It's Hard Out Here For A Frontierswoman: "The Homesman" (2014)

A little uneven, but director Tommy Lee Jones manages to creates some engaging and unsettling moments. The cast was terrific, though I found Swank to be a little too wooden. It's a shame Steinfeld wasn't old enough to play Cuddy.

Given that they're the entire impetus behind the film's plot, there is precious little exploration of the "insane" women outside of a few grim flashbacks. While those scenes are successful, we lose all three characters just as they're introduced. That's an opportunity wasted right there. Outside of 'the frontier is hard' and 'men are scoundrels,' the film doesn't really say a whole lot about them or their experience. Though I suppose that there's any focus on women at all (specifically Swank's character) is something of a coup. Mick LaSalle writes:

The phrase “feminist Western” has been thrown around with regard to the film. Better to say “The Homesman,” based on a 1988 novel by Glendon Swarthout, is concerned with the struggles of women in the West. Just imagine living in a world in which every man is filthy, half drunk and brutalized by hard living, where even the biggest idiot considers himself superior to every woman he sees. Just imagine being a woman in that world. Now imagine living in that world alone.

Overall, it's a decent film that struggles to find the right tone and balance. I feel like this was a mediocre film that could have been a good one. Now I just want to watch True Grit (2010) again for, like, the eight time.

O! The Varieties Of Compatibilism

I enjoyed Gazzaniga's book and would recommend it, but I, like Jerry Coyne, was unmoved by his compatibilist hedgings. Naive 'free will' is one of those old ideas that we made up and began to take for granted, and now we have to all sorts of heavy lifting to undo it. For me, it is far more parsimonious to accept that in light of a deterministic universe, libertarian notions of 'choice' (or any type of free will based on dualist ideas) are incompatible with our understanding of the nature of reality.

I could be wrong, of course, but whenever I see free will being redefined it strikes me as an attempt to hold on to some old idea for no other reason than that it was here FIRST! In this way, it is very much like what Sophisticated Theologians do when they distance themselves from what their revealed holy texts actually say and move toward some new definition of faith or god(s) that can coexist with a modern understanding of the world. The average believer seldom grapples with these heavy intellectual problems and are content to have their immature and unsophisticated view of their faith go unchallenged.

This constant revision should be a clue as to how desperate some are to cling to old ideas in light of new information. At some point, it may be useful to throw it all out and start working from scratch on new explanations rather than trying to square leftovers from more ignorant times with our newfangled enlightened ones.

It has gotten to the point where one must try very hard to see 'freedom' where it probably doesn't exist. And when our intuitive impression of what it means to be a free agent doesn't comport with reality, why not just change or reimagine the definition of said freedom or agency? It all smacks of wishful thinking and moving goal posts. This, again, is very reminiscent of how people work to reduce dissonance with respect to holding onto certain idiosyncratic religious beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Why can't we just shake it off and start constructing arguments from the ground up instead of building on top of what are almost certainly unsound intellectual foundations?

In case my ramblings were unclear, it may serve to quote Coyne at length here:

One of the most obvious resemblances of theology to compatibilism is the continual redefinition of “free will” so that (like God) it’s always preserved despite scientific advances. When Libet and Soon et al. showed that they could predict a person’s behavior several seconds in advance of that person’s conscious decision, the compatibilists rushed to save their definition, declaring that these experiments are completely irrelevant to the notion of free will. They’re not. For if free will means anything, it means that our choices are coincident with our consciousness of making them (to libertarians, our consciousness makes those choices, and we could have chosen otherwise). There is no scientific experiment, no finding from neuroscience, that will make the compatibilists give up their efforts, for they will simply continue to redefine free will in a way that humans will always have it. That resistance to evidence is another way compatibilism resembles Sophisticated Theology.™

In Which I Make Some Unnecessarily Snarky Comments About Richard Linklater's "Boyhood" (2014)

And now, some unnecessarily snarky comments about Richard Linklater's "Boyhood" (2014):

1. Grown-ups are the worst.
2. This movie is Liberal propaganda.
3. RICHARD LINKLATER STOLE MY TASTE IN MUSIC.
4. "You don't understand us!"
5. The Mom has the worst taste in men.
6. Director films movie intermittently over 11 year period. You won't believe what happens next!
7. They couldn't find any better child actors in Texas?
8. Movies grow up so fast. Where does the time go!?
9. You guys. Life is hard, you guys.
10. I've been saying stuff like "It's always now" since, like, 2006.

No, but seriously, following the story of a child growing up over a decade+ is a great idea for a movie. The problem is you still actually have to make the dang movie.

Thinking about "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman

After briefly outlining the trajectory of his research with Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman drops this little nugget in the introduction to Thinking, Fast and Slow:

By and large, ...the idea that our minds are susceptible to systematic errors is now generally accepted.

The irony is that few minds ever confront themselves in the critical ways necessary to fully come to terms with this. Most of us are simply unaware of the kinds of cognitive biases and unconscious processes that shape how and what we think. What is doubly ironic is that we are overly confident in our beliefs, impressions, and preferences for no good reason. We seldom ask ourselves why we think what we do. Nor do we often consider the possibility that the conclusions we reach may be wrong and/or based on unfounded assumptions or unreliable information:

The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little. We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgement is missing—what we see is all there is.

