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Thursday 31 December 2020

Free Will and Determinism

 The Choice is clear

Faced with a choice between free will and determinism, the choice has always been clear.  Neither our legal system nor our morality could exist without free will.  No-one could be accused of a crime or a sin, unless we accept that they had free will, that they had a choice.  In recent eras, the conviction that determinism is wrong has been reinforced by expressions like "biological determinism" and "social determinism."  

Biological determinism

"Biological determinism" is widely recognized as the fallacious belief which claims that the limitations and diminished social status of women are determined by their biology, not by patriarchal societies and cultures.  In fact, there is a schism inside feminism with French feminists recognizing some role for biology and American feminists denying biology.



Social Determinism

"Social determinism" allows the idea that members of the upper classes of society are in fact superior. Some 19th-century novels, in particular, Dickens' Oliver Twist, have been criticized for the alleged subtext that certain characters, like Oliver, were morally superior and immune from corruption because they were the biological offspring of a wealthy ruling elite. 

Christian philosophy

Christian philosophy has been particularly challenged by the incompatible, mutually exclusive dichotomy of an omniscient, omnipotent God and individuals who have free will.  If God knows what I'm going to do and chooses to allow me to do it, how can I be blamed for whatever I do?  Partially in response, John Calvin elaborated a new kind of deterministic Christianity which became the basis of Puritanism.  According to Calvinism, God has already chosen his "elect" and there is limited possibility for atonement for most of humanity. Anathema for Calvin was the Catholic practice of indulgences; that is, that I could buy my way into heaven by purchasing another gold chalice for the church. 

Puritanism

The word "puritanism" was first used, quite mockingly, to describe the most extreme anti-Catholics, who wanted to "purify" Christianity of any vestige of Catholicism.  One of the causes of the American revolution was that Puritans who had ventured to North America in part to practice their particularly fervent "Protestantism" (meaning "protest" against Catholicism) discovered that, under the Quebec Act, the English government had granted a landmass stretching from the Arctic Circle to the Mississippi Valley to French Catholics.


Physics and free will

Just when I was ready to relax and accept free will as an obvious state of affairs, I was introduced to Sabine Hossenfelder's "You don't have free will, but don't worry." In her vlog, Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist, presents straightforward, no-nonsense analyses, explanations and critiques of the current state of physics.  Her style--which is key to the vlog's appeal--is to do away with uncertainty and waffling.  She offers her opinions and judgments as ineluctable facts, and the alternatives as "rubbish" (one of her favourite words).  She is, as it were, the Judge Judy of physics.

I must confess that while I find it relatively easy to deny the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful God, I find it much harder to dismiss the laws of physics. Human brains and human bodies, Hossenfelder argues, are collections of particles and atoms and molecules.  We might feel that we are making choices and changing reality by exercising free will, but particles, atoms and molecules will do what particles, atoms and molecules will do.  This is what our brains do; they follow the laws of physics.  Our feelings of having made a decision are chronologically after our brains have completed the chemical reactions necessary in decision making. To put it simply--as Hossenfelder does--the idea of free will is incompatible with the laws of physics.

The argument is so counterintuitive that it is hard to credit.  However, counterintuitive does not mean wrong.  The argument aligns with Pierre-Simon Laplace's Demon, as described in Sean Carroll's The Big Picture:  On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself.  Laplace (1749 - 1825), the "French atheist mathematician," claimed that a Demon who had "perfect knowledge" of the present would be able to perfectly predict the future.

 Laplace’s Demon could say with confidence what the probability of every future history will be, and no amount of human volition would be able to change it. There is no room for human choice, so there is no such thing as free will. We are just material objects who obey the laws of nature.

Thought Experiments on free will

Despite the fact that Hossenfelder is not only a theoretical physicist but a German theoretical physicist, she does not seem very taken with Gedankenexperiments ("thought experiments" in English). As a counter-argument to Hossenfeld's, I performed the following simple thought experiment. I placed both of my hands on my desk. I told myself that I would then decide which hand--left or right--I would raise. After reflection, I raised my left hand. According to Hossenfelder, my decision . . . actually there was no "decision," my raising of my left hand was determined at the Big Bang. Like the falling of a domino in a chain of dominoes, the raising of my left hand was an inevitable consequence of the tumbling of the first domino, the Big Bang at the beginning of the universe.

Don't worry, be happy!

