Agents and Opposition

I rarely write out my talks when asked to give them at church, but since I have a translator here I decided to take it easy on him and provide him with a text to work from. Even so, I still when through two translators. Here's the text:

Today I have been asked to talk about our “freedom to choose.” My text for this talk is from Lehi’s lecture to his son Jacob in 2 Nephi 2:27:

Wherefore, men are free according to the flesh; and all things are given them which are expedient unto man. And they are free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great mediator of all men, or to chose captivity and death, according to the captivity and power of the devil; for he seeketh that all men might be miserable like unto himself.

2 Nephi 2 has long been my favorite chapter in the Book of Mormon. Coupling this chapter with a spectator’s passion for science, and a love of idle speculation, I used to imagine I had acquired a rather unorthodox view of agency. However, upon rereading the chapter I am now more convinced than ever that my crooked point of view is actually correct.

Philosophically 2 Nephi 2 is one of the most important chapters in the Book of Mormon. It posits a type of dualism, but one unique in a Christian context since the dualism proposed is divorced from the moral concerns of, say Manichaenism. The Manichaeans believed that life was an eternal struggle between good and evil, their heresy was in accepting the notion that evil might win. The dualism that Lehi proposes is oddly monistic since its primary requirement is the fact of opposition. Often times we think of opposition in strict moral terms, like the Manichaeans: the good opposing the bad, the just the injust. But this is not the case. Opposition is a generative principle and only involves morality insofar as creation itself is moral or immoral. Opposition is the very principle, according to Lehi at least, which generates life, for without it the world would “remain as dead, having no life, nor death.”

This principle of opposition is realized in a world populated by agents “both things to act, and things to be acted upon.” An agent, as I choose to define it, is a point in a nested hierarchy at which a decision is made (and here I am borrowing heavily from Kevin Kelly and his synthesis of every thing from biology, to robotics to cognitive studies). You and I are nested hierarchies, further nested within the larger hierarchies of ecology and culture. I realize that traditionally we like to make the doctrine of free agency a strictly human purview. For example, I am a free agent because I can chose whether or not to eat, while my cat is compelled to eat everything from lizards to snotty tissues. Were he a free agent, in our traditionally limited sense, surely he would not choose to gorge himself on snotty tissues. However, this is a mistaken view in my opinion. If we think of an agent in the terms laid out in the scripture, as a thing which both acts and is acted upon, then we see that my cat, as a hierarchy of agents, contains few, if any, inhibitory agents, other than satiety, which would act upon his desire to eat bleached wood pulp embedded with mucus. I on the other hand am endowed with a modicum of self-reflection, and whenever the urge to look for a midnight snack in the depths of the wastebasket might overtake me, inhibitory agents come to my rescue. As human beings we are blessed with the illusion of being in control. Granted, illusion is too strong a word, though strictly speaking, we are not in complete control of ourselves. Our digestive, circulatory, and endocrine systems quietly go about their business, allowing higher-level agents, such as worry or stress, to interfere as little as possible. As we learn more about the brain and human behavior we are discovering more and more of these agents that act below the threshold of consciousness. It has even been proven that the decision to do something as basic as moving an arm or a leg is made by the subconscious part of the brain before the conscious part of the brain has been informed. This would seem to contradict any notion of free agency, until we understand that higher-level agents are usually inhibitory. Lower-level agents act, higher-level agents act upon them. Basically your subconscious says to your conscious, “OK, we’re moving, do you want us to stop?”

Our free-agency is not the monolithic construct of enlightenment style “free will,” but is instead the complex interaction of millions, and possibly billions of networked and dependent agents. Given these facts we should think of our free-agency, and therefore our self-control, as negotiable, and subject to improvement with training, or to inevitable decline through neglect or disease. Surely with a little reflection we can see that this is in fact the case. This is what Lehi means when he says, after first declaring that we “are free according to the flesh,” that “all things are given them which are expedient unto man.” We have as much control as is expedient, that is, as much control as is convenient or practical. We have been endowed with the agents that allow us to make moral or immoral decisions, and also to reflect on how our decisions affect the world. My cat on the other hand has been endowed with the agents necessary to feed himself, and to enact his neurosis. Fortunately I have also been endowed with a squirt bottle, and with diligence and training I can strengthen or weaken certain of the agents acting within my cat. As the agents that tell him to eat used tissues become more strongly associated with the agents that inform him that he is suddenly wet and frightened, eventually the desire to avoid getting wet will win out. As self-conscious human beings we have been blessed with our own internal squirt bottle, and where that is not enough we have the guidance of the church, the encouragement of our leadership, the blessings of help and comfort from God and our fellow men, and the whisperings of the Holy Ghost.

