I am spending time in Denmark at the moment. Walks on the beach, strolls though Copenhagen at dusk – not bad, at all. Yet, early November in Denmark is the slightly uneasy time when Nature cannot quite make up its mind whether it is autumn or winter. Remarkably, temperatures are not much lower than in July (tells you something about the July we had!), but there is no doubt that the direction is winter. Soon we will wake up to gardens covered by frost’s embroidery. But we are not yet there! The sun still has authority and trees are still not naked. Unmistakably, this is not New England foliage with its blazing colours. Instead leaves are turning yellow with the tenderness so typical of Danish nature.

One can be upset about the need to wrap oneself in many layers, about the onset of a season which is physically demanding, about the short days and long nights. Despite this I would not want to live permanently in a place with eternal summer. For me the procession of seasons is important. It is a cycle I relate to, a cycle that symbolises something of fundamental human significance.

Perhaps I would like that summers were longer and winters shorter, something which can be achieved by moving further south. But moving to Vienna, I did not achieve exactly that. I achieved that summers and winters became longer, and spring and autumn shorter. Of course, I do not condemn those who choose eternal summer (or eternal winter). Only, for me, seasons are attractive because they provide variety and cyclical repetition.

Seasons represent an overarching issue worth reflecting on. Human lives have their own seasonality, and although we have extended each life season tremendously in the last few decades, we should be cautious with changing the human condition fundamentally. This is a key message of my book.

Over the last sixty years average lifetimes have gone up by 50 percent. These 24 years of additional lifetime we have essentially spread out over youth, middle and old age, but arguably we have been decreasing childhood to benefit youth. With frighteningly early sexual first times, unhindered access to mature information for the immature, and pubescent pop stars peddling youth ideals (or smut) to their peers, we have robbed children of the privilege of letting childhood run its natural course. With a likely lifetime of 80+ years should children really want to become adult with 12? Psychoanalysis has shown us the incredibly formative importance of childhood; we become nostalgic about childhood, and yet we curtail it! The Bible tells us that unless ye ‘become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven’. Seems we are making it harder than it needs to be!

At the other end of youth we try to extend it by all sorts of artificial means with comical if not tragic results. Valentino and Sophia Loren trying to look 30 when 80 are not a pleasant sight. Old age is dreaded even if extended, although in truth many people find old age a blessing in their heart of hearts. So much to digest, so many lives to assist, so many grandchildren to spoil, so much earned freedom and joy, even under the shadow of physical decline and possible illness. The mildness and loving fostered by old age are not sufficiently prized, neither by society nor by those living it.

When earthly immortality comes within our reach, one of our dilemmas will again be how to time the seasons of our lives. Will we do 200 million years as children, 400 million years as youths, and infinity as the middle-aged, thus cutting out old age altogether? For all the attraction of youth, are you sure you want to spend 400 million years there, and infinity as a successful middle-aged lawyer? Are you sure? Really?

 

The many-worlds theory of Hugh Everett may allow physicalists to believe in free will, as explained in my last blog post. Since every choice you do not make will create a parallel universe where a parallel you will make your discarded choice there is no conditioning logic that means that you as you will necessarily have to choose one given alternative. All possible alternatives are equally realistic and each choice possesses its own impeccable internal logic. You may be free to choose, but whatever choice you make will appear to be the inevitable result of your conditioning.

The problem with such a theory of free will is that it seems to assume that you subscribe to the many-world theory; a theory which it is hard to get one’s head around despite its respectability. Another interpretation of quantum mechanics might provide another route to the same result, however.

The firm assumption of quantum mechanics is that alternatives are preceded by a state of superposition. At that moment the alternative states, the cat is dead and the cat is not dead, coexist. One very popular theory of quantum mechanics assume that the wave function that sustains the co-existence of the two alternative states collapses, so that only one of the two states survives. Parallel universes do not arise. In fact, a number of sophisticated theories assume superposition but no ensuing parallel universes. Question is then whether the co-existence of alternative states in superposition is dissolved randomly or deliberately. Will your kissing someone or not be decided arbitrarily or will you be able to dissolve the preceding superposition (where you both kiss and don’t kiss) by deliberate, free choice? Both alternatives are equally possible, each choice will possess its own immaculate internal logic!

Free will theorists have heralded the indeterminism of quantum mechanics as a sign that free will may exist. But that is stopping half-way. The superposition of alternatives before choices are made, or parallel universes arise, poses the question whether we choose or whether all the choices we seem to make are, in fact, random. The contending theories are thus not free will versus mechanistic determination, but free will versus complete randomness. Resolving that contention, how could human experience be reconciled with the complete randomness of our choices?

