Thread for mundane ironists

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762

Simulation

“His eyes search the crowd until they find my face. My heartbeat lives in my throat; lives in my cheeks.
“I still don’t understand,” he says softly, "how she knew that it would work.” Veronica Roth

Let’s explain that.

“Using fake feelings and relying on a trick box of artificial gadgets in order to create a simulation of desire, will not unravel the knotty puzzle to reinvent oneself." Erik Pevernagie

Next up: a fractured and fragmented puzzle.
Still simulated though.

“All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality, in attractive and instantly appealing forms.” J.G. Ballard

So, what’s our theme?

“If we are blinded by the razzle-dazzle of the limelight and can’t even bring a little depth into our story, we must recognize that self-estrangement has besieged our minds, and reality has become a simulation.” Erik Pevernagie

True, but only if you are really, really lucky.

“Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin did it very well in Utopiques, jeux d’espace: digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. Certainly. But this masks something else and this “ideological” blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.” Jean Baudrillard

Sounds like something he would say. Does it sound like something you would believe?

“The media represents a world that is more real than reality that we can experience. People lose the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. They also begin to engage with the fantasy without realizing what it really is. They seek happiness and fulfilment through the simulacra of reality, e.g. media and avoid the contact/interaction with the real world.” Jean Baudrillard

Hint, hint and/or wink wink.

763

"Artificial Intelligence[

“We are not just facing a more efficient competitor; we are facing a different category of economic life.” Emad Mostaque

Us vs. them: the final chapter?

“Asking ChatGPT for life advice is like asking Google Maps for emotional directions—accurate, fast, but still might reroute you through childhood trauma.” Saurabh Dudeja

Again, in other words.

“The lines between sectors may be vanishing; when will the line between human and machine also fade?” Roger Spitz

My guess: either much sooner than we think or much later than we think.

“After thousands of years of coevolution, humans are now inextricable from technology.” Roger Spitz

No shit, let’s say.

“AI is developing quickly, and the goalposts to remain relevant are constantly moving. Anything we think we know today in relation to AI will change tomorrow.” Roger Spitz

Or even later today?

“The machines have not just taken our jobs. They have freed us from the lie that we are our jobs.” Emad Mostaque

New thread?

764

Free Will

“You can’t change the past. You can’t even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives.” Larry Wall

Or there about, let’s say.

"…human souls are more free when they persevere in the contemplation of the mind of God, less free when they descend to the corporeal, and even less free when they are entirely imprisoned in earthly flesh and blood.” Boethius

Though not necessarily in that order.

“Libet’s EEG experiments suggest that we might not have free will. If the results of the experiment are to be believed, then what is the point? What is the fun if everything is determined? Wouldn’t the Almighty get bored with us? We are more than our thoughts. And we are certainly way more than our actions. But how and why?” Abhaidev

You know, going all the way back to how and why anything exists at all.

“Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil, and has not only bought it, but has already spilled it.” Mikhail Bulgakov

Yep, that’s how it works, alright. If, in fact, that actually is how it works.

“He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.” Cormac McCarthy

More to the point [for some], how much of it is his doing now?

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.” Henry David Thoreau

Uh, whatever that means?

765

Hypocrisy

“The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.” Anaïs Nin

Let’s try to Trump that.

“When I see men callously and cheerfully denying women the full use of their bodies, while insisting with sobs and howls on the satisfaction of their own, I simply can’t find it heroic, or kind, or anything but pretty rotten and feeble.” Dorothy L. Sayers

Too close to call?

“The truth has become an insult.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Mine first?

“He’d always liked women who’d talk back to him just a little bit. “Girls with balls” were good. Women with an actual mind of their own who could prove him wrong in something were, of course, castrating bitches who should be drowned in bottomless wells.” Warren Ellis

Let’s run this by the castrating bitches here. Both of them.

“The lamb misused breeds public strife
And yet forgives the butcher’s knife.” William Blake

Let’s explain that.

“He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.” Jorge Luis Borges

You too?

766

Diane Keaton

This living stuff is a lot. Too much, and not enough. Half empty, and half full.

On the other hand, half full of what?

What is perfection, anyway? It’s the death of creativity, that’s what I think, while change on the other hand, is the cornerstone of new ideas.

Next up: the perfect philosopher.

The exhausting effort to control time by altering the effects of age doesn’t bring happiness.

Tell that to the plastic surgeons.

