The end of the American Dream

An article I ran across more or less pronounced the end of the American Dream (in the Wall Street Journal, here).  The issue:  "barely half of all 30 year olds in the US earn more than their parents did at a similar age."  Of course this isn't related to Buddhism, this is just a good place to keep some writing and research on this topic.

Let's check a graphic about that subject, from the article:

It looks bleak, doesn't it?  One of the things that struck me about the article is that they didn't pause to examine any assumptions.  Why is it part of the American Dream that people should always earn more than their parents, and isn't that eventually supposed to level off?  It's not as if a lot of those people were the Irish just off a boat fleeing a potato famine.  If their stats somehow missed capturing Mexican immigrants then immigration might not play so much of a role at all.  

People that are 30 right now were born in the mid-80's, and their parents were experiencing the tail end of the American economic superiority that came from being at the lead of globalization development after World War Two.  It's not surprising that most of that leveling off of standard of living improvements occurred by the 60s, although the Great Depression 30 years prior to then throws off clear expectations a little.

I'll back up and get to some assumptions soon enough but lets look at where they go after making this observation, after a claim it's even worse in the Midwest, partly related to the rust-belt issue:

If income distribution remains as tilted toward the wealthy as it is now, they calculate, it would take sustained growth of more than 6% a year, adjusted for inflation, to return to an era where nearly all children outearned their parents. Since World War II, the U.S. hasn’t experienced anything near that level of growth for a lengthy period of time.

Even growing at 3.8% annually—about what Donald Trump pledges to produce as president—would only increase the percentage of children able to outearn their parents to 62% from 51%. Many economists are skeptical that the U.S. can grow anywhere near that level and is more likely to grow at around 2% a year.



Lots of assumptions folded in; somehow economic growth is what we need.  There is no justification here for why that growth would have more people better off at all, or why those different numbers link up, and depending the form growth took none of those people in that bottom 50%--related to this indicator--may improve status.  A closer look at causes and income distribution, what had actually changed, might work better before prescribing a solution.

In discussing the article another friend chimed in with solutions as well, one who feels like he knows a good bit about lots of things, since he has an MBA:


It's supply and demand of labor. In the US, manufacturing, which has historically and still pays better wages for the workers with the least education, has fallen to under 9% of GDP, compared to China at 33% and Germany at 23% (from memory, but should be close). The supply of workers is going up, as we are creating more workers for fewer high paying jobs. The causes are hard to fight, but include currency manipulation by China and Japan, poor trade policy enforcement, high tax rate, elimination of protections, and better access to low wage workers that have better machinery than before. 

The US birth rate is high compared to the rest of the west, and we have more immigrants, legally and illegally. The bigger problem is that manufacturing is shrinking globally too, as automation has reduced the global manufacturing employment by half in 20 years, according to the world bank... The answer isn't pouring supplements and taxing income, it's investing in vocational education like the Germans do, turning off illegal immigration, fixing tax policy, and battling currency manipulators. Most of that is as popular as a root canal politically.


Some of that sounds right, some seems way off; most seems quite difficult to evaluate.  One aside:  China has roughly a billion more people in it than the US, and we can't say how their average standard of living is shifting without a closer review but they are regarded as the most dominant world economy now, in some senses passing the US (related to adjusted GDP).  But then manufacturing shifted to there in part because wages are much lower, so all that is surely complicated.  Before getting into all that lets look at one factor neither of those inputs is considering, the balance of wealth in the US now.

Balance of wealth as a related factor

This subject was mentioned in the article, but not discussed.  A starting point comes from this graphic from a popular news source (The Guardian):

That source describes the trend as such:

Over the past three decades, the share of household wealth owned by the top 0.1% has increased from 7% to 22%. For the bottom 90% of families, a combination of rising debt, the collapse of the value of their assets during the financial crisis, and stagnant real wages have led to the erosion of wealth.


That MBA-holding friend and I have discussed the difference between wealth (holding assets) and income (earning a revenue stream), and they are different things, but of course they do correlate to some degree.

In another discussion we ran through that difference, and the numbers review left off at concluding the top wealthiest 1% hold a third of all wealth in the US.  But then small differences in how data is presented can shift what seems to show up (like this graphic relating to families, not individuals, or discussing wealth versus income, etc.).  If the top .1% really do own something like 20% of all wealth and the next .9% only hold the next 15% there seems to be income inequality among the wealthiest too.


Here is a Wall Street Journal blog graphic addressing income instead, the other issue:

Completely sorting all that out is a post for another day, but it's clear enough that within that top 1% people are probably generally doing a lot better than their parents (350K US is a good wage, and that seems to just be the bottom threshold).  Within the bottom 50% it just depends on how poor their parents happened to be, but it's still the relatively opposite story.  30k doesn't go so far (the upper limit for that group), and the lowest quarter are getting by on between essentially none and way under 20k.

This American Dream article is talking about income related to parents only, averaging out everyone, so who fits where aside from that one benchmark gets lost in the original data.  It just doesn't go into that; people all across that spectrum of being wealthy or poor could be better or worse off than their parents were at 30.  We might assume the middle class is just not gaining ground, and the poor are staying poor (something like half of them, at least; half the people in that study were better off than their parents), so in general across a broad range people just aren't moving up in terms of income level.  Of course eventually one might expect improvement in standard of living to level off, it just doesn't seem like the author of that article thinks these are the right conditions for that to occur, all more implied in that content than expanded upon.

As I'm presenting it there really needs to be three different reviews, to see what's changing with the top 1%, then the next 10 or 20%, then related to the rest in the bottom.  Given the discussion is about in general, the 50-50 split across some doing better and some not, the 1% at the top almost isn't relevant; there is 99% more to consider.  Related to who holds the wealth of the country in general that small better-off group definitely are improving status; they own a third of all of it, give or take.  But the concern and marker here is average adjusted income related to their parents' generation instead, with the only relevant benchmark what a 30-year-old's parent's earned at 30.

looks ok, but different graph arrangements always imply different things (source)

Back to why (speculation)

That friend raised some points that seem right to me, about manufacturing and jobs types changing, but in general I wouldn't agree with most of those details.  I'm an industrial engineer, for what that's worth, and from the rust belt (PA), so the part about manufacturing moving away is familiar.  I saw it as a child, in the 70s, well before that education helped make sense of it.  It's odd to me that my friend says "we need to invest in vocational education," as if that's somehow going to bring back manufacturing or give service employees a better wage for what they're already doing.  It seems it wouldn't help, with either.  Germany retains manufacturing in their quite developed country for reasons that must be complex, and surely education is only one piece of the puzzle.


I don't think currency manipulation is a key part of the problem; it seems to instead tie back to other countries doing manufacturing, not us (the US).  Japan is almost surely in the same boat related to some of the US's problems, accounting for some of their difficulties, although I would be surprised if it all doesn't play out much differently there.  That initial Wall Street Journal article concluded on a point about the wealth distribution issue:


Revamping the tax code so that it taxes the wealthy far more heavily and gives bigger breaks to those in the middle class and below could also work, said Mr. Chetty, but he doesn’t advocate that strategy.  “It’s actually not clear to me that a more progressive tax code is necessarily the solution,” Mr. Chetty said. “Many think of the American Dream as ‘earning’ more than their parents, not getting more transfers from the government than their parents.”


