tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30025356582491859232024-03-13T15:07:47.995-04:00Catalytic NarrativeWriting toward crystallization of narrative plots to something more like poetry. Poetry is for adepts, but anyone can tell a story, right?Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.comBlogger646125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-62849263803945498562024-02-28T11:25:00.000-05:002024-02-28T11:25:52.470-05:00The Three Body Secret of China<h1>The Three Body Secret of China</h1><p>Some time back in maybe 2016, when I was routinely in Shanghai working for an American College which wanted to build a bridge between here and there, I became aware of the SciFi novel then known in English as <b>The Three Body Problem</b>, by Liu Cixin. Of all things, I learned of the book by way of Facebook, where Mark Zuckerberg touted reading it and touted himself by proxy.</p><p>Now I’ve grown to detest Facebook for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here, but mostly because I’ve always been socially shy. It was a work-necessity at the time (across a VPN while in China). But I learned about the precedent-shattering Hugo award, and I even watched Zuckerberg mimic an American tech-titan in a cringe-worthy imitation of Chinese. I’ll give him credit for trying. I won’t give him credit for much else.</p><p>While trying to build my bridge, I would routinely speak before large groups of Chinese students, and sometimes - after I’d read the book - I would ask who had read <b>San Ti, </b>its Chinese title. I was surprised that only a few would raise their hands, though my survey was not an accurate count. The book has its subversive undertones, which might have kept hands unraised at the time. </p><p>Amazon was viable then in China, and I had a physical address in Shanghai, so creating my Chinese account was trivial. I had amassed enough WeChat cash to purchase the three-book collection for a song. It was a pretty easy read, not exactly packed with those pesky four-character expressions or too many erudite literary allusions the way that <b>Card Apprentice </b>was when I translated its 600-plus chapters uncredited and for a pittance while wandering across the US trying to understand Trumpism. I was translating for the Chinese on-line literary equivalent to <b>The Voice</b> or whatever we do over here on television that I shall never watch. I was indeed a party to, and part of, the modern version of <b>They Shoot Horses, Don’t They</b>, or a six-day ride-until-you drop bicycle race. Not pretty.</p><p>Hey, let’s put on a show! Let’s get rich on the desperation of the intelligent masses. Let’s transform our economies to something even worse than capitalism and make the people love it! It’s all free, after all! The money pump to the top is more efficient than ever, post-industrially speaking. That’s what tech means!</p><p>Along my travels, I was told about the child of an acquaintance of my sister who was starring in an upcoming Chinese film about the story of Edgar Snow and <i>Red Star Over China</i>, which I’d obviously read, since I’ve obviously studied some about China.</p><p>Now Kenan Heppe, who played Snow in the film, comes across as a rather caricatured American, reminiscent of Zuckerberg’s self-caricature, and is criticized for that. I think that’s how he was cast though, and he played the part brilliantly. Zuck is just a tool.</p><p>Way back when, I spent some hours trying to figure out if either film was ever made, and never could. That was when Covid was hitting, and frankly, penetrating the Chinese web remains deuced difficult by reason of a kind of language and ordering that is still more different than Chinese already is from English. I gathered that production of <b>Three Body</b> was suspended for various reasons, having less to do with Covid than with cinematographic cultural reconfigurations. I watched some atrocious clips. And then I forgot about the whole mess. </p><p>Now, in the midst of another great China-America chill which makes me glad I never did build that bridge because it would have crumbled if not from Covid then from America’s continued ignorance about China, I find myself curious again. </p><p>Low and behold, there is a Chinese TV series called <i>Three Body</i> which is easily available now to continent-bound me, by way of Peacock. And that unnamed American piratical (when I point at you there are three fingers pointing at me, nenerneenernana) mega-service had the Red Star film for free. Navigating cross-continent subscriptions remains tricky for me, and the price differential can be mind-boggling, although I may still have some yuan in my WeChat account. Hmmm. In any case, Amazon in China, having my now defunct Chinese phone number on its mostly defunct service, is well beyond me anymore. </p><p>So here’s the point of my meandering post: </p><p>Each of us is a strange attractor by way of coincidence; we are attractors mostly for links which none of us could make solely on the basis of hard work. None of us can master what is really true in cross-cultural relations. All of us are subject to prejudice, and all news is slanted, at least by the prime directive to get your attention. </p><p>But I shall and must confess that I wept while watching the Red Star film. It was a fine representation of China’s founding hagiography. I saw myself in my own youth, since the actor somewhat resembles me at that time. The film was also a morality play meant to remind the US of old promises, and the way we once were. Both cinematic productions are old by now, just as I am.</p><p>Anyhow, I’ve dived right back in to reading <b>Three Body</b> for yet another time, with my old-age Chinese on my crumbling China-based tablet. I know that I was thrilled by the first read. But there are deeper harmonics for me now. I doubt that anyone even yet knows how profoundly this book has altered China’s sense of itself, and our relations with China. </p><p>These twin experiences have given me new hope. </p><p>End of Message.</p>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-30560154779609036042024-02-19T08:49:00.002-05:002024-02-21T10:24:59.060-05:00It's About Time<p>I said I'd stop this. I'm old and I'm tired much of the time. I'm always in pain. Not debilitating pain, but the kind that makes you not want to kneel, lift, climb and so forth in anticipation of how it will feel. I exhibit many of the signs which most people refer to as lazy. I'm certainly lazy in my writing. </p><p>Way back when I hit on what I thought then, and still think now, was an important reconfiguration of how we conceive of understanding, I was certain that the upshot was so obvious that all I had to do was prime the pump and then some more qualified individual would take it over. </p><p>Indeed that pattern has been my conviction about how things work. If Einstein hadn't come upon his theories of relativity, someone surely would have. After all, these are matters of truth - or what I prefer to call truing - where, over time, all of us must agree. I don't tend to credit genius as much as an exuberant first to the finish line. Perhaps you might say that so-called "genius" is a grant from the Fates, which it surely is. But a winner does require skill and training to luck into a win. </p><p>A lazy ass like me can almost never be a winner. Well, I'd say, based on work I've done and jobs I've held that I am not a lazy soul. But I sure am shy of winning. </p><p>Lately, I've been making the unsupported claim that time is a conspiracy of life. Then last night I watched a fairly pedestrian biographical look at Einstein, on Netflix, and realized that I'd better do a bit more work here. </p><p>Among the quips tossed off by the actor playing Einstein - all credited as the actual words of Einstein in writing or in speech - was one about time. Something like "no future to look forward to and no past to regret". I find this online: "The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Close enough. </p><p>But Einstein's theories only showed that time would slow according to relative velocity of motion, I don't think he ever demonstrated, in his thought experiments, that time could reverse. Subsequent physical models have required time reversal - a kind of reverse causality - as a feature of our cosmos at its extremes.</p><p>So it remains unchallenged and therefore unexamined that on the macro scale, causality defines the material cosmos. That's the basis for how the scientific method sets out to understand the way things are structured, and the way that they work. Prediction is the thing, and it should, ideally, be based on a schematic model; a theory. I understand something, scientifically, when my predictions are true, to within some acceptable margin for error.</p><p>In a way, I would like to broaden the meaning of "understanding" to accommodate what most of us mean when we say "understood." We live in a time of radical mistrust of authority, which must relate at least a bit to the complexity of elite theorizing. I think that the cosmos may be rather simpler than the experts let on. I continue to believe that this reconceptualization will be good for us all. And by "good" I don't refer to the good life, but rather to life that is good for everyone. A community of man.</p><p>But most of us who read at all know that there is this pesky matter of quantum theory, also triggered by Einstein, which prevents, in principle, knowledge about causality beyond certain limits for perception. Indeed, most accepted versions of the theory have it that the investigating subject cannot be removed from the observations; that any attempt to measure - to pin down - what is happening has an impact on the results. Objectivity is dashed beyond a certain scale. </p><p>Now way back when in my youth I was troubled by the twin paradox in classical relativistic physics. In my thought experiment I had to reduce the cosmos to just two elements, each of which would leave the cosmos of the other were they moving relative to each other.</p><p>I understand that the paradox has been rubbed out by math, but however those formulations are made, they don't resolve the thought experiment for me. It's trivial to realize that objects in relative motion eventually fall out of touch. But for me, the trouble was that 'out of touch' meant impossible of relation in the direction of what I consider to be 'multiple cosmos solutions' to knotty physics problems. Talk about a violation of the principle of Occam's Razor!</p><p>In a material world, there are only forces and objects, and all relative motion must be accountable to those. I surmised that there must be a conceptual relation apart from forces and objects, without which there couldn't be a singular cosmos at all. </p><p>Without forces, these relations are static; they form concepts or ideas. When they change they do so according to the quasi force of emotion. But emotion is an apprehension rather than an imposition. Still, it is real. The shape of a crystal is real and realized over time. It seems to tend in the direction of some idealized geometric form. </p><p>We humans are used to distinguishing natural forms from artifice on the basis of shapes which tend toward ideals, discounting the spirals of the nautilus for their very complexity; their no two the same quality. </p><p>Now here's where my laziness kicks in. I simply don't know what the consensus is about apprehensions of intelligence. I know that the creationists are crazy, but I don't know that the evolutionists care enough about how unlikely evolved "natural" forms are. I differ with their usage for random.</p><p>Over enough time, the random processes of evolution begin to look similar to crystallization; as though revealing a kind of hidden structure - the manifestation of an atomic structure "underneath." Might we ourselves not be conceptualized as the manifestation of some latent structure of the cosmos? Something only manifest over time. </p><p>I would maintain that time is directional in either the materialist or the evolutionary sense only as a conspiracy of the whole. Furthermore, there is no purely physical resolution to the conundrum of time's arrow. </p><p>Here I make my lazy leap, that, therefore, time's arrow is a function of the evolution of life. And the attention given for the measurement of quanta, whose existence in a particular locus in space-time as required by an act of measurement, is demonstrably absent prior to the measurement being taken. The "thing" measured demonstrably exists in a measurable, or at least estimable, cloud of probability. There are waveforms which pervade the cosmos, until they are collapsed by impingement.</p><p>My own impetus for this kind of thinking was to resolve - or to "understand" - the many "meaningful coincidences" that I, and I suppose all of us, experience in life. It seemed too lazy even for lazy me to attribute these to God. There had to be something missing in our treatment of random. In all things, I took some clues from China.</p><p>Probability relates to chance which relates to random. It is my contention that emotion is what turns the attention of the measurer to the object being measured; passionless though those operators of the perceptual apparatuses may seem. I am redefining usage for emotion to where it is never absent and is never just some quality of the higher forms of life. Emotion is apart from, but essential to, the materialistic outlook.</p><p>If there is consternation about the weirdness of quantum mechanics, it seems to focus on the absurdity that conscious measurement determines the disposition of reality. Or call it conscious attention. I understand there may be argumentation about whether, and if so how, consciousness might be an aspect of everything. A kind of panconsciousness. Some call it panspiritualism, panpsychism or maybe "analytical idealism" the way that Bernardo Kastrup does.</p><p>I'm trying to make this all much simpler. In my understanding (haha!) it is emotion which is pervasive. And emotion is not something that is possessed, any more than forces are. Emotion is a relation, as is force, and it constitutes the apprehension of forceless motion; meaning, really, that there is a correspondence between the motion happening "over there" and something "familiar" toward or away from which it is moving. </p><p>I don't wish to imply that there has to be an apprehender. I'm only trying to distinguish from perception, which is material implication. Emotional implication is what entangles the twins of the twin paradox. A sense of potential oneness. This is also the superposition familiar to researchers in quantum computing. The connection of distant particles, by definition as I'm suggesting, is an emotional connection. </p><p>At the mega scale at which we operate, all that means is that the particles are connected by a "knower." There is no other way to define both the separation and the oneness. Knowledge then consists in a correspondence between models in the mind and models in reality beyond the mind. The match is an emotional match. Reality can't be defined without it. I guess that I must confess that I also don't think "mind" implies a knower. Mind is a distributed quality of matter when that matter takes a form. Mind conceives, while force is required for perception. And exchange of percepts or what we sometimes call gauge bosons (I think).</p><p>Or in other other words, the search for strange forces or time un-bound exchange of information is fruitless, and shall forever be. Information theory is strangely agnostic about means of transmission, which makes information seem disembodied, which, of course, it can never be in reality. There has to be something to count; whether "packets" of zeros and ones as transmitted by wifi or ethernet or light pulses or whatever. The information is sent and it is received. In the case of superposition, there is no transmission at all. There is a definition for identity which is far more extensible than the resolution of the twin paradox ever need be.</p><p>Well, I guess and suppose that this is all about as clear as mud to you, though it is as limpid as ether to me. I remain convinced that this shift to understanding can and will make a difference, and that it is as inevitable as Einstein's part I. Part II is where we neutralize the power of the bomb because we realize that it is only love which is holding it all together. No matter what the Right Wingers tell themselves, truth does matter. A lot. </p><p>Let's start telling it.</p>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-52746927063781243752024-02-19T08:32:00.000-05:002024-02-19T08:32:04.288-05:00Interregnum: Grey Gardens and Pale Fire<p>You will recognize by tortured non-native English my affinity for Nabokov, who is quite unreadable in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Fire" target="_blank">Pale Fire</a>. I depended on meme-literate offspring for the existence of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_Gardens" target="_blank">Grey Gardens</a> (I watched all three renditions). But it is by the strange happenstance which orchestrates all our lives that I witnessed and read both renditions, gape-mouthed, within a very short interval. </p><p>It is strange that either of these works existed in the first place, and stranger still that they have survived. I could say the same about myself.</p><p>I won't recommend the works, mainly because of each their obstinate impenetrability. And yet they were fun for their makers, who must all have felt no choice in the matter once it began. The creative world of media was certainly strange during my childhood. Stranger even than now.</p>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-69969358032889441242024-02-14T11:55:00.000-05:002024-02-14T11:55:09.769-05:00The Really Big Picture<p>Across the span of my lifetime, things have changed with almost breathtaking speed. My tendency, which must be the tendency of most everyone as they grow older, is to disparage the changes. So I have all these possibly fake memories about how workers once took pride in their work, and devoted themselves to a lifetime craft. I remember my own jarring discovery in my youth on a bicycle, that each city looked like any other with the same ugly shopping strips sporting the same ugly shops and bright neon-analog touts.</p><p>I've watched and tasted good local eateries replaced by automated franchise outlets, and national brand-names supplant local trusted merchants. I grew up in a house with a fallout shelter, and I remember "helping" to build it. World War II replayed incessantly across the same television networks which helped me cheer our arrival on the moon.</p><p>Or, in other words my upbringing left me blind to racism, sexism, ghettos of poverty, except in retrospect. I was insulated from deficits in health standards or building standards or how much industry was changing and despoiling the landscape. Until Lake Erie died, which changed the course of my entire life.</p><p>By the time I was a conscious adult, computers had already infested banking and supply chains and would soon infest education and commerce more generally.</p><p>Now, on a macro scale we see any and all kinds of trust dissolving into an unholy mess of conspiracy theorizing. I know it's attraction. I remember reading about the Bildebergers in a tract out in the territory where Bo Gritz was as prominent as Jesus Saves billboards. I could feel the panic and outrage as it fitted itself to my doubts. Somehow now the billboards and the tracts have become coarser and even further removed from reality. How quaint it is really, that it was a Google divorcee who funded the bizarre retro respiriting of JFK with the likeness of his nephew. The flaw not quite being the nutty nephew, but rather the already weird and unreal conception we've all inherited about JFK himself. </p><p>Judging by how one stream of filmic zeitgeist has developed, many of us are transfixed by apocalyptic endings. History can and likely must be jarring in our technological streaming age. It's never the same river anymore, in a way as different from what Heraclites might have meant when he spoke or wrote of flow and change. </p><p>We still think that at least a part of the change has included improvements to understanding, to knowledge, to security, and even to decency. If things are not getting better that must be because of a moral failing. Indeed it is.</p><p>Like a ski jumper, there can be no doubt that my life has spanned the end of the geometric curve which represents the scientific and industrial revolutions. Guilty! Any sort of geometric curve ends not in quasi-parallel trajectories to eternity. It ends in explosion. It ends in a leap.</p><p>I hope for an explosion of consciousness, let us pray.</p><p>So many people now apologize for Trump by calling him honest, honorable, not part of the swamp. We crave a moral compass now that we accept unvarnished appetite for the way an honest honorable and clean person <i>should</i> behave. </p><p>Others challenge you to find an honest or decent politician anywhere. When did that become a proper defense for the moral vacancy now in ascendance on the Republican side of the aisle?</p><p>Anyhow, the thing about all understanding and knowledge is that it must build within a kind of master cultural narrative. The feeling of understanding is really the pleasant feeling of meshing with the larger understanding; our cultural zeitgeist. One person's understanding, these days, is another person's woo woo conspiracy theory, or religious dementia, or depraved hedonism. </p><p>The kinds of Kuhnian shifts which really change our minds are at least analogous to cultural clashes. At least that jarring. </p><p>Now we seem to have fragmented into a kind of heaving swamp of mini-cultures clashing in ways as subtle, changeable and confusing as what the world looks like through a kaleidoscope, without the wonder.</p><p>What could possibly bring us back together, now that commerce is the only thing which can truly define the overall appearance of our living landscape. Commerce based on wants and needs which start with food, shelter and community and end with abstracted lusts for those same things writ larger and larger and more and more complex. How much of our enthusiasm do we spend anymore on things that really count. Do we even spend a relative dime on sustainable permanence? Should we?</p><p>Or are we locked into a collective supposition that we can collectively achieve a kind of perfection in our systems? A supposition which seems indistinguishable from driving over a cliff in a mad paroxysm or joy at the ride. </p><p>When we despair about "biodiversity" we've reduced the earth to a matter of complexity. By some measures, our complexity has increased, especially if you're focused on data, which is a focus on tabulation which is a focus on a false information theory based misapprehension of intelligence. What we obviously need are sets of better metaphors. To fret about biodiversity is to ignore the possibility that the destruction is equivalent - and I do mean morally equivalent - to the destruction of each of our own bodies. We are killing ourselves for the sake of dead metaphors. </p><p>Frankly, we're doing it because we're having too much fun. We dance on earth's corpse. </p><p>*sigh*</p><p>Well, I started this quest by the instigation of meaningful coincidence, or what <a href="https://www.meghanogieblyn.com/" target="_blank">Meghan O'Gieblyn</a> calls "doublings." I felt at the time - <a href="https://www.catalyticnarrative.com/p/where-i-started.html" target="_blank">when I was a younger man</a> - that I'd figured it all out. I have to confess that while I may be wiser, like Joe Biden, I may have lost some acuity. I can't quite bring back that Eureka! sense. </p><p>I had something to do with a basic realization about the structure of the cosmos, and I know that it didn't challenge any of our materialistic certainties. It only drew limits around them. Those limits were fundamentally premised on the "function" of chance in reality. Not just in genetics, where it might be almost obvious, but in our daily lives. I experienced a kind of euphoric sense of amplification of the quite ordinary observation that most of what determines who and what we are is not a predicable function of material reality, but rather a complex interaction among more factors than we can catalog. Emotion defines the thrust of those factors, just as emotion defines how we make our decisions, rational or otherwise.</p><p>The essence that I have retained is that there is a more expansive definition for emotion than the limited and limiting one we intuit in our naive - as in "naive physics" - ways for making sense. When we despair of our destruction of biologic diversity, we also, at the same time, arrogate to ourselves the obligation to make it right, which goes right along with our guilt for the destruction.</p><p>We are simply not that important, and all of our metaphors, dead or alive, have it that we are of cosmic importance. We've refined that to some measure for "intelligence" which is the thing we hang our collective hat on. As though that were the core function of evolution and of life.</p><p>Well, I do declare that our naive understanding for intelligence is indeed an important aspect of life's evolution. But we should hardly omit the certainty that earth will not go quietly into the dark night of eternal nothingness. The totality of life on the planet is not in accord with our contemporary notions about what intelligent life is doing. On the scale of politics, we have obviously demonstrated most our idiocy as stewards of anything at all. </p><p>Borrowing mildly from Chinese, as I often do, intelligence without what in the West is referred to as heart is not intelligence at all. When we put orgasmic irresponsible thrilling performances of love front and center in the guise of triumph, success, and performative joy, we are ignoring and not embracing love. To say this sort of thing will not make me a popular fellow. I'm positively anti-economic thrusting. We have to cut it out.</p><p>*sigh*</p><p>We have to stop searching for any postscriptum to the standard model of physics. It's no longer about force and particles. There are force-free conceptual relations which compose the structure of eternal ideas, though I don't quite mean what Plato meant (the first real book, honest, that I ever did read was Plato's Republic). </p><p>The ideas I refer to are not eternally static. They move, and that motion is what emotion describes. Before Apple patented the i- prefix, I was already calling it e-motion, just as a kind of joke on what we're most proud of.</p><p>Well, I might be signing off for good. I'm getting too old to make good arguments, and nobody is paying any attention anyhow. </p><p>*sigh* </p><p>I must repair my house and car. It didn't use to hurt so much.</p>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-55578283783762617982024-02-12T10:06:00.000-05:002024-02-12T10:06:06.686-05:00Super Bowl PredictionsJust like Tracy Chapman, ha, I drive around in my old car. Too much money going into it after too many miles. But it's a stick shift and has no interest in guiding my driving. I scoured the universe and there are no more manual transmissions on the market. And I've had it with rehash of someone else's driving habits being pawned off against my own concocted penury.<div><br /></div><div>A tipping point for me. Driving is dead and so should car culture be. Buying electric is a vote for a future I don't even remotely want. I want my city back from Robert Moses, and don't we all now? Vegas can't even do Formula One right!</div><div><br /></div><div>I wrote about eating at the restaurant at the end of the world, the one which targets the inhabitants of Mcmansions. All of whom spend at least some time in Vegas. What were we thinking? Let gambling in and the NFL will be better? Richer, sure, but . . .</div><div><br /></div><div>I went to Vegas once and it was mind-blowing. Never have I been so panicked than when crammed by a funneled crowd of strollers at a choke point in the storied sunset walk though and past all the competitive free shows.</div><div><br /></div><div>If TayTay were performing at half-time it couldn't be more over the carrot top who might yet be our president again. His swan song will be to impersonate Elvis let us pray. What are the odds. Haven't we invited in all the terrorists of the planet for this one? How will it start and how will it end. Will anyone even notice what is being kicked off?