Fragments

The advent of COVID-19 is so timely, one could feel justified to suspect a conspiracy. I don’t, but it is  as if  the purveyors of everything Internet and virtual and robotic had come up with the perfect way to monopolize human life. That trend had already been fast afoot, of course, what with all of us glued to our monitors, laptops, and phones at work and at play, robots and expert systems ready to replace workers of every color collar, and self-driving vehicles and drones available to deliver all of our needs to our doorstep.  But now comes a virus that no one has yet developed a vaccine or cure for to scare us all into staying home, or put us into mandatory quarantine. No more going to work or school, no more cruising or jetting to other cities or foreign shores, no more local shopping, no more concerts or theatre or parades, you name it. Nowhere to go and nothing to do but stay at home if at all possible.  Another conspiracy one might concoct to account for ...

It is a commonplace that, in order to boost circulation, the (so-called?) news media tend to emphasize cloud-pleasing stories which – given human nature? – tend to the violent and seamy. It has been suggested that an appropriate response would be to balance this reporting with positive news as well. As German economist Max Roser put it (here I am quoting from an article ["The Big Question," by Joshua Rothman, July 23, 2018, p. 27] that quotes a book [Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now ] that cites Roser), a truly evenhanded newspaper “could have run the headline NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY every day for the last twenty-five years." However, I think this does not really redress the imbalance because even the bad news is distorted … and not nearly bad enough! So let me make a modest journalistic proposal (although this could also serve as a personal philosophical or ethical exercise): Each day (perhaps one week later in retrospec...

My doctor prescribed N for me to take when other drugs were proving ineffective against an ailment from which I suffer. However, when I filled the prescription and took a look at the fine print, I noticed that the drug is an anti-depressant. No way did I want to take an anti-depressant. Oh, I could probably use one; but it is a point of philosophic pride (and stupidity?) that I deal with my “mental” problems by means of reasoning alone. So I just put the bottle in my medicine chest and forgot about it. After a while, the original ailment was bugging me ever more, and I remembered the bottle in the cabinet. I also called to mind the example of a colleague, who had been taking an anti-depressant and whom I had berated for doing so on the aforementioned philosophic grounds. He replied that a true philosopher would not be dogmatic and insist that there can be only one right way to do something. The temptation then became too strong to resist and I popped the pill. Well, the drug ...

The other day an old friend told me of her regret about the decision she had made in her early life to go to graduate school A rather than graduate school B, because it may have shut off some career opportunities. Philosopher that I am, I immediately dismissed her concern by pointing out that her beloved daughter would not even exist had my friend made a different decision. My friend did not at first see the connection, so I explained that I was referring to the utter contingency of which sperm meets which egg; so the slightest alteration of prior conditions would mean a different person, or no person, would have been born. Although she then saw what I was getting at, this did not lift her regret. I chalked it up to the usual irrationality of nonphilosophers (which also includes all philosophers when they revert to being just plain people, which is really just about all of the time, even in their professional role). But some musing on another subject has now given me a differ...

Like most folks, I imagine, I have always believed there is some plausibility to the proposition that there are no atheists in foxholes. If the shells were raining down on you, and your buddies were dying left and right, wouldn’t you be praying? As a bona fide atheist, I have no fear of death as such. Dying unpleasantly I dread, and also dying “prematurely,” although that term is relative to what one cares about and has accomplished or experienced. Being generally pleased with the latter in my own life, I fancy I am “ready to go” at any time because, at my age, the future is likely to go worse than better as a whole. Nevertheless all bets are off when I’m in a foxhole, literally or figuratively. So it came as a surprise to me just now when I had the sudden realization that one’s likely behavior and feelings in a foxhole testify not to one’s (however temporary) belief in God but, quite the contrary, to one’s loss of faith. For if one truly believed in God, and especially in t...

