The Evolution of Bucket-Man

About three and a half years ago, when he was six, my son A created his own superhero. He and his brother were living with his mother in Rhode Island at the time, and I was visiting. I happened to have a video camera with me to capture the birth of Bucket-Man.

Like most kids his age, his invention was mostly an imitation influenced by available materials. He was obsessed with Spider-Man and knew the three Sam Raimi movies scene for scene. He also had a big blue plastic bucket that could fit on his head like a hat. Bucket-Man was pretty much Spidey, but with buckets. That is, he saved the city by using his "bucket webs" and  his "bucket climb." Apparently he could shoot buckets from his wrist and use buckets to climb walls.

He looked like this:

...although I think in his head he looked closer to the image here (I have since learned that bucket-headed superheroes are rather common creations for kids).

In the three years since then, A has done a lot of growing. He'll be ten in January, and those chubby cheeks have thinned out quite a bit. He has lived with me for three years now and is in fourth grade. However, when he and his friends play superheroes in the schoolyard, he still plays as Bucket-Man.

But Bucket-Man is not quite the same. A recently told me that he has been making an effort to flesh out Bucket-Man and make him less like Spider-Man. He doesn't want his character to be a simple imitation, but an original superhero. The bucket is not actually a bucket, according to the revised story. It is a bucket-shaped alien that came to Earth and attached itself to a regular kid's head one day, like a parasite. It gave him special powers related to buckets - he can make them materialize and capture bad guys, for instance - but it also exacts a toll on him. See, in a Moorcockian twist (though he has never been exposed to the Elric story), the bucket creature is actually evil and tries to influence Bucket-Man to do bad things. One of the many plotlines A has created for Bucket-Man involves defending the planet from an invasion of other bucket creatures, presumably because they would make everyone evil.

The development of Bucket-Man into this sort of semi-tragic superhero has been gradual, and it has been interesting as a marker of A's mental development. Layers of complexity he could not have understood when he first created his character have made the character more interesting. He only has a couple more years before his obsession with superheroes is replaced by the hormonal craziness of adolescence, but it should be interesting to see how the character changes from here. Perhaps a love interest will creep in, or maybe some deeper levels of angst, or more exploration of the huge gray area between good and evil, which is something of which A has become precociously aware.

I look forward to finding out.

I Am Clark Kent

When I was a wee lad, I was obsessed with Superman. I have vague memories of seeing the first movie with Christopher Reeve as the Man of Steel in the theater with my father when I was three years old. I can recall the extreme, full-body excitement of finding out that there would be a Superman II. I even have fond memories of my parents taking me to see Superman III. I will not speak of Superman IV, as I try to think of it as little as possible.

At home, my friend Joe and I would play Superman. Somehow, through warped kid-logic, we both got to be Superman. Eventually we made up our own superheroes who were thinly disguised versions of Superman. Mine was Supersonnix. He was from the planet Criptanian. He was exactly 100 times as strong as Superman (whatever that means), had blonde hair (as I did), and mostly did all the same stuff.

I guess you could say that I wanted to be Superman. Superman was everything a man should be to me. He was fearless and utterly benevolent. He was both strong and smart. He exuded confidence and made those around him feel safe.

But Superman was also Clark Kent, and Clark Kent was like a totally different person. I understood, even then, that Superman had to use the Clark Kent disguise in order to walk among people without being treated like a god, and also to protect the people he cared about. His Superman persona - his real persona - had to remain somewhat mysterious, since the only way to hurt an invincible man is to hurt the things about which he cares that don't have the same protections. Clark Kent was all that Superman wasn't. He was meek and fearful, shy, clumsy, and socially inept. He had to be all that in order to throw Lois Lane off the scent, I guess.

Anyway, I think a seed was planted deep in my mind when I was young. I knew I wanted to become Superman. Being human, I would never have Supe's unearthly powers, but surely there was much about me that would set me apart as some better form of human, I thought. But I knew that being Superman also meant being Clark Kent. It meant learning not to show off, to be humble. It meant not ever really revealing the true amount of power I could harness.

