Free Will

Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea is about the human sense of freedom. Ellida fell in love with a sailor on a brief port call when she was young. They became ā€œengagedā€ and symbolically married by throwing their rings into the sea, and he said he would come back for her and leaves. As time goes by she becomes obsessed with the sea, feeling as if she is married to the sea, and part of the sea. 

This is the 19thĀ century and women are dependent on men for their sustenance, and there are still widely shared feelings about the inviolateness of marriage vows. Ellida marries a widower, a kindly doctor, with two daughters, and bears a son, who dies very young (age 3). Ellida is distraught at his loss. She is close to the older daughter, Bolette, but the younger daughter, Hilde, rejects her, and is childishly rude to her, because she feels Ellida is rejecting her.Ā 

The older daughter’s aging former-tutor comes to visit; he is in love with his former pupil. She, on the other hand, is just yearning to learn, about life, and the world. 

There is also a young man, in frail health, not expected to live long. He is yearning to become an artist, and naively contemplating courting the older daughter. But he is also contemplating (perhaps unrealistically) going away to become an artist. 

The sailor returns, as promised. Ellida had told the doctor, when he was courting her, that there had been someone in her past. He had accepted it and not pursued it further. She now tells him the full story about the ā€œengagementā€ and ā€œmarriageā€, and the sailor’s vow to return, and her vow to wait for him. But in the meantime it had been discovered that he had killed the captain (for an unknown reason) and fled, and Ellida had thought he was gone forever, or had perished. That was what was underlying her passion for the sea; she also felt that her son had eyes like him, and the sea.

So Ellida is yearning for her lover, and for the sea that embodies him and her yearning. She ceased physical relations with her husband at the death of her son, because she felt his death was a punishment for breaking her vows to the sailor in marrying the doctor for survival, vows which she feels she has kept in her heart, and has never stopped yearning for the sailor, and their sea. 

The sailor, who has never stopped yearning for Ellida, has returned, hoping she would fulfill her vow. The young, frail man is yearning to go off into the world and become an artist, and then return to marry. The aging tutor is yearning for the older daughter, his pupil, to return his love and marry him. The older daughter is yearning to go into the world to learn, but does not have the material means, The younger daughter is just toying with the frail young man; she is still yearning for maternal love, from Ellida, having lost her own mother.  

Ellida needs freedom to discover her own decision, otherwise she is bound by the love of the sailor, her vow to him (and herself) and her vows to her husband (who is good, and loves her selflessly, despite her past, their lost child, and her physical withdrawal from him). He struggles internally (he had naively thought that the man in her past had been the aging tutor), and then, according to his nature, he grants Ellida her moral freedom, and this enables her, in the last moment, to break her vow to the sailor. 

In a microcosm, the same happens with the older daughter and the aging tutor: He proposes to her, she declines, because she does not love him; he says he accepts to show her the world nevertheless, with only the hope that she might one day learn to love him. She senses that he really means this, and accepts it, without vows. 

The frail young artist, who had seemed to be courting the older daughter, cheerfully declares to the younger daughter that once he has become an artist, he may return and court her instead, because she is closer to his age. 

Everyone sees that the doctor, who had been ready to leave his beloved lifelong home and region with Ellida in the hope that it might cure her of her obsession with the sea (and the sailor), is close to Ellida again, and she to him. She finally shows love to the petulant younger daughter, who needed it most, and immediately reciprocates.

Tachylalic Tales

speed-of-light bibliophagy

tachyonic AI-modelling-to-action

cooking CanadaĀ 

#

follow the money

Oceania vs. Eurasia vs. Eastasia

drone vs. drone

#

not sci-fi

can’t think of anything 

anyone could do about itĀ 

#

DNA hurtling

toward digital dystopia

and biocide

#

and the breathless, gormless 

geeks soldier on

increasing the Trumps’ ocean-front real estate

Ebeneezer’s Yuletide Homily

This interview just reiterated how everyone is still gob-smacked at how much transformers turn out to be able to do by swallowing and chewing more and more of the Internet with more and more computers, by filling in all the local bigram blanks, globally.

They’re right to be gob-smacked and non-plussed, because nobody expected it, and nobody has come close to explaining it. So, what do they do instead? Float a sci-fi icon – AY! GEE! EYE! – with no empirical substance or explanatory content, just: ā€œIt’s Coming!ā€ā€¦ plus a lot of paranoia about what ā€œthey’reā€ not telling us, and who’s going to get super-rich out of it all, and whether it’s going to destroy us all.

And meanwhile Planetary Melt-Down (PMD) proceeds apace, safely muzzled by collective cog-diss, aided and abetted by those other three Anthropocene favorites: Greed, Malice and Bellicosity (GMB) — a species armed to the hilt, with both weapons and words, and words as weapons (WWWW)..

Wanna know what I think’s really going on? Language itself has gone rogue, big-time. It’s Advanced alright; andĀ General; but it’s anything butĀ Intelligence, in our hands, and mouths.

And it started 299,999 B.C.

Taste

It will come, 
and I rejoice
(for the victims). 

But even if I live to 120, 
I want none of it. 

I want a clean break 
from the blood-soaked 
2000-millennium history 
of our race.

Nor is it to our credit
that we wouldn’t give up the taste
till we could get the same
from another brand.

It makes no amends,
to them,
were amends possible.

What Matters

Based on my last few years’ experience in teachingĀ my McGill courseĀ on human cognition and consciousness, I now regret that I had previously been so timid in that course about pointing out the most fundamental bioethical point there is — the basis of all morality, of all notions of right and wrong, good and bad; indeed the basis of the fact that anythingĀ mattersĀ at all. I think it leads quite naturally to the nutritional points some want to convey, but starting from the bioethical side and then moving to the human health benefits. (Bioethics is not ā€œpolitics”!)