If we accept this point of view, it then becomes clear that our notion of good and evil, rather than being a question of essence—God being essentially good, the devil being essentially evil—is actually a question of placement and degree within the universal hierarchy of agents. Will we act as higher-level agents, favoring liberty and eternal life through the atonement of Christ? Or will we be acted upon as lower-level agents, subjects to captivity and death?

No Money No Honey 4x4

Not every one feels this way. At church the Sunday school class was divided into two groups, "kon Thai," and "farang" (the farang group, incidentally, included two "kon yipon," I suppose due to their inability to speak Thai, while the "kon Thai" group included one "kon filipin" fluent in at least three languages). The Thai group was further subdivided into men and women. Each group was given a scripture to discuss. Ours was the raising of Lazarus from the tomb. I conjectured that we might be stuck with that scripture due to the undead hues of our guava colored flesh. Farang also means guava, though the version of the word used to indicate a foreigner of European descent is probably a corruption of the word "frances". Africans are called "black guavas", or "black frenchies" depending on how you care to read the phrase. Asians get to be called by the names of their respective countries. Lucky Asians. Before we came here we learned a bit of Thai from the Pimsler CDs (or as I call them "eight easy lessons to ask your hotel clerk out to dinner"). Hopelessly naive, one of the major lessons is about how to answer if you are an American (kon amerigan) or not. No one will ever ask you if you are an American. In over half a year it has happened to us only once. They already know you're a farang, they can tell from the guava colored hues of your pasty flesh.

No Girls Allowed

Thailand is one of the few places I've lived where it's perfectly alright to put up "no girls allowed" signs on public buildings. Enjoy the thaiglish phrasing.

Still No

Still no internet. But travel plans for July are fixed. We'll be on the east coast the first half and Texas the second. We'll try to make a trip to Austin, and would love to see NYC buddies the first week of July.

Not Yet

No, we haven't abandoned this blog yet, we're just having trouble getting an internet connection to our house. So in the mean time enjoy this lovely picture about not over feeding welsh pigs.

Casa Nueva, Vida Nueva

Our house hunting is finally over. Here's our snug little new place. Today we cleaned top to bottom. Tomorrow we'll give the oppressively dark bedrooms and kitchen a coat of white paint and tear out some unwanted plywood which is preventing airflow in the kitchen. We have great plans for the place, including a solar water heater over the kitchen, a rocket stove, and maybe even a small wood burning oven if I can scrounge up the firebrick (wish me luck).

Rear. The kitchen is to the right. Living room 2nd floor left, bedroom right.

Front steps and door.

Looking out the front door, you can see the balcony and hallway.

Shot from the back of the living room.

Shot through the balcony door.

J mopping the second bedroom.

A kitchen of sorts.

Downstairs.

Etlaoephantcatagarwood

We made a visa run to Lao this week. Again. The process was much smoother this time since we actually had the paperwork we needed, and we knew how to get places. We also lucked out at the morning market in Vientiane and found a 14 inch piece of agarwood. It's not top quality, but it is streaked with resin throughout. The gal who sold it to us even lit it so we could see how it smelled before we bought it. Delicious. Just around the corner, however, my favorite little bronze elephant had gone up in price from 100 to 150 dollars. At least I got a picture.


On our way back, at about 4 am, somewhere in the mountains east of Chiang Mai our bus rear ended another bus. Jami saw it happening, but I was asleep, and bruised my kneecaps on the seat in front of me. As usual our bus driver was following too close. For some reason bus drivers seem to imagine that they only need four feet of clearance if the vehicle in front of them is another bus, as thought there were some psychic connection that would prevent one bus driver from actually hitting another. Our bus was fine, aside from the broken windshield, but the other one had metal and plastic pushed into the belts, so we had to hold their hands while they waited for another bus to pick up the passengers. We were worried about getting home in time to pick Tien up from the kennel at the small animal hospital.



