Matters of Life and Death

2005-04-13T10:19:00.000-07:00

Do you want to live forever?

Thinking a little in advance of this afternoon's Socrates Café ... The question we'll be considering is "Would immortality be good for me?"

There are lots of details one might want to nail down before trying to answer this question. For example, will I stay in more or less the physical state I'm in now, or keep aging (a la David Bowie in The Hunger)? Are others immortal too, or is it just me? (If others are immortal, will the birth rate end up creating a real problem for us?) Do I still get to retire at 65? Will Social Security still be around when I'm 1000?

Details, details.

Let's imagine for a moment that I won't have to deal with the ravages of aging, and that I don't need to worry about money or over-population. What are my intuitions about immortality now?

I suddenly have a lot more time to get those big projects done (plant and tend the garden, catch up on my reading, write a book, learn Russian, etc.). I get really tired of racing to meet deadlines, so maybe this would be a good thing. Of course, racing to meet those deadlines is often what gets me off my butt to do stuff in the first place. Would I become much less productive -- much less motivated to even start a project -- if I had all the time in the world?

Also, while some things I do (such as good class discussions, visits with friends, etc.) seem to fly right by, temporally, others seem to last forever. What if I really had an eternity of committee meetings and laundry and commute time? Would this really be an improvement?

If I was the only person who was immortal, I'd undoubtedly get pretty bummed, watching all my family members and friends die. Sure, I'd have the chance to get to know my great-great-great-great-grandchildren, but eventually they'd die, too. Forming attachments to new people might get harder and harder, after having lost so many people I've cared about. Either I'd set myself to be hurt yet again or I'd have to forego the pleasure of forming a real attachment to other people.

On the plus side, I'd outlive all my enemies.

If everyone gets immortality, I don't have to watch the people I care about die. Instead, I get to deal with them in perpetuity. This might be a mixed blessing. How many marriages could survive immortality? How many families would stay estranged from each other if there's no kind of time pressure to mend fences?

Wouldn't it get boring? I mean, honestly, once you've gotten to know me, it's not like I have that much additional material to work with. After 100 years, you're already going to have a pretty good guess as to how I'll react to X. Could you handle 1000 years of that kind of predictability? 1,000,000?

Maybe you could fill the time with new experiences (line dancing, sky diving, running for office, doing prison time, etc.), but eventually, wouldn't you run out of new things to experience? Maybe people could create new things to experience, but wouldn't these experiences end up feeling like desperate attempts to fill the time? (Think of the programing on VH-1; aren't we on our way down this road already?)

I guess my big concern with immortality is that having it might somehow undermine what makes my life worthwhile in the first place. Maybe my life gets its value, in part, from the fact that it's finite.

I'm not trying to advance a scarce-resource pseudo-economic argument here. But I suspect we live differently when we're aware that the clock is ticking, and that a certain awareness that the clock is ticking might prompt us to live in ways that are richer and more fulfilling than some of the ways we might live if there was no death.

I'm curious to hear what others think about this!

2005-04-12T10:45:00.000-07:00

Philosophical items, post Terri Schiavo.

A couple of interesting entries that connect to the Terri Schiavo case in different ways.

Andrew at Universal Acid tries to work out why our dying wishes -- and especially, our wishes for what happens after we are dead or otherwise bereft of awareness -- matter to us.

Lucretius would say, you want to dance a jig on my grave? Why should I care? Once I'm dead there's no "me" left to take offense. But most of us don't react this way. Andrew discusses why this could be.

Chris at Mixing Memory discusses "higher brain death" as a criterion for when someone is really dead.

The distinction Chris is working on is one between bodies that still count as persons and bodies where the person has died (because of the cessation of higher brain function). He suggest that there's more to personhood (and the ethical constraints that come with it) than just having a heart that pumps blood or nerves that transmit signals.

This distinction might leave us in an awkward position with respect to certain disabled persons (even some not as badly impaired as Terri Shiavo was) ... which is why I find myself returning to Peter Singer's construction of personhood (at least as I read him) a little bit easier to swallow.

Thanks to Inessentialism.org's Philosophers' Carnival for bringing these entries to my attention.

2005-04-06T12:40:00.000-07:00

Thinking about Schopenhauer

Over at Philosophy Talk they've been thinking about Schopenhauer. Check out Ken Taylor's post on Schopenhauer's pessimism about human life and John Martin Fischer's post on why pre-birth nonexistence doesn't bug us nearly as much as post-death nonexistence.

