Italy: Part 2

While we toured a lot of Sicily we did spend some time in Bagheria, my family's home town. While there my sister told me a story she had just heard that had to do with home my family came to live in San Diego.

It all started many years ago when a daughter was born to a family that lived on Corso Umberto (main street) right by the old Villa Palagonia. As she grew everyone in the town recognized her as the most beautiful girl in the village. Now, Bagheria isn't a big town I'll grant you. But even people outside the town agreed that she was the fairest. My sister explained that this woman was considered beautiful for three things: she had dark dark hair, light light skin, and big boobs.

Every week this most beautiful girl had a new fiancée. Partly this is because every man wanted her as his own but partly because - to this day - Italians will describe as "engaged" any couple that has gone out more than two times in a row. At any rate, this woman's heart was finally tamed by an visiting ex-pat that had immigrated to the US years before. After a quickie engagement he whisked her away to America.

Now at the time the US immigration laws stated that you could only become a citizen if you were related to a citizen and lived in the US for 9 months. So after she became a US citizen she brought her brother over who was my uncle by marriage. Once he became a citizen my father's sister could became one and then finally my father and mother. (It's the kind of story that would make Lou Dobbs mad if only my family spoke Spanish.)

I asked my sister if I had ever met this lady and she said that I must have. I don't remember her though. No doubt by the time I saw her time had taken it's toll and she was just another old Italian lady that I'd see at holidays and social gatherings.

Italy, primo parte

I've put off writing about it but it's been a couple weeks since we got back from our two week trip to Italy and I suppose I ought to write about while it's fresh in my mind.

Though Lisa got to visit Italy when my sister got married we thought we'd swing by to meet with all my relatives who couldn't make it to the wedding.

Since we'd have to transfer at Rome, and since Barbara had never been to Europe we decided to spend a couple days in Rome checking out the sites. It was quite fun and we got to see the Colosseum, Palatine hill, the forum, the Sistine chapel and all that. It was pretty cool although it involved a lot of walking.

It was raining so hard when we arrived Palermo's airport that they shut down shortly after we arrived. Though I had never driven in Italy before we rented a cute little Fiat Panda and made our way to Bagheria, my family's home town.

Despite the rain the town was all aflutter because of the premier of Baarìa, a film about the town directed by native son Giuseppi Tornatore. By that time all of my relatives had seen it more than once and since Lisa and Barbara wouldn't be able to understand it we put off seeing it ourselves till it comes out here in the US. It looks like it'll be awesome though.

...

Oh no, this is turning into one of those posts that is so long no one reads it. I will continue it later.

More thoughts on free wil

WARNING: Exciting philosophy/physics talk ahead. If you fail to read on I will not take it personally, even if you are my friend.

Photoshopping by Lisa S.

So here I am, reading a Hominids, a sci-fi Lisa recommended and trying to not write boring things about materialism, dualism, and consciousness when I stumble upon this passage of a character talking about consciousness:

No matter how many times you placed a trilobite at the same fork in the road, it will go the same way. A trilobite doesn't think; it doesn't have consciousness. It just processes the inputs of its senses and does what they dictate. No choice is made.
...
what we think of as intelligence, as sentience, doesn't arise from some biochemical network of neurons, or anything as crude as that. Rather, it arises from quantum processes. Specifically, [Roger Penrose] and an anesthesiologist named Hameroff argue that quantum superposition of isolated electrons in the microtubules of brain cells creates the phenomenon of consciousness.

Though it's a great book in other respects, this passage is the kind of stuff I just can't stand. Like time-travel in the Back to the Future films - it only makes sense if you don't think about it. Humans are conscious and unpredictable because we tap into quantum mechanical magic!

Now, I have no problem with fiction taking flights of fancy. But what we're talking about isn't being proposed as fiction. Roger Penrose is a real guy who - the internet informs me - actually wrote a book seriously proposing that human consciousness rests on quantum effects and that indeed - that free will requires Quantum Mechanics since everything else is just "deterministic".

