A Love Heuristic

I continue to slowly read Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. I recently wrote a post about the title and how I take exception with it. But no matter that.

Kahneman has written a very impressive book. But his methods and his goals are different than mine, I think.

His goal is to show that humans are systematically biased, always relying on heuristics to guide our thoughts and choices. Moreover, Kahneman is skeptical of the possibility of reconfiguring our heuristics and biases so as to improve our capacity for intuitive judgement. Kahneman, it seems, thinks we should do our best to become aware of our heuristics and biases, and should augment our choices with statistical and other types of knowledge.

Choice, this seems to imply, should not be left entirely to intuition, but should be about the intelligent/statistical evaluation of intuitions.

This makes sense to me. I think that Kahneman is right that we will never be able to completely break down and reprogram our heuristics.

But I don't think that we should give up on the idea of training intuitive judgement. I think that we must strive for the purposeful creation of heuristics and biases. We must work to structure our intuitive apparatus, we must try to purposefully create habits of thought and action.

The one habit that I have worked to cultivate in myself is the habit of love. Loving myself, loving the people I know, loving the people I see around me, loving the world.

The more I go forward with thinking the more I am convinced that Gandhi and MLK had it right. Proper morality, proper politics, must be built on a foundation of love.

All of this has something to with what I wrote about God. Because I've realized that what I'm talking about can be called God, but doesn't necessarily need to be. It can be called oneness, connectedness, or the quantum self or some other craziness like that. But there is something serious going on in oneness, in feeling a sense of connection to everyone around us.

I am in the habit of loving these days. I want to keep cultivating that habit.

Dare to think.

Dare to love.

Absence.

On Friday I'm flying to California.

Nine days or something.

Family reunion.

What up, fams.

What up, Sea Ranch.

No computer.

Cell phone, sure.

Books, def.

Looking forward to disconnecting for a bit.

Excited to reflect for a minute.

Things are good.

I intend to do some substantial work when I return.

Both on my new writing project and on my future.

I Long For God.

I was raised somewhere between agnosticism and aggressive atheism. I am at home with both of these ways of thinking.

But in my heart I long for some conception of god.

Not a god like the Christian god.

Not a god like some sentient being that controls everything and has some awesome plan.

A god like the force, like chi, or like Reiki.

Because I am indeed Reiki trained.

I suspect there are things going on in the world beyond the material.

I believe in matter.

But I suspect the existence of other things.

This is all wild speculation. But I have very little tolerance for hardline atheists.

Atheism simply will not do.

Plus, I love the way Rilke speaks of god.

I share with you:

 In The Book of Hours Rilke writes:

"What will you do, God, when I die?
I am your jug (and I will shatter)
I am your drink (and I'll go bad)
I am your clothing and your calling,
you'll lose all reason, losing me.

With me gone, you'll have no house
where warm words will welcome you.
Without me, you'll have no sandals:
your exhausted feet will wander bare.

Your mighty cloak will fall away.
Your gaze, which my cheek took in
soft and warm, like a pillow,
will arrive here, look, search long–
and finally at the end of sunset
lie down in the lap of alien stones.

What will you do, God? I'm afraid."

Oh fucking christ...

This poem moves me so deeply and I don't understand why.

Partly because I feel like a universe in myself.

What will the world do without me?

Don't you know that I am the keeper and bringer of all these riches and pains?

Don't you know that the world's depths reside within me?

Don't you see that without me the universe would have no way to know itself?

I don't really long for God.

But I might.

Instantaneous Retroactivity, Or, How Being Responsible Means Being a Historian

This post's title is absurd.

Part of me chose the title because I like the absurdity so much.

But I really am trying to say something with that title.

Right now the thing I'm trying to think about is the retroactive elements in responsibility. I want to know, Why is it that responsibility can be claimed days, months, or years after an event has occurred?

How is it that the idea of responsibility leaves room for such retroactivity?

Responsibility contains these retroactive elements because its core, I suspect, is narrative (and history).

Responsibility, in other words, is nothing more (and nothing less) than telling a story in which we are responsible.

But what about those moments in which responsibility is immediately claimed? Because, while responsibility can be retroactive, it can also be instantaneous. We can approach a situation and know fully what we are doing, and claim responsibility for in that moment, with zero retroactivity. Responsibility is fully claimed in the moment, and no (or minimal) retroactivity exists.


But is it possible to fully claim responsibility for an action in the exact moment in which it occurs?


I have two doubts about this.


First, we never know exactly what our actions will do. Perhaps in the short run, in 5 minutes we see the anticipated results. But there will always be unforeseeable longterm consequences. If we never know quite what we do does, then we can never quite assume full responsibility for our actions (unless we do it retroactively). 