And, for those who like opening the vault, another of my blogs has my own take on the Will to Live described by Schopenhauer. (It's in the entry from September 23, 2003; scroll down and you'll find it. Sadly, Xanga makes it fairly inconvenient to link to particular posts.)

2005-04-03T21:36:00.000-07:00

Where's the time?

Mercy me, the rat-race has come for the children. It's not only students (and, of course, "responsible adults") who are stretched too thin by the demands on their time. This conversation makes me want to cry. In part, I think it's because my childhood didn't seem quite that busy. (Well, maybe it did by the time I was in high school. But by then, all the demands on my time served the useful purpose of keeping me out of screaming matches with my parents.)

I'm all for doing the work of trying to live a meaningful life, but it seems to me that a lot of the work that gets piled on us (and that we pile on ourselves) isn't leading that direction. My kindergartener has homework 4 nights a week. I am thrilled that there is actual learning going on in kindergarten, but some of this stuff seems to be aimed less at developing a love of learning and more at doing well on the state-mandated standardized test. Which, for the record, I think is pretty crappy. Because if there's one thing I'm pretty sure of, it's that the value of our lives will not be measured by our test scores.

Rather than ranting about the short-sightedness of choosing our activities according to what gets the best results on the stinkin' tests (because if I got started on that rant, I might never stop -- and that would be a bad use of my scarce time), I want to think about why "play" gets such short shrift. Why must every single thing we do lead in some obvious way toward fulfilling a practical goal or yielding a tangible payoff? Why must we feel guilty and wasteful for having fun? Isn't having fun valuable to us? Isn't it possible that enjoying our activities for themselves, rather than as instruments that are supposed to lead us to something Really Important, is good for us, and might make us better people?

Play gives us some space. It lets us try stuff, not because it's part of some great plan, but just to see what happens. Play lets us recharge our batteries. And, it gives us the opportunity to pull back from our big projects and be reflective about them.

(At the same time, I worry a little bit about turning play into "mandatory fun" -- Ohmigod I need to clear my schedule for play today or else bad things will happen, and if I don't get to it that's one more thing to feel guilty about. Could it be that the slackers were onto something?)

2005-03-31T10:50:00.000-08:00

More food for thought on the Terri Shiavo case.

I found this discussion of the lengths to which Terri Schiavo's parents were prepared to go a bit troublesome.

For a long time, I have thought there was a very important insight in Peter Singer's book Rethinking Life and Death as to why, sometimes, it makes sense to prolong the life of a person who cannot have any awareness of her life (and so, can experience neither pleasure nor pain from having the life prolonged), and sometimes, it does not. The key issue, which most people lose sight of in these debates, is that people are not fully compartmentalized entities -- what makes our lives valuable includes our relations to other people. We exist within social webs. And the other people in our social webs can make our lives better even in cases where they may not have self-awareness and so, may not be getting much value out of their own lives. (It's possible I'm putting this insight into Singer's mouth -- in my quick flip through the book after the last time I read it, I haven't located a killer quote that captures this insight. But I know I became aware of this insight when reading his book, and if it's my insight, Peter Singer brought me to it.) Thus, it is not the case (as is sometimes claimed) that Singer argues that the lives of the severely incapacitated or the very young are without value. It's just that the value of their lives seems to have quite a lot to do with our relationships to these individuals.

But along come Terri Schiavo's parents. According to the report of Terri's Guardian Ad Litem, Jay Wolfson, court testimony in 2000 established that

despite the sad and undesirable condition of Theresa, the parents still derived joy from having her alive, even if Theresa might not be at all aware of her environment given the persistent vegetative state. Within the testimony, as part of the hypotheticals presented, Schindler family members stated that even if Theresa had told them of her intention to have artificial nutrition withdrawn, they would not do it.

The relationships in this particular social web scare me. Arguably, the parents found value in maintaining Terri's life. They admitted that this was value coming to them, not necessarily to their daughter. But, in nearly the same breath, they indicate a certain kind of disregard for their daughter's wishes and interests. In some sense, they were arguing to maintain a social relationship (by maintaining the life of their daughter) even if it were the case that Terri herself would choose, if she could, to opt out of this relationship. "Parasitic" may be too strong a word to describe the psychological state of the parents here, but ... do the words, "Mom and Dad, stop trying to live my life!" mean anything here?