Physicalists have always had a hard time believing in free will! Real choice seemed excluded by conditioning and the perspective that all things and beings, including humans, are nothing but machines with predictable responses has held sway.

Quantum mechanics and the many-worlds theory of Hugh Everett seem to be able to reconcile possible free will with the physicalist viewpoint, however. As explained in my book, the many-worlds theory operates on the assumption that the state of superposition that precedes every alternative route, every choice, leads to one observable reality for one actor, but equally to the alternative reality for a doublet actor spawned by the state of superposition. In other words, every alternative, every choice, gives rise to a parallel universe where another version of you will live your discarded choice. The you that is you will only experience one version of reality, but parallel yous will live all possible permutations of your choice. In this theory, every possible variation of reality will play out in its own parallel universe, and the number of parallel universes will be almost infinite.

To digest this is obviously a tall order, but the many-worlds idea is, nevertheless, a respectable theory in theoretical physics. Relative to free will the interesting thing is that it may break the stranglehold of the mechanistic perspective without discarding it. Physicalists assume that every alternative can have only one logical outcome, but in the many-worlds theory every alternative will be a reality in some parallel universe, and every alternative will have come into being according to its own impeccable logic. In the past physicalists assumed that if you are faced with the choice between a red and a blue shirt you will choose the colour based on your conditioning. You choose blue – with the consequence that your buying the red one will end up on the garbage heap of discarded possibilities. Mechanistic logic meant that only blue was possible.

In the many-worlds theory the resolution of the superposition (red and blue co-exist) means that two universes will be the result. One in which you will have chosen blue and one in which you will have chosen red. And the reality and logic of either universe is unassailable on its own premises!

Does this mean that you have free will to choose which universe to occupy? Not necessarily!

Even if every choice you make will give rise to a parallel you who lives your discarded choice, you as a unique single being, will live only one existence, of course. This is so even if all your parallel yous will live the alternative existences of your discarded choices. The thread of existence perceived by you embodies a unique logic which is the only one you will live. The fascinating question is, however, whether the many-worlds theory means that every time superposition is achieved and new universes are born, you may be able to choose freely which one you will occupy! The many-worlds theory means that you have been conditioned to be able to choose all alternatives! Will the choice of where the specific you will live be random or will you as you be able to decide in which universe your consciousness will reside?

Do you promise to come back, my taxi-driver asked? When at all possible, I answered.

Where would that conversation have taken place? Well, in Jerusalem, this week. And, indeed, if I can go back, I will, partly because I saw so little. Professional obligations blocked the early part of the week and in the later part the unrest made it inadvisable to go into the Old Town from my hotel outside.

My answer to the question reminded me of the Jewish mantra ‘Next year in Jerusalem!’, an expression of such longing for home and for religious and personal freedom! Jerusalem, a home for three religions, but a home always being torn, so full of tension, as events this week tragically showed.

I had wanted to just stroll through the Old Town, enter through Damascus Gate, happenstance on the Via Dolorosa, take in the Armenian Quarter, marvel at the tomb of Crusader queen Melisende of Jerusalem, bow my head at the Western Wall, lift my gaze to the Al-Aqsa Mosque. All these names and places so full of magic! When I left for Jerusalem my wife said ‘you will open the window and it will open to the Orient’. Indeed!

If you love the idea and reality of Jerusalem you should read ‘Jerusalem: the Biography’ by Simon Sebag Montefiore, a scion of one of the great families of Jerusalem. Montefiore shows you how the ultimate spiritual city has been fought for, died for, has given rise to unimaginable cruelty and yet has remained so dear. What terrible irony that ‘home’ and the highest spirituality can also cause such barbarism! Jerusalem is not only The Holy City, it is also a most powerful symbol of human nature: inhumanity residing side-by-side with humanistic ideals and impossible beauty!

My book talks about how God may not be able to exist without the Devil – that good may be predicated on evil, beauty on the ugly. If you look for evidence, Jerusalem is the place to look!

The time of happy anticipation is over. It is Christmas. For me! Copernicus/Springer has now brought out my book ‘What If We Don’t Die?’.