Since I wasn't really developing any powers, I got to work on what I could do. I took on traits of Clark Kent. I was shy. I was deeply modest and never wanted to show off anything I could do (partially, I think, because attempting to show off might reveal to me that I did not and would not ever have super powers, and I wanted to maintain the illusion of my own specialness). I became socially inept and, as the lack of super powers became more evident, I withdrew.

As an adult now approaching middle age, I've overcome (or learned to deal with) a lot of the anxieties and such that plagued me when I was young. However, I still have that boy-scoutish drive to be Clark Kent. I never drink or smoke or do drugs or even use particularly harsh language, even though I really have no deep moral issues with any of those things (as long as they do not hurt others). I feel a strong need to make those around me happy, and I am driven by an internal moral compass to the degree that I find it difficult to do things I consider "wrong," even when alone.

These might seem like good things, and indeed they are traits that have generally worked out for the best. They have made me good at my job and at getting along with others, and they've really helped me to be a good example as a parent. But they are also burdens. They are things that single me out and make me feel like an outsider. I am always concerned that my way of life will be viewed by others as a judgement about their own, which it is not. I am driven by an internal drive, not by some consciously considered decision to act a certain way or a belief in some externally ordained right way of doing things.

I find that I sometimes envy those who just don't care, who swear like a sailor and get drunk from time to time and go to wild parties and have fun. I wonder why the Clark Kent urge still exists so strongly for me. Is it habit? Fear of change? I don't know, but neither of those feels like the whole picture.

I suppose I'll just have to keep on being who I am. I like who I am, but I wonder about these things sometimes.

Free will

The existence or non-existence of free will is one of the longest-running debates human thinkers have had. Thousands of volumes over millennia of human existence have attempted to provide answers, or at least frameworks for discussion. Do we make choices, or do we only think that we do? Do our decisions make fundamental changes to reality, or are the decisions we feel we are making merely the inevitable outcomes of reactions within our brains?

The answers to such questions have far-reaching consequences. Is it ethical to punish someone for a crime if they had no real choice but to commit it? Are there infinite timelines existing for each choice made, or do we follow a linear path from beginning to end, the script already written, whether by some superior being or by the irregularities of the early universe?

However,I have never been completely comfortable with the debate over free will, and the reason is that I think it is a false one. The very concept of free will seems to rest upon assumptions that are themselves questionable to me. In this post, I will try to articulate what I mean.

Free will, as I am using the term, refers to the ability of a thinking, rational entity to consider options and choose one. It comes into play only when there are multiple options available and the choosing entity is conscious of at least two available options. It does not include reflexive or instinctual action. Awareness of choice is central to free will, which is why it is often said to exist only for humans (and possibly a few other kinds of creatures capable of higher brain function).

Free will is a central concept for most religions. Without the assumption of free will, there can be no karma, no reward or punishment for good behavior, since no behavior would have come about through personal choice. It is also central to our legal system. If no one has a choice, then no one can be responsible for anything that happens. All actions and outcomes might be unknown, but they are predetermined. I might perceive that I have the option of stealing money or not stealing money, but the option I select will be the result of powers that reside outside of me.

So let's start with the idea of making a choice. What is it to choose? Do we choose with our minds or with our actions? If I think to myself that I will commit an act but I do not do it, have I chosen to commit it? As an example, imagine that you are hungry and you see delicious food for sale in a store. You have no money. The store attendant is not paying attention, and you determine that you could take the food easily without being caught. The decision of whether to do so or not is yours. Now imagine that you move to take the food, but you trip, cause a commotion, and you attract too much attention to take the food without being noticed. Your plan ruined, you walk away. Did you choose to take the food?

Now imagine the exact same situation, but without the clumsiness. Instead of tripping, you get to the food, but at the last second, you have a change of heart and decide not to take the food. In this instance, did you choose to take the food? Did the fact that you changed your mind negate the fact that you had previously decided otherwise?