2005-03-26T12:28:00.000-08:00

Hobgoblins.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I suppose the nature of the Web makes it inevitable. You start in familiar territory. You follow a link, and from there follow another link, and from there to the next, and the you go just one link further ... and suddenly you're in the belly of the beast. Someone you've never heard of is on a rant about "those people" and you realize that in all likelihood you are one of those people. At least, the ranter you have never met will automatically identify you as one of those people. And even though you've never met this person, and probably never will, you suddenly feel the need to explain yourself, to demonstrate that the rant isn't on target.

I'm going to explain myself here, even though the chances of anyone whose rant actually sparked the explanation actually reading the explanation are vanishingly small.

Personally, if I were in Terri Schiavo's position, I would not want to be kept alive. I would want my parents to respect my husband's efforts to look out for my interests. I would want them to try to make their peace with the fact that the part of me that was important -- to me, and I would hope, to them -- was gone. I would want them to figure out how to keep my memory alive in their lives, but I'd want them to let go of the bodily shell.

Does this mean I want the power to "play God" and "kill Terri Schiavo"? No. Indeed, it feels like the combination of modern medical technology and political grandstanding is working the "playing God" angle. We have the technology to keep the bodily shell alive, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good thing to do so. (Shouldn't people of faith, who think it's the next life that really matters, be concerned about our ability to "trap" people in this life for over long?)

Is there a basic inconsistency between supporting efforts to let Terri Schiavo go and supporting stem-cell research to explore treatment for Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and other illnesses? There might be if stem-cell research were aimed at saving people in Terri Schiavo's condition. But it's not. Rather, I think the hope is that medical application of stem-cell research might help people avoid getting to such desperate states.

Maybe the alleged inconsistency is something like this: Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is an unnatural intervention extending her life; it's bad because it's unnatural. But stem-cell treatments would be an unnatural intervention to extend other people's lives, so we ought to be against them as well. Of course, this would depend on some hard line between the natural and the unnatural that has some moral relevance, and it's just not clear that there is any such line. And I don't know anyone whose argument depends on there being such a line. We watch what we eat. We get vaccinations. We exercise. We cross at the crosswalk. How natural is any of this? Why would it matter anymore?

Another version of the alleged inconsistency: We need stem-cell research because, potentially, it will work medical miracles for people who are otherwise doomed to horrible suffering and agonizing death. But, Terri Schiavo is in a state where she is beyond the reach of miracles, so there's no point in keeping her around just in case. The inconsistency, I guess, is predicting miracles for one set of patients but not another. But here, I think there's a conflating of "medical miracles" and divine miracles. If divine miracles are going to happen, can humans thwart them? If so, why wouldn't we think that medical miracles might also be thwarting the will of the divine?

(For the record, I'm rather less sanguine about stem-cell research than a lot of people. I think the potential benefits have been oversold, as often happens when scientists are looking for funding.)

My worry about the whole shouting match is the idea that consistency depends on drawing sharp lines that are supposed to fit every situation. My experience of life is that these sharp lines really don't serve us very well (and it's not like they're pre-drawn for us to read unambiguously off the world). Life is complicated. Humans have to make tough choices. And, from my understanding of theology, that's part of the deal. Humans have rational powers because they need them. Moral agency often involves navigating through complex territory and making the best choices you can. Sometimes this involves reflecting on what is really valuable. And maybe sometimes the real value is not from achieving a particular outcome so much as coming to a better understanding of what makes our lives good.

I'm sad about polarization, and our inability to really engage each other on the hard stuff. Maybe that's because I don't have a political base I need to pander to.

2005-03-22T11:17:00.000-08:00

Life as a political football

I suppose I have no choice but to blog about the case of Terri Schiavo. It has managed to squeeze even a high-body count school shooting nearly out of the headlines (although I suspect there's some interesting link between these two phenomena in early 21st century American culture ...).

Even just looking at what NPR has posted today is pretty overwhelming. (I must say, however, this commentary makes me love Daniel Schorr more than I did already.)

