"And the war came." as It will again if we ignore history

"War" and "politics" are usually different domains of our thinking and of public discussion.  It is actually a continuum, something not realized until the transition between the two occurs. Opposing groups in the form of political parties, are designed to allow their divergent interests and values to be negotiated short of actual combat, using a structured plebiscite to determine which shall prevail -- until another scheduled vote will allow alteration or change in direction. Politics can be fun, a structure that brings people together against a common enemy without the cost of human carnage.  It has this carnival quality, an intoxicating unifying institution, that is until the music stops.

"And the war came" is from the part of Lincoln's second inauguration that looks back at his first, when there was still hope that the differences between the confederacy and the country defined by the federal constitution could be accommodated by both sides.  My contention is that we are at a similar place right now, with failure to foresee the future consequences of war making such a tragedy possible.

 We may actually be closer now than even the prelude to the Civil War.  The current President has articulated only somewhat less than an overt threat with words such as these: "I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad."

The escalation of this saber rattling from the other side was confronted by the recent pronouncement of the presumptive Democratic candidate for the Presidency, Joseph Biden in a public statement based on a question at a live town hall. It was whether he would promise to "not pull a President Ford” by pardoning Trump “under the pretense of healing the nation.” emphasizing his point with, "Absolutely, yes. I commit.”

His firm statement is meaningful, as the question was an opportunity for him to define a direction for his administration that would have been a reversal of the calumny and hatred of his predecessor. He could have responded with words to the effect, "This is a difficult subject, as the expectation of endless prosecution could energize Trump to do something foolish to prevent the traditional transfer of power. "

It would have been bad enough if he had stopped with this statement, but he went further, and in doing so betrayed his lack of mastery of the structure of the executive branch of our government. He continued with “It’s hands-off completely. Look, the attorney general of the United States is not the president’s lawyer. It’s the people’s lawyer.”

He is accurate in as far as there being a tradition that once an attorney general is appointed there is a high degree of autonomy in specific decision making.  Yet, as in all cabinet positions, it is the elected president who defines the general policies. The AG is the "peoples lawyer" only to the degree that he follows the principles that are determined by the president.

Biden may have been trying to convey that he would not engage in the attempt to use the Department of Justice to advance the partisan goals of the president, but in doing so he went too far, and worse, sacrificed the opportunity to convey that he would be more than an extension of the livid hatred of most Democrats for President Trump.  He implied that after his nomination and election he will unleash a tiger of an AG to destroy the President and will not restrain how he does it.

The lack of any media discussion of Biden's promise is further evidence that the endeavor of healing has been  replaced by normalization of the hatred of one side towards the other.  No prominent Democrat has questioned Biden's statement, so the full extent of the consequences of his promise has not been explored. This is in contrast to President Ford's explanation of his career-ending decision to pardon Nixon that he presented at a voluntary congressional hearing, a case that holds up to this day.  

Biden is at a point where he should start to anticipate his presidency, where his major challenge must be to demonstrate the will and the courage needed to heal the wounds that divide us.  Anything less could lead to an unimaginable tragedy that must be avoided.

UCSD Lecture on Free Will - A personal story

The blog article below was posted before I attended the lecture described.  The story of what occurred there, Science and Mysticism, was posted to a public website that received over two hundred comments. 

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 Oct 12, 2015

This is prompted by a lecture on the title subject at UCSD, which I choose to exercise my free will to provide to attendee's the case that the premise is not only incorrect, but an affront to the most profound elements of the enlightenment, the long slow ascendance of scientific research of ignorance.   This lecture is given by a tenured professor at a respected public academic institution, which makes it that much more egregious.

Of course, my making this case to this audience is similar to my standing up at St. Patrick's Cathedral and accusing the Pope of revering one as the son of God, who is just a human being like the rest of us.  It would not play well to that audience.  And those attending this lecture here are part of our culture, one that enjoys fantasy and reveres those who have appeared to master the mysteries of the universe.

First, the name of the lecture is inherently inimical to not only science, but our current civilizations stasis between faith and science.  Physics is science, FreeWill is faith, a belief.  In an article of Steven Jay Gould, a renowned biologist of the last century, he described why these must be kept separate for reasons of co-existence between faith and science, in this article  "Nonoverlapping Magisteria,"   

Physics, is a branch of science, of which a paramount rule is that any theory must be falsifiable by experiment.  Phenomenon must be amenable to operational definitions to allow reproduction of experiments for verification.  Free Will is of a different nature, fundamentally the realm of values and morals, elements dealt with by cultures and religions, not by experimental verification.  Societies that espouse free will such as Saudi Arabia and the United States, upon breach of cultural-religious norms will torture and execute the individual.  Counties that do not, such as Norway, will never cause suffering to another human being no matter what the deviation from norms or degree of suffering he has caused.

