Clockwork Oranges

This is a review I posted on Amazon that I am also posting here regarding "Free Will" by Sam Harris.

I came into the book thinking I'd be further convinced that free will is an illusion but, after reading it, I'm more skeptical than I was before. Well, I learned a word for what I am -- compatibilist.

To me, the more lucid and resonating arguments from the book came from Daniel Dennett and others Harris quotes in opposition to his thesis that we're puppets on unseen strings. I agree that consciousness is not ultimately in charge, but my CEO brain still retains the power to "deliberate and choose and act," as I am doing with this review, or when I choose to say something sarcastic or not (and have done both), or whether to take advantage of the broken candy machine or not (and have done both). True, I don't inspire the urge to be sarcastic or steal a Snickers, but I have the ultimate say in whether I do it or not.

Or is Harris really saying men who cheat have no say in the matter? He never brings up this scenario, but I guess if he feels murderers can't help themselves, neither can adulterers. I disagree. Men may be, for biological reasons, more prone to cheat, but that does not mean those who cheat do so unavoidably.

Harris focuses somewhat on the extreme choice of murder, and seems to want to equate murderers with tumors in their brains to murderers who have unlucky genes, bad parents, and an unlucky environment. Well, we can see and remove the tumor in the former (though I still don't know what an apt form of justice would be to such a person), but what do we do to the person who kills for the fun of it? Could such a person be reformed? Could they develop enough willpower not to yield to the urge to kill? Isn't that a kind of free will, then?

If there's no free will, how does anyone ever effectively diet? How does Alcoholics Anonymous work? How can one have the atoms to abuse alcohol and then never touch it again? The conscious self never makes a decision in any of this?

Harris is right when he says we cannot go back in time to see how someone might have reacted differently, but we also can't see the situations where a store wasn't robbed, when a family wasn't murdered, when a home invader decided not to drop the bat on the patriarch's head. What in those situations? Is not beating someone with a bat still evidence of no free will? The genes just didn't have it in them at that time?

Or maybe Harris and I agree more than I think, and we're just defining free will differently, because he does says that choices matter.

And as a final criticism, the book did feel breezy, heavy on rhetoric, light on evidence and real world application. Harris brings up a couple of real world scenarios, but doesn't really develop or probe them in meaningful ways. The awful scenario he opens the book with never gets brought up again, for example. We're left to think Harris thinks what was done to that family was essentially unavoidable. The book feels like Harris spent a couple of weekends writing it.

A book that treads some of the same ground, but with more efficacy, depth, rigor, and power to persuade, is Incognito. I'd recommend that book over this one.

Incognito

I haven't published anything for a while because of a lack of things to say and because I got a Kindle and so I've been reading much more than I usually do. The increase in reading has brought two things to the fore: I've begun writing short stories (and a novel, but that seems so long) and I've been looking into neuroscience as a possible path since working as a paid fiction writer of any kind seems less and less likely to happen (but I keep plugging away).

The best books lately have been Incognito (I forget the subtitle ... and the author) and The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer. Both are excellent. The first is about all the unknown processes the brain does as it sits in total darkness in our heads. The best, and most difficult to accept chapters, revolve around free will, especially as it relates to crime.

Shermer's book continually drives home its thesis -- beliefs come first, then we seek out evidence to confirm those beliefs -- by applying it to everything from religion, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, politics, ghosts, and even science.

The New and Improved Prophet

Even as a believing Mormon, I thought it was silly the way certain figures have come to be represented over the years, from the Americanization of Jesus to the modernization of Joseph Smith. Compare:

Big nose, slightly bug-eyed, looking like the 19th century military and spiritual leader he saw himself as.

More prophet and less theocrat. Looks like a man burdened by God.

Hey, the all-American boy. Handsome, strong, clothes and features completely removed from reality. Those marketers sure can do their job.

Video Games and Values

The Supreme Court recently ruled a California law banning the selling of M-rated, violent video games to minors was unconstitutional. Justice Scalia, whom I dislike in just about every way, wrote the majority opinion.

The ruling is welcome, but the law was misguided in the first place. Almost no one thinks minors should be allowed to play violent video games. Stores already have practices in place to prevent their purchases. Even I, at 29, have to show my ID most of the time.

Also, the games, like movies and music, are "rated" so that parents know what kind of content is in them. And you know, if I had a 13-year-old boy, I would buy Call of Duty for him, or Fallout, or pretty much whatever game. Maybe not some of the really crass and vulgar ones, but those titles are fine for a teenager, if they're interested.

The reason people are worried about it is the idea that violent imagery begets violence in people. Video games must be worse because they're interactive. This is based on the false notion that we are blank slates with brains that are putty-like and adopt whatever they are exposed to. This is not so.