Certainly this is a very sad situation: Terri Schiavo has been in what doctors have identified as a persistent vegetative state for 15 years. Her husband says that Terri told him (after family funerals of relatives who had been kept alive through extraordinary medical measures) that she never wanted to be kept alive in that condition. Her parents hold out hope that the doctors are wrong and she'll come out of it. Given my dad's medical travails, I'm not unsympathetic to her parents' position ... but 15 years is an awfully long time. And ultimately, I think their position ignores the possibility that some things may be worse for us than death.

Let's say Terri held a firm conviction that being kept alive indefinitely in a permanent vegetative state was a bad thing -- no help to the person being kept alive, a source of anguish for that person's loved ones, a waste of resources on a futile end. In this case, her parents' actions (and the intervention of the U.S. House of Representatives) actually go against Terri's values. Arguably, such actions then hurt her more than they help her.

(How could it hurt her to keep her alive? If a permanent vegetative state means that she's not conscious of any pain, neither being kept alive nor being allowed to die could literally hurt her. On the other hand, if, as a person, she was serious about her values and took them as being at least partly definitive of the person she was, then anything that acted against these values would be acting against her.)

It's possible, of course, that Terri might (given the chance) have changed her mind and said, "Give me the best medical treatment money can buy and don't give up no matter how grim it seems." Even in this instance, it seems there would be a point after which it would be appropriate to listen to the medical judgment that there's nothing more to do. Otherwise, modern medicine may find itself saddled with the obligation to keep all of us alive indefinitely, and, for that matter, to come up with the technology to make us immortal.

Whenever I contemplate whether immortality would be good for me, I start by assuming I'd be conscious. I know of very few people who would opt for immortality in a permanent vegetative state.

Indeed, the issue at hand is not shutting off a respirator but withdrawing a feeding tube. It's been pointed out that death by withdrawal of nutrition and hydration can take a while. (Is it painful? Maybe to the family, but not to Terri if she's not conscious of pain. Of course, a lethal dose of morphine might ease the exit, but that's not part of the life-is-more-important-than-anything-else agenda.) Some have argued that society has a fundamental responsibility to provide Terri with nutrition and hydration (since she is unable to provide them for herself). Yet wouldn't this obligate society to provide nutrition and hydration for everyone unable to secure them himself or herself, whether for physical or economic reasons? It's not like people don't starve in these parts.

If Terri Schiavo were to come out of the persistent vegetative state, I wonder what kind of life she would have -- dealing with parents who made disagreement with her husband so nasty and who showed so little regard for their adult daughter's stated position, living in a society where people cared about her as an object of political discourse but probably care very little about her actual well-being (and certainly don't act consistently to treat all the living with such "high regard". It might be enough to make her want to go back down.

2005-02-07T21:10:00.000-08:00

"Not everyone is cut out for college."

There's been a debate in these parts (as always) about funding priorities in the high schools. Among all the programs that have suffered deep cuts are vocational classes, and, in the context of arguing that some of these programs ought to be better funded, it was claimed that such programs are important because not everyone is cut out for college.

Something about the assumptions underlying this claim just doesn't sit right with me. A big part of it, I think, is the idea that anyone could possibly know, at age 14, what one really wants to do with one's life, let alone whether it would require a college education to do it. I'm not denying that some high school graduates don't have study skills or motivation together enough to succeed in college courses without a big struggle. But somehow, in these discussions of funding voc-ed, the world is described as high schoolers headed for college right away and high schoolers headed to college never.

The other part of the assumption that bugs me, I think, is that college is only valuable as a prepartion for certain sorts of profession -- that college would be a collosal waste for someone who's going to fix cars for a living. But, dammit, the point of college ISN'T to train you for a job; it's to train you for life. And I don't think there's any reason to believe that the car mechanic wouldn't need (or want) tools for leading an examined and meaningful life just as much as the lawyer or the teacher or the doctor would.

(Besides, everyone ought to learn something about how to fix his car!)

2005-01-20T10:50:00.000-08:00

Keeping it real (?)

I was making dinner the other day when I heard Eli Jaxon-Bear on this show, talking about "what's truly real in life". Some of what he said fits pretty well with some of my own attitudes. Consumer culture does kind of suck, and the constant hunger we seem to have for more stuff is probably masking some other hunger we really have but can't work up the nerve to address. There doesn't need to be poverty or starvation, but there it is because we're pretty bad at thinking beyond our own individual interests. Appearances are deceptive. I'm down with all of that.

