Dog ritual, science as religion

This morning when I took my dog for a walk his friend Chauncey was out in the yard, barking to greet him. We crossed the road so that the dogs could say hi and to my surprise, after wagging tails and sniffing both ends through the gate, my dog peed on the gatepost. I was just about to reprimand him for what looked to me like bad dog etiquette, when Chauncey proceeded to do exactly the same thing. They both stood there, taking turns peeing in each other's general direction on opposite sides of the same gatepost. It must have been a ritual they developed together, away from the broader dog culture. My dog almost thinks he is a cat anyway. He adores our cat, who regularly joins us on our evening stroll. The dog tries to make friends with other cats and is at best indifferent towards other dogs, a mixture of frantic fear and aggression signaled by loud barks and fur bristling along his spine.

Taking turns peeing in one another's general direction from opposite sides of the same gatepost. I wondered sadly if this what many human interactions have become as we immerse ourselves in increasingly unnatural environments.

Somebody asked me what I thought about the movie What the Bleep Do We Know, so I watched it. My view is that science as religion is no more harmful than any other religion. Analysing the movie, we seem to have replaced God with the Quantum Universe (both out there and within ourselves), Bad or Evil with Addiction (chemical addiction and, slightly more troublingly, addiction to emotions) and Good with Self-Evolution, Awareness, Knowledge, Creation/Creativity and/or nonattachment. Genuine scientists as well as chiropractors and spiritual leaders served as the priests and prophets of this new religion. If badly spun metaphors of quantum theory and neurobiology are what gives you those tingles down the spine associated with spiritual feeling, then karma to you. I vaguely remember experiencing that when as a 17 year-old physics student I finally understood Dirac's matrices. Sadly the moment was fleeting as it took a great deal of mental effort to follow the math. My one qualm about all this is that if Jesus were nonattached, why would he have bothered? The same goes for Moses or Maimonedes, who was among other things a great physician. Show me someone who did some great thing for the benefit of humanity who was not emotionally attached to the world and the creatures on it. Oh, and what about the imagination? If all these other things are Good, then why not also Imagination?

What are the rituals of this new religion? The two ritual actions depicted in the move show the deaf protagonist (illustrating the limitations of our senses) tattooing herself with hearts using an eyeliner and then immersing herself in a hot bath. Later, she tosses away her anti-anxiety pills. Perhaps watching the movie is a ritual in itself in some circles. What the Bleep do I know?

Night hike

Yesterday evening I went hiking in the dark with my friend. It wasn't really nighttime, the sun sets so early this time of year, and it was just getting dark. We walked in a loop in Tilden Park. To our surprise, there were as many or more joggers and dog-walkers as there might have been during any other time of day. It was warm as we walked up through the meadow, and the first stars appeared - maybe Venus and Mars. Then we walked into the Eucalyptus grove and it became pitch black. Fortunately, my friend had a headlamp, and I was happy to hold hands and let him lead the way. We met no more people after this point. I mentioned the possibility of mountain lions. Several years ago, a woman was mauled by a mountain lion as she jogged along this trail in the early hours of the morning. I didn't feel scared, but my belly started aching. As we walked down by the creek, the air was colder. The smells seemed to be different at night. Suddenly we heard something large splashing across the creek ahead of us. Probably a dear. I was glad when we arrived at the meadow towards the end of the trail, and there was enough light from the sky to see the trail ahead. As we were leaving the woods a coyote cry rose up behind us, and another coyote answered in the hills over the way. I took a sip of cold water from the fountain at the trailhead, pretending it was spring water.

Some Thoughts

Pursuing men is not a worthwhile activity. I feel sorry now for ever having tried it, and although I feel tempted to do it again I am better able to control the impulse. I learned a lot in a year or two of dating. What I learned is that friendship is much more valuable to cultivate. I really needed friends, and it can be hard to turn acquaintanceships from dating into friendships. If I rely on my friends I can avoid pursuing men and all the feelings of loneliness that inevitably arise from this activity.

Notes for Practical Philosophy

Can philosophy be practical? I would argue that it always is, in the sense that philosophers believe their views to be of worldly merit. Probably even the most abstruse philosopher is not analyzing something simply to find out how it is constructed, but is writing about it at least in part in order to have an impact by changing people's thoughts and actions. Philosophers such as Plato, Confuscius, Machiavelli, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx or Nietzsche all had ideas not only about what is but also how it should be, which they presumably believed in. The difference between a religion and a philosophy is that the former derives its justification from authority, personal or divine inspiration, whereas the latter derives its justification from reasoned inference usually based on replicable or universal phenomenological observations. However, it would be misleading to say that Philosophy as a whole system of knowledge can be practical, because there are as many different philosophies as there are philosophers. A life lived according to Spinoza would be very different from a life lived according to Nietzsche!

