The Realityist

We crossed the country in a red Chevy Nova. I was an 11-year-old Nebraska native and I'd been thrilled to see mountains for the first time when we went through the Rockies on our way to California. Temperatures rose coming down into the desert and my dad, brother and I puttered along at 55 miles per hour, sweltering in a car without air conditioning. I liked to stick my hand out the window and let it be pushed up and down like an airplane wing. Reaching Arizona, we diverted from our main route to make a side trip to see the Grand Canyon.

The road to the viewing area passed by what's called the Little Colorado River Gorge. There was nothing little about it. It was stunning and huge. It twisted and turned and plunged 3,000 feet into layers of massive red and orange rock. My boy's brain ogled, "Whoa, what could top this?!!"

Little Colorado River Gorge

But, nearing the viewing area, you get glimpses. You begin to realize. You begin to realize your approaching something that can't be realized. And when you get there, get around the visitor center to the viewing platform, you confront a scene your imagination simply cannot comprehend. It's too big. Your mind can't grasp its vastness and abyssal depth. The brain's orientation response is obliterated. But only briefly. Soon the moment of abject awe and fear passes. The mind adjusts. Equilibrium is restored, and you settle into admiring the spectacular view.

That moment of true awe stayed with me, however, and became foundational.

Even before the trip to California, I'd had moments of standing at the abyss. These were events in my mind best described as times when words suddenly lost their meaning -- nothing made sense, nothing could make sense. I would be terrified, but the terror would pass quickly. It had the effect that meaninglessness lost its horror. This too was foundational.

Looking back now, it's clear that in a way I was (and still am) neuro-divergent. Not debilitating like autism -- I was a mostly normal boy -- but, different. One thing I realized early on was that words don't have an intrinsic relationship with the things they refer to. Words are conventional. The word "cup" refers to a thing we drink coffee from because we agree that that's what it means. There's no relationship of the word to the object outside of that social agreement.

It also meant early on I realized the stories people told about reality could have the same character. The stories were conventional and often arbitrary. This kind of mental framework made me a natural skeptic and doubter, even as people tried to instill in me important "truths." It could lead to awkward moments when I asked unwanted questions: "If God was Jesus's father, who was God's father?" "If God is all-powerful, all-knowing and entirely good, why does he need to be prayed to in order to do the right thing?"

Questions like these could invoke horrified looks, stammering answers, or even anger. I soon learned to keep a lid on them and, perhaps unfortunately, a lid on my thoughts generally.

Eventually, probably late high school or early college, I realized I was, by inclination, a philosopher. By this I don't mean anything high-falutin' like "philosopher king" or some kind of seer of truth and dispenser of wisdom. I mean someone who likes turning over ideas, poking and prodding them, looking at them from different angles, seeing what holds up and what doesn't. People often don't see that this is what actual philosophy is. Philosophy isn't the act of figuring out The Truth; it's an exploration, and one with no prospect of final arrival, which, for a philosopher, is good news. (Philosophy would be pretty boring if the truth were knowable and known.)

But why does a philosopher think this way? Here we get back to the Grand Canyon and other, similar experiences of awe. These experiences are cases of encountering the sublime, i.e., the vastness of reality and the smallness of our own being. They lead to the recognition that any ideas we might have about reality are inevitably small too. This doesn't mean any idea is as good as any other. Some ideas are clearly better than others, but much depends on the measuring sticks you use. No idea can capture the fullness of reality, or even really come close.

Several years ago, I came up with a term to label this line of thinking: realityism. And I was a realityist. (It's a bit self-glorifying, sure, but, you know, we all have egos to feed.)

Why not "realist" or "realism?" Realism, as a practical matter of applying experience and good sense to various problems and issues, is fine. But, philosophically, realism implies that one knows what reality is with a level of certainty. Certainty, however, is unavailable. Reality is too big. A stubborn realism can turn into an inflexible dogma and thus become self-defeating, both in the sense that it's vulnerable to being blindsided by what the dogma doesn't account for, and in the sense that it tends to shut down further inquiry. If you possess the truth, there's no point in continuing to seek it.

So being a realityist isn't about striving to know reality, it's about improving one's understanding of it while realizing there's no end point.