But something about what he was saying just rubbed me the wrong way. His big claims seemed to be that we're all basically asleep and that the life we feel ourselves to be living isn't real. Basically, we all have it within us to escape the horror of this life by just "waking up" and seeing that this individual existence is an illusion. Yes, this is Schopenhauer and the Buddha packaged to address particular bits of modern crappiness, but for some reason the way he presented it made it suddenly way too simplistic.

I think it is very easy to deceive oneself about the goals that are worth pursuing, or about what shared humanity requires of us, or even about what our human essence really is. I don't know whether the soul persists after this life ends (and you don't know, either, so don't start with me). But none of this means that the life I am living now -- with the everyday struggles of setting goals and trying to meet them, re-evaluating who I am and who I want to be, and trying to play well with others -- isn't real. While my particular trajectory of experiences and self-awareness does not wholly define me, it is not completely irrelevant, either. I certainly don't think that my personal experience is a "lie".

The rub, I think, is that as humans we are deeply connected to other humans, yet we are simultaneously going it alone. I don't think this is just the unfortunate result of Yankee propaganda (about self-reliance and rugged individualism) or of manipulation by advertisers. It's a side effect of our having minds that belong to us alone; you just can't get into my head, and I can't get into yours. We can interact in various ways to share what we're thinking or feeling, but we can't get into each other's heads to check the fidelity of the transmission.

And here, I find myself liking Schopenhauer a bit better than Jaxon-Bear. Because of the loneliness of our isolated little heads, how we get through the hard stuff is by developing sympathy for the other isolated minds out there and doing what we can to break the isolation. But part of that, I think, has to include acknowledging the reality of the experiences we're faced with on our own (for Schopenhauer, the reality of the suffering). And our shot at overcoming the suffering and the isolation (for ourselves and for others) happens here or it doesn't happen at all. That makes my individual experience, and in particular how I choose to use it, of the utmost importance. This is all the reality we're going to get.

2004-10-22T10:48:00.000-07:00

... and then you die
Living is hard. Some days, it's really hard. Those up till 2 A.M. last night grading papers, waking up at 6 A.M. with a head full of phlegm and pain to face another round days especially. You can get so tired you wonder if letting the germs win would be such a bad thing. But then (if you're me) you shudder at the stacks of unfinished business someone else would be left to deal with and you drag your ass out of bed.

More then a dozen years ago, quite suddenly, my dad almost died. A few months short of his fifty-first birthday, he had a massive stroke. It didn't help that he spent more than a day lying on his office floor before anyone found him. When he was found and rushed to the hospital, the medical consensus was that he would die, or that if his body somehow kept functioning, it would be mere biological functioning and not anything like a meaningful life -- his brain would surely not come through intact. A few months of deep coma seemed to support the doctors' assessment. Even though it seemed way too early in my life for me to be losing a parent, a part of me started preparing for that eventuality.

It didn't happen. Against all odds, my dad came out of the coma. He fought to speak to us on the telephone. He went through months of grueling therapy to be able to walk again. The doctors didn't, in this instance, know what the hell they were talking about, and it's unclear just how much they contributed to my dad's recovery and how much was completely out of their control.

So, my dad still has some problems. Walking is not as easy as it used to be, and he has some problems with his vision and bits of his memory. But he has made a much fuller recovery than anyone could have predicted.

And ... every day he gets to struggle to try to get better. To get his body enough under his control to walk. To remember stuff he wants to remember. To read. His reward for not dying is the extra work of living with a body and a brain that no longer function smoothly. My mom's reward for believing he would live, when the doctors were arguing that his only remaining value was as a source of transplantable organs, is getting to nag him to do the hard work of getting better, and to take care of him in ways that he did not require care before the stroke. This, I am sure, is not how either of them imagined spending their golden years together.

If someone asked me whether my dad is better off for surviving his stroke, I'd be inclined to say yes. There are lots of important things he would have missed -- seeing his children graduate or get married, getting to know his grandchildren. But surviving hasn't been a pure happy shiny miracle. It's come with a great cost. In the normal course of things, at age 63, my dad would be dealing with very different kinds of things: Keep working or retire? Visit children or have a vacation away from family? Read a book or plant a garden? As things turned out, he's so worn out from just living that none of these choices are even on the radar.

