Tag Archives: background

Balance Impaired

 

DSC00176Close-up, the little gully evoked a strong sense of deja vu. The angle suggested that one might almost be able to stand up and walk it. The rock looked like a crocodile’s skin – all knobs and chunks with few cracks or pockets – and the few voids in the surface had formed from the erosion of yellow clay inclusions. I had been in this situation before, in the Canadian Rockies, the Tetons, the Cascades. It meant sparse and dubious protection for insecure climbing, with an ugly fall looming throughout.

The fresh memory of yesterday’s Eureka foray reinforced my unease. Just going into the mining country in Colorado’s San Juan mountains is sobering.  The road winds through acres of avalanche terrain peppered with jumbles of gray boards and rusty iron marking the eternal resting places of generations of abandoned avarice. Eureka itself stands for self-consciousness of our bitter relationship with the range. Once a small,  hopeful mining community the town is now a single building. The lone, windowless watchtower bears a prominent sign with the name of the town, placed there, no doubt, by the same sort of joker who might strap a party hat on a skeleton.

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Yesterday was our second consecutive day at the ice climbs in the valley above the ghost town. The day before, we had been denied access to the longest climb in the area by an SAR exercise. Yesterday, we encountered a line of four parties on the same route, and we decided to trudge a bit further past the routes at the valley’s entrance. Around the bend and not far above, we found a lovely pillar of ice baking in the sun. The air temperature was cold however, and the ice looked to be in good shape from the ground, so we went for it.

My partner took the lead and ran the two pitches together. It went well until the very top. There he found the last few feet melted out and he could not get to the fixed anchor. Worse, in a fit of hubris, neither of us had thought to have him take the kit for building ice anchors. He put in two ice screws at his high point and I lowered him back to an intermediate ledge. He set up a belay and I set off to retrieve the ice screws and build an anchor in the ice to get us back down to the base.

Looking up at the situation, I knew that I should not risk falling. He had placed the two screws at the anchor properly. They had already held his weight on the lower. But the stainless steel tubes were basking. Many times, I had raced the process now at work on the anchor, placing another screw on a sunny climb before the last one heated up enough to melt loose. I arrived at the anchor and placed a back-up screw. Out of curiosity, I jiggled the anchor screws. They rattled in their holes, and by the time finished the rappel anchor, I could lift the screws free with two fingers.

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By the time we got back down, the crowds had migrated our way. We had another objective in mind for the afternoon, but our hopes were squashed on the road, for we found a fellow standing at the head of the approach trail just staring across the valley as if he were reconsidering something. He informed us that he had ridden a slab avalanche for a few meters down the slope below our goal.  My partner had his wife and young son waiting back in Ouray anyhow.

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There had been angst around bringing the child, who was their first. He was a nidus of concern in some familiar ways. He was 18 months old and did not want to eat or sleep regularly. He clearly understood everything said to him, but his only bit of expressive language was the word “No”. Each morning, he spent a non-stop hour on Rube-Goldberg action. Cups went into other cups, packets of jelly were transferred from person to person and then into the cups, and then back to their original owner. All of this chaos worried his parents. It seemed so overwhelming that one could hardly imagine any organized behavior arising from it.

Unless you had seen it before. I had. I distinctly recalled worrying about how I could possibly teach my first child to speak. I had no training, and no idea where to begin. Nevertheless, the kid started to talk. He had inherited the talent for it. From an adult perspective, it looked like a miracle, because adults liked to think that they had, each and every one, invented the world – or at worst discovered it. That way, the adult felt more competent, and the world seemed more solid.

From the child’s standpoint, he was building a constellation from the inside out. He had his experiences – what he might come to call ‘sense impressions’ should he grow into a particularly deluded adult – and he had the dots and lines to mark and tie together those experiences, inherited in his nucleic acids, language, and culture. The dots and lines were powerful tools. They would allow him to develop at heady pace, mapping out massive territories, like language, on the fly.

His ancestral mechanisms  assembled his star chart in a blur, and if he was at all self-conscious in his adulthood, he would spend a lot of time figuring out how he got there, and what kind of picture he had made with all those dots and lines overlying the bright spots of his experience. It would be daunting and he might be tempted to throw his hands up and just call the dots and lines the truth, to give the mathematical, linguistic and philosophical accretions on experience an undeserved solidity, while relegating the experience itself to a dirtier, incomplete status.

