Dried French Sausage

Today I'm supposed to be being creative. As it's far too cold to go outside, this mainly means eating saucisson from the fridge. Like most things, saucisson tastes better straight from the fridge, as the naughty frisson of eating it devoid of civilized accompaniment (eg bread) gives it an extra zing. Until the fifth slice, when I have to eat a little gherkin get rid of the layer of pig fat coating the roof of my mouth. I am contemplating making a sandwich with the one pitta bread I know is left in the freezer, and half a tomato left over from yesterday. But a sandwich would constitute a sort of proto-meal, which would spoil my lunch/tea/dinner (delete as applicable for 4 pm), and I just can't live with the guilt.

Laura is angry with me, as she knows I'm supposed to be being creative, but doesn't consider eating dried bits of pork as a valid form of personal expression. I think she's a cultural fascist, and consider proving it by writing an insightful blog posting on the culinary delights of artisanal French meat products, although the saucisson we have was cheap and a bit tasteless, so I decide against it.

Alternatively, I was thinking of writing something about Susan Blackmore's article on free will. She doesn't think it exists, and from pictures of her on the Internet, it certainly appears that her hairdresser at least is lacking any internal supervisory system.

I went to see a talk by her when I was a student. I remember her being really captivating; she was talking about memes, which is a pretty captivating subject anyway, but she was a particularly engaging speaker, and I bought her book afterwards. At the time it was a pretty radical to talk about applying evolutionary theory to culture, and she was seen as a bit of a maverick; her past life as a parapsychologist probably didn't help her scientific credibility, to be honest. Now the term "meme" seems to have fallen into everyday use (at least among nerds like me), and it looks like she got it mostly right.

In yesterday's article she suggests that we should reject the concept of free will in the same way that most intelligent people have rejected God. I think I generally agree with her - it's certainly a bit weird to have a legal system based on a clear distinction between sane ("I did it because I wanted to") and insane ("I did it because my brain made me"). It's pretty clear that most (all) cases fit the latter category - no-one seems to have come up with a very good explanation of what the first would look like.

Nevertheless, I can see of few problems with actually doing away with the whole free-will illusion as advocated by Blackmore, not least that we'd have to let a lot of not-very-nice people out of prison. One solution might be simply to re-name the prisons "treatment centres", and give them all a few more comfy sofas. If we're honest, this is basically the path we've quite rightly been going down for the last 100 years or so anyway, as we gradually take the whole old-testament-revenge part out of the equation. Even so, I'm not sure society is ready for that kind of liberalism yet (those Daily Mail readers can be a pretty aggressive bunch).

So for the time being I propose that we hold on to the free-will idea as a pragmatic white lie. A bit like Father Christmas (social control of children) or Homoeopathy (social control of hypochondriacs).

I'm off to eat more stuff (I think there might be some processed cheese behind the tonic). I just can't help myself.