Benjamin Hourigan

I got my Powerbook back on Thursday night, just before work.

Having a computer again has its upsides and downsides: while I’m not going crazy for lack of a writing machine and a way to talk to my friends and family in Australia, I’m also back wasting a lot of time surfing the web. Computers have a rhythm that they can tie you to, and since I got mine back I’ve spent a lot of my free time reading news from RSS feeds and putting my data back in order from the horrible mess that attempting to migrate to Linux left it in. It’s easy to just keep working on such things, and I tend to stay up later than I’d planned. While I was without my laptop, in contrast, I managed to read a book an a half, and get in some early nights and the consequent much-needed sleep.

I am, by the way, back on OS X for a good while yet. Ubuntu Linux has matured a little since I last tried it, but it still doesn’t have the polish and usability that OS X has. One day, I hope, Linux will beat all of the proprietary operating systems at desktop usability, and when that day comes I’ll make the switch for good, but for now, again, I’m afraid not.

My Powerbook’s hard-disk failed. So I’ll be completely offline for a week or more.

I was attempting to migrate to Ubuntu Linux at the time, so I had thought that all the slow boot-ups and IO errors I was experiencing might have been my own fault, the result of me and gparted messing up my partition table together, but it looks like I was wrong. I wasted a good four days last week trying to move all my data into a new system that was never going to work. I’m out of patience, so when I get my Powerbook back, I’ll be sticking with MacOS.

After a HD failure, I’m keen to go back to something that, famously, “just works.” Being alone in a foreign country, where you don’t speak the language, without email access, the web, Skype, and a computer to write on is just too traumatic. No more fiddling, as I promised Annnette a few days ago.

I love working for Berlitz…

Last week the Umeda school, where I am based, was briefly closed for renovations, so I got shipped out to the Kyoto Ekimae (“station-side”) school for two days. On one of those two days, a student cancelled their lesson after it was meant to begin, so I got paid to go out and walk around Kyoto for two hours.

And this is some of what I saw…

A view towards central Kyoto, looking north up the Kamo river, near the Shichijo-dori bridge.

At both the Nishi Honganji and the Higashi Honganji, it’s difficult to take good photos, because the main halls at each temple are being restored inside giant hangars like this one (at the Higashi Honganji).

Nevertheless, if you look away from the hangars, you can take some decent photos. This is a fountain at the Higashi Honganji. It’s not suffused with holy power, it was just a bright day and I’d forgotten to peel the plastic lens-protector off my new mobile-phone.

One of the east gates of the Higashi Honganji complex. The fountain in front is a sculpture of a lotus blossom.

Everybody knows the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor and the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows

Leonard Cohen, “Everybody Knows” (Sung by Don Henley, ©1995)

Today I had an unexpected day off, and so in the late afternoon I rode to Ôsaka-jô kôen (Ôsaka Castle Public Park). Sadly, I don’t have any photos of it to show, since I lost my phone this week and won’t get a new one until tomorrow afternoon. Of the few places I’ve visited on this planet, Ôsaka Castle is one of the most spectacular, and the views from it over the city, backed by sunset, are impressive.The grounds of Ôsaka Castle are also a good place to think, and think I did.

A little over a month ago, I had a powerful experience, of making the choice to quit NOVA with a single day’s notice, to leave Gunma, and to move to Osaka on the very good, but not certain, chance that I’d get a job with Berlitz. I did get the job, and I’m very happy now.

It seemed then that I stood at a crossroads in time: that depending on my choice, my life could go in two directions. Either I’d stay in Gunma, bored and miserable but with secure employment, or I’d move to Ôsaka, where I’d have an exciting time, but might not find a job and might end up having to fly home from, penniless. I considered my chances of employment (good), my feelings (that I’d respect myself more if I took the risk and moved), and my ideas that it’s important to take responsibility for one’s life and to make choices that move it in a pleasing direction. I thought, then, that my choice was free.

In the last year or so, I’ve been annoying people with talk about freedom and responsibility, having abandoned socialist ideas and letting myself be inspired anew by philosophies of individualism and strength, like Nietzsche’s and Ayn Rand’s. Thinking back, I feel foolish.

You see, I believe that the universe is mechanistic: that objects and events arise predictably from the present state of the universe, proceeding according to physical laws. And I believe that given sufficient information about the present state of the universe (or, theoretically, it’s initial state), we should be able to use our knowledge of physical laws to predict all future states.

This is a view that tends towards determinism, and if one holds it, one needs all sorts of metaphysical rubbish, like souls and such, to fit free will into the universe. Generally, I don’t allow myself such indulgences, but I still found it difficult to give up on the idea of free will. By “free will”, I mean a power to choose, that could have chosen otherwise than it did in the past. I mean the sort of power to choose that stands at crossroads in time and picks whether to stay in Gunma or leave for Ôsaka.

I used to think that the profound feeling of standing at crossroads in time indicated that free will did exist, and that being a determinist would contradict that experience. It would also contradict the impression that one gets from history that ideas are important, and that persuading people of one thing or another can have powerful consequences. But in a conversation I had with my friend Sasha on Sunday afternoon, he argued me into a position where I had to admit that consciousness (which includes the feeling that one stands at a crossroads in time), and the ability and power of persuasion, are not incompatible with determinism.

In a mechanistic universe, you see, physical laws can still produce brain-states that are conscious of making a conditioned decision based on the information available. And such brain-states can result in activity that involves attempting to persuade others: in which we emit information that causes another person to have share our ideas, which spur them to future action that steers history in a direction pleasing to us.

My objections to determinism thus shattered, I believe in the idea more than ever. I still think it’s important to act as though one could have chosen differently in the past, and as though one will choose “freely” in the future, because it’s obvious that people and cultures that abandon themselves to destiny fail to achieve their goals. But “free will” is an illusion. Our choices proceed from our conditioning and our present circumstances, as naturally as an object falls to the ground when we release it from our hand within Earth’s gravitational field. We could never have chosen other than we have, and our lives, and the entire history of the universe, could not have been otherwise than they are and have been. Our fate is predetermined, and nothing will change it, because there is nothing that can change it.

In some ways this epiphany is a let-down. I’m evidently not as powerful as I felt while riding the shinkansen to Ôsaka. But life is no less exciting knowing that the outcome is fixed. I don’t have perfect knowledge, so every day will still be a surprise, laid out for me through all of beginningless time. I now have a philosophical justification for my feelings of self-importance and of having lived a charmed life, as well as for my expectations of a grand destiny.

My biggest questions now are: “what will that destiny be?” and “how long will it last?”