“Free Will”, by Sam Harris, contends that free will as we commonly understand it is an illusion. There is a large and growing literature that demonstrates that we make decisions before we are actually aware of them. He cites several experiments with human subjects showing that certain brain centers are activated early enough to permit experimenters to predict decisions before the subjects themselves are aware of them. Depending on the exact setup, the time lag can be several seconds to several tenths of a second. This is disquieting to the subjects themselves; they are invariably surprised, because most people feel in control of their decisions. Of course, nobody else is in control of these decisions, but large parts of the decision-making process are unconscious, and by the time we become aware of the final decision, it is already made by our unconscious mind. Given that, what level of responsibility do we really have for our decisions?

I think part of our tendency to confusion here is the meaning of the word “we” in the previous sentence. We have an inherently dualistic notion of ourselves – our minds we identify with our consciousness, and we assume everybody else does the same. The conscious self seems to us to contemplate both itself and the body that contains it. And yet we know from science that both are part of our body and its active processes. Those who deny this may believe in a soul or a spirit, but that still does not relieve them of the problem that decisions are made by their brains without their knowledge. So how can we assign responsibility to ourselves and others, when everybody’s decisions are given by the unconscious?

For Harris, moral responsibility still resides with the individual who makes decisions, be they good or bad by their own lights or in the opinion of others. Only the degree to which we feel that individuals are blameworthy changes. This follows when we recognize that so much of what people do is determined by antecedent processes, many of which are hidden from our consciousness, sometimes never to be revealed. Harris discusses this with some intriguing hypothetical cases. Consider for example two situations: a boy of five finds a loaded gun in a drawer and accidentally kills a young girl with it. Here we cannot blame the boy at all, but the person who left the gun loaded and insecure. Next consider a young man who shoots and kills a girl “because he felt like it.” He is very culpable. But suppose it turns out he had a brain tumor that likely made him behave this way. Then his culpability is less. In all these cases we make different estimates of culpability even though the basic facts are the same. Harris is arguing that our condemnation of the healthy young man will be less intense once we understand that he too is the product of forces beyond his own control.

Others, like the philosophers Eddy Nahmias or AC Grayling, feel that free will is fundamental to morality and our system of justice. Nahmias resists the idea that the scientific results really undermine free will. He argues that they are telling us in part how our minds work. In other words, Nahmias thinks free will has not really been falsified by the evidence. Harris thinks that the free will Nahmias believes in is not what most people understand by the term.

Harris argues that what most people understand by “free will” is that, faced with a decision, we could choose freely to follow one or more courses of action. The objection to this conventional view is that the decision we make is completely determined by the mental state we are in before we become conscious of the decision. Thus, the conscious “we” are not really free to make a different decision than the one we make. Most people are assaulted by conflicting desires, and he asks rhetorically, “Where is the freedom when one of these opposing desires inexplicably triumphs over its rival?” Here is another of his remarks: “Am I free to do that which does not occur to me to do? Of course not.” Harris manfully quotes his critics, who claim that even if some of our thinking is unconscious, it is still ours, and so we are responsible for the results. But this, he says, is really redefining free will, so that it no longer means what we feel that it means, that we are in charge of a stream of thoughts. In essence, the idea that free will is compatible with determinism entails assuming responsibility not only for our unconscious deliberations, but also for the bacteria inside us, or the obscure machinations of our bodily physiology.

According to Harris, operationally we still have grounds for law and for the more informal modes of regulating the behavior of individuals in society. What disbelief in free will does is take away the intensity of moral condemnation, replacing that with a consciousness that what people do is a consequence of their prior experience and genetic makeup.

Free Will, by Sam Harris

Free Press, 2012

I was trying to follow the news yesterday as the negotiations were going on between Biden and McConnell, but I soon found that I was looking at out of date stories. Things were happening so fast that the written press could not keep up.

As near as I can figure out, the Senate voted to keep my income tax rates unchanged, but my payroll taxes will go back up. We’ll see whether they do anything to cut back federal spending. Is this about right?

And why did this all have to happen on New Year’s Eve?

Which reminds me. The TV offerings last night were awful. Billy Joel in his 2008 concert? Who was that guy on NBC? Where is Walter Cronkite? At least one station could have played Die Fledermaus…

Once again there has been a mass shooting in America, this time in suburban Connecticut. As President Obama said, there have been too many. It is time to do something meaningful to discuss them, to find out what if anything can be done.

It is not out of line to ask for a Congressional investigation. We need to get a handle on all the circumstances that can lead to these horrible crimes. We do not know, really, how to prevent them and will never know if there is not a strongly motivated and bipartisan attempt to get at the facts. The general features of course are well known: the criminal is often a young male with poor social skills or psychological problems and access to guns. If not killed by police, the shooter usually commits suicide rather than …rather than what? I cannot remember any of them leaving a suicide note.