He'd had surgery the previous Thursday to remove three dog-bite related abscesses. One went into his spine, and the surgeon told us how difficult it was to remove when we picked him up. It took him about twelve hours to get back on his feet. Literally. Every time he tried to stand up he would flip over, so instead of walking he would roll across the floor, howling, until he hit something and had to stop, or roll back the other way. I put him in a box and gave him water and half a raw egg with a syringe. The next morning his bandages had loosened enough that he could walk, and we found him out of the box, sitting on the bathroom rug when we woke up. This morning they took his stitches out, and he looks like a regular Frankenstein's Monster in his shaved, scarred, and iodine-speckled glory. Poor T.


Finally, we have a house to move into, and just in the nick of time since we have to be out of this place on Tuesday. It's south of downtown, a concrete and wooden combo, with a workspace underneath, and plenty of room for visitors if we ever get any. We're going over tomorrow to sign the contract and give it a top to bottom scrubbing. I'll post some pictures before we're sans internet.

The Humanure Handbook

Last month's seminar at the at the Long Now Foundation was by archeologist Brian Fagan, author of The Little Ice Age. He discussed how climate change has effected human civilization at different times in the past--spurring the rise of agriculture when the oak forests retreated in in the middle east, forcing the Norse out of North America and Greenland, or causing the collapse of the Moche and the Maya. One of the key problems in the coming years will be access to water, as the climate becomes more unpredictable and population pressures increase, especially on marginal land. Lately my somewhat haphazard reading on the web has been synchronizing in strange ways with the podcasts I listen to (try listening to Plato's Republic while reading The Botany of Desire and Oryx and Crake), and sure enough Joseph Jenkins, writer of The Humanure Handbook has the answer to eliminating 37-45% of our household water use. Stop crapping in drinking water. His suggestion, or rather, his admonition is that people stop flushing those valuable nutrients down the toilet, but compost them instead. His book, aside from repeating the same twenty or so nuggets of information ten times each, simplifies composting nicely, and gives a few simple rules for an efficient and sanitary collection and composting system, resulting in agriculturally safe humus. Some places, like Austin, Texas, already compost sludge, but waste a huge amount of water and money getting the sludge to the composting site. Think of how much water we could save and infrastructure we could forgo by processing poop on site, or picking it up with a weekly or biweekly poop truck? For the fecophobic Jenkins explains, and presents studies from real scientists (!), that urine and feces composted by thermophilic bacteria at temperatures exceeding 55˚ C for a couple of hours will kill any human pathogens. They either get burnt to a crisp, or out-competed, or eaten up by the earthworms and fungi that move in during the one year curing period once the compost has cooled down. And if you're healthy to begin with, there's not much chance of anything nasty getting in the pile. The toilets and compost don't smell either, since you cover each deposit with sawdust, rice hulls, peat, or leaf mold in the toilet, and straw, weeds, or leaves in the pile. If they do smell, then it's an indication that you're doing something wrong. The book is no great work of literature, but it's good for skimming, full of good information for anyone interested in dismantling one of the defining characteristics of western civilization, centralized plumbing.

Scarecrows

We pass these scarecrows in the University's experimental rice fields on our way to and from the vet. One of them took a nose dive.

Evolutionary Advantages of Subcutaneous Fat

Anyone who has grabbed a cat by the scruff of its neck knows how remarkably loose their skin is, a property conferred by the elasticity of their skin and the presence of subcutaneous fat. When little Tien was attacked by dogs last week one of the bites was on his left leg and abdomen. For a while we (vets included) thought that his abdomen had just been bruised, until Thursday night, when a previously closed wound opened up, revealing a large abscess, which Tien diligently licked clean. I took him into the vet to have it dressed properly (irrigated with peroxide and iodine, packed with antibiotic gel). All the puss that got squeezed out was basically liquefied adipose tissue, which made me realize that if it weren't for his loose skin, that bite would have punctured his upper colon. If he were in the wild, and able to escape, that would have done him in no matter what. But thanks to his wriggly, elastic nature, the damage done was localized, and not internal, something he might have been able to recover from. Maybe. As it stands now the vets want to cut into the abscess to clean it properly. Poor guy.