Guidelines for doctors recommend prescribing cholesterol medication for patients who show a ten percent (or even lower) chance of developing heart disease over the next ten years by the most recent approved measure. When I first heard about this it struck me as odd, even absurd: another case of a hammer seeing everything as a nail. For doctors, all of us are only varying degrees of sick, and hence in need of treatment, since we are never perfectly healthy, right? But how could 10 percent be something to worry about? Isn’t it intuitive that something is probable only if it's >50 percent? And 10 percent is so far below that that it seems downright   im probable.     But then I thought about it in a different way: Suppose someone handed you a revolver with ten chambers in the cylinder and a bullet in one of them. Would you be willing to play Russian roulette?     Or suppose you were one of ten people in a room, one of whom was to be chosen at random to be killed...

You know the duck/rabbit phenomenon, where a drawing sometimes looks like a duck and sometimes like a rabbit, but never the two at once. This is known as a Gestalt shift, since the whole form (Gestalt) of the drawing changes from one (duck) to the other (rabbit), and each form is in some sense “greater than the sum of its parts,” which are the original lines and curves and their arrangement on the page, which constitute neither the image of a duck nor a rabbit but are ambiguous or just themselves.             Another well-known example of Gestalt shift is the Necker cube, another drawing which presents itself to our vision in only one or the other of two distinct aspects – in this case, both times as a cube (and so again not merely the lines or their arrangement on the paper), but with front and back reversed.             Well, the other day I was out for a walk. Of late I h...

The people who were killed: May they rest in peace. Their families and friends, and people who were wounded or otherwise terrorized: May they be healed. The killer: May he rest in peace. His family and friends: May they be healed. The LGBT community: I have empathized with your suffering and persecution and advocated on your behalf for decades, been amazed and thrilled by the growth of tolerance in recent times, but recognize that you are still lightyears from being able simply to be yourselves almost anywhere in the world like everybody else would like to be. I see you as fellow Jews – the world’s pariah and whipping boy whenever any knucklehead wants to blow off some steam about anything whatever (including, apparently in this case, a gay who has been taught to hate himself for being gay). Muslims: I just want to go out and say a kind word to any Muslim I meet today. There is absolutely nothing, no reason whatever, to single you out because of what some nuts ...

One can only be astounded by humanity’s ever-accelerating advances in technology … although I’m sure most of them have always taken place out of sight of the general populace. But every once in a while something hits the airwaves, and this latest leaves me feeling there are no limits whatever. Quoting one report (with my emphases) on the achievement: On September 14, 2015, the two LIGO sites, in Louisiana and Washington State, independently  detected a gravitational wave by measuring a discrepancy in the time the light rays took to reach a sensor at the ends of the tunnels. The precision of the measurement is simply astonishing. The  difference in length that  each light wave traveled  corresponds to 1/1000th of the radius of a proton , a subatomic particle that is itself minuscule, with a size of about 10 -12     meters.              But I am also astounded … and ver...

The Baby Boomers -- my generation – have always fancied themselves something special. This was due not only to our economic privileges as the wealthiest (young) generation in history (albeit not uniformly distributed, of course!) but also our numbers. My own intimation of mortality came a decade or two ago when I suddenly realized that, say, the Beatles would fade into history, and probably rather rapidly, like everybody else. Except … that didn’t happen! So our collective ego has been reinforced by at least one succeeding generation … and no doubt abetted by the eternal presence of the recent past on the Internet.             Of course ours was also the generation that grew up with the fear of nuclear world war, which certainly would have ended things right quickly, with no other generations to succeed our massive failure. But side by side with that were inspiring spectacles of a high order, surely the “highest” (for me anyw...