My experience of realityism contains a level of ruthlessness -- no idea is sacred, none should be spared the rigors of scrutiny, none should command unconditional loyalty -- but it's also a source of compassion and humility: We're all small, everyone's understanding is limited, we all stand near the abyss. Can I judge people for their fears, angers and hatreds? For their beliefs that emerge from their experiences and struggles? Are my ideas so clearly better than theirs?

No.

Woodland Stream by Doug Ross

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Lapse in Judgment

On Sept. 26, 1983, Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov saved the world. An officer with the Soviet Air Defense Forces, he oversaw a computer-controled network of satellites that monitored the skies for a possible nuclear strike from the United States. On that day the computer system reported five incoming missiles. Petrov double-checked the data: The probability of a nuclear attack was 100%.

The system was new and Petrov didn't entirely trust it. There was no confirmation from ground radar and Petrov thought if the U.S. was going to strike, it would be all-out, not just five missiles. Nevertheless, his duty was to report the attack -- a duty reinforced by a command structure that could be brutally severe -- and if he did, the the chances were good that Soviet leadership, given the very short time window, would order a retaliatory strike.

Petrov didn't report it. He exercised judgment and made a decision. A subsequent investigation uncovered a flaw in the Soviet early-detection system.

I learned of this episode recently when reading *A Web of Our Own Making by Antón Barba-Kay. The book is a philosophical critique of our digital age and a hard look at what our digital realms are doing to us as people. There's much that's not good. One thing is the erosion of the willingness, and possibly the ability, of people to exercise judgment. Instead we're handing that chore over to computers and big data.

The allure is that a computer's judgment will be unbiased and fair. Human emotion and fallibility will not intrude. But what is the risk of deferring to computers? Beyond the fact that computers are themselves fallible and their datasets often imperfect, there's the reality that the less people exercise judgment the less good at it they will be (use it or lose it) and the more they'll feel the need to rely on technology to tell them what the correct decisions are. Barba-Kay doesn't hedge:

"Data analysis has eclipsed human judgment as our shared conception of what's most authoritative."

In Petrov's time, the dilemma was clear cut. The technology gave him an answer and he had to decide whether to trust it or not. It was a moment that demanded a decision, one with potentially catastrophic consequences. Today's deferral of decision-making to algorithms and datasets is piecemeal, we parcel out our decisions in bits. And maybe that's more pernicious.

A while back, my brother and I were playing with AI, trying to produce an image we wanted for a role-playing game. Despite using templates and elaborate prompt instructions, the best we could do was only kind of close to what we wanted. The temptation is to settle for that instead of the the more challenging and time-consuming work of creating the image ourselves. That kind of temptation permeates people's experience with the digital realm. Our choices are defined there and we tend to settle for what's available.

AI is, of course, the amazing, splashy, scary new thing but digital services have been funneling people's choices for some time by learning what they like (at a given moment) and reinforcing those preferences. "They give us what they make us feel we want," writes Barba-Kay.

It ends up, he says, as a kind of abdication of responsibility to companies and the data they've collected. They exist to do our thinking for us.

Online chats and social media message boards have their own dynamics that erode thoughtfulness. The like feature becomes an addictive pursuit where folks post to please and attract attention, a further channeling of behavior toward narrow, self-supporting avenues of thought. These venues favor shock or sensation over careful thinking. Strong emotions are exciting; circumspection is boring.

The allure of buying things to satisfy immediate wants, the draw of social media cuteness, and the drama of chatroom shouting matches -- it all creates an emphasis on the new and the buzz of the now. The scope of our digital world is short term, Barba-Kay says, and erodes society's capacity for long term thinking. Addressing problems like environmental degradation in a meaningful way has become essentially impossible. The speed of the digital world and the slow pace of climate change are, as Barba-Kay says, "temporal opposites."

"So long as the new is normal, no sustained vision can accumulate into settled practice."

Then there's the fracturing of people into groups based on interests and viewpoints. Online we can avoid folks who don't share our perspectives. Barba-Kay calls the subsequent groupings of like-minded people the "social imaginary" and it tends to erode the skills we need to get along in actual, physical communities where "we must inescapably work out our differences about shared concerns."

