What is Friendship?

Should you erase traumatic memories?

“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is one of my favorite movies.  It stars Jim Carrey as Joel and Kate Winslet as Clementine. They’ve been in a relationship for several years, and their relationship has been both powerful and contentious because they are complete opposites.  Joel is careful, quiet, and timid, while Clementine is wild, impulsive, and emotional.  When they have a nasty fight, Clementine (perhaps impulsively) goes to the Lacuna Corporation, which has a procedure for erasing memories.  When Joel goes to her work to apologize, he discovers that she does not remember him or anything about their relationship with each other.  She’s had Lacuna erase her memories of him!

In anger, Joel goes to Lacuna to ask them to erase his memories of her.  As the procedure proceeds, he goes backward through his memories of their time together, and he realizes that it was a huge mistake.

Besides being a great movie, this scenario is interesting in part because the technology to erase or at least dampen memories is currently being developed, partly as a treatment for PTSD. 

What do you think?  Should a person seek to erase painful or traumatic memories?  If you could erase the worst moment of your life from your memory, would you?  Why or why not?

Nietzsche and Parkland Shooting

The Teachings of Nietzsche in relation to the Parkland Shooting

On February 14, 2018, tragedy struck Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Seventeen lives were lost as a result of the mass shooting. This was one of the world's most deadliest school shootings as of now. 

On the other hand, Friedrich Nietzsche, a professor of philosophy, shuts down the idea of minimizing suffering. Instead, he advocates that we should embrace our sufferings and grow from them. Alain de Botton writes on the philosophy of Nietzsche and states that "most of us fail to recognize the debt we owe to these shoots of difficulty" (228). He goes on to say that most of the time we cut out suffering like "weeds" but little do we know that we are "choking off the positive elements that might arise form it further up the stem" (228). This is so powerful! Often times we cut off things when they become hard or emotional. We should instead endure the pain and keep going because according to Nietzsche, fruit will come from our difficult situations. 

Now back to our original topic. The students who attend Marjory Stoneman Douglas could have chose to let their emotions and suffering get the most of them. They could have avoided going back to school. They could have shut themselves off from society. 

There are so many possibilities for what could have happened as a result of this tragedy. Instead, the students chose to stand for what they believe in. Instead of cutting off their suffering, as suggested by many philosophers before Nietzsche, these students chose to cultivate awareness through their tragedy. The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas adopted the hashtag #MSDStrong. They also participated in the March for Our Lives in Washington D.C. just last week. 

This isn't about what your personal stance on gun control is. This is about students, just like you and me, taking a stand and growing through our suffering. 

If these students would've avoided this situation and shut down their feelings of suffering, change would not already be in the works. These students are working to make sure that other students and teachers don't have to fear going to school. Unfortunately, there is a chance that more school shootings will happen in the future, but because of these brave students, there is hope for a better tomorrow. 

Do the Patterns of Your Life Predict Your Future?

On the radio this morning I heard an interesting story that relates to our discussion about free will and determinism last week.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/03/30/597974076/invisibilia-do-the-patterns-in-your-past-predict-your-future

The story discussed the research of sociologists (particularly, Matthew Salganik from Princeton University) trying to use computer models to predict the path of people's lives.  As computer algorithms have gotten to be more powerful, they've become better and better at understanding patterns and predicting the future.  Pandora can guess which songs you might like; Netflix recommends movies and shows for you personally, based on your previous history.  So can we predict what path a person's life might take, using the patterns from their past?

The story describes the project: 

"So Salganik set to work. He got a massive trove of data on 5,000 kids who had been followed from the day they were born, then made that information available to data geeks and researchers across the globe. Four hundred teams were given incredibly detailed information about the kids from birth until age nine, then told to predict their grades — and a handful of other outcomes — at age 15."

What did Salganik find?  In fact, the predictions were all very inaccurate.  No one was able to create a model that could reliably predict where the person would end up based on the data they had been given.

Duncan Watts, a sociology researcher who works at Microsoft Research, explains:

"We find exactly the same pattern everywhere we look... when you're talking about individual outcomes, there's a lot of randomness," Watts says.

"And the other half of this conversation is that people don't like that answer, and so they keep wanting a different answer. They say nature abhors a vacuum. Humans abhor randomness. We like deterministic stories," Duncan says. 

We like the idea that patterns can tell us what will happen in life because that idea makes us feel more secure, he says.