I know this may come as a shock to most of you, but Quantum Mechanics is deterministic. Yes, quantum effects require spawning parallel universes, but the number and composition of these parallel universes is completely determined by what came before. The future seems unpredictable to us only because predicting "the future" doesn't make any sense when multiple futures awaiting multiple equally valid yous.*

The most ridiculous part of this whole line of thinking is; even if QM wasn't deterministic the argument would still fail. If the universe isn't deterministic, than the rules that govern it has some randomness. Well, big whoop. A trilobite doesn't seem any more impressive to me if it employs a random number generator to make decisions. Human free-will would not inspire more wonder if it employed a tiny roulette wheel in the brain.

I'd also like to say that as a student of physics I take offense at someone trying to use the well-deserved respect which Quantum Mechanics has earned in an effort to lend credence to their obviously amaterialistic - and thus unscientific - belief.

*I'm relaying QM as explained by the many-worlds interpretation. The rival theory, termed the Copenhagen interpretation, is pretty silly and posits a magical observer induced wave-form collapse to preserve a single world. Needless to say I see no reason why we ought to accept that.

Free will

This may bore most of my readers (even more than my posts do regularly) so be advised: possible philosophy/physics talk ahead.

I've been reading Overcoming Bias lately and though I certainly don't agree with everything they write it has helped me come to some new understandings free will and all that good stuff.

Free will is the idea that rational agents exercise control over their actions and decisions. People certainly feel like they have free will (I know I do) but a lot of people find the concept problematic. A lot of people seem to believe that their mind is somehow separate from the brain (or body or whatever) and this leads to all kinds of bizarre problems.

Take a simple example: I bring a fruit to my mouth and eat it. Clearly my hand moved the fruit in response to signals from my nerves. The nerves fired because neurons in my brain did.

If you're a materialist like me it's enough to observe that my brain is me so clearly I exercised control over my actions. But most people don't think the self is the brain. They reason that if the self is just made up of atoms acting according to physical laws, then the actions of the brain are in some sense predetermined. And they argue that if something is predetermined then there is no decision happening at all. And - they argue - if there was only one way the situation could have played out how can you hold people accountable for their actions? How can the concept of "culpability" be salvaged?

I think the right way to think about it is this: The brain is the self. Culpability stems from susceptibility to persuasion. That is, punishment can be justified if doing so will actually persuade the punished to not transgress again. This doesn't require non-determinism or consciousness or anything! Hell, you can punish a robot if you think it'll persuade it to stop doing what you don't want.

With this new understanding of culpability a lot of formerly mysterious moral concepts seem a lot clearer. For example, it explains why the same crime can lead to harsher or lighter punishments depending on the state of mind of murderer. It explains why insanity is actually a defense. And of course we've explained free will without recourse to magical non-material actors.

Canada!

Lisa and I flew up to Peterborough Canada over the weekend to attend a friend's wedding. It was really beautiful notwithstanding the mosquitoes. Some highlights:

Got to see Ned, a friend from many years back. I don't get to see him often since he lives in China working for a company that makes low-cost lights (or something) for third world countries. Anyhow, I told him to look me up on facebook sometimes but he explained that it's often fire-walled in China. Yet another reason to prefer democracy I suppose.

Also, this same friend loaned me the use of some bug repellent which he got while visiting Africa. If that's what Africans are using you know it's got to be some good repellent. Hmm... Somehow I think that slogan wouldn't work in a US ad campaign: "So powerful, it's what Africans use!"

As friends of the groom we got shuttled off to one of the distant low-status tables. I'm fine with that because I got a chance to chat with all their NYU Director friends. We came up with an idea for a movie called "Divorce Party Planner" whose plot is exactly what it sounds like. We fleshed out most of the plot and decided that Matthew McConaughey should star (though Luke Wilson would also do). Eventually the conversation got cut short by a far too long argument over whether or not it would be a good idea to open a "Sniper school".

Also, on the way back I lost my keys. This stranded me and the ever patient Lisa at the airport where we parked our car days before. Only the heroic efforts of Paul Bruno saved the day. Thank you Paul for getting Lydia's house key's from her at the Korean restaurant, using them to retrieve her copy of my house keys from her apartment, using those to get into my apartment to get my car key, returning Lydia's keys, and then driving to the Oakland airport to drop them off. Seriously, that's a true friend.

UPDATE: My keys have been found at the home we stayed at in Canada. Hooray!