Actual communities, as opposed to virtual ones, have the tendency to soften divisions and act as anchors against extreme views. Virtual communities tend to encourage divisions and reinforce extremes.

Then there's the kind of slow divorce from mundane virtues of non-digital life. One recent study, Barba-Kay points out, shows that people are more likely to be honest when they write things down on paper, as opposed to texting, emails, chats, or other digital communication. The ink on paper has a "presence" the digital realm cannot provide, and it's a presence people tend to instinctively respect. Online, the need to adhere to the constraints of honesty fades.

Participation in social media is a projecting of a ghostly self that's physically invulnerable. This projected self is a kind of armor, and a license to say and do things you might not otherwise. It also offers a way to curate your projected personality. To do that in face-to-face socializing takes more effort and can never be wholly complete. Some of what's less savory always slips through. But knowing that people see you as something other than your idealized self is important, if for nothing else than as an antidote for self delusion. Online our idealized selves can feel like our real selves.

Strangely, this dynamic can make us more psychologically vulnerable. The lack of constraint can lead to ugly, vicious comments that almost no one would make in face-to-face settings. The sting of those can create surprising anxiety even when it's clear the comments are unfounded. The glow of one's online persona is dimmed.

Ultimately, I believe, and so does Barba-Kay, that the non-digital world is far richer than the virtual one can ever be. Technology is at its best when it enables us to make our lives richer, to see more. Digital technology certainly can, and does, do this. But that aspect has almost become an afterthought. Instead, digital technology has evolved to become a siren call beckoning us away from the substantive world into a virtual one where we end up seeing less. 

"Whatever boon it [digital technology] offers -- and those are untold and undeniable -- we are, in my view, continuing to trade away the richest possibilities of human vision, the kinds of ideals that justify our very existence, for the lesser comforts of safe and predictable rule by data."

Perhaps the fundamental lapse in judgment is the belief that technology can make us better. It can't. It can make us better off, but not better.

Twilight of the Hunter

I stepped out onto the muddy parking area and donned my blaze-orange hoodie. Another deer hunting season had come. I readied my predatory gear — utility belt, small backpack, rifle — and headed into the wilderness. It was warmish, 36 degrees, for an early November morning in central Minnesota.

After killing my first deer seven years earlier (detailed *here), I succeeded again the next year and, boy, I thought I must be pretty good at this. My luck ran out, however, and the next four years were busts. One year, the only deer I saw pranced across the road as I was driving away from the hunting grounds. I was sure it was mocking me.

This time would be different. A buddy who was into bow hunting scouted out the Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge and thought it was pretty ideal. A couple of weeks earlier, I came to look for myself and agreed. The wooded and winding St. Francis River flowed through this section of the refuge, but the dense woods were broken by large patches of grassland. That’s what Sherburne is known for — an area where the ecologies of big woods, marsh and prairie meet. It creates “edge country” and that’s what deer like best. Deer sightings and signs were plentiful on my scouting trip. This was a good spot.

The 30,000-acre refuge near the town of Zimmerman was established in 1967 and is maintained by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. It has a reputation as a birder’s paradise. There’s a 7-mile circuit through the refuge’s marshlands and every time I’ve made the drive, the bird watching has been wonderful. Moving slowly, the car acts as a blind and often you can get quite close. My favorite experience was stopping to watch a kingfisher swooping and snatching small fish from a pond. I was close enough that its sleek blue, white and gray body filled the field of vision of my binoculars. Other birds I’ve seen there include cormorants, grebes, mergansers, wood ducks, swans, sandhill cranes and bald eagles.

If it’s a wildlife refuge, why allow deer hunting?

Having no natural predators in the vicinity (namely wolves), deer populations can get overly large, which leads to them overgrazing the vegetation and depriving other animals of habitat. Allowing human hunting is probably not ideal, especially since the culling is concentrated during a short period of the year. It would be better ecologically if the hunting was more spread out over time.

On this morning, I was a couple miles north of the bird-infested marsh in an area of drier ground. I headed toward the river and into the trees that lined the banks. I used a method called still-hunting: walking slowly for a few yards, then stopping (maybe a deer will flush, thinking it’s been spotted), then scanning for any shape that might be a deer in hiding (in the woods, my imagination conjures lots of deer-like shapes), then moving again a few more yards and repeating the process. The method is taxing and challenging but I lack the patience to hunker down in a deer stand for hours at a time. I’m a walker, a pacer. I need to move.

