Monthly Archives: February 2012

Is Sam Harris Right to Say Free Will is an “Illusion”?

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in shackles. ~ Rousseau

Can we decide who are parents are? No. Can we decide what we look like when we are born? No. Can we decide which country we are born into? No. Can we even decide what personality traits we inherit upon birth? No. It seems, then, that a large part of our existence is already predetermined. If this is the case, how much free will do we have, if any at all?

Sam Harris, American author and Neuroscientist plans to release his new book Free Will in May – indicating the topic is still as pertinent as ever, and remains a issue of profound ambiguity. In the book Harris argues free will is an “illusion” and we have known this for about a “century” (1).

Harris’ conclusion is hubristic – particularly because our knowledge of the brain is limited, so limited, in fact, that Neuroscientist Lawrence Parsons of the University of Sheffield believes we are 300-500 years away from understanding the brain and all its complexities. Furthermore, our understanding of what human consciousness is the subject of conjecture and speculation. Philosopher Colin McGinn believes “the more we know of the brain, the less it looks like a device for creating consciousness: it’s just a big collection of biological cells and a blur of electrical activity – all machine and no ghost” (2).

So here we are: we have limited knowledge of the brain and we don’t have a clue what consciousness is, yet we want to say that free will is, factually speaking, an “illusion”? Now, while it is possible that free will is an illusion and all our actions are predetermined by prior causes of which we have no control over, we need to be careful of labeling something as “fact”.

Timothy Winter, intellectual and academic, believes that while free will is “highly circumscribed”, we have “limited free will”

The mention of the body/soul dichotomy may seem fictitious to some – but only to the narrow minded. Once again we need to be careful: to concretely say we do not have a soul is a theoretical fallacy; ‘we have no proof for the soul’, is more sensible. Science, however, will never be able to penetrate the world of the unseen or the world of metaphysics, simply because it is not interested in it. For those that rely purely on scientific observation, it is only the physical, tangible world that can empirically experienced, therefore, if anything else exists, it is out of science’s domain and has no relevance to us.

The existence of the soul should therefore remain open. If the soul does exist, however, we can posit that free will exists, too. Why, you may ask? If one believes the soul and the brain interact to form intentions – and that intentionality derives from the soul – our brain is therefore at the behest of our soul. Without the soul, the brain – it could be argued – cannot function properly.

Scientists have been studying intentionality rigorously for the past ten years, but there is still no definitive answer in relation to how intentionality is formed. Clearly, when analyzing the brain, consciousness and intentionality, there seems to be a missing component. Science has shown us that decisions can be predicted between 300 milliseconds – 10 seconds before we are even aware of them. But if the origin of our actions come from the soul, this would go some way to explaining this phenomenon.

However, because the soul and the brain must interact for free will to exist – when we suffer from mental illness, or when we take drugs which alter our biological chemistry – the link between the material and the immaterial becomes severed, and the brain then begins to function by itself. This is why in most religions, the mentally unwell or those who are not consciously aware of what they are doing are excused of Divine accountability, as so long as they are in that state.

If we don’t have any free will – as Harris suggests, or we have limited free will, as Timothy Winters suggests – can we enhance the amount of free will we possess, or even, seemingly paradoxically, “activate” our free will?

Winter says: “At the moment we authentically rise above our genetic programming and education and take a moral decision, we are stepping outside of the mechanics of the universe. We don’t create our own actions, there is only one Creator, but in an instantaneous, miraculous fraction of a second, we can acquire actions and this is of the mystery of the Ruh [soul].”

If we are slaves to our previous experiences, education and genetic programming, we cannot step outside “the mechanics of the universe” but if we transcend everything apart from what we know to be innately good or bad [something we all have within us], we then make a moral choice for ourselves, and activate our free will.

If we do, therefore, have free will, it can be enhanced through the pursuit of transcending our ego, our doubts, fears and inhibitions, and, in turn, by activating a component within our consciousness that allows us to tap into that which is innate within us. That which is innate with in us – it could be argued – is the soul, the component in us that acquires actions from the Creator. Therefore there is not just a body/soul dichotomy at work – there is a trilateral harmony between: the Creator, the acquirer of actions (the soul) and the disposer of these actions (the brain).