"If you think you can predict things— even if you're wrong — it means that you get up in the morning and you feel confident," Watts says. "And so you can invest your time and energy today in things that won't pay off until tomorrow."

We want to be able to predict what will happen, to feel like we have some kind of control over our lives or over our children’s lives.  But maybe there just is a lot of randomness in life and how things turn out, and we have to come to terms with that.

What should we think about this research?  What does it tell us about human life and the problem of free will?

One possibility is that the lack of deterministic patterns is evidence that humans have free will.  Of course human behavior looks random--that's because each person is a free agent and makes her own choice.

But maybe that's not it.  Maybe where we end up going is random because the situations that people face are so random.  The bank robber in the story because a law professor because of random things that happened to him, not because of something he clearly chose.

Another possibility is that human behavior really is determined by external factors and patterns, but we just haven't learned what they are yet.  Presumably there are things that determine, say, the weather, but they are so complex and hard to measure that we haven't yet been able to model and predict weather perfectly... yet!  But that's no reason to think we never will be able to predict weather, or predict human behavior, if we have more data and better models.

The Godfather and Buddhism

In my last post, I illustrated the ideas of Stoicism found in the movie "Arrival." Since movies are kind of my niche, I will continue along with this format.

The 1970 movie "The Godfather" follows Michael Corleone, the youngest of four siblings, as he takes on the mantle of the mafia family his father leaves behind.

Michael was the family's "good boy." He went to college, he joined the Marine Corp, and he was straight laced, with a good life ahead of him.

However, after an assassination attempt on his dad leads to him being thrust into power over the entire mafia family. He leads his family to victory in the ensuing gang war.

However, as the movie progresses, we begin to see the straight laced Michael fade away, as his desire for more money, power, and influence grows. Throughout the movie, we see him grow farther and farther apart from his family and farther away from being the honorable and kind person he was at the beginning of the movie. In essence, just like the Buddhist preach, we see his desire lead to suffering, for him, and his family.

"Arrival" and Stoicism

The 2016 movie "Arrival" staring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner is by far one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. From the story, to the cinematography, to the music, everything about that movie is near perfect in my book. In addition to those things, it also has one of the best plot twists of the 21st century, rivaling even the works of M. Night Shyamalan, and this plot twist and it's consequences help reveal some of the philosophical insights of the movie.

*SPOILERS AHEAD*Seriously, go watch the movie if you haven't. It's two hours, and you'll love it. Please don't ruin the movie for yourself by reading ahead.

So, essentially, "Arrival" is an alien movie like no other. The main character, Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is a linguistics professor and works alongside Dr. Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), an astrophysicist, to communicate with aliens who have recently landed on Earth. As the movie progresses, and Lousie begins to understand the alien's written language, she begins to have flashbacks about her daughter Hannah, who we know from an opening scene to have died of cancer.

Basically, Louise realizes their written language is peculiar in the fact that it has no beginning and no end- it's circular. She remarks that to write in "heptapod", the alien language, one must understand time in a nonlinear fashion, since you'd need to know the beginning and end of each sentence simultaneously before writing. As she learns more of the written language, flashbacks of her daughter begin increasing until she finally asks the aliens "who is the girl?"

That's when the audience, and Louise herself, realizes that they weren't flashbacks. They were flash forwards. Her mastery of the alien language allows her to perceive time as they do: non-linearly.

So Louise can see the future. How does this relate to Stoicism? I'm getting there.

Louise begins to become conscious everything that will happen in her life because of the way she now perceives time. She sees that she will marry Ian, and they will raise a beautiful daughter named Hannah. She also, however, sees that Ian will leave her and her daughter will parish at a young age.

Her reaction to this newfound knowledge is what makes her somewhat of a Stoic. The fact she knows what will happen doesn't change the fact that she still has no control over these external events. Just like the stoics say, Louise realizes every hand she will be dealt, good and bad, but what matters is how she chooses to play every hand. She chooses to enjoy her time with her husband and child despite the fact she knows one day it'll all be gone.

Another principle of Stoicism that applies here is the fact that stoics believed that it was the pursuit of the "preferred indifferences" of marriage, friendship and motherhood that mattered, not necessarily the success of said pursuit. For Louise, she knew, in the end, that her husband would leave her and that her daughter would die. But that didn't stop her from pursing those preferred behaviors.

She knew the cards before they were dealt, but she still reacted rationally, pursuing love, friendship, and motherhood even though she knew fate had different plans. And for that, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius would be proud.