What does my thought experiment prove?  Not much--except perhaps how extremely counterintuitive the denial of free will is.  I'm left to wonder if every word that Shakespeare wrote was the inevitable consequence of interacting particles--not a reflection of the brilliance of the Bard.  Diminishing Shakespeare does seem to diminish us all.  But Hossenfelder tells us "not to worry."  We can think of our lives as stories or films, and we can carry on believing in our free wills until we arrive happily at the end of the story which is our inevitable, pre-determined conclusion.

Free Will as legal fiction

Sean Carroll presents the inescapable argument that life as we humans know it would be impossible without the concept of free will.  The legal system, human psychology, human sociology and human life, itself, would all be quite baseless without free will.  Whatever you might choose to do or not do in life would mean nothing because choice itself is an illusion and all consequences are already determined.  However, the fact that the concept of free will is necessary does not prove that free will actually exists.  Free will might, in fact, be another example of a "legal fiction"  (see my post on Terrorism and Madness); that is, something we pretend to believe because it serves a legal purpose.   If so, free will is the legal fiction of all legal fictions.


 

Free Will in The Swerve

In Stephen Greenblatt's remarkable research into Lucretius, the Roman poet/philosopher, and Poggio Bracciolini, the 15th-century "book hunter" and papal secretary, who saved Lucretius's work from ignominy, the existence of free will is once again in question.  Writing fifty years before the birth of Christ, in his poem On the Nature of Things, Lucretius repudiated all religions as cruel superstition, denied the existence of an afterlife and the idea that human beings had immortal souls.  He described the nature of all things, including humans, as collections of particles in constant motion; in other words, much as sub-atomic, quantum-theory physicists do today.

Greenblatt paraphrases Lucretius's Latin poem:

The swerve is the source of free will. In the lives of all sentient creatures, human and animal alike, the random swerve of elementary particles is responsible for the existence of free will. For if all of motion were one long predetermined chain, there would be no possibility of freedom.

The "swerve" is "an unexpected, unpredictable movement of matter," but how it proves free will is less than obvious.  Greenblatt asks rhetorically, "what is the evidence that free will exists?"  But what follows is more an inkling than an answer.  The analogy of a horse race invokes "the thrilling spectacle of a mental act bidding a mass of matter into motion."  Lucretius further argues that a man

may deliberately hold himself back: Both willing oneself to go forward and willing oneself to remain stationary are only possible because everything is not strictly determined, that is, because of the subtle, unpredictable, free movements of matter. What keeps the mind from being crushed by inner necessity is “the minute swerve [clinamen principiorum] of the atoms at unpredictable places and times” (2.293–94).

The Possibility of free will

In a seemingly unrelated vlog post, Do We Need a Theory of Everything?, Hossenfelder opens the possibility of a swerve and of free will.  She asserts: "There is no reason that nature should actually be described by a theory of everything." Nature might occasionally swerve outside of or from between the theories of physics.  The human being might be more than and different from the sum of her parts; therefore, capable of behaving unlike particles, atoms and molecules.   It seems more than possible that human consciousness, what physicists call an "emerging property," might actually, in moments of swerve if not beyond, affect the material universe--instantiating what we call free will.

 

Saturday 26 December 2020

The Truth about Money: Money Good; Money Bad

What is money?

Anything can be used as money:  paper, tokens, clay tablets, seashells, tree bark, pixels on a computer screen, strokes on a ledger somewhere, even people.  Historically, not just slaves and cumal were used as money.  The Bible tells us a man can beat his servant because "he is his money" (Exodus 21:20-22).  As Jacob Goldstein reiterates throughout Money:  The True Story of a Made-up Thing:    "money is money because we believe it’s money."

However, some things become like money (a soft way of saying they become money) even when people doubt, question or just don't notice.  Silver, data, Modigliani nudes, and, most importantly, "commercial paper" have all become forms of money despite doubts, questions and ignorance.


                        In 2008, the day after the Lehman bankruptcy, this Modigliani

                        sold for $150 million (USD). Someone was shifting

                        currency from the stock market to the art market.

Money Good

Goldstein quotes Marco Polo who wrote that his readers would not believe this but  "the Great Kaan [of the Mongol empire] causeth the bark of trees, made into something like paper, to pass for money all over his country."  The result of the Kaan's "bark of trees" money was a unified, stable and prosperous empire.  When the Ming Dynasty attempted to return to traditional (money-less) ways in China, the result was three hundred years of poverty, deprivation and starvation.  Even today, world-wide, getting food from farmers' fields to the shelves of your local grocery store is facilitated by; in fact, dependent upon money.

