Donald Wheeler

As suddenly as cousin Donald Wheeler appeared in our life, he disappeared one day. In between lay a good number of Thanksgivings for which the lanky old man would appear in his "purple people eater", his beloved custom GM van on the rare short wheel base to spend the holiday with us, "his cousins". The vehicle, as we got to see it, had always over 200,000 miles on it.  Donald had it  rebuilt at one point, because it was his goal to drive it until he died. Well, it almost worked out that way. Named after the capability of accommodating at least seven passengers, the vehicle proved its usefulness at Nayna's family reunions which she began organizing for her mother sometime around the turn of the century. That is also where Donald resurfaced for Nayna. She remembered him from her great grandmother's home when Nayna was a teen but hadn't seen him since. Donald was known in the family as working for Anchor Motor Freight, presumably a lifelong job in accounting until he retired and began a second career as part-time tax consultant for H&R block. He took annual continued education classes and worked during the main tax season until he was eighty.

For tax preparation in Linden NJ, you can count on Donald C. Wheeler at H&R Block. Donald C. Wheeler assists taxpayers and small businesses with taxes in Linden NJ and the surrounding communities. Whether you are an individual or a local business in or around Linden NJ, Donald C. Wheeler has years of valuable experience as an IRS registered tax preparer. Contact Donald C. Wheeler, tax filing specialist in Linden NJ, for help with your taxes. (Internet entry)

Donald didn't change much during the ten or so years we knew him as a Thanksgiving guest. He'd show up the day before in high spirits in spite of an arduous drive on the New Jersey Turnpike on the busiest of travel days. He liked to say that he was doing "faan-tastic" and that "life was getting better every day". His face had many smile wrinkles around his blue eyes, he could be quite charming. He was tall, slender and big all around, the type who doesn't fit into any airplane seat, which is maybe, why he didn't fly. He went swimming on a regular basis and was hooked to doing morning stretches. He had long thin, grey and somewhat stringy hair which he bunched into a tale in the back like an old hippy or folk singer. He slept long hours at the rate of 12 hrs a day. On cold nights he would go to bed in a white night cap with a pointy end. The only noticeable change from year to year was that his speech got slower and slower. Living originally with a  partner in his house on 1025 West George Avenue in Linden NJ, and then alone, after the partner died of aids, he enjoyed having company and an audience. He regaled us with lengthy stories from the past which we had mostly already heard in previous years, stories which were stretched by long pauses when he searched his memory for names, dates and words in general and during which he pursed his lips to exhale long puffs of breath. Many stories involved his brother David with which he had a somewhat strenuous relationship and "camp", a cabin in Maine located right at the water which he and "brother" now shared. David spent long month "at camp", a definitely even more monastery existence than the one in Linden. In the winter he would load the van on Amtrak's auto-trains with  sleeper cars and go to Florida. From there he would drive to Texas, where he visited brother at times. I think Donald never took a plane.

Our kids who were still living at home or later came visiting for the holiday took Donald as some kind of odd uncle from a bygone era with artefacts such as his old flip phone to find addresses, names or numbers or told us about working on his old Commodore computer with 256 MB RAM or some such thing which he still fired up to do some housekeeping.

The seats in his van were covered with purple frottier towels and when he parked it in front of our house he always carefully flipped the large side mirror in as if he had parked a big rig of the kind his old employer had sent across America.

Cousin Donald, unsurprisingly, had long, slender fingers and liked to sit down and loom over our piano to give it a workout. He played long jazzy improvisations showing great finger dexterity and sense for music but there was hardly ever anything with a melody and I don't know if he could play sheetmusic.

He was very gracious, lauded Nayna's or my cooking inevitably as "fantastic, restaurant grade", brought a box of Merlot, the only wine he would drink and invited us one night out to wherever we wanted to go. He loved inviting us for dinner and he hated to leave after Thanksgiving, sometimes staying so much beyond the holiday that we began wondering how to tell him that he didn't live here. At the restaurants he would use all his charme to not drive the waiters crazy when he modified the menu items with very particular instructions especially pertaining to the obligatory starter salad (No onions, dressing on the side). Donald was good eater but he never cooked a thing and kept downtown Linden's diner scene alive all on his own. He liked to take an extra dessert home in case he would wake up at night hungry.

During the fifties he had lived in the Baltimore area for a while when he served in the army at Abderdeen. He reminisced about those long gone days when Baltimore had still streetcars while we were cruising through today's much shrunken but shinier city. I gave him once or twice my city tours and he was one of the most grateful guests I ever had on board, showing interest in many aspects of the city. He specially like the visit to the streetcar museum.

Last year Thanksgiving Donald was sick and didn't come. This year we never heard back after Nayna called and e-mailed him again. During the holiday we wondered several times what Donald would be doing. Although with Jonas and family visiting we were not lonely but I missed his fussing and turkey praise ("best meal I have ever eaten in my life") anyway.  After the holiday was over, Nayna finally called Donald's brother David to ask what was going on. That is when we learned that Donald had crashed his purple people eater last year sometime around Thanksgiving, that he fell into ill health and died of a stroke last December. Brother never called, sent a death notice, or published an obituary. The phone in Linden still takes messages and e-mails do not come back as undeliverable. But Donald had been reduced to ashes for almost a year without us having any idea. His urn sits at the family's cemetery somewhere in Connecticut. A very lonely death, indeed, and an end that Donald didn't deserve. "Life is getting better and better" was his way of expressing what we all like to believe. We will never know if he truly believed it.

