degringolade

Got a couple of loads of laundry in the machines, read my emails, and generally waking up to another day. Yesterday was pretty successful, walked down to the public library and managed to snag a study room where I dashed off chapter 18. I rewarded myself with a small beer and a big soft pretzel at the bar around the corner from the library.

Been thinking about writing lately. Since it appears to be my hobby in my dotage, I am thinking about the structure of what I write and how I write it. It is amazing how the past sixty-some-odd years of sentience and experience have shaped and limited my way of thinking about writing. For years I was a technical writer, produced literally reams of paper outlining the how-to's of performing technical tasks. Everything had to be nailed down clearly and in a manner that the folks doing the work could have a reference beside myself.

I think that this approach doesn't work especially well for writing in the here and now. When you get to the point where you can write and think about the subjects that actually are interesting to you. That is one of the reasons that I am attempting to write fiction.

Whenever I try to think about and write about truly important issues (free will, the nature of consciousness, the fate of the earth, etc.) the problems themselves seem to be too damn big with too many variables for my feeble old mind to handle. I can sometimes get a glimpse of what is happening, but it is like looking into the back of the beat up old mechanical watch that is in a box somewhere in my apartment. The thing has a glass back and you can (if properly handicapped by marijuana intake) watch the visible gears and escapements move around and imagine that you can understand the mechanism. But that is hubris. When I do that, all I can see is the layer of complexity close to the glass, and knowing, but not understanding the layers underneath.

Right now I am veering off into the nature of free will. It is a sticky one. But anything worth thinking about is sticky. In a sense, when David Chalmers coined the phrase "the hard problem", I tend to think that maybe he should have said "problems". Because there are a bunch of interrelated quandary out there that still haven't been addressed to my satisfaction.

Or maybe I am just stupid.