I'd have to completely disagree with that framing.  Addressing the unequal distribution of wealth issues with a real progressive tax system is nothing like a wealth transfer, it's a taxation choice the country's government makes.  It is strange case to consider a very poor family living on better or worse social welfare handouts than their parents, who were also on social welfare, but for the most part that's not who the discussion is about.

Donald Trump makes for a good example; he pays no taxes, for the last 20 years, because tax laws allowed him to cite investor losses as his own losses, and he was also able to offset the personal impact (his liability) through bankruptcy protection.  He was worth a large negative amount not so long ago, but it wasn't a problem, laws protected him.  It's not as if that's the one exception, that the wealthiest in general are really propping up the government while their income and holdings are decimated, while the poorest three-fourths live on government hand-outs instead of paying into the systems.  The opposite is true in some senses; some of the taxation systems are regressive (sales tax, social security, etc.), with loopholes and shelters built in to offset a progressive tax rate, so the wealthiest do just fine.  In terms of proportion of wealth held and income they're doing really, really well over the past 30-40 years.

Of course taxation could only help so much, dropping back what people in the middle or bottom contribute.  The income side also needs to be addressed, and it's appropriate that the focus is there instead related to root causes.  To be clear, I think the main cause and problem lies with both, though.  In the comments section of the article people raised other issues that really do also seem relevant, like the cost of education going up much faster than inflation and income compensation.  If some of those 30 year olds evaluated as doing better--in terms of income--were crippled with 100K USD+ of student loan debt (and many surely were) they could be evaluated as "doing better" without feeling like they actually were, or without having the expendable income that should relate to that.

Even prior to that I was scattered among issues, right?  Is it really manufacturing leaving, the wealthy soaking up the country's wealth, or other policy and tax issues as a root cause, or could it be something like currency manipulation?  One factor is completely getting missed:  eventually wages were going to level out in the US, because as US manufacturing employees earn many times over those in other countries the centers for manufacturing and the jobs were naturally going to move.  That stopped being limited to people building cars awhile back; in the IT industry whatever could move over to India and elsewhere did a lot of moving over the last 20 years.  Now if you call someone for customer service help related to problems with your computer in the US you probably wouldn't be talking to someone in the US.  If someone in a foreign country could serve a morning coffee instead--via robotics?--that would be happening, but since they can't barista jobs are still safe.

One of the biggest problems is that the American people can't step back and see what the problem is, and leaders aren't really trying to either.  Trump claims he'll bring back manufacturing, which is more or less completely impossible.  NAFTA may have been a bad idea but undoing shifts in manufacturing inputs through protectionism definitely won't work.  Even if it did, the cost of goods would go up enough that the problem would just be shifted from one place to another.  It would take lots of extra taxes and other restrictions but maybe Americans really could build Iphones, they just might cost $1500 instead of $1000.  Maybe that's not the best example, since if someone could afford a $1000 phone then maybe they could also almost as easily afford a $1500 phone.

It's not as if Obama was working on that, or that Clinton was really going to try to sort it out either.  Simple protectionism, cutting off trade exchange through taxation, doesn't seem likely to work.  And it's also hard to see how any good can come from the mix of random policies and positions Trump seems poised to unleash, trying to burn down most of the social supports and other direction that US government has taken, destroying housing programs, banking regulations, and the educational system, etc.  Even ceasing climate change resolution doesn't seem so bright as a long-term solution.  Beyond potentially making the earth unlivable in another century it turns away from development in what really should be a huge growth industry, solving that problem, not just in the US but globally.  A trade war is a potential bigger problem, maybe closer to a cause of what is being regarded as a problem in that article.

GDP growth looks pretty good, except you when you consider how much is from debt (source)

My take on status and solutions

It's not as if I'd know, really, but I'll throw out some guesses.  To start, eventually US citizens will have to adapt to not continually earning and consuming more.  That one core premise is problematic, that it's necessary to do so.  In the comments some people raised the idea that in some senses people with the same purchasing power--adjusted income--as their parents could have higher expectations since there is more to buy now; people are carrying around $1000 phones, eating foods from around the world, taking part in gear intensive activities that weren't even invented yet back then, or at least not popular.

I think addressing wealth and income inequality will have to be part of the solution as well.  This part is the core of what sparked so much controversy surrounding Bernie Sanders, isn't it?  The old American myth is that people can strive to improve themselves and do better, and keep what they earn, and to some extent that's still just as true.  The balance of people keeping a lot more has been shifting over the last 40 years though, with 1% now keeping holding onto a third, and the bottom half pays a steep price for that.  Decimating social programs will make that price even steeper.

Bringing back manufacturing, shifting the balance of the economy to what it was 40 years ago, is most problematic.  I don't think it can be done.  My home area in rural PA is in terrible economic shape.  I wish it would be possible, I just don't relate to wishing for that by believing lies about the potential.

I see a main root cause being that the US government stopped focusing on the good of the people half a century ago.  Or maybe they never actually did, and things just worked out better by accident in the 50s and 60s, a temporary case, with clear initial decline occurring in the 70s.  Increased socialism probably is part of a complex answer to a very complex set of problems.  It may be a problem that we now contrast two different myths, that people can do better by working hard, and the US can take care of everyone through adequate social supports, like making education and health care affordable.
The US has a terrible track record related to offsetting free-market equilibrium for any issue but I think that relates to bad government more than to the invisible hand of the free market resisting supports.  Social programs in the US are designed to benefit special interests in addition to serving their original goal, because special interests control the government.

The end of the American empire?

“Rejoice with support from Allah, and find glad tidings in the imminent demise of America at the hands of Trump,” said the ISIL-affiliated al-Minbar Jihadi Media network, one of several jihadi forums to post commentaries on the results of the U.S. election.  (related source article)


All of this reminded me of a quote about a different subject:

Kind of the opposite of what I was just saying, wasn't it, since Nietzsche is rejecting socialism here.  A natural read of this is that exactly what Nietzsche was suggesting as a good thing, people trying out socialism and that failing, came to pass in the Soviet Union, and in a different story line and sense also in China.  The difference is that Russia reset differently, but in both cases the protections against the unequal distribution of wealth definitely ceased, and the planned economy aspects failed.

Of course socialism tends to refer to a few different things; one is the economic, planned economy system that caused the ideological-based political systems in the USSR and China to fail.  The other is the ideology that was behind those, really more what he is critiquing, or so it seems.

The back-story about capitalism--closely coupled with a free-market economic approach, which isn't really related to the rest--is about personal freedom, free speech, equality, etc.  Socialism stresses a different type of equality, an emphasis on protecting the common people from the unequal distribution of wealth other systems lead to, along with mixing in some other ideas.


Maybe it's also time for the US empire to end, for different reasons.  Maybe a demonstratio ad absurdum in the form of that empire falling is due.  It sounds like something the villain in Batman would advocate but that could just be where things stand.

