Revisiting the pasts in the present

This weekend I’m gathering with about a dozen friends with whom I attended high school more than 50 years ago. I use the term “friends” somewhat loosely here, though (I think) not as loosely as it’s commonly used in these Facebook days. We attended a relatively small school, so we all knew each other, but I was much closer to some of those coming together than I was to others. And some of them have stayed in pretty close touch with each other over the last 50 or so years, while I’ve had relatively little contact with any of them. (And, in fact, I would say that they were very kind and generous to invite me to join them this weekend. I’m grateful.)

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Genes: fate and choice

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Genes must carry out programmed responses to environments – otherwise, there would be no conserved form. But they must also leave exactly enough room for the vagaries of chance to stick. We call this intersection ‘fate.’ We call our responses to it ‘choice.’ An upright organism with opposable thumbs is thus built from a script, but built to go off script. We call one such unique variant of one such organism a “self.”

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Cycling: Inside or outside?

I’ve spent many hours and miles on bicycles over the course of my life. I commuted to work by bicycle for most of my career, in all sorts of circumstances – some more risky than others. I continued cycling to work most days even after we moved to Boston and even during the winter. (I’ll admit here that the rather extreme snowfall in February 2015 – over 100 inches of snow in a month in which the temperature didn’t get above freezing – had me driving to work for months.) But even when I cycled to work here in Boston, I logged many “miles” each week on a trainer in our basement. I shifted those inside miles to a gym after we downsized to a condo in the city, and post-retirement winters here in Boston eventually found me riding almost exclusively in the gym.

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So many words, so little time

I’ve long been frustrated by the fact that I’m not able (or willing?) to read all of the books and essays that I think I want to read. I’m further frustrated by the fact that it’s not at all unusual for me to begin reading a book and then abandon it half-way through. Sometimes the abandonment is intentional – that is, sometimes I make a clear decision that it’s not worth my time to finish a book. But more often it’s that I become distracted by something else and simply don’t return to a book that I intend(ed) to finish reading. I’ve just dedicated a couple of shelves by my desk to the books that I’m (still hoping to be) reading now. It’s a little embarrassing to see how many of the books with bookmarks indicating my progress are books that I’ve not picked up for weeks.

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The value of civilization

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr:

… the chief worth of civilization is just that it makes the means of living more complex; that it calls for great and combined intellectual efforts, instead of simple, uncoordinated ones, in order that the crowd may be fed and clothed and housed and moved from place to place. Because more complex and intense intellectual efforts mean a fuller and richer life. They mean more life. Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have enough of it.

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Living an entirely private life is a deprivation

Hannah Arendt:

To live an entirely private life means above all to be deprived of things essential to a truly human life: to be deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others, to be deprived of an ‘objective’ relationship with them that comes from being related to and separated from them through the intermediary of a common world of things, to be deprived of the possibility of achieving something more permanent than life itself.

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Of a certain age …

Ian McEwan:

In your mid-thirties you could begin to ask what kind of person you were. The first long run of turbulent young adulthood was over. So too was excusing yourself by reference to your background. Insufficient parents? A lack of love? Too much of it? Enough, no more excuses. You had friends of a dozen years or more. You could see your reflection in their eyes. You could or should have been in and out of love. You would have spent useful time alone. You had a measure of public life and your relation to it. Your responsibilities would be pressing in, helping to define you. Parenthood must cast some light.

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Reason, properly understood, is public and sharable

Cristine Korsgaard:

…if our social nature is deep, in the sense that it is the nature of our reasons that they are public and shareable, then justifications of morality can and should appeal to it. So the kind of argument we need here is not one that shows us that our private reasons somehow commit us to public ones, but one that acknowledges that our reasons were never more than incidentally private in the first place. To act on a reason is already, essentially, to act on a consideration whose normative force may be shared with others.

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Purpose vs goals

I’m thinking today about the relationship between one’s sense of purpose in life and the goals one might set in life. I’ve long ago given up the notion that a person has a purpose assigned by some sort of god or by life’s circumstances, but I do think that whatever sense of purpose one has emerges in the context in which one is living. I’ve mentioned in an earlier entry my struggle to decide what to read next, and it occurred to me as I continued to struggle with that question that what I’m after is something like a sense of purpose. To what end am I reading whatever it is that I’m reading.

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ChatGPT: Point and Counter-point, etc

First prompt: write a blog post in the voice of George Orwell explaining why climate change is a problem. At the end of the post explain why the reader should believe it was written by a human instead of by a chatbot

The response: Greetings, my dear readers. I am George Orwell, a writer who has witnessed the worst of human history. However, I’m not here to talk about war or politics, but about something that concerns every living being on this planet: climate change.

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