One of the big philosophical and religious questions is our capacity to freely choose our actions. Is choice a clever ruse? Are there no true alternatives? Thinkers like the classical mathematicians Laplace and Newton believed the world was mechanical and predictable. Humans were reduced to mathematical objects. If human action seemed less predictable than the planets and stars visible in the night sky, it was perhaps due to ignorance alone. Newton, grappling with the ambiguity of human nature, would assign absolute knowledge to equations, and the system that governed the stars became, for him, the divine Great Mathematician. Thinkers who adopted this framework, embracing mathematical divinity, interpreted the cosmos as the mind of God, with human perception being an imperfect model or proxy of that mind. But the mere existence of a divine, all-knowing, all-seeing entity, process, or system implied that anything could be possible—a free choice could indeed be free, willed from on high by whatever decides the fate of the cosmos. This divine Will was distributed, with humans receiving the greatest proportion. But the question hasn’t really gone away. New perspectives always emerge, creating spaces just large enough to preserve these historical views. Scientists continuing the debate are now wondering if we’ve been too accommodating—bending science and math to fit a world of our imagination, perhaps at the expense of truth. Neuroscience, an intellectual tradition that emerged from philosophy and psychology, threatens to subsume its origins. Fields that were once independent, under pressure to prove their worth using

Observe any public dialogue and lines of division are apparent. Yascha Mounk, in The Identity Trap, warns that this strict polarization, if unchecked, will slowly deny the democratic principles that have kept authoritarian influences at bay. The seeds of unrest are inevitably objects of the past. But it is never clear where or how far back to look. Mounk begins with the identity synthesis; initially, an arcane field of thought it has steadily grown in popularity alongside social media and the movement of graduates from elite (typically liberal) universities into positions of influence. What began as a well-intentioned, strong identitarian position to make instances of oppression more visible eventually suppressed dialogue. The Identity Trap, as Mounk puts it, emerges when an oppressed or marginalized group denies the relevance of outside perspective. Truth becomes personal experience. Relativism of this sort is not however dependent on the identity thesis alone. Mounk notes the indemnity thesis is an extension of postmodernist thought. Postmodernism became a dominant intellectual tradition after World Wars I and II. It was/is an aggressive revaluation of truth and fact, suggesting that truth wasn’t something “out there,” a fact of the world; it was constructed. Although this sounds nihilistic, it wasn’t necessarily a denial of all truth and virtue but an interpretative shift. Truth, for a thinker like Derrida, was methodological. Intellectual work was deconstructive—meaning that it was aimed not at uncovering absolute truths, but revealing the cracks, so to speak, in claims that such absolute truths actually existed. The goal,

Doppelgangers or doubles have been a fixture in literature from the works of Dostoevsky to Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous, Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A characteristic of these “doubling” stories is that they are almost always unsettling. Typically writing on political and economic topics, Naomi Klein takes a more personal turn in her recent book, Doppelganger, while not entirely leaving her outspoken liberal and anti-capitalist positions. Her last books focused on corporations and the manipulative strategies they use to drive interest in their products and increase profitability. She has emphasized that these strategies appear not only in economics but also as tools to control or manipulate people for political gain in what she calls the Shock Doctrine. Her latest book, Doppelganger, turns to corporate tech. But it is more directly an account of her experience being mistaken for the writer and increasingly far right political pundit, Naomi Wolf. This leads to commentary on how technology and the capitalistic playbook have commodified experience. Young people, she argues, as an example, are pressured to construct brands—being so many selves that any attempt at an identity beneath the gameplaying and brand construction only pushes them further into the mirror world, a surreal digital world that extends to everyone; a world of divisive narratives—”us vs. them” logic—that meet society’s superficial needs. Chief among these is the need to make the world sensible; simplifying narratives—racial, class, gender, and political profiling—although socially destructive, are addictively self-affirming in an unsettled world. Klein goes into some of these

I have written elsewhere on the transition of universities to businesses with economic interests that aren’t any different from corporations—marketing and branding strategies are not the stuff of imagined boardrooms, shady figures, and questionable ethics; they apply equally to universities, and the student is the customer/client. With the award of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, science has become increasingly corportized.   Before winning the award, mRNA vaccines had been controversial. Many doubted their effectiveness when compared to traditional methods, and there were other constraints, ultimately resolved through later technological developments, that turned the research into a financially risky bet. Under these pressures, the inventors were essentially pushed out of their academic posts and had little choice but to continue this research in industry. COVID-19 accelerated the research, and alongside much needed technological developments for portable storage and transport, mRNA vaccines would become a tremendous success with a complex origin story ripe for mythologizing. The public dialogue around this new hero myth is on the evil, corrupt forces of the university, suppressing our heroes. But fortunately, as if real life had been written by Any Rand, the heroes did escape to the free market, and it is only here that they could save the world.  We can’t help but trivialize the university in this tale—to wonder how surprisingly broken it is and whether it should even exist. A tendency to moralize here suggests that the public perceives science and the university as independent, non-corporate or non-economic entities (often

“Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” William Wordsworth Ode: Intimations of Immortality Tech allure undeniably abounds. The pioneer journey, the migration from east to west with the dreams of wealth and utopia is eternal. Novelist Edward Bellamy once had dreams of a socialist utopia, writing in Looking Backward about a man who wakes up at a future time of peace, prosperity, and equality. But unlike the novel, it’s not clear where reality begins or ends.  A history of tech is the living dream; the 49ers and the Gold Rush and the aesthetic brilliance, the flowing pastures and valleys of Central and Northern California. It’s the confluence of money and poetry straining against the likes of Steinbeck and Kerouac, as if it occupies a deeply poetic place but the words just don’t fit. And as the words have slowly failed, the poetic energy has risen and is burning off with the many hopes of action, change and revolution. This is the pioneer myth.  Myths express nonsense and truth and can be socially positive when this tension persists. The Silicon Valley tech mythology is however increasingly alluring because it denies the tension, making the myth lived or literal. This literal interpretation of the tech mythos likely originates in the word “innovation.” Innovation dates back to Ancient Greek word kainos or “new” and the later Latin verb innovare. It appears in 13th century legal documents with negative connotations, implying to renew or alter, presumably to change needlessly or corrupt.

From earie noises, bizarre coincidences, synchronicities, time slippage, and shelves and doors that seemingly open and close on their own to the unexplained light patterns in the night sky I remain fascinated by the firsthand accounts of what may be inappropriately labeled paranormal or supernatural phenomena. My interest is not as a skeptic or debunker per se because these efforts reflect the opposite extreme, an absurd other-worldly confidence in scientific verification. If it cannot be verified by its methods, it isn’t meaningful. Yet science is an invention, a very useful one, but it’s imbued with human fragility. There are, I think, natural, and I want to emphasize natural here, causes for everything, while at the same time, a portion of these fall outside scientific methods. To fully understand what I mean here, scientific methods can’t be viewed as an impersonal set of tools that overcome bias. A tool must be observed, and its capabilities (what it can do) are a matter of perception, which depends on experience. Professional scientists are trained in a very specific way—in highly controlled environments, insuring that through their training, any rough edges or individual differences are lessened; this is critically important in making the whole enterprise work as this shared training provides some assurance of future consensus; at some point, scientists look at the experimental findings and converge on an interpretation; outside of science, outside of that shared training, this isn’t guaranteed. For the sake of making everything work, we therefore have injected bias. And