</div><div><br /></div><div>The only places I would still like to drive anymore are in the flyover realms off season. I would like a walkable city with parking at its perimeter and plenty of convenient mass transit thank you very much. Bicycles a-plenty where all the beefy guys are nice.</div><div><br /></div><div>I will watch on a wall-sized low-res projection, even as TV prices still incredibly drop. I will make wings in Buffalo, coals to Newcastle, over the airwaves. Missing Hunter S. as my wheels are already smoking, my engines belching fire over which rainbow reboot? He shot himself for what?</div><div><br /></div><div>Anyhow, what's being kicked off is the end of this whole mess. Everything reverts to local, where there actually do remain politicians who are public servants, and who knows, maybe we'll stop paying attention to the global once the media starts its inevitable crumbling now that the interconnections exceed the actual knowledge to keep it all going and safe and worth interacting with. Now that everywhere is pretty much the same.</div><div><br /></div><div>Let's start with the Post Office, how about, located at the very origin of our brand of capitalism, and put Facebook back where it belongs there. Separate out the product from its delivery again. We'll devolve expertise back local as well. Prices will recalibrate with working class wages and nobody will abide the megawealth of sports or media superstars because what's that all got to do with me.</div><div><br /></div><div>I like my music live in intimate venues. Welcome back, Buffalo, and may the Super Bowl recede from importance in all of our recollectivism of community activism. Don't come rushing in to where we'll have drinkable water without climate catastrophe for a lot longer than you will. We will dig ourselves out from our automobile destruction a lot more quickly than you will, by hand if necessary, without the panic of New York City.</div><div><br /></div><div>Vegas will melt down from desert heat. The coasts will be inundated. It's a sign that many of you will find us during the eclipse. Darkness at Noon. Ish. A sign of the times. Groucho not Karl, we shall move beyond the twin models for totalizing labor at the expense of real work. Real human work. MAGA. Communism. Same thing. Whatever.</div><div><br /></div><div>Any end is always a beginning. Go Bills!</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">* * *</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>Well, for sure the Bills didn't win. I was rooting for the Chiefs despite TayTay, and they did their end thing in then end, which maybe we'll learn by next year. I'm keeping my old car, I guess, no matter the cost. It's my service for the sake of the world and so that I don't hate driving. </div><div><br /></div><div>It's interesting how much infrastructure can be destroyed how quickly, in Ukraine or in Gaza say. So it's a good thing that our world is now built of cardboard? Has that been the plan all along? Build it and they will come to burn it down. And then we can reinstate, as it were, our art. Reclaim beauty as a public good. Find a way actually to know our neighbors and talk to them. Let go of guilt and outrage both, because they tend so much to become their opposite which never seems to resolve in the direction of love.</div><div><br /></div><div>I don't know. A bunch of the family went to Niagara Falls the day before the Super Bowl, indulgently and somewhat embarrassingly crowding around my wonderful granddaughter as she was treated to the aquarium. A mostly deserted place on the American side, and mostly deserted by Americans as most strollers were speaking other languages. And it was that rare thing for this winter. A sunny day.</div><div><br /></div><div>Who knows why the ice boom was put up this year, the first year really in a while that it held back no ice at all. So few years ago it was busted by ice which scraped the low lands bald. </div><div><br /></div><div>And as we did with the Peace Bridge, we will debate to death our dire need to rid the city of cars instead of coddling them. Until the car culture dies its natural death, too long after I'm gone for me. So long. The Peace Bridge undercapacity was solved by an obsession with terrorist crossings, making it so unfriendly that casual trips to Canada, by boat or by car, have become too cumbersome to be a pleasure.</div><div><br /></div><div>The most amazing thing about the Super Bowl was that with tickets costing a minimum of a couple grand, and a maximum of a few hundred K to average 11K a pop, there was a streaker on the field, adverted to carelessly by one of the announcers. What's the backstory to that one? A bet redeemed? An actual football fan who bares his or her chest routinely and spent their entire fortune just to be there? Surely no rich person would risk the attention.</div><div><br /></div><div>God knows. Yeah right, we all need our comforting fictions. My wings were great!</div><div><br /></div><div>I do take comfort that wisdom and grace do win out when nature takes its course. We'll get over this because we have to. We shall continue to evolve, like it or no.</div><div><br /></div>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-56271701443937458192024-02-09T06:18:00.001-05:002024-02-09T06:18:21.615-05:00Reading with Indigestion After the Pandemic<p>I lay mostly awake, almost in a panic, from too much unaccustomed rich food and wine. My seeming fevered imagination recalls the day's peregrinations in search of a stick shift car. Inside the ones that I could have spin endless rounds of mindless interconnections. I want to drive dammit, not to be driven. I need at least to picture what is going on.</p><p>Automobiles now like golf carts, even reminding you when you approach a hole; prompting you to look up from whatever doomscroll passes on your phone. In my forced awakeness I catalog shopping trips. Rude memories of empty shelves for toilet paper may have been part of the impetus to install a squirting toilet seat. At least I won't ever have to fret for pinching shit between my cheeks, though I do discover that my skin there is tender now when forced to wipe. Perhaps frozen raw by my lack of wherewithal to make the squirting heated. <br /></p><p>How much flour shall I keep in reserve? How much pasta? I measure the balance between nearby store and my shelves and shall never again be completely calmed by how close it is.</p><p>Rolling along overfilled tailgated lanes past almost unbelievably ugly squat structures sporting touts for this and that, without even any hint of architectural digest. It is abomination cast in fake stone. Getting even worse by the flashing lights of delivery vans right in my lane.</p><p>Of course, I am attempting Nabokov Pale Fire as the simpler alternative to Finnegan's Wake which shall never be worth my bother, or the Recognitions which inevitably shall be. Metanovel, what? Oh please. Exposing the structure is interesting only to dissectionists.</p><p>Hypertext progenitor, I do actually own two Kindles and can, therefore, move easily back and forth between the cantos and the cruel send-up of all academics, true to my own experience though that may be. I am rather more sympathetic.</p><p>There are roads left to travel, though not many. Not very many at all. We suffocate in sameness.</p><p>I feel it all fall apart. We all do, but won't admit it. Our landscape the fever dream of getting by and shooting for the very top. We drive the landscape of raw greed, and where's the advancement in that? </p><p>I truly have no understanding of what, truly is left of the attraction of, say, the Himalayas. To climb perchance to die and along the way to make everything worse for your efforts. I'll watch the filmic version and be plenty excited enough. There are plenty of real heroes, locally.</p><p>I was treated by my wealthy friend who had the good sense or good fortune to inherit scads of Eli Lilly. The restaurant so self-consciously tasteful I knew that it would have to be one of at least several in a chain, though it touted a chef of its own. There was utterly nothing fine about the food and so where is the line between a Macmansion and the superstar houses depicted as a kind of pornography on or through our webs? The taste is all gone. My digestion has aged is all. </p><p>Shall we survive this our maturity on our planet. Perhaps small enclaves, but where it the art? Wasn't there something good once?</p><p>Where is the love? It would seem that the king of our Amazon wanted only large tits. My boat is more fun to sail. Bush free for the sake of grinding beef. Really? Is that all that there is? I don't even want an automobile anymore. I would rather walk or ride in the company of nice architecture. Nice people, well read and fed and led by those who at least know how to read.</p>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-82740018488907833482024-02-06T09:43:00.000-05:002024-02-06T09:43:38.605-05:00What Emotion Means for ConsciousnessAs you must know by now, gentle reader, it is my burden to convince you that emotions are at the core of what it means to be conscious, even at an animal level. Just as emotion pervades the cosmos, which would never move without it. <div><br /></div><div>I don't believe that I am a panpsychist, being rather more attached to the successes of materialism than those folks seem to be. My take is more limited. I take rational consciousness - of the sort which enables us to fix and build things and to get to the moon and back - to be a human quality; a quality of humans alone.</div><div><br /></div><div>What I don't believe is that emotions arise only at some point in the evolutionary process. Along with Steven Jay Gould, I don't quite believe that evolution is progressive, teleological, or tending toward completeness in understanding or fulfillment. Evolution is life, driven in the direction of love, and is no more forever than the sun is. We're in a shady moment now.</div><div><br /></div><div>Love is not necessarily a force for progress.</div><div><br /></div><div>Emotions are as there at the beginning as elementary particles are, though they don't avail themselves to perception. Emotions are more directly felt - they are the only truly inner feelings. Emotions move without any rational consciousness at all. Interactions among Platonic ideas, if you will. Though nothing is eternal.<br /><div><br /></div><div>The researcher <a href="https://www.catalyticnarrative.com/search?q=Solms" target="_blank">Mark Solms has convincingly demonstrated</a>, and cited others who have demonstrated, that consciousness does not require our "higher" faculties; it requires the stem more than the convoluted surfaces of the brain. Emotive awareness is a direct response; a weighing of the odds which requires no more calculation than does the attitude of a leaf which wants the sun.<div><br /></div><div>I am no researcher. I am an interested party, convinced that we are on a very wrong track with what we think intelligence means, and free will, and how that all might relate to evolution and our very existence. To think that we can design our way out of life is to believe that you can lift yourself by your bootstraps. I think this matters, and that those who are researchers need to be nudged by random others, before the consequences of our misapprehensions play out their massive consequence. Our world will not endure our contemporary cleverness; our heartless AI designs.</div><div><br /></div><div>Like everyone I've ever met anywhere, I spend a lot of time trying to figure things out. Mostly, like everybody else, I keep these things to myself (except for here, haha!), though I may have a talent for eliciting the everything thoughts of others. Not sure.</div><div><br /></div><div>When I mention 'heartless AI designs', that does not mean that I think AI research is somehow evil. I just don't believe that it can lead anywhere close to what it means to be human. Except, perhaps, by abreaction. Like all research, AI research can move in many directions. It's the remoteness from ordinary thought that makes it suspect. We've already ceded so much of our reason to the upper echelons, which is plenty enough to explain the Trumper backlash. We need to stop this. Stop ceding our local initiative.</div><div><br /></div><div>For sure, I am not as willing as some researchers are to discard the possibility that there will still be a godhead, no matter our apparent progress toward more and more complete understanding. I am quite willing, however, to discard religion, which is fundamentally the play of patriarchy; and a perennial goad toward its power. I'm still not sure if or that my godhead differs in any significant way from the panpsychists' sense that consciousness is everywhere in everything.</div><div><br /></div><div>No, I think I meant the idealists, Bernardo Kastrop style for whom my godhead is his cosmic mentation. Mentation still feels like a kind of direction to me; something that tends toward completion. I'm not sure that there's anything wrong with Kastrop's thinking. I just a little bit unsure that it really adds anything or resolves anything. That's because he seems as emotion-voided as the physicalists.</div><div><br /></div><div>Well, enough of that blather. Because I am convinced not so much that I might be right about what consciousness isn't as I am that it's not what most researchers on consciousness seem to think that it is, I am rather more interested in human tool usage than most seem to be. And less interested in design.</div><div><br /></div><div>As a boat rebuilder (I'm not bold enough to build from scratch, nor can I see my way clear to becoming a builder, any more than I could become a researcher), I find that there are two approaches. The one builds on experience, but engages in back and forth with the results of the building at various stages until a serviceable and beautiful boat is revealed. The other begins with a design - on paper, if you will - which the builder endeavors to realize as nearly as possible. </div><div><br /></div><div>I am and shall remain much more enamored of the first sort of boat-building. I guess it feels more "organic," and therefore more real. It allows for triumph that's closer to the grass roots. It never favors the rich and the powerful. I still drive a stick shift, idiot that I am.</div><div><br /></div><div>I find my own attachment to tools to be emotive. There is a feel to tools and their usage, which is quite on the border, for me at least, between physical feel, which is a quality secondary to perception, and the more direct feeling of an emotion. Direct feeling in the mind is that in which consciousness consists. An emotion is only ever obliquely mediated by perception. I say that because emotions are always prior to conscious perception. They turn our attention, so to speak. </div><div><br /></div><div>Just about the only thing I take actual joy in is fixing things. I'm good at it, though not professional good. Git 'er done kind of good, but my work lasts. I'm old enough to prove it. I'm also old enough to be losing the joy in the fixing. A certain kind of energy is required for that. I'm losing it.</div><div><br /></div><div>And yes I do mean something akin to what <a href="https://g.co/kgs/6n7iCfP" target="_blank">Zen In the Art of Archery</a> describes. Attempt for too much precision and you miss the mark. As an item of trivia, this is the book I've given away most in my life. But I'm no purist. I do use electrically powered tools now, where my emotional feelings are mostly engaged in the sharpening. I no longer use them free-form, though I once did with pretty darned good accuracy.</div><div><br /></div><div>Zen in life involves accepting the inexplicable accidents as a part of the life that you have rather than a distraction from the life that you (think that you) want. Want too much and you miss all the good stuff. Of course that's easy for someone loaded with as much social capital as I have. My desired contribution to helping others is by way of a quest to improve our understanding of what life is, and by inference therefore our understanding of what it isn't.</div><div><br /></div><div>Our brutish behavior toward one another is not a necessary part of civilization. Our brutishness toward others demonstrates only our own lack of civilization. </div><div><br /></div><div>Now, for sure, as always happens, my relation between perception and feeling raises a kind of chicken/egg problem. For me, that is only a milepost on the way to what we generally mean by consciousness. Does it happen first in bacteria? In plants? Is it only ever a matter of relative speed? Over a long enough time, the world does evince a kind of consciousness overall, or so some would say.</div><div><br /></div><div>But we are not aware of any "other" for our earth, nor of the necessary bicameralism of its thinking apparatus. Each of those dialogical processes is required for rational consciousness. Or any kind of consciousness; there is no such thing as a unitary solitary lizard. So far as we know so far, there may be such a thing as a solitary unitary earth.</div><div><br /></div><div>I rather think there is no consciousness in plants, although there are other sorts of researchers who think that plants have feelings too. I can't seem to get that far, though it may be that plants are so integrated with our own thought-based chicken/egg sets of dilemma and paradox that it would be hard to disentangle the relations. There are "plants" within the boundaries of our skin.</div><div><br /></div><div>The moves of plants - toward or away from the sun, for instance - surely mimic our own feelings toward homeostasis, as Solms would have our feelings work. In any case, up through the food chain, plants provide our energy from the sun. They are, at least, a part of consciousness.</div><div><br /></div><div>And so I raise yet another reason why there are no digital tools, in the literal sense of tool. At least, I claim a mild distinction between "proper" tools and metaphorical tools. In our language now, we seem to like to paint with a brush too broad, and don't always notice, or want to take note, about when a particle has become a meta-particle, or when a tool has gone meta too. </div><div><br /></div><div>For me, tools represent a reversal of the ordinary vehicle/tenor vector toward meaning beyond what words can say. A tool is not like a hand; a tool extends the hand to make the hand like a tool. Sometimes there is love in the touch, though almost never by way of a tool, once you're meaning human to human love.</div><div><br /></div><div>And I'm not so enamored anyhow of the metaphoric conceit. I think that's because there always seems to be a direction to it, analog at least for the direction for history that most of us in the West - which means almost all of us altogether now - seem to believe is progress. </div><div><br /></div><div>As metaphor, a tool points, as I say, backward, to the thing itself. The hand, say, or the teeth or sometimes to the eye or the ear. I have now on my bookshelf an actual telescope from the age of sail. And it's still functional. And wooden and brassy and gorgeous, in its way. </div><div><br /></div><div>I have said, very early on, that the skin provides a kind of boundary to when words become metaphorical. Head of state, hand of the market, foot of the mountain kind of thing, expression of the self or of a bladder. Our body is what we know intimately, while these others things can only be pointed at. The soul, say. God, maybe. Sub-atomic particles certainly. Mathematical constructs which happen, in the aggregate, to work, mathematically speaking. So long as you don't try to pin them too exactly.</div><div><br /></div><div>But now plants may indeed feel, though I doubt they're conscious. Lizards are surely conscious, but they don't have will. Not free will anyhow. Nope, one needs reason to have free will. The body moves and the mind takes credit. After the fact.</div><div><br /></div><div>Back when I worked with computers and networks, I really didn't know as much as plenty of the rest of that crowd. But I was the better trouble shooter and problem solver, and network systems developer. I think pretty much because I knew how things worked and how to fix them. I had some sense that others lacked. I had worked with my hands and with tools. Actually, in fact, when gathered as a group, by Novel or by Microsoft, for example, we tech managers were all aging baby boom liberal arts and portly schlumps.</div><div><br /></div><div>Tools are extensions of the body. They give the mind room to calculate; the sharper the tool the sharper the mind. One must take the time to sharpen and hone if one wishes to cut the uncarved block and not to cut oneself. Break the skin. Outer the blood, and let the aliens in. </div><div><br /></div><div>If one wishes to think, one ought to do it by a tree, the very way that Kindle pictures reading. Leaves. Which the tenor, which the vehicle? The both do move in mysterious ways, one by wind, one by reading and round and round the qi flows, where it stops nobody knows.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>Come in, my friend, come in. It's warm inside. There is no metaphor where qi is flowing.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>Well anyhow, our trouble now is that we've allowed everything to move up, up and away. There is almost no decision-making to be made locally anymore, with finance capitalism funneling it all to the mystical top. Money is the beating heart of artificial intelligence. </div><div><br /></div><div>When restaurants and grocery stores and hardware stores were owned and run locally, there were smart and informed people involved with local politics. Sure, they had local prejudice and shortsightedness. They needed to be invaded by the feds now and again. Whatever.</div><div><br /></div><div>Most of us have abdicated our responsibility to try and understand life, the universe and everything. We prefer to entertain ourselves to death. In rough order of descent, let's start with religious abdication, go through hedonistic apologia down to the basement of utter depravity. Call that one lust for power.</div><div><br /></div><div>At the lowest level one becomes an avatar and not a person. A reflection of the depravity of at least and at most the half of us. Consciousness depends.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now nobody knows who and what to believe. Otherwise smart people think that it's OK to put a zero like Trump in charge. Should have been tossed out with the bathwater. There's nothing there after you wash off all the dirt. But things are so bad that really people are just excited to blow it all up before it turns into their personal nightmare. We can't even share our nightmares anymore. </div><div><br /></div><div>Like maybe SBF is fundamentally innocent, since it all comes out OK after the wash when the Ponzi schemes rebound, and maybe the board members she sold ought to have been sent up instead of Grace Slick Thanatos, I mean Theranos. Would Harvey Weinstein have been convicted if he looked like gay Rock Hudson instead of like a troll? He picked me up as a hitchhiker when he was part of Harvey and Corky here in Buffalo - music promoters - and I just wondered how someone so young and dorky, wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, could afford to be driving a Buick. A Riviera, I think. Maybe. He was very nice, not like those creepers who sometimes wanted to grab my leg, but always let me out when I objected. Thanks God I could be threatening. Look, I always liked the guy's films.</div><div><br /></div><div>On the whole we're out of whack and off our balance. Getting it together globally on the planet is proving much more tricky than we seem to have anticipated. Like, who could know that fascist piglet Giorgia Meloni could be good for Italy's economy. Mama Mia!</div><div><br /></div><div>So now I'm trying to read Dennett et al. on humor. I can only try to read now, I am so decrepit. But along the way of my read, they make a vague claim that the two uses of "funny" may be universal; the one leading to involuntary laughter apparently so-called as Duchenne laughter, and funny as in my stomach feels funny.</div><div><br /></div><div>Try as I might, I can't find that distinction/identity preserved in Chinese. I'm not native enough to say this with any certainty, but funny haha is just "laughable" in Chinese, and funny/weird is just "weird." I think this all goes along with yin/yang couplet versus metaphor pointing toward universal truth. There is no irony in Chinese, though the Chinese themselves don't seem to know that. This, to me, goes along with humor, as in funny haha. The word for humor in Chinese is actually a phonetic borrowing from English.</div><div><br /></div><div>Irony requires eschatology, teleology, eternity, and God. China is always glossed over, even by the Chinese now. The literary couplet as the major figure of speech is being glossed over. Funny. </div><div><br /></div><div>So anyhow, AI is nothing new under the sun. It's been codified in our economics since we started thinking that we could and even should take over the earth. Scientific and industrial revolution, same thing, The joke's on us. AI has long since taken over.</div><div><br /></div><div>God and Confucius walked into a bar. Both of them needing a drink. 'On me!' says God. 'Oh no,' says Confucius, 'you have no credit down here. This one's on me!' Wanting to honor the Chinese courtesy, God defers to Confucius upon entering, who then says, of course, 'oh no no no, after you,' as must be said to any foreigner. Now God in his certainty that he was the ultimate, the one, the only God, says back to Confucius, 'It's true that I have no credit here. Might I borrow the coin to treat you?' 'Let's flip, says Confucius. Head for yang and tails for yin.' So God flips the coin and it comes up. </div><div><br /></div><div>It is sad to me that our American attempt at universal democracy is failing so miserably. A part of that sadness is that we won't admit Chinese as equals, though that only means that we're returning the favor. You won't yet quite really be admitted to China as citizen unless you have Chinese blood.</div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps the world requires the othering of peoples. Rural urban east west divides, not to mention north-south. Perhaps our ultimate awakening depends on this dialogic process, and perhaps there will always be blood. I had hoped not. </div><div><br /></div><div>A dream for final understanding is but fantasy. Progress is not good unless you know toward what. Understanding doesn't ever lead to meaning. If you buy too many new things you'll lose track of what you like. If you practice love with too many lovers you'll lose the possibility for love. These obvious truths are at odds with our current behaviors on the planet. We should really get a clue.</div><div><br /></div><div>What we really need is slack.</div>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-5588783904645963962024-01-28T08:54:00.003-05:002024-02-03T13:19:49.015-05:00False Oppositions<p>Oh, how I do wish that my voice were equal to my task. It is late in my life, and my references are disappearing. And yet still I know things. I have experience in certain matters. </p><p>I'm not so sure about what knowledge actually is, but one way to consider it regards the ways in which knowledge might bring us together. I still believe that this is the basic function of the scientific method. Science is a process of truing, and not a search for any truth. It operates in a limited and limiting aspect of our shared reality; it's basically about how things - physical, perceptual things, work.</p><p>No matter the efforts of psychologists or sociologists or sexologists or humorists nor certainly artists, those efforts will not further the truing of science. That might mean that these are all the most important pursuits.