Death of a CPA

No hour was too early for an appointment with Phil. Before rush hour would clog the roads one could slide off the Route 100 ramp onto Furnace Branch Road on the outer edges of what is loosely called Glen Burnie and see the non- descript little concrete structure with the mansard roof surrounded by  storage yards and a school bus yard. The dark M300 Chrysler would already be tucked on the side of the building where Phil had his own little escape hatch, he could almost drive right behind his desk.
I would enter from the front, Monica not yet there, Phil came into view in the back room bouncing around on his rickety chair, piles of files in front of him, at times a take-out breakfast from which he took a bite every now and then. There were brown file boxes all around the room and up an entire wall. Next to the side door hung George Bush, the W President. The back wall next to the window had a picture of the Inner Harbor when it still had sheds and warehouses and a working harbor.

Phil would offer me one of the two chairs on the other side of his desk, one would sink deep down into some broken spring upholstery and watch him  shift papers back and forth and occasionally hammer a few numbers into an old style battery powered calculator printing columns of numbers on a paper roll. His right hand typed the numbers in rapid fire way over there while his blue eyes scanned the spreadsheets in front of him. This blind typing always impressed me, especially when he would rip the results the paper roll, nod and then with a #2 pencil log a new line into the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet would go on top of one of the files, he would shut it, shove to the side, lick an envelope, toss a few errant bits off paper into the bin under the desk until the space immediately in front of him was clear. Then he would look up and say, "show me what you got" and the process would start over.

He would say "this is crazy", or that "it gets worse every year"; that "they don't know what they are doing over there", meaning presumably the IRS or the government altogether, especially when it was Democratic. He would report from another training course in which yet another set of rules were explained and how crazy it all was, especially the feds. For the State he had "this girl". He would call her out of the blue, rattle off the tax number, and even protracted issues would be resolved in seconds. I could see that the more local government had somehow a human side and that Phil worked this angle well.

Phil may have had highfalutin clients, but mostly I picture plumbers, glazing company owners and car repair shop owners sitting on those broken springs, folks who hated to pay taxes and for whom Phil was the God that made them go away, or at least seem smaller. "Monica, give me that file!" he would bark when Monica showed up at 8:30 sharp, or "where is this and that" and Monica would magically find things in the organized chaos, and Phil clearly expected she would. Monica was sufficiently no-nonsense to not expect praise or much warmth. The efficiency was like what happens at dental surgery when the assistant wordlessly hands the tools to the surgeon.

Phil loved efficiency. For a while he used a phone ear-peace and had some automated gizmo that lifted the receiver of his old land line phone so he could speak the hasty and breathless "ya, Phil Fewster" without taking his eyes of the charts or the fingers of the calculator. A caller greeted this way would immediately be on alert not to waste any precious time. For all the efficiency, though, he would find time to ask how business was, complain about the stupidity of government, talk about good real estate deals in Ocean City or some trip he made. Or how well his son did who didn't want to work in his office but did more lucrative things. Usually he would conclude the chat with "its crazy" and resort back to the numbers. We couldn't talk about politics, we were worlds apart and he would get way too excited. I had been worried about him getting a heart attack for almost all the 25 years I knew him. How could he possibly keep up this much pressure? Back in my office I found myself copying his moves when sorting through stuff on my desk, including his habit of running the hands through his hair until he looked as ruffled as his desk.

This went on quarterly after quarterly for 25 years, from the office where one had to climb up to on wooden exterior stairs in downtown Glen Burnie, to the one on Rose Anne Road. Phil was part of my routine and my business and in between enough glimpses of Phil the father, the husband and the human seeped through to make his sudden departure much more than a tax catastrophe. It lifted the curtain on the human condition and represented a loss quite close to home, because, really, a friend has left.

Are progress and time reversible?

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice (Martin Luther King)

The idea that history is running a course towards better outcomes is derived from Christian teleology and has become a cornerstone of modernity. The belief extrapolates one's individual life expreience to society in general, to history and to the entire universe.  We hope that the trajectory is good or think that it is human's responsibility to see to it that it is good. Both the concept of human separation from the rest of nature and the thus arising responsibility are already found in the biblical interpretations of Genesis. Today when humans seem to be able to destroy the planet, feeling responsible for the planet and the course of the future is probably good in spite of the inherent hubris.

Humans being able to change the climate or extinct whole species of animals and plants is as scary as it is novel. Novel is also the view of the universe as something that evolves from a big bang to accelerating expansion. For most of history humans had to fear nature while the universe was a fixed cupola spanning above a flat earth. On it were pinned the stars while sun and moon rotated around the earth. Below was hell and above was heaven. The human lifespan was short in light of such eternal thruths and little if anything changed from generation to generation. What could be observed remained unchanged for millenia. The stories of the fathers and mothers were the stories of their sons and daughters, their grandchildren and so on.
New is also that life on earth changes during a single lifetime, it is different from when our parents were born and almost unrecognizable from when our grandparents were born. It is hard for humans to come to terms with this if for thousands of years that was not the case. People did exactly what their great grandparents had done and any deviation was frowned upon. Whether someone was born in 1101 or in 1301 made little difference, no matter that our history books try to evoke this big arc of progress from the stone-age to the renaissance. Between the wars there lay centuries of leaden sameness.

Also new is the idea that we can shape our own life. Storytelling is full of the lost son who went out to explore the world (as in the next town) and the moral of the stories is that it is better to return. The better life with less toil and hardship was not to be found in the next town but in the transcendental space after death which more often than not came quite early. Paradise wasn't thought of as something earthly.