Something seemed to shift. I raised the rifle. The something resolved itself into a tangle of deadwood and ground plants moving with the breeze. I lowered the rifle.

“Rifle” is a glamorous word for the weapon I carried. It was actually a slug gun. The Sherburne refuge is located below what in Minnesota is called the “shotgun line.” North of it, high-powered rifles like a .30-06 are allowed for big-game hunting. Below it, you have to use a shotgun. The rationale is that a shotgun has a shorter range and the projectile is less likely to carry for miles into someone’s house or workplace. But the rule is antiquated. Slug guns aren’t really shotguns like you would use for pheasant hunting. They now have rifled barrels and use special shells with bullets that are jacketed with a sabot — a polymer thingamajig that separates from the bullet as soon as it leaves the barrel. It helps accelerate the bullet to a much higher velocity than you’d get from a heavy slug in a regular shotgun. It makes the potentially lethal range nearly as long as a typical hunting rifle.

In fact my slug gun was more powerful than the pistol-caliber carbine I’d used on previous hunts above the shotgun line. Called the H&R Tracker II, it was twenty gauge and single-shot, meaning you had to reload by hand after every shot. The gun wasn’t pretty but I kind of liked it for its rugged simplicity.

I continued my advance through the brush near the river. Even though it was slow — tiptoeing through the ground clutter, stepping over dead wood — it was fatiguing. I was beginning to feel my high-side-of-50 age. Yet the toil was part of the reason I’d taken up deer hunting. I had this strong, capable body. An instinct nagged me use it, use it before using it was no longer an option.

By late morning, my meanderings had resulted in no deer sign. The sun was up and the air had warmed to the point I was sweating. I doubted I would have any luck today. Then I heard splashing near the river. Slowly I approached, rifle ready. Not a deer but two animals playing in the water near a sharp u-bend in the river. At first I thought they were otters but, not having that eel-like quality, I realized they were muskrats. The pair didn’t seem to be doing anything in particular — diving, circling, climbing onto the bank to hunch for a while, then plunging back into the water.

I set the rifle against a tree, sat down on a fallen trunk and just watched. The muskrats continued their pattern of play for a few minutes, then decided on a change of venue and swam up river out of sight. I decided it was a good time for lunch and ate my ham-and-cheese sandwich, apple and potato chips. In that setting — overlooking the little gully where the muskrats had played — the mundane fare was acutely tasty. I realized that without even having seen a deer, this morning’s hunt was a successful one.

I decided to head home. I cut a northwesterly course toward the trail that would take me back to the car-park. After a 100 yards or so of woods, I emerged onto a heavily grazed field and walked toward a line of trees where I knew the trail was. My mind drifted into reveries as it tends to do. The opening of the senses that comes from hunting, when sights and sounds have an enhanced distinctiveness, had by that time faded. Naturally, that’s when the buck appeared.

It trotted in an unhurried way across the field, nearly perpendicular to my path, maybe 75 yards away. The sun was at my back, the wind blew toward me, and the deer didn’t know I was there. My reverie snapped; my heart surged into my throat. I raised the rifle and pulled back the hammer. It was definitely a buck with a good-sized set of antlers. I put a bead on it and led it a little, following it with the iron sights.

I didn’t take the shot.

The buck disappeared into a thicket of tall reeds. I made a half-hearted attempt to follow but soon gave up and headed back toward the trail.

Why didn’t I take the shot?

The proximate answer is that the deer was a moving target on the edge of the range I was confident I could hit with any precision. I’m pretty sure if I’d pulled the trigger, I would have hit it. I just didn’t know where. Hitting a game animal in the wrong spot is bad for a number of reasons, but the main one is that you’d wound it in such a way that it would run off and die a slow death.

Afterward my brother said I should have shouted. The deer likely would have stopped and then I would have had a clean broadside shot. That’s probably true. But would I have taken the shot even then?

I think now the answer is no. Something had changed in the course of the morning. I had answered the call of my predatory instincts. Hunting had been a revealing experience and I have no regrets, but the time had come to set it aside.