</p><p>Here's what I have watched quite intimately, and never mind the references: The state has transformed from a wobbly flawed people-driven shambles into a mighty administrative empire which can't leave go of militaristic hegemony. As though there were no choice. </p><p>Educational institutions have morphed from teacher owned and driven shambles with a governing board, to the analog of the state, top heavy with highly paid administrators and faculty expected to attend only to their classes, leaving their own destinies and the institutions' destiny to the massive class of governors. </p><p>Where once it was the case that friends and neighbors would repair your car and your house, depending on a mutual sort of trust, there now are systems micro-managed from far above shoving costs an entire solar system away from where they once were; even reputation is managed from afar. There is a cheat sheet to keep you on the up and up.</p><p>All local businesses, and here I mean restaurants and hardware and lumber stores and certainly sawmills and planing mills for house-parts, are in the charge of national chains, as are dentists offices and most medical specialties. </p><p>The inducements are inexorable, as what owner can refuse the offers from invisible hedge funders, to be able to retire comfortably in Florida? But all that expertise moves away from local to some cloud of finance. Nursing home deterioration is but the canary in the coal mine. </p><p>My first motorcycle trip through the south was chock full of wonderful local places for breakfast or for barbeque, full of local color with a chef who was the owner. More recently, it's all Popeyes or Chic-fil-a with lines of cars out into the streets, no local knowledge or expertise required. </p><p>What, really, is the difference between those arrangements and the pharmacy giving me a quart-sized jar of opioids for a broken bone? And that was a long time ago. Surely those drug companies understand on some level that they are shooting up the veins of the entire country. Flood it and they will want more.</p><p>A small manufacturer once explained to me how "Wall Street" money comes in to set prices on chock-full shelves beneath what any local owner can possibly set. Walmart perfected this predatory process, destroying almost all local stores, where the clerks once could raise their families based on intimate knowledge of their stock and its uses.</p><p>By now, we don't even need a product on a shelf. Get mind-share and whatever replaced Wall Street funding will come flooding in. We've ridden a wave of cheap crave food and nearly free movies to the loss of the very soul of the nation.</p><p>Which is fine, since the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_community">nation was always an invention</a> and not some found reality.</p><p>Christianson so-called creative destruction is hardly creative. Technology, so far, is basically a pump up to the finance classes. What we call artificial intelligence is as old as everything above. Put simply, there is no heart to it.</p><p>Now yes I do enjoy my ability to watch streaming films, and learn on Youtube how to dismantle my cheap but wonderful little speaker so that I may replug the circuitboard connector ribbon and get it to charge again. I enjoy my aging laptop, which is good enough now to have outlasted any computer I've ever had. Lots of things are getting better and better, and even seem cheaper and cheaper for a while.</p><p>Most of all, I enjoy the revelations of science, disseminated farther and wider than ever before. </p><p>But underneath it all is an unnecessary divide. We can untangle ourselves from all of this mess, if, once again, we find some common ground on which to stand. That might even mean to find some common standard; a goal around which to rally and for direction.</p><p>Part of our distress is due to the eradication of local news that's fit for print. Another part is the echo chamber of social media. But it's possible that the the main part of our trouble is simply not knowing what to do with what we do know. </p><p>Like in some sense many of us worry about the end of it all, or the ends of it all, as in we "know" that everything ends according to whatever scale you might choose. Some are distressed that even the earth has a life-span, and so we're desperate to accelerate some process for escape. That tends to lead us in the direction of too much reliance on what we already do know which means, in turn, to discount the far more vast reaches of what we don't know.</p><p>Those who don't worry about our ultimate demise, simply because the time scale makes the concept tend toward abstraction, might still be worried about our more proximate demise. That would be the sort that is, strictly speaking, avoidable. The climate change, nuke the planet, eradicate too many species poison ourselves to death kind of non-abstraction.</p><p>Overall, we discount the possibility that life is bigger than this life or our life. Yet life may be as large as the cosmos, in ways we're simply not prepared to understand. Making our local lives better might even be at odds with the nature of life on the grand scale. We may be on the verge of discovering just why it is that all the living species of the earth are a part of each of us, and we are not and cannot be apart from them. </p><p>We may even be on the verge of discovering that the evidence of life elsewhere in the cosmos is not and never shall be where we're looking for it, not to mention discoverable by the communications vectors we deploy in the search. </p><p>We need to get it together in the here and now before we can be ready even to think about the hereinafter. The ever after. The coda, the swan song, the end. </p><p>Is war materiel really as necessary as we think it is, or is that the same kind of flim-flam which bought us Walmart and destroyed the meaning of market pricing. What we need is a sort of world democracy which respects difference. My very own son-in-law has a fully referenced outline to make a start.</p><p>But he doesn't get how things work. I don't mean in physics sort of way, I mean in an embodied tool-bearing kind of way. Sure, now I can't remember where I read something or who said this or that. I find the gas burner left on at the stove where I cooked my breakfast. We have a new totem word for that: Alzheimer's, like Cancer before, it strikes terror into the heart of a man. It's hard to fall asleep anymore against fantasy fugues of my sore-tooth jawbone rotting away in my head.</p><p>It takes a while, but I can learn to change my suppositions and ways of operation to always turn off the burner <i>before</i> I remove the pot, and to check the knobs for position each time I leave the stove. Problem solved.</p><p>I brush my teeth so very meticulously, wishing I had realized then what I know now, including even the knowledge that it's far too late to be meticulously preventing the decay of my whole mouth. The workaround costs a lot more money than the cost to keep my stove off. I wonder now, when will I lose my balance to the point that I can't climb up to clean the gutters? I am meticulously careful, taking no risks anymore, but I won't be doing it forever in any case, end or retreat.</p><p>Almost none of us recognize what Hannah Arendt fully recognized a while ago; that the concepts of capital and labor were both refined by Marx. And that communism and 'rules-based-world-order' capitalism are two sides of the same coin, in artificial contention. Both ideologies are terminally focused on an end-game, a steady state, an allegory homologous with Christianity or any religious what-you-will. </p><p>The classes delineated are caricatures, like Chairman Mao's Big Character Posters, simplifying everything for Mickey Mouse. The fantasies of a re-enchanted end-time where life will be all honey and roses.</p><p>To oppose Marxism to capitalism is to perpetuate a meaningless contention for the sake of those very very few who benefit from it. In either case labor expands to fill the all, but for the administrative class, the owners, the party members. In Arendt's terms, labor is that aspect of life which is necessary for survival. Everyone has to participate, but it's not meant to consume your whole life else what's our humanity for?</p><p>There isn't all that much labor to accomplish just for the sake of living. Work is the stuff that makes us human, but it's not what's necessary. Work is what's desirable to make conscious human life worth living. Both Marxism and capitalism expand labor to consume the life of the laborer; both for the sake of bankrupt ideology. When there's no time left for the work you really want to do, you've been denied a life.</p><p>By a measure of the low fertility which overtakes prosperous economies as represented in the New York Times, the real danger to the continued viability of our contemporary means for living may be the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/18/opinion/human-population-global-growth.html">drastic depopulation of the planet</a>. (why is that an opinion piece, I wonder?) Perhaps that will happen in coordination with the flourishing of the rest of earthly life, or perhaps it will happen in concert with earth's demise. The choice is ours to make.</p><p>The choice has to be made by action, which means politically. qua Arendt. Population in the aggregate is not a political choice. It happens organically, based on other choices. Well, except for fictional dystopias. Sometimes dystopia feels very real, however. Like when women are forced to give birth or forced to abort. When lives have to be sacrificed for the lack of shelter. When the labor to live is overwhelmed by the 'creative disruption' of the very essence of our lives.</p><p>By definition, the hyper wealthy are those who wish to escape the human condition. This is no definition for merit, except in our particular capitalist dystopia. The rest of us are left with the petty joys of local entertainment; escapist films, professional football, and alcohol, always wanting to be rich enough to really live it up. </p><p>Well enough of that. If you want Cassandra then read poor ol' <a href="http://indi.ca">Indi </a>anymore. He's simplified and whittled it down to race-based good and evil, and those of us who are white might as well just go to hell, because by being stowed in a sack of learned helplessness we don't even know where to start.</p><p>We've built infrastructure which can't be repaired because where once road building and later rebuilding and still later the laying of sewers all happened in times when the basics could be afforded because there was not the overlay of sophisticated military-industrial complex finance capitalism on top of it all. </p><p>So that now it would be impossible to dig up the streets to lay a parallel sanitary alongside the decrepit and environmentally dangerous mixed storm and sanitary because there is no bond issue that can be made so big. First it was houses that had to be mortgaged to eternity, now it's college, and soon it will be our infrastructure, since the wealthy separate themselves easily enough from "our" infrastructure, where the we that is us just hate each other to death anymore.</p><p>We don't have to look far into the future to see this exponential curve terminate. They can build proper infrastructure in Gaza now, can't they?</p><p>The trick is to find a way to live a social and non-toxic life right now, in our present, having the start as we have here in Buffalo, to rectify our sewer and water delivery systems. To know that we are moving in a direction where capital doesn't overwhelm all else. Where we admit that there is no weapon system, no matter the cost, which can or will impose our will on the rest of the world. Anymore. Drones of the shelf can beat us any time.</p><p>All that we need to do is to get started, one foot in front of the other, and start with the low-hanging fruit. Healthcare, housing, food, sewer and water how about? True pricing without Walmart economics. When the price without insurance for a blood test is many multiples of the cost with usurious insurance - literal pennies on the dollar - can't we call it obvious that something is out of whack?</p><p>There is no technical fix. And for so long as we're made to hate one another because we come to our realizations by different paths, we shall never be able to find the real, social, political fixes. The ones right in front of our faces.</p><p>And so I no longer know, on a minute-by-minute basis, what to do. There will always be more books to read, even though I limit myself to those that will energize me. I know enough about the house I live in now to know that its needs will exceed my life. There will be no end to it, but for endless piles of money. And even those will prevent my ever living here, since there is far more disruption from the workers whose work I must follow closely because nobody really knows or cares how to repair and maintain things anymore. We live in a modular modulated economy of terminal panic.</p><p>I must follow the work closely not because I mistrust the workers, but because their shrift has narrowed its focus such that painters won't take care of carpentry, or even notify you when bad work is exposed. There are storm drains to clear in concert with the demolitions, and to install in the garden against the pooling, and there is insulation above the attics and my very body rebels against my own suiting up against the filth revealed, from across the years, from a roof removal, from the past.</p><p>Oh, how I do want my little travel trailer back, its flaws so contained, my needs so limited, but now the tow car has flaky wiring and is as beyond its useful life as I am. There is repose only in the dying. A life in full well-lived.</p><p>My trouble is simple. I already understood what I needed to understand, but have passed that prime when I could tell it. A failure in full am I. And yet I do have some satisfaction in that knowledge, since there are much worse ways of success. </p><p>To have had full voice and to be heeded would be worse even still than the tragedy of the commons. Whatever I have that counts as knowledge is worthless without it belongs to everyone. It needs not my name.</p><p>Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' father by the same name wrote a poem, with which my literary friend thought I was obsessed:</p><p class="pfirst" style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify;"><span class="dropcap" style="float: left; font-size: 4em; line-height: 1; margin: 0px 0.1em 0px 0px;">H</span>ave you heard of the wonderful one-hoss-shay,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">That was built in such a logical way?</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">It ran a hundred years to a day,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">And then, of a sudden, it—ah, but stay,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">I'll tell you what happened without delay.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Scaring the parson into fits,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Frightening people out of their wits,—</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Have you ever heard of that, I say?</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Seventeen hundred and fifty-five.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"><i>Georgius Secundus</i> was then alive,—</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Snuffy old drone from the German hive!</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">That was the year when Lisbon-town</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Saw the earth open and gulp her down,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">And Braddock's army was done so brown,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Left without a scalp to its crown.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"><br /></p><p class="pfirst" style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify;"><span class="dropcap" style="float: left; font-size: 4em; line-height: 1; margin: 0px 0.1em 0px 0px;">I</span>t was on the terrible Earthquake-day</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">That the Deacon finished the one-hoss-shay.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Now in building of chaises, I tell you what,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">There is always <i>somewhere</i> a weakest spot,—</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">In hub, tire, felloe, in spring or thill,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">In panel, or crossbar, or floor, or sill,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">In screw, bolt, thoroughbrace,—lurking still</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Find it somewhere you must and will,—</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Above or below, or within or without,—</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">And that's the reason, beyond a doubt,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">A chaise <i>breaks down</i>, but doesn't <i>wear out</i>.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">But the Deacon swore (as Deacons do)</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">With an “I dew vum,” or an “I tell <i>yeou</i>,”</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">He would build one shay to beat the taown</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">'n' the keounty 'n' all the keuntry raoun';</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"><br /></p><p class="pfirst" style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify;"><span class="dropcap" style="float: left; font-size: 4em; line-height: 1; margin: 0px 0.1em 0px 0px;">I</span>t should be so built that it <i>couldn'</i> break daown:</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">—“Fur,” said the Deacon, “'t's mighty plain</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Thut the weakes' place mus' stan' the strain;</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">'n' the way t' fix it, uz I maintain, is only jest</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">To make that place uz strong uz the rest.”</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">So the Deacon inquired of the village folk</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Where he could find the strongest oak,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">That couldn't be split nor bent nor broke,—</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">That was for spokes and floor and sills;</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">He sent for lancewood to make the thills;</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">The crossbars were ash, from the straightest trees;</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">The panels of white-wood, that cuts like cheese,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">But lasts like iron for things like these;</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">The hubs of logs from the “Settler's ellum,”</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Last of its timber,—they couldn't sell 'em,—</p><div><br /></div><div><p class="pfirst" style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify;"><span class="dropcap" style="float: left; font-size: 4em; line-height: 1; margin: 0px 0.1em 0px 0px;">N</span>ever an axe had seen their chips,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">And the wedges flew from between their lips,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips;</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Steel of the finest, bright and blue;</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Thoroughbrace bison-skin, thick and wide;</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Found in the pit when the tanner died.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">That was the way he “put her through.”—</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">“There!” said the Deacon, “naow she'll dew!”</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"><i>Do!</i> I tell you, I rather guess</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">She was a wonder, and nothing less!</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Colts grew horses, beards turned gray,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Deacon and deaconess dropped away,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Children and grandchildren—where were they?</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">But there stood the stout old one-hoss-shay</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">As fresh as on Lisbon-earth-quake-day!</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"><br /></p><p class="pfirst" style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify;"><span class="dropcap" style="float: left; font-size: 4em; line-height: 1; margin: 0px 0.1em 0px 0px;">E</span>ighteen hundred;—it came and found</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">The Deacon's Masterpiece strong and sound.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Eighteen hundred increased by ten;</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">“Hahnsum kerridge” they called it then.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Eighteen hundred and twenty came:—</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Running as usual; much the same.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Thirty and forty at last arrive,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">And then came fifty, and <i>fifty-five</i>.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Little of all we value here</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Without both feeling and looking queer.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">In fact, there's nothing that keeps its youth,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">So far as I know, but a tree and truth.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">(This is a moral that runs at large;</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Take it.—You're welcome.—No extra charge.)</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"><br /></p><p class="pfirst" style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify;"><span class="dropcap" style="float: left; font-size: 4em; line-height: 1; margin: 0px 0.1em 0px 0px;">F</span>irst of November—the Earthquake-day.—</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">There are traces of age in the one-hoss-shay,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">A general flavor of mild decay,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">But nothing local, as one may say.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">There couldn't be,—for the Deacon's art</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Had made it so like in every part</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">That there wasn't a chance for one to start.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">For the wheels were just as strong as the thills—</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">And the floor was just as strong as the sills,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">And the panels just as strong as the floor,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">And the whippletree neither less nor more.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">And the back-crossbar as strong as the fore,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">And spring and axle and hub <i>encore</i>.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">And yet, <i>as a whole</i>, it is past a doubt</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">In another hour it will be <i>worn out!</i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"><br /></p><p class="pfirst" style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify;"><span class="dropcap" style="float: left; font-size: 4em; line-height: 1; margin: 0px 0.1em 0px 0px;">F</span>irst of November, 'Fifty-five!</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">This morning the parson takes a drive.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Now, small boys, get out of the way!</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Here comes the wonderful one hoss-shay,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Drawn by a rat-tailed, ewe-necked bay.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">“Huddup!” said the parson.—Off went they.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">The parson was working his Sunday's text,—</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Had got to <i>fifthly</i>, and stopped perplexed</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">At what the—Moses—was coming next.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">All at once the horse stood still,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Close by the meet'n'-house on the hill.</p></div><div><br /></div><div><p class="pfirst" style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify;"><span class="dropcap" style="float: left; font-size: 4em; line-height: 1; margin: 0px 0.1em 0px 0px;">F</span>irst a shiver, and then a thrill,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Then something decidedly like a spill,—</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">And the parson was sitting upon a rock,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">At half-past nine by the meet'n'-house-clock,—</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Just the hour of the Earthquake-shock!</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">—What do you think the parson found,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">When he got up and stared around?</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">As if it had been to the mill and ground!</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">You see, of course, if you're not a dunce,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">How it went to pieces all at once,—</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">All at once, and nothing first,—</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Just as bubbles do when they burst.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">End of the wonderful one-hoss shay.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">Logic is logic. That's all I say.</p></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45280/45280-h/45280-h.htm" target="_blank">Thanks Project Gutenberg!</a></div>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-80429970728842258202024-01-21T16:56:00.000-05:002024-01-21T16:56:24.609-05:00The Thrill of Consciousness<p>Hey, I got an actual comment. A first across many years. It was disruptive of whatever it was that I was about to write about. Still, I'm grateful. I hardly even look to see if there are comments to moderate. There never are.</p><p>I remain in the throes of attempting to find out what the real thinkers are thinking about consciousness. All of them seem addled by brain. To me the brain is also important, though not so much as the seat of intelligence, which seems unrelated to consciousness in almost every way. The brain is important because, qua Edelman, with whom Dennett doesn't agree very much, the brain involves as many, or more, interconnections as there are particles in the known cosmos.</p><p>That gives the brain the possibility of microcosm, metaphorically akin to the whole hologram as in how chips from a holographic plate contain the entire image, but attenuated according to proportion. Our consciousness is analogous to being the whole plate, which might contain a sort of image of the all. No, not contain, stupid. As a follower of Riccardo Manzotti's thinking, there is no containing. But for sure the mind mediates all sorts of perceptions to form that analog of a holographic plate which requires lazer light to reveal. The brain requires coherent, rectified, perceptual awareness, but it does not contain that awareness. It projects it, even to the self. </p><p>Each of us refracts the all, knowing only a small aspect, but now, grace science, each individual mind is able to refract more and ever more. This is a wonderful cosmic happening.</p><p>Metaphoric thinking will never be sanctioned as real thinking, alas, but I am an ironist and don't really think real thinking is quite real. I strive to understand, and the measure for my understanding is to achieve such narrative clarity that I might convince the best in the field. But what is the field? Everything?