Here is a link to an article on some facts pertinent to the discussion. They don’t all point in the same direction! In the USA, states with gun control laws have fewer shootings than those that do not. While helpful, gun control does not guarantee safety. Connecticut does have a gun control law. Gun violence is on the decline in the USA, but mass shootings seem to have increased since 2007. The South is more violent than other regions of the country. This suggests that a rural, conservative culture is more likely to foster violent conduct. Again, these are statistical tendencies – Connecticut is neither rural nor conservative.

Progress means an improvement of society. A desire for progress means that one is not satisfied with the current state of affairs. What is that? Well, the chief executive officers of corporations currently are paid about 400 times what the average employee of their businesses is paid. Most people who pay income taxes pay a higher rate than those who are living off investment income, which is taxed at only 15%. Progress would narrow these discrepancies. Progress is to provide health insurance for upwards of 30 million people in this country, as specified in Obamacare. Progress includes eliminating the incentives for moving jobs to foreign countries and for parking funds in secret foreign accounts. Progress consists of eliminating the violation of the principle of separation of church and state, in which federal funds are given to religious organizations. Progress includes stopping the charter schools movement, which is sucking money out of the public school system without any measurable improvement in student achievement. Progress includes educating the public about science, about equitable treatment of minorities, about rational decision making in the public (and the private) domain, and about refraining from imposing private religious morality on the public. Progress, in other words, is common sense.

As I was watching the election returns Tuesday night, early in the evening the monitors showed Romney with more electoral votes than Obama. The commentators on MSNBC paid not the slightest attention to this fact, even though it was prominently displayed. They spent the time discussing other matters. This situation persisted quite long into the evening. However, when the polls closed on the west coast, the results started to come in from there, and Obama’s tally rapidly mounted, as California, Oregon, Washington, and Nevada all came in for him. And then, suddenly Ohio was called for Obama, and it was clear that the President had won the election.

None of this surprised me. I knew that the President was going to win. Why? Because I had been reading the posts on Nate Silver’s blog on the New York Times website. Unlike Fox News, or MSNBC, which are openly biased media outlets for the right and the left respectively, Silver’s analysis is based on averaging of many polls, and thus is a very detailed and accurate representation of the intentions of the voters. Silver’s data have shown the President significantly ahead in the projected electoral vote for months. Even the rather startling perturbation caused by the results of the first debate between Romney and Obama did not reverse this. By the eve of the election, Silver was predicting that the President would win with 313 electoral votes.

Silver has been accurate since 2004 on every single national election.

I assumed that Romney and the Republicans also knew this. It turns out that I was giving them far too much credit. They were actually stunned by the fact of Obama’s victory. Romney had not even written a draft concession speech.

They actually thought they were going to win. Why? Because they have no respect for the principles of science. They discounted Silver’s analysis and chose to believe in only those polls that showed Romney in the lead, instead of taking into account all the available polling data, as Silver does.

I knew that the Republicans had contempt for science. They are a haven for creationists and climate change deniers. But it turns out that they also don’t believe in the science that is most sacred to Americans: statistics.

There is a far larger lesson in this than just the political calculus. The Republican Party is in denial about reality. They are trying to figure out why they lost, but they still don’t think that the main problem, their  disconnection from reality, has anything to do with their loss.

I am a happy camper today. President Obama has been re-elected. He gave credit to a lot of people who worked hard on the campaign. The victory was the result of a well-planned effort to raise funds for advertising and for organizing. I found that after contributing a bit I got the chance to have my own fundraising page and try to get others to give money as well. And when the time came to stop sending money, there was another opportunity to make calls to help get out the vote in the battleground states of Ohio and Pennsylvania. That sense of participation in the campaign was so much more satsifying than just sending a check and voting. It is an experience I would recommend to anyone. As a resident in a non-battleground state, New York, I really welcomed the chance to spread the message to others in places where, in our system, it really matters.

I watched an interview on CNN today, with Mary Matalin, the conservative commentator. She said she was proud of Romney and she criticized the Obama campaign as being full of deceit and distortion. I was incredulous. The Romney campaign was entirely founded on lies (see one of my earlier blogs), and Romney wound up skidding away from everything he said to get the nomination when it came time to appeal to undecided voters. He got more than Obama did of these people, according to exit polls. The one thing I will grant to Romney is that he gave a decent concession speech. Other than that, his campaign was an avalanche of mendacity from beginning to end. That half the electorate – or nearly so – chose him defies any sense of reality as far as I can tell. We live in a truly deluded society, where people will vote against their own economic interests if somebody pulls the right levers of hate, religious bias and racial prejudice.

So I congratulate President Obama on a consistent, smart, and aggressive campaign. The country will be the better for it. Obamacare will now go into effect. The economy will recover. And, hopefully, the Republican Party will enter a period of soul-searching that will lead to a less bigoted, ignorant, and wrong-headed approach to government.

Normally conserving good practices is a good thing. Novelty for its own sake is a luxury at best, and counterproductive at worst. We require innovation only when there is a problem or an inefficiency or an injustice to deal with.