Time wasn't very important or seen as a useful tool to describe life even though, it had an obvious beginning and end but it was embedded in eternity. The essence of being was timeless or a matter of eons. God, the universe, rules, laws, kings. There was little motive to attempt change. If there was an aspiration at all, mere mortals aspired to understand the eternal rules and laws and at best looked for explanations for why things were the way they were not as tools to begin change. At best history consisted of cycles that resembled life: Greek philosophy saw government move through cycles similar to the stages of human development from childhood to death. Thomas of Acquinas and later Leibniz developed theories of morale and purpose in which anything happens for a specific reason. Wars, epidemics and natural disasters, were, in fact, part of a larger divine plan. Science took the same path. Newton's great discoveries in physics were new laws that explained the world in terms of a giant clock. Newton and the scientists then thought  that life was determined by eternal laws and that those laws could be recognized by their beauty and simplicity. Religious scholars thought that an all knowing God has set everything in motion physicists described the motion itself. Both were deterministic and the view of the universe remained static.

It was only during the period of Enlightenment that humans were taken out of this universal and determined context and began considering themselves as individuals with a purpose that could be discovered through the mind via reason. Kant described it as leaving behind a state of immaturity and challenged people to dare to know. The biblical command not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge was put on its head and knowledge became the new imperative. Hegel developed a theory of dialectic dependence of good and evil in which the world progresses. Karl Marx, finally insisted on putting Hegel on his feet when he proclaimed in his thesis on Feuerbach (1845), that "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." In short, the idea of progress and a progressing course of history is a modern construct,

For progress to occur it takes a dynamic view of time. Time as a topic has tickled the imagination of big thinkers throughout the ages. Theologians debated whether God was outside of time or inside time. A view of God as the creator of everything assumes that God is all at once and thus outside of time.  Another view sees God inside time and not as the creator of time but as a God of the eons. That would make time itself the absolute and stimulate human desire of participation in eternity.

Some philosophers and physicists, however began to wonder whether there was time at all, whether it objectively existed or whether it was simply a construct of human imagination to explain birth and death. These questions have influenced and continue to impact philosophy and theology and science in profound ways. The views differ between east and west differentiated by western concepts of teleology assuming a destination and a eastern cyclical concepts in which life like the universe goes around and around.

Physicists use time to describe motion, for example, but they do so against a timeless background or an absolute time. It was Einstein who famously discovered that neither space nor time were absolute but were in a relationship and therefore relative. Not only can clocks tick at different rates in various places in space, space itself can be bent by gravitational ripples. Einstein believed that time is really just imagination. He said "For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Classical physics after Newton and the Standard model of quantum physics seem to confirm Einstein's view. These models suggest complete symmetry. In that symmetry time can be mathematically eliminated because equations work equally well whether time has a plus or a minus sign in front of it. In spite of his own relativity theory Einstein still believed that the universe had a fixed size a precondition for symmetry and the belief that time was an illusion. Today, most physicists have given up on the concept of symmetry and "block-time" in which the entire universe is "all at once" just as in the respective model of God because thermodynamics and the knowledge of the expanding universe put some non-symmetrical hurdles in place that seem to require an arrow of time to be explained even though some like Stephen Hawkins have expanded the cyclic concept to the idea of a multiverse system in which many universes begin as singularities, expand, collapse and begin again.

That is certainly a relief to most of us mortals who find most of life experiences irreversible, but the matter hasn't become any simpler to understand. Entanglement with religion remains: Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and the fact that the observer is key in quantum mechanics (only the observation itself determines where a particle is at a particular moment in time) seems to suggest that an observer is needed and has been used by some to "prove" God. Creationists like to use the fine-tuned universe as proof that God created the world.Others developed an anthropomorphic concept of physics, the Participatory Anthropic Principle, created by John Wheeler in which there are no physics without humans.

The split between philosophy, science and theology that became fully necessary and sanctioned by enlightenment and the modern methods of science leave people confused. Frequently people take bits and pieces from each field and combine them in a personal belief system that glues together seemingly conflicting constructs. The volatility of such melanges and the increasing incomprehensibility of complex science from genetics to physics fosters metaphysical contemplations and irrationality. Ironically it is the rational construct of enlightenment that hasn't foreseen the possibility of a reversal in which humanity slides backwards on the path of understanding and knowledge. Maybe enlightenment has misunderstood humans all along, because the backsliding began concurrent with enlightenment, at least politically. The French Revolution which was propelled by enlightenment sank into despotism and rationalism was followed by romanticism.
That progress of clear thought, science and technology  cannot be taken for granted has been clear throughout the ages. Whether it was the burning of the library of Alexandria or how achievements of the Greeks and Romans were forgotten through the dark ages or the destruction of advances civilizations through colonists in South America. This time around we may not have as much time to recover.  If there is an arrow of time it certainly doesn't fly straight and to believe that it really bends towards justice, the long view is needed.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

“on the wrong side of history.”
historical determinism
“Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name. Yes, ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice'."
19^th century clergyman Theodore Parker first coined the phrase

LAWS do not change the objects on which they are operating and hence probably are time reversible.

OPERATIONS on the other hand can change objects, their number in the system and hence are not time reversible (if I delete some files there is no algorithm how to restore them again)

https://www.thoughtco.com/five-great-problems-in-theoretical-physics-2699065

The phrase "the arrow of time" was coined in 1927 by Sir Arthur Eddington and popularized in his 1928 book The Nature of the Physical World. Basically, the arrow of time is the idea that time flows in only one direction, as opposed to dimensions of space which have no preferred orientation.

The most common explanation is that in the very distant past, the universe had a high degree of order (or low entropy). Because of this "boundary condition," the natural laws are such that the entropy is continuously increasing. (This is the basic argument put forth in Sean Carroll's 2010 book From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, though he goes further to suggest possible explanations for why the universe may have started off with so much order.)