In the first scenario (the tripping scenario), your unexpected fall changed the situation before you could complete your action. But this does not mean that you would have completed the action even if you hadn't tripped. As the second scenario shows, you have up until the moment of taking an action to decide whether or not to do it. So is the intent to do something the choice, or is the action the choice? Does changing your mind before you complete an action qualify as a second choice, or is it part of the same choice?

The boundary between deciding to do something and actually doing it is not as clear-cut as it might seem. It all gets fuzzy when you look at it closely.

Let's look at another scenario. Imagine a man - we'll call him Bub - finds himself very strongly attracted to a woman named Anya, whom he has just met, and Anya has dropped many signs that she feels the same about him. However, Bub is married to Bertha, and he believes in commitment. Anya invites Bub back to her place for drinks (and more). He is faced with a decision: does he follow his instinct to go home with Anya, or does he keep his head about him and decline the offer? Which decision is the rational one?

Well, the rational decision depends upon the outcome Bub wants. He has to weigh his desire for a quick fling with the very attractive Anya against his desire to remain committed to Bertha, including all that each option entails. Perhaps he even tells Anya to wait a moment while he sits down and draws out a chart of probabilities of outcomes, being extremely rational about the whole thing. In the end, he decides do decline Anya's very tempting offer because he feels that the long-term consequences of cheating on his wife are a bigger negative than a romp with Anya is a positive.

How does he decide this? How does he assign values to each consequence? What unit of measurement does he use, and how does he make the measurement?

Here is the problem: A choice made by pure reason is not a choice. It is, by definition, predetermined. Adding one and one together will give you two. You don't get to decide. However, the decision to follow the conclusions of pure reason is a choice, with the alternative being to follow one's heart or instinct. However, isn't the choice to follow the reasonable conclusion also an instinct? If not, what is it?

Reason, for all its uses, provides no impetus. It is a means without an end, a way of reaching a conclusion. Why do I do anything that I do? Why do I not simply sit down, stop eating, and wait to die? Not because of reason. Because of instinct. I don't want to die. Why do I care if I die? Why do I care if I live? I care because I am driven to care by instinct, by internal drive. It is animalistic. There is no rational need for me to live. To what end? However far you go, however much you reason, you will never arrive at anything other than instinct and irrationality.

Therefore, at their roots, all choices, no matter how well reasoned, are irrational and instinctive. Reason and instinct are not dichotomous. Instinct provides a drive. Reason provides a means of fulfilling that drive. I work so that I can afford food and shelter. I eat because I want to live. I want to live because I am driven to do so by instinct. The decision to get a job is rational given my desired end, but the end is not rationally determined The fulfillment of desire is not a rational choice. It is instinctive.

Given all that, what are we doing when we make a decision? What is the difference between our decisions and those of worms? The same force that drives a worm to bore through the dirt is what drives every decision that everyone makes. Our rational capacity might make the process more complex for us or allow us to make an estimate of what might happen a few more steps down the road, but it does not provide any reason for moving forward on the road.

So if we are driven by irrational desire and all decisions are ultimately attempts (however convoluded) to fulfill that desire, and we do not choose our desires, what are we doing when we choose?

Imagine that Bub, feeling too irresistibly drawn to Anya, decides that the only way to stay committed to Bertha is to kill Anya. He brings her to a dark alley and shoots her dead. Why did he do it? Should he have done something else instead? How did he reach the conclusion that he did? And, the million-dollar question: Is it his fault?

Bub killed Anya because he figured that he would feel worse about cheating on Bertha than he would about killing Anya, and he determined that he would cheat on Bertha if Anya lived. Couldn't he stop himself in some other way? He reached the conclusion, possibly through faulty reasoning, that no, there was no other way to avoid cheating on Bertha. Why did he care so much about cheating on Bertha? Because he wants to minimize his guilt, and he knows that he will feel a good deal of guilt if he cheats. Couldn't he have come up with something else? Perhaps, but he did not take the time to reason it out. Why not? Because his urge to cheat was too much for him to take. Could he have sought professional psychiatric help? Maybe, but he didn't think of it. Why not? Because he was preoccupied with thoughts of cheating. Why was he so preoccupied? Because he was driven by instinct to be that way. Is that his fault?