McGinn says we have more ignorance than knowledge; so the worst thing we can do is coalesce our ignorance with arrogance. Let’s leave the options open and not be one-dimensional creatures. The truth is there to be discerned but we must first accept that there is more than one way of arriving at it.

“Those who play chess are constrained by the predetermined limits decreed by the game’s inventor. And, although the player of chess is in complete subordination to the originator’s decreed limitations, the player’s own merit and effort or neglect and lassitude will determine whether he wins or loses the game of chess..ponder this well, for chess is an edifying metaphor and a sagely invention. (3)”

1) The free will delusion, page 46 New Statesman, 19 December 2011

2) All machine and no ghost? page 43, New Statesman 20 February 2012

3) http://sandala.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Chess-and-Divine-Decree.pdf

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Paul Mason: The Global Revolutions, Social Networking & The Demonisation of Arabs

Live Magazine‘s interview with Paul Mason.

In a nutshell, why did it all kick-off?

It kicked off because the economic system started to fall apart, that changed young people’s outlook as to what their prospects were and did so almost immediately – and over large sections of the western world.

It happened at the end of 10 years in which communications technology has become very democratic. This is rushing at us and the combination of social media, a huge economic crisis, empowerment of individuals and a generation that acts and thinks differently, has basically produced the explosion

Why are they acting and thinking differently?

The human being who experienced the arrival of movies, motorcars, aero planes and phonograms, were very different human beings to their parents. They acted, moved and dressed differently. Even the women were freer than 20 years before that.

There has been a historic change in human behavior driven by mass consumption. What I’m saying is, above all, social media and mobile telephony have literally changed the way we do [things]. They have even changed the way what we do with different bits of our body, our thumbs – we type text messages with our thumbs.

Okay we are still human beings, we are the same animal, but the social side of us and the empathy we have with each other, has been enabled more. It’s very hard to pin down, nobody is theorising it, nobody can study it scientifically, there is no mass sociological study of it yet, but it’s the job of the journalist to notice this stuff.

There is a quote in the book by a young person who says “social media isn’t making us more antisocial but ultra social.” Is social media really making us more isolated individuals – and is it such a bad thing?

I think there is strong evidence that a creation of an online world is a creation of an extra human space that has its own laws of interaction just like the physical world does. Margaret Wertheim said there is an extra bit of consciousness being created and when we are in this world we’re not so defensive of ourselves and our personas. That we can’t share our intimate feelings and thoughts with people we hardly know. That’s quite interesting. Nobody knows where it’s going.

Another young person in the book said: “I can’t believe people still read articles when we have instant information from social media.” What’s the future for young journalists when social media is becoming the main tool for journalists?

All the business models of media are in crisis. That doesn’t mean they can’t exist, it just means we have to find something people are prepared to pay for.

For a journalist, the question is: how do we create the content people want? People already have a lot of the truth coming at them, unmediated by us – they choose who to follow on Twitter. I followed the right people in Libya so I could work out when they had started the assault on Tripoli way before even the newswire started reporting it. I thought, “shit they are going to assault Libya, this is amazing.“

Does that mean I don’t want a fantastic photojournalism essay of the assault on Tripoli? No. I want to read it.  All it means is that us, as craftsman, as journalists, are the only people who can make the whole thing. I just think there are going to be fewer journalists making lots of money and a lot of people doing bits of journalism for free. It has changed the dynamics of it.

In that case, is it worth going abroad to pursue journalism?

I think it’s the story of this generation. In emerging markets in places like: Brazil, Columbia, Turkey and Egypt – Egypt and Turkey are so developed that if you are a professional you can live a very decent lifestyle.  With the right language and the right social skills and the ability to fit in – I think people of all professions: finance, engineering, architecture; people are going from the west to these emerging markets.

I think for journalists there is only so much you want to read about your own world. Journalism has to bring the unknown into you. Sometimes the unknown is an estate in Manchester but sometimes it’s in Mongolia.