Amateurs at War

 

In 1859, after being sentenced to hang for the ill-fated Harper’s Ferry insurrection (a quixotic adventure aimed at getting the slaves of the South to rise up against their masters), John Brown scribbled a short note and left it in his jail cell. It proved prophetic: “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”

Yet, on the way to the gallows, as he rode in a wagon sitting on his own coffin, Brown looked out at the Blue Ridge Mountains and said, “This is a beautiful country. I never had the pleasure of really seeing it before.”

The anecdote appears in the opening pages of Shelby Foote’s *The Civil War: A Narrative and is one of the pithy asides that took me off guard and donged a bell deep within. For me this is history at its most appealing. It doesn’t lecture; it takes you there.

This last spring I took myself there, or, anyway, the Gettysburg battlefield park in Pennsylvania. In the museum’s bookshop I saw a title, The Stars in Their Courses. It was an excerpt from Foote’s narrative dealing with the Battle of Gettysburg and put into book form. I read the first paragraphs and thought, wow, this could be good. So I bought it and quickly devoured  it. When I got home, I bought the whole thing -- hardbound, three volumes, 1.2 million words — and dove in.

Shelby Foote entered pop culture when Ken Burns’s seminal documentary, The Civil War, aired on PBS in 1990. Foote was one of the main commentators in the 9-episode series. His deep knowledge, southern drawl, tobacco-stained beard and cornball humor captivated audiences. And, previously, so had his writing among history buffs and literary types.

I was quickly immersed in the world of the Civil War, Foote’s old-school style really capturing the atmosphere of the conflict. (He composed it with a fountain pen.) The work, published between 1958 and 1974, is military history and focuses on the campaigns and the leaders who managed them, figures like Lincoln and Davis, Grant and Lee, Jackson and Sherman, and many others. The really useful thing for me is how well Foote ties events together, showing how even distant battles west of the Mississippi had an impact on the more prominent action in the east. Simply riveting is the narration of the sequence of battles in 1862 when Robert E. Lee takes over the Confederate army and wins victory after victory until he’s finally stopped at Antietam. It’s edge-of-your-seat stuff with the outcome of the war teetering in the balance.

One thing that stands out is all the hesitancy, fumbling, hair-brained schemes and general ineptitude shown on both sides during the war’s first years. These weren’t the highly institutionalized militaries of Europe, but amateurs figuring it out as they went. Early in the war, one general complained to Abraham Lincoln that the army was too green to go on the offensive. Lincoln replied: “You are green, it is true; but they are green also. You are all green alike.”

Admiring Foote’s gifts as a storyteller and a historian, I assumed he was a professional academic. I didn’t realize until the end of volume one that he was actually a novelist. This is what he writes in the bibliographical notes:

The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth — not a different truth: the same truth — only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes [...]

This has been my aim, as well, only I have combined the two. Accepting the historian’s standards without his paraphernalia, I have employed the novelist’s methods without his license. Instead of inventing characters and incidents, I have searched them out — and having found them, I took them as they were.

That approach applied even to Lincoln whose dark side is made visible. Lincoln possessed a ruthlessness that can be unnerving to read about. Lincoln knew it was a war of attrition and the Union had to keep hammering. The cost of lives would be high but the Union could afford the “terrible arithmetic,” whereas the South could not. Yet so many of his top commanders struggled to be adequately aggressive. Among other things, being normal human beings, they didn’t like hurling men to their deaths. Who could blame them? Eventually generals emerged who could stomach the bloody math -- Philip Sheridan, William Tecumseh Sherman and, of course, Ulysses S. Grant.

Lincoln defended Grant when, after a setback, people called for his removal: "I cannot spare this man. He fights."

Foote was born in Mississippi and was steeped in its white parlor culture. You can feel that influence and that bias. There’s a bounce in his writing as he depicts the notorious Nathan Bedford Forest outfoxing yet another Union commander.

Foote has been criticized for short-changing important aspects of the war, namely slavery and the black perspective, and economic factors that weighed heavily on the conflict. But that’s not his project. His project is the conduct of the war itself, to put you in the midst of the turmoil, to see the strain the commanders were under, to feel the horror of it all, the crushing failures and the grim glory. Yet the other issues do come up, often poignantly, when they have a direct effect on the conduct of the war.