See, there's a problem with the concept of "his fault". It assumes causality. If something is someone's fault, it means they caused it. But what is causality? The concept of cause and effect is a simplification. It is an abstraction. In truth, everything causes everything else to some degree or other. We call something a cause when it reaches a certain threshold of likelihood that an effect will follow it. The threshold is rather arbitrary. It is tied to our tendency to categorize as a means of understanding things better, except that we mistake the abstraction for the reality it represents. The concepts of cause and effect are human impositions. They are categories we created to help us make sense of our surroundings in a hostile world, not real things.

So should Bub go to jail for murder if he is caught, even though it's not his fault that he was driven to do what he did?

I would say yes. Why? Because I think it will deter others from doing the same thing by increasing the weight of negative consequences for the act. Why do I want to do that? Because I want there to be fewer murders. Why do I want there to be fewer murders? Among other reasons, because it reduces the likelihood that someone I care about will be murdered. Why do I care if someone I care about is murdered? Because it would make me very sad. So what? Well, I don't want to be sad. Why not? Because it is unpleasant. I am driven to make myself happier by instinct.

See, even if the assumptions I make (such as the assumption that locking up Bub will deter other murders, or that deterring other murders will reduce the chances that someone I care about will be murdered) are logically flawed (indeed, if you followed the questions along the path of why I think it will deter murders, you will eventually come to a point of irrationality), it all leads back to an irrational drive anyway.

So what does this say about free will? Does it exist?

Punishment

I have been thinking lately about the concept of punishment. It seems quite natural to us that when someone does something wrong, he or she should be punished. When someone commits murder, we may argue about the nature of the punishment deserved, but the fact that they deserve to be punished is not often questioned. I wonder, though: what is the utility of punishment? In what ways does punishing a crime make things better, and do the improvements warrant the cost?

When we speak about someone going to jail or serving some other sentence for a crime committed, we usually do so in terms of fairness - did they get what they deserved? Are we really the arbiters of fairness? Is that what we are doing: maintaining some sort of balance? To what end? When we put someone to death by lethal injection, are we correcting some kind of imbalance in the universe? Avenging a victim or a victim's loved ones? When we throw someone in jail for possessing marijuana, are we trying to keep the person off the streets? Are we teaching them a lesson?

To my mind, none of the usual reasons given for punishment hold a lot of water. I believe that the most important reason for punishment is one that doesn't sit well with the American ideal of individualism. It is that by punishing one person for a crime, you disincentivize the crime for others. This is essentially the only rational use of punishment for cases in which the perpetrator poses no further threat to society, and it is the most important reason in most other cases. By creating a punishment for a crime and showing that you will, in fact, enforce it, we attempt to make the commission of that crime less attractive to others who are inclined to commit it.

I believe there is too much emphasis, at least in this country, on punishment as a means of retribution. We often hear about whether a person is getting what he or she deserves. I think that completely misses the point of punishment. We are not trying to restore a cosmic balance. We are trying to create a society that is shaped in the way its members want. The only way to do so is to create incentives and disincentives where they do not otherwise naturally exist. It is not and should never be about revenge.

What has primarily steered my mind toward these issues is the Trayvon Martin case. The anger in this case is understandable, and based on the knowledge I have of it, it seems to me that it was a real travesty and the shooting was not justified. However, calls for the lynching of his killer, George Zimmerman - and yes, I have indeed read those online, written in some cases by people who likely have not-so-distant ancestors who were victims of lynch mobs - are disturbing to me. The justice system in the United States is far from perfect, but it certainly beats lynch mob justice. That does nothing to fix the problem. Nothing will bring back Trayvon Martin. His killing is a wrong that cannot be righted. However, by using his case as a way to shed light on the problems with the system and to bring about changes for the better, we can make sure it wasn't for nothing.

