Born on State Highway 1

Within minutes of my son being born — December 18 2009 after a forty minute labour and a harrowing drive to the hospital — I asked the doctor, only somewhat in jest, if I could hop on the table and have her right then and there give me a vasectomy.

“Wait two years,” she said. “That’s what I always tell them. Wait two years.”

I haven’t stopped scratching my head since, to say nothing of my soon-to-be filleted testicles.

Why two years? I’m not sure.

Some background. I’m 30 years old. I have a daughter who is almost 3 years old. My partner and I get along well. I’m not dependent on any illegal substances. I have life insurance and a will.

And so. I’m pretty sure that I can handle the idea of having a 12- and a 10-year-old when I’m 40. But that’s the limit. I don’t want to be 40 with an 8-year-old, let alone a 4-year-old.

In short, I want to move on. Pass down genes. Check. Do something else. Check.

Again I ask, why two years, then?

The obvious reason is that I might change my mind. Well, maybe. It isn’t likely though. I’m comfortable with the decision.

I’ve discussed it with people. An old friend of mine got a vasectomy about 3 years ago without having had any kids. He didn’t tell his parents. I always thought that might mean he wasn’t so comfortable with the decision. His advice: don’t shake a batch until they say it’s okay to do so, because it’s really painful.

I’ll remember that.

The other potential reason for the two-year rule is macabre: maybe there will be something wrong with the new baby. Maybe he’ll fall off a cliff. Maybe he’ll like Pat Conroy novels.

I don’t find that convincing. His life will be as precarious as any. Waiting two years will not make a lick of difference.

It is weird to be considering such matters. I remember when my stepdad went in for the snip. The doctor who performed it had been doing it since before it was legal. After two days of hearing my mum and me make jokes about going for a bike ride, he lost his temper.

I’ll remember that, too.

Perhaps I’ll skip the doctor. Surely I can do it myself. It’s amazing what one can find these days on YouTube.

It is commonly understood that technology is advancing at an exponential rate. Everyone is familiar, for example, with the rate at which mp3 player storage capacity is increasing. Eight years ago, I bought a Nokia phone that was very fancy indeed – it could hold 12 or 13 tracks of mp3s. Today, iPod storage is measured in tens of gigabytes. And that’s only what’s commercially available – researchers are pushing forward with new technologies that will make today’s iPod seem like a punch card.

Fortunately, John Wyndham did a lot of my thinking for me long before I was born.

And probably in only a few years.

Ah, the exponential rate! It gave Malthus nightmares. It leavens bread and ferments wine. It makes pyramid schemes work. And it might just usher in the technological asymptote that revolutionises what it means to be human.

Ray Kurzweil is a nutter who probably drinks his own urine, but in a recent interview with Computerworld he talks about the possibility of human immortality in 30 to 40 years. Health- and youth-maintaining nanobots in the blood, the ability to upload total human personality and memory functionality to a non-biological substrate – the stuff of science fiction is getting closer, faster.

The technological singularity is coming. The inventions that re-invent invention. The advance that overtakes advantage. The leap that escapes the gravity well.

I don’t think we’re giving enough thought to just how radical a change in priorities this should bring. Does what is important to us change with the prospect of functional immortality? What will economics become the world becomes truly and obviously post-scarcity? How will the world’s religions deal with such rapid changes in what it is to be human?

Obviously.

To me, the most interesting impact is this. As immortality or greatly extended lifespans become realistic possibilities within our lifetime, the stakes get exponentially higher. To die is to lose the rest of your life, and that loss is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. The potential cost of any risk increases accordingly.

In the long view, one is left with a sensation something like being diagnosed with HIV or cancer and trying to hang around long enough for the cure.

We’ve all been born with congenital mortality.
What happens if there’s a cure?

Speed is about human evolution, right? It’s so obvious. The bus represents the world. Watch it again – they’ve got every nationality on there. Not only that, but it’s being driven to disaster by this guy who’s either made up to look Cro-Magnon or chosen becasue he looks that way. He’s our brutal evolutionary heritage, driving the world to Armageddon while everybody argues. The whole thing’s symbolic… Just look at the amount of times you see the number 23. It’s in scene after scene. That’s not coincidence. The whole things a coded message.

And finally , after the whole tantric love trip on the subway train at the end, they burst out into the street in front of a cinema showing 2001 – A Space Odyssey…

I mean, I could go on all day. Check out Speed next time you watch it, just keep in mind that the bus is the world and that big gap in the highway construction is the Apocalypse.

- Grant Morrison, The Invisibles.

I wrote the following on Tuesday 27 April 2004:

I have five cigarettes to last me till morning:
But 18 bottles of beer

The Kropotkin cryptic this week vexes me. The day today is Tuesday already and I still have two more clues to get. How utterly irksome. There is nothing more pathetic to me or so lonely as an incomplete crossword puzzle. Moreover, its wretchedness is only matched by the fact that I find so inconsequential a thing as an incomplete crossword puzzle so pitiable.

What a strange and sad man I once was. Well, I’m off to drink some cider and play some darts.