</p><p>If I did have a field, I might manage to be convincing, but then I would be limited by that field. That's not how my mind works, and so it wouldn't be very satisfying to me.</p><p>We can't leave go our objective materialist science, because it continues to work so very well. That's even after we know for certain that there is no objective unimplicated perfect Archimedean stance from which, finally, to understand.</p><p>And anyhow, maybe Steven Pinker thinks that humanity is better off than ever before, as he pals around with the likes of Jeffrey Epstein. I think that our amoral backside is hanging out. I blame it on the workings of money, which is the universal solvent of decency. Along with the quest, individually, to be noticed. Money and recognition rule the world. No matter how much more we might understand, we behave more and more badly, on the whole. I guess I mean that we don't behave at all. We just seek comfort and joy for the nonce.</p><p>Once upon a time, knowing the dangers of mob rule, we did stipulate that the electorate is responsible only to choose wise leaders. Now we choose a kind of absolute zero of humanity because he has perfected the art of reflecting back those prejudicial beliefs that we can't leave go of because we don't and can't trust the leaders and the intellectuals. This danger was always present. </p><p>As was the danger that we will deploy our intellect only to escape the conditions for life. We feel so certain that, ultimately, life will burn out according to physical principles that we bend our full effort to eluding that inevitability. Wouldn't it make more sense to recognize the limits of the very possibility to understand <i>everything</i>?</p><p>Hannah Arendt, who strikes me as very sane, puts thinking forward as what we lack and what we must have for the sake of right politics. But I think she means mindfulness, where mind is more than intelligence and calculation. She foregrounds politics; the social processes of the unwashed as we conspire together about our goals and directions. </p><p>Politicians, as those who make their entire vocation politics, should be a banned category. We now have politicians where what we want are leaders. Leaders prove themselves in other ways from advertising themselves as leaders.</p><p>None of this feels as complex as we make it. We've been doped is all. We think the world runs on automatic, and that there's nothing that we need do, individually, to make it better. Might as well watch another fine movie, play a good game, take a nice trip. The world has a way of taking care of itself.</p><p>Go Bills! (That's how we tell each other to have a blessed day around here)</p><p><br /></p>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-60112674659900123202024-01-19T05:11:00.000-05:002024-01-19T05:11:03.056-05:00The Atheist Class of the Twenty-first Century<p>In some sense, everyone knows that the true atheists now are the true believers. The structure of their belief is so absurd that they are indistinguishable from Disneyland fanatics, who own fully perfected and elaborated costumes and props to keep life meaningful, in an animated sort of way. No wonder, Donald Duck.</p><p>The named atheists, vaguely followers of the Four Horsemen, enthusiastically toss out the baby Jesus with the bathwater, requiring a materialistic cosmos which remains, in principle, comprehensible on the basis of laws and other types of regularity. </p><p>These folks are willfully obtuse about daily miracles, which forms the same kind of willful blindness that the religionists hew to. Willful blindness is the most general term for evil; the basis for Arendt's 'banality of evil.' She must have been antisemitic, mustn't she have?</p><p>To conflate the brain with the mind is to ignore ground for signal, and to suppose that whatever happens happens 'in there.' Which of course it never does. </p><p>I have just passed through yet another grueling and barely survivable holiday season. It's almost as personal as my previous bare survivals - bursting appendix while over the border, PE followed by TIA, both inceptions on Christmas Eve and accompanied by strange coincidence. </p><p>This time it was Mom, and it started before anyone knew that there was anything wrong with her. Well, beyond the normal. For whatever reason, the house I live in, but don't own, became the dumping ground for Mom's belongings, without any consultation with the inhabitant, me. And then Mom had a stroke, and then she died. The uncovering for display had already begun.</p><p>I charged myself to cull and sort the mountains of photos and other memorabilia, and make possible their laying out and sorting and cataloging in preparation for the family gathering during an actual snow emergency, which itself followed the warmest and most snow-deprived lead up in the history of Buffalo, to Christmas. </p><p>Mom's unwrapped crèche, in the same browned paper as ever and ever, was missing the baby Jesus, so I put Santa Claus there. There has always been a santa clause as codicil to my missing will. Gifts for me the gift of being relieved of gifting. I've always been happier to be in hospital.</p><p>Oh, poor long-suffering me, at least I had my daughters and sister to accompany me to nearby ward and to clear out the work-in-progress ladders and tools and coverings; to communicate, to deal with logistics, to remove the wedding band and ring since there is no morgue which can be trusted that way. I hastily built an occult platform in my overwarmed attic to sequester parts and pieces of rehabilitation. To allow for gathering and viewing and dispersal of jewelry in what had been a work in progress.</p><p>To suggest that Mom is some construct in my brain would be more absurd than to claim that godhead is absent from cosmos because there is no there there. Mom has been present in so many dimensions that when one granddaughter sent around the voicemail of Mom, from just before Mom's phone was removed because of the mountain of pledges made to unscrupulous charity outsourced callers, it felt to me a milepost too far. The voice as present as she had been so few days before. </p><p>That was the uncanny valley for me, once constructed of stone markers atop graves where actual remains were buried. Ashes now in the most trafficked part of the old church garden, an honor which still includes the possibility to gather, to reminisce, to mourn at times when the church is not trafficked.</p><p>We all know how harmful religion has been. The false prophet basis for misplaced certainty which leads, inevitably, to war. </p><p>I feel the same petty complaints welling up about behaviors about the family. A kind of judgyness about moral, ethical character-unbased behaviors. I think that this sort of thing is ingrown now. Closeness no longer possible, even in a family sort of way. Get out before I have to invite you out.</p><p>The actual memorial service was scheduled for the zero point of Buffalo's most recent snow emergency. We still carried on, with a group far more intimate for being small and composed of those willing to make the actual struggle and take the actual risk to make it to the church on time. Afterward back to "my" house, where Mom was hosting in absentia with her usual aplomb.</p><p>As the flowers and leftover food was being subjected to attempts to sweep it all away by howling wind and dashing snow, my sister and I wondered aloud, "Mom, what are you trying to tell us?"</p><p>Ah well, my religion is not your religion, nor any religion at all. But that hardly makes me an atheist. Atheists are idiots, by definition. Reclused from public space, as I am. And yet I do know God.</p><p>The notion of a soul, rather like Descartes' discarded and good riddance notion that the mind infuses body in the self-same way, feels indelible. As in, that there is some totality centered on some self and composed of acts large and small and some in speech and some in handling, and that that self persists since, in any case, it is and was absent to those who loved it for most of its livelong days.</p><p>No wonder that some still see, and shall not be disabused of that illusion, the soul depart from body. And yet there shall never be any there there to look for it, the soul. It can't inhabit, for it isn't alive, any more than Descartes' mechanical sub-human creatures had any there there, to him yet not to me.</p><p>Alive in our hearts, we might say, though I say alive in what it is that we do and in artifacts and even by the gravesite. We who are so loathe to leave physical correlates behind yet wonder have they yet been organized by powers beyond the grave. Graven images of Jesus, arisen beyond the fall. </p><p>We must have some object for our desires. Barren when guided by men for a kind of gory glory here on earth. There is no irony where there is no God. Set it to linen and flatten the shroud. The body of Christ. Amen.</p>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-86182101910184004972024-01-18T09:40:00.001-05:002024-01-18T09:40:39.870-05:00Interesting Happenings in the Ivy League<p>When I was unconscionably young, I was named headmaster of a small school for gifted children. The school was founded by an order of Hungarian priests, who'd gotten out just as Sputnik was launching a national defense motivated push for better education of intellectual elites. Scientists mostly. The school thrived for a while, as American hegemony continued to grow.</p><p>The school had been running lazily on the inadequately thought-out presumption that IQ testing was valid, and that such testing could cut through social prejudice against racial, gender, and religious demarcations. Fair enough, as far as it went.</p><p>There was also, at the same time, the fair observation that the tester, who was the founder of the school, would tip the scale according to his personal preferences, and even the need of the school for money. That tended to undermine credibility among our private school compatriots. </p><p>I, personally, had a kind of ingrown skepticism about both intelligence testing and, especially, about the testing industry which was then in command of university and college admissions. I didn't think it was healthy for children to think of themselves according to some stigmatizing scale. I was reasonably well-read on the topic, and handed to myself the effort to reform our own admissions policies and procedures. Wasn't there something, after all, which distinguished students appropriate to our school which was not quite measurable by psychometric testing? Aren't there many types of intelligence, even when restricted to academic settings? History seems to prove that so.</p><p>Along with my maneuvers to become less alienated from the private school community in Buffalo and in New York state, we developed a more rounded admissions process based on committee review of both affinity for our rigorous curriculum, indications of chafing in the available public schools, and, of course, reserving psychometric testing as a check on our own observations, though using an outside certified tester. </p><p>Alas, I had no real chance to see the changes flourish, since the school was in too much accumulated financial trouble. And, also unconscionably, I arrogated to myself two summer trips during critical moments in the school's evolution. That was pure selfishness, possibly combined with exhaustion and a need to get away.</p><p>The first was a previously planned trip to China, organized while I was still a teacher of Chinese. Oh how I did enjoy printing out a pile of name cards in Beijing, using my title as headmaster. In China, this title was incomprehensible when considering my youth. Vanity vanity.</p><p>The next summer I accepted an invitation to Buffalo's sister city in Russia, as the delegate of hizzoner the mayor, Jimmy Six-Pack, who I later sued on constitutional grounds for the right to use a public park to commemorate the Tiananmen massacre. That was also facilitated by political friends of the school and of free speech, and the fact that I had offered the school as dressing rooms for the nearby Shakespeare in Delaware Park season whose traditional dressing space had been removed by repurposing. I had friends in the right places, and got electricity access for the commemoration with the police and Shakespeare on my side. The police weren't so fond of the anti-union mayor themselves.</p><p>It was my goal to make the school both more relevant and more visible to the community. The very public lawsuit caused the event to be extremely well-attended, and the school's name to become better known. But, in addition to a recent history of flubbed management was the evident fact that gifted education had become vaguely incorrect, politically. </p><p>Of course, all children are gifted. But not all in the same way. The kids we taught were disabled by disposition from taking instruction from disrespectful or authoritarian teachers whose own understanding of whatever field they taught seemed less than reliable. Our teachers were required to discuss a challenging written article each week alongside Upper School students, where the field for discussion was levelled outside what each teacher taught. This was our weekly "colloquium."</p><p>I did also endure, on my way toward approximate adulthood as a young headmaster, the required transition of the Ivy Leagues from wealth as the criterion for the chance at enlightened leadership, to the far more vague criterion of "merit." </p><p>Now finally, after dumping some ways for using SAT-type testing as a heavyweight in admissions, in part because of complications of access to testing during Covid, there may be some change afoot. Covid may also have been a convenient excuse to dump the inherently anti-diversity results of such testing, </p><p>Once test-prep companies successfully sued the College Board, which had kept a veil of proprietary secrecy over their tests, upon the claim that their "objectivity" would be compromised by test-prep regimes, the whole regime of testing itself became yet another proxy for wealth. I mean WTF (Who, not What) can afford to prep their gifted kids for admission to the Ivies, whose criteria ought properly to be a plain lottery, once basic competency for the curriculum has been established. God knows that the current de-facto lottery destroys character and self-confidence among would-be students.</p><p>I learn from the New York Times that at least a few professors at Yale would like to see Yale "return" to its proper mission to develop new knowledge. Imagine that! All universities declare that their mission, in one way or another, and yet students attend them mostly to get ahead. I'm guessing the profs are plain sick of that, and want to teach real students.</p><p>For a place like Yale, it must be a hard stretch to go from wealth as the qualification for elite learning through merit (a purely mystical concept, relating only to our peculiar and particular economic arrangements) to something more like affinity for an academic, intellectual, scientific, philosophical, musical, artistic life.</p><p>OK so sure, the ivies have the great professors because they can afford them. But those profs also come for good students and colleagues. Many of the rest of the universities have to be some variant on what my professor of comparative education used to call, and probably still does, the "service university." Meaning, really and broadly, that the knowledge has to be applicable to the economy and/or to the powers that be. </p><p>I do remember my dismay - I was in graduate school - when Yale announced that it would open a school of management. Would this newly reinvigorated old mission of knowledge creation entail the dismantling of the business school? What about Engineering, where I got my start? Forestry? Law?</p><p>I'd say, not necessarily. Even a business school could be engaged in something like an historical comparative study of business. Heck, Yale still doesn't have a school of education, which it seems to regard as vaguely beneath them. This while almost all other schools of education have dropped Comparative Education (which has no practical application to getting ahead in the field of education, unless as a professor at a university which still offers a course or two). </p><p>Anyhow, turning the ivies and their ilk into more genuine universities would put to good use their fine endowments. Who knows, maybe even the post-industrial titans of digital whatever would see fit to further the endowments for the sake of humanity. Hey, it <i>could</i> happen!</p><p>I'm guessing that this actually will happen, along the way of our back-to-the-future dismantling of so much of what had barely gotten started. We never did get very far with our experiment in democracy. As the Trumpers know, we've taken away the dignity of working life, replacing it with get-rich quick soulless digi-life. So many of the unskilled jobs are so regimented that the worker has become the robot even beyond Charlie Chaplin's parodies. </p><p>There is true intelligence to be cultivated in the devolution of ownership back to the local and away from the hedgemonsters. There are better things to do with a life than shill yourself as an influencer. Not everyone needs a university to lead a meaningful and exciting life. I thank goodness on a daily basis for all those talented and experienced Trumper tradespeople and contractors who keep my life going. Sad to say that they are harder and harder to find, though that also means that their pay is getting better and better. Things will change.</p><p>Back to reading Hanna Arendt, for goodness sake. It is her wisdom to point out that capitalism and Marxism are united in the denigration of man as social and political actor. Marx confuses labor with politics and opens the way for Stalin (and Mussolini and Hitler) to use man as raw material, just as capitalists do. Robbed of labor, we have never been liberated for [creative and individuating] work.</p><p>Trumpers, but hardly Trump, know that something is wrong and they want the dignity of labor back, so that they can get to actual work. All of us should celebrate that. In this regard, Clinton(s), for instance, are as misguided as Trump is. Both live in a world where it's the economy, stupid, and where winners are celebrated beyond the democratic reach. The dynamic duo of Marxism and capitalism both exploit labor to end history, by ending work, and denying politics as collective action. </p><p>As I have said time and time again, technology is mostly a pump for money, away from workers and to the top. No self-respecting university should be a party to this. Technology should be a tool to get work done. The result of work might be entertainment, but technology is replacing people in that work. Art has become posture, and the tech is internalized as robotic behaviors. Blech.</p><p>I'd say it's no wonder that Arendt doesn't get credit as a political theorist. I suspect it's because, first, she's a free thinking woman, and second and most because she disrupts the false dichotomy of capitalism vs. Marxism. Each of them is the mirror of the other in the reduction of man to labor without margin. When labor is all that you do, man becomes the raw material for the work of tyrants who use man as their raw material; their palette. </p><p>As mom used to say before she reformed my father, 'I'm nothing but a slave.' Arendt points out that labor derives from the organic and collective need to survive. More individualistic work is the cream on top of being human. And language introduces the possibility for collective, which means political, action. Our neoliberal rules-based order encodes a work-free life, where politics is reduced to whatever keeps the growth economy humming. </p><p>Trump embodies the inchoate complaints of living humans who don't wish to be cogs in that machine. We should listen to him and how he speaks, not because he knows an f-ing thing - he doesn't - but because he is a channel into a collective angst which is important. You don't have to know all the details to know you're being screwed. All the fast talk of the digi-titans boils down to anti-humanism against the whole.</p>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-77773025944320055552024-01-08T11:22:00.002-05:002024-01-08T11:22:22.723-05:00Surely You're Joking, Mr. DennettSince my Mom just died, and I'm thinking a lot about her, assembling memorabilia, and remembering things, I remember way back when I was bombing out from academic physics - really from anything academic - and there was a shallow pool of water in her sink and some machine or other was jiggling it, there was produced a squarish noded pattern on the water, and I pointed to it to say that this is how the cosmos is organized.<div><br /></div><div>She gushed her amazement, which has always left me cringing and disappointed. I've always preferred a challenge to praise, and still tend to hide out rather than to expose myself to social disgraces. I blame Mom.</div><div><br /></div><div>Anyhow, Dennett just seems trapped in brain as entity and its various possibilities for reproduction, representation, origination and creativity. Now I, along with Plato (I guess) don't consider ideas to be something which can originate in mind. They are, rather, a sort of eternal which only mind can apprehend. Creatives (I hate the term. It denigrates so) seem to believe, some of them, that their creations begin with an idea, which, of course they can't and don't. Creativity and all thinking have to originate from outside the self, which is in interaction with all that the physical embodiment of the mind is working with.</div><div><br /></div><div>If there were a limit to God, which of course there isn't, then conscious humans might be other from God and in a kind of interaction which machines can't do. I think that's all why Jesus had to be invented, once you're stuck with a God concept. Machines, rather, become a kind of context for our own minds' informing, and are no different from musical instruments in that way. That's one of the nicer observations which Dennett makes.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>He's very astute with his distinguishing virtual from real, in that with real there are always impingements which have to be gotten out of the way or dealt with, and which inform us in ways that virtual reality can't and doesn't. Virtual reality requires the creation of those impingements.</div><div><br /></div><div>There's no mystery to the apparent beauty of computer generated music, or more recently of computer generated imagery. So what' the difference from the real? Well, maybe not much, except that our minds are now so extravagantly informed by the proliferation of machine assisted creative beauty, to stay limited by what machines might do without us is to abdicate our human obligation to work with it, the machine's creation, instead of to be amazed by it. </div><div><br /></div><div>A paint brush is a primitive machine as such, and I don't think any painter really wants to watch a machine deploy the brush except, perhaps, to discover possibilities not apparent otherwise. </div><div><br /></div><div>I am suggesting that the human being, the conscious mind, is never severable from the real environment of its inception. There is no mind without its perceptual context, and without lots of other like minds. Together, we all form the same kind of lively matrix I witnessed in the kitchen sink with Mom. </div><div><br /></div><div>To remain obsessed with particles when they are better seen as nodes within the context of the all, whatever that is, is just a mind stopper. We know that there is no ether, in the primitive meaning of the term as something which might provide drag or pin down absolute zero motion. But now we also know that there is no perfect vacuum, and that these metaphorical "particles" pop in and out of reality all over the place. It's all interactive. </div><div><br /></div><div>I might even grant to machine simulations of life the same kind of emotion which I believe actually does pervade the cosmos. That emotion depends from conceptual arrangements when the shape of concepts forcelessly transform. Emotion-free physical motion depends on forces. And these forces are never by themselves, just as our metaphorical particles aren't conceivable as isolated items.</div><div><br /></div><div>Upon the medium of the mind then, ideas must participate in a kind of evolution. No idea originates with you alone, but also, whatever ideas you might have will be different from those of an earlier or later generation. But they'll never be yours, though you might be the first to apprehend one.</div><div><br /></div><div>I just finished reading the entire written corpus of Joseph Mitchell during his time at the New Yorker, conveniently compiled into a single quite massive book before he expired. He stopped writing after he awakened to his mirror in Joe Gould. His salary was never suspended, though he never wrote another word. So many poetic types - creatives - were "friends" of Joe Gould. Not only do we invent our projections onto others, we invent ourselves, and Mitchell must have felt a fraud of sorts. Others know better than I could.</div><div><br /></div><div>But Joseph Mitchell channels the language of his down and dirty livers of life in all the grimy quarters of his environs of pre-digital New York. You sort of know, by the remove of time at least, when styles have shifted, that his own voice overpowers the voices he so faithfully reproduces. The result in any case does feel like real life, and the reader - I - is grateful to know life, well, before. Before it was so belittled by, oh I don't know, the oil-powered explosion of humanity. Life seems closer in Joe Mitchell's recitations. Death too, of course.</div><div><br /></div><div>I won't have the chance to interact with Dennett while he's still alive. I shall remain intensely grateful to him and to each of the other four horsemen (well, I don't really know Sam Harris, though my daughter had her picture taken with Ben Stiller. once).</div><div><br /></div><div>I have nowhere been brought more closely to God than in reading Dawkins. It is such a shame that his mind has become right-wing retrograde on social issues regarding gender. Ditto Dennett whose very efforts to disabuse the rest of us from God only cements for me the wonder of existence. I remain radically uncertain as to how those who did finally forsake a clockwork determinate cosmos which could eventually be figured out, went right ahead and replaced it an only subtly different kind of materialism, which won't admit that the unlikelihood for our complexity is the very wonder stuff which Dennett bans from all their models. And anyhow, didn't even Christopher Hitchens go all right wing in the end? God forsaken?</div><div><br /></div><div>There is indeed nothing very special about humanity, as Dennett's alter ego Stephen Jay (not Joe) urged us so eloquently to understand. Of course Gould would have been a better scientist if he had only let go of his religion. It tends to make a person cheat. Intellectually. As Dennett points our so severely. </div><div><br /></div><div>Well, who knows? Not me, that's for sure. I do know that digital reality, which generally means virtual reality, is cut off from cosmos, which is the meaning of on/off zero/one. It's a lousy way to model consciousness, which is far more subtly connected to the all. That doesn't mean that digital hasn't and won't continue to change us, no matter what our beliefs are. </div>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-26903888346667790652024-01-01T08:08:00.000-05:002024-01-01T08:09:12.748-05:00A Resolution for a New YearI have this old car, which isn't old enough to lack the universal connector which throws the codes which tells the mechanic which is the part which likely needs replacing. The part was replaced, but the light show now goes on and off, and I despair that there will ever be any definitive resolution which doesn't implicate rats eating the wiring harness. <div><br /></div><div>I have a new porch with a new light which has two bulbs. Each bulb is the minimum brightness that an outdoor LED light may have, or so they told me at the electric wholesaler. The light is more pleasant when only one of the bulbs is lit, but now randomly the second goes on. Is it even worth the trip up the ladder with head bent back to troubleshoot? This was installed by an extremely competent, experienced, professional but old electrician. Like me, he may not have enough experience with the on/off workings of digital replacement reality. </div><div><br /></div><div>At night my bed is a little bit cold for comfort. I could turn up the heat, but I bought a heated mattress pad instead. The documentation in this case is sufficient to the usage, and I am well pleased. I still don't understand why natural gas costs nearly half of what it did last year, given the war in Ukraine, and then there is the mildness of the weather. I need not be so concerned.