My partner’s son would have an antidote in that case. He would learn to climb, and that would at least open the blinds on the relationship between the picture of the stars and the stars themselves. He would still have to look, but most people didn’t even get that chance.

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Perched in the little gully, I saw the true landscape.

I was not motivated. I felt the burden of all those extraneous considerations which populated the slope with angels and demons instead of little edges and blotches of ice. I climbed back down and handed the sharp end over to my partner. He was motivated, and managed to lead the pitch despite some misgivings about the security of the climbing. I followed without slips or fumbles. It was sketchy, no question. We looked at the next pitch, but decided against it. It would be there when the stars aligned favorably, or even better, when no one was thinking about the pattern of stars at their back.

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He Baked a Cake with Duty in It

Duties never truly conflict. Unless they are truly categorical. But if they are not categorical, are they truly duties? 

You know what, I gotta take a walk. Forget all that stuff I said before.

– Immanuel Kant (astral form) as related to me, 0300 June 8, 2018

 

Every act is a political act.

-Cain, to whoever would listen.

A baker in Colorado claims to have managed the feat. He said that the totally gay-free contents of his cake fulfilled his obligation to show love for the Baby Jesus. Because, as everybody knows, the Baby Jesus don’t like the gays. Wait. Strike that. The Baby Jesus loves everybody, so he just don’t like the gayness.

Anyway, this baker loved the Baby Jesus. He refused to bake any cake with any gayness in it, and in doing so, baked into each cake his duty to abide by the wishes of the Baby Jesus.

Some might ask how the baker’s achievement were possible. Cakes are made of flour, sugar, mixing and heat. You will never find respect for the Baby Jesus between the crumbs or under the frosting. But that assessment is not fair.

The folks who ask to see the duty in the cake (God bless their simple hearts) are the same ones who, when told that green experiences reside in the brain, ask to open up a skull to see the green inside. They like to hold the notion of supervenience  upside down, because it seems easier to grasp that way.

But it isn’t so much that neurons and photons and retinal pigments add up to green; the point is that green experiences break down in certain, common ways. Admittedly, the difference is a little tricky to apprehend. It has eluded smarter folks than the poor bastards delving for green things in a pile of brains. Mistakes about the difference have led some very smart people to propose that we can get rid of green, and everything else. Instead of saying “green”, we can just hold up a balance sheet with all the retinal pigments, neurons and photons on it. But then we’ll need a balance sheet for the neurons, photons and retinal pigments, and so on and so on. You can’t get away without primarily localizing things somehow, and you always end up reaching for the balance sheet labeled “green” when you want to indicate “green”, and then you  might as well just say “green” in the first place.

The same mistake about supervenience gives rise to the notion of emergence. Emergence is the balance-sheet scheme for those who just can’t let go of Aristotle (and a very uncharitable reading of Aristotle at that). The only thing on the balance sheet, in the emergent case, is something like a metaphysical time-share: property theoretically without exclusive ownership, but available for occupancy by a variety of occupants in turn. For green, the pigments, neurons and photons tally up to a certain critical point and then begin acting with ‘greenity’, which subsequently begins to explain everything else directly related to green. In the case of the cake, flour, sugar, water, heat, and so on tally up to a certain point and suddenly – cakeity. Ask the obvious question – where does the cakeity or the greenity begin – and the whole thing unravels, just like the more detailed balance-sheet scheme. You circle back to simply saying ‘cake’ and ‘green’, and ‘cake’ and ‘green’ then break down in certain, common ways. Each cake and each green perception has its own, unique identity, without a homogenizing property reaching down to bring it into the categorical fold.

Now we can get around to duty in the cake. Not only will we fail to find specks of duty among the crumbs, but we can’t expect it to pop out of the baking process, or even to be the sum of baking, Bible verses, and love of the Baby Jesus. That’s OK, though. So far, duty fares no worse than green, or cake itself. But it is worse for duty, because duty does not break down in any reliable way. It doesn’t even break down in any definitive way.

