A letter from Spain – and Sweden

Yes, back in our village of La Fresneda after a 1500 mile (2400 Km) journey taking in Bolton, Belfast, Dublin and a string of delightful towns in France. I have worked briefly in Belfast before, but this was Margaret’s first visit and, with the very definite exception of the city hall, we both found the city to have many fine buildings, though their locations were often marred by overbearing modern constructions. The famous Crown public house was as good as ever and we even managed to grab one of the many secret snugs that are part of its ornate architecture. It was however expensive, understaffed and beset by tourists – like us. We straddled the border with the South for some time and distance but, unable to answer the ‘Irish question’ just then (we did later after a few pints) proceeded to Dublin where I tackled the more amenable task of roofing my son’s large shed.

In that city we had a good night out at a local pub witnessing the Dubliners at their most abandoned. A bacchanalian scene fuelled by the second (yes second) night of Dave and Rachel’s wedding celebration apparently, plus lashing of alcohol of course. At one point Dave took the microphone from the professional DJ. He joked as confidently as a Frank Sinatra, then sang with the force of a Frankie Vaughan.  Meanwhile his five-year-old daughter rushed aimlessly around the vast bar in her bridesmaid dress and a much older and much larger lady roamed around predating lecherously on younger men.

As usual the good ship Oscar Wilde took us to Cherbourg, a dull crossing with very few passengers aboard – though I did meet a young man who professed to be the son of Martin McGuiness who told me that he was returning from a meeting with Jeremy Corbyn, “your future prime minister who will immediately unify Ireland as soon as he gains power without a gun being fired”. No wait, that was on the trip to Belfast. How the mind can play tricks – and so back to my previous blog on the brain. There I introduced the concept of ‘aporia’ and what follows is a comment from a good friend of mine from Sweden who explains it all so much better.

 Your stories remind us that no absolute truths exist. The premise is wrong, i.e. that our brain is first and lastly logical and just a little emotional like the scum on the sea’s waves. Actually, it’s the other way around. This state of our mind has fostered reams of ridicule and we are ourselves delighted in making fun of our brain’s shortcomings. The latest proof of this is Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow. After having read it there is just one comment: “so what?”

If we didn’t have any biases, cognitive dissonances or emotions, we would be a completely different animal. Or why not a robot as we are slowly approaching a robot like state of mind from being stereotyped by social media (internet).  Forget biological evolution, which has been overtaken by technological evolution, which is so fast and unpredictable that we have lost control of it. “Earth, we got a problem.”

So why are there no absolute or universal truths? If there had been they would since a long time ago been thought out. We have had to do with our own laws, manmade like time, before and after, limits, endlessness, eternity, etc. just to cope with life.

It is said that libido is the ultimate drive for life, for animals as well as for mankind. Not so, this is where we differ. Our lust to hang on to life and live (long after we lost our libido and money) is our curiosity, to see what’s around the corner (to be transformed to the fly on the wall).

Not knowing anything, just being suspended in the air and revelling in the unfolding of world events that is true happiness. Happiness through aporism. QED!

About the brain and us

In 350BC, Aristotle noted that “our senses can be trusted but they can be easily fooled”.

Let me start this with a story that I have told many times. Many years ago my wife and I lived on the edge of the city of Ipswich. You may wonder why we lived there since the house looked out onto one of the sink estates of Ipswich, to our left we had a scrap car yard, and to the right a rubbish dump plus the house had no mains drainage or water – but all that’s another story. The house came with a resident female cat, Jemima, and we adopted each other. After some time the cat became pregnant and gave birth, in my shed, to a delightful litter of kittens. Soon after their birth they were all killed!

A few years later we were revisiting the tragedy and found that we had quite different recollections: in my version our dog, Droopy, had killed the kittens, Margaret recalled that a local tom cat had done the deed. Fortunately I kept quite a detailed diary in those days and was able to refer to my notes. Shock, horror, Margaret was right. My memories of the event, though clear, were false.

We all have false memories some of them pure invention, some distortions. Most people do not believe this, but it is true – and scary. In what can we trust?

Another story. Fairly recently a group of us were shown a video of football game: we were told to watch the player in the black shirt and count how many times he kicked the ball. At the end of the short display we were asked for our answers which were quite varied, but similar. We were then asked, “Did you see superman?” Puzzled, we all said no and the video was replayed and there he was threading his way through the players as large as life! A trick – yes, of the brain. Actually I have changed the players and the intruder in this tale so that this will not be a spoiler if you if you sometime see the original, but hey the brain’s flexible so that’s OK.

In a somewhat related phenomenon your brain filters out the mundane. Its overriding duty is to keep it, and therefore you, safe, and it’s the new, the unknown, and the surprising, that are likely to be dangerous. Hence: a liking for sleeping in one’s own bed, home being where the heart is, blood seemingly thicker than water and so on. However, to the contrary, new environments or challenges steps up the brain’s awareness, hence the stimulation of travel (which ‘broadens the mind’ apparently).

We often need to ‘see for ourselves’ or maintain that we only trust ‘the evidence of our own eyes’. But should we trust that evidence. There are numerous illusions which dramatically prove that our brain messes with reality.  A simple matrix of blobs appears to be moving yet we know that they cannot be, spinning dancers uncannily rotate clockwise or anticlockwise depending on which you set your eyes upon first. And so on and on as more illusions, old and new, are discovered and broadcast over the Web.

Science, one might think, can slice its way through this nonsense to reveal reality. But can it? Much of what is ‘observed’ in modern science is detected by a sensor and relayed to us through a computer which processes the data. We can never see the ‘new’ particles which constitute the things that we actually see, though there was a time when we could observe the tracks of some of the particles in a cloud chamber. Nowadays sophisticated detection and heavy processing sits between the collisions which occur in the Hadron Collider and the graphs that allow physicists to buttonhole the Higgs boson.

There are more and more examples which shake the very foundations of our natural belief in our powers of observation, and yet more can be supplied by philosophers in relation to our powers of reason, meanwhile life goes on. After all, too much doubt in ourselves might cause a collapse of confidence and a resort to instinctual behaviour or a cynical retirement from life itself.

I have a thoughtful friend called Bjorn in Sweden who seems to have found refuge in not knowing and has even found a term to describe his philosophic position which dates back to the Greeks – aporia. Whether aporia  leads to greater clarity or simply defines doubt and confusion, I do not know.  But one thing’s for sure Aristotle was right to say that our senses can be easily fooled – and therefore so can we. I suppose the one thing that we can know for sure is that we don’t know, for sure. However, I’m pretty sure that I am off on my travels in a few days time: Ireland, France, Spain and Portugal.