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics suggests that as a system unfolds, its physical state is defined by its quantum wavefunction. This quantum wavefunction describes the probabilities of all possible configurations of the system. At the point when a measurement is made, the wavefunction at that point collapses into a single state (a process called decoherence of the wavefunction).

what would happen according to quantum physics is that the universe could exist as a superposition of states, unfolding simultaneously in every possible permutation, until such a time when an observer springs up in one such possible universe. At the point the observer potentially exists, there is therefore an act of observation, and the universe collapses into that state.

This is essentially the argument of the Participatory Anthropic Principle, created by John Wheeler. In this scenario, there is no need for a God, because the observer (presumably humans, though it's possible some other observers beat us to the punch) is itself the creator of the universe. As described by Wheeler in a 2006 radio interview:

We are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago. We are in this sense, participators in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past and if we have one explanation for what's happening in the distant past why should we need more?

One important thing to remember is that in quantum physics, the original uncertainty about the particle's quantum state isn't just a lack of knowledge. A fundamental property of quantum theory is that prior to the act of measurement, the particle really doesn't have a definite state, but is in a superposition of all possible states.

The phase of a wave function is entirely “arbitrary” according to physics, and it is precisely this phase that creates huge consequences for how a time-dependent wave function evolves and interacts with other wave functions. In truth, this phase factor is not arbitrary, but deliberately chosen at some level of consciousness because being detached from the deterministic (statistical) parts of quantum theory, phase is left entirely at the discretion of choice. This shows how mind ultimately affects physical reality, not by violating its classical laws, but by working through nonlinear systems to amplify “arbitrary” quantum fluctuations into macroscopic effects.

Time dependent wave functions show how consciousness creates time. The only reason they appear to evolve through time is that they consist of multiple stationary states (wave functions independent of time) whose various phases change to produce a “moving” wave function. But these phases are chosen by consciousness, and since it is the phases that give rise to the seeming time-dependence of a wave function, it should be beyond debate at this point that consciousness creates time.

Furthermore, once a wave function has “collapsed” (one disc of the jukebox selected to be played), it cannot “uncollapse”. The collapse of a wave function is not time reversible because mathematics cannot calculate it equally well forwards and back. Only linear systems which are perfectly predictable are time reversible. So once more, time is irreversible when, and only when, it comes to quantum systems and freewill choice.

the choices we make determine what choices are available, but not which ones we’ll end up making. Thus, classical and quantum processes interact to give rise to the rich dynamic fractal we call life.

Was there a Beginning?

Musings. 

Sometimes the yearning for an understanding of the full expanse of existence, the Sein, almost hurts. 

The sense of the immensity of what there is hurts in all it's infinite aspects: The earth, the universe, the presence, past and future. The own existence, whose beginning is nothing but fog to all but the parents who now vanish with this, their unique knowledge of my first days. Even the tiny splinter in the grand scheme of things, of our own history is largely unexplored. So many paths not taken, so much love not given, so much not seen, even though it was in plain sight, so much not understood in spite of all efforts. 

All this comes into focus here in the cabin's own forest, my forest as it were, here where the silence is so loud that the ears are ringing from the voices of the past and the choir of desires. Only the sudden stillness allows these to be heard. 

Subconsciously the eyes rise to see the distance, the deep blue sky, or, later in the evening, the stars that shine here as bright as they shone everywhere before industrialization. In German the word for heaven and sky is the same. Makes so much sense when the eyes drift up to gauge scale. 

Humans do this, stare at the moon and conjure up deep thoughts or even deeper longings. Think of love, a lover and the heart becomes heavy. This is never fully explained anywhere but the heart is always heavier with the moon in sight, no matter what cardiologists may think or why dogs howl at the moon. 

For perspective I like to look at the stars. While the moon makes one feel heavy, the stars give the thoughts wings. They make earthly heaviness appear so laughably small to become  ridiculous. Of course in the month of darkness, in December, we string stars to trees and to rooftops to ensure ourselves their enjoyment even when it is cloudy.  

Stars open the view into the past, so far beyond the own small fog of birth that, with a stiff neck from staring straight up, the enormity of what is in view of the bare eye escapes any grasp. All this is supposed to  once have come out of a singularity smaller than an atom? And  has been expanding ever since and getting colder with stars and galaxies being swallowed and others born? The upheaval is so slow, though, that seafarers even now could  use celestial maps from Columbus' time and would still find their route through the night with reasonable accuracy. 

At the cabin I am torn between contemplation and basic direct action: Chopping wood, making a fire in the stove, cooking, love, clearing trails or hiking. Sitting on the porch or on a stump observing the sun rise or set, gazing at the mountain ridge barely visible through the trees. Both, contemplation and action, elevate the urge to read, to understand and to write.  Act, contemplate and report, a trifecta so hard to bring into the right balance. 

Writing is the art of taming wildly tumbling thoughts, emotions and yearnings into an abstract of symbols, domesticating them to being words, nailing down what resists grounding. Making permanent what is fleeting. Giving order to what is chaos, making communicable what is locked deep inside. All that is what it means to find words, to write them down and to string them together.  

But that act is also a terrible reduction, an injustice to reality, words are not even a shadow of the real things; furthermore, writing stops or slows the onslaught of new thoughts and turns treacherous torrents into tame trickles and placid and navigable waters. 

The letters, whether on a screen or on paper, are incarnations of failure. But the failure to match reality also spells success because the reduction of complexity is a condition of understanding, a necessity for finding patterns, laws and meaning in the chaos. 