Is it snowing outside? No? But you can still snuggle up in a comfortable chair with a soft blanket and read ‘What If We Don’t Die?’. You might even be entertained!

http://www.springer.com/de/book/9783319190921

At a concert yesterday my daughter remarked that the piece we were hearing was remarkably sad, considering that it was written in a major key. She was right. We do, indeed, tend to associate the major keys with drive and optimism and the minor keys with the more melancholy and dreamy. Mozart’s Requiem, the epitome of sadness and longing, is in D minor, yet Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, distraught and as solemn as its name implies is in D major.

We choose music according to our mood, not necessarily so that we choose sad music when we are sad and happy music when we are happy, but often so that our sentiments are complemented by the music. I find myself listening to much melancholy music when I am not at all melancholic myself and I will sometimes listen to the wildness of Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin when I am the most downbeat.

Yet, it is also true that some music fits a certain atmosphere perfectly. Walking through Paris at nighttime with Chopin as accompaniment is a wonder! The autumn that is meeting us presently seems to demand music in the minor keys. Christmas has its own repertoire without which Christmas would not be Christmas.

Music always moves you in some way. Even the muzak you hardly notice is found indispensable by shops to get you in the mood for buying. But oftentimes, I find, you want to be moved but do not find the music that is just right. Despite great choice perhaps the problem is that you have heard exactly the right piece too often for it to have the desired effect.

Hearing a piece of music too often is related to the topic of my book, in which I discuss how our susceptibility, or sensitivity, tends to decrease over time. Endless repetition is hard to imagine as anything but torture – the inversion of the sensitivity we seek.

At a lecture I attended recently I was struck by a scientific finding showing that human beings who lose the eyesight or hearing at a very early age and get it back 30 years later cannot really capitalize on the regained ability, because the learning process on how to use these sensory inputs was missing during a critical part of childhood. The 35 year old does not come even close to the 5 year old in terms of interacting with and learning from visual or acoustic stimuli. If that is the case what should we assume for a 1000 year old or a 100.000 year old? The answer to Francoise Sagan’s ‘Aimez-vous Brahms?’ would likely be a resounding no!

Famously Bach covered all the 24 major and minor keys in Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, and being a man of prodigious appetites he did it twice, once in Book 1 and a second time around in Book 2. But even Bach stopped there, because more would have become too much.

It is a normal human aspiration to want to experience all the major keys, all the facets of a positive life, and that many times. And we welcome the minor keys as well when they make us in the mood and dreamy – and also that many times. But the welcome is probably not endless.

In the final analysis our endeavour must be to retain as much as possible, for as long a time as possible, the impressionability of the 5 year old. In the face of disappointments and adversity we must strive to stay curious, must allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by emotion, even allow ourselves to remain vulnerable!

In Intimations of Immortality Wordsworth warns us in the most beautiful fashion about our decaying ability to be impressed:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

————————————————————————-

Delight in all the keys, I say – and fight, fight the ‘prison-house’!

Copernicus/Springer now gives you the opportunity to win one of two signed copies of What If We Don’t Die? If you want to enter the lottery just go here:

http://basicfront.easypromosapp.com/p/196601

When you are young you tend to think more in black-and-whites than when you grow older. When I was young I did not much like the novels of John Le Carré because of the many moral grey tones. When you are young you may be able to express yourself more readily on whether humans are basically good or basically bad. The choice between Locke’s perspective that humans are rational and tolerant and that of Hobbes that the life of man is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ seems clearly drawn.

Yet, life teaches that the issue is more complex than that. Surely our species is not always rational and tolerant, the current treatment of refugees is ample illustration, but neither are we all bad, as the great readiness to help the refugees on the individual level shows. The whole idea that humankind can be labelled as good or bad is probably misconceived, and building societal structures based on one or the other view fraught with danger, see the Marxist experiment. We as individuals possess good and bad, but to varying degrees and influenced by life circumstances. We are composites and it can be argued that good might not be possible without bad. I love Nietzsche’s ‘Everything good is the transmutation of something evil; every god has a devil for a father’, and I discuss this extensively in my book.

But my book more specifically holds up the magnifying glass of eternity to our failings, and suggests that in lives without end possibly our failings will be exacerbated rather than cured. This ultimately does not render judgment on the Locke versus Hobbes debate, it only accepts the reality of us being bad as well as good, and examines whether our failings over the longest time will be remedied, as the weaknesses in our tennis backhands, or whether we as persons, and as a society, would become worse.

If it is accepted that humans constitute a continuum of good and bad, the conclusion may be drawn that culture makes us better, more considerate. So societal design is very important. But I also think that our culture is a thin veneer that can dissolve easily, leaving us to become much worse.