The baker baked a cake without any gayness in it, because he loved the Baby Jesus. He told the world, but he would have felt that he was true to the Baby Jesus, even if the baker himself was the only one who knew that there was no gayness in the cake. So then, the duty can’t break down to any relationship between ideas or even attitudes. Maybe it breaks down to just the baker’s attitude toward the Baby Jesus. But then you don’t have an account of the compelling part of the perceived duty, especially regarding gay-free cake.

Loving the Baby Jesus is just loving the Baby Jesus. In itself, the attitude does not contain any obligation. You can’t break down moral obligations (or any other moral “properties”) to a supervenience base. Therefore, we also lack reliable generalizations regarding moral obligations and moral representations.

You can’t even make a cakeity (emergent) case for duties, because duties don’t arguably emerge at some compositionally determined phase. Duties can pop up anywhere along the way, from turning on the lights in the bakery to accepting money for the cake.

The inevitable response to the above observation is an argument from incredulity which refers to the holocaust or infanticide. You can always say that it is morally wrong to throw a baby on the campfire, bake a gay cake, or exterminate a certain group of people, but such statements are always after the fact and are supported by historical fixation of the facts in the acrylic of moral terminology.

After all, moral arguments have been made in favor of all the above activities. And, the moral advocates have not differed with moral opponents of those actions on the factual contents of the actions; they have merely assigned different moral properties to the things and events which can, like a cake or a fire, be said to have a supervenience base, and about which effective theories are possible. In other words, moral ‘properties’ are merely attitudinal ephemera, pinned to the facts of the matter, whatever the matter may be.

 

 

 

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Breaking Trail

For the umpteenth time, my snowshoe breaks through the crust and dives into hopeless depth hoar. The continental snowpack nibbles away at one’s soul with a false promise in every step. The crust feels solid when one’s foot first rests upon it. It even holds as weight shifts from back foot to front foot. But, it can sense when the full weight of body and pack has shifted, and then it collapses.

The slog would be bad enough were it a grueling monotony of breakthrough after breakthrough, but it is worse that that. Because sometimes, the crust gives you a few steps on top, and just when you relax, then it lets you fall through into the great vat of cornstarch beneath. What’s still worse about my current situation is that I am following a trail. Minus the snow, it would be easy walking.

If I persist, I will soon get a little psychological boost, as my course turns off the cut trail and into untracked forest. Though it really isn’t any harder or easier than wallowing above the Summer trail, breaking off the established path onto the section that only I know, feels like progress and is an antidote to the demoralizing snow conditions.

I used to do the walk to high camp with a map and compass. I no longer need those. The rocks, trees, sequences of slopes and their conformations chart a more accurate course in my memory. These days, I can get to my destination despite the snow cover because the trail isn’t really on the ground; it is in my mind. Or, so it would seem,

One might say that the trail presupposes or lies in the potential of, my mind and memory. For a trail to be, the possibility of a trail must have been. But the trail is not made of possibilities. It is made of my memories of trees, slopes, rocks, and all the other landmarks on the way. It is made of my senses of time, space and distance, which are properties of the phenomena which constitute thought and memory. My memory, and its possibilities, are dependent upon its contents. And so it is with memory in general; it is defined by having extant referents.

In other words, my memory is nothing without memories, and all the possibilities of memory lie in its contents, including its metaphysical possibilities, which lie in its having contents. When I recall looking down the trail in this moment, I trace a path through the space and time of my memory, just as I did when I stood in the snow on the day I recall. And I do so on background – all the historical infrastructure which orients my current experience and dictates its aspectual shape.

My recollection at the keyboard can’t get going without the background, yet the background can’t be background except in relation to current experience, which links it all together. The possibility of a trail inheres in legs, eyes, slopes and trees. Memory resides in its defining contents. The contents of my memory rely upon where and when I am now.

Some folks get frustrated with all this interdependence and would retreat to the simple certainty of a hierarchy. I can understand the appeal of a world where there is a separate mental substance, an uncaused cause, memory as an independent faculty among other independent faculties, and a trail waiting beneath the snow to accommodate our walk without the hard work of trail breaking.

But that means a world where there may be memory which doesn’t necessarily remember anything, a mind which doesn’t necessarily think about anything,  an agent which does not experience the changes it makes, and destinations which don’t belong to anybody – a world which is not possible.

 

 

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