today i bought a new bike.

you know when you're dating someone way cooler or prettier than you, and psh/whatever of course, but sometimes you look at them and just laugh, bemused, thinking: what? what is going on here? how did this happen? that's what my new bike is like.

III. rational agency is a bullshit foundation for anything

christ, i've been rattling on now forever and i haven't gotten anywhere near to the point of my paper yet, which is that if morality is anything that matters, then it's not the sort of thing that depends on our being rational agents. because whatever rational agency is, not everyone has it, and no one has it all the times-- and guess when we're least likely to have it? when it counts. when things are tough. when it hits the fan.

rational agency isn't some obscure philosophical idea, it's a way of viewing other people that pretty much everyone uses to get through the day. people do stuff that makes you mad or makes you happy, and that is translated almost immediately into being angry at them or pleased with them, liking them or disliking them, and we don't really bother justifying the connection, but if someone asked you to, you wouldn't have to think that hard: jane did x. she could have done y (steve, sal & danni were all in same sitch and THEY did y.). but she did x. and x fucking stung. so jane is a douche. she's not a child. she's not a sociopath. she's not a dog. she should know better.

when philosophers go to justify moral standards and the penalties for breaking them, they usually say the same sorts of things: human beings are rational agents. human beings have the the capacity to grasp moral reasons and the capacity to act according to them. children, the mentally ill, and those under extreme stress may be permanently or temporarily exempt from moral scrutiny precisely because they are NOT rational agents. dogs just are what they are. dogs just do what they do. human beings can reflect on what they do, and when their desires conflict with their moral beliefs, they can, by force of will, behave morally despite their desire to do otherwise.

it is my studied opinion that this is bullshit. it is true, as i will personally attest, that most persons tend to reflect (and reflect and reflect and reflect) on their behavior. most persons analyze, to one degree or another, what it is they should do, and what it is that they want to do, and why they should do it, and why they should want it, and so on. it may be the case that thinking rationally-- consciously reflecting on our behavior or analyzing our options-- we tend to be better behaved. (or it might not be the case. thinking things through hasn't always led me to behave in ways that i'm proud of.) but whatever it means to think rationally, it's clearly not something that everyone does, and it's clearly not something that anyone does all (i would even say most) of the time. we we do hurtful things (which is when the question of morality generally comes into play) we're so often under stress, or feeling some strong distracting thing, or we lack some relevant information.

(a small break from explaining myself.)

we know some things, and one of the things we know is that we have brains in which knowledge must somehow be instantiated. and we detect activity there-- we can talk, for example, about neurons and how they fire. but we don't know how knowledge is instantiated in brains-- what the physical state is that equals knowing your childhood address during all of that time you spend not consciously saying it to yourself. and we can calculate the energy of the entire universe, but what we find is that: seventy percent of the universe is something that isn't matter. we don't know what it is. we call it dark energy, or quintessence or the cosmological constant, but we might as well call it 'other people's hearts' for all we know about it. and of the thirtyish percent of the universe composed of matter, the vast majority is dark matter. what is dark matter? well, it's the kind of matter that we can neither observe nor know the composition of. another term we use to bracket off the inexplicable in our mathematical models. and the matter that we know, that small percentage of a percentage that we've got a handle on (minus brain matter), when we look at it down as far as we can look, is a matter of quantum mechanics, of which the physicist richard feynman said "if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics." [as a small taste: if you are interested in making sense of quatum theory you'll have to get used to assuming that we live in one of many possible worlds existing in four dimensions.]

i look in and i look up and i see what i sort of know and i'm in awe, but it's a thin film on the surface of what i don't know, which is almost everything.

II. the relevant facts.

so as a conscientious society we need a consistent set of principles that we all understand and agree on-- morality or ethics or whatever you want to call it-- and they should jibe with the facts that we've managed somehow to know about people in the world. here are the relevant facts as i understand them:

(1) we live in a deterministic universe. whether we're formed by god or darwinian algorithms it all amounts to the same thing: effect has followed cause has followed effect from long before us, and they continue to follow each other right through us, and every belief or desire that you have must ultimately be the effect of some cause that existed before you did. which is just to say: you might behave that way because you're clever or selfish or wonderful, but you're clever or selfish or wonderful because you were un/lucky enough to have acquired that characteristic from somewhere. even those qualities that we cultivate in ourselves must be the result of some preceding beliefs and desires-- the desire to cultivate and the right equipment to do the job-- which we can also explain, and back and back and back until conscious you gives way to unconscious you gives way to not you at all with no break in the causal chain.