Money is infinite

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, one after another, representatives of the US Federal Reserve announced that they could provide a limitless supply of US dollars to support American businesses?  Of course, it's obvious that money is a product of our collective imaginations and is therefore infinite (or at least only limited by our collective imaginations), but it was unprecedented for the Fed to publicly confirm this fact.   

Wealth inequality versus poverty 

Steve Pinker was quite right to point out the difference between wealth inequality and poverty in his tome Enlightenment Now.  What Pinker calls the "lump fallacy" is the mistaken notion that the economy is a "zero-sum" game:  "that if some people end up with more, others must have less."  On the contrary, if history shows, as Pinker claims it does, that we have all prospered over time--even if unequally--we have nothing to complain about.

Pinker's point is well taken, but I suspect that in this argument he might be confusing wealth and money, the real economy and the financial markets.   Money is infinite but the planet itself is finite, and its wealth/resources are similarly limited.  The real economy becomes very much a game of winners and losers when the biggest winners are willing to sacrifice the planet for short-term gain through, for example, global warming (which, as Pinker later argues, is the real and most threatening problem of our time).

What every kid should know about money

Perhaps I need to remind you, dear Reader, and myself that this blog is about education.  I really don't know what is being taught in grade schools and high schools these days, but shouldn't every middle-schooler know how money is created? 

Goldstein concurs with every other source that I have consulted on the subject: "Most of the money in the world is not just stored in private banks; it is created by private banks."  I found it reassuring that Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, has a very straightforward explanation, directed at high-school students, of how private banks create money.  Khan displays the mathematical formula which shows that for every $1000 which the Federal Reserve introduces into the monetary system, private banks, using the fractional reserve system, create $10,000.  

The Federal Reserve was created at a "secret meeting"

As long as farmers are getting paid and the grocery store is getting paid and I have enough money to pay for groceries, who cares how the money was created?  Is it a problem that private banks create money?  To answer this question we would, of course, first have to acknowledge that private banks do create money. 

According to the "History" section of the Federal Reserve website, the Fed began with a gathering which included a senator, his secretary, an economist and three private bankers who met in November, 1910, on Jekyll Island.  (The name sounds like something from a Gothic novel, but the place does exist.  I played golf there once and even slept in the famous Jekyll Island Clubhouse which was pretty run down by the time I stayed there.)  The secrecy of the meeting is emphasized in the "Federal Reserve History."  Senator Aldrich . . .

went to great lengths to keep the meeting secret, adopting the ruse of a duck hunting trip and instructing the men to come one at a time to a train terminal in New Jersey, where they could board his private train car. Once aboard, the men used only first names – Nelson, Harry, Frank, Paul, Piatt, and Arthur – to prevent the staff from learning their identities. For decades after, the group referred to themselves as the “First Name Club.”

Despite the fact that the  Federal Reserve is a model for monetary systems all over the world (including in Canada, Russia and China), and there are widely available descriptions of how the system works, more than 100 years later, the shadow of secrecy still seems to hover over how the system works and how private banks create money. Consequently, as I outline in How Is Money Created, for conspiracy theorists, the Fed is part of a cabal of satanist bankers out to control the world while, for others, it is an altruistic gathering of civil servants.  Officially and perhaps most accurately, it is a mix of the private and the public.  However, which is the dog and which the tail, and who wags whom remains a matter of debate.

Commercial banks, investment banks and shadow banks

For most of us, a bank is a bank.  (However, if you googled "types of banks," you might be in for a surprise.)   As Alan Blinder explains in After the Music Stopped,

[ . . ] commercial banks do have deposits--that's why we call them banks.  Investment banks do not.  They fund themselves almost entirely by borrowing. Remember, with a 40-to1 leverage, capital constitutes a mere 2.5 percent of assets.  They must borrow the other 97.5 percent.
Blinder points out that "By most estimates, the shadow banking system was [in 2008]  far greater than the conventional banking system."  "The shadow banking system," as Blinder explains is "a complex latticework of financial institutions and capital markets that are heavily involved in various aspects of borrowing and lending."  The important takeaway here is that these shadow banks are non-banks and therefore not regulated as stringently as commercial banks.  Current estimates of the size of the shadow banking system put it at $1.2 trillion.