That's not to suggest environment can't shape us - it can and does. But generally not through mediums of entertainment, like books, movies, music, video games, and even pornography. A few people might be genetically disposed to be more affected by such things, but here's an easy test to the effect of violent games on youths: has crime risen or declined in the years since Grand Theft Auto? If violent video games were a instigator, wouldn't we see a dramatic rise in aggressiveness from the $18 billion dollar a year industry?

Instead, the effects of video games are minimal. They get blamed because they are a relatively new technology, just like people thought the Walkman was the end of conversation. The iPod, too. And how Twitter is allegedly going to make us dumb and only able to communicate in 140 characters and unable to have the attentions pans we're supposed to.

The medium is not the message. Behaviorism got it wrong. If you want to ban violent games, you would have to logically extend that to every other medium as well.

Mike Hammer

That's Mike, all right. Women can't keep away from him, and he can't care less.

By happenstance, I read the new Mike Hammer book, Kiss Her Goodbye, and saw perhaps his most famous movie version, Kiss Me Deadly, this week. It was my first Mike Hammer experience, though I'm familiar with the character. The author, Mickey Spillane, is dead but another author is finishing and publishing his manuscripts. I checked out the move because a new Criterion edition is due out this week.

I'm a fan of noir and tough-minded protagonists, but Mike Hammer is too dated. His sexism and machismo have thankfully gone out of favor, and so to hear the way he describes women in terms of their physique and himself in terms of his hardness made me cringe and chuckle, respectively. The story itself is pretty interesting, but much more detail is given to Hammer's day to day gumshoe-ing rather than delving deeper into the plot. It's skimmed over in favor of Hammer's vanity.

I wasn't impressed with the earlier film, either. I liked the beginning, but it didn't really hold my interest after the first half hour or so. I finished it, but didn't really care about the story.

The God Delusion

Would it have killed him to smile?

A recent Gallup poll found that 93% of Americans believe in God. That is astounding. Such a high percentage. On what other subject do so many Americans agree? The number of people who are certain there is a God is 73%. I guess those lucky folks don't have to live by faith anymore.

What astounds me, as someone who became an empiricist nel mezzo del cammin di sua vita, is the lack of evidence for a God and yet so many people believe in their god while denying the rest - Ra, Buddha, Allah, Moloch, Baal, Zeus - and the rest of the many hundreds (maybe thousands) of Gods that were once worshiped but have know fallen out of favor.

Believers will probably tell me to look at the simple fact we exist or a baby's face and the diversity around me and tell me to deny the evidence of God. And I will. There are natural explanations for those things, biological evolution chief among them. Then maybe someone would say that a god started and guided that process. I'm still doubtful, but open to the possibility. But that god is certainly different than the God I was raised to worship, the Heavenly Father who hears and answers prayers and intervenes (and sometimes chooses to not intervene) in the lives of his children.

I'm talking about real evidence. Something that points to a supernatural being instead of a natural answer that requires no such thing. First hand witnesses of God are no good, unless they happened to be caught on tape. I would bet a large number of that 93% that believes in God still thinks that a person who says he has seen God (and converses with him regularly) is a kook (and yet Joseph Smith and others get a pass).

Feelings are useless as evidence, by the way. How far would a lawyer get if he based his case on a feeling rather than evidence? I get the same sensation from a movie as what I used to think was the Holy Ghost.

There's that stupid saying, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Actually, it is evidence of absence. Until there's evidence, we have no reason to think anything is so. Who is agnostic on the existence of unicorns, dragons, elves, fairies and Santa Claus? There is no evidence for any of those things, and none of them have a large following (except children on the last one because of stories adults tell them).

Yet so few people are agnostic or outright disbelievers in God even though there's just as much a paucity of evidence and much more plausible explanations for things people like to chalk up to a divine being.

Fogeyism

Of course he dislikes TV. The man uses a typewriter. Older is not necessarily better, sir. Why not write longhand, then?

I've never read a David McCullough book and now I really don't care to. In an interview with Time, he was asked what he thought future generations might say or wonder about us, the same way we wonder about otherwise intelligent men who denied women the same rights as men, and owned slaves. McCullough's answer - "Why we watch so much TV."

What a lame answer to an interesting question. Is TV not worth watching when you are on it, Mr. McCullough? PBS? The evening news? A good comedy or drama? Do you never seek pleasure, Mr. McCullough? Do you think reading is inherently superior to watching? Are you a determinist who thinks that watching TV has some kind of lasting impact on our capacity to learn, socialize and behave?

There is a lot of TV that is not worth one's time, just as there are many books, hobbies, paintings, sports, pastimes, movies and whatever else that is arguably not worth one's time. Why Mr. McCullough singled out television, I do not know, but I do not think it was a worthwhile answer at all.