(2) some things feel good, and other things hurt. we have nervous systems calibrated to sense the lightest touches, insults disguised as compliments, even the weight of a gaze. we're on a hair trigger when it comes to feeling things, oh man can we feel them. so you may not have chosen to be clever or selfish or wonderful, but it is nonetheless the fate of the people near you, for better or for worse, to feel the force of your wit or self-involvement or wondrousness. we can't escape the fact of our nervous systems-- our sensitivity to pleasure and pain in their myriad and nuanced forms.

I. the motivation

what i've been thinking and writing about for the last month or so is rational agency and how morality does and doesn't depend on it. it matters, and i'll tell you why: we have social institutions, and through our social institutions we do things to people. we tell people where they can and can't go, what they can and can't do. sometimes we put people in a building and hold them there while years of their lives pass, or until they die. sometimes we cause people to die. we strap people down and kill them. we have to say why. with stakes like that we can't just say "this is for the greater good", or "you deserve this", we have to say what "good" means, where "deserve" comes from, and who decided and why they get to. if we can't, then we're just burying people alive, consigning them to the nightmare of being unjustifiably restrained. it's no small matter to take away a person's life, or some part of their life. no matter what they've done we've got to explain to them, and to ourselves, in a meaningful way what we're doing, why, and what gives us the right to. and it's got to square with what we know about the world and about people. and what we know about the world, and about people especially, is changing.

there are, of course, philosophical principles at the foundation of our justice system. this is a liberal democracy, founded on social contract theory, which has been profoundly successful in some ways. but this theory is itself built on a particular conception of human beings as rational agents-- as persons whose actions are best explained in terms of free and measured deliberation. it was all worked out a few hundred years ago, before we even knew the chemical make-up of water, let alone our own bodies, our own brains. before freud, before darwin, before watson & crick.

and the story that is both larger and more intimate is how we treat each other, not as citizens, but as friends and colleagues and hook-ups and competitors. we cause a lot of harm to each other with our jealousy and anger and righteous indignation, and i think that these intimate harms should be attended to as well. if my feelings and the behaviors that they prompt can cause harm, i have to think about what justifies them, or if anything does, or if there the sorts of things that can be justified.

i'm tired and i haven't gotten anywhere near my point yet. i think that i'll have to do this in installments. but i'd like to explain what i've been working on, and why it's relevant and accesible, and interesting, and urgent. how it changes me, and how i hope it can be used as a lever to change things larger than me.

what?

today i learned something shocking/horrifying/fascinating: map makers add in cities and streets that don't exist, as a gaurd against plagiarism! the makers of dictionaries put in a false word! i understand the threat that plagiarism poses to cartographers and lexicographers, but these are REFERENCE MATERIALS. i'm not looking for Truth or moral absolutes, but christ, the dictionary! also, i want to know the words, the fake ones, so bad. i want a list of them.

also, let's say that a group of lexicographers suspect that their dictionary has been plagiarized. they say 'ha! look here! you've included this fake word, which we made up! you're clearly in violation of copyright!' how do they prove that it's not a real word? it's in their dictionary! maybe because it's not in OTHER dictionaries? but dictionaries must, as a rule, include different words or there would only be one kind of dictionary.

my mind is fucking boggled.

turning over a new one.

food, conversation and the internet are generally my preferred procrastination methods, but i've decided to substitute masterbation for all of them. starting now.

if and as it could.

there was not a soul there but knew how shallow-rooted the whole town was. it flooded yearly, and had burned once. often enough the lumber mill shut down, or burned down. there were reports that things were otherwise elsewhere, and anyone, on a melancholy evening, might feel that fingerbone was a meager and difficult place.

so a diaspora threatened always. and there is no living creature, though the whims of eons had put its eyes on boggling stalks and clampled it in a carapace, dimished it to a pinpoint and given it a taste for mud and stuck it down a well or hid it under a stone, but that creature will live on if it can. so fingerbone, which despite all its difficultes sometimes seemed pleasant and ordinary, would value itelf, too, and live on if and as it could. so every wanderer whose presence suggested it might be as well to drift, or it could not matter much, was met with something that seemed at first sight a moral reaction, since morality is a check upon the strongest temptations.