Darth Trump: "In order to ensure our security and continuing stability, the Republic will be reorganized into the first American Empire" (credit)

US governments haven't been working towards the best interests of the people for some time, and electing Trump to correct that seems almost certain to make it worse.  The unequal distribution of wealth is worsening, and social protections to ensure some degree of basic equality are strained to the point of failing (health care, education, infrastructure and public transit, etc.).  Trade imbalance is another problem, not so closely tied to those.

My own take is that it hasn't worked to maintain a higher standard of living in the US than in the rest of the world, for lots of reasons.  A main one might essentially be that free market systems don't completely stop at one country's boundary, and the leveling up is unpleasant for Americans.  It's a really long story but protectionism is also problematic.  The US sinking to the level of being an average country, not a world economic or military leader, might resolve some of the problem, shifts in expectations occurring on different levels instead of restoring some flawed perception of a natural order.

I live in a developing country now, Thailand, but it's too much to go into how all that relates to here, how living standards relate, how shifts in this economy probably tie to shifts back in the US.  There are complex patterns.  It's funny how "real" issues like costs-adjusted income distribution and expectations combine together, here as in there.  I have no answers, just the observations I've already made.  I hope things go well for the US, although it's getting harder and harder to be optimistic, especially after the last five weeks.  Now it seems like avoiding catastrophe is the best possible outcome one might rationally expect, not improvement of any kind, and that half the population has intentionally rejected reason in favor of hopefulness.  Good luck with that.

Engaged Buddhism and crisis, related to the US election result

I wrote about why Trump might have won the election in the  last post, nothing at all to do with Buddhism, just reading up and passing on some theories.  It's funny that subject isn't dropping off.  More theories crop up about the role Facebook played (people see feed posts of only like-minded individuals, or even fake news), or blaming media sources for being biased (they were, just different sources for both candidates).

I was also just talking with a friend about the relation of Buddhism to this issue, about how non-attachment relates to potential stress.

His point:  we live in an imperfect world, and trying to experience it differently than it actually is isn't useful, or pleasant.  According to the teachings of Buddhism we need to live directly in the moment, which involves accepting things as they are.  So no freaking out, even if someone doesn't like the election result, or even in cases of real crisis.  I guess that could even extend to something like 9/11, so that a truly enlightened person might just think "we live in that kind of world now," but really how that reaction would work out sort of depends on interpretation.  Getting upset might be in order.

It sort of works, the extended "keep calm" take.  Sometimes it seems like freaking out is normal, maybe even for the best.  My grandmother died last year and I think it was healthy to be quite upset.  The King of Thailand died last month and this whole country was upset, and I think they should have been, that it may have been a healthier reaction than just saying "all things are impermanent" and moving on.  Buddhism has nothing to do with being emotionless, to me.  Of course that is just an interpretation, and I'm not claiming I've got it all figured out, that my take is just what the Buddha would have said.

This might be a good place to go a little deeper into what that friend was saying, which I'll quote:


The best thing is to not conceptualize your experience. Things are as they are. The interpretation that you conceptualize after the fact is totally subjective and not factual or even necessary. It is something to come to terms with, not the fact that Trump won or the King is dead. It is an indulgence of the world of ideas which have no basis in reality. Being in the here and now is the only antidote to this. 


It sort of works.  This sort of abstract take on things can also part ways with a practical, normal reality.  If I had no attachment to my grandmother then there wouldn't have been anything to be upset about, but I did, and that attachment was a good thing.  Now I'm mixing terms, since caring for my grandmother and the form of attachment Buddhist theory is talking about are almost certainly two different things.  The Buddha wasn't saying that people shouldn't love their grandmothers, and if he was then he was a jackass.  But I've spent a lot of time reading direct teachings from the Buddha, and interpretations, and it can all really make sense, and it's useful.  He was no jackass.

no need to let dying get you down, for some

It's hard to say if the Buddha transcended the normal experience of human emotion from the mix of old stories, if he would have seemed anything like us, or quite different.  It seems conceivable he was serene and transcendent in nature, but so much spin gets added to those stories that what is in them now hardly seems to be clear on that.  Teachings and descriptions say he did, essentially, that he was fundamentally quite different.  Per some stories he also did magic tricks and talked to deities, and in others he seemed to reject things like magic tricks and talking to deities (not completely unlike Christianity, although that is a different story).

I'll edit down my response a little, in which I embraced that line of thinking, discussing the normal experience of emotions to what might be a reasonable interpretation of applied Buddhist non-attachment.  The discussion was between three people, so the response might seem odd.  My ideas were positioned against two different kinds of response, that Zen-like-state version and another friend's more typical take, a bit shocked.  Then again, a Trump supporter wouldn't be shocked, but no need to go into that tangent here, all of this applies more generally than to someone just being upset about that one thing.


I get it about making peace with the result and our own reaction to the result.  Trump as President is the new reality, in January, and only limited forms of rejecting reality make sense (eg. taking actions that actually do change it).  At the same time grief is natural, and loss of a person and loss of an understanding of reality and a set of expectations aren't so separate, in this case.  

An emotional reaction is in order; this is human nature.  Moving to acceptance is a process, and negative emotions are part of the process.  Or potentially even moving through denial and anger phases, then onto depression and acceptance.

I cope through discussion, and a little writing.  For someone else they might just flip a switch, and say this is now, that other set of circumstances was then, and all is well.  Things are just as they must be, a mix of external events and whatever response we naturally take.  I've only lost the idea that Americans would have better judgment, not a reality where they actually did.  That was always only an expectation.  It's nice philosophizing about loss.  

Don't do anything crazy, although marching around and showing public disapproval seems harmless enough, if one felt inclined.  That really is feedback, likely not so functional, but it's a real thing.  I do the same online, move some ideas around a little.  I share the experience with friends and talk it through with others that don't share perspective as well.



It might seem like I'm taking it a bit personally, more as a tragedy than necessary, or compared to people I've talked to back in the States not so much at all.  I guess I see it as move back to the perspective of the 1950's, one in which men are better than women, whites are better than minorities, and religious tolerance and tolerance for people that see gender differently are non-issues; it's normal to be straight, and not really ok to be Muslim.  And I don't want to go back to that.  I don't want to be better than Mexicans for being white, I want all people to be created equally, like it says in the Constitution.  But all that is tangent.  We could almost as easily be discussing my reaction to 9/11 here instead, any change or event that's hard to accept.

he can't be that bad

Engaged Buddhism versus a less active take on Zen

There are two different takes on Buddhism that map onto two reaction patterns, which may not be familiar to everyone.  Zen would be, in general, one interpretation of which that friend is advocating.  It's all about equanimity, dispassionate acceptance, staying at the center.  How to take that related to immediate experience and what we should do or not do could go in different directions.  Here I'm sort of condensing it to mean inactivity, although it typically wouldn't be equivalent to doing nothing.  That friend isn't saying "do nothing," he's saying don't get upset, because the cause for being upset is only the way you position the ideas.

