in that they never manage the connection between the white room of pure philosophical thought and the tangled mess of life. Functional autonomy is the clumsy and imperfect definition of free-will that, while not logically rigorous, is accurate enough to apply to our lives without exhaustion and convolution.

Functional definitions of determinism, fatalism, free-will and autonomy are what we starve for. However, the only intellectually honest way to arrive at a correct functional definition is to first slog through the establishment of true definitions. There is no fair shortcut.

So kids, if you want to participate, here’s what to do. Break your leg and then ask yourself the following questions:

Does determinism exist? Does autonomy exist? If so, where is the line between the two?

I’ve been all about challenging myself this winter. Let us become a snowboard instructor. Let us reinvent ourselves in another new town. Let us design websites at a professional level. Let us see what happens when we attempt infinite workweeks. Let us learn how to drive a five-speed manual transmission on a new 2004 Subaru Legacy Wagon.

When you buy a backpack for snowboarding, they always tell you about how useful those external straps are for strapping your snowboard to your back. Makes it super-convenient to carry your board in the backcountry, they say. What they never tell you, however, is how great those straps are for carrying around your x-rays after busting your leg in the terrain park. Cuz, like, when you’re hobbling around on crutches, the last thing you want to be thinking about is how in the hell you’re gonna carry your x-rays.

Today I broke my leg while freeriding at the mountain. I got kicked all weird off a spine in the terrain park, was headed straight for the flats and tried to butter my landing to soften the blow to my legs. The board buttered out just fine, but my weight was so far back that the top of my bindings acted like a fulcrum against my fibia, busting that bone in two. I heard it pop. I sat down right there and had Kyle summon ski patrol. I got to wrap myself up in a yellow tarp and ride in a sled towed by a skiier. I got a cast and crutches and happy pills and have nearly fallen down the stairs at least four times. I got a ride down from the mountain with some friends, and my roommate was kind enough to go for a walk and retrieve my car from the park and ride.

Bones take six weeks to knit back together, so I won’t be driving or rock climbing or snowboarding or hiking or kiteboarding any time soon. I will need to restructure my free time to embrace activities I can do. Any suggestions for new hobbies, be they brewing beer, knitting a sweater or commiting arson, would be greatly appreciated. Let us take this opportunity of limitation to do things new and exciting. Perhaps I will become an expert at Risk.

As for the rest of ya’ll, stay safe. Or break your legs. Either way. A broken leg is a great social ice breaker, and you’ll find yourself chatting with interesting people that you would never have met, otherwise. And perhaps you will find yourself chatting with people who just recently you thought were as good as gone.

Fate is funny that way.

Inspiration has not been kind to the Blogosphere as of late. Zosia Blue finds herself disappearing unannounced. Redscreen.net is being subjected to much prodding in order to start posting photos again. I know not where Dierin is currently penning his work. Only the Noble Hobo, with a mind racing after a summer at the South Pole and a couple of long days running around New Zealand, has any insight into this whole human being thing. Damn, though, that Hobo has some serious words. Swing by and check ‘im out.

As for Brainside Out, my mindspring is running dry. Earlier tonight I was flipping through the pages of a notebook I was keeping in 2000, a year before I started blogging. It’s brimming with freshman college student crap, failed lyrics to songs, thoughts unstrung and quotes thuggishly torn from unspecificed sources. Things were different then. I had a vague and anonymous enemy that was pinning me to the ground, and all my writings have me grappling for control. You can call it what you want: The Man, conventionality, critical thought, the ennui of modern living… whatever it was it grated me so, such that it consumed my thoughts, my soul, my passion. Somehow I had to get his foot off my neck and my mouth out of the mud.

A lot happens in four years. Someone rams a few airliners into your skyscrapers and you get really pissed off and you start taking things a lot more seriously. Then someone hands you a piece of paper rolled up all right-nice with a piece of ribbon, and you dash across the countryside to become a windsurfing bum. Then a snowboard bum. Then a web designer. No matter what you do or where you go, you’re still fighting, always fighting, because the fight reminds you that you are alive. Nay, the fight is what it means to be alive.

At some point you lift your head, and realize that you’re no longer surrounded by enemies. You see that The Man is actually a toothless git when you get right down to it, and raging against him isn’t even worth your time. You feel the inner flame shudder as it gasps for more fuel, a new reason to keep burning. You fear that three unprecedented years of clear thought are the limit, as you find yourself sinking into the bitter clouds of unconsciousness.

At the same time you consider the enormity of the year last, and consider cutting yourself some slack for feeling tired and groggy. You left home, your home for twenty-two years, ten months ago and ever since then you’ve had to reinvent yourself every day. Your new environment does not give itself up to familiarity without effort, and thought this effort can be minimal it is always persistent and can weary the soul. Your good friends you have not seen for nearly a year, maybe more, and they are scattered across the globe like spots of sunlight glinting off the surface of a pond. You have not seen your sister, the only person in the world able to keep your ego in check, since August, and haven’t seen your parents since September.

You dined with wonderful mountain people for Thanksgiving and Christmas, but nothing can take the place of family. Nothing can take the place of friends. You have strived to reinvent yourself to meet every twist and turn, but at some point invention must be allowed to give way to contemplation.

Perhaps the only way to redefine yourself, now, requires that you first lay down your sword. Perhaps that is the most difficult battle of them all.