With our country’s debt pile now at £1 trillion, youth unemployment still bad ­–  here and around Europe — how will the youth react in the next year?

I think this generation of youth – even people who are very disadvantaged in terms of money and education – are still very self-educated, they know more than my generation 20, 30 years ago. And therefore they are able to be more entrepreneurial; some will be pure business entrepreneurs but others, social entrepreneurs. But they are very individual people. Like I say, this has happened before in the world where generational change has taken place and people’s behavior is different.

Yes, the west is going to be crippled by debt probably for a decade, yes the form of capitalism will have to change, at the very least if it going to deliver anything like social justice.

Do I know what the final outcome of that change is? No. Can we predict some things? Yes. What can we predict? It’s going to have to be greener.  The Germans are pouring money into green technology, it’s going to have to be more hi-tech, the point is through hi-technology we will create new markets. There will probably be markets in genetic medicine in 10 years time.  Not just genetic medicine but genetic, cosmetic surgery. Out of that will come the Richard Branson of the future, and other stuff that might be more attractive than Richard Branson.

How have the recent protests differed from those over the last 200 years?

This is the paradox. Something like the Egyptian revolution is following a classic pattern of revolution that we can recognize from the year 1848, which was the big year of revolution in the 19th century. It was led by the educated youth but with the workers and the urban poor proving the decisive numbers to overthrow the government. And then, also in 1948, you get an election – huge numbers of religious, rural dwelling people who get the same vote as everybody else, quite rightly – and they vote for reactionary religious parties. So anybody who has read history knows the revolution to be predictable.

Because of social media, the young students, the educated youth, people who have dragged themselves out of slums to become educated, are in a more global world. They are on my Twitter feed, I am on their twitter feed. When you watch the Twitter feed of fighters in Libya, sometimes it’s about Gaza or a piece of hip hop music  - and it is this fascinating unpredictable bit of it that I’m trying to study.

What makes these revolutions different, however, is their sustainability through virtual communities, even when parts of reality turns bad, the ability to sustain the spirit, feeling and discussion of what you are fighting for, through this global medium of interchange of ideas, is new.

What role do you think the likes of CIA and Mossad have played in the Arab revolutions and what role will they look to play now?

I think the CIA and Mossad isn’t the end of the list. The state department, of course, had a project to support liberal oppositionists in various Middle East dictatorships. One would like to think they [the state department] could see the dictators would fall but they had no idea. The state department held training sessions for young liberals – that’s what the American state department did in the cold war as well.

I don’t see these revolutions as a tool of the west; I don’t see them like that at all. And as for Mossad, the Israeli military and intelligence community was as surprised as everyone by the Egyptian revolution.

And of course there is a third big security service in the Middle East and that is the Iranian one and they have lost control as well. If you think of Iran’s proxies  – Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria – they are all in crisis.

The modern world is not a world of the hierarchical, structured religious – or ideological in [President] Assad’s case, I’m certain that all of that is doomed. I don’t see anything of this as the creations of western interests. Maybe you do, I don’t know.

In Tunisia, Libya, and possibly in Egypt, we will see moderate Islamist parties ruling the countries, is this something we should fear?

For decades, Europe was ruled by “moderate Christianist” parties in France, Germany, Italy. So one should have no fear of the term moderate Islamist.

Given that the leaders of many of these parties [in Egypt] were treated as terrorists by [Hosni] Mubarak, we should celebrate the fact they are willing to play the game of democracy. Part of me wants to celebrate the Muslim Brotherhood being able to hold itself together and be a party that contests elections like any other. The Muslim Brotherhood may be riding high now but it is being disintegrated by forces.

What forces?

The forces of modern youthfulness. Its own youth wing broke away and formed a separate party not because they are secularists but because they are Muslims who don’t want to be in this sense, Islamists.  They want to be devout but don’t want to be defined by it.

If, along the way in Egypt,  a whole bunch of parties that are Islamist but are prepared to take part in a essentially secular constitutional system, that would be a great achievement. But many who began the revolution want to go further than that: they want social justice, social democracy, liberalism and secularism.