The story about the one founder spending nine years facing a wall indicates otherwise, that inactivity is just fine, or even great practice, but even that circumstance was probably not exactly like that.  Maybe that guy (Dogen) meditated part-time, and was socially engaged otherwise, although that's not how that story typically goes.  "Real" Zen may be more like a second pattern I'm going to discuss, about a way to be active, to not get away from emotion or doing things.

It's about Engaged Buddhism, a variation of Zen teachings taught by Thich Nhat Hanh.  Sound familiar?  He is a pretty big name, still with  us, but getting up there in years now.  To be clear, he is teaching Zen, part of that tradition himself, and there surely isn't a lot of discontinuity between what he is saying and some other very inactive-oriented form.  Zen is zen; a direct experience of reality, and people are just describing it differently, or different but related means to the same end.  Here is a website about his community and teachings.  Here are some related points from his 14 Precepts of Engaged Buddhism:


Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of the existence of suffering in the life of the world...

Do not accumulate wealth while millions are hungry.... Do not maintain anger or hatred... 

Do not lose yourself in dispersion and in your surroundings. Practice mindful breathing to come back to what is happening in the present moment. Be in touch with what is wondrous, refreshing, and healing both inside and around you.... 

Do not utter words that can create discord and cause the community to break. Make every effort to reconcile and resolve all conflicts, however small.

Thich Nhat Hanh (photo credit)

So he is teaching others to be active, but to change perspective.  The same ideas about letting go of attachment are there, common to all types of Buddhism, just stripped of any directive to not experience certain kinds of things.  We suffer to learn not to suffer, to get to the root of what it is, then the form of experience can change so we aren't adding that to it.

One point in there is interesting, about not just avoiding staying inactive in meditation, but also about not losing your self-awareness to activity, described more clearly here:


Buddhism has to do with your daily life, with your suffering and with the suffering of the people around you. You have to learn how to help a wounded child while still practicing  mindful breathing. You should not allow yourself to get lost in action. Action should be meditation at the same time.

Interesting!  He's not really saying we should do a certain kind of activity, again more related to perspective in general, really in this all a "being in the moment" theme.  More about a specific crisis event helps clarify that:


John Malkin: When the World Trade Center was destroyed, you were asked what you would say to those responsible. You answered that you would listen compassionately and deeply to understand their suffering. Tell me about the practice of deep listening and how you think it helps in personal situations...


Thich Nhat Hanh: The practice of deep listening should be directed towards oneself first. If you don’t know how to listen to your own suffering, it will be difficult to listen to the suffering of another person or another group of people.

I have recommended that America listen to herself first, because there is a lot of suffering within her borders. There are so many people who believe they are victims of discrimination and injustice, and they have never been heard and understood...

If America succeeded in that, she could bring that practice to the international level. The fact is that people know America has the capacity to hit. To hit very hard and make people suffer. But if America does not hit, that brings her more respect and gives her more authority...

Violent action creates more violence. That’s why compassion is the only way to reduce violence. And compassion is not something soft. It takes a lot of courage.


So it would seem his advice is for people to understand why they feel as upset as they do about any changes, to make peace within themselves, and then apply the same process to others.

An interesting question:  would Thich Nhat Hanh still get angry?  On one read, no, he would be past that.  A philosophy and religion professor of mine once told a story of being at a function where Thich Nhat Hanh spoke, of being involved with the organizers and presenters, and conveyed how at one point someone in the crowd interrupting and asking questions that weren't relevant was throwing off the communication.  Thich (a bit much always writing all that) went in the back at one point to cool off a little, and expressed that the disruption was making him angry.  He was still human; he still experienced the normal range of emotions.  Some might say "he's not a real Buddha then" but I'm not sure he would claim to be one.  Emotions aren't a bad thing, but keeping a balanced perspective is still better for us.

Of course America isn't going to turn into a country full of millions of Buddhas.  This is intended as practical guidance, though, nothing abstract.  He thinks we can make peace within ourselves, and then make peace with people we would ordinarily consider our worst enemies.

It's odd thinking of a Trump supporter as an enemy in the same sense as a terrorist, but the dynamic is playing out that way this week.  Violence and hate is occurring on both sides.  Compassion and understanding won't work like flipping a switch but there is something to this, it's practical, or at least potentially so.

Of course we can't take "the other side" with us, completely.  If someone absolutely hates minorities and they don't want to change, or can't find influence to shift that perspective, then there is only so much that can be done.  Talking ISIS or Al Qaeda out of conducting terrorism seems a stretch.  But Thich Nhat Hanh is saying we can more or less break that cycle, bit by bit.  Or at least that's our best chance, not success through being the last one standing through successful application of violence.

Our President-elect isn't much of a Buddhist, but the rest of us can do better, and even he can.  A simple part of shifting perspective might just relate to giving him the benefit of the doubt.  When he says "illegal immigrants from Mexico are criminals and rapists" he is more or less expressing racist views, but it might be better to accept that as rhetoric aimed at coordinating shared views about concerns over the impact of illegal immigration with other Americans--his supporters--than jumping to the conclusion that we've elected a new version of Hitler.  The KKK supports Trump, and is happy he was successful, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he or his average supporter shares most of their views.  These teachings from Buddhism apply to trying to understand the most extreme opposing perspectives, to try to sort out the roots of views that seem clearly wrong by relating to them.

My friend's point was more about our own initial reactions, something much easier to control than to actually conduct peaceful relations with ISIS and white supremacists.  Our family is Buddhist--we live in Thailand--and although my own beliefs and background aren't so simple in terms of alignment I try to teach my kids to apply the most practical aspects, and then it's their mother's job to enforce the religious ritual aspects.  As I tell my son, if you can't control yourself then you don't stand much chance of controlling anything else.  Of course this isn't folk wisdom from my own tradition, in which righteous indignation is quite acceptable, it's from Buddhism.  On that subject, I'll add a little more about my own take on Buddhism related to everyday experience here.

looks cool, might be functional

Buddhism and everyday experience, some of my own thoughts

We just celebrated Loy Krathong here; that's sort of one set of practices related to Buddhism, holidays, rituals, and such.  That relates to floating a small bread or leaf and flower boat, lit with a candle along with incense, to carry off your sins.  I don't know the connection to Buddhism, but then Thais aren't always clear of those ties either.  I'm talking about something else, about immediate perception, not rituals.  About those boats, in addition to clearing off sins you also get to make a wish, kind of a common theme in Thai Buddhism.  No need to worry, America, I've got you covered; I burned my wish asking for that political / social mess there to clear up nicely.  Now hopefully it's not like the birthday one, where you can't tell anyone what it is or the magic doesn't work.

This subject naturally drifts into review of the related Pali terms, and parsing out roles of teachings and meditation, and separating mental faculties, etc.  I'll try to simplify beyond all that, of course limited to describing a very rough version of my own take.  Per the Buddha, we make life worse than it is, through mistakes in our take on perception and self, or even related to how we deal the past and future.  Accepting present reality as it is really is a lot of the message.  That doesn't mean dropping out our role in possibly changing it; our own activities and intentions are part of that present, as much as external factors are.  But we can't change the past of the future, and suffering over what happened or being stressed over what might don't really make sense; we only exist in this present.