A Nation Divided

I am utterly and completely baffled that Rick Santorum is being taken seriously as a candidate for the Presidency of the United States. I always try hard to see things through the eyes of others, including those with vastly divergent views from my own. In fact, I take a sort of pride in my ability to do so even when I personally find a particular set of beliefs to be reprehensible. I feel that only by fully understanding why a person would come to believe such things can you form a decent argument against those beliefs.

Now, I didn't intend for this blog to be a political blog. However, we Americans are heading into election season, and it's hard to avoid thinking about such things when you're reading about them wherever you look. Besides that, there is a lot to think about beyond merely this election. The future of the country as a whole is something less clear than it was once thought, and there are issues that will need to be addressed in the coming years.

Back to Rick Santorum, though. This man has an extremely regressive belief structure with gaping holes in every argument he makes. He is a bigot who is blind to his own blind spots, a fatal flaw for any leader as far as I am concerned. But, unfortunately, he is also expressing views held by a large swath of the country, where a very strange mix of libertarianism and Christian evangelicalism has taken hold (never mind that Christianity and libertarianism are not particularly compatible). Essentially, they want the government out of their financial matters (i.e., they don't like taxes), but they want strong government presence in social matters, with an emphasis on Christian morality (on which they believe this country to be founded).

This view is completely at odds with reality in many ways. For one, the country was demonstrably and explicitly not founded with Christianity at its center. While it's true that Christianity was the dominant religion at the time (and still is), those whose ideas shaped the country clearly wanted a country whose laws did not depend on the popular myths of the day. The original ideas are very humanist, not particular to any religion.

Another issue I have is that you can't defund the government and also make it a moral guardian. Defunding the government - the libertarian ideal of making it as small as possible - has gained traction as a way to stop it from being wasteful. After all, if the government has less ability to act, it has less ability to waste. But there are many areas where the government is the only party equipped to act properly (defense, law enforcement, infrastructure), so you need it for some things. And you need it to maintain the collective good in cases where individuals damage it by acting toward their own ends.

As an example of what I mean, I turn to baseball, ten years ago. Steroid use is rampant among major leaguers and gives anyone who uses it a leg up on the competition (i.e., other players). It's a highly competitive sport, so a large number of players use steroids, despite their dangers. If a player doesn't want to use steroids, well, he puts himself at a disadvantage and, if he's a borderline player, may shut down his career. So even though he doesn't want to, he uses steroids. It requires an external force, a governing body, to impose a regulation on player behavior, mandating a lack of steroid use, in order to stop this spiral from continuing, one that will end with all players being collectively worse off but no one having an advantage (because everyone is on steroids). It's better for everyone if no player uses steroids, but it's better for each player if he uses them. Therefore, you have to maintain the collective health by imposing rules that limit behavior.

This is what the government can do that private industry cannot do.

Unfortunately, the government is indeed wasteful. But the way to cut the waste isn't to defund it. That just keeps the same proportion of waste to good work and doesn't fix the problem of what to do about all those things for which a government is needed. Do you think that pork projects will be the first thing to go when you cut government funding? No. Realistically, there will always be waste in the government. All we can do is create incentives to mitigate it. But that's for another diatribe.

Getting back to my point, a portion of the country sees pluralism and the embracing of our changing culture as a bad thing. It sees all movement as degradation. Those who are railing against gay marriage are the modern equivalent of those who railed against miscegenation. They channel the neophobic tendencies of the people into specific causes masked as religious ones (e.g., if being against gay marriage is so against the will of God, where are all of the people protesting divorce, which is much more explicitly condemned by Jesus in the Bible?).

It deeply bothers me that this country has so many people in it who think Rick Santorum is presidential material. Mitt Romney isn't as scary because he doesn't actually stand for anything. He's all of Bill Clinton's sliminess and ideological meandering without any of the charisma. Newt Gingrich is intelligent but a total hothead and clearly not a man who believes in what he says.