Close as I am to this situation, it's hard to figure out what lesson I should draw from it. Should I quit my bitching about how tired my little life makes me? Probably. Should I make sure I don't see the value of my life as riding on my being able to achieve certain goals that may be put out of my reach by unforeseen events, like a stroke? Maybe. But if that's what I'm supposed to do, then I need to figure out what the value is of simply living, especially if simply living becomes very hard work.

2004-09-13T09:42:00.000-07:00

Taking shots at easy targets.

I've gone and done it. I've used William Hung as an example in class. It's just that he seems like such a perfect example of the absurd-everyman Thomas Nagel describes in his essay, "The Absurd," a guy whose view of himself and his talents seems wildly at odds with reality. This, I think, is the kind of person Nagel says we fear being, but cannot help but be; we all want to be brilliant at something, but we secretly fear that we'll actually end up being horrible failures.

So, why is William Hung an object of our derision rather than our sympathy?

Is it that he opened himself up for derision on such a large scale (primetime TV)? But surely that takes guts, and I ought to admire that. Except that I feel like he should have had a better grasp of what his singing talents were (or were not) before he set those guts in motion.

Obviously, he saw himself as a talented singer. It seems (to me, anyway) like he was badly mistaken about this. But how could he tell? Was he supposed to just go by what others told him about whether or not he was a great singer? What if they were wrong? (Oooh, what if they told him he was a great singer??) What better way to find out the facts then to strut his stuff for an audience of millions?

But then, when the "celebrity judges" called him out, it's not like he showed any signs of changing his mind about himself. He kept singin'! He cut a CD! He made TV and radio appearances!! According to the rumor mill, he even charged money to sign autographs for other students at UC-Berkeley!! While the world may have viewed William Hung's appearance on "American Idol" as a disaster (albeit an entertaining one, in an airshow-disaster kind of way), William Hung apparently viewed it as the impetus he needed for his future as an entertainer to really take off.

So, shouldn't he be admired? Hasn't he found a way to take the vortex of evil that is reality TV and use it for his own purposes? Could it be that his appearance on "American Idol" was intended to be horrible, on the theory that it would make him more memorable than someone delivering a servicable but bland performance?

I'm not sure I can buy it. There's something about exposing oneself to such scrutiny from the public at large, while showing no signs of engaging in any real self-examination, that makes me uneasy. It's hard enough living an authentic life in private. I'd imagine living a life that centers around how others respond could threaten to remove one's own interests or goals. At best, the public-you and the private-you would have to be compartmentalized to keep them from destroying each other. At worst, it would be all public-you with no trace of private-you remaining. How could that be a good life.

Reason #39 I'd be a lousy famewhore...

2004-06-23T13:19:00.000-07:00

I hate killing snails. Don't get me wrong -- I hate snails, and I really hate what they do to my garden. And, in the interests of the poor, defenseless plants in my garden, I know that I must face down the gastropod menace. Those slimy varmints must be stopped.

I've tried deterring them in the past, but to no avail. And I won't use the chemicals they sell to kill the snails. So, I have to kill them, and in a pretty hands-on way. We're talking blunt force to the shell-and-contents. Violent, sloppy death.

As much as I feel the pull of arguments (from Peter Singer and others) that humans ought to have more regard for non-human animals, there's no part of me that feels like snails rise to the level where I should take their rights seriously, or worry about their pain, or whatever. So why the heck, when I kill the 10+ snails per day I need to kill to keep my garden alive, does a part of me die? Is administering garden justice coarsening me, and is that coarsening what I'm resisting? Is there a built-in revulsion to death and killing -- even of creatures I'd really feel OK blotting out of existence is I could do it remotely? Am I recoiling because I sense that all this killing to keep my garden alive is wasted effort -- that the snails have already won, just like the worms that will eventually devour my own corpse, and all I'm doing is delaying the inevitable? (What would Freud, with his "death drive", have to say about that?)

And what does it mean that I align myself with the beans over the snails?

2003-07-01T12:43:00.000-07:00

So it begins.

This is the space where I will be keeping my journal for the seminar. I will include my musings on the course readings, reflections on seminar discussions, lingering questions, off-the-wall ideas, and such. I may also post links to related stuff I find on the web.

I haven't come up with all the answers to the "big questions" I think this seminar will explore. I'm still working on those questions myself!