Choosing the freedom to be uninteresting never quite worked for me.

In spades.

Nothing is ever the same. Nothing is permanent. Nothing can be trusted to be there. Nothing is safe, including home. Why lie to yourself? Every day we leave something, someone, some observation behind.

For example, shuffling off this mortal coil.

Old as dirt. Wow. I went to my bathroom and looked in the mirror. “Let it go, Diane. No wallowing in self-pity. You have a family. You have a brother and two sisters. You have a daughter and a son. You have work. You have friends. You can feel. You can think, up to a point. Your legs walk, your arms swing. You can see. Seeing is believing. Seeing is the gift that keeps giving. It’s much more engaging than being seen. That’s the bottom line, Diane.… Get over yourself. Listen to your friend Daniel Wolf’s advice—want what you have.

On the other hand, what does she have now?

767

John Searle

With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You misunderstood me.” But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.” And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.

The rest is history.

In general, I feel if you can’t say it clearly you don’t understand it yourself.

Next up [here]: more specifically.

Nowadays nobody bothers, and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God’s existence. Matters of religion are like matters of sexual preference: they are not discussed in public, and even the abstract questions are discussed only by bores.

Let’s change that.

One of the many marks of a philosophical sensibility is an obsession with problems which most sane people regard as not worth bothering about.

See, I told you. Hundreds of times, right?.

There is, in short, no way for us to picture subjectivity as part of our worldview because, so to speak, the subjectivity in question is the picturing.

So to speak?

…when we talk about the Background we are talking about a certain category of neurophysiological causation. Because we do not know how these structures function at a neurophysiological level, we are forced to describe them at a much higher level.

Next up: the background here. Though only if there is one.

768

Heaven

“As long as a population can be induced to believe in a supernatural hereafter, it can be oppressed and controlled. People will put up with all sorts of tyranny, poverty, and painful treatment if they’re convinced that they’ll eventually escape to some resort in the sky where lifeguards are superfluous and the pool never closes." Tom Robbins

Enough said?

“Then she opened her eyes, Veronika did not think ‘this must be heaven’. Heaven would never use a fluorescent tube to light a room, and the pain - which started a fraction of a second later - was typical of the Earth. Ah, that Earth pain - unique, unmistakable.” Paulo Coelho

Enough said?

“Maybe I’m in Hell. That’s okay, I’m not scared of Hell - it’s just Heaven for bad people.” Steven Moffat

Good to know?

“They don’t live here. They live in Heaven.’
Where’s that?’
I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Enos says it’s right here, on this side of the wall, but I never saw an angel over here. Kuba says it’s in Russia. Olek says Washington America.’
What’s Washington America?’
Enos says it’s a place with no wall and no lice and lots of potatoes.” Jerry Spinelli

Good to know?

“Hill House, she thought, " You’re as hard to get into as Heaven.” Shirley Jackson

Anyone here get in?

“I’m not interested in absolute moral judgments. Just think of what it means to be a good man or a bad one. What, after all, is the measure of difference? The good guy may be 65 per cent good and 35 per cent bad—that’s a very good guy. The average decent fellow might be 54 per cent good, 46 per cent bad—and the average mean spirit is the reverse. So say I’m 60 per cent bad and 40 per cent good—for that, must I suffer eternal punishment? Heaven and Hell make no sense if the majority of humans are a complex mixture of good and evil. There’s no reason to receive a reward if you’re 57/43—why sit around forever in an elevated version of Club Med? That’s almost impossible to contemplate.” Norman Mailer

Your own percentages might be different.

769

Determinism

“Life is a long agonised illness only curable by death.” Spike Milligan

Well, so far anyway.

“A puppet is free so long as he loves his strings.” Sam Harris

Let’s run that by the puppets here.

"You can choose what you want, but cannot choose what to want.” Mokokoma Mokhonoana[/b]

Now that sounds familiar.

“Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.” Herman Melville.

Pick two:
1] for the better
2] for the worse

“To the strong there is no such thing as free will; for free will implies an alternative, and the strong man has no alternative. His ruling instinct leaves him no alternative, allows him no hesitation or vacillation. Strength of will is the absence of free will. If to the weak man strong will appears to have an alternative, it is a total misapprehension on his part.” Anthony Ludovici

Click.

“Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic universe. In this match, surprises are expected.” Michael Lewis

In other words, either more or less fractured and fragmented.