Suffering is used in an odd way.  It's really a translation, and as with a lot of language translation the original range of senses doesn't match the translated version.  Even within one language, tradition and worldview a concept like "self" may not be pinned down as well as it initially seems, but when a concept is at the core of an unusual model of reality things really get unusual.  As I'm describing I see this as prescriptive as much as descriptive; it says how we can do better for perspective, just as much as it describes what people ordinarily do, mentally, in terms of context of perspective.

It matches everything my friend said, and what Thich Nhat Hanh is saying, it's just not as clear as it could be what those really mean.  According to a bad read my friend might be saying "just get stoned and let it all drop," and Thich Nhat Hanh might be saying "just try to be open and understand everything, and be compassionate, but not necessarily do anything."  Those aren't the point, although they may overlap with some of the ideas, and just miss the proper end point, the right view.

Suffering--in the one special sense--isn't being used as pain, or even mental anguish, but in a special sense.  It's about things being unsatisfactory for being different than they "should" be.  Everything really should be exactly as it is, in this present, because there is no changing the present, at all.  We can act, but then that's part of the present moment too.  To some extent sadness is still a reaction about a change that is natural, a carry-over from the past, but we can only part ways to a limited degree with normal human experience.  Maybe the Buddha had moved on, or maybe he didn't, but in a sense we don't need to worry so much about that.  If anger moves us to violence we have went way too far with embracing normal human nature, or if being upset takes us over, but to some extent reacting through emotions is fine.

Where is the right balance?  Hard to say.  It's potentially problematic to put ourselves on a scale of irrational / emotional up to Zen-line Buddha state, because we might just experience gap.  The idea is to improve over time, to personally benefit from a perspective shift, and to use that to help others.  Meditation is described as one tool for doing so, or the teachings are another, with mindfullness emphasized more than both in some traditions (conditioned momentary awareness).  So there is no magic bullet, along with there being no clear end state.

As with any subject someone claiming to be an expert is a bit of a red flag, although some others have varied experiences and perspectives.  I was ordained as a monk here in Thailand for two months once, and it's odd how that shifts things, someone being an authority based on wearing certain clothes, being in a formal role.  Lots of monks could be a lot more familiar with these basic ideas.  We learn from whoever or whatever is a good teacher, and someone in a formal teacher role might have the most potential, or they might not.

Really personal experience itself, our own momentary perspective, is the best grounds for learning.  In a limited sense it's the only basis for it; no one can pass on their perspective to you.  A teacher can lay out examples, or advise about practices, or explain teachings, even hit you with a stick if that somehow seems relevant, but everyone takes the steps for themselves, or else doesn't.  You either notice all this works and experience changes in perspective or you don't.


Unpleasant experiences can be quite useful, although again conventional suffering and our reaction to that suffering as a different kind of suffering are quite different.  Dissatisfaction with very uneventful experience could also be instructive, or maybe physical pain could be, or fear of the future.  Proper perspective of those would be critical, which typically wouldn't stem from just experiencing them, some guidance on how to take them would really make a difference.  Contemplation of death and impermanence as a means to learn is commonly referenced.  In a sense I'm really talking about un-learning, removing parts of ordinary experience that aren't useful, assumptions that relate to self and point of view.


And all that is kind of the simple version, as far as I might go without going on and on.  I like to discuss philosophy (and tea) so if I can help further with discussion I'd be happy to; just look me up.  Of course I'm no living example of these practices completely extended; I'm an ordinary person.  I feel all this works because following it to a limited extent seemed to help, and it has seemed accurate based on introspection.  It might be as well to close by noting this isn't really tied to any particular belief system, to reincarnation or making wishes, or separated from others, although lots of people would certainly take it that way.

Why was Trump elected President?

I wrote this on Tuesday, in part as a way of coping with the distress of the choice Americans were making.  It's now really time to move past why they did it, and on to dealing with the fall-out, but it remains relevant as to why Trump was elected in the first place.  Dealing with him as President and living with half a nation of supporters will require some degree of understanding and acceptance.

Note that this has nothing to do with Buddhism.  Some aspects of coping may; I might get around to another post.  For now this post is just about why he was elected.

November 8th, 2016

Trump will be President, elected just now.  I'm a bit shocked by that, and sickened, really.  I was in the camp of people thinking he was probably the least qualified Presidential candidate in the history of the US, clearly unfit to lead the country on so many levels.

My own opinion and which parts I think are gaps are sort of secondary to what I'll write about here.  It's too late to do much with defending Hillary, or explaining how much or little of what was said about her seems accurate, or which parts seemed to only be spin.  The FBI came out last minute and said the email issue was nothing, in results from a second round of investigation, but people didn't care.  They weren't voting about that.  So why were they?  I really don't know, but writing about it seems therapeutic, so I'll pass on my take.

1.  Rural, racist white Americans elected Trump

Of course that's partly true; he swept the white racist vote, but that must only be a part of the story.  I must admit I am a bit put off by Trump coming across as so clearly racist as he did, but it was never a central selling point.  Trump was slow to reject a KKK endorsement, until noticing not doing so played badly, called illegal immigrants from Mexico rapists, drug dealers, and criminals, and his election was praised by David Duke as a victory for "our people," which it really was.

The real story is about why anyone that isn't uneducated, or white, or who doesn't dislike minorities or Muslims also voted for Trump.  As I see it anyone who is Mexican, Muslim, black, gay, or female shouldn't have voted for Trump, based only on self-interest, but votes from plenty of people in those groups pushed him over the edge.

42% of women voted for Trump, per CNN poll.  really?!

The best article I've read explaining more about this was How Half of America Lost It's F***ing Mind.  The explanation is simple:  there is a divide between rural and urban American culture, the establishment and outsiders, and Trump exploits that by appealing to the "other half."  He's definitely not one of them, he's a billionaire from the city, but his message works, to some degree even for non-whites.  There is something to that, or maybe that's most of it.  A map of voting by county seems to point to that being it:

voting by county:  cities blue, all else red

The theory isn't quite as simple as rural people resent urban control and influence, a close parallel to the rich versus poor story line, but that's part of it.  I'm from the country, from rural PA, but it's hard for me to completely relate to a general worldview from back there.  But then, my parents are well educated, and to some extent that alone brings in a divide.  I was taught to be intolerant of racism; that's a bit outside the norm where I'm from.

But the author tried to explain the perspective, and I sort of get it.  Most of the people I grew up with didn't "get out" quite to the same extent as I did, to other countries in addition to other places in the US, and the changes that came along with that they didn't experience.  The same is true of my parents, just in a different sense; they made it to college, and broadened worldview.  But few of my old high school friends live locally now, so they're sort of all over the place related to which "traditional" perspectives stuck (no good way to put that; I don't mean if they still like the Christmas season).

It's almost as if I'm saying that the Civil Rights Movement never happened for many people, and I'd love to be writing out a different kind of post now, about how reason and broader perspective prevailed.  But it didn't.  Somehow a black person was elected President (half black; just as black as MLK to those that see it as negative though) and for whatever reasons some relatively opposing views took hold instead.  It might not be as simple as push-back about race, or an anti-political-establishment trend, or a woman not being fit to be President, in this case.  I'll review a second possible explanation.