marilynne robinson
housekeeping

to M [if you ever look for it.]

one of the hardest things when i first moved home was watching my grandparents interact. they were horrible to each other. they would lash out, unprovoked. they would needle mercilessly over the very trivial. listening to them would stir up my sense of unfairness and injustice in a way that it hasn't been since i was fourteen, arguing myself bloody against the wall of my dad. but i rarely interrupted their dialogues, partially out of discression and partially because neither of them actually appreciated my interference. this is how my two years of talking less began. no action seemed like a good action, so i listened, and what i heard is that when two people have been married for sixty years, no one else knows what it is they're saying to each other-- even when they hear it, even when it's "please pass the syrup". every word is so full of old meaning. no word is innocent, and it's impossible to know what compliment is a provocation and what slur is a coded endearment. i might as well have attempted to mediate an argument between two people speaking portuguese. i hope that i never talk to anyone the way they'd talk to each other, but i don't know anything about what it's like to be at the end of my life, stuck in a house with the person i've lived it with, and if i judge them i judge them gently.

i've come to feel that most relationship, at least the vital ones, are a little (or a lot) twisted in ways that it's easy for casual observers to disparage. life in the world is ragged and impenetrably complex, right, and so are we, and so are the ways that we relate to each other, and so are the circumstances that we find ourselves in when we go to relate, but i don't think that it's therefore best to abstain. the judgers don't know where it's all headed any better than anyone else, let alone where it should be headed or how we should get there.

some circumstances are particularly ragged, and anything other than cutting one's losses looks imprudent. but i don't really give a fuck how this looks. it's not ideal, but nothing is. i'll navigate any circumstance with you.

the hush of the very good, by todd boss

You can tell by how he lists
to let her
kiss him, that the getting, as he gets it,
is good.
It's good in the sweetly salty,
deeply thirsty way that a sea-fogged
rain is good after a summer-long bout
of inland drought.
And you know it
when you see it, don't you? How it
drenches what's dry, how the having
of it quenches.
There in the grassy inlet
where your ocean meets your land, a slip
that needs a certain kind of vessel,
and
when that shapely skiff skims in at last,
trimmed bright, mast lightly flagging
left and right,
then the long, lush reeds
of your longing part, and soft against
the hull of that bent wood almost im-
perceptibly brushed a luscious hush
the heart heeds helplessly--
the hush
of the very good.


[this poem is about sex, yes, but also something else, maybe the opposite and/or antidote to what i've been thinking about all day, reading philosophy and wondering how available dispassion is to human beings as a tool (a lever, not a hammer, please), so of course it's the first thing i turned to, browsing some journal that i have no business reading, while taking a study break, waiting for my tea.]

life comes down to: the itch and the scratch. only the itch and the scratch, but occuring in so many shades and degrees and combinations. itches run from tickle to hurt to our hearts exploding, and the scratch can happen or the scratch can be delayed, for pleasure or to our detriment (or both), and we can scratch til its gone or scratch til it hurts or resist scratching, for a minute or forever (although the desire to resist is just another itch that's hard to reach, maybe).

travel.

I.

"birds migrate toward the equator when days shorten because their brain converts changes in day length to hormonal signals that activate migratory behavior."

p. richerson & r. boyd
not by genes alone
[which i began reading this week for a seminar i'm taking on cultural evolution.]


II.

The human brain, wrinkled slug, knows
like a computer, like a violinist, like
a bloodhound, like a frog. We remember
backwards a little and sometimes forwards,
but mostly we think in the ebbing circles
a rock makes on the water.

The salmon hurtling upstream seeks
the taste of the waters of its birth
but the seabird on its four-thousand-mile
trek follows charts mapped on its genes.
The brightness, the angle, the sighting
of the stars shines in the brain luring
till inner constellation matches outer.