Maybe that is what is meant with the famous opening statement in the gospel of John "in the beginning was the word". He continues, "The word became flesh" per the King James Bible and per Luther's German translation,  flesh instead of Theon, god, an interesting choice of words. 

This puts the symbol and the abstract in front of and before the objects that they describe: idealism in pure form. God, then, is a principle that humans derive from the overwhelming complexity that surrounds them and of which they are part. God as logos and logos as god. No god without logos and no logos without god, which, of course makes an anthroprocentric god who cannot be thought without humans who think. This is a tautological trap but the concept of the word first makes it eternal, timeless and god-like. It is easier to think of mathematics that way, since they don't need or describe objects. The word is harder to see as the beginning than numbers, unless we say that numbers are words. And why not?  Was the word or math there  before the Big Bang, before singularity? Physicists would not object, they wouldn't allow the question of what there was before the Big Bang, for there was no time before the beginning. 

Free Will, Determinism and Neurology - The Chicken and the Egg all over again

The following musing is based on a mail dialogue with a Suebian theologian whom I met on the occasion of my mother's death. He sent me recently a particular (English) sentence describing instructions in the Libet experiment with the request for help in interpreting and translating it to see if it could have a second or hidden meaning. This as part of his preparations for a talk about freedom, will and religion. At the same time I had received Sam Harris' book "Free Will" as a present. So, the topic was clearly on the table.

Please allow that I write in English today in regards to your preparations for a talk about freedom and free will in conjunction with the Libet experiment. The Libet conundrum has moved ethicists, philosophers and neurologists for some time and you reminded me of something I had been dimly aware of and brought it back to light just after my wife gave me the little book Free Will (by Sam Harris. I have not read it yet). For that I want to thank you.

Like you I feel that the mechanistic causality conclusion (that there is no free will if the brain “knows” about our decision before we do) is unsatisfactory. It may interest you that Neuroscience seems to have confirmed the Libet experiment as far as the time sequence. I found a nice little video on this. But even this much larger time span between neural firings and awareness of a decision or the act does not prove anything, I think. Namely the separation between neurons, awareness and physical action (pressing a button) is suspect since all of it is part of one and the same system, a human.

For one thing, I am not very unsettled by this as physics has already told me that time is relative and that causation isn’t always what it appears to be. Quantum physics, for example has the nice little “Entanglement” problem from which the concept of Quantum Computers is not only derived but even already realized on a very small scale.  The puzzle of cause and effect also reminds me of Schroedinger’s cat which is alive and dead at the same time, a thought experiment with this astonishing conclusion. In short, mechanistic logic (Newtonian logic) is by far not able to describe the physical world on the very small scale nor on the very large scale (of Black Holes, for example). So why should the brain be an exception?

But maybe one doesn’t have to go as far as quantum mechanics to question the simple cause and effect conclusion that seems to be inevitable from the experiments. One could put this into the realm of the dualisms that have governed thinking for eons, namely idealism and materialism (Hegel/Marx). Or the popular term of nature and nurture. Whether Hegel or Marx, we should have learned about dialectic relationships. The relations of the material brain, external factors that made the brain the way it is (genetics and experience) and awareness of what the brain does could be described as dialectic. And that even before one introduces the terms free and will. The issue, then, is where will resides in this dialectic relation or in the time sequence. The problem with the Libet experiment or with the brain scans is that it doesn’t measure will but the lag between neural firings and the awareness of them.

This lag isn’t unknown. Similarly we may already see ourselves running from the tiger before our brain is finished reporting what it just saw and that it was, in fact, a tiger. This would introduce the spheres of the conscious and the subconscious. It is well known from recent neuroscience that there is a lag between those spheres as well and that the conscious mind is terribly slow and often unreliable.

I can’t put any of this into the context of Erasmus and Luther but I think that this is generally just another case of the search for the Prima Causa where science and religion find each other in a pseudo conflict that goes away upon further thought, just as you suggest.  Going back to physics, the prima causa question reminds me of the creation versus Big Bang debate. Was there a creator that made the Big Bang happen, or did it happen on its own or in a multiverse (Hawkins)  where Big bangs happen regularly in a kind of cyclic pattern. The classic chicken and egg question. Anytime we expand our thought model we can internalize what was previously an external factor. This has been the history of physics but it never answered the question of god or the prima causa. It just moved it to a different sphere much in the same way as the Libet test moves “free will” to another level.

Not sure that any of this contributes to your talks about freedom. But I think the question cannot be “are we free” but can we wrestle any degree of freedom from the materiality of our existence. That, indeed, is a matter of degree and the kind of work we put into it. I see religion or ethics as imperatives for us to try and free ourselves from determinism as much as possible, a herculean effort but one that is worth it, for it makes us human.

It was the bite in the apple that expelled us from paradise, created awareness and began the struggle away from the determinism of the rest of creation for the apple came from the tree of knowledge and knowledge allowed humans to follow the dictum Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. Freedom and knowledge come from the same tree in my opinion.

Klaus

Now and Then, Why the Present is Very Different from the Past

It has become common to define ourselves as a Knowledge Society, usually in contrast to the Industrial Society. Or before that the Agricultural Society. These are sloppy definitions, for sure, for they immediately beg the question how we can have industry without knowledge or live with knowledge without making stuff, let alone growing food. I suppose the point is, how many of us are engaged in these necessities. Today more people than ever are part of the "creative class", the folks that simply research, study, teach, write or create while a smaller and smaller portion of the population is needed for production or food.