Florence nightingale once said the Arab would be beaten to death rather than give up. Did you observe a difference between the Arab’s mentality and ours in the West?

What I observed on the streets of Egypt is that when you see the possibility of everything changing – and you realise they can kill some of you but they can’t kill all of you – things will change. This is what has made it different to the Intifada [in Palestine] which has come and gone, and while the youth have been at the forefront, it has been led by Fatah or Hamas.

What I observed was something much more fundamental, and that is when an entire community comes out – which I think is not open to the Palestinians – and see total liberation was at their grasp.

The fact they [the Egyptians] could do it with such humour and good nature. It was an insurrection of joy such as which the Arab world has not seen.

As a white, western journalist, I do think so much of what we have produced hasn’t helped to understand the Arab or the Muslim world. It’s partly because in Britain and in the west, Islam exists as a community and it, like it or not, seems like a separate community and all the differences with the west are emphasised. But if you go to a Muslim country and stay there for any length of time, it is just like anywhere else. This may upset some Islamists, but I’m afraid there are drunks and prostitutes [in the Muslim world], just like there are in Brixton.

Once we realise that the “other-isation” of Islam becomes pointless – it’s just a religion. The west has got into this situation because we only see the Arab world through the eyes of Islam when there is what you might call the “Arab culture”, which embraces the secular liberals – the dancing, the jazz clubs, the folk singing – on Tahrir square. As somebody said about Tahrir: “It’s Glastonbury without Bono.”

Does Egypt, therefore, have a positive future?

I think it [moderate Islamism] might lead to dictatorships, that’s the problem. What a lot of the secular left in Egypt talk about is “Attaturkism”. [They say] “We aren’t going to have any Sharia Law so we have to insulate the country against religion by having a strong army that cracks down on anybody who tries to ‘religious-ise’ Egypt.” I think the Brotherhood has got to be quite careful because the Salafis are so strong and they are recruiting from the poor and it is very difficult to combat it especially amongst uneducated people. And especially when they are playing the same game which Hamas and Hezbollah played which is to give money. They will exert a big pressure on the Brotherhood.

So do you think our perceptions of the Arab world is now changing?

There is a struggle between the “Arabists” and the people who are still reducing issues to terrorism, violence and religion – and there are people like me who want to see beyond that. I’m afraid Syria, and then the war in Libya, has allowed this image to come back. Look, people shout Allah hu akbar. Why are they shouting it? It’s because they think they are going to die. They want it to be their last word. They aren’t shouting it because they are religious fanatics.

When I’m watching the news I just want people to pop up and explain why they are shouting Allah hu akbar! It was Edward Said who said 30 years ago that we still haven’t grasped the complexity of the Muslim and Arab society.

“I’m a devout Muslim, I’m a hip hop artist, I’m a dancer I’m a revolutionary.” I met a leftist revolutionary who said: “I want to study Hebrew so I can understand the Israelis”. None of it fits the stupid two-dimensional stereotype, none of it.

Why should a young person buy your book?

My book takes you on a tour of the ideas, the people, and the biggest thing that has happened in your lifetime. It’s the first draft of history so it’s quite rough, some of it will be proved wrong.

What I’ve tried to do – because of my background in understanding social history and the Labour movement history – is try to relate these movements to stuff that has happened in the past that has been forgotten.

The Book of Life & The Game of Chess

Although my life is probably only half way through its course, the remaining chapters don’t particularly interest me. My soul yearns to return to its Author, where the book of life shall be explained and I will exist in a state of plenitude, tranquility and happiness. However, I have no say over how much time my Author has allotted me; but I must continue to play my part as the protagonist in this sorrowful story.

As I entered this realm and began playing out my character, I was still fresh from the divine Presence. But one loses the affinity with his or her Author upon getting too caught up in one’s own story.

My book, however, is a microcosm in the grand book of life, amounting to nothing more than a mere sentence. How I wish I could comprehend my own book let alone the grand book of life. The characters that I began with in my life are slowly disappearing, and returning to the Author who removed them from both my book as well as theirs. And with every day that passes, another page is turned and the end of the book gets closer and closer.