In a 2015 post, I reported estimates of the unregulated derivatives market as being between 710 trillion and 1.2 quadrillion US dollars.  At the time,  I remember thinking these numbers were too big to be believed.  How could there be an unregulated market that was 50 times greater than the GDP (the total value) of the US economy?  According to Investopedia the current (2019) value of the derivatives market is estimated to be over a quadrillion dollars or 10 times the GDP of the entire world.

Commercial paper is money

The mind boggles at the size of these numbers.  How are they possible?  What are the mechanics that allow such fantastically large amounts of money to be created? When I read that "financial institutions  . . . are heavily involved in various aspects of borrowing and lending,"  I interpret that they are creating money.   As Goldstein explains, the collapse of 2008 "is a story about money itself—a new kind of money that started flowing through a new kind of banking system that nobody quite knew was a banking system."  This new kind of money is "commercial paper."  It usually comes in denominations of $100,000  and is issued by commercial banks and investment banks on behalf of large companies seeking funding. 

Solutions

About having private banks create money, Goldman comments, "For nearly a hundred years, some of the smartest economists in every generation have said this is a horrible way to do money."  One solution, as Goldman describes, is "dazzlingly simple":

The root of the issue is that basic banks do these two, very different things. (1) They hold our money and make it easier for us to get paid and make payments. (2) They make loans. The dazzlingly simple argument from all of these great economists comes down to this: split those into separate businesses. Variations on this idea are usually called “100% reserve banking” or “full-reserve banking” (as opposed to the current, fractional-reserve banking system)  [. . . .]
Another solution now being debated and seriously considered, as Goldstein reports, is called "Modern Monetary Theory or MMT, for short."  The underlying principle is that the government should take over control of the creation and distribution of money to ensure full employment and sustainable development of available resources, reducing the money supply to prevent inflation when these objectives are met.  Oddly, much of what has been happening in the context of the 2020 pandemic, with governments distributing money directly to businesses and individuals, seems in line with Modern Monetary Theory.  We are in the process of discovering how the theory works in practice.

Whatever the future holds, it is inevitable, as Goldstein concludes:

that money will change. The way we do money will look as strange to our great-great-grandchildren as a world where banks print their own paper money with pictures of Santa Claus.

Addendum

In response to this post, one of my readers (Thanks D!) email a link to this Front Burner podcast on Modern Monetary Theory:  Never Mind the Deficit!


Sunday 13 December 2020

The Politics of Adjectives

"If corn oil is made from corn, and vegetable oil is made from vegetables, what is baby oil made from? "
 
                                                                anonymous

"The Great Canadian . . . . whatever"

Have you ever noticed how many Canadian businesses and organizations brand themselves as "The Great Canadian . . ." something or other?  Ever wonder why?  In a brief article in the Catholic magazine Commonweal in 1929, Harvard Professor of Literature, Douglas Bush, asked the question "Is There a Canadian Literature?"  His answer was that in order for a Canadian literature to exist it must produce evidence of greatness, a great novel or poem or play--something great enough to be included in the established canon of great literature.  The sardonic response has been that in order for anything to be "Canadian" it must also be "great"; ergo, "The Great Canadian Bagel," "The Great Canadian Restaurant," "The Great Canadian Theatre Company," etc, etc. 

 

Canadian Nationalism:  An oxymoron?

During my enthusiastic Canadian nationalist phase in the mid-to-late seventies, I naively imagined that most Canadians would be eager to embrace Canadian literature, performance and art.  To my shock, Canadians, who would claim admiration for Dutch painting, Italian opera, Swedish cinema, German theatre, and English or American literature, reacted with outrage at the thought of having anything described as "Canadian" "shoved down their throats."  (The violence of this expression always took me aback.)   For the intelligentsia and literati inside Canada, "Canadian" invariably implied "parochial," "tribal," and that famously misunderstood expression "a garrison mentality."

 Does Canada even exist?

I must admit, I have long suspected that the name "Canada" came from Portuguese map-makers who labelled the topography of my homeland "ca nada" meaning "here nothing."  (See Pure Laine Québécois)  Frank Davey,  who is routinely described as “a leading authority on Canadian literature,” is quoted as saying that “Canada does not exist except as a political arrangement for the convenience of individuals accidentally happening to live within its arbitrary area.” Hugh MacLennan, author of what, for some time, was consider the quintessential Canadian novel, Two Solitudes, was also categorical that "there is no Canadian literature." Eventually, we came around to admitting that Canada does exist as a nation, a state, an imagined community of people and diverse peoples, a big piece of real estate with borders and a quirky history, and it was okay to call something Canadian because we had a flag and a beaver and a constitution and a police force mounted on horseback, and Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Celine Dionne and hundreds of thousands of other names worth mentioning.