</div><div><br /></div><div>I am urged to purchase a new car, since I've poured so much money into this one. But it would be a betrayal of my soul to drive an automatic.</div><div><br /></div><div>Our Earth now is blanketed in electronic debris in outer space, and I manically binge <i>For All Mankind </i>wondering, has it really come to this? Which this?</div><div><br /></div><div>So many people observe that we are like Wile-E-Coyote, having crossed the point of no return, legs still churning in the comic gap between over the edge and the realization of gravity.</div><div><br /></div><div>Meaning simply that we inhabit a seventeenth century world and lack the instruction manual to live in the twenty-first. Since we have never been modern, we can never be post-modern. All that we can do is to accept irony as our final stance. Both/and is not the same as on/off.</div><div><br /></div><div>Our world is so much better now, and yet the oppressed remain oppressed. The wealthy are, effectively, more wealthy than ever in earth's history. They own all of our enthusiasms, which is plenty to keep us down.</div><div><br /></div><div>I make the modest proposal that our resolution is social, and hardly technical. We already know better than to imagine that we can, as a species, triumph over whatever mysterious evolutionary processes brought us to this point. And yet we already know that our failure is certain if we continue to allow our lowest common denominator to prevail. Call it the artificial intelligence of money. Where greed replaces love as the prime mover.</div><div><br /></div><div>Yes, of course, we continue to evolve. We trick ourselves into thinking that our evolution is continuous with all that came before. That ours is the natural elaboration of those processes and that our injection of intention to the quick is right and proper. </div><div><br /></div><div>Which would be so, truly, if our thinking had ever progressed from Newton's. Who dissected dogs while they still lived, so certain was he that they weren't sentient. Whose object was still God and not the Truth. Who is credited with triggering all of this accelerating development, which is geologically explosive in its form. </div><div><br /></div><div>And yet across this particular New Year - the first that I remember which I transgressed without remarking it, even internally. Having been preoccupied with other things. Like picking photos for the slide show for Mom's funeral, some of which turn sideways by the undocumented internal workings of the cheap projection system on which I watched the Bills win, excitingly, nail-bitingly, and barely, yesterday afternoon. My excitement was enhanced by the fact that my little portable but great-sounding battery powered speaker system, which works on boat, in trailer, and even in the rain and was very cheap, like me, was either no longer charging or the charge indicator light went out. </div><div><br /></div><div>Black box.</div><div><br /></div><div>Which is likely also why spell-check no longer works. I supposed Google has gone all AI, because that's the overall trend, and they are now so clever than I can no longer click to repair, but have to type around their over-sophisticated suggestions. My mattress pad delivered on New Year's Eve, late, after the game. Could we even have imagined this world when I was but a child?</div><div><br /></div><div>Nope. </div><div><br /></div><div>And yet there is nothing unfamiliar about it, though there should be. </div><div><br /></div><div>Not even a heated mattress pad provisions my night for sleep, though I was asleep before I heard the midnight noise too close nearby. Which hardly awakened me. It's not commotion which keeps me awake.</div><div><br /></div><div>This morning, on New Year's Day, the New Yawk Times offers a week's worth of fine and tested resolutions of the energy loss from sleep deprivation issues that each of us now, apparently, faces. I have zero hope that any of these will work for me, but hey, I'm game! I slept so easily and naturally until my frequent flying to and from China. I still blame the dietary rather than time-zone upset.</div><div><br /></div><div>I shall likely not be able to let the attendees at Mom's funeral know quite how much I loved her. It was never with my Dad that I could discuss all that was on my mind. She was always my champion, no matter how negligent I was and remain about what I did was doing to her. Dad made all the decisions, and was uptight for that. Not someone you might talk with until we took a sailing trip blind across the Big Lake in his old age. In an old-style wooden boat. </div><div><br /></div><div>Which might have been a death pact of mutual trust. We "landed" by dead reckoning, which is all we had, within the plot where we found ourselves marked out on the charts as "restricted" by reason of ordnance testing, from which we laughingly hightailed out. We could espy the shore by then, and knew right were we were. </div><div><br /></div><div>And so, sure, my dead reckoning does espy the resolution to our contemporary madness. It's rather post-modern, if you can stand that. I'm a mid-century modern man myself, contaminated now by Mom's decorating effluence, which tended colonial as does, well, this post-colonial house.</div><div><br /></div><div>We shall never populate Mars, but not for lack of cleverness. Our trouble is that we've definitively cut ourselves off from cosmos, which is the deeper meaning for digital. The conflagration on whose tail end we live is identical in form to the instant Trinity test by which Oppenheimer's success was meted out and then away. I am no big fan of Christopher Nolan's scientistic fantasies, but he nailed this one. Has he grown a literary heart? Doubtful, but hey!</div><div><br /></div><div>Each of us has outsourced by now the better angels of our nature to the good graces of ambitious people. And what's wrong with ambition? Daniel Dennett has it in spades, as do those Mars rovers for all mankind.</div><div><br /></div><div>What choice do we have? Who among us would arrogate the resolution of important matters to ourself? Who among us would consider themselves to have that expertise? If I can code, you might still pay me very well, but you'd be paying me for the blinders I wear about the bigger picture. Which is identical to C-level corporate compensation. Watch only the bottom line, and learn to speak to the boardroom the way that Steve Jobs spoke to the world. Coders are paid well to have no ambition beyond the code. C-level requires Ivy-grade networks. A death-pact of mutual trust.</div><div><br /></div><div>Reconnecting with cosmos requires humility. And the realization that we've never been apart. Most of our human brainpower is "meant" to be social and not intellectual. Mom was never allowed to make the big decisions, though she had the real intelligence in the family.</div><div><br /></div><div>I still can't find the baby Jesus for Mom's stylish Christmas crèche. No worries. It's someone in one of the boxes, I'm sure. Someday I'll have the energy to open the rest of them,</div><div><br /></div><div>The brain is neither isomorphic nor coterminous with the mind. The mind is spread, though perhaps the brain acts, metaphorically, as a kind of microcosm for the all. Not a receiver of cosmic emanations, though that metaphor might get you pretty far. But an ironically social and intellectual nexus in a kind of living thinking swamp of humanity. The irony is that while we have never been more individually named and free and potentially heroic, we have never been so subsumed in and by the human All. </div><div><br /></div><div>The novel I would write, if I could write, would be the last novel. The hero disappears. I have the whole thing in plates. Never to be finished. The protagonist . . . </div>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-51380925935452645872023-12-31T06:44:00.002-05:002023-12-31T07:20:30.267-05:00I Am No Philosopher<p>I'm not telling you, dear reader, anything you don't already know. I am not a philosopher.</p><p>People blame me for being one, sometimes, just like they think that I have ever tried to "find myself." I have no idea what that would even mean. </p><p>I like Daniel Dennett qua philosopher, since he doesn't seem the least bit cranky. I know his blind spot, though I'll never be able to convince him of that. Put simply, he will go to absurd ends to ensure that not the slightest bit of non-materialism makes it into his philosophy.</p><p>Just now, I'm reading his book called <a href="https://g.co/kgs/cdjTFyk">Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking</a>, which I find quite useful. His thinking exercises tend toward the absurd though, and all are dedicated to erasing any possibility for what he calls the "wonder tissue" which roughly equates to some kind of ghost in the machine.</p><p>Dennett takes great pains to demonstrate that he is not a philosophical bully the way that so many of his colleagues are, according to him. Bullies hold tight to unexamined and unexaminable notions, and berate you if you undercut their arguments. And yet I catch Dennett out using the word "surely" which he doesn't like other philosophers to use (though I suspect he's joking with his readers).</p><p>I don't think that I introduce "wonder tissue" when I find emotion and concepts to be part of cosmos and not some sort of human invention or epiphenomenon. Indeed, I might suggest that I am the more materialistic, since I don't think concepts are limited to mind, as in the human mind, which Dennett equates to the brain. </p><p>Conceptual arrangements of matter are simply static unmoving relations which aren't mediated by the exchange of meta-particles which are what force reduces to in standard accounts of physics. I'm not sure if I just coined the word meta-particle, but no scientist believes that subatomic particles are particulate in any way that would count as real. The term is metaphorical, though metaphor to me, a lover and sometime reader of Chinese classical poetry, is not the be-all end-all figure of speech.</p><p>The superposition connection in quantum physics also involves no forces, being a purely conceptual, though physically testable, relation. No “wonder tissue” required, it's just how the actual cosmos works. </p><p>Now, in measurable tangible reality, we can't ever really capture concepts in the wild. We only comprehend them with and by our minds, which is a kind of apprehension, no? But our mind is surely (!!) not embodied by the brain alone. </p><p>Sure, as Dennett often does, you might conduct reductio thought experiments to demonstrate that you can pare away all parts of the body, so long as you keep the perceptual connections active, and the mind will remain intact, though every other part of the body has been replaced by canonically "wonder-tissue" free material.</p><p>To me, this is as silly as his (is it his?) twin-earth thought experiment, or the robotic spore-like capsule in which some intuition-pump intention laden actual person seeks to preserve himself across some centuries. These thought experiments are far more outlandish than any I could ever cook up. Which becomes almost an exhibit A for why I am no philosopher. </p><p>Materialism dissolves at its fringes, as we all know and as, perhaps, his friend Hofstadter who writes variously about Gödel has proven. There remain conceptual connections in the form of non-force-mediated structures which transpose across those fringes.</p><p>You can still call it materialism if you will, though the cosmos itself becomes far more like mind than matter. Mind pervades our cosmos and always has. I sometimes call that "god" as a kind of placeholder, and certainly not to mean that "god" is some sort of grand intentional intuition pumper.</p><p>Consciousness just doesn't trouble me enough to need explaining. Ditto "free will." Both are distinctive and real things without which we wouldn't make sense at all. The philosophers just have the cart-horse arrangement backwards.</p><p>Leaping free of metaphorical usage, I might simply state that the human being has arrived at such complexity - by way of DNA and Darwinian evolution - that we qualify as microcosm to the cosmic whole. Not a mirror to it, and not, I suppose, some holographic chip off the old block, though that makes a nice metaphor. </p><p>The funny thing is that our material science, continuing on as it has beyond the cosmos-raveling of both quantum and complexity theory, is now more likely to be destructive of the conscious human-being than it is constructive. Our wonder-tissue-free machines have already taken over our minds, and there is nary a thinking soul out there any more. Certainly not the ones who want most to make a name for themselves.</p><p>Well, I'm being a bully, I guess. I'll try not to do it again. I must attend to my spore-like automobile and continue to stare at some screen or windscreen or what-you-will. Go Bills!</p>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-59474866455101447262023-12-30T08:25:00.002-05:002023-12-31T06:45:48.426-05:00Mom Died, and I Am Still Here for this Happiest of New Years<p>Somehow, this puts me in mind of my nephew when he was about five. Our family was together for Thanksgiving, and we were going around the table telling each other what we were thankful for. Memory-challenged Dad was thankful that everything was always new all the time. Taking up the jocular cue, my nephew wondered that since mammals all have hair, and grandpa doesn't but grandpa is human and humans are mammals, then is grandpa not human?</p><p>That was a nice Thanksgiving. </p><p>Mom hasn't been entirely present for a long time. She can't register a thought about whatever it was that just happened. I doubt she even knows that she's not even here any more. But while alive and maybe not even thinking, she was recognizably herself and she did recognize every single person that she loved, by name, by old stories and by familiarity. This was proven when we celebrated her 95th birthday recently, and loved ones came from far away.</p><p>Thanksgiving came and went without her. Every sibling but me was away, and somehow I don't do Thanksgiving by myself. They'd dressed her up in memory care, thinking that she would be taken out. I paid her a visit and sent around her picture of vitality and actual beauty. I had dinner with my ex, at her sister's house, and it was lovely. </p><p>Both of us somehow live out our vow of love for eternity. Maybe the vow is as present as Mom was for her birthday. She was there in spirit on Thanksgiving just because I have mastered her art of making the rolls! The exclamation point is because she always almost forgot about them as we were sitting down, and they were always almost burned. OH! The rolls! I have a post-it note now, under the alarm pad, which says "Stove Off?"</p><p>Had the dinner been at my ex's house, Mom would have been there. I never made it back to see her again that day as I'd said I would. Probably because I'd drunk some wine. Lame excuse!</p><p>As things happened, just before she had a stroke, my sister-in-law had decided that she would clean out some stuff from Mom's storage unit, which is where we stowed the stuff which might be too personal to give away, but which would no longer fit in Mom's ever-shrinking living spaces. Each of her downsized apartments and then rooms still managed to look like her. And as she lay dying, my own house had already been transformed to look like her.</p><p>I'd unboxed pictures and objects, including a Christmas crèche somehow missing the baby Jesus. It's the only sign my house had that it was Christmas. I thought my sister, the only one of us who still keeps Jesus in her heart, must have taken the baby Jesus for herself, when we all were packing up Mom's stuff some years ago. She says no, but I feel better for not having to hold in memory my suspicion. </p><p>Now we are all preparing for Mom's funeral, where I won't speak since I can never be sure that I can hold myself together. And I don't want to fall apart in front of friends and family. Such a cop-out, but I have grown feeble that way. </p><p>Last Christmas was cancelled because of a massive snowfall, which might have killed me as it did many others in our fair city. When my power went out, I'd opened all 9 faucets, hot and cold to a bare trickle, and layered myself with enough outer wear that I soon discovered that it would be my exhaustion and not my freezing to death which would kill me as I left the house to plow through drifts above my chest. The 40,000 BTU water heater ran the whole 80+ hours without electricity and the 1850's uninsulated brick house stayed just above freezing.</p><p>I am always so relieved when Christmas is cancelled. Once it was because of an appendicitis, when I was living over the border in Canada from my newly estranged wife and kids (one still on the way). The Christmas Eve trip to the hospital would have made for exciting film! The very nice customs officer was sure that I was faking.</p><p>The next time was a pulmonary embolism which went the way that Vladimir Harkonnen went when his heart plug was pulled by Sting in Dune from 1984. I may have been that film's only fan. I was on a walk with my icy mountain climbing sister when it was well below zero near my uninsulated apartment when I slumped on that Christmas Eve. </p><p>Now Mom rescued me from not having bought any gifts. I show my love year 'round by my constructions, and have always been repulsed by mercantile capitalist Christmas. Except for when I knew what everyone wanted and was filled with joy at the prospect of giving it to them. Now I am the poor one. Poor me. I don't even own the pot I piss in. </p><p>I feel rich in most ways. I am the beneficiary of love. Graced by good fortune, my social capital overfloweth. Social Security is sufficient, and I have good saving habits. I've worked hard jobs all my life. I'd be a regular guy, if I weren't so white.</p><p>And yet I persist to think and even sometimes claim that I own a wonderful secret that I would like so very much to give away, but can't. I try and try and try, but it remains meaningless to anyone else. </p><p>Like, for just a quick example, I don't think that cars are necessary conveniences. I continue to pour money into the old Outback that was gifted me, simply because one can't buy a stick shift any more. If I must drive, I want to drive and not be driven. I've always loved the road. But I would be thrilled if there were working mass transit and high-speed rail of the sort they have in China; where I could go anywhere in sprawling Shanghai without even thinking much about it. Try that in the orbit of LA, where there might be lots of things going on, but it will take you longer to get there and back than almost any of them will be worth.</p><p>Cars to me are metaphor. They express our capitalist individuality, and as such represent our deadly fictional distance from one another. Cars are human robots, our truest selves now, and our intelligence within is all artifice, expressed with the subtlety of a tweet composed while driving. Musk and the Tesla he rode in on be damned for perpetuating the farce.</p><p>At least when I drive, I am not watching a moving picture, although truth be told I once did watch a Bills game on my mounted phone while I cruise-control traversed one of New York's vacant freeways, no self-driving required. That sure kept me awake! Go Bills!</p><p>While all the world remains fixated on the Sometime Great Notion that the brain is the mind, that the human is a wet robot, that emotion distracts from truth, that God is a delusion just as consciousness is an illusion (I am truly and eternally grateful to Daniel Dennett for these less-wrong assumptions), I remain a lonely holdout.</p><p>I no longer look to quantum physics to explain connection at a distance, and no longer need to denigrate metaphor as a parochial Western figure of speech. I just finished a speed read of <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/567075/god-human-animal-machine-by-meghan-ogieblyn/">God, Human, Animal, Machine</a> by Meghan O'Gieblyn. I am familiar with all her references and sources, but her book was a revelation because she put them all in context. I can only dream of being able to write so well.</p><p>Dennett rids himself and us from the absurd Cartesian theater, only to reintroduce the mind/body split by virtue of an obsolete and newly dangerous notion that the mind is only embodied by being contained in the skull. It might as well be detached. The body composes our universal grammars, Doctor Chomsky, not some black box in or about the brain.</p><p>My Mom kept her language and her consciousness even without her short-term memory. She could even read and write. Her memory loss was a blessing, so fretful and worried had she been before. Trying to understand the strange paths her children and grandchildren took. Loving them just the same, no matter. Even the tattoos and the gender transitions.</p><p>I wonder why it is so hard to see a distributed eternal God, there at the beginning and perpetually here beyond all ends. No anthropomorphizing required, no perfect understanding allowed. Is it still the scientific mandate to remove all wonder? Must truth be expressed in mathematical equations? Do we consider love to be a merely human invention? Epiphenomena of the illusion of consciousness?</p><p>What, I ask, is wrong with love as the definer of time's direction? If evolution is progressive, then it is progressive across time whose only motive is love, apart from decay, its opposition. Yes, Virginia, the world is a better place now, and remains without end Dr. Oppenheimer, as realized by the Inception maker? What?</p><p>On balance, love wins out over hate and greed. Science introduces more wonder than it destroys. Religion now militates against the good, wanting the diktat of order where it doesn't belong. God is not a showman, please.</p><p>This all makes no nevermind, if your only goal is to make it in life. You can't take it with you, but it can be a blast right now! I really really want a motorcycle again, but now is not the season. I want for nothing, that is true. But I still want you to understand that we are not going to hell in a handbasket. </p><p>Love prevails in the cosmos, and always will for so long as we don't replace our hearts with the artificial hearts of those we so wish to admire.</p><p>Happy Happy New Year, and many, many fine returns.</p><p>I love you Mom</p>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-38738861196050228032023-12-26T09:12:00.002-05:002023-12-31T06:46:05.872-05:00I've Been Thinking, Daniel C. Dennett<p>I've been thinking too. </p><p>I just outed myself as a cosmologist, and so I'd better try, in outline form, to sketch out "my" cosmology for what my Spanish teacher used to call the "umpteenth" time. It evolves, I evolve, but I am now, indeed, losing my mind. Not in the nutjob sense, just in the decay sense though there may be room for debate. </p><p>I am almost speechlessly grateful that Professor Dennett has been so generous as to provide his admirers, of which I count myself one, with some detail about his personal history. Though I must say that for me, he describes a life unattainable by almost anyone else, and certainly not approachable by the likes of me. So my grateful inspiration is tempered by a kind of very self-centered discouragement.</p><p>What is my deficiency, I sometimes wonder. I'm intelligent enough, I've had the right background - not all that far removed from Dennett's. I was admitted to all the best universities, though it is true that while Dennett made it there leading up to the cusp of administrative overreach, I slid down just the other side of that sharp divide. Metrics for merit. Blech. Not to mention the insurmountable expense obstacles that have kept piling on.</p><p>Once upon a recent time, there weren't so many hurdles so well defined if you were outwardly gregarious, evidently multi-talented, and not timid about approaching beautiful and accomplished people, and, obviously, white. Dennett had and has these qualities in spades. </p><p>Except for being white, these are all graces which I lack. I mean I'm perfectly comfortable around important people, and can pull a pretty good game of name-dropping if I have to, but I suffer a distinct deficit in capitalizing. On anything. </p><p>I'd like to claim that this is because I'm after bigger fish. Bigger than a career. Bigger than renown. Bigger than credentials or even income. But the likely fact is that I'm vaguely agoraphobic, manifestly cynical, and tend, socially, to isolate. Plus, I'm not quite the polymathic multi-talent Dennett is. I quit before I get ahead, just about as soon as I know the limits of what is possible for me. He doesn't seem to know limits or run short on enthusiasm.</p><p>I sail, but not to his level. I play the guitar, but would never venture up on stage. I can't even wildly imagine attempting a sculpture out of marble, though I have considered certain of my mechanical accomplishments to approach a kind of art. But dang, I just don't have as much fun as he does.</p><p>Well, enough of that! I insist on being lifted by Dennett's inspiring life rather than to be dispirited by my own deficits.</p><p>So here you go: I began with a mild "eureka" when I was but a lad of 27 or so. That eureka happened in and through writing, and you can find it <a href="https://www.catalyticnarrative.com/p/where-i-started.html">here</a>. The very thing itself. </p><p>That start, easily diagnosed as a manic episode while living in winter on a sailboat I'd rebuilt, led me to a conviction that emotion is an aspect of cosmos. I had some crazy notions to go along with that, most of which I've let go, but I can't quite shake the fundamental realization. I have tried.</p><p>To bookend the whole thing, my most recent addendum to my original theorizing has regarded time. Time being that (at least quasi-) dimension which goes along with the other basic three of length, width and depth. Each of these can be measured, and together they provide the minimum basic ingredients for any brand of materialism. </p><p>Like Dennett, I am fundamentally materialist, though I'll confess up front that I differ with him about godhead and most forms of determinism. Or in other words, I'm not sure that emotion is distinguished by virtue of measurement deficit from those more conventional descriptors of physical objects, in a cosmic sense. Materialism doesn't cover everything.</p><p>My unsettling got its start with relativity theory, which demonstrated that length, width and depth are all a function of time and motion in the direction of their extension. Which is to say that parallax is true - is required to true - in all dimensions. Then came general relativity and the equivalence of gravity and acceleration. Space-time "curvature." And then the Zeno paradox of measurement was unsettled by the wave/particle dualism of quantum physics. Meaning that beyond a certain scale, there is no stable precise meaning for measurement. </p><p>We are never standing still in any dimension from all perspectives, but if we're alive there is conspiracy along the dimension of time. Along that dimension, there is no living thing that can be out of our present, which extends at least all around the thin layer of life on this planet, and possibly throughout our solar system if humans find it so important to expend that much time and energy to find out.</p><p>This is not so very different from the obvious and evident fact that there can be no conspiracy beyond the distance of some interval for perceived simultaneity in any dimension. Go to far away, and you don't count.