While this is pretty well understood, the focus on these definitions is on the material aspects of society rather than what is going on in us, the people in society, human minds and their thinking.
Outwardly it would seem people grow older on average and they are taller as well, they can run faster and operate complicated stuff with ease, but generally it is assumed that human needs and abilities and the great drivers that makes us tick, remained pretty constant throughout history. Love, competition, aggression, fear, the desire to socialize, get recognition. We assume that caveman was subjected by pretty much those same forces and, indeed, pictures, narratives, books and music suggest as much. While technology changed, the human remained much the same.

What if this is assumption dramatically wrong? What if a medieval farmer who could magically be transported into  our life would not just be hopelessly overwhelmed by our technology and would have no clue what to do with I phones, TV's or cars, he would also be aghast about how women and children live and behave, about the multitude of races, about the pace with which we race through the day? About the fact that so many different things are all considered "right" at the same time, our way of questioning things and allowing new ideas very hour of our lives? Did we ever consider that he, who lived in the middle ages would have lived in a time where things at his birth were exactly the same as things were when he died and then the same again for his children and children's children?

In spite of all the technological progress of the last two hundred years, knowledge about knowledge itself has been slow in coming. We have decoded DNA and know how genes program our bodies but we know very little what ideas are, how knowledge manifests itself or what consciousness is. Of course, these questions have been asked throughout history, typically known as the "meaning of life", yet it is fascinating how much these remain still questions with no answer. We still struggle with the concepts of  the "soul" or the crudely mechanical constructs of the Id, the Ego and the Super-Ego invented by Freud and Jung to explain the forces that form our mind and consciousness. Neurologists are feverishly tracking the electric currents fired off by neurons trying to find what thought and emotions are what or what may make the two different. While we know that society certainly creates common patterns in thinking and emotion we still like to think of ourselves as singularities, one of a kind prototypes, somehow driven by a mix of nurture and nature but also "free will".

While we are conscious of the fact that technological and social change have accelerated, few have a concept for logarithmic or exponential developments and many of us are, in spite of two and a half centuries of enlightenment, still deeply influenced by the cyclical world concepts of eastern philosophy in which things turn in cycles and circles without actual progress. These cyclical philosophies, actually even had a renaissance in recent decades, driven by all those who where frightened by the fast speed in which we moved away from "paradise" and our place in nature. Indeed, critical thought would have to admit that the possibilities created by technology exceed knowledge, morale and ethics, the very foundations and faculties to exert some control. Hippies and tea-partiers are united in their attempt to slow things down. The ones preach unity with nature over progress the other "the America they know and grew up in" over the change they think is brought about by sinister forces.

But nature as our model is tricky. It isn't a paradise and it sure isn't static and also not cyclical. It has entropy and it appears to have a clear arrow of time. It can't be fully symmetrical since matter somehow won out over anti-matter. The universe is getting colder and is expanding in an ever accelerating fashion. This, after all, may be an appropriate analogy for the human condition.

Some philosophers and scientists are trying to apply the methods to explain genes and their reproduction to ideas as well. They call those memes. Memes as societal formations of ideas, patterns that mutate and procreate and hop from person to person and from generation to generation. But while genes are quite slow in their adaptions to the change, memes are exploding just like the universe into wider and wider horizons of knowledge and understanding. This journey into infinity might just have begun. While our imaginary medieval surprise guest would be quite confused in our world, his puzzlement would be nothing compared to the ours if we could see the very world in which our very own children will live when they will be old. The change that will sweep through this century would make us utter strangers in it.

Reference literature: David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity, Penguin Books 2011
Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos

Juror #13

On November 13, after three hours of waiting and being processed in various ways, I stood in Judge Barney’s courtroom on the third floor of the county court house in front of the two prosecutors, the defendant and the two defense lawyers. They all looked me briefly up and down and then both sides agreed:“Acceptable”.

Thus I became juror #13. I took a seat in the jury box.

It was a surprise to me that more than twelve jurors would be selected and that “alternates” were a normal and reasonable occurrence injury selection. I should soon see why. But when I sat down I thought being the spare tire was the worst fate, for I would have to listen to everything while I would not get to deliberate or vote.

Eventually fifteen of us were jammed into the jury box. The judge, the defense and the “State” had taken their places as well, the defendant in his light blue shirt was well in my sight-line. #13 was a good seat for that, also close to the audience where some family seems to sit. The judge,a middle aged black female gave us general instructions, sort of what they had already told us all morning but only now, after actually being selected, were my ears open.

Then she sent us to our jury room where we were released for lunch. We received our phones back which we had just surrendered and could go our merry way, but just for 45 minutes. It seemed so implausible now after we were told to speak to nobody about anything related to this case.  But there I was outside the court house back in the world I knew. This freedom felt already sweet after only the briefest of interruptions.

After this interlude, we freedom and electronic devices alike were locked away while we lined up in the order of our seats to walk collision-free into the courtroom and the jury box, now in full and official function. We learned that “all rise” not only for the judge but for the entering jury as well.

Proceedings started with the opening statements. The defense laid out the case for us from their perspective, trying to explain the complicated events and what we had to expect.  As if to confuse us, the prosecution immediately followed with a very different story.

While the case was still an entirely blank sheet for us, we hungrily took the brush strokes with which the defense painted the picture,after all, this was the first information we received about the case. Right before us unfolded bits and pieces of the type court room drama we know from TV, enacted only for us jurors, it seemed. The attorneys marched up and down the jury box, trying to make eye contact.

The judge had explained that these opening statements were not evidence and should not be considered when we deliberated guilt or innocence.

 It became immediately clear that we had a tough case: Murder and attempted murder in one crime act.State and defense warned us that we would get to see “shady characters” that we would “our daughters not want to go out with”. A statement that I as father of five daughters could easily relate to,even though the State used it for the defendant while the defense characterized witnesses which we had yet to see the same way.