 Is There an Anglo-Québécois Literature?

Always a glutton for punishment, as an English professor in Quebec, I went from defending the adjective "Canadian" to promulgating the modifier "Anglo-Québécois."  Reactions tended to be a rolling of the eyes rather than the visceral "shoved down our throats" response.  However, resistance to "Anglo-Québécois" was similar to what I had earlier witnessed in reaction to "Canadian." 

Josée Legault, in her book, L’invention d’une minorité : Les Anglo-Québécois, is adamant that   "s'il est indéniable qu'un certain nombre d'anglophones résidaient bel et bien au Québec, on ne pouvait toutefois parler de l'existence d'une 'communauté' anglo-québécoise"  ["even if it is undeniable that a certain number of Anglophones do in fact reside in Quebec, one can still not talk of the existence of an Anglo-Québécois 'community'."]  In an essay entitled  “Neil Bissoondath disait . . . .,” professor of literary studies Gilles Marcotte was equally adamant that “Il n’existe évidemment pas telle chose qu’une littérature anglo-québécoise [ . . .]."  ["There obviously exists no such thing as an Anglo-Québécois literature . . . ."] 

What the experts say

Just as professors, critics and authors who would seem to have a vested interest in the recognition of Canadian literature resisted the idea, English professors, critics and authors in Quebec, typically repudiated the notion of an Anglo-Québécois literature.  Jason Camelot is a professor of English at Montreal's Concordia University and the co-editor of a collection of essays entitled Language Acts: Anglo Quebec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century.   In his introduction to a special issue of the journal Canadian Poetry on Anglo Quebec,  Camelot agrees with Marcotte that “there is no such thing as Anglo-Quebec literature in the sense that there is now Can Lit and la littérature québécoise."  More surprising still, Linda Leith, author, editor and impresario, who has done more for and about English literature in Quebec than anyone, has avoided the expression Anglo-Québécois to describe her work and interests.

Thinking inside the box 

 I know we are all supposed to admire people who "think outside the box" but, really, I wish there were more people (like me) who could think inside the box.  I may not agree with Professor Marcotte, but I understand his logic.  For Marcotte, Québécois literature is by definition French.  Québécois literature in English, for Marcotte, would be the equivalent of a married bachelor.

The term "Québécois" only became the politically correct designation of a citizen of the province of Quebec in the late 60s and throughout the 70s.  Earlier, "Québécois" was understood to mean a resident of Quebec City. With "French Canadian" now signalling Francophones outside Quebec, inside my symmetrically-inclined, Canadian box, Anglo Québécois seemed all the more legitimate as a designation for Anglophones living inside Quebec.

The difference between a wine glass and a glass of wine

I must confess that when I began writing this post, a discouragingly long time ago, it was with exactly the opposite intention of what I have written here.  I intended to maintain my obsessive conviction that "grammatical mistake" should be "a mistake in grammar," and "comparative literature" should be "studies of literature in a comparative context." Any composition manual will tell you that placing an adjective in front of a noun is more succinct and elegant than following a noun with an awkward clause or phrase.  Additionally, an adjective in front of a noun has the potential of becoming the next big thing:  "post modernism" versus the more informative "modernism after 1965," "oral literature"  (a contradiction in terms since "literature" means what is written) versus "written representations of orality," and "block chain" versus "a chain of blocks"--this latter phrase at least gives an inkling of how this technology works.  Nothing whets the appetite of an academic more than the possibility of coining the next big thing, the next viral catchphrase.

Clearly, many of the phrases we accept are, to use one of my favourite academic expressions, "sites of debate." The problem I see is when we accept without debate. I still wonder why, when the Americas comprise two continents and 35 countries, the adjective "American" is typically, exclusively applied to the USA.  I spent four years studying the works of George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, and James Joyce as "English" literature, barely noticing that these authors were all Irish. Politics matters.

I recognize that the appellation  "Canadian literature" means something more than and different from "literature in Canada," or "literature about Canada," or "literature by Canadians."  But I also see that when all these things have been happening for some time, the political decision to use the adjective this way makes sense, even if we might pause and stumble over exactly what the adjective "Canadian" might mean in this case.

 

"Three Days of the Condor" and the Tenth Anniversary of "The Sour Grapevine"

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