While it seems that my father’s book was not yet complete – dying only at 47 – every book has an end and every character finishes his or her story – no matter what age they depart.

Suicide is when one rips out the remaining pages of the book and, with it, rip themselves out – which is, of course, still part of the storyline. We cannot always understand why the Author, in His divine Imagination writes what He does, but we must accept it and upon returning to Him, all shall be revealed.

Life is like a game of chess and we, as an individual piece on the board, are free, in a limited sense. We must obey the rules set by the Creator of the game and we cannot transgress the limits set by the Creator – all our moves are therefore completely free yet completely determined. This is the paradox of our existence.

Sooner or later, we will be knocked off the board  – sometimes we will know it is coming and other times we won’t. We will return with the other pieces with whom we started with who were on our side: our friends, our family. We will not return to the board: it was just a short-lived experience to see how we, in our limited movement, could survive in the game of games.

Be prepared to be knocked off the board at any time; we will return to the Creator of the game and the Author of our stories. From Him do we originate and to Him shall we ultimately return.

Whitney Houson Dies Aged 48: Drugs and The Music Industry

Whitney’s Houston’s publicist, Kristen Foster, has announced the death of the “Queen of Pop”. In 2009, the “King of Pop”, Michael Jackson, died in mysterious circumstances after many years of trouble, accusations and controversy. Houston, too, was not shy of controversy: in her later years, she was believed to be on drugs and, in 2006, separated from her husband Bobby Brown, after years of problems and alleged domestic abuse.

Houston won more music awards than any other female recording history in history, she won six grammy awards and is one the best selling singers of all time.

Like many other world famous artists, Houston was accused of drug abuse. Etta James, who died last month, was treated in the ’70s for her misuse of drugs; MJ, Amy Winehouse, Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix were all known for their drug use, too. The question that arises is: why do the most famous musicians in the world feel the need to resort to drugs? They have everything, so why do they feel the urge to escape the world of reality and use intoxicants? Perhaps purely for fun? But aren’t they having enough “fun” as it is in their “luxury” lifestyles?

A person who is truly happy, or who has inner peace, will not resort to drugs. Drugs are used to fill a void, a void created because of inner disquiet. George Green, who toured the world with the likes of Kanye West, Jay Z and Snoop Dogg, recently left the music scene and has talked about how “money, women and materialism” didn’t bring him happiness – neither did he think those whom he toured with were happy either – there remains a void. There is no lasting satisfaction from material pleasures, he says, the lifestyle many musicians lead does not bringing lasting fulfilment.

Houston, like MJ, were two of the greatest entertainers of this age. However, there has to be a reason why so many celebrities lives are shrouded in complication and vicissitudes. R.I.P Whitney Houston, but let’s not forget those in Syria right now who are being slaughtered. No life is more precious than any other.

Lowkey, Hip-Hop & The Five Girls

Shall I tell you a funny story? I went to an event yesterday, called Un-Convention, at the Roundhouse – it was about “looking at political voices and social messages through spoken word, hip hop, social media, art and culture.” There was a series of talks and in one of these talks, called “The politicisation of hip-hop”, Lowkey was suppose to be one of the panelists.

Sat right at the front of the seminar hall were five young girls, four of them wore jumpers, and on the back of these jumpers was stitched LOWKEY.  Obviously big fans.

The talk Lowkey was suppose to be featuring in was at 3pm, however, the girls arrived at the event before 11am – the time the event began. At 3pm, the girls moved to the front row of the seminar room, eagerly awaiting Lowkey. There were five seats at the front of the hall for the panelists. Three of the panelists sat down – and then the moderator came. There was one seat empty. Where was Lowkey?

“Quick announcement everybody”, said the moderator, “We’ve just found out Lowkey can’t make it.” “WHAT!” said the girls, frantically looking at each other. “We came here just to see him, that’s all we came for!”

Yeah, so anyway, Lowkey didn’t come and the girls ended up listening to the talk, rather sullenly. After the talk, despite there being two hours left until the event finished, the girls left the building. The end.

LESSON: Don’t come to an event for one person and be careful of idolising a person.