Determinism, Human Destiny, and Self-Determination
Here’s your weekly(-ish) roundup of everything I’ve curated or created online, January 7–13, 2024.
The Fate of Free Will by James Gleick in The New York Review of Books:
Merely adding randomness to a deterministic machine still doesn’t produce anything we would call free will. Free will ... implies consciousness and self-reflection.
Iran Update, January 7, 2024 by Ashka Jhaveri et al. in Backgrounder:
The third phase of Israeli operations in the Gaza Strip, as described, will very likely enable Hamas to reconstitute itself militarily. Israeli forces have degraded several Hamas units in the northern Gaza Strip, as noted above. But Hamas’ military forces are neither defeated nor destroyed at this time.
Very Ordinary Men: Elon Musk and the Court Biographer by Sam Kriss in The Point:
If you have fans, it’s because what you’re providing is ultimately some form of entertainment. Musk claims to be a business genius who’s changing the world and sending us to our destiny in the stars, and he says it with such conviction that the rest of the world responds as if it’s true.
Reality is Discovered, Not Made: An Interview with Tara Isabella Burton by Alexandra Davis in Public Discourse:
As this idea of self-creation, telling our own story, self-determination has become seen as the fundamental element of human life, that means those of us who participate more fully in self-creation are more human, and those of us who participate less fully are, in some sense, less human.
Music
Fearing neither drought nor winter's chilling breeze
Cold the year, new whiteness wearing
Fragment
On Apocalyptic Overexposure
It seems that Adventism has collectively innured those most exposed to its message of an end-time crisis over the meaning of the Sabbath through irresponsible overstatements to the point that, when important things are actually happening, the apocalyptically inclined are too overstimulated to notice and the sensitive souls are too alienated by anxiety to care. Lessons that should have been learned when our evangelists predicted that the imminent fall of the Ottoman Empire would trigger Armageddon were quickly forgotten.