Dialogues with Claude

Part 2. of Dialogue 4., On free will, agency, and determinism

I am no philosopher, physicist, theologian, lawyer nor scientist of any stripe. I have a master’s degree in public health. My professional life began at age 28, when I entered a career in hospital and medical group management, becoming CEO at age 37. I have been a board member, sometimes chairman, of many voluntary community organizations focused on health, community service, and hospital advocacy. I founded the only English-speaking Rotary Club in Stockholm, Sweden after retirement from employment. This has been my public life.

My private life has been in different realms. How I am constituted has influenced my interests and direction.

I became aware of the ‘Myers-Briggs Type Indicator’ (MBTI)upon engaging a management consultant to help me with team building when I was managing a small hospital in Alaska. I needed to find a way for the chief financial officer and I to work together more productively. The consultant administered the MBTI to the management team, and it was useful. Years later, shortly before retiring from employment at age 65, I attended a teaching seminar where I became certified by The Center for Applications of Psychological Type (CAPT) to administer and interpret the MBTI for clients. I created a PowerPoint presentationof what I had learned and received permission from the instructor (PhD in psychology) to use it. (CAPT has since merged with the Myers-Briggs Foundation.)

I am INTJ, characterized by the Myers-Briggs Foundation as: “Hav(ing) original minds and great drive for implementing their ideas and achieving their goals. Quickly see patternsin external events and develop long-range explanatory perspectives. When committed, organize a job and carry it through. Skeptical and independent, have high standards of competence and performance—for themselves and others.” (Emphasis added by me).

Patterns

Numbers have always fascinated me. I first became aware of them when I was six years old in 1943, San Francisco.

Kindergarten was a short walk away from home at 1822 Sunnydale Avenue, in the Visitación Valley Community Center. Every morning, after the students had been brought to silent, standing attention by the teacher, we did three things: we recited the pledge of allegiance, our right hands over our hearts; then, hands still in place, we sang ‘God Bless America’; and then we recited the times table, from 1 to 12. This is where I fell in love with the number nine.

Consider the sequence: 9, 18, 27, 36, 45, 54, 63, 72, 81, 90, 99, 108. Look at those digits! Each set of digits in each number adds up to nine or, in the case of the number 99, when you add the digits together you get 18, the digits of which number follow the same pattern. This was magic to me. I seemed to be the only one who saw it. I had this all to myself.

Twelve was interesting, too; it seemed a very royal kind of number, very grand. I especially liked 6×12=72. I could see, then or later, that seven of the nine digits felt comfortable inside 72: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 9. This left out 5 and 7, which made them kind of exclusive and special. I began to see that 7 was a particularly special number for me because I was born January 7, 1937. I took seven as my lucky number.

In my first high school, when I was bored (and this was often), I would doodle numbers on a piece of paper. I was always looking for patterns. One day, I started to write down numbers in a row, starting with 0, then 1, then added the two previous numbers together to make the next number, and so on: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144… An older student passed by and glanced at my doodles and said, simply, “Fibonacci Series.”  (This was Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, to which I commuted by subway from our Brooklyn railroad flat. I was 13.)

I later learned that this was a well-known sequence, famously formulated by the mathematician Fibonacci, around the year 1200 A. D, although it was also in use in ancient India. This sequence and pattern are found in nature everywhere, such as in the spiral curvature in the growth of flowers and seashells; and, it is basic to the concept of the golden section, developed by the Ancient Greeks and Leonardo da Vinci in art, architecture, and music.

In summary: I see patterns everywhere: in human behavior, from the most intimate between individuals, through to the flux and flow of civilizations, in the movements of the earth’s layers and its journey within the solar system and through space, and in the growth and decay of lives over years and seasons.

—

1998, Santa Teresa County Park, Santa Clara County, California

Now Spring toward Summer ripens soon
Its greens will now begin to brown
The browning yields the seeds of Fall
And then a final sigh and rest

In Winter’s dormance gather we
Our thoughts and lessons for the year
And add our own tree rings of age
In hope that wisdom will result

And with such wisdom greet the Spring
Of yet another year to come
Perforce to yield a better crop
Of thoughts and deeds to sow then reap

And thus to earn our just reward
Of satisfaction and of rest
To contemplate the work we’ve done
Our spirit then can be released

—
Now, what about the linked topics of Free Will and Determinism, and everything in between?

The subjects have never interested me sufficiently to dig deep. I have come to see the ‘free will’ much as ‘Hamlet’ pondered on life and death:

… And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action

—

I don’t take a position on free will. Rather, as I have been seeking since childhood I ask— what is in the world, and what underlies the way the world is?  So, I went into the world. When I take action, learning begins. That is my response to Hamlet. Less examination (laying out flat, literally) and more doing, or, later in life, being.

—

Alan Watts puts it succinctly (my paraphrase):

From the word’s Latin roots, to “examine” is to lay something out flat. When you examine something—be it a frog in a biology class or a psychological problem—the first step is to take it out of its living, dynamic context. You pin it down, dissect it, and look at its individual parts. Our language reveals a deep-seated assumption: that the only way to know something is to stop it, take it apart, and inspect the pieces. Thus, we often miss the essential, living nature of what we are trying to understand.

—

Very early,I developed the notion that I had to perfect the self. Not in any religious sense of moral improvement, though that was part of it, but in the sense of bringing into alignment what I was doing and what I perceived I should be doing — the actor-self and the observer-self.I felt that I contained an observer who watched and evaluated the actor. As I wrote in 2019:

I am the willing participant
And engaged observer
Of the continuously unfolding entity
I perceive as
My Self.

I note now that continuously unfolding is the language David Bohm uses for the ‘implicate order’— arrived at, in my case, through experience and introspection rather than through physics. Whether the convergence with Bohm suggests anything, I leave open.

—

In 1995, at a crossroads in my life, I sat alone overlooking a forest in Arizona and wrote down nine phrases that seemed to capture the pattern of my life. I have found no reason to add to or subtract from them in the thirty years since. They are not conclusions.

Words to Describe My Path

– To let go; to not-cling
– To accept; things are as they are
– To be open; to learn about the universe/my “self”; to reveal the spirit residing within
– To live simply
– To nourish loving relationships
– To create and maintain a private space
– To contribute to useful processes
– To avoid negative people and processes

—

On the subject of God’s will or guidance, I don’t like the word‘God.’. It is a word, and words are abstractions pointing at something. Whatever the Great Everything is, it cannot be captured or contained in a word. And Godevokes, at least in much of the Western world, the image of a bearded ancient in the sky, watching, passing judgment, rewarding and punishing. I wrote about this more fully in Regarding Beliefand in The Holy Zygote.

—

There is no ending to this ramble:

I AM A LUCKY MAN

I am a lucky man, I am
I sit in mountains watching sky
As Moon traverses showing path
For Sun to take in just an hour

The trees, my friends, stand ever straight
And radiate their calmness true
My soul’s enraptured with the touch
Of cool thin air embracing me

I ponder when it came to me
To open soul and spirit wide …

A woman in whose eyes I dwelled
In full without my outer shell
Revealing naked self to her
As she herself did show to me

From that time until now I flow
As like a river through the world
Accepting all I touch and see
As part of me — and lovingly

My breast does swell with nameless warmth
A joyful feeling calmly felt
How easily I might, I think
Become a tree and friend to all

There is no ending to this poem
Like Nature’s patterns through us all
As we are played as instruments
In this celestial symphony

——————————————-

Claire Tappaan Lodge, Sierra Club
Norden, California
7 September 1998