Charm

Current Music: "If I Could Only Dream This World Away" from The Woman in White, Act II (By Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber)

"Charm" is the right title, predestined for this entry, because as soon as I wrote the Current Music bit above and typed in the title "Charm", Michael Crawford sang "You could try some charm" on the recording, which I'm listening to for the first time right now. But I was really referring to the passage below by Dr. Hofstadter. I woke up this morning feeling like I believed in determinism and that free will was an illusion, so that the morning shower really felt like a meaningless routine -- "going through the motions", as it were. This is my punishment for reading some John Searle before bed -- I was ruminating about certain topics that led to the question of free will, so I started reading the free will section of his book Mind: a brief introduction. But now I'm hoping that the old quantum brain thing turns out to give hope for free will. I haven't read anything about it but I've imagined such a thing before, so the term "quantum brain" conjures up neat ideas that imply that there is "room" for consciousness and free will and all to be "squeezed in" to the "spaces" in the physical universe based on smaller scales than the Planck distance, where there's still hope for a non-discrete universe, etc. etc. I probably sound really silly, so I'll read up on this at some point. The trick is that we can't rely on random elements of quantum mechanics to provide real free will (Searle writes "Quantum mechanics gives us randomness but not freedom" but then disagrees with it in the next sentence), but rather consciousness itself has to be based in the quantum world in a very signficant sense. Or something.

Back to the macroscopic world: I opened up Le Ton beau de Marot to look up Searle in the index, but in S I got distracted by the entry "sexuality: awakening of, 350; on neutron star, 307, 331-332"

Page 350 actually gets back around to free will... and astoundingly I started thinking about free will last night due to a similar chain of thoughts... which itself makes me wonder some more about free will! Ugh. So at long last, here is the passage by Hofstadter, including the word "charm":

It is meant to be a natural awakening that happens in most people in adolescence. And yet, when this marvelous awakening takes place in a particular one of us, it feels so unique and individual, it feels like it springs from our own innermost, most private, personal desires and not at all from some kind of general, abstract, impersonal force. The people on whom our attraction focuses seem simply to radiate charm and vivacity and mystery, and those qualities seem to be the reasons behind our fascination, not some kind of biological destiny programmed in our genes. This tension between homey, comfortable reasons and reasons that stretch out into a past so far beyond our comprehension that we need to ignore it to stay sane becomes ever greater as we delve more deeply into questions about free will and biological and physical determinism. Putting one's finger on the ultimate source of one's identity is a very tricky thing.