2.  Authoritarian explanation

For many Trump sounding a lot like Hitler was a strong negative, but this article explains that may be exactly why he is so popular.  Here I'm not talking so much about the Hitler trend to kill all Jews, but the more general tone, about taking an oddly structured approach to problem solving.  The theory is that when people feel unsettled they tend to gravitate more towards a strong leader, or someone that projects that image, that is based on that type of authoritarian stereotype.  Such a person would advocate using force instead of reason, would blame a minority instead of looking for real, complex solutions, and would use fear to trigger people to respond in ways they normally wouldn't.  It's supposed to sound exactly like Hitler.

Mind you I'm repeating a theory, one possible alternative suggested by people that were already into the study of "authoritarian" behavior patterns.  It could be partly this, or maybe the urban/rural trend fits better, or perhaps most likely different patterns worked together.

Why are people open to such triggers now; why would fear play such a role in their decision making?  What threats cause them to feel a level of instability that would enable a turn to simple, irrational solutions to complex problems, even if they violate their own typical beliefs?  9/11 was awhile back,  ISIS is as quiet as they've been in awhile, and the US economy is ok now, per most indicators, at least.

That part isn't completely clear.  Different kinds of threats might work, per this theory, so terrorism or economic uncertainty could do the trick, or both.  It really could just relate to exposure to ideas that support these triggers.  Constant exposure to these ideas, via the media coverage of the election, or due to popular right-wing media, could help plant enough of this line of thought that for half the public impending economic and terrorism threats are real.  Or maybe the long term trends towards expecting the end of the world were a part of that, a cause in addition to an effect, for awhile only from a fringe, but developed to become more mainstream.  Hard to say.  I'm starting to drift a bit with this speculation, but the stress of the election process itself may have triggered responses normally reserved for reacting to specific fears.

3.  Anti-Hillary

Why did this take?  Was it ever even a factor?  It seemed completely clear that she won all three debates, that put in the same room to discuss issues she prevailed.  She seemed to know a lot more about running the country, seemed clearer, a better communicator, and much more stable.  But then, problems the country faces or policy positions didn't come up much, since the debates were over who is a worse candidate.

That always felt like a potential gamble to me, that she never really tried to split the topic set into why Trump was a worse choice, his faults, and also develop why she is better, to focus on the issues.  Some might claim, of course she did that, but it sort of seemed the parts about issues were filler in between the jabs and baiting, even if those were offered in a much more composed fashion by her than Trump.

To me almost all the most serious accusations against Hillary were just spin.  She might have had that one guy killed (per Wikileaks), but all that seems like speculation, with even "evidence" posted by a biased source not covering much that is incriminating.  I read a number of the transcripts of Wall Street speeches that were supposed to be damning, and there wasn't much in those at all, some general ideas about developing the economy.  If someone extrapolated that to define policy statements--stretching it a good bit to say what she didn't actually say--and compared it to Obama's policies they don't match.  So what?  Ideas like "I hope someday we have free trade in the region" couldn't possibly be incriminating.  It seemed like they relied on people to not actually read the content to make the points, but then that always was a safe bet.

I'm reminded of the idea of "which candidate would you rather sit down and have a beer with?"  Wasn't that mostly from the George W election?  Are people really that shallow, that in the end gut feel for how much you would like a candidate in person is the overriding deciding factor?  Maybe.  She isn't warm, in terms of public persona; it's not one of her things.  I find Trump despicable but I get it that opinions vary on that.  Maybe if I'd liked the Apprentice more.  But to me that really was the deal-breaker; how could people watch that show and say this guy should be the President?  He was mean spirited, irrational, petty, condescending, and nearly incoherent.  Or was that just my take?

I almost left out the most obvious point to be made:  she's a woman.  To me that makes no difference, but if was a deal-breaker for 8% of the people outside Trump's core group that's the entire swing.  Or it could have shifted half that number over, or multiple factors including that could tie together.

4.  Anti-Bill Clinton / Obama

You might say, but those guys aren't running, it really shouldn't matter.  The connection to Obama is clear enough; she was part of his cabinet.  I think a main thread beyond those first two different theories, and also the third potential factor, is that ordinary reason can take a back seat to gut-feel.  Trump definitely used Bill Clinton as a defense for his own issues, specifically related to a tape one could easily interpret as him claiming he routinely commits sexual assault.  Maybe Bill did commit some heinous crimes; it never seemed relevant enough to sort through the two versions of spin in the media.

The general impression of Obama seems positive at this point, but I'm not so sure; that's likely not true among the 47.5% that voted for Trump.  In terms of stats an Obama Presidency was very successful, but I think the people that care about that level of reality were already voting for Clinton.  The most committed racists were definitely not voting for anyone associated with Obama, but again that's the minority on the other side, already committed.  None of this seems to explain the middle-ground support, as the first two theories may.

It's possible that other factors acted as triggers, but in a different sense than the authoritarian explanation.  For some gay marriage may have been too much, or Obama-care never working out, and that may have set off a reaction against Obama and Hillary Clinton.  One friend seems to have based his entire opinion on Benghazi, about an attack on US staff in a diplomatic compound in Libya.  The idea there was that she was personally responsible for a terrorist attack for not ramping up security, related to a perceived threat.  It seems unlikely there was any tie to her (see a British newspaper source summary), but this seems to be how spin works, a core of some sort of truth can be turned into something else.

5.  Anti-establishment

This article on how to cope with Trump's election (short version:  just relax) they propose one core reason:


In their case, it's a belief that the system is fundamentally broken and that Hillary Clinton would have been more of the same. Trump rode a wave of support from people who've spent the last eight years watching terrifying nightly news reports about ISIS and mass shootings and riots. They look out their front door and see painkiller addicts and closed factories. They believe that nobody in Washington gives a shit about them, mainly because that's 100-percent correct.


Hard to argue with the last point; it's something I've believed for the last 25 years.

Thinking Trump would be any better is really grasping at straws, but maybe for some they were just down to that.  In practice he could be much, much worse, because he has his own relatively unbalanced perspective and agenda, and all the parts that might help the average person probably won't work out.  Even one point alone seems a deal-breaker to me; ignoring climate change at this critical time is only going to make the disaster that is definitely coming that much worse.  But all that is another subject.

Maybe beyond Obama not implementing "change we can believe in" people were just sick of the political system.  Hillary is a clear part of that, Trump a clear outsider, and voters were willing to overlook any other differences and go with that.  Maybe, or so the story goes.  I kind of doubt it being as much a factor as the rest, but I'm going to keep saying maybe the factors all mixed together.

There is no clear reason why people would want to vote for a non-politician now more than at any time in the past.  Combined with people believing some of the other spin, about her ties to Wall Street (she does make lots of money speaking), it sort of could be a factor.  But George W Bush came from an oil industry background, and invaded a country that produces oil on clearly false premises, with business associates earning a fortune in the rebuilding process, and he was re-elected, after doing all that.  So speaking fees are worse?  Maybe the idea is that GW never received anything himself, which would be a bit naive.