By Joel Marks It is almost impossible to believe that the comic strip Blondie has been running continuously since 1930, because it is, to my taste, the best comic strip today. At least 50% of the time, seven days a week, it can be counted on to give a good laugh. Take the most recent daily episode. The first panel shows Blondie and Dagwood in bed with Dagwood looking concerned and Blondie peeved. She says, “The problem is … you never ask me how I’m feeling!” In the next panel Dagwood obligingly and earnestly asks, “How are you feeling?” In the final panel, Blondie replies, “Well if you have to ask, then we really have a problem!”             This is not only funny. It is beautiful. Consider the perfect symmetry between “The problem is …” at the beginning and the “… have a problem” at the end. But there is also a special bang to the mirror-reply added by the word “really.” And of course topping it off is the hapless helples...

by Joel Marks Last night I glanced out my window before pulling down the shade and noticed a bright star. It was probably Jupiter. I am fairly knowledgeable about the nighttime sky, since I have been an amateur astronomer all my life. Nothing is more fascinating to me than the physical universe with its vastness and mystery. So as I gazed at the blazing planet I began to picture it as the immense and gorgeous globe it is, when I suddenly had a random thought: There could be artificial satellites orbiting that planet!             Now this is hardly news for anybody. We have been sending probes to the planets and moon(s) for decades, indeed for over half a century; and I’ve been following them the whole time. But, dagnabbit, not once before had I ever put 2 and 2 together in my perceptual experience and felt their presence when I looked at the sky. Oh, plenty are the times I have gazed at the moon and practically swooned a...

I had been preparing for months for a conference overseas and at long last was boarding the airplane. How much effort had gone into this, but now everything had been arranged and all that remained was to carry through with my well-designed plans. The main event was to be the presentation of a poster at the conference; this is a form of mini-paper that features a literal poster on a wall containing one’s main arguments. As I was approaching my economy seat in the rear section of the plane and getting ready to hoist my carry-ons into the overhead bin, I suddenly realized I was not carrying the tube containing the poster! I was later told by an onlooker that my pale face went absolutely white. I know from my own experience that my stomach dropped to the floor. In a panic I turned around and struggled through the line of people in the narrow aisle to the exit of the plane and explained my plight to the attendants. One of them accompanied me to the gate, where an official grudgingly gave ...

My previous post, " A Matter of Interpretation ," alludes to the parable of the sheep and the goats at the end. A number of years ago I had occasion to write a sort of sermon on that parable after hearing someone else present an actual sermon on it. I think that episode is worth sharing now. -- Joel Marks When I Heard the Learn’d Theologian The Sheep and the Goats   31  "When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. 32  All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33  He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.   34  "Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35  For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirs...

by Joel Marks December 31, 2015 In the infamous Red State /Blue State divide in the United States, the Red States are stereotyped as the patriotic and Christian types. But I wonder. In this increasingly polarized and surprising Twenty-first Century, I have become more and more profoundly disillusioned, and just plain puzzled, by self-proclaimed Christian Americans. Of course one cannot generalize to all Christian Americans, nor are the ones I have in mind found only in the geographic middle of the country. But those of whom I am speaking tend to hog the airways … much as “Islamic fundamentalists” make for better “news” than the presumably very different Islamic mainstream. And increasingly they are steering the country, as in our dysfunctional Congress and now in the Presidential race (at the moment, the Republican contest for the nomination). So the nonsense matters.             9/11 was the pivotal event that brought all of...

It’s nothing short of a miracle. Pressure points, aka trigger points – have you heard of them? I could not tell you what the underlying physiology is. But I learned about them in practice from a good friend of mine, who is a masseur and also the creator of a line of simple tools for self-massage. When a number of years ago I began noticing that sign of exceeding the normal lifespan of Homo erectus, namely, lower back pain, Allan gave me a squash ball to place between my back and the wall and then roll across. The aim was to discover a pressure point which was somehow responsible for the “referred pain” in my back.  After some experimenting I found a spot on one side of my spine, seeming to be in a cord that ran up and down the side of my back parallel to the spine (there being another cord on the other side as well). How did I know it was “the” spot? Because it hurt sharply when the ball rolled over it.   Lo and behold, after doing this for no more than three seconds – ju...