And you can feel a turning of attitude as Foote progresses through the three volumes. Lincoln emerges as a towering figure (the passages regarding his death are almost too painful to read) and slavery an evil that must end. This becomes clear in a quote from Lincoln where he defends the Emancipation Proclamation against impassioned criticism coming from many in the North who otherwise supported the war:

I thought that in your struggle for the Union, to whatever extent the negroes should cease helping the enemy, to that extent it weakened the enemy in his resistance to you. Do you think differently? I thought that whatever negroes can be got to do, as soldiers, leaves just so much less for white soldiers to do in saving the Union. Does it appear otherwise to you? But negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive — even the promise of freedom. And the promise, being made, must be kept.

I can’t really follow that, so I won’t.

From the Cauldron: The Stuff That Bubbles Up

Where do ideas come from? What’s the source of creativity? I kind of go along with *Wittgenstein who argued that taste and reason, while important in shaping the end-product, don’t “give birth.” What does give birth? I don’t know -- something weird happening in the flow of ichor through the vast, innumerable catacombs of the brain.

But not knowing doesn’t stop my imagination from coming up with something. So I imagine a cauldron hanging over simmering coals in a dark cave. In the cauldron, a viscous fluid churns and, occasionally, a bubble surfaces, releasing a little puff of vapor. And there it is, an idea.

Maybe the idea is rubbish, probably it is, but that’s yet to be determined. Most puffs of ideas disappear quickly -- some process of rational and aesthetic judgment coupled with emotional undercurrents quickly consigns the puff to oblivion. Some survive a little longer and, with me, might even get jotted down in a notebook.

The ideas are undeveloped and probably won't be, I thought a few might be worth trotting out onto the blog once in a while (for entertainment purposes only) ...

 

~

Emotions fade, even perceived wrongs against us. To sustain a grudge requires work — one must periodically shovel coal onto the fire. How we feel about something, strangely, is one of the few things we can control.

 

 ~

Reading poetry aloud. Yet when I do, I impose my own voice and cannot hear the author’s.

 

~

The words we have for emotions are crude. A rhythm on the bongos creates an emotion but there’s no word for it. Another rhythm, another emotion that has no word.

~

A Lakota warrior who could find his way through prairies, hills, mountains and forests for a thousand miles in any direction — he was never lost. I wonder if for him it was even possible to be lost. It would be like getting lost in your own home. Is the man who finds his way with GPS tracking better off? Is he the better man?

~

dithyramb          obliquity

no babysitter      crooked stick

doomgoggles        peltast

a clod of dirt crumbles in my hand

Penelope Cruise

[Don’t ask. I have no idea.]

 

~

I think I am a woman who wished she were a man and got her wish.

 

~

Sentient Plasma Energy Being #1

   Solid matter has got to exist; it’s the only way to account for the anomalous data. I’m telling you, it works! When you assume solid matter, the math comes out right.

Sentient Plasma Energy Being #2

   Preposterous. The fact that you have to invoke “solid matter” just exposes the weakness of your theory. There’s no direct evidence. All you have is shaky inferences, born more from the need to make your theory work than any substantive indication that solid matter exists. It’s like the old religions when people believed there were magic solid beings that communicated with prophets and mediums.

 

~

Embodiment of the Autumn Monkey

- Book of Five Rings, Musashi

The idea of keeping your elbows close to your body when sword fighting: The point being that retracted arms are poised to strike, extended arms are vulnerable, and you don’t want your body to “lag behind” your arms.

 

~

I can never know reality but I can at least peel back some of the layers of the onion.

 

~

It’s silly to think that what I create comes from the Golden Light of My Genius. I’m too intertwined with the world around me. Yet at the same time, collaborative art can be difficult.

 

~

I mistrust certainty; exhortations of unwavering belief are lies — if not the dishonest kind, then the self-deceiving kind. One can’t know; one can only pretend to know.

 

~

a deep current of pain

a veneer of resigned sadness

little bubbles of joy now and then

 

~

If aliens visited, what would they find interesting about people?