The stark black rocks, the island beaches
of waveworn pebbles where it will winter
look right to it. Months after it set
forth it says, home at last, and settles.
Even the pigeon beating its short whistling
wings knows the magnetic tug of arrival.

marge piercy
from 'the perpetual migration'


III.

it's been a trying week, the kind you can't think your way out of. i know that the style is to say how reason and language set us apart, but hopefully m.p. is right and we're built to recognize even (especially) what we can't say or reason.

tonight i biked from central square home and it was snowing. dry snow that 'fsh fsh fsh'-ed back and forth on the pavement. it's not bad biking in the winter. i like it better than biking in the summer. less sweaty. only my thumbs were fucking freezing (i lost the good mittens. all six!). and my nose a little. i can't cover it anymore with a bandana or anything like that. my glasses fog. and late at night i can't bike, or i hate it. i get ice-cream headaches and swear the whole way. but tonight it was early. and pretty. and there were plenty of jerkface drivers (rush hour), but they didn't see me give them the finger. because, you know, i lost the good mittens (all six-- the ones with the finger flaps).

i'm going to go read some bentham. because school started again.
i hope that you're having a good day.

2006: one fucked up bitch of a year for the world- a pretty good year for laura gillespie.

i've come to feel that there's not much i can say about the most important things. if you don't believe me (that i feel that way) i couldn't blame you-- i'm always talking. but i think maybe talking is important as a way of things happening more than as a means of naming important things. last year was full of unspeakably important things. intractable things. this year there was less death. more room for life.

i never once succeded, this year or any other year, in speaking the unspeakable. it has sometimes been very disappointing. tremendously endlessly disappointing. but i could talk about most things and it was important to me that i could. i talked as a way of being known to people (who've come to matter to me so much). i talked just to make warm noises, to make people feel welcome in small ways (i maintain that this is a terribly important kind of talking). i talked because i felt like it, and i only have a limited amount of time to enjoy that sneeze-y feeling, that relief.

new year's stock-taking and resolution isn't my bag. it's too arbitrary. i'm going to stop now. but hey, if you're reading this, that means that you most likely had something do with these last twelve months and what they've meant to me. thanks.

the book of tea begins:

'tea is the ultimate mental and medical remedy and has the ability to make one's life more full and complete.'
i'm inclined to believe this.

diesel has teapots now, my readers.
today i've had one pot each of:
jasmine
earl grey (w. soy milk)
wu wei + herbal mint (the rosie mix)
(which isn't technically tea, but an herbal infusion. until someone comes up with a better term, though, i'm just going to call it tea.)

one term paper down, three finals to go.

AMAZING!
[thanks to e.j.]

my dog ate it.

i used to enjoy arguing. i liked thinking of what came next. i had an intuition, i stated it as a point of fact. then came counterpoint. dodge. parry. thrust. first i am the point, and someone else is the counterpoint, but then (and always, really, but more and more as time passed) i'm the point and the counterpoint. i formulate a little argument to myself and i like the way it goes-- i might think it through eight or ten times, running little fingers over it, tweeking-- and then, out of habit (dodge. parry. thrust), i counter. and as it happens i get better and better at countering.

so first it's: point, point--point...point! (counter) point.
and then it's: point...counter...point...counter.
and then it's point. counter. point. counter. point.
and then it's pointcounterpointcounterpointcounter.

the counters gain. they're unanswerable. (it's not always or even generally unpleasant. when i'm thinking of a thing in the world that interests me i learn more or differently about it. but when decisiveness is called for i'm occasionally horrible, sometimes unforgivable. ideas of what to do are rejected as quickly as they occur and i stand there while the whole thing burns or grows or does whatever it does, no thanks to me.) and the day finally came when the point was overtaken (pointcounterpoincounterpoicounterpocounterpcounter) and a little part of who i was imploded, and i sat there in the middle of it for a longtime and couldn't say a goddamned thing that mattered.

why make a point when its unanswerable contradiction is right on top of it? you can't even tell them apart anymore.

this is a story-- a little argument-- that i told myself today while i walked. it's not particularly true.
[i was born/ you begin, and already each word/ makes you smaller. -n.flynn]

vessel networks. neuron forests.

take the brain tour!
[nevermind about the context.]

study break.

i could seriously use a coke habit right about now. sleep is the enemy.
in three weeks i'll court it and find myself devastatingly unrequited, but for now i'll enjoy/loath this unprecedented moment. and speak wistfully of copping some adderall.

elegy.

paint splashed, coffee soaked, belled and mildewed. branded and debranded. no reflective surfaces left to speak of. laces notched eyelet to aglet from bike gear incidents. i've hungum up.