Second, I believe that human action only becomes intelligible in terms of narrative and story telling. So, for us to claim full responsibility for an action we must have a full narrative of the action and its outcomes. But that narrative can never be perfect. So I guess this second point is really just an extension of the first point. 


In either case, my conclusion is the same: Responsibility can only be claimed after an action through the construction of an explanatory narrative that renders our own actions intelligible.


We cannot claim responsibility in the precise moment of an action because we never know what we do does.


Responsibility can only be retroactive.

Responsibility can only be a form of historical thought. 


It may be possible that there is such a thing as instantaneous retroactivity, or near instantaneous. Because maybe we have a good narrative that predicts the outcomes of an action, and we can apply that narrative to our actions in a moment with minimal reflexivity.

But, at best, this is a sort of instantaneous retroactivity.

We cannot claim full responsibility for an action until it has been performed. No matter how quickly we do it, it is still a past action that we are claiming responsibility for.


Responsibility is a species of historical thought, through and through.


To be responsible is to be a special kind of historian.

This is the claim I am working on in my latest essay.

This conclusion is sitting more and more comfortably with me, but I don't yet know how I intend to demonstrate it.

The Ease of Anger. The Power of Love.

I can remember a moment.

It was probably early 2007. I was listening to The Smiths. I was walking up a flight of stairs near the University of Maryland's gym.

I remember the lyric: "It's so easy to laugh. It's so easy to hate. It takes strength to be gentle and kind."

Such a bomb that lyric dropped on me.

Perhaps Morrissey is no philosopher and I shouldn't take that lyric too seriously. But I do.

It is easy to laugh, easy to hate, easy to be angry.

For me, at least, it is easy to be angry.

I was angry most of today, most of this weekend.

I had no patience for anything. I was snapping inside.

I, of course, was polite to my customers. I worked hard, I did what I had to do.

But I wasn't happy about it. Not at all.

Yet I need to remain strong. Love takes work. I need to stay strong.

I remember once when someone told me they wanted to see me angry. My answer: 'You wouldn't like me when I'm angry'. Then I turned huge and green and ripped their head off.

Just kidding.

That person never saw my anger.

Most people never see my anger.

I don't want them to see my anger.

I don't want to see my anger.

There is nothing in anger to be lauded. I do not think anger a virtue. I think it a shortcoming. I think it a failure.

Anger is a defense.

To think anger as essential is to fail to see the true origin of our emotions.

Anger is always a defense against pain, against embarrassment, against shame, against what have you.

So why does anger come so easily to me?

Because my emotions are fucking intense, man.

I'm a freak. I'm bursting at the seams at every moment. I can hardly contain myself.

If only I could find the words.

If only.

Hey. Guess what?

I don't need those words.

Because, ugh.

I just know it.

I know that it is easy to be angry.

And I know that Rilke is right when he tells me to trust in what is difficult.

Because life is difficult.

Life, too, might be simple.

But just because it is simple doesn't mean it isn't hard.

In A Moment

My entire mood can change.
I apologize about the egg shells.
I don't know my own strength.

I sat down and suddenly I realized
How much fun I am having and
How much I don't want this life to end.

How much I was lying when
I told them that I was fine and
That I didn't care about them.

I'm better than fine.
I'm the worlds greatest and
I am living the dream.

Tomorrow, I do get to experience
Another day in paradise.

A Delightful Development

I've been so confused about how to develop a concept of historical morality.

But all of this thinking about responsibility and stuff has got it all going like crazy.

I've got this excellent new outline, and I'm really excited about it.

The problem is this.

Modern conceptions of freedom and responsibility typically rely on ideas like thought, will, reason, or consciousness.

Recent psychological research, however, is revealing how limited our self-knowledge is, and how out of control our feelings, thoughts, and actions are. We live far more intuitive lives than we think.

How are we to be responsible, then? If responsibility cannot be identified with consciousness, reason, or will, then what is it to be identified with?

My answer: it is to be identified with history. It is to be defined as a method of telling a story in which you are an agent, responsible for your thoughts, feelings, and actions.

This conclusion, as I noted in an earlier post, seems unavoidable if we ask ourselves, How is it that responsibility can be assumed well after an event? Days, even weeks or years can pass and we still have the option of claiming responsibility for something.

How can this be?

How, in short, to account for the retroactivity of responsibility?

I believe I can resolve this problem by arguing that responsibility is about being a special type of a historian. Specifically, a historian of your own actions. One that fully identifies with feelings, thoughts, and actions. One that sees past actions as expressions of our duty.


I believe that by approaching the issue of responsibility in this way I am making a great stride in my quest to develop a concept of historical morality.