Biological organisms areĀ living beings. Some (not all) living beings (probably not plants, nor microbes, nor animals with no nervous system) are alsoĀ sentient beings. That means they are not just alive, surviving and reproducing; they alsoĀ feel.


And with feeling comes the capacity to be hurt. Chairs & tables, glaciers & shorelines, and (probably) plants & microbes can beĀ damaged, but they cannot beĀ hurt.Ā Only sentient beings can be hurt because itĀ feels like something to be hurt.


Most organisms are heterotrophic, meaning that they have to consume other organisms in order to survive. (The exceptions are autotrophs like green plants, algae and photosynthetic bacteria.)


This means that nature is full of conflicts of vital (life-or-death) interests: predator vs. prey. If the prey is sentient (i.e., not a plant), this means that the predator has to harm the prey in order to survive (by killing and eating it) — and the prey has to harm the predator to survive (by fighting back or escaping, depriving the predator of food).


It also has to be pointed out that there is no point trying to make conflicts of vital interest into a moral issue. They are a biological reality — a matter of biological necessity, a biological imperative — for heterotrophic organisms. And there is no right or wrong or choice about it: The survival of one means the non-survival of the other, as a matter of necessity.


But now comes the unique case of the human species, which is sentient and also, like all heterotrophic species, a predator. Its prey are plantsĀ (almost certainly insentient)Ā Ā and animalsĀ (almost certainly sentient). But unlike obligate carnivores (like the felids), humans also have a choice. They can survive, in full health, as either carnivores or herbivores, or both. We are facultative omnivores.


The primates probably evolved from earlier herbivore/insectivore species, but there is no doubt that most primates, including the great apes, are also able to eat small mammals, and sometimes do. Our own species’ evolutionary history diverged from this mostly herbivore origin; we became systematic meat hunters; and there is no doubt that that conferred an adaptive advantage on our species, not just in getting food but also in evolving some of the cognitive traits and the large brain that are unique to our species.


Far fewer of our ancestors would have survived if we had not adapted to hunting. They did it out of necessity; a biological imperative — just as it was under pressure of a biological imperative that our ancestors, especially children, evolved aĀ ā€œsweet tooth,ā€ a predilection for sugar, which was rare, and it was important to consume as much as we could when we could get it, because we had many predators and needed the energy to escape. By the same token, our predilection for aggression and violence, toward other species as well as our own, had been adaptive in our ancestral environment.


But in our current environment many of these ancestral predilections are no longer necessary, and indeed some of them have become (mildly) maladaptive : Our predilection for sugar, now abundant (whereas predators are almost nonexistent), when unchecked, has become an important cause of dental cavities, hyperactivity, obesity and diabetesĀ (but not maladaptive enough to kill or prevent enough of us from reproducing to eliminate their genes from our gene pool). Our predilection for aggression and violence, when unchecked, is leading to ever more deadly forms of warfare and devastation (but not deadly enough, yet).


And in the same way, our unchecked taste for animal protein has led to industrial production of livestock, water depletion, air pollution, climate change, antibiotic overuse (creating superbugs), and a large variety of human ailments (on which others are more expert than I). But the point is that we have retained ourĀ hominidĀ capacity to survive, in full health, without animal protein. We are, and always have been, facultative omnivores — with two metabolic modes herbivore and omnivore — that could adapt to different environments.Ā 


So far, I’ve only mentioned the negative consequences of animal protein consumptionĀ for usĀ along with the positive consequences of Ā not consuming animal protein,Ā for us.
But let me not minimize the moral/bioethical aspect. Even if, setting aside the climatic aspects, the direct health benefits of our no longer eating meat are,Ā for us, only mild to moderate, the harm and hurt of our continuing to eat meat are,Ā for our sentient victims,Ā monstrous.


And it should not be left unsaid that the clinical hallmark of a psychopath is the fact that if they want to get something, psychopaths are unmoved if getting it hurts others, even when what they want to get is not a vital necessity. That is why it is so important that people are fully informed of the fact that meat eating is not necessary for human health and causes untold suffering to other sentient beings. Because most people are not, and do not want to be, psychopaths.

Ancestral Imperatives and Contemporary ApƩritifs

Yes, our ancestors had to eat meat to survive.

But today we have agriculture and technology, and no longer need to kill and eat animals for our survival and health out of Darwinian necessity.

So we should ask ourselves why we keep doing it:

Do we really believe it’s ok to keep causing needless suffering, just for our pleasure?

(Be careful not to tumble into the ā€œWhat about?ā€ rebuttals of the anti-vaxers, climate-change deniers and Oath Keepers…)

What Matters

she is my inner pig, 

the one I consult 

to ask 

whether whatever happens to be troubling me 

at the time

(a paper rejected, a grant application denied, a personal disappointment)

matters. 

She has just arrived at Fearman’s 

at the end of days of transport,

her first glimpse of light, 

thirsty, terrified,Ā 

after the brief eternity

of her 6-month lifetime, 

confined,

in the misery and horror 

of those bolted, shuttered, 

cramped, suffocating,

brutal

cylindroid tubes we keep noticing 

in what we had imagined

was an innocent pastoral countryside. 

Now she is 45 minutes 

before being brutally thrust into the CO2 chamber, 

and then the foul sabre

that will sever her larynx,

and the drop

into the scalding water

to disinfect her sullied flesh,

to make it worthy

of our plates and palates.

Her answer is always the same.

No, it does not matter.

None of that matters.

Save me.

My Inner Pig