The fountainhead

I just watched (most of) The Fountainhead: the 1949 film based on the Ayn Rand book of the same name. The story is about a architect who wants to design modern looking buildings and won't compromise with "the masses" who want old-timey greek/gothic facades. The story is inspired by the works of Frank Loyd Wright's ground-breaking work in architecture (but not his philosophy - Wright wasn't a selfish prick).

First thing's first: this was a really bad movie. And not bad in a way incedental to it being an adaptation of an Ayn Rand book - any good book can make a bad movie if poorly executed. No, this film was bad precisley because Ayn Rand's book was bad. (To paraphrase Futurama: Your book's bad and you should feel bad.) The most immediatly striking failure is the dialogue which couldn't sound more lifeless and robotic if it were emmited in a binary series of long and short beeps from a computer's internal speaker. Here's an example:

Before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the people! Your own work, not any possible object of your charity. I'll be glad if men who need it find a better method of living in the house I built, but that's not the motive of my work, nor my reason, nor my reward! My reward, my purpose, my life, is the work itself - my work done my way! Nothing else matters to me!

The character's are transparent props for Rand to explain her philosophy of selfishness. This maybe wouldn't be a problem if the philosophy was interesting. But it isn't. And I guess that's my main problem with the movie. Take the above quote. The main character is trying to explain why he's so uncompromising. His reward is the love of doing he explains. But he doesn't love doing just anything. He only likes doing things in a specific way. Why? Why does he conform to the constraints imposed by the building material but not to the constraints imposed by the unrefined tastes of the masses?

In the book, as in real life, Moderist architecture is based on the idea of form following function. But one can't judge how well a building functions without taking into account the opinions of the people in it. Indeed, modernist architecture fails precisely when it doesn't account for the aesthetics of "the common man" Ayn Rand so loathed. When it does account for that aesthetic, like in much of Frank Lloyd Wright's work, it's awesome.

The real reason Ayn Rand so dislikes the common man is that her formative years were spent escaping the Bolsheviks with her Russian bourgeois family. It's not clear that her opinions should be of any interest to people that don't share such atypically narrow personal experiences.

Married

So much has happened since the last post that this one will be even more disjoint than normal.

1. I got married to the awesomest girl ever. Let it be known that Lisa is totally neat-o and cool. The wedding (which Lisa did most of the planning for) was really really beautiful and we all enjoyed it very much. More photos will come soon.

2. We went on our first honeymoon in South Lake Tahoe (we'll take a luna di miele in Sicily this September). We did a lot of hiking and wildlife viewing and saw more varieties of squirrels than I've ever seen in my life: The Douglas Squirrel, the Chipmunk, the Golden-mantled Ground Squirrel and more. Also, of course, we saw many new birds including Clark's Nutcracker which had the audacity to surprise us in the parking lot before we even began our day's hike.

2b. We stayed at a hotel courtesy of my mom who got us a gift certificate as a present a while back. The hotel itself was nice but it's connected to one of those scam time-share companies (see here, here and here). Of course, we didn't know any of this when we showed us since they were real diligent to not market the gift certificate under their real name. We only found out about their offer when we checked in and they offered us a "free" dinner in a fancy boat if we listened to a 90 minute presentation. The guy was really pushing us to take the offer then and there. Even though he swore up and down that there might not be space available if we waited, we pushed back and insisted that we think it over. I'm glad we did: we ended up refusing and had a wonderful time.

3. We got back yesterday to find many presents awaiting us which is nice. Lisa and Lydia made a fort out of the boxes. Unfortunately we've found that Nature Conservancy doesn't seem to be telling us who donated in our name which makes it very difficult to thank people properly. I'm going to try to phone them tomorrow to see if I can get answers.

4. A couple hours ago we found a baby California Towhee in trouble. It had somehow fallen out of it's nest and it's parents were repeatedly trying to call to it to fly even though it clearly was not yet capable of doing so. Since there are cats around we decided to help out and try to return it to it's nest. Unfortunately we couldn't find it so following some on-line advice we made a fake one out of a wedding gift box and some tissues. We tried to place it in a inconspicuous place but we eventually had to duck-tape it to a tree. Good luck, little towhee.

(Note: Wedding photo credits go to the excellent Luke Snyder)