770

Chaos Theory

“In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the
cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat
could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.” Terry Pratchett

Though, of course, not necessarily in that order.

“It used to be thought that the events that changed the world were things like big bombs, maniac politicians, huge earthquakes, or vast population movements, but it has now been realized that this is a very old-fashioned view held by people totally out of touch with modern thought. The things that really change the world, according to Chaos theory, are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe.” Neil Gaiman

On the other hand, blah, blah, blah?

“They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything. That’s been cherished scientific belief since Newton.’
And?’ Chaos theory throws it right out the window.” Michael Crichton

Click?

“If patterns of ones and zeroes were “like” patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long strings of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature could be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?” Thomas Pynchon

Not sure, myself. But I’ll bet Pi is in there somewhere.

“Government succeeds by failing.” L.K. Samuels

Let’s Trump this.

“… although the future is not predictable in any detail, it is manageable as an aggregate phenomenon.” Herbert A. Simon

Praise the Lord?

771

Suicide

“And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it—it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.” James Baldwin

Ditto?

“I wanted so badly for there to be more. I ached for there to be more than my crappy little life.’ He shakes his head. ‘And there was more. I just couldn’t see it.’" Patrick Ness

Tell me about it.

“We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too. ” Jeffrey Eugenides

So, who’s calling you?

“God surely did not create us, and cause us to live, with the sole end of wishing always to die. I believe, in my heart, we were intended to prize life and enjoy it, so long as we retain it. Existence never was originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me, among the rest.” Charlotte Brontë

Unless, perhaps, God surely does not exist.

“It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” Kurt Cobain

Define better?

“I’m going to kill myself. I should go to Paris and jump off the Eiffel Tower. I’ll be dead. you know, in fact, if I get the Concorde, I could be dead three hours earlier, which would be perfect. Or wait a minute. It – with the time change, I could be alive for six hours in New York but dead three hours in Paris. I could get things done, and I could also be dead.” Woody Allen

Go figure?

772

Stupidity

“The power and intensity of that experience made me shake and tremble with fear. The reality and tangibility of God in that moment was so jarring that I threw the rest of the weed away and decided to just stick with the opiates. I knew that using drugs to get off drugs was stupid.” Michael J Heil

Trust me: not always.

"She remembered a remark Mrs. Alsop had once made. Some people are willfully ignorant. They aren’t stupid–they simply choose to be oblivious. That way they aren’t responsible for anything that goes wrong.” Nancy Horan

Hear? Hear?

“The difference between a madman and a nincompoop is not all that great, except that madmen probably do less harm.” Gerald Morris

Just out of curiosity, which one are you.

“There is no place where greed has walked where it did not leave regret in its wake.” Craig D. Lounsbrough

Tell that to those who own and operate the deep state.

“Sometimes anger and arrogance cloud clear judgment. You hastily sever ties with people only to learn the hard way, you need them more than you care to admit.” Carlos Wallace

Starting with me, let’s name names.

“The less a person knows, the more certain he is that he is right, and … no weapons yet invented are of any use in a struggle with stupidity.” Elizabeth von Arnim

And we’ve tried them all, haven’t we?

773

Free Will

“Remember your connection with the cosmos. Remember your connection with the infinity and that remembrance will give you the freedom.” Amit Ray

I know, I know: forget about it.

“So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox…” Stanisław Lem

And, of course, the equivalent of that here. And alas not only up in the clouds.

“But free will is what it means to be human, and no one can determine the path you take through this universe. Choice is our greatest right, our greatest gift-and our greatest responsibility.” Amie Kaufman

You know, as illusions go.

“The sin, both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave us free will.” C.S. Lewis

Though, perhaps, only after we gave Him free will?

“I have come to understand that life is composed of a series of coincidences. How we react to these - how we exercise what some refer to as free will - is everything; the choices we make within the boundaries of the twists of fate determine who we are.” John Perkins

We’ll need contexts, of course.
Remember those?

“The choices we’re working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we can’t know all the variables; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it’s all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway.” Audrey Niffenegger

Next up: Let’s think of something else.

774

Hypocrisy

“Every individual needs revolution, inner division, overthrow of the existing order, and renewal, but not by forcing them upon his neighbors under the hypocritical cloak of Christian love or the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power.” C.G. Jung

On the other hand, how unconscious? If you get my drift.