So I've been thinking that it would be kind of cool to try out splitting the country up. I say let the south secede. Let them try it their way. See how far it gets them. Let them see how it works out when you remove social safety nets and force religion down people's throats (see Virginia's soon-to-be law), when you stop regulating companies. We'll see if that invisible hand forces them to stop poisoning the water.

Of course that won't happen. We're stuck together. I guess I'll just have to figure out some way of understanding how people can think these things.

I You They

So much about how we think can be found in the structure of our language. I often think that I should have studied linguistics, but I think that about so many fields of study, and my problem is that I never could make up my mind.

But let me not get away from my point only two sentences in. What I've been thinking about a lot lately, since I'm rather odd, is how language contributes to our sense of identity. In particular, I have been thinking about first, second, and third person (I/we, you/you, he/she/it/they, respectively), and how this separation reflects the way we divide the world.

When I say "I", what do I mean? Do I mean my physical form? My mind? Something else? It's not exactly clear cut. Religious folks I've known tend to say it's the soul, but that word is pretty meaningless. It just opens up whole new worlds of things that need to be defined (e.g., what is a soul). The soul is what we call the thing that we are, but it doesn't define it.

When I refer to myself, I clearly do not mean my physical form. I am not talking about my body. I can refer to the body as something that belongs to me, as I just did. It is my body. So who is this "me" that owns the body? Is it my pattern of thoughts? My set of memories? No, again, these are all things that I can describe possessively. They are my pattern of thoughts, my memories. So what am I?

Language doesn't serve particularly well here because the language itself is built upon the assumption of the division between first, second, and third persons. But the best I can define myself is: I am the thing that experiences the world subjectively. It is not a perfect definition, but I think it captures the idea. To avoid confusion, I will refer to the generic "I" (as opposed to the "I" I use to refer to my actual self) as Sum. I will refer to the second and third person as Es and Est, respectively (I always knew taking Latin would be useful at some point!).

So what are you? What is Es? That is a little easier. Es is the thing to which Sum directs its output. Sum speaks to Es. Es's experience is not important to the definition of Es, since Sum is, in any given situation, the only thing with a subjective experience. When I speak to you, I am Sum and you are Es, at least from my vantage point.

Est, then, is anything else. Est is not necessarily involved in the conversation but can be referred to within the conversation.

Ah yes, the conversation. The division into Sum, Es, and Est reveals the importance of conversation to language. Don't give me that look now. You know, the one that says, "Well, duh, you Laputan nudnik!" What I mean is that we usually think of it the other way around, that language is necessary for conversation. But in truth, it goes both ways: conversation that is needed for language as well. Any use of language assumes a conversation, even if one is speaking to oneself (occupying both the Sum and the Es, in my invented argot).

As I've written before, language is one of the many tools with which we force a continuous reality into categories in order to better understand and communicate it. This kind of abstraction, though, always introduces a degree of imprecision. Sum, Es, and Est do not truly exist as separate things. They are merely categorizations. There is no hard line of division between you and me and the air between us. Each flows into the other, so that there is no "other". The Sum, Es, and Est are different parts of the same thing, which is everything.

Again, language itself fails me whenever I get to this level of thought precisely because its utility is the opposite of what I am trying to communicate. But my point is that language creates hard edges in the continuous reality. Not points out or accentuates, but creates. There is no division. We impose one because it is more efficient for our brains to function by pattern recognition, and pattern recognition requires categorization. When we make assumptions about the nature of reality based upon these decisions - when we refer to Sum, Es, and Est as if they really exist and base theories of reality upon them, we are building upon abstractions of reality rather than a view of reality itself.

Okay, enough for now. I have no idea how comprehensible to anyone else this might be. If I could ever organize my meandering thoughts into something coherent, I'm sure I could write a book -- not that anyone would necessarily want to read it, but I could write one.