I can assert without hyperbole that the world would be a much better place if more people seriously contemplated how our thought processes are riddled with systematic errors, or that the idea of the self (that there is a coherent and essential "I" in all of us that is the conscious author of our thoughts) is an illusion. The notion that humans are fundamentally free and rational agents has been dramatically undermined by the findings of cognitive psychology. As a result, economics has undergone somewhat of a revolution in light of our new understand of human behaviour. Now, behavioural economics is all the rage!

On a more personal level, accepting that our brains come loaded with biases can lead to better and more productive relationships and interactions. One of the main reasons I seek to learn about all the ways our intuitive reasoning fails us is so that I may be better equipped when I tell someone they are wrong on the internet. I readily admit that sometimes I just cannot help myself... (Wait, who is the "I" and "myself" in this sentence? Why should they be at odds and struggling for control? Just who is in charge here, anyway?)

So after seeing many references to Kahneman's work in other books, and seeing him in an episode of BBC Horizon called "How You Really Make Decisions", I finally picked up a copy of Thinking, Fast and Slow a few weeks ago at a used book store (hardcover in great condition). Better late than never, I guess.

And if this isn't a nearly perfect description of what it's like to be a "confident idiot" in a complex world, then I don't know what is:

A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped. True, you occasionally face a question such as 17 x 24 = ? to which no answer comes immediately to mind, but these dumbfounded moments are rare. The normal state of your mind that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way. You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing it. Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain or defend.

They're illusions, Michael: "Waking Up" by Sam Harris

Although we are only beginning to understand the human mind at the level of the brain, and we know nothing about how consciousness itself comes into being, it isn't too soon to say that the conventional self is an illusion. There is no place for a soul inside your head. Consciousness itself is divisible—as we saw in the case of split-brain patients—and even in an intact brain consciousness is blind to most of what the mind is doing. Everything we take ourselves to be at the level of our subjectivity—our memories and emotions, our capacity for language, the very thoughts and impulses that give rise to our behavior—depends upon distinct processes that are spread out over the whole brain. Many of these can be independently interrupted or extinguished. The sense, therefore, that we are unified subjects—the unchanging thinkers of thoughts and experiencers of experience—is an illusion. The conventional self is a transitory appearance among transitory appearances, and it vanishes when looked for.

Waking Up: A Guide To Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris

Em-dash overuse notwithstanding, this is such a good summary of how the self is an illusion that it should be printed up on little cards and handed out to people on the street. It is no coincidence that this passage appears near the end of a terrific book which also extolls (among many other fascinating and enlightening things) the importance of having a competent teacher who can point a student in the right direction on the contemplative path of inner exploration. 

Sam Harris has written another challenging and important book. It is also a necessary one. One of the many questions that invariably arises in response to the project of New Atheism to disabuse the world of faith-based malarkey is how is one supposed to find meaning in life without religion? It is not just believers who worry about this. It is not unlike the concern over whether humans can be moral without religion. In The Moral Landscape, Harris tackled this by showing how science and reason can guide us toward moral answers. Similarly, Waking Up provides us with good reasons for seeking spirituality (i.e. meaning) in a secular context through meditation and contemplating the nature of our own consciousness.

Not that "I" needed any further convincing but if one has lingering doubts about the death of dualism, Waking Up should close the case. Coming to terms with the fact that we are our brains is, as Sam Harris argues, liberating. That the stakes couldn't be any higher in recognizing this is illustrated by this eminently tweetable gem:

Confusion and suffering may be our birthright, but wisdom and happiness are available.

"I" mean, dude. Seriously. Admittedly, "I" was always going to like this book. Rarely are expectations so dramatically exceeded. The phrase gets thrown around quite a bit, but Waking Up truly is required reading. (Also, The Self Illusion by Bruce Hood.)

("I" briefly considered changing the title of this post to "Their illusions, Michael" which, I think, is funnier, but less clear and just looks like a typo instead of a reference.)

"The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History" by Elizabeth Kolbert

"Since the start of the industrial revolution, humans have burned through enough fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—to add some 365 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. Deforestation has contributed another 180 billion tons. Each year, we throw up another nine billion tons or so, an amount that's been increasing by as much as six percent annually. As a result of all this, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air today—a little over four hundred parts per million—is higher than at any other point in the last eight hundred thousand years. If current trends continue, CO₂ concentrations will top five hundred parts per million, roughly double the levels they were in preindustrial days, by 2050. It is expected that such an increase will produce an eventual average global temperature rise of between three and a half and seven degree Fahrenheit, and this will, in turn, trigger a variety of world-altering events, including the disappearance of most remaining glaciers, the inundation of low-lying islands and coastal cities, and the melting of the Arctic ice cap. But this is only half the story."

- The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert

Quoted, at length, for truth. What else is there to say? We done goofed.

HBO Documentaries: "Terror At The Mall" (2014)

Having survived the Westgate shopping mall attack in Kenya and speaking in the documentary Terror At The Mall, Amber Prior has this to say:

I don't really blame them as individuals. They really were just ordinary men with very, very wrong ideas about life. When I spoke to them there was a real calm and determination about what they were doing. You know, they were there to send out a message to the world, however messed up that message was, and to die doing it.

To survive such a horrible ordeal and still be able to think about it rationally in real terms... Brilliant. She's my fucking hero.