Obesity: no longer a handicap, specially for drunkards with very sharp projectiles

Bin Laden: erstwhile ally, sometime terrorist, always Arab

You know what’s wrong with young people today? Too much not being in war. In my day we were always in war: Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, the Balkans. Not enough being in war nowadays. That’s the problem with the young ones, not being in war. And films these days are just plain rubbish. When I was young we saw all the greats: Die Hard, Crocodile Dundee, Die Hard 2: Die Harder, Ghostbusters. And we didn’t have to pay through the nose for it either. And we even got an intermission. Don’t see much of that nowadays, intermissions. Probably got something to do with not being in war, I reckon.

Oh, and the hidings we used to get back then! Not just from mum, but from the headmaster and basically anybody who was taller than you, unless of course you were in war, in which case you got respect. Not like nowadays. Nobody gives anybody a decent hiding nowadays. You can bloody well bet Lange used to give his kids a good hiding. Now there was a politician, David Lange, handing out hidings left, right and centre. Andropov: hidings. Reagan: hidings. And if he’d ever got the chance, Khomeini: likely hidings. But of course you could get away with that sort of thing back then, because you had to be in war, you see. Not like today. Some days you couldn’t move for all the hidings.

Tito: missed the boat

And in them days you were tripping over hidings and two cent pieces. And there was the fantail and rifleman on the one and two dollar notes, because they used to have notes for them back then. Then you had the tui on the a five dollars, the kea on the ten, the kereru on the twenty, the morepork on the fifty (which was yellow back then and didn’t even exist when I was born) and the takahe on the hundred. Now there was real money, made of paper like money ought to be, not this indestructibly plastic stuff you get nowadays, because it actually made you appreciate money and what it stood for, which was the supremacy of capitalism and being in war.

And why don’t we have the Warsaw Pact anymore?

You used to know where you stood back then: You were either with the Commies or the Yanks, and that was that. Either way, you’d get a good hiding, but then that was par for the course, getting hidings. Thea Muldoon came to my school and gave all of us a hiding and, because David Beattie was there too, we got the rest of the day off. Back then you used to get days off school if the Governor-General visited; it gave us plenty of time to spend at home getting hidings and whatnot. We never went home of course; we just hung round the jungle gym because dad didn’t get home till newstime when the news was still read by Dougal Stevenson and Phillip Sherry and Bill Toft. We’d all probably get hidings when we got home, but we didn’t care. We were more interested in breaking our limbs on the kinds of jungle gyms we used to have back then, i.e. dangerous-by-nature jungle gyms. Back then they were made out of concrete and wood, not plastic and rubber. Sure, we could have saved ourselves the trouble by falling off bikes (riding helmetless) or jumping off the garage roof on to the trampoline (also helmetless), but it was always a mark of pride and being in war to have broken one or more limbs on the old concrete jungle gym.

Why don’t more teachers wear walk shorts these days? When we weren’t preoccupied with being in war, all the teachers used to wear walk shorts and socks that went all the way up to their knees, just like in the movies. And they all used to have sideburns too, even the women, because women were real men back in them days. Oh, and the hidings they used to give us! I remember I got whacked by both Mr Wakefield and Miss Wilson in the same day. And of course you used to get the strap from the headmaster.

An example of a headmaster with supplejack

Mr Eggleton used to call his strap “George”. He always used to end assemblies by saying, “And remember: If you’ve been naughty, you’ll be in for an appointment with George.” Now some people might think that’s unnecessarily sadistic and macabre, but we would think it strange if we weren’t getting upwards of several hidings a day or more.

As well as tripping over hidings and two cent pieces, you couldn’t move for all the pies they used to shove down our throats. It was every child’s solemn duty to eat pies and get hidings on a daily basis back then. Not like today. Today it’s all panini and encouragement. Encouragement, for Pete’s sake! I say “for Pete’s sake” because we never used the Lord’s name in vain back then. We used to have to attend Bible class and religious education. Not that we didn’t swear back then, mind. It was a point of understandable pride to rattle off as many swear words as you knew. We used to reckon time itself by just how extensive a catalogue of swear words each of us had built up and how severe a hiding we would get for uttering each one. If you said “bloody”, for instance, you were in Primer 1 and got a slap. If you said “fuck”, on the other hand, you were at least in Standard 2 and could look forward to the full foot-on-arse treatment. That’s just the way it used to work when we were in war.

You know, we never had homosexualists in those days, not till I was at least five. Even the sibilant young kids weren’t homosexualists, though you never stood too close to them in the changing sheds. Speaking of which, in the holidays we were subjected to a strict regimen of pies and hidings and tuis on a five dollars, but in the afternoons we were free to go down to the school and jump the fence to use the pool. If you had the nerve to do it, you could even try jumping off the changing shed roof. And of course it didn’t matter much that the pool was only 3’6″ at the deep end. (Even though we’d been using The Metrics for at least ten years at the time, pools were still imperial back then, even public baths, most of which used to be named after Norman Kirk.)