</p><p>Time is interesting. Physics makes it seem much more "rigid" and durable than the other dimensions. It can be measured with accuracy across thousands if not millions of years now by virtue of metering atomic decay. It's not so trivial to distort. </p><p>Decay is the operational term, from my cosmic point of view. Sand through a precise aperture in glass, a spring winding down against sufficiently large "forces" of momentum (in a pendulum or flywheel - periodic acceleration, gravity), the decay of an ordered atomic structure by the processes of radiation.</p><p>Against these measures of entropy are the processes of life. The Darwinian stuff of DNA formation and preservation depend for their reality in our contemporary meaning for materialism upon an odd definition for random. The same randomness of atomic decay, in the aggregate, is what makes for the background radiation of evolution.</p><p>If you hold a variety of conditions constant - like temperature and motion relative to large masses, then the frequency of radiation emanating from, say, cesium at near absolute zero after the radiated particles are sufficiently distant from the originating cesium so as not to be influenced; that frequency can "measure" time to an accuracy within a second across millions of years.</p><p>Indeed, the main usage for this is to keep the globe's communication systems in synch - within, of course, the cloud of indeterminacy created by the earth's rotation, gravity, and the distances involved. The same accuracy is also determinable for any given dimension, if the same environmental conditions are held constant. Where we once kept platinum measures stored in controlled conditions, we can now define the measurement and take it, more or less, at our leisure. But since we want to stay in synch, we must actually keep time, metronomically if you will.</p><p>It was once, oh so recently, sufficient to measure time by the motion of earth relative to sun, and still achieve your navigational objective.</p><p>The mistake we make very early on is to assign the quality of meaninglessness to random. I'm not sure I have time left in my life to conduct a proper survey of what philosophers mean by meaning, so I'll tell you what I mean. </p><p>If we are communicating, each of us will want to know what the other means, to be accomplished with what we say (or gesture, or pantomime) about something. Meaning is, in this case, understanding. When it's important, you might have to ask for clarification, but we eventually get there. Meaning is, in this reductive case, a kind of meeting of minds.</p><p>In that sense, meaning is not unlike what happens when we recognize an apple as an actual apple, and by extension when there is some representation of that apple which is sufficient for everyone who apprehends it to agree that it represents an apple. Ditto with so-called qualia, I'd say.</p><p>We relate meaning to understanding, and so according to the methods of material science, we might understand something when we can predict an outcome on the basis of a stipulated set of conditions at some outset. </p><p>But do take note that I can "get" your meaning without being able to understand you at all. We, collectively understand electricity pretty well, and use it effectively all the time, but it doesn't mean anything. It's useful, it works for us, and we understand how to make it so, but it has no meaning in and of itself. </p><p>Similarly, I may understand you perfectly well and decide that you are meaningless or even evil. In that sense you mean nothing. You might be nuts or you might be malevolent and so I might get what you mean and still not understand it. Meaning seems to require understanding first. </p><p>I think maybe <a href="https://www.catalyticnarrative.com/2021/07/electric-summer-school-museum-of-modern.html">Tesla thought that electricity had meaning</a>, which didn't stop him from finding ways to make it useful. Many of our stories revolve around the moral boundaries faced in the calculus of survival or the protection of our intimates, where we might choose local evil over global good, and when we do, we generally know the meaning of what we do. </p><p>Already, we have been dragged away from the common sense usage for "meaning." To understand some process and its entailments doesn't feel very similar to understanding what another person means. Though such predictions do mean that the processes and their outcomes can reliably be shared. Whatever result I get from the transformation of a given set of circumstances over time will be the same result that you would get were you to replicate what I've done.</p><p>Now this feels a bit more like the meaning we get by way of social intercourse. As with synchronization of time, we may begin to share a materially rational understanding of how things work.</p><p>One of the problems of our time involves, absent a shared God, the messy disagreements which are entailed by all of our planetary synchronizations. It has gotten so bad that prominent people might even become prominent by outright denying the material realities which we ought, by reason of meaning-making, to accept. This is the kind of mind-decay which I disclaim for myself. Though I do confess that it's hard and thankless work to stay abreast of what is demonstrably true and what is obviously false. </p><p>Anyhow, there are, evidently, material advantages to the denial of meaning. You may, all to easily, become rich and powerful once unmoored from meaning.</p><p>Scientifically inclined minds would like to banish the kinds of feelings which are at the base of our disagreements about what is true and what is real from the processes and procedures used to establish agreement. Mistrust in science is sometimes labelled as an emotional wanting of something which just simply cannot, materially, be. There are so many idiots wanting reason. A rational person might be defined as someone who understands when and what must be agreed to, within what limits, regardless of emotional preference. </p><p>You can see the problem here, right? Predictions depend on forces and measures which remain constant over time. But if reality is always relative to some stipulated conditions for constancy of measurement, then there must be plenty of material processes which cannot be determined accurately. Which are beyond the limits built into material physics, and material science more generally.</p><p>In medicine, we might cover these under "placebo" effect, to account for the mysteries of the mind/matter connection - at least insofar as we cannot quite reduce human animals to reliable physics. So, is there a placebo effect in physics? I'd say that there is certainly always a threshold beyond which predictions become unreliable for any describable condition.</p><p>There is an interesting confusion between the indeterminacy posited by the principles of quantum physics and the implied determinacy of the so-called "butterfly effect" of chaotic systems, where "chaos" turns into a very precise physical term having almost nothing to do with what we colloquially mean by chaos. Chaos here defines a "deterministic nonlinear system" whose outlines take the form of a fractal, which looks a lot like nature. Except that there is almost nothing about nature that is deterministic. </p><p>The chaotic divergence of systems based on minuscule differences in stipulated starting conditions might be a way to define the threshold for prediction. A different way might be by way of quantum effects, which directly inject a kind of random into any physical process. Random here means a kind of material unknowability, rather than a kind of exaggerated difference over time. </p><p>I might suggest that as quantum effects become significant only at an extremely attenuated scale, the butterfly effect disappears as the scale reduces. These two approaches to indeterminacy effectively cancel each other out, and of course there is no real meaning to the butterfly effect in "reality" (no flapping butterfly "causes" any hurricane) just as there is no real impact on most scientific investigations in the macro world which require taking quantum theories into account.</p><p>In either case, random doesn't and can't reduce to meaningless. It only reduces to the absence, in principle, of any possibility to understand. Any mind has limits. But for certain, my personal relation to the slings and arrows and joys of existence is emotional. Random is meaningful to me almost every time. I know that Daniel Dennett must praise his lucky stars almost all of the time.</p><p>But Dennett, along with all the other four horsemen, considers our "agent-alarm" system to be mistaken when there's not an agent there. We insert God where he doesn't belong. If it's not a tiger crunching that gravel, though the gravel crunched at a significant time based on my internal state, then to attribute meaning to the crunch would be nuts. Except that many of us experience such synchronicities, as Jung called them.</p><p>While I would agree that it's a massive error and probably dangerous (anymore) to insert any kind of God in there, I wouldn't go so far as to remove these events from meaning. They certainly can't be understood. However, if I do have a theory of mind, it would start by the declaration that decision-making is the result of emotive certainty. Rationality need not apply. In either case - rational or emotive - correctness is never guaranteed. </p><p>I have to stop here. This will amount to a confession. I'm still reading Dennett, and still enjoying learning about his rather amazing life. Now, within a few short recent pages, he let's the reader into a couple of seemingly minor secrets. The first is that philosophers live by cutting each other down, in apparent defense of their own strongly held certainties. This being in the context of vague reference to some sort of work on beliefs, which, as reader I must be expected to be familiar with. But he seems to be exposing philosophers as holding to beliefs before they are demonstrably true.</p><p>So confession one, I do believe that this argumentative habit of philosophers is that they hold too strongly to beliefs as though they were certainties. My confession is that I often consider philosophy to be a bogus pursuit. I should say 'to have become' a bogus pursuit. By the time we're doing artificial intelligence as though it might approach human intelligence, to conduct thinking in the guise that thinking in and of itself might be conducted with sufficient rigor to exhaust all possible ways of knowing has become patently ridiculous. </p><p>By contrast, Dennett points out, the scientists - in this case computer scientists - listen eagerly as colleagues present their work, looking for ways to help or that they might be helped in their own conjectural and more experimentally based pursuits. Score for scientists, duck's egg for philosophers.</p><p>Of course I, and any good scientist, assumes that these argumentative differences will be resolved the instant that a more comprehensive theory comes along. I'm not sure Dennett is in the right to call out those he calls intellectual bullies, no matter how well he documents his careful avoidance of bullying. His stature is such that he can overshadow those who disagree with him, which might excuse what he calls bullying. The bully is the one who commands the floor.</p><p>And then, confession number two. After I find out that among all else that he does so much better than I can ever hope to do, he's also a SCUBA diver. But he has no clue as to the physics and physiology of SCUBA diving, making ill-informed comments about his fellow corpulent academic having to loosen his weight belt because he'd had to tighten it under compression. Or that exhaling upon ascent was necessary to prevent being, essentially, blown up by expanding air. My confession is that I gloat on this miniscule arena where mine is the superior mind. It's only the lungs which might compress (or explode) and the actual danger is from gases dissolving under pressure in the blood, where, dissolved, they don't shrink or grow the body. Well of course the fat fellow's guts were likely full of gas, which I would be far too woke to suggest. </p><p>So why is he the superior sailor? Well, I was young and stupid too, and would go out in anything on a boat largely of my own reconstruction. I'm older and wiser now is all. But young enough, I guess and hope, to still have two sailboats at the moment, and three if you count a canoe. Wait, I also have an inflatable kayak, which was necessary when my sailing dinghy and canoe were quarantined in Canada during Covid.</p><p>Back to the limits of the mind (which will never be told (or dreamt) in anyone's philosophy). I do believe that mine is the more scientific, inquisitive and open-minded approach. The trouble is that I haven't the skills to convey what I've discovered as knowledge, and not just as a belief.</p><p>Anyhow, the proof that random is meaningful is in the progressive results of evolution. I know that to use the term progressive here is fraught, but there is time's arrow in play, which I maintain is not a physical property, but which resides, instead, among what Dennett seems to refer to as . . . damn! I can't locate the paragraph in which he outlines his replacement for the meaningless term qualia, so beloved by so many philosophers. Something about manifest "primary" mechanistic properties versus secondary dispositional properties. I believe he coined a pair of terms. Oh well, I hate technical terms anyhow. </p><p>Whoops! Found it in Wikipedia: illata for the real hard stuff and abstracta for the stuff tending in the direction of what others, in contention with Dennett, call qualia.</p><p>Random is also meaningful to each of us. If you haven't experienced an uncanny coincidence, you haven't lived, man! Anyhow, most of what's significant in our lives, good or bad, is made up of happenstance.</p><p>Back again to this divide on either side of which Dennett and I thrived or failed to. I arrived at Yale in the face of rather new challenges for me. The first was that I was meant to be an engineer, which relegated me to a cohort apart from Yale's sophistication. In high school, I could fake it. I could never regain my balance. </p><p>Related to this deficit were the computer terminals helpfully installed in the library on which I was expected to operate without any experience or instruction. Those same prep-school privileged students who enabled me to palpate the sophistication I lacked also populated the engineering classes with their experience on computers. Double bind for me!</p><p>Anyhow, back to cosmology (as distinguished by now in this bit of writing, I hope, from philosophy). My difference with Dennett, as with Dawkins, might come down to their shared and to me extreme atheism. The headquarters for their brand of atheism happens to be here in my home town, Buffalo (call it Amherst which calls itself Buffalo when convenient). As footnote, my former student was once its executive director. Name drop. Well, OK, person drop.</p><p>The trouble with the godhead is that there are no limits. There can be no dialectic. There can be no meaning, no knowing. I take Dennett's colleague Edelman's word for it that the complexity - or at least the raw number - of possible interconnections in the brain is on a scale with the number of particles in the known cosmos. To me, that means that we are, each of us, candidates for microcosm in that reductive sense of quanta.</p><p>And furthermore, I find that Dennett participates in attempts to understand the workings of the brain and of language in evolutionary terms. Bravo!</p><p>But here's where confusion between meaning and understanding takes sharp hold. The godhead is surely beyond the limits of understanding, but may yet be the terminus for meaning. As in the be-all end-all shouldn't-have-a-name limit. This stance is subtly but importantly distinct from the double-D's stance of atheistic materialism.</p><p>Why does that matter, you might ask? Well, you know, because the godhead is the font of meaning, beyond which we can't get. Ever. </p><p>Anon. </p><p>What I come down to is the meaning of random. I certainly don't dispute mathematical usage for random, especially in statistics. I shall never expect to beat any odds, except by chance. Meaning that my intention would be meaningless.</p><p>But if, in the aggregate and over time, random adds up to a progressive direction for life's evolution, then it can't be meaningless. This is, I believe, a categorical leap impossible to make. The cosmos is meaningless without life. </p><p>I would go even another step further to suggest that just as we can't move beyond godhead to understand this meaning, it is the same thing that happens in our minds when the evolutionary forces which determine which among the forceless changes in the configuration of our mind lead to aha! Now I understand. Now I know the meaning. This is what identity means, for that matter, and identity can't be had without boundaries. Without limits. </p><p>One basic limit is our skin, which I have often referred to as the metaphoric divider. Along with Dennett, I differ with Chomsky about his grammatical black box. He, along with Dennett now, ignores the body in the main when he considers mind and language. Watch a child learn to communicate and you can see the guts of the Chomskyan black box in action. It's the body, stupid. Grammar is emergent.</p><p>But our personal boundaries don't define any sort of absolute distinction from our surroundings. In a trivial sense, we are what we perceive and what we make of that, Remove our environs and there is no there there for identity.</p><p>In a more complex sense, never going so far as Roger Penrose does in his Chinese finger-puzzle trap of quantum mechanism (which should be a contradiction in terms) for remote contact, we are not severable from anything in cosmos. It all always resonates, though it does so far far beyond our ken. </p><p>Which might even mean that personal happenstance - meaningful coincidence - is not only likely; it's inevitable. Most of what we mean by metric merit is a mistake for personal fortune. It's never enough to be born with the measurable good stuff (of intelligence, of beauty, of musical, artistic, athletic prowess). One must still make something of it. I am a kind of exhibit A here. I was always called "Hardluck" for short. </p><p>But here's the final kicker. It's the morals that matter. There is a direct correlation at Yale and like places between the transition from wealth as the mandatory quality for admission, to the measurable difficulty of admission based on "merit." Admissions once was trivial for the likes of Dennett and me. Wealth once had its obligations. Merit has none. No applications were expected or solicited from the hoi polloi. Now all are welcome, but admissions is a lottery play once some artificial boundary for merit is exceeded. </p><p>While admissions might be more fair, were they to be run as a literal lottery, wouldn't it be more fair to the rest of the world if there were some evidence for compliance with and completion of moral obligation. </p><p>Given the expectation as outcome for wealth and power and preferably both, we can expect cheating on both moral and intellectual quizzing. Toss out the moral dimension and earthly values quickly rise to infinity. Just look at Yale's record for dirty power. Dubya, Hawley, Scalia, Thomas, Vance and so many more. Or do I mix up Yale and Haavaad? Difference with no distinction.</p><p>Now please don't get me wrong. I am not claiming to be any sort of moral giant. I'm a pretty lazy feckless n'er do well. Obsessed with something that I discovered and often wish I hadn't. I don't claim any invention, though I am mildly shocked that I have remained and still do remain alone with this discovery for so long. The world keeps transforming at an ever accelerating rate while we hold tight to obsolete philosophies. My thinking would displace lots of powerful people and institutions, which makes a sufficient explanation to me for why lots of false truths are left alone. </p><p>Or in other words, we're collectively getting away with shit. In nature, in life, in the long run, nobody gets away with anything. If you want to make your life a flash in the pan, do as the single-named people do and live for yourself alone. Build private empires behind guard towers on Hawaii so that you can behave as a normal person?? Cosmic impact requires love. Requires companions. Requires grit.</p><p>I've written at length previously about how unlikely it is that you'll ever love a robot the way that I love my granddaughter, say. Which doesn't even come close to the way my daughter loves her. My love is easier, being removed as it is from any of my daughter's daily challenges. </p><p>But I do get to watch my granddaughter as she becomes conscious, learns to imitate, learns to communicate and now at just over one year old she clearly recognizes many words and knows a question when she hears one, even dutifully taking her first step upon verbal and bodily encouragement.</p><p>Before you jump to the conclusion that I might jump to and declare that you too shall never love a robot, consider how far removed we already are from being human. Not to hold you in suspense, but we've squeezed out nearly all the good stuff with our mapped and ordered and playacted world now. Our issues not only won't be resolved by technology, but they are affirmatively all political and social. Our design must return to being human, which would abolish just about anything Big Box; retail, churches, schools, you name it. Would abolish weaponry beyond spears and knives. </p><p>But I get ahead of myself. I simply didn't wish to be coy here with what I'm about. </p><p>So what would we want in machine intelligence? Some sort of radical honesty? Dependability? Absence of emotion for sure; emotion just invites lying and cheating and even selfishness. I don't think that the pursuit of AI is somehow inherently evil. I'm sure it's interesting. But we're far enough along the way now to consider what will always be missing, and then to see if we're also missing something cosmic which could point us in other, more evidently productive, directions. </p><p>It is almost certain that our distraction from life as induced by the draw of gizmos and games and movies and all sorts of fun fun fun is also a distraction from truths we don't have the energy to face. Like what has really been going on in the Middle East all these years, and can it be distilled to fossil fuels? Pipelines? Economic imperatives which don't have time for truth or decency, where there will always be some Kissinger or Cheney to take the reins.</p><p>Now back to physics. I vaguely remember leaving that pursuit upon the homework requirement to calculate the probability wave to locate a human with precision. (the answer is trivial. Humans are fuzzy) As with Chinese, one doesn't really want to take a break with Math, if one expects to pursue it academically. These pursuits require a kind of constancy that I have always squandered. So I quit physics for Chinese and then left that for education and so here I am.</p><p>I was later distracted by the Twin Paradox, which has apparently been resolved to any physicist's satisfaction, though never to mine. Reduced to two objects, the twins leave each other's cosmos pretty quickly. So the question becomes, what holds us together?</p><p>Well physically there are forces which describe toward and away, forward and back, among the three canonical dimensions of space. These forces are, in turn, defined by the exchange of meta-particles. I can't quite get my mind around either phonons and qualia, though I'm sure I should. I take comfort in Dennett here.</p><p>These three dimensions are surely as accurately describable as time is. And they are as relative. </p><p>My work has been, post math and post Chinese, in the definitions. I'm defining a static arrangement - an arrangement sans forces - as a concept. In my usage, this is vaguely related to the word "idea" except without the inception part. I don't think ideas originate in the mind. I'm an uncarved blockhead myself, meaning that there has to be perception first. </p><p>Intention and free will are fine, but these are always impelled by emotion. Emotion is defined as forceless forward and back. Meaning the kind of motion which happens in the mind. The kind that Artificial Intelligence will never muster. Emotion and meaning are bound by bodies. </p><p>The godhead, if you will, is skinless. Meaning no meta, no metaphor, no outering, no innering. We all partake (in the cannibalistic rites, right?).</p><p>It is my contention, though I am happy to be unseated, that none of these redefinitions undermines any of science, math, statistics or anything else we might hold dear. But it does keep me from being the type of atheist that Dennett and his pal Dawkins are. In that regard, I think that they lack imagination. And only in that regard. </p><p>Meanwhile, my definitions cause a world of hurt to religion, which I hardly consider to be a bad thing. Those institutions have discredited themselves beyond recognition, though I don't think they have to jettison their essence.</p><p>I'm looking for clarity is all. And I'm looking for the limits of objective knowledge. A space for morality which is no longer quite so relative. Some return of Truth and Beauty, if you will. </p><p>Well, I'll do more better some day soon, maybe. If at first you don't blah blah blah.</p><p>And then, in the midst of working this out, Mom dies. Her mind had attenuated, and her short-term memory was gone, but she maintained a happy, well-dressed, and loving presence, and would recognize all her loved ones, converse with them, and be sure that we felt loved. A fibrillation caused a clot which caused a stroke, or maybe it was the other way around, but eventually her heart beat itself to death not pumping enough blood to suffuse her starving brain. And yet the there is still there. She lived alone, but well cared-for. Adieu.</p><p>Metaphor is embedded in Western literary traditions. Chinese has couplets. Inert bodies imitating the quick, or the other way around. Literary language looks beyond the literal to find meaning. There is so much that shall remain forever beyond words, though words may provide inception. I batter mine. </p><p>Apologies for Christmas!</p>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-72981303404536333972023-12-08T08:42:00.001-05:002023-12-08T08:42:12.103-05:00So What Do You Do?<p>I think it might be a peculiarly American thing to want to know what somebody does for a living, almost before, but almost certainly just after actually speaking with a person for the first time. I know I'm guilty of it. </p><p>I'm always ever so slightly put off by the question, having to answer, 'oh I've done most every job in the book' and then sometimes having to elaborate, which might end the connection if it's a new one. I start with bike mechanic, the only job I ever loved with my whole heart. I don't really play the game fairly.</p><p>Once I said, truthfully, that I'm a cosmologist, qualified by the disclaimer that I'll never be paid for that. I don't think I ever have or ever would introduce myself as a writer. For obvious reasons. </p><p>I write here because it's how I think. I don't expect and don't really care for someone to read what I write, but I seem to need the fiction of a reader. An actual reader would probably terrify me into silence, and so I actually feel respected that I get no comments anymore. Like if anyone reads what I've written, they politely back off, not knowing what to make of what I write. Mission accomplished!</p><p>Most times, I confess, I can't even really read my own writing. Meaning that it takes me as much work as it might take you, though I can generally bring back what I was getting at. Only sometimes does it badly embarrass me. Like to see a picture revealing how fat I've become. I mean I don't cringe, but it is not, apparently, how I see myself, if to see oneself is even possible.</p><p>I'm comfortable to say I'm a cosmologist, because I don't think I've ever really experienced certainty about anything. Sure, I can get preachy on some topics, adopting a tone of certainty, but almost nobody takes me seriously when I do that. </p><p>As I was leaving the nearby cooperative grocery store yesterday, there was a polite but noisy march of protesters against Israel going by (or were they pro-Palestinian? Am I the guilty party or were they?). It reminded me how this might be the very last vestige of actual protest, and that maybe that would be a good thing.