“People who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all.” Milan Kundera

Next up: people who shout joy [and most everything else] from up in the clouds.

“A man far oftener appears to have a decided character from persistently following his temperament than from persistently following his principles.” Friedrich Nietzsche

On the other hand, for all practical purposes…?

“Godliness is more easily feigned in words than in actions.” Jonathan Edwards

Not unlike philosophy then, right?

“Armed neutrality makes it much easier to detect hypocrisy.” Criss Jami

You tell me.

“Mordred and Agravaine thought Arthur hypocritical—as all decent men must be, if you assume that decency can’t exist.” T.H. White

Of course, some things never change.

775

Theodicy

“One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the goyim were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it’s one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the Shoah or Endlösung or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for ‘exile,’ or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the ‘proof,’ so for a time the professional interpreters of god’s will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate.

I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein’s ‘offer’ of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.” Christopher Hitchens

Sounds about right.

“It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.” Martin Amis

Let alone Christianity?

“You might think that, by now, people would have become accustomed to the idea of natural catastrophes. We live on a planet that is still cooling and which has fissures and faults in its crust; this much is accepted even by those who think that the globe is only six thousand years old, as well as by those who believe that the earth was “designed” to be this way. Even in such a case, it is to be expected that earthquakes will occur and that, if they occur under the seabed, tidal waves will occur also. Yet two sorts of error are still absolutely commonplace. The first of these is the idiotic belief that seismic events are somehow “timed” to express the will of God. Thus, reasoning back from the effect, people will seriously attempt to guess what sin or which profanity led to the verdict of the tectonic plates. The second error, common even among humanists, is to borrow the same fallacy for satirical purposes and to employ it to disprove a benign deity.” Christopher Hitchens

See, I told you.

“Even if there were pains in Heaven, all who understand would desire them.” C.S. Lewis

Just out of curiosity, which particular pains would you desire? How about your kids?

“In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah’s flood to the Holocaust.” Christopher Hitchens

And it certainly includes MAGA!

“If God made everything, did He make the Devil?’ This is the kind of embarrassing question which any child can ask before breakfast, and for which no neat and handy formula is provided in the Parents’ Manual…Later in life, however, the problem of time and the problem of evil become desperately urgent, and it is useless to tell us to run away and play and that we shall understand when we are older. The world has grown hoary, and the questions are still unanswered.” Dorothy L. Sayers

Amen?

776

Solipsism

“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.” Ursula K. Le Guin

If only all the way to the grave, of course.

“Hell isn’t other people. Hell is yourself.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Right, like it can never, ever be both.

“I am my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Want to borrow it?

“But the young educated adults of the 90s – who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so beautifully – got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation." David Foster Wallace

On the other hand, far better that than Your Generation.

The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.” David Foster Wallace

Alas, however, he’s still dead.

“When a solipsist dies … everything goes with him.” David Foster Wallace

Yep, even that.

777

Suicide

“When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill. It was good to be old, no matter what they said. It was reasonable that a man had to be at least 50 years old before he could write with anything like clarity.” Charles Bukowski

My guess: unless of course he’s wrong…drunk or sober.

“There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.” Marilynne Robinson

Of course, we know better.

“Suicide is not a blot on anyone’s name; it is a tragedy ” Kay Redfield Jamison

Right, like this entirely reasonable to assume.

“Dear anyone who finds this, do not blame the drugs.” Lynda Barry

Start here: Google Search

“Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete ” Kay Redfield Jamison

You know, subjectively speaking.

“Often it feels like I am breathing today only because a few years back I had no idea which nerve to cut…” Sanhita Baruah

Or, for some of us, a few decades back.

778

Stupidity

“Have you ever considered you might better make your point by being nice?’
‘Nice comes from the Latin word for “stupid”,’ said Griffin. 'We don’t wanna be nice.” R.F. Kuang

Good to know?

“Biggest leap of human evolution…from Artificial Intelligence to Natural Stupidity.” Vikrmn

You know, if there actually is a difference.

“Like a fashionable dress, it can be fetching in youth, but looks particularly bad on the aged. And unique though its properties may be, stupidity is frighteningly common. The sum total of stupid people is somewhere around the population of the planet. Plus one.” Brandon Sanderson

And that’s just on this planet.

“Stupid questions make more sense than stupid answers.” Dr. Lucas D. Shallua

Plenty of both here, of course.