The subject of the presentation today suggests that the scientific method may be applied to determine which country is correct.  No matter how many people cheer him on it does not become true.  Majority rule has never defined true science, if it did we would still believe in possession by witches and the central place of our planet in the universe.  However,  we do have evidence that mass movements can germinate, and grow, and take over entire countries and culture ----irrespective of the validity of their premises.  Sadly, this lecture illustrates one we are now  living through. 
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Addenda: This forgoing is written after attendance at above lecture at various times

Needing support for my challenging Professor Keating from someone with credentials,  I wrote this email to a man who only had months to live, who had been my neighbor for ten years:

Wesley A Clark

Hi Wesley,

I just read this article in the N.Y. Times, Data Storage on DNA Can Keep It Safe for Centuries, that referenced your seminal work on personal computers.

I often think about you, and the condition you mentioned to me,  Dementia with Lewy Bodies.  I have more mundane cognitive decline, just the inability to recall names or specific bits of knowledge.  Wikipedia is my salvation as far as public issues, as with just a shadow of a memory of something I can trace it down to their expansive article complete with references. 

I've become involved in something interesting, that almost got me thrown out of a lecture at University of California at San Diego last month.  Now that I know that you have the distinction of being "the only person to have been fired three times from MIT for insubordination." I'll consider it a badge of honor.

I was asked to leave because I insisted on giving a response to a lecture with the name, "The Physics of Free Will."  While technological "miracles" have become routine, with you being among the early wave in the cyber world,  I see a need to maintain a wall between science, whether theoretical or applied and fantasy.  If you have the time and interest this essay I wrote entitled "Science and Mysticism" describes the lecture and my response. 

Best regards to Maxine     

Al Rodbell   

And then his response

To Al Rodbell

I had almost begun to think I'd never be hearing from my old friend again, my neighbor across the hall in the Big Apple; but Al, I'd lost the iMac file that held our exchange of email correspondence, a matter of clumsy-finngers, I suppose … partially paralyzed left-hand.

Restart

Good Sir Alvin of Rodbell,

I'm delighted to hear from you again, and you get full marks for refusing to leave the UCSD meeting out there on the left coast in San Diego! Of course I read your essay, pointing out why the lecturer's emphasis was so far off base. Your logic is faultless.

Mine, in a related form: I believe that there are at least as many Gods as there are people in the world, and I don't believe in any of them (which makes me a poly-atheist). In any case, count me among the many readers who admire your great writing skill!

There's more I wanted to write here, but this will have to do for a re-opener. I have to take myself down to a holiday party in the lobby of our Brooklyn apartment building for the annual NAM festivities.

Best of all possible wishes,

-- Wes

This was his obituary in the New York Times, and there will never be a description of such an accomplishment ever again:  Wesley A. Clark, Who Designed First Personal Computer, Dies at 88

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I viewed with care this two hour video of  what was described as: 

The Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination (at UCSD) will have a panel discussion on 8/6/15 o the subject of  The Physics of Free Will.   The event will be a discussion about what modern physics has to say about the concept of free will, including perspectives from the foundations of quantum mechanics, cosmology, and speculations about the role of of conscious observers in the cosmos.  Discussants were Brian Keating (Physics, UC San Diego), Andrew Friedman (Astronomy, MIT), and David Brin (Hugo & Nebula Award Winning Author).

One option that was seriously considered by at least two of the discussants was that our existence was as creations of a massive simulation, with common elements of the film, "The Matrix."  Dr. Keatings presentation was similar to the one I attended, but with more detail of the relationship between Physics and Free Will beginning at about 35 minutes into the video.   Dr, Keating uses a quip during these lectures that always brings a laugh, "The slide of the group of undergrads, grad students and post docs, is proof that there is no "free will."  He chooses not to explore how the dynamics of absorbing and accepting of academic values, that does not end when his collection of obedient individuals reaches a level of authority,  can perpetuate error that eventually becomes part of a Zeitgeist. 


Hour long video of lecture by Dr. Keating, "Physics of Free Will" (not the specific one I attended) 

Lee Smolin is one of the most articulate theoretical physicists who challenge in his many books and articles the mystification of deviation from historical restraints that have given legitimacy to science itself over the last centuries.

Excerpt from article by Sean Carroll, an eminent theoretical physicist, on limits of expert views:

Physics is the easiest subject of all, which is why we know enormously more about it than any other science. The social sciences deal with fantastically more complicated subjects, about which it’s very naturally more difficult to make definitive statements, especially statements that represent counterintuitive discoveries. The esoteric knowledge that social scientists undoubtedly possess, therefore, doesn’t translate directly into actionable understanding of the world, in the same way that physicists are able to help get a spacecraft to the moon.

There is a final point that is much trickier: political inclinations and other non-epistemic factors color our social-scientific judgments, for experts as well as for novices. On a liberal/conservative axis, most sociologists are to the left of most economists. (Training as an economist allegedly makes people more selfish, but there are complicated questions of causation there.) Or more basically, social scientists will often approach real-world problems from the point of view of their specific discipline, in contrast with a broader view that the non-expert might find more relevant. (Let’s say the death penalty does deter crime; is it still permissible on moral grounds?) Natural scientists are blissfully free from this source of bias, at least most of the time. Evolution would be the obvious counterexample.

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