It makes a lot more sense than the rest, related to racism, or the negative spin about Hillary sticking, or fear triggering people to turn to a leader that's clearly not qualified.  But my intuition tells me that reason wasn't a big part of what happened, that choice for President.  People voting for Bernie--the figurehead for the more liberal version of anti-establishment sentiment--didn't switch to vote for Trump.  Or did they?

The latest count was 59,698,506 for trump (47.5%) to 59,926,386 (47.7%) for Hillary; odd Trump lost the popular vote, but then so that can go.  That's a lot of people, that first Trump count; they had to come from somewhere, and surely that can't all be conservative, right-wing Republicans.  So back to the same question, why would a middle-ground voter support Trump?  It seems crazy but maybe some Bernie Sanders supporters could have flipped all the way to far right.  Nah...  Maybe...

6.  Other 

Really, what the hell were all those people thinking?  

Half the leaders in the Republican party either didn't endorse Trump or endorsed Hillary, because he was that far from being a plausible candidate.  Both former President Bush's endorsed Hillary.  It just makes no sense.  This would tie back to the anti-establishment theory, though, that if the Republican party would reject Trump he must be doing something right.

Both of the first two articles and theories predicted that those inputs didn't need to make any sense at all, that it wasn't one bit about that (those related to a rural vs. urban and authoritarian explanations).

Or could it have been a perfect storm?  A percent here or there most influenced by this or that, amounting to a narrow win?

Whatever it was media spin definitely played a role, on both sides.  From what I was seeing online major papers clearly backed one candidate or the other, with bias clear in their reporting, even choosing poll numbers that supported "their" candidate.  That was always true of Fox news, but in this case no sources seemed clearly impartial, except maybe the BBC and such, those outside the country.

It would be odd if the factors played out such that neither candidate was at risk of losing their 40% of the vote, but somehow the anti-Hillary spin clicked better than the anti-Trump spin.  Shows like Saturday Night Live ridiculed Trump, but while the spin on the other side focused in on Trump's own words (Mexicans are rapists, grab them by the...) Hillary's claimed she was behind murdering people, most likely dark stories spun out of thin air.

I have no idea.  The people spoke; that's it.  It's too bad that a slight vote-count minority spoke louder through the electoral college system, or that the people said a clearly unqualified candidate should be the President, but that's democracy.  Either Trump really will make America great again or the country really did just take a big leap backwards, and he might help trigger a major recession or start another war.

About climate change, it's really too bad we're back to the US rejecting that, letting scientifically proven knowledge drop, potentially dooming the planet.  Really we're already doomed, it's down to a matter of timing, but that's no reason to stop trying.  Making an enemy of China would be a nightmare, and high on his list is targeting their monetary policy for fixing exchange rates.

As for the rest just as likely things will land in the middle, and the usual ups and downs will continue.  As they said in the one article, to some extent it will be necessary to just relax, even if things seem to keep taking a turn for the worse.

Free will and the nature of time

A recent discussion based on a post about a book on time brought up this issue, which I'll use as a starting point:


The "Block Universe" theory states, briefly, that time does not exist in the sense that we experience it, but rather as a sort of spatial dimension. It's called a "block" because, if you can lay out all events in time on a coordinate plane, like you can points in a spatial dimension, then the future is fixed, free will is an illusion, and in fact the whole universe is a sort of stasis, or "block." If this view is right (and it gets circumstantial support from relativity, as well as from Kant and other philosophers who think about metaphysics) then this is a pretty profound subversion of our everyday experience of the world. If time itself, that is our experience of it, is created by the brain, how utterly strange must be the "real" reality underneath!


Then again, the theory isn't quite as far from conventional reality as that summary implies, related to this quote from the post about the book, and based on the author's own explanation:


Still, he says, that argument ultimately “rests on a big confusion about what the block universe theory is saying.  Even the block universe theory agrees that … the only experiences I’m having are the ones I’m having now in this room.” The experiences you had a year ago or 10 years ago are still just as real, Skow asserts; they’re just “inaccessible” because you are now in a different part of spacetime.


Those two takes, the post author's, and the book author's proposing the block universe theory, seem far enough apart that the first may need some adjustment, or could be extending the same ideas to unrelated conclusions.  They really seem to be discussing two different versions of a block theory of time, one that sees the past and present as real and existent with an uncertain future, and one that sees it all as in a sense already fixed (a growing block theory of time versus a different version, where the future is also part of the block, the reality).

At any rate I intend to discuss the issues here from my own perspective, not track down alternatives of what is being proposed and try to make the most sense I can of that.  Google would turn up more, but I'm more interested in a different sort of post.

Free will is an interesting part of the larger picture here.  If the future exists as well as the past, in some sense, then we are completely conditioned by past events, and have no input about what choices we make, since in a sense it all will be exactly as it will be.  On the other hand, it seems like what I've just said and that intro statement both include a lot of assumptions that might not really hold up, and that completely laying bare what is meant by "free will" might not ever work.  If will and making choices is somehow completely determined, in any sense, then the freedom part seems a bit thin, but that doesn't seem necessary by looking at time a different way.

It's a bit odd, but I'll quote my initial take as a comment on the Facebook post (in a philosophy group there, which in general aren't worth looking into, but a couple aren't so bad):


This was standard stuff in metaphysics classes back in philosophy study, but it goes nowhere. We experience reality in the form of moments of time, or a flow, and it doesn't change based on describing it different ways. It doesn't make any sense to describe time outside the framework that we experience it in, other than as a thought model, to consider if there are any alternatives. Maybe there are, maybe there aren't, but even if so it wouldn't mean anything to us.



It's not based on much study of theories on my part but my understanding is that our common sense take is called presentism, the idea that only the present is somehow real.  I was saying that embracing something other than that common sense perspective wouldn't end up making any sense, even if this experience of time is somehow a function of us more than of the physical universe.

credit dilbert.com, also referenced in this blog post on free will

To cut to the crux of all this, even if we see the whole universe, past and future together, as one larger whole, I don't see that as necessarily entailing there is no free will.  Just as there is complex physical cause and effect as part of that universe our own thoughts and inclinations are also an input.  We can change what we do in the present, to the extent that we evaluate external factors and thought and choice are also factors.  A thought model might help where I'm going with all this.

Consider a number of dominos set up to knock each other over as those are arranged to.  Each individual domino action is completely caused; there is no choice, no way a domino could "decide" to fall sideways and break that chain.  Even if we are a product of our own past and generally conditioned by external inputs (immediate circumstances, and also culture, influence of others, etc.) to some extent our will is the activity of our own thought as an input.  We can define that as being externally caused, and try to model even our own thought and judgement in some vaguely mechanistic, determined way, versus seeing us as special for having a different type of judgment as an input, most often expressed as being well beyond the extent to which animals also do.  Both approaches seem to just describe the same thing in different ways, more a judgment about importance of some mental function than a change in modeling some real aspect of reality.

photo credit

But lets consider further.  The issue of free will and determinism seems to hinge on the extent to which we could do the equivalent of a domino falling sideways; could we initiate actions that are not caused by the past or external factors?  It almost doesn't make sense, as if somehow that framing doesn't work.  How could I wake up and quit my job for absolutely no reason, or do anything more reasonable, limited, and positive without any prior cause instead?  We experience our existence and selves as a continuity of the past, and exist along with the rest of reality as a related input.