</p><p>I certainly don't hate Jews, though I've often been annoyed by Zionists who remind me vaguely of evangelicals whose cosmology seems as off as a Chinese rock singer. Vaguely crazed. I certainly have nothing good to say about Netanyahu. Well, maybe now he'll be kicked off his nutjob horse in the face of the real world. Not sure. Powerful people don't seem to mind killing off the other, so long as the job is delegated.</p><p>Honestly, my cosmology would prevent me from causing actual harm to anybody, unless they were attacking someone I love. I couldn't do it for political reasons. I was terrified that my number would come up during the Vietnam war. Would I even have the agency not to go? I think so, but remain glad that I wasn't tested.</p><p>Yes, I can get passionate that America should stop making and selling so many weapons of mass destruction. I might even start there before going after the AKs of our domestic terrorists. I'm put off by the solemnity of Bills fans in the stadium when someone mentions "veteran." I don't think it's compatible with being a Trumper. Just sayin'</p><p>To defend our country means first to defend the constitution writ large. There are betrayers in every stratum, especially as they get power. </p><p>But so, OK, I happened upon this book, "Imagined Communities" - I guess by the processes of reading and exposure. It's a coherent exposure of the ways in which "nations" came to be, a process in which the various Americas play a part. In reading the book, I'm pulled away from all sorts of certainties about constitutions, about the death of newspapers as a certainly bad thing, even about what's absolutely good and absolutely evil. We seem less removed from barbarianism than ever upon this read.</p><p>I don't remember encountering the term "print capitalism" though I probably have encountered it, and just didn't have any context to understand what it meant. Now I learn that it might have been the prototype of capitalism writ large. Mass production of standardized products. Control of the means of production and distribution and even the creation of demand. Turns out ol' Ben Franklin wasn't quite so unique as we were taught. </p><p>So the horse cart arrangement does its usual about face, and it may be that digital technology wasn't so much the means of destruction as it was itself the manifestation as well as cause of deeper strains of transformation. The fragmentation of nations, by forces of nationalism of all things, into subgroups with subclaims about authenticity such that the Free State of Vermont associates unwittingly with fascist white supremacist secessionists, because they both require the same superstructure for their definition and formation. </p><p>Which side are you on, brother?</p><p>And here I am, back in history, rather than to the side of it. These global contortions are the manifestation of post-nationalism, and maybe I'm starting, finally, to comprehend that term. Even though my son-in-law is the reigning expert, in my book, of the field. I'm still winding up for my read of his book. </p><p>Here's the thing: I pay attention to the stock market just barely. Enough to know that the mix the one underworked wealth advisor I shall ever be graced to have gave me worked fantastically well on the run up to the COVID bump, and it's been downhill ever since. Something about my hedges clipped, since maybe those were in bonds and real-estate. </p><p>The thing about AI is that it will finally master stock-market investing in ways that my brilliant-with-MATLAB super, as in top of the global heap in statistics engineering, synthetic-aperature radar kind of thing was never able to do.</p><p>Which, I get it, spells the end first of all of nationalism second of all of history and finally we'll get our revolution, though it won't be the one we wanted. It never is.</p><p>I have no fear as in zero about AI taking over life. It has almost nothing to do with what life is, and therefore less than nothing to do with what consciousness is, well except in the sense that our collective loss of consciousness was already AI. </p><p>Benedict Anderson borrows from Walter Benjamin who I learned of by my glancing acquaintance with computer gaming from a quasi-academic point of view. As in all digital artists have to have read <i>The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.</i> Although, like good academics everywhere it gets located on a shelf. And now I'm relieved where I used to be depressed that all my shelves are virtual. They've never been easy to organize anyhow.</p><p>Although, truth be told, when I was a bike mechanic it never worked for me to keep my tools catalogued on the shelf or pegboard. By end of day in preparation for the next day, sure, but once I started working I didn't have time to look for or think about where the tool I needed was. Every time I try to rationalize my tool locations even now, attenuated as they and I are, I lose them. Sometimes forever.</p><p>Like I had this marvelous Leatherman multi-tool that my Mom gave me and that I gave my daughter, and now it's gone missing and I'm absolutely certain that I lost it myself by displacement. The hole is palpable. This the very Leatherman I took aboard an airplane post-911 and panicked when I realized it after losing it overboard from a canoe fishing in the thick muck up in the Boundary Waters. And found it with my bare foot and retrieved it six feet under.</p><p>Synthetic aperture this fuckhead! You couldn't find a haystack in the pile of shit below your outhouse head!</p><p>Were anyone like Walter Benjamin around anymore the essay would be called <i>Art in the End of Ages Where Reproduction Internalizes the One Authentic Self. </i>His Name has one syllable and not the two of Moloch. I have no art in me. Zip, nada, zero. I wouldn't be able to choose from among the AI productions, no two alike as in the random seed number which has to be gotten from beyond the machine. Still.</p><p>It gives me vertigo, but I can't remember what the book-length article I read from Esquire on my tiny iPhone yesterday was even about. Was it about anything? I'll check my history. Here! It was about Moloch, Nobodaddy, Steve Bannon who will never make it to the ranks of single syllable. Riveting. There is no truth to pin. Down.</p><p>And I shall read the memoir now from Tufted Daniel Dennett. I played Santa Claus myself just the other day and it broke my heart that my granddaughter was afraid of me. Ho Ho Ho!</p><p>I want no time on the machine. My hands shall always be dirty and the prints crazed and cracked.</p><p>To follow print capitalism is perpetually to act, perchance. To internalize the machine.</p><p><br /></p>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-20570861429966680402023-11-18T08:58:00.004-05:002023-12-31T06:46:18.894-05:00 The Singularity is Fear, Redux<p>Oh dear! It would seem that I expressed some fear of AI in that last post. In fact what I fear is the nutty repetition that <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/robots/a42612745/singularity-when-will-it-happen/" target="_blank">some sort of singularity is near</a>, whereby artificial intelligence will outpace human intelligence and take over the world. </p><p>That fear embodies <a href="https://www.catalyticnarrative.com/2021/12/self-referential-notes-while-reading.html" target="_blank">the supposition that human intelligence come the closest to abstracted and perfected intelligence</a>, and that it is intelligence, writ large, which affords us our singular ability to survive and rise above the slings and arrows of otherwise outrageous fortune. </p><p>There surely is that function for our kind of intelligence; the proof being our ability to live in such an incredible range of habitats and environments. We do that by designing and then constructing clothing and habitat; machines and communications gear. And we write history, <a href="https://www.catalyticnarrative.com/2009/09/geek-rapture-singularity-is-fear.html" target="_blank">or at least tell our stories</a>.</p><p>But, hoist by our own hubris, we actually start to believe that we can live without any habitat at all. As though we could construct our very survival as living beings without all of the living context.</p><p>We have, as yet, no vocabulary for understanding the commonplace miracles which accompany our survival. We focus on personal miracles for which some of us thank God, and for which still more of us, perhaps even giving lip-service to some god or other, basically take credit. Now we seem to think that our constructions can exceed us.</p><p>This robotic AI won't be participating in the evolutionary processes by which we were ultimately begotten. Nope, the machine mind will do the creative improvements all on their own, beside and apart from nature. </p><p>Of course, nature will wipe them out pretty much as soon as we are wiped out, in the same way that any other niche not-fitted creature gets wiped out. </p><p>We think that the reason these machines exist is because we creatively designed and then built them. In fact, they appeared in the same way everything else does. If <a href="https://www.catalyticnarrative.com/2023/11/the-flaw-in-gregory-batesons-otherwise.html" target="_blank">Edelman </a>is right that the neural interconnections of our brains also change and develop according to principles at least analogous to the larger and better understood processes of evolution, then it would be foolish to think that our minds, even if they do ride on our brains - which I don't think that they do - have been evolving in any other way than to fit the man-made niche from which they come. </p><p>Which is to say that we ourselves have been evolving in ways most certainly reflective of the environment which we inhabit. Or, to put it another way, our minds are already machine intelligence. How could they not be? That's our built niche, now globalized.</p><p>Many of us now have internalized the market as our identity. Even though we might not always wear our branding on our sleeves, we would probably like to, if we could afford it. </p><p>Very uncharacteristically, I attended an actual Buffalo Bills football game the other night. I'm still wrecked from it, though I think I was just about the only fan there who wasn't drinking. It was such an ordeal; through the traffic to the stadium and then through the security lines, and then squeezed to far within the margins of my winter-clothing expanded body, along with my similarly superannuated friends, and then again to endure their drinking and cigar smoking as I was internally shut down both from the cold aluminum seats (which have to be that way to act as noisemakers), from the Bill's discouraging loss, and because I don't really know how to speak 'fucking this, ficking that' which is apparently a dialect of English. Fucking Allen has to fucking execute the fucking technical plays made by fucking Dorsey. </p><p>Well Dorsey got shitcanned, tant pis. </p><p>Meanwhile I have this gang of recent immigrants - no, I think they're our version of guest-workers - putting a new roof on the house in which I live. They're overseen by owner-class recent immigrants from Russia. Having previously endured a series of non-immigrant contractors, each of whom declares that they can't find workers since nobody wants to work anymore, I'm getting the feeling that this is a generalized American malaise of genuine Americans. What MAGA Americans mean by Americans. </p><p>But I mean these Mexicans, or more probably Puerto Ricans, are flying up and down ladders, carrying massive loads and laughing and joking with one another. </p><p>Put all of this together and you learn that the mind is really quite transpersonal. I'm pretty sure none of the roofers had attended or would ever attend a live Buffalo Bills game. As for me, I like the televised version better. What's happening gets explained to you, you don't have to struggle or freeze to get there, and there is a context (of all the other games and stats). And mainly because it's free!</p><p><a href="https://www.catalyticnarrative.com/2009/04/should-we-all-just-throw-in-towel.html">I do remember the time and the many places when you could go to a game on a whim and pay something well within your bar-tab budget for a ticket, and have a lot of actual fun. </a>Now we still have baseball here in Buffalo, so long as it doesn't go major league. But it's so darned boring and brainy and slow.</p><p>We make our living, I guess, by branding ourselves. Some are influencers. Some are bloggers. Some salespeople. If we're professional, we are our brand, a conceit made very large by the former guy. What we mean by our intense hatred of one another is that we really can't stand ourselves. What we imagine we are bears almost no relation to what we actually are. Which is inauthentic shitheads who behave like all the other shitheads. And I have no idea what authenticity even means, but I shall not brand myself!</p><p>Sure AI will have no emotion, and no prejudice, once we get the kinks worked out. No play, which would mean no learning, or at least not the kind that counts. Please let us not mistake AI for human intelligence, though we are moving rapidly in that direction.</p><p>The singularity that the AI nutjobs fear or wish to celebrate is not much more than a highly elaborate crystalized rock. We think that the computation will keep on keeping on, but really? Would it? Once a nano-second makes a bejillion chess-board moves it stalemates at a solution. Over and done. There is no life there is all.</p><p>We lack almost all imagination in these matters. It amazes me how unexamined most of our assumptions are. We assume that to be human is to be something like what humans can make and then we project ourselves right onto the monstrosity. Look closely at AI, Pogo, and you will see yourself, already gone.</p>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-77482365850514111592023-11-16T11:21:00.000-05:002023-12-31T06:46:58.494-05:00The Flaw in Gregory Bateson's Otherwise Brilliant Ecology of Mind<p>OK, so I don't mean that Bateson is flawed, but rather that his thinking and therefore his writing is flawed. The flaws are with cybernetics (no surprise there - I'd already adverted to that surmise) and with brain, each of which resolve to the same flaw. </p><p>And look here, I'm not meaning to suggest that I am remotely qualified as a critic. My role, here and in life, is not to specialize to such extent as my betters have, but rather to seek out possibilities for not just hope, but for a direction of effort toward the Earth's persistence. That direction, I am convinced, will have to be away from rewarding principally those who toy with money and corporate AI power. It will have to move back toward what is holistically human, which would mean to be of a piece with the entire cosmos. We are still so stuck in dualism, and the banishment of any and all knowledge which doesn't begin and end with the quantifiable extension of materialism.</p><p>Now I have to confess that I just took a long pause to listen to a talk given by Gerald Edelman some time ago at the nearby Chautauqua Institution. Edelman does all of my dirty work for me and more, quite simply by his demolition of our likelihood to understand, much less to decode, the workings of the human mind. Sure, he's still brain-centric, like Bateson is, but in his case, he doesn't distinguish the brain from the body, and his measurement of mind is of a scale with how many subatomic particles exist in our cosmos. This is based on numbers of possible interconnections in a single brain, though he goes well beyond that simple measure.</p><p>Sure it is true that I can't approach the brilliance of either man. It's also true that I don't have the capacity to sit still and listen to a lecture, though I surely could have and would have were I in that audience that day way way back in 2003, before the man died. </p><p>And I can't afford to go on a drive for the purpose of listening, though I know for a fact that driving works for me. So, instead, I decided to mend my moccasins. These aren't made to be mended - they're machine-made in some struggling country, and carry the brand name of Hush Puppies. I got them on steep discount. I could just toss them out, but in answer to my well-off brother-in-law's comment that it's interesting that my scant income is precisely equal to my outflow (he didn't seem to consider that this is the result of my finely calibrated economic decision-making), no I couldn't.</p><p>For one thing, I've already invested a repair in them, which was the unravelling of the main lace holding the top to the sole. I have a collection of thread, but somehow lost my store of needles, even knowing where I last had stowed them. While listening, I searched again, hopelessly and with predictable result. So I dabbed the thick thread with some glue, just simply to avoid the waste of a gas-powered trip out to the sewing hobby store on the other side of town, and managed to thread the two-sizes-too-small needle. </p><p>Then there is the problem of pushing and pulling. I have these devices on the sailboat, but it's a lousy day and my main project is to cover the boat. So I find that I can pull the needle with the sleeve end of some rubber gloves for grip (don't touch the fingers, where I could not abide a hole), and a chunk of wood to push, and by the time the talk was finished I'd both repaired my moccasins again, and listened to the whole lecture. </p><p>Success!</p><p>I hope that this is the very opposite of the "creative destruction" which powers our economy just now. Perhaps we'll even return to handmade repairable everything, certainly because we might have to but also because we might want to. Despite my mildly sore fingers, I found the entire process quite enjoyable in its way. I shall never again be internally judgey about women who knit at meetings.</p><p>I have also had some success talking my well-off brother-in-law down from his pride in the good luck of working for Microsoft in the early days when they were in high dudgeon destroying their betters for the sake of their own still everlasting success, leading us to believe that there is indeed only one way to do some particular thing. </p><p>The brain is plastic, as we know, but also evolves in ways unique to every single individual. Edelman got his Nobel prize for identifying the evolutionary processes of our immune system, which led to his understanding of the evolutionary processes of neural interconnectivity.</p><p>My own conviction is that the structure of the human mind allows this jiu-jitsu transformation of our 'life-force' to come about in a virtual instant, once the need to do so has been universally recognized. The time is looming and near, isn't it?</p><p>Cybernetics for Bateson and for us, is that aspect of reality which is lodged in the mind. There is no actual circle, being the most common example, from Plato. Logic another, which Bateson critically distinguishes from causal processes; the error not to do so being strangely common. His error is to suppose first, that the brain is digital (something about the firing on/off nature of neurons), and second that digital can be embodied, in a computer, say, or a brain. Logic processors are as unnatural as a circle.</p><p>Bateson's idea [sic] of cybernetics involves coding, which to my mind, is but another way to say that the brain contains replicas - that it replicates - the world outside. That is, to me, logically and causally impossible. I might say that the brain whirls and swirls and mimes with the world "outside," and even that just because it is not outside at all. </p><p>The main burden of Bateson's shift from materialism to ecology is to identify structural identities as these pervade cosmos. Inside/outside are meaningless distinctions without first distinguishing object from field, organism from environment. Such distinguishing, while natural and therefore trivial, is not the same as dividing. Any more than quanta in physics can be divided.</p><p>Ideas are not ideas unless they are common to the point of being universal. They therefore cannot be contained in any mind, but constitute the whole, in a way, of a kind of logical universe. They can be deductively derived, viz Plato, with no real learning engaged. In Bateson's terms, they can be reduced to tautology. Which is to say that the necessary learning had to have occurred before any <i>realization </i>of any <i>idea</i>. </p><p>Realization here of an idea is not the same as reification, which is what Bateson does when he places ideas in the brain. Nevermind Penrose's scheme of quantum relatable tubules, which is still a search for mechanism and transmission which is precisely what quantum physics is <i>not</i> about. The computer is detached, while the brain is embedded and in touch. Transmission of ideas is of a piece with gravity changing the topology of space. </p><p>Batson cannot have been aware of the extent to which we are made up of genetically mediated "other" organisms and their detritus, quite apart from the stuff which carries our own genetic signature. Gene cataloguing and quantifying hadn't been accomplished as he wrote. </p><p>Autoimmune and immune-related diseases might make a kind of accelerator for change which is not directly attributable to the stochastic processes of canonical evolution. Fecal transplant makes an interesting case, as does the cocktail treatments for AIDS.</p><p>As I watch my granddaughter grow, I am astonished by how long and how painstaking the transition is from latent to fully conscious human. At just a year, she is already capable to identify picture cards and to change her pronunciation of the words they represent when I say them. But it will be a long way yet before we're having a conversation about ideas.</p><p>I remarked in my immediately prior post that we don't need to relinquish consciousness in order to continue our evolution. It's not only the sudden, if not surprising, appearance of Covid19 which might transform us no matter how skilled we are at cybernetically adapting to our changed environment. It must also be the changes to the weather, and to the nature of driving and communicating long-distance. </p><p>When you hop into an autonomous vehicle you are also relinquishing the very thing which made driving cars so compelling. Inside you resemble more the worm of a Mexican jumping bean than you do a human. You are utterly cut off, and perhaps you wish to be. Not so different, really, from driving an AI to do your homework.</p><p>Well why wouldn't you if the economy is debasing the whole idea of a liberal education, because it doesn't pay. Like all things elevated, liberal derives from free men, just as high art derives from aristocracy. But you won't internalize a single idea nor masterpiece without a liberal education. A liberal education is the basis for all the rest. </p><p>Now I'm not big on ideas as ends in themselves. I don't think that the inception of a work of art is ever an idea, just as evolution depends on random processes for its creative resolutions. But it is hard to construct a house, say, to extend your range among twisting and turning ecosystems, without some geometric sense about fitting things together. </p><p>Speaking of which, just as we are hurtling in the direction of autonomous vehicles (think hurtling toward Mars, which would be to extricate ourselves from the ecosystem which informs and becomes us) we also hurtle away from houses and cars which are accessible to the mechanics we require to service them. All will be cookie cutter, like the most primitive Super Mario context. </p><p>Mechanics have already become merest menials, subservient to their hedge-fund overlords because that's the way we think the economy has to work. Everything flowing to the top, we still do believe that humans qua humanity as we live it right now are the apex, the top, the culmination of the Great Chain of Being. We are the merited, God's favorite and we must not kill an unborn child because to do so would be to invade, dirty, and disgrace the Handiwork of God as He carries out his plan for Nature. </p><p>What a muddled mess. Those people won't even abide a simple law to help avoid our killing one another, yet somehow latent humans are more valuable to God because, well I don't know, because Father said so?</p><p>Whatever God is, He has no hands. No identity. Is an idea outside of history; both natural history and humanity-composed history, which is never just the facts, maam. God is Love and not a designer. We are not apart from God since our minds partake in God. Macrocosm/Microcosm or . . .</p><p>Whatever else evolution is, it moves in Love's direction (not at Love's direction). Autonomous digital anything is a reach which exceeds its grasp. Nip it in the bud or live in eternal regret. </p>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-76265152920002661162023-11-04T06:21:00.000-04:002023-12-31T06:47:38.860-05:00Sapir Whorf and Language RelativityWhen I was a kid, like before middle school, and already presuming I was going to be an engineer like my Grandaddy, I absolutely loved to read Popular Mechanics. I was always building things, and especially liked to build gadgets. Popular Mechanics had plans for kooky gizmos, as I recall. At least one of my close friends was also a fan. I'll be helping him with his bathroom this weekend.<div><br /></div><div>How strange it seems that this magazine is now the one willing to look at oddball topics, blithely crossing political boundaries with seeming agnostic ignorance of their significance. Popular Mechanics extricates itself from the death spiral of algorithmic click-bait, as far as I can tell. It's stealthily highly politically incorrect, in that it seems fundamentally to hew to the real and demonstrable.</div><div><br /></div><div>And what a strange place to find <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/will-artificial-intelligence-save-native-languages/" target="_blank">an article about disappearing language</a>s, though their hook was about how machine learning was trying to help prevent the disappearance. The article was fully cognizant of the ironies. </div><div><br /></div><div>I was admitted to several very fine universities back when structural engineers were already a dying species, and then I committed a flim-flam to major in Chinese literature. Which is relevant here because part of my motivation, partially vindicated, was a vague supposition that a different language might inhabit - and create - a different world. I had an early skepticism about objective truth.</div><div><br /></div><div>Having grown up on the shores of Lake Erie to watch it die, I had plenty of angst by college-time about pollution and disappearing species. More recently at a college where I briefly worked, one of my colleagues had started a foundation of sorts attempting to preserve obscure written languages. By that time, I rather thought that this was a quixotic pursuit. </div><div><br /></div><div>Maybe even a part of my motivation to study Chinese - also vindicated somewhat - was my sense that there would be only two distinct writing systems left on the planet; the alphabetic and the Chinese character; alphabetic languages converging on English.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now my angst about the planet is widely shared, the only real exception being denialists and religionists; both tending toward dangerous extremism. Or is it that they celebrate what the rest of is cerebrate? </div><div><br /></div><div>But my own despair is highly moderated by memories not so very much removed from my personal memory, of plagues and wars, depressions and floods and even climate disasters caused by volcanoes. It often seems that whatever horrors we might now be facing are moderate in comparison with the brutal lives we so recently lived.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm not putting my head in the sand, but my focus is certainly not on fixing things beyond the local. Preserving disappearing species in a kind of gene-bank, or even revivifying them, seems as lost a cause as the attempt to preserve disappearing writing systems. If the ecosystem isn't supporting it, what gets preserved would be, at best, artificial, and at worst a kind of invasive species more deadly than the ones we introduce by accident. </div><div><br /></div><div>Those users of a dying alphabet would themselves be marginalizing themselves to the extent that the language remains internalized and native. The point being that they're already marginalized if they speak a dying language. It feels like putting primitives on display at the world's fair. Or a freak show.