In practice however our society is heterogeneous, and conditions that are just fine for one part of society are poor for others. Marie Antoinette, when informed that people were rioting because they had no bread, supposedly said “Let them eat cake.” This is precisely the situation we find ourselves in, minus the pitchforks.

In our culture, economic inequality is extreme, and it is getting even more so. Those at the top are doing quite well indeed, but they fear they are losing their grip. The election of Obama was very alarming to these people. They applauded their political servants, such as Mitch McConnell, who pledged to do everything possible to make sure that Obama would serve only one term.

Now one of the greatest problems of our society is the medical care system. It is badly broken and everybody knows it. We spend more money for poorer health outcomes than any other industrialized country. Obama and the Democratic party in Congress, without the aid of a single Republican vote, passed a health care reform bill, which will go into full force in 2014. It will result in near-universal coverage of the population, and put in place systematic reforms to alter the goals of care from the current cover-your-butt plethora of excessive testing to an outcomes-rewarded scheme. It will save money and lives. This is a case where the status quo is harmful, and the Democratic alternative is a clear improvement.

It does not help when Romney, who invented some of the strategies in this plan when he was Governor of Massachusetts, builds his campaign on the promise to repeal this reform. Why has he abandoned his own plan? Because to get elected President he needed Republican support. Or not. It is impossible to tell what he actually thinks because he has adopted every position on this issue at one time or another. Now he is claiming that his plan will protect people from being denied insurance for pre-existing conditions. It actually does not, but that does not seem to keep him from claiming otherwise (see the comment on Romney Mendacity and the endorsement of Obama by the Times on this blog). How can anyone trust this man, who will say anything, and who is on record as having adopted every possible position on this matter?

Another big problem in our society is the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower, who was a general before becoming President, warned against a revolving-door relationship between industry and the military, but this relationship has evolved anyway. We now have a stupendous military, bigger than the next 15 countries combined. Our politics has become linked to the idea that this system should be expanded, if anything. This has led to the development, among Republicans, of the so-called neoconservative movement, which argued for wars of aggression. (Remember it was we who attacked Iraq, not the other way ’round). Aside from the fact that this war was prosecuted incompetently by both the Bush administration and by military brass, the notion of aggressive war is a grave departure from American ideals. It is really radical, not conservative. Romney and the Republicans want to return to this policy, this time with Iran as the target. Again, Romney is now saying that war with Iran would be a last resort. But the same people who pushed Bush to attack Iraq are advising Romney now. The man is unpredictable, but weak. He will almost certainly do what they say because he is inexperienced and irresponsible when it comes to foreign affairs. By contrast Obama has ended the war in Iraq, is ending the war in Afghanistan, and still is prosecuting a successful military operation to suppress the active Islamic extremist movement. In four years, he accomplished what Bush and the neoconservatives could not do in eight. Do we really want an utter naïf like Romney in charge if Israel attacks the nuclear processing facilities in Iran next Spring?

A really huge problem is the aging of our industrial base and the movement of capital and jobs abroad. There is no going back to the protectionism of the past, but we do not need to reward American companies for exporting jobs as current law allows. Obama has proposed straightforward reforms. The Republicans oppose this because it will limit profits by individuals and corporations who are exploiting the cheap labor markets in foreign countries like India and China.

Another big problem is the national debt. Our European allies have the same problem and they have pursued a policy of austerity to resolve it. The result is that they are on the brink of depression. In the US, thanks to Obama’s stimulus and tax relief for the middle class, our economy is growing faster than any European country. The Republicans would cut taxes in a way that would disproportionately benefit the wealthy, create pressure on deductions for the middle class, and pressure to increase, not decrease, the debt. Realizing his proposals were not selling, Romney has run away from them in his rhetoric, claiming to have been misunderstood. But he cannot escape the facts. We have him on record as proposing this enormous tax cut for the rich, without identifying anything he would cut in terms of expenditures, (apart from funding for Planned Parenthood and Public Broadcasting). A look at history shows that businessmen elected President have in general done very poorly when it comes to economic growth. The best rates of growth in the last hundred years have occurred under Democratic, not Republican administrations.

Another big problem in our society is right-wing religious extremism. People like Paul Ryan, Todd Akin, etc., are quite willing to impose their private religious convictions on the rest of us. They want to take away women’s rights. Obama is the conservative here, defending the liberties that women have fought and sometimes died to acquire. Also, Republicans are the natural haven of creationists and climate-change deniers, and if their austerity policies are put in place, there will be huge cuts in medical and scientific research sponsored by the Federal government. Again, this is radical. Obama is the conservative on this issue, seeking to preserve the powerful and beneficial role of the government in promoting the public good.

It is time for the wealthy in this country to share more of the cost of government, to help balance the books by restoring the tax structure left us by Bill Clinton (remember we were running a slight surplus when he left office). The Republicans are dragging their feet. They stand in the way of progress.