Other thought models come to mind as options, like the alien character in the one Men in Black movie who could somehow experience alternate realities at the same time.  But that sort of didn't make sense; conditions are what they are moment to moment, so working out how they might be slightly different doesn't work.  All the talk of other possible universes, like the Star Trek episode where Kirk and Spock are evil instead, are also meaningless.  Those people (characters) were the product of all the other moments of their lives, and there couldn't be an identical universe where they shared all the characteristics except being evil, and presumably an entire past.  So many things would be different there wouldn't be genetically identical opposites to only be different in that way.  A movie or television show based on a related but different premise that sets up a fork in time, based on some external change, does sort of work, but it takes careful writing to make up a plausible external event or source of change.  Time travel works, if that can somehow be written in.

So moving into fiction as a reference doesn't seem to shed much light.

Alternate experiences of time are more promising than defining free will out of existence.  We definitely have free will, it's just not so easy to define what that means, to somehow grasp the limits of external factors, or leave space for any freedom from those.  It seems to just boil down to a matter of use of terms, of definition.  But it's vaguely conceivable a different type of organism wouldn't experience time as we do.  How would that be possible?  Based within our own frame of reference, on how we experience things, it's absolutely impossible, but then I am talking about possible range beyond that.  We are based on a certain type of physical reality, on a physical make-up, on chemical processes and physical reactions firmly grounded in our experience of time.  Could a different type of life form not be?  Again, not that we can clearly imagine, but what about beyond that.

Even imagining what that means, or could mean, gets tricky.  The obvious description might be to compare how a three dimensional being might interact with a two dimensional being (not that we have any example of such a thing; again it's a thought model).  Limitations of that being possible aside, experienced reality would be in a very different form.  Any interaction at all would entail some sort of projection, limitation of three dimensions to interact with two.  It kind of makes no sense, but thinking it through gets one a feel for the level of problems.

So the idea is to imagine what a fundamentally different type of experience could be like, not exactly based on a three dimensions + time worldview.  Beyond being impossible it's interesting.  Such a being could only communicate with us by projecting into a form identical to our own, in the same way we could only "talk" to a two dimensional, sheet of paper world type being by somehow being represented in theirs.

Maybe this all goes too far, still based on the input of sci-fi, imagining that a character like the one in Men in Black would be necessary for a different experience of time, or like Q in Star Trek.  Premonition would be an unusual case where someone could experience time differently, not that it's a given anyone actually experiences that.  In such a case or experience scope knowledge of the future is given as a vague input, completely outside normal sensory perception.  It would work better as an example if there were more acceptance of it, or at least one standard model for how people would experience it.

But then I'm kind of drifting off the subject of free will with all this.  These ideas do circle back towards considering, from that first discussion  "If time itself, that is our experience of it, is created by the brain, how utterly strange must be the "real" reality underneath!"


That seems to sweep in a bit more assumption than is necessary, that we are creating the the experience of time, when we might instead just be structured to exist within such a context.  Synapses firing, thoughts occurring, these are our mental reality, in the same way I digest breakfast from this morning now, not from last week.  We are organic and time-bound in both ways.  Separating perception and choice from the immediate moment is impossible, to free up will more than it is free now, without that being based on a fundamentally different form of experience, of life itself.  I would agree that it would be quite strange to have a different kind of experience, but I don't see why it would have to be impossible, it would just have to be based within a different format of being, the kind of thing we couldn't really imagine in detail.  Premonition would fall outside normal experienced scope, if it really ever did occur.

About the physics, the way such theories connect to philosophical explanations, people seem to take all that the wrong way.  Experience is one thing, the first person sense and thought based nature of reality, and physics is another, a model for how reality works, a description.  Under the model of either Newtonian gravity or relativistic gravity an apple still falls to the ground, the latter just describes things better in some subtle ways that don't really matter at the level of apples falling.  If there are really 20-some dimensions to this reality and we experience three physical dimensions plus time it doesn't matter, unless it somehow turns out to matter.  Maybe ghosts live in a different related dimension, and then it really does matter, but only if your house is haunted.  Or maybe astral travel is real, and that somehow ties in;  speculation could go in lots of bizarre directions.

In any case the real-real nature of reality would make absolutely no difference to us, unless it was somehow relevant.  If we can someday, somehow travel across time then that scope becomes relevant, otherwise it's not.  Maybe that's not the best example since it's still interesting to consider, especially since time moving at different rates is really standard stuff.  Going somewhere via "wormhole" and coming back much later poses no problem at all, in relatively ordinary interpretations of physics, but coming back earlier may be completely impossible, to the extent our take on physics says anything at all about it, per my very limited understanding.

Getting to be a bit of a tangent, but related to that time-shift in the movie Insterstellar one might wonder if those gravity fields really could slow time that much, them aging so slowly due to time differences due to being near a black hole.  But how could one tell, who can do calculations related to gravity fields and the flow of time?  Not many people, but I wasted a bit of time reading up, and answers were all more or less similar to this one:


If you find a way to keep a watch working circling around on the rarefied 'surface' of the Sun (where gravitational acceleration is a respectable ~ 28g), and that watch will count about a minute less per year compared to the distant observer.


28 times normal Earth gravity is way more than any person could live to experience, and one minute per year difference is essentially almost none.  It's quite a real difference, and it's the kind of difference that we have to take into account to keep our GPS system working well, but it implies that movie-character astronaut could not experience gravity that causes him to come back when his daughter is old, at least not without being killed by the effects himself.

Someone else might argue that personal experience of gravity or speed could be relative, for example that someone travelling at 99.99% the speed of light related to us is just existing in a normal framework to them, not experiencing any special forces.  To a far lesser extent the same could be true of gravity; someone could orbit a very massive object and feel nothing, they would only get flattened by trying to stand on it.  But in actual practice this wouldn't seem to work.  A gravitational field 28 times that of the surface of the earth is not even close to enough to change time experience, and being exposed to a place experiencing hundreds of times as much gravitational influence as we do on Earth wouldn't be practical, there would be reasons it just wouldn't work.

makes for some cool ideas and images though (credit)

Back to the original point, the "free will" problem has no space to change, at all, unless something in the model of reality shifts.  Free will is either defined as a basic part of us making decisions, a description of an aspect of thinking, or else we might not accept there is anything interesting enough about that for a special term.  Maybe we just do something more similar to what dogs do, react to circumstances, and explaining that as something extra special makes no sense.  Or else maybe dogs have free will too.

About premonition, a friend once mentioned making a decision based on knowing something of non-local events, something he couldn't know anything about, which makes you wonder.  Maybe...  It sounds sketchy, but there is something to that as a possibility for a non-linear experience of time and causation, it's just not much to go on.  Astral travel is a close parallel case.  I'm too agnostic about most things to go in for all that but who knows.  I have experienced things I can't explain but this post isn't about that.