Kraig Adams is a filmmaker, hiker and minimalist living in New York City. I like this dude.
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Intro music: “Brightside of the Sun,” by Basin and Range; “Little Gardens,” by Eric Vitoff; “Faith,” by Joshua Redman; “Smoke Alarm,” by Carsie Blanton.
Wow, this conversation made me feel OLD and somewhat depressed.
I wonder how many young people out there share Kraig’s sentiment that we humans don’t have free will and we should just resign ourselves to let A.I.’s make all our decisions for us. I guess I reject that notion for the same reasons I don’t feel the need to share every single moment of my life through social media. I do keep a (private) sketching journal, though, and I do write and draw in it with a sense that maybe someone outside of me will care to read if long after I’m gone; but even if that’s wishful thinking it makes for an interesting mental exercise about what would ‘posterity’ find interesting about my ‘thoughtcrimes’, like Winston Smith in 1984 writing his diary for a future he cannot possibly comprehend –and yeah, I just realized that in that novel Winston was somehow forced to WRITE the journal by influencing forces that escaped his attention. Maybe Kraig is right and we humans don’t have free will, but I’m not sure if a society built upon that premise would be much of an improvement.
Re. what you said in the intro when you criticized Jordan Peterson’s ideas about how the ideal family is the one with 2 parents, but he never considers the possibility that 3 or more would then be better than 2; that’s something which happened within my own family: My mom’s dad left when she was very young , but my grandmother would not have thought of herself as a ‘single mother’ because she and her two daughters had the support of a whole network of cousins, uncles and aunts that looked after them. So my mom grew up with at least two or three paternal figures instead of just the one she would have had if her dad hadn’t left, and if you listen to her talk about her childhood, you do not perceive one iota of sadness or frustration; on the contrary, she always tells us she grew up very happy, despite the fact they were poor –well, ‘poor’ by 1950s standards, which is WAY ABOVE those of today, economic propagandists be damned…