I would so much like to say that I am with Locke, yet all I can say is that I rejoice when I see good and that I despair when I see or do bad. But I am with Locke in the sense that I think that the good far outweighs the bad. Let us keep it that way!

The happiest nation on Earth! The happiest nation on Earth, yet not willing to share happiness. The happiest nation on Earth believing that happiness can be sustained in isolation; that happiness has no moral connotation!

Denmark, my home country, has decided that a Syrian life is not worth a bit of inconvenience, that Danish comfort dictates heartlessness! Denmark revels in its historic role as the saviour of the Danish Jews during WWII, but sees no relationship to the ethical imperatives of today.

One of the really depressing things about current political discourse is that any political action must be justified from the perspective of the national interest of the country, defined in the narrowest sense. This is the detestable legacy of Senator Jesse Helms and his ‘America first’ ideology. But why should this ‘national interest’ perspective be right. In our private lives we do many things that are not in our own interest, but we do them because they are right. We help those of broken minds or broken bodies although we dearly hope we shall never be in that position ourselves. We do these things because they are right. The same within our countries. We see that communities take pain in order to serve the general good, although the inhabitants of these communities will be worse off. A new motorway is built leading to more general prosperity but at the cost of all those living close to the new road. We do it because it is right. We then come to the national level – and suddenly we say that we will not sacrifice anything for the common good because it means that our own prosperity will be impacted. We will not do what is good, because it may not be good for us. This is the logic that would have kept us in the Stone Age if we had applied it across the board. But more importantly it is wrong, wrong, wrong!

The almost as depressing thing as the national interest perspective is its misapplication. Because even if you adopt its logic it does not lead to the xenophobic attitudes of Denmark. Denmark has the same problem as many other European countries of an aging society, and immigrants are on average younger. That will make the pension burden easier to carry. But also, figures from Germany show that foreigners there pay more to the state than they take out in social benefits, and, of course, the long term productivity boost can be considerable depending on how well newcomers can be integrated. Look to the US of yore to see how immigration creates wealth (a lesson the US sadly has also forgotten). But all this is secondary. The real issue is how it can ever be justified to deny refuge to human beings in terrible distress!

I love Denmark, still. After all, home is where the heart is. But if home has no heart how can you love it? When you live in Vienna you are confronted with the misery in the middle of all the incredible prosperity. You go about your daily life as usual, yet something is amiss. The horror of the migrants is there for all to see. In fact, not so different from life in Denmark during the occupation. Back then Denmark took action, showed heart. Now it has lost heart – does not want to see, does not want to understand, does not want to help. Denmark is better than that, I know that. But it is highest time to reject the demagoguery of xenophobia, and to finally show who we are. A nation of good people ready to help, a nation of happy people understanding that happiness does not grow on stones of inhumanity.

Does this have anything to do with my book? No! But there are things much more important! Do not be on the fence. Show heart!

Many years ago a friend of mine suggested that what one should aspire to is a rounded life. What she meant was that one should not only appreciate, or strive for the pink Champagne and caviar. One should embrace also the beauty of the mundane and should understand that a well-lived life contains both glittering balls and hoovering. One without the other would make the lived life unbalanced. I am ashamed to say that back then this perspective did not resonate completely with me. But with time I have become very conscious of the beauty of daily life. The people who invest more in the dinner jacket than in a well-designed kettle might have gotten things wrong. As my friend suggested it is a question of balance. There is a need and a time for the dinner jacket and there is a need and a time for the kettle. When billionaires are unhappy it is maybe sometimes because of the loss of roots in everyday life.

My book deals a lot with what it is that makes life worth living, and thus there is perhaps reason to reflect on why in my own life the mundane has become more appreciated now than when I was young. My youth in a small village in Denmark was overwhelmed by the mundane; the appearance of a new film in our village cinema was a major event. In such circumstances it is probably not strange that the pursuit of Champagne moments becomes dominant. But perhaps it is also not strange that after many years of much travel, and the intake of a considerable amount of Champagne, daily life becomes so attractive. Mind’s buffer containing much material means that daily life becomes a way to absorb all the impressions. Yet, again, the rounded life is the aspiration and that means that there is a time for the road and a time for the pleasures of home.

Publishing a book is obviously a Champagne moment – but I hope it is more than that. I hope publishing the book will stay with me as an element of contentment – will remain a notable element in my continuing quest for a rounded life!