Tool and Laozi

One of my favorite bands is Tool (recording a new album, apparently) and one of my favorites from their albums is title track from "Lateralus". The song has interesting resonances with the idea of wu wei (or non-action) as expressed in the Dao De Jing.

Wu wei literally means "without action", but it does not really mean to do nothing, sitting on the couch and letting the world pass you by.  Instead, it is a way of being in the world, contributing to development and flow of things, without excessive thinking or control of the situation.  Many poems in the Dao De Jing explore this idea--we need to open ourselves up to the depth of the situation as it is, not only so that we can experience it fully, but also so that we can respond in the best and most productive way.  Laozi urges us to "cultivate emptiness" (Dao De Jing 16, trans. Addiss and Lombardo) so that we can be open to the experience as it is happening.  Rather than imposing our own expectations and desires, we encounter life's mystery (Dao De Jing 1).  As Laozi explains,

"Things grow and grow,

But each goes back to its root.

Going back to the root is stillness.

This means returning to what is.

Returning to what is

Means going back to the ordinary.

...

Understanding the ordinary: Mind opens.

Mind opening leads to compassion,

Compassion to nobility,

Nobility to heavenliness,

Heavenliness to the Way." (Dao De Jing 16)

Similarly, Tool's song "Lateralus" begins by taking us back to the root of our humanity--the experience of a baby:

Black

Then

White are

All I see

In my infancy

Red and yellow then came to be

Reaching out to me

Lets me see

The baby's experience of the world begins with basic black and white, no colors, with no definite understanding of the shapes and forms and objects she is seeing.  But colors and objects begin to arise, the experience "reaching out" to the baby's developing mind.

But the chorus of the song describes a problem:

Over-thinking, over-analyzing separates the body from the mind.

Withering my intuition, leaving opportunities behind.

The baby is purely receptive, learning, growing, engaging the world with playful spontaneity. But as adults, we lose the attitude of wu wei.  We desire to understand, to control, and to effect the results that we expect and want.  Unlike the baby, who experiences unmediated reality, we over-think and categorize until we cannot react in an intuitive, embodied way any longer (see Dao De Jing 2).

The song's climax expresses a wish for a different kind of relationship:

Feed my will to feel this moment urging me to cross the line.

Reaching out to embrace the random.

Reaching out to embrace whatever may come.

I embrace my desire to

I embrace my desire to feel the rhythm, to feel connected

Enough to step aside and weep like a widow

To feel inspired, to fathom the power,

To witness the beauty, to bathe in the fountain,

To swing on the spiral, to swing on the spiral,

To swing on the spiral of our divinity and still be a human.

In the mindset of wu wei, you don't impose upon experience.  You reach out and embrace it, taking in whatever comes. You feel its rhythm, weep, dance, breathe in the beauty that life has to offer.  You can do this only when you disengage your will to categorization and control.

I'm reaching up and reaching out.

I'm reaching for the random or whatever will bewilder me.

Whatever will bewilder me.

And following our will and wind

We may just go where no one's been.

We'll ride the spiral to the end

And may just go where no one's been.

Being bewildered, losing control, not understanding--these are components of a deep experience.  As Laozi says

I have the mind of a fool,

Confused, Confused.

Others are bright and intelligent,

I alone am dull, dull,

Drifting on the ocean,

Blown about endlessly.

Others have plans,

I alone am wayward and stubborn,

I alone am different from others,

Like a baby in the womb. (Dao De Jing 20)

So we return to where we began--the baby.  I have often puzzled about this poem in the Dao De Jing.  Why is good to be confused, dull, wayward?  But Tool's song puts poem 20 into context:  It's often a good sign that you are bewildered and confused about life.  It's evidence that you are truly experiencing it.

Perspectives on the Good Life:  A Class Project

In the Spring semester of 2018, several sections of students enrolled in a First Year Seminar have been studying and discussing what it means to live a good human life.  We discussed the emotional aspects of happiness; the relation between happiness and well-being; and the sources and conditions that make it possible for humans to flourish and live well.  As the semester continues, we will be discussing a variety of historical and philosophical perspectives on these topics, investigating what they have to teach us for our lives today.

In this class blog, we will be going beyond those readings to explore the significance of these issues for us today. Posts will include:

• Links and discussions to articles and news items, discussing how these relate to issues discussed in our class;
• Analyses of movies, books, and songs that offer perspectives on happiness or the good life;
• And any other ideas that come to mind.

Feel free to post and contribute to the discussion!  Any constructive and thoughtful feedback is welcome.