As a system of knowledge, philosophy has been losing ground to science over the past few hundred years, as more and more content becomes subject to empirical research. Like philosophers, scientists these days seem to be flirting with proscriptions for life, or at least neurobiological theories of why we humans are the way we are. Scientific theories derive their validity from a particular kind of observation and inference. I somehow doubt that Darwin wanted us to live by his theory, although he probably wanted us to change our minds about some things, but try telling that to Richard Dawkins.

I would argue that philosophy is of practical value as a way of thinking about things, not only about so-called philosophical questions but everything that can be addressed with thought, including (but not limited to) how to live, and other questions that have now become the provenance of science. Philosophy as a method concerns itself with critiques of the connections between ideas, thought in other words, and without such a critique ideas can become connected or disconnected simply by spurious juxtapositions. A train of thought can lead to a conclusion that might be false or erroneous, and philsophy urges us to beg the question 'but does that really follow?'

The philosophical method is discursive, and will not necessarily lead to one right answer in questions of practical life value such as whether to change careers, relationships, or to commit suicide, any more than it results in a single decisive view on what things are or why we are here. But it can help us avoid certain kinds of errors that come from wrong thinking, whether our own or others'.

The motivation to come up with a solution generally originates in feelings. Perhaps it's like a cooking timer.

Writing Difficulties

Writing is hard. This morning, I talked on the phone with my aunt in Israel, who is a very good chronicler of family histories. She asked how I was getting along, and I told her that I had finished reading, but I was still writing my dissertation. I said it was really hard. She reflected that up until now, everything has been easy for me. I finished my undergrad studies, my first doctorate, without every experiencing any difficulty, and now I was finding something that was difficult, that had already taken a long time and was going to take even more time.

I'm not sure why this is. Maybe I've bitten off more than I can chew, the topic keeps expanding. I prune stuff and then it expands again. My first dissertation was about visual perception and eye-movements. I just clapped together the two papers I had already written (one in press, the other already published) and a talk I had given at a conference. The hardest part was making the changes requested by the external examiner. Now I think that would be easy, I have certainly learned in the intervening ten years to be less defensive. But the writing itself is hard.

Here I am, sitting in a cafe, writing this instead of continuing with the 20-odd pages I have down. Perhaps it is hard because last time all I had to do was describe the mechanics of things, and now the problem I am facing is more complex and my own view on it shaped by the integration of many different perspectives. It would take a book to write down exactly what I think about pain and how it can be treated. But I have a clear action plan, just to summarize the 9-10 books that have shaped my opinions, and worry about integrating them later.

A friend and fellow-student from the days of my previous degree just sent me a draft of her first novel. When we were both studying science, we each said we would write a novel by the time we were 30. Well, that deadline has been and gone, but if she can finish a book then so can I.

Yellow Moon

Yellow moon stretches
Yawns, rising like a balloon.
Silver trails the bay.

On Being Goal Directed (or Not)

Last night I had a conversation with a friend on being goal-directed, or not. He thinks that both of us are not, and that one needs to be, in order to accomplish things in life and make a difference to the world. Earlier in the day, I was reading in another friend's blog about life-goals and deadlines, realizing that I never seriously set myself any, except perhaps to write a novel by the time I was 30 (which I did not do, and I can't say I feel too bad about it). I was surprised that other people set goals for life events, like getting married, having children, completing a doctorate, owning a home. Those things just happened, like sickness, deaths, other losses - but instead in a positive way. I definitely seem to have a more passive approach to life than most people in this society.

I had a conversation with my best friend a long time ago, before he was my best friend, about how goals just make you unhappy, and unable to appreciate the blessings of the present moment. He pointed out that as a species we evolved to set goals that we could attain the same day, like hiking up a mountain that we can see in the distance, whereas we live lives with the expectation of long-term goals. He feels happy after riding his bike or hiking to the top of a mountain, something we have done together numerous times since that conversation. One time, there was another person up there. We said hi. The other person was surprised that once we arrived we spent so little time at the top, but for both my friend and I it was more the getting there, the momentary glimpse of the view and the feeling of having reached the top, without any lingering desire to stay.

Perhaps there is more to it than that. Some months ago we read Elaine Scarry's book On Beauty for the philosophy group. I struggled with it, because in my mind there is a conflict between reverence for beauty and for duty, as expressed in these lines by Dante Alighieri:

"Beauty and Duty in my soul keep strife
At question if the heart such course can take
And 'twixt the two ladies hold its love complete.
The fount of gentle speech yields answer meet
That Beauty may be loved for gladness sake
And Duty in the lofty ends of life."

We climb up mountains for the sake of beauty. But reading On Beauty made me realize for the first time that perhaps duty can involve having a vision of a more beautiful world, which itself requires appreciating and being inspired by beauty.

Maybe it seems contrary that I am motivated by a strong sense of duty but lack goals. I stumble upon things that demand my attention, like another person's need or how interesting pain is, and what can be done about it. Probably I would get further if I knew where I was going. If I had some vision and followed resolutely in its pursuit I might have a greater impact on the world and others. But I don't feel as though I'm flailing, just bending down to smell the wild roses and pet the stray cats.

When we look at the trail maps before starting a journey we seek out the loops.