I peered over to the defendant who sat small, and quiet, his head lowered.  Rarely daring a glance sideways to the jury he appeared already somewhat defeated. If one can say such a thing at all, he didn’t look like a murderer. Rather, just sitting there silently,in his slender shape and blue dress shirt, he reminded me of a well connected up and coming Washington developer I had met a few times.

The opening statements quickly conveyed a rough outline of the crime and what had preceded it. Four people who all know each other had gotten together in a car, drove around for a while, left the vehicle in a dark forlorn cul de sac of a yet to be completed subdivision. Shortly afterwards,the only girl in the group is dead, her boyfriend has been shot and left behind for dead, the two others have fled. People who hear the gunshots call police which eventually find the victims. The surviving boyfriend immediately sets police on the track of his friends. Both will be arrested within 24 hours after the shooting.

One of the alleged perpetrators sits in front of us, the other has already had his day in court, although we won’t be told the verdict.The wounded victim has recovered and will be the prosecutions key witness.

Many names and nicknames swirl around in our heads and notes. (All names have been altered). Shacky, the other perpetrator, his real name Bryan McLod. Cornell Hull, the other victim, was also called Coco. Andthen, of course, the defendant, Emrich Altona Smith, now 19 years old and the murder victim Catelyn Dresser, 17 years young when her life was taken. A somewhat interesting detail is that the victim is not only the only female, she is also the only white. At the early stage of this trial, no plausible motive emerges why these four friends would have trained guns on each other. Neither does it appear obvious to us jurors who shot whom or if anybody other than the four occupants of the car may be involved.

Back in my home for the night I realize how close these events were to my life, geographically and because of the age of my children.  Yet, language, culture and circumstances of this world of drugs, gangs and violence were worlds away from my experiences.  Crime can bring it all together, as was not only demonstrated by my presence here in the courtroom but also by the mother of the killed daughter sitting next to the mother of the injured but recovered shooting victim although the killed girl apparently never has had a run-in with the law while CoCo ad just been released from prison at the time of the crime.

 Over the next two days  the prosecution will line up witness after witness and expert after expert to prove that a gun, retrieved in a hiding place, was the murder weapon and that DNA clearly links the defendant to the crime scene. Gang experts explain gang culture to us, the prosecution is trying to distill motives out of that culture. Murder as admission test to a gang, or retribution for going with a girl that a gang leader may have laid claim to. Maybe snitching since the surviving victim had just been released from prison before that hot July night, that brought him into a helicopter and the shock trauma center. It is one of the great revelations from ballistics tests and forensic evidence that two guns were fired at Catelyn and that shots from either one could have killed her. The second weapon never found.

Obviously, the most interesting witness is the shooting victim, Coco. After all, he was clearly there when Catelyn was shot. The defense does what they can to render him not credible, and indeed, some of his statements are contradicting themselves, especially the story about the defendant’s cellphone, whether it was lost (as he says it was in the lonely dark court and caused everybody to get out of the car to search for it) or if it was clearly sitting on the dashboard as he had also testified. It remains murky, why he would have encouraged his girlfriend to get out of the car as he admitted he did. The defense points out that Coco was once again in prison and had a motive to lie so he would be released early. The defense attorneys also pointed out that one of the investigators bought Coco lunch while he transported him to an interview and could have told him the details that CoCo now spits out as his own experience in the case. The defense, in their closing argument, went as far as describing him as one of the shooters, potentially even the murderer. They described in vivid colors a possible shootout between rivaling gangs in which the girl just happened to get caught up.

When four days of arguments, witness testimony and cross examinations had passed, the hard evidence, indeed, allowed a number of scenarios even though it was indisputable that two potentially deadly bullets retrieved from Catelyn’s body came from two different weapons, one from the weapon that had been found. DNA linked all participants to the crime scene or the vehicle. Still no direct evidence was found on the weapon or on the perpetrators that clearly proved who shot whom.

What was the jury to do? Isn’t guilt beyond any reasonable doubt the condition for a guilty verdict as well as the “innocent until proven guilty” maxim that is the hallmark of any real justice system?

By the time closing arguments had wrapped up, the jury consisted of only the necessary twelve members. Already on the morning of the second day two jurors were eliminated due to whatever legal concerns brought forth by either defense or prosecution and I advanced from being substitute juror #13 to actual juror #5. On day three another juror was dismissed, thus even juror #15 was now a regular.

It was Friday evening and the prospect of a reconvening after the weekend became increasingly likely. But the judge sent us into deliberations after reading to us the charges again which included first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder and two counts of use of a handgun in the commission of a crime of violence. All seemed to hinge around the key question, did the defendant kill Catelyn?

The jury would have been hopelessly stuck, if that, indeed,would have been the main question because it wasn’t even proven that Emrich Smith had fired a weapon at all.

 But, alas, it would be simpler than that. As the judge explained, if two people premeditate murder,both are on the scene and a person is, in fact, killed, it is sufficient to be present and not intervene to be guilty of first degree murder. This is the legal principle of “accomplice liability”. CoCo’s witness testimony that Emrich called out “kill him” when he tried to flee after the first shots rang out would be a key ingredient in establishing that Emrich would not have been just a passive bystander in the commission of the crimes.

It was Friday after 6pm when the jury gathered in the always too hot or too cold jury room with its drafty windows. Finally we were not only allowed but required to discuss the case with each other. To date we had barely talked, afraid to say something non permissible. Our dozen was a diverse group,by age, gender, race and background. Although juror #1 was technically the jury foreperson, she was rather unsure how to go about the deliberation while the youngest, a white male took several successful attempts to guide the deliberations.  As often in cases of severe emotional stress, people need comic relief and there was laughter and banter that felt somehow inappropriate in light of the gravity of the case with one young person’s life already gruesomely ended out and a second now in our hands.