Our artist's impression of a pie

And every one of us had a crazy aunt, usually called Joan or, in my case, Joyce (either way, she was only ever called “Auntie”) who thought it was still 1969 and would talk fondly of just how close Big Norm came to winning the election, without ever realizing that he actually won in ’72 or indeed that he had died two years later, which just happens to be when we started using The Metrics. Either way, Joyce was a nutter as all crazy aunts worth their salt tended to be in them days. But of course we were a lot fonder of Big Norm’s Finance Minister later to be Prime Minister in his own right Bill Rowling’s Deputy Prime Minister after Hugh Watt Bob Tizard back then. You see, Bob used to be the member for Panmure and this has a lot to do with pools, because Swim-o-rama was in Panmure and that was about as good as you could hope for when it came to waterslides unless you went all the way up to Parakai or Waiwera and, lah-di-dah, if you weren’t so special for doing that.

Like Lei, who did just that and was envied for a good half a term, of which there were only three when I was a boy growing up getting hidings and being in war. But she got her comeuppance, after a fashion. Our Standard 2 teacher, Mr Symonds, decided she needed a whack for some reason, so picked up the nearest object to him. This happened to be my friend Herman’s old-style wooden foot-long ruler. He rapped her over the knuckles so hard he managed to snap the ruler clean in two with only a few stray splinters, one of which I dutifully placed in my mouth, but that’s another, far stranger, story to tell. Anyway, the only person who ended up crying was Herman. Lei laughed; we all laughed. We had “softies” and “quitters” even back then. They tended to be people like Herman. I could have told you even back then that he needed to be in more war, as we were wont to be in back when I was a far more hiding- and pie-appreciative boy. But there’s really no way the young ones could understand all that…

Next Time: The physical violence and pastries of a lost age

Note: my views on free will more concisely summed up here.

Brian Edwards recently expressed his innate laziness by rehashing his views on determinism. He cites the fact that he is a “hard determinist” as support for his position on crime and punishment. Basically, because a combination of genetics and environment entirely determine a person’s actions, it makes no sense to punish them.

While I appreciate Dr Edwards’ sentiments, I take issue with various points and turns of phrase.

Firstly, the reason I have a problem with the whole post is because determinism is put up as an alternative to “free will”. This gives “free will” far too much credit. On hearing that someone believes in determinism rather than free will, one is left with the impression that “free will” is an intelligible enough position to disagree with in the first place. Mistake number one.

This may sound unfair, but imagine it from my perspective. To me, it’s like someone saying, “I believe in geometry. I’m not one of those people who believe in square circles.” At first glance, it sounds like it makes a bit of sense. But then you think, “Wait a minute. You can’ t put those two words together and pretend like they mean something.”

For example, Edwards says that he “lives as though he had free will”. What does this mean? How can one “live as though” one has a completely nonsensical contradiction in terms?

To will an action is to will it for reasons. Those reasons determine the outcome of that decision by definition. However you act, if the action was chosen, it is intelligible to ask, “Why did you do that?” Nothing else has any intelligible effect on choice.

There are those who say that what I am calling “reasons” are merely “influences” – they have some effect on choice, but are not the (ha ha) deciding factor. However, when pressed to explain what this deciding factor is, some synonym for “to choose” is thrown around. “Oh, well, one considers all of the reasons for acting one way or another, then one chooses – but one could have chosen differently!” The confusion seems to be made possible by the symantic separation of the notion “choice” and the notion “reasons”, so that the two feel like they can be considered distinct from each other.

They cannot. What we call “choice” is nothing but “choice-for-reasons” and what we call “reasons” are nothing but “reasons-for-choosing”. The two are not just related concepts – they imply one another, like up implies down and hot implies cold.

This is the problem with “free will”. I was recently rather unimpressed to learn that Schopenhauer basically said it centuries before I thought I’d come up with it:

YOU CAN CHOOSE TO DO WHAT YOU WANT,
BUT YOU CAN’T CHOOSE WHAT YOU WANT TO DO.

Ironically (is it?), I realised the nonsense of “free will” back when I was a Christian. I was thinking about how God is all good, all knowing and all powerful. So God wants what’s best, knows what’s best and can do what’s best. Therefore, God will do what is best. There is no circumstance under which God will do anything less than what is best. Therefore, to say that God “will not” do wrong is as much as to say that God “cannot” do wrong. God has no free will.

And what is clearest in the extreme example of God still holds true for the more terrestrial example of man. To say that you will not do something is as much as to say that you CANNOT do that thing. If you will not do it, you cannot do it.

I’ve ranted long enough, but I want to add an unfinished note here. I also dislike Edwards saying:

Hard determinists have trouble with punishment, since blame can only attach to those with genuine freedom of choice.

If genuine “freedom of choice” – in the sense of “free will”, in the sense of “being able to choose contrary reasons for choosing” – is necessary for blame, then blame has always been as nonsensical as “free will” itself. But if the notion of “blame” has meaning, could it not be that it is based in something other than the equivalent of “square circles”? Could blame not be a condemnation of certain reasons for acting, rather than certain actions for reasons?

I’d say I’ll explain that later, but who am I kidding.