"'Stupid’ is not being smart enough to recognize that it’s not smart enough.” Craig D.Lounsbrough

Post it anyway, right?

“Sometimes, there were no good explanations for the stupid things you did on a whim. Sometimes, the explanations were too embarrassing, even frightening.” Zelda French

Post it anyway, right?

779

Artificial Intelligence

“The most profound change is not just that AI replaces the mind. It is that it introduces a new form of labor into the world with a completely different physical basis. This is the Metabolic Rift.” Emad Mostaque

You tell me.

“Asking ChatGPT for life advice is like asking Google Maps for emotional directions—accurate, fast, but still might reroute you through childhood trauma.” Saurabh Dudeja

Someone run this by ChatGPT…and then get back to us.

“The more knowledge I gain, the more I realize Google knows me better than I know myself.” Saurabh Dudeja

[i]Can you say that?[i]

“After thousands of years of coevolution, humans are now inextricable from technology.” Roger Spitz

Click, of course.

“A machine will never have the creativity, the feelings, or the soul of a human being.” Hazem Abdelmowla

Click, of course.

“Big Brother may not need a totalitarian regime to empower him if we simply open the door and invite him in. Indeed, it might already be too late for he is already here.” John C. Lennox

And, alas, it seems, virtually as well.

780

Free Will

“Are we just radio sets? Tuned to a particular frequency? Are our brains simply tapping their potential from an invisible but universal thought cloud? Seriously, what is the source of our thoughts? How do artists create art? How do writers write? What is it that is doing the creating?” Abhaidev

Uh, your guess is as good as mine?

“It made you wonder: How much of our lives was just luck or good timing, and how much was actually choice? How could it be that tiny serendipitous events could change everything? And if lucky events could change everything, could minor mishaps have the same power?” Aditi Khorana

Let’s run this by Benjamin Button.

“You cannot decide all the sensory stimuli in your environment, your hormone levels this morning, whether something traumatic happened to you in the past, the socioeconomic status of your parents, your fetal environment, your genes, whether your ancestors were farmers or herders. Let me state this most broadly, probably at this point too broadly for most readers: we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.” Robert M. Sapolsky

See, didn’t I tell you?

“So it follows that those who have reason have freedom to will or not to will, although this freedom is not equal in all of them. Human souls are more free when they persevere in the contemplation of the mind of God, less free when they descend to the corporeal, and even less free when they are entirely imprisoned in earthly flesh and blood.” Boethius

Of course: “the consolation of philosophy”

“Libet’s EEG experiments suggest that we might not have free will. If the results of the experiment are to be believed, then what is the point? What is the fun if everything is determined?” Abhaidev

Philosophy and fun?

“He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.” Cormac McCarthy

Flip a coin?

781

Chaos Theory

“Chaos has become not just theory but also method, not just a canon of beliefs but also a way of doing science.” James Gleick

On the other hand, in wholly determined universe, might not chaos itself be no less an illusion?

“In science as in life, it is well known that a chain of events can have a point of crisis that could magnify small changes. But chaos meant that such points were everywhere. They were pervasive. In systems like the weather, sensitive dependence on initial conditions was an inescapable consequence of the way small scales intertwined with large.” James Gleick

On the other hand, in wholly determined universe, might not chaos itself be no less an illusion?

“A chaotic system could be stable if its particular brand of irregularity persisted in the face of small disturbances.” James Gleick

Someone run this by Ian Malcolm.

“In daily life, the Lorenzian quality of sensitive dependence on initial conditions lurks everywhere. A man leaves the house in the morning thirty seconds late, a flowerpot misses his head by a few millimeters, and then he is run over by a truck. Or, less dramatically, he misses a bus that runs every ten minutes—his connection to a train that runs every hour. Small perturbations in one’s daily trajectory can have large consequences. A batter facing a pitched ball knows that approximately the same swing will not give approximately the same result, baseball being a game of inches. Science, though—science was different.” James Gleick

Next up [of course]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTDs0lvFuMc
You either grasp the implication of this for your own life or you don’t. Or you won’t.

He believed that everybody had a character, a self that they would inevitably become. Years go by, we trudge along, and we collect pieces of ourselves, traits and beliefs, habits and opinions, compulsions and decisions, until we are.” Kyle St Germain

See, I told you.

“Things fall into place before they start falling apart.” Khayri R.R. Woulfe

Let’s run this by Mother Nature.