We had learned very little about the defendant. His history was not brought up and he never took the stand. What we knew about him was from tapes of recorded phone calls he had made from prison. Those stood in stark contrast to his appearance; the two hour recordings were throughout a barely understandable foul mouthed rant about a mix of trivia and items possibly relevant to the case. It turned out that a few in the jury had been able to follow those tapes well, but most of us did not comprehend much other than that he was frustrated that his friends didn’t do more to help him out, at least with some phone money. There was no clarity if he had, as the prosecutors maintained, alluded to his gun. His elaborations used code words and extreme street slang that had only been partly decoded by the gang expert from the County police.

Several on the jury wanted to discuss the behavior of the crown witness in order to find out how credible he was. I thought, though, that with the newly learned principle of accomplice liability, that it didn’t matter if CoCo had lied or not. That even if the defense’s scenario would have been true, namely that there was, in fact, a shootout and that the missing second gun may have belonged to him, this would not change the fact that the defendant was in cahoots with the already earlier convicted  Bryan and that they together drove the victims into the cul de sac and that together they assaulted them. Whether two guns were used, one by each of them, or if one of them shot both victims with one gun or possibly with two, is ultimately non material under the accomplice principle.  

An hourly later, we were not anywhere near a consensus. We had spent almost all the time to explain the case and available evidence to one juror who simply hadn’t followed the proceedings with enough care. He kept saying that the case is too grave to rush it and I assume, that secretly every single juror was glad for the added review time, even if we had now run against the time the judge had given for a postponement until Monday. After we sent a message that we may be close, though,  the judge ordered pizza and we got some more time. I can only imagine how high the tension runs in the courtroom where the defendant, his lawyers, the state attorneys, the judge and the families wait for the verdict. Back in the jury room we finally determined that we all felt comfortable being asked the big question. Do we find the defendant guilty of premeditated murder or not.  Twelve times the answer was: Guilty. That eliminated the also possible second degree murder charge and made the weapon charges basically inevitable.

It was after eight on that Friday evening, when we marched back into the court room and took our seats in the jury box for the last act:To listen to our forewoman how she responded to each of the three judge’s questions with a low voice “guilty” and then confirm that she had spoken for all of us. 

Catelyn’s mother cried. The defendant did not show any emotion, the young state attorneys looked pleased with themselves, the defense lawyers less so.

Leaving the courthouse into the cold crisp evening, free to go wherever I pleased, I thought of the young defendant who was heading back to prison, whatever hope he might have had for a release, completely dashed. One more young black male in prison, for a very long time. I did not feel accomplished, neither as juror #13 nor as #5.

The experience haunted me for days. I went on the internet and tried to find whatever news that had been published about this case which somehow had kept a pretty low profile in the media both when the crime happened and also now, during the trial. I found that Emrich Smith and his father had been mentioned in the local paper when he was only four years old in a little story about his father moving his hair cutting business outside on Monument Street so he could keep an eye on his son.

It was only at the sentencing hearing that I learned more about Elrich. Almost three months had passed since the trial, Christmas had been celebrated,  a brand new year had begun when I settled back in the same courtroom where time seemed to have stood still. Emrich was the only one who had changed, he had gained weight so it seemed to me. Maybe it was only that he wore two T shirts on top of each other instead of the blue dress shirt. Defense and State attorneys looked like they never had left the courtroom at all, each one of them wore the exact same clothes, hairstyles and facial expressions as back in November and Catelyn’sfamily members sat in the same places as in November.

As at the trial, the defense got to talk first with a somewhat impassioned but not very well performed plea for mercy. I learned that Elrich had been born to a drug addict and had drugs in his blood at birth. That his parents didn’t care for him and he lived with an ant. Then at 4, as I had found out already, he lived with his father; but it was only for one year. When he was nine the mother tried to be a parent but didn’t last any longer than the father and then left her son once more. Thus, Emrich had jumped from place to place all his young life. The mother’swhereabouts were unknown today, the defense lawyer pointed out and that neither parent ever contacted court or defense during the entire time between the crime and now. We learned that Emrich had his first contact with the Department for Juvenile Services at the age of 12. "Emrich never had a chance. Temper justice with mercy" pleaded the defense in closing. Naturally the State prosecutors didn’t see it that way, they presented the young man as one thatcouldn’t be reformed, that had been accused of robbery, arson, assault and violation of probation even before Catelyn died. As a son whose father was on record as having said on occasion of the arson case: "Emrich has a demon in him". That even now in prison he is alleged to have associations with BGF (black gorilla family) gang  and was involved with assault. That he had tested positive for a certain drug even during the trial. "He is beyond rehabilitation". 

The prosecution called on Catelyn’s father who appeared with his “lady friend” and then the mother for testimony on the emotional harm their daughter’s death had inflicted on them.  Finally, the defendant got one more chance to address the court. He did not use it.

The verdict came swiftly. The judge pointed out that it was impossible to undo what had been done or do now what should have been done then. Then she read her sentences: Life without parole and 20 years each for the each of the firearm and assault charges. The defense noted that they will appeal.

Handcuffs clicked around both of Emrich’s wrists. Then he was guided out of the courtroom, I detected what looked like defiance in his eyes. He would not agree that justice had been served here or anywhere in his life. Catelyn’s mother and father went their separate ways: Parents who lost a child. They will never find closure.

As the judge said, it isn’t for the justice system to fix the past. But true justice cannot exist, if the society continues to fail so many children.