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm far more concerned with those aspects of the mainstream languages - and in this case all languages, including especially Chinese, seem convergent - convergent toward dangerous and obsolete world-views. Trivially, this is a corollary of what we almost universally consider to be a shrinking world. Whether by communications technology, supply chains, instant and un-curated video or what-you-will, we are all becoming one. Our attempts to enforce boundaries are ludicrous at best, and dangerous for the tensions they build. </div><div><br /></div><div>As silly as it seems to try to preserve what we've already committed to killing, it seems even sillier to claim some cultural form as a basis to claim insider status. And still more dangerous to base that claim on religion. As much as we are a single people on a "shrinking" planet, we are already a mono-culture. Which feels pretty dangerous in and of itself. </div><div><br /></div><div>It can be useful - it feels useful to me - to go back and study someone like Gregory Bateson, who attempts to map what's common to any conception of reality. I find the guy brilliant, while I also find him interestingly misguided. I'm not sure why yet. I think it might have to do with his turn toward cybernetics as a kind of meta-description of systems and how they function. I'll let you know when I figure it out, but be warned that so far as I can tell right now, I'm simply not in Bateson's league. I know you'll agree!</div><div><br /></div><div>Anyhow, as a case in point, our fear of artificial intelligence seems based on a faulty notion about that in which intelligence consists. We seem to be afraid that artifical intelligence will make what's already terrible about our digital culture even worse. If we do nothing about the stuff we already understand well enough to build laws around it (but fail to do so) then it will certainly make things worse. </div><div><br /></div><div>But as it is, I find the fear mongering to be of a piece with the reduction of environmentalism to the single term "climate change." It's a dodge and a PR trick which allows us to keep on keeping on with our current global economic regime - broadly construable as "capitalism" - because we have identified something which is, at least theoretically, fixable. Emit less carbon and we're all good. Right, and I've got a bridge to sell you. </div><div><br /></div><div>Prevent all heartless amoral thinking and we're good. Uhhuh, sure. We already promote that kind of thinking, and we already think that tinkering with it will destroy the economy. Yet it's the economy, stupid, that needs work. It's individualism that needs work. We need to deconstruct individual merit, and remind ourselves that no man is an island. </div><div><br /></div><div>Almost everything about globalism as we live it is built on a very deadly sort of American conception of life. Home on or at the range and able to survive survivalist-style all by one's lonesome. I'm a prime practitioner of that discipline, but at least I know it for the disease that it is. I desperately wish that there were a healthy society that I would feel good to join. </div><div><br /></div><div>Build a healthy society and, microcosm macrocosm, the world takes care of itself. Sure, these secrets may be embodied in the lost language of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaw%C3%A9sqar" target="_blank">Kawésqar </a> (yes, I too just read <a href="https://g.co/kgs/frcr6x" target="_blank">The Wager</a>), but getting access to them doesn't mean preserving that culture. By the time we could communicate, whatever the language had meant would be as wiped out as their ability to thrive nearly naked in canoes with fires on their clay bottoms in a frigid squalling climate. Like we're going to have to do if we keep going the way that we are. </div><div><br /></div><div>Now we see China, with its facial recognition cameras on every light post and its social credit scoring as the antithesis of American-style freedom, by which we mean individual liberty I think. Heck, many Chinese think so too, and would love to live here, often suggesting that we don't even know how good we have it. </div><div><br /></div><div>Meaning they already inhabit American culture, I suppose. Chinese know us a lot better than we know them. </div><div><br /></div><div>But you know, if by identifying me as an individual also means to identify me as embedded in a group and that group is as responsible as I am for my behavior, then what's the harm? We already behave Chinese in secret, with every corporation having the virtual serial number of every living American, whether they admit it or not and whether they make use of that information (illegally, of course) or not. They still have it, in principle. </div><div><br /></div><div>And guess what? The Chinese can get hold of and use that information, and do, with legal impunity or perhaps even with the encouragement of their government, implied or spoken but surely rewarded in some way. I know this intimately because I recently had a cordial email conversation with a Chinese vendor who quite apparently couldn't resist selling my identity, judging by the instant - like turning on a faucet - spew of phishing emails now following my every online behavior. </div><div><br /></div><div>And we, in the background, are encouraging the same thing by villainizing China. I mean I love President Biden in most ways, but his approach to China is misguided. His administration is practically underwriting China's indigenous superseding of those very technologies we're trying to keep from them, because we can't quite believe that anyone can do normal science better than we do. Chauvinism writ very large indeed. </div><div><br /></div><div>I doubt very much that we are either more clever or more industrious than the Chinese are. We once did have a more robust educational system, especially at the tertiary level. It's sad to me that education has become such a fraught field. We seem to believe that children will believe whatever their teachers tell them. I'm not sure when that has ever happened.</div><div><br /></div><div>Children respect teachers who offer them something demonstrably helpful and useful. As the former head of a school for gifted children, I've always thought that we - meaning the world, not my school -were selling a pig in a poke with the idea that you have to get to college to get ahead. Academics do not solve most problems, and most problem solving doesn't reduce to book smarts. </div><div><br /></div><div>I think the whole message was really about offloading onto individuals the responsibility of getting ahead. As though the dice weren't always loaded for the ones who were lucky enough to start with a boost. My school was great not because the kids and faculty were smart, though they were that. It was great because the connection was honest with no knowledge or information held back, and with the teachers as exposed as the students about their ignorance outside their field. We all learned together and with respect.</div><div><br /></div><div>As a species, humans have evolved to be able to live in a more varied and variable environment than any other creature, as far as I can tell. Intelligence means adapting to however the environment is transformed. We're nervous now because we're the ones doing all the transforming. Like bacteria let loose in the perfect growth medium, we've fouled our nest. To many of us, this feels like our ultimate comeuppance. </div><div><br /></div><div>But the failure is social and political, meaning that the solution depends on language. I don't really buy into notions of individual genius, except, perhaps, within specifically delimited fields of endeavor. Within disciplinary boundaries, a so-called genius might be first, but can't really be a genius unless what is produced is immediately recognized by other sub-geniuses as worthwhile.</div><div><br /></div><div>I would say that in any endeavor, being first is equal parts luck and effort, with the quality of genius reduced to the ability to notice something interesting. That ability has to be conditioned as much on being outside the limits of the discipline as it is by having mastered the discipline from the inside. </div><div><br /></div><div>The trouble with monoculture and the destruction of languages is that there increasingly is no other. And even beyond that, motivated by fear we tend to cower within and behind such things as totemistic flags and religion, which are no longer goads to pride, but are instead the rallying points for a kind of warfare of all against all. The other - all other - has become us, to paraphrase Pogo.</div><div><br /></div><div>There is a massive difference between the kind of liberty required to intelligently adapt to various natural environments, and the kind which would destroy the natural environment to impose a kind of culturally imperialism on all of the environment, turning the world into a kind of hellish Disneyland.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is our evolutionary turning point. To survive and thrive as a species now means to become conscious of the boundary between our own intelligent design and nature. That will mean re-inhabiting nature with a kind of consciousness which isn't exclusively deployed to problem-solve the American wilderness. </div><div><br /></div><div>This is the root of our terror about artificial intelligence. Somewhere and somehow we each and all know that a brilliant but cosmically amoral (and probably evil) resolution would be to destroy all humans. The remainder, artificially intelligent environment, would be the moral equivalent of a rock.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now far be it from me to claim that a rock isn't genius. It most certainly is. But it's not alive. </div><div><br /></div><div>For one, I am reasonably certain that what we call artificial intelligence can be helpful in guiding humans to evolve. Shockingly implicit in this statement is a transformation to the meaning of evolution. Meaning simply that we don't need to leave consciousness behind in order to evolve naturally. </div><div><br /></div><div>Individuals live or die according to genetically endowed ability to mesh, socially and environmentally. A society thrives to the extent that individuals join in to sacrifice their individuality. Changes in language are far more powerful than changes in technology when it comes to ordering society. Our language, at present, fails us. </div>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-47534843403790644242023-10-31T14:08:00.004-04:002023-12-11T09:42:58.769-05:00Rentier Finance Capitalism<p>At the outset, I should say that I entirely lack the theoretical chops to enter this terrain. So, I will be making my observations from a layman practitioner point of view. Now it also should be said that this puts me on par with those, tending toward the right politically, who make what often sound to me like unsupportable pronouncements against the MSM-reported assumptions about how things work. </p><p>I'm almost always impressed, and sometimes nearly taken in, by these cracker-barrel arguments, coming as they do from clearly intelligent people. In my observation, these arguments are made mostly by men and by many contractor types with whom I've been working. I respect the world-view, built on their personal experience getting ahead on hard work. And based especially on the genuine business harm caused by the evident dearth of responsible employees who genuinely want to learn their trade. Plumbers, electricians, carpenters, roofers, concrete contractors and so forth.</p><p>The arguments don't differ much from conspiracy theorizing, but I'll go along with them right up to the point where they declare their support for Trump. That just blows my mind every time. As though they're in on some secret conversation about what Trump really and genuinely advocates which is different from his obvious advocacy for himself and his very personal interests. Heck, that was the argument his hyper-expensive and way higher-class than him attorneys made, to prevent him from having to divest for conflict of interest. As I recall it, the argument went that he couldn't be separated from his corporate self, because he, personally, was the brand.</p><p>But I confess to a kind of solidarity that something stinks with the mainstream narrative, even though I'm coming from a Lefty point of view. </p><p>As a worker in the trenches of IT, meaning only that I have a decent understanding of how that stuff works, I was obviously aware that something had changed when the incremental cost of additional product "shipped" approached nil. There was plenty of cost up front to develop the product, but once created and developed, there would be no further incremental piece-based and labor-based cost to mass-produce. </p><p>So, all the funding went into the destruction of the competition, and the creation of ad-copy, which in turn created almost a zeitgeist about what was the best. And so we went through Netscape and Word Perfect and so forth leaving the creators of the underlying operating systems to be in charge of nearly everything. Again, I have no data. I have only the same observations that my contractor friends make. I saw it happening intimately. Meaning that it wasn't the best product which won out. Where did Lotus go? </p><p>To my limited understanding of the concept, there is slight - and only technical - difference between the behaviors of a rentier and those of a tech patent holder. I don't think anyone had adequate theory to know what was happening. It seemed like they were making something useful and earning a profit on it. </p><p>Then along came Google services for nothing. There's been some fretting about surveillance capitalism, along with some very serious attempts to determine just what it is now that was is turned into a product (you!) and how that could be legal. But, you know, money talks and so there was this vague, and ultimately triumphal, claim that all of this activity was good for the economy. Never mind the military and global capitalist hegemonies which were being built. You know, capital breeds capital.</p><p>Again, without a refined theoretical understanding, I'm also aware of the term vectorialism, which is related to the argument sketched out above. Unlike a capitalist, the vectorialist doesn't own the means of production, but rather controls the media by which the products of digital production get distributed. The medium becoming the analog to capital in this brave new economy. Distribution trumps production. Everyone works as an influencer. </p><p>Again, the elision of actual-seeming product in the form of disks, slowly disappeared the way that, oh I don't know, the physical substrate of photographs did. Each of us can document this transference in and through our photo archives. </p><p>Or if we live near Kodak and Xerox, we might have a more personal connection to the transformation. And then especially newspapers, which used to roughly charge the cost of the paper according to the cost of, well, the actual paper, with upwards of 50% profit margins built on advertising, and well, want-ads. </p><p>So the solids of supply and manufacture and distribution melt into the ethereum of design and transmission. There used to be money in supporting the IT infrastructure and now that's all been reduced to truck driver wages without even the ethos of unionization. Because we IT trench workers identify with the designers, I guess. Like the way that franchise owners identify with corporate central.</p><p>Now I really really don't know anything about the ethereum of cryto-currency, but I know enough to be certain that it's evil on many levels. Like pyramid-scheme evil, or money laundering evil. It's at least the metaphorical equivalent of the transition of capitalism through vectorialism to finance capitalism, where money itself, representing nothing other than money (think gold standard) is meant to become the prime playground for the rentier class. Stripped of politics, stripped of even digital monopoly profiteering, stripped of social input, money itself stands in for still fictional but more real than money "merit." Think about it. </p><p>By these measures, gamers should be our new overlords. Hey, I think maybe they are. But then there are classes of gamers, and so forth, from slacker gamers through sporting gamers through finance gamers. Our most lavishly praised and lauded and celebrated mathematicians have been engaged in game theory. Applied to the military and the economy in the end. </p><p>So, we're worried about Artificial Intelligence now. I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure that I'm not so worried. In my observation, we've been running on AI for as long as the corporation has thrived at the expense of the worker. Artificial intelligence is just that aspect of human intelligence which can be mimicked by machine. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson as he portrayed a Maxim Male Chauvenist, strip out the emotion, the integrity, the character, the grit and you have machine intelligence. That's how corporations work, run on automatic to maximize profit. Massively well-compensated CEOs are rated on the reliability of their machine prediction. Have a heart and you're done.</p><p>Oh-so-recently, we nearly destroyed our economy when the likes of General Electric divorced themselves from actual tangible physical production with actual profits and turned to management of financial capital exclusively. And we celebrated Jack Welch.</p><p>I don't think that machine intelligence is like human intelligence in the very same way that I don't think cryptocurrency is like money. They both ride on the same ignorant and obsolete paradigm, which gets called capitalism, and gets called it the same way Jesus gets called God, even though Jesus has long-since been reduced to a branded meme. The only thing you can't do is to question the dogma. That would be to sin.</p><p>But then this is how paradigm shifting works, right? Just before the shift there is a flourish of 'normal science' where all practitioners feel ultra close to a kind of epic near apotheotic culmination. We're almost there! Jesus is almost here. The end of history. Huzzah!</p><p>I'd say that the project ought to be focused on understanding better what human really means. I can't use the term intelligence or even consciousness, since these have such dogmatic interpretations already. That's why I go for love, which is not likely ever to be made dogmatic in its meaning. I could be wrong.</p><p>Be that all as it may, let's just say that we've celebrated the evident intelligence of our elaborations on the physical plane of our existence, while almost utterly ignoring the destruction of the affective plane. Some nitwits even sacrifice their actual life in the insane pursuit of physical immortality. Zombies. This being the very essence of contradiction in terms. Find me life that is perpetual, and I'll either show you the cosmos as a whole, or I'll show you a rock. You decide which you want to emulate.</p><p>Look around you and you'll see a flourishing world. If you want to see the flourish, you'll have to convince yourself that global warming is a hoax, climate change is a hoax, peak oil is a hoax, political institutions will sort themselves out, autocracy is not a danger, warfare will never encircle the globe, technology is our savior, and China is our enemy. I think the only quibble is on technology as our savior, but certainly intelligence has to rule!</p><p>Technology, especially big tech, feels pretty skeezy just now. To some maybe because the Democratic party seems to be so in-bed with it. Tech leaders tend woke, in a way, don't they? Well, except for the ones who've earned a single name epithet. The really rich ones make us all nervous. </p><p>The surveillance aspects of Big Tech make us all nervous. The algorithmic rearrangements about how we get our news and which to trust. Nobody is quite sure that tech is a good answer.</p><p>But I digress. I want to focus on what would be a more enlightened understanding of humanity's essence that doesn't fall down the rabbit hole of intelligence, unless you wish, as perhaps I do, to declare all of life intelligent. There is a certain direction in which life moves which is the opposite to physical entropy. The opposite to the entropy of information theory then too, by definition. </p><p>It is persistently difficult to prove that there is a direction for life which leads inevitably to something like humanity. It will only seem that way if we think that our very clever behaviors toward the alteration of the very nature of planet earth in our seeming favor are what is meant by natural evolution. Here's a clue; it's not. </p><p>Persistent life arises from a stochastic brew of random. We persistently mistake random on an individual level with random as it impacts the whole, as Gregory Bateson might have pointed out. To move further in the direction of this argument, we are currently at odds with our environment, when the goal of life - distinctly <i>not </i>the teleological direction for life - is to fit the environment without which nothing can be distinguished as an entity at all. At present and for the foreseeable future, we are misfits, at odds with everything which defines us. Which doesn't bode well for the species, never mind individuals among us.</p><p>"Goal" is a taboo word when talking about evolution. Maybe "direction" would be a better term. Is there even a direction for evolution? Canonically and scientifically, I think the answer is no. But I don't think the answer is no. I think that the direction for the anti-entropic moves made by the processes of evolution is love. </p><p>I am not unaware that the overall course of human development would make for a hard call between love and hate, and yet still we seem to thrive. Could it be that love has been generally in the ascendant? I'd like to make that claim myself, though I think we're over a cliff the way that Wile-e-Coyote hovers over a cliff with legs churning. </p><p>Anyhow, I don't think that AI is dangerous in itself. It doesn't relate to nature, it only relates to human nature; meaning that aspect of our lived environment which is a human production. In relation to humanity, AI can clearly be a force for good. Sure, it could make machine phone attendants even more predatory and dismissive, but it doesn't have to. Sure, it could help pump more money up to the top, though we don't have to let it do that. The issue is not to control or fence in the development of AI, but rather to take hold of how we deploy it.</p><p>I think we have a problem of scale and not so much of kind. Building a habitation feels very human. Even building a city. But building out to overtake our environment seems plainly destructive.</p><p>If we don't take charge, it's almost certain that AI will exaggerate and distort all those processes I outline above to make the grotesquery of how we live even more obvious. Which isn't obviously a bad thing. Right now many of us are unsure if Elon of Bezos or Zuck or Gates are good or evil. AI unbound will make it obvious. Our very souls will be disclosed and not just our marketable marketing behaviors. Red pill or blue kind of thing.</p><p>Meanwhile, while he fell into the trap of a representational mind, Bateson is certainly correct that mind must be homologous with nature. Which is to say that the entity of a human mind and the collectivity of all human minds in a society is, pretty much by definition homologous with any other entity in nature. I don't even think it would go too far to say that the mind of a human is, or could be, the cosmos in microcosm, though I don't know if Bateson would go so far. </p><p>And if our mind is a natural mind then we are built for love as much as for reason. Indeed, not so very many entities have gotten so far as to be able to embody love. I've written too much already about how unlikely it is that robots will ever be the object of "true love" ho ho. Sure, we might have warmish feelings for R2D2, but almost anything is narratively possible. Just not in the pesky details, as in a new mother's love.</p><p>Well, that's about as far as I go for now. I'm simply not sufficient as an expert-system adept in any and all disciplinary fields. You can bet I'll harness AI, if and when that becomes possible. Over and out for now.</p><p><br /></p>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-1654034223778203612023-10-20T12:47:00.000-04:002023-10-20T12:47:40.012-04:00Joe Gould and MeWhy me? There is a fascinating interplay among Joe Gould, his chronicler Joe Mitchell, and Jill Lepore, whose own read on history feels bright. Joe Mitchell seems to mirror himself in what he makes of Gould, while Jill Lepore despairs of history's sinkholes. Imponderables all. Not everything has an answer.<div><br /></div><div>Father/son there are these imponderables whereupon Big Decisions get made. Mitchell puts me somehow in mind of Cormac McCarthy, maybe based on shacks in the South they both wondered in and about. When I think of my Big Decisions, they get made in the same way I might think through an engine mount, or a piece of furniture that I'm fashioning or refashioning, or how to rig part of my new old sailboat. I can get angry if someone sees it differently.</div><div><br /></div><div>But the Big Decisions have big consequences, like buying the little travel trailer in which I lived for a while. Or the sailboat which still weighs me down for its puzzles upon both my present and my memories of bolder sailing. I seem to enter into these matters blithely, as a kind of thinking experiment until it's a done deal. Very much <i>not </i>like falling in love, which is how you might think it should be, given the consequences sometimes.</div><div><br /></div><div>But then, whatever is the material consequence, I do always find it fetching and rather cathect myself upon the object, more blithely than compulsively. Managing to find the perfect motorcycle though it morphs from Honda to Harley, like as though I went from blond and thin to curly and fat.</div><div><br /></div><div>I suppose it necessary to conjecture yourself into this new future and find it more attractive than others you might already be in possession of, as it were. Like, what the hell, let's give it a whirl, always leaving an exit strategy; falling short of absolute commitment. </div><div><br /></div><div>Like Joe Gould's father, my grandfather also sunk too much money into gold prospecting schemes. I think Dad had to work through some of that. It must be like how tech enthused kidlets blithely put their purchase on the ephemera of bit-coinage, little understanding what an economy is and how much harm can come from crowd beating.</div><div><br /></div><div>Children must never be possessed of so much choice, and yet adults may also resent their fathers' ministrations. Is the excitement of investing in a gold mine more similar then, to falling in love than something navigated more within one's means? I suppose it must be. </div><div><br /></div><div>Just now still, and for a long long time before, I wonder about consciousness; that thing about ourselves, as humans, which makes us count for more than any but God could have wanted. I make a narrative more compelling even than yours, when it comes to me. Of course I know the survival value of that fact. But the me remains even though I'm as crazy as Joe Gould, who might also have had no real choice in the matter.</div><div><br /></div><div>Personality imposed, but still self-manufactured overall, might you say? Can we ever be other than ourselves? None other. </div><div><br /></div><div>Joe Gould seems to have edited himself to death. Never turning to the exclaimed task at hand, though surely always intending to, in some sense. </div><div><br /></div><div>Me too, right? I rehearse those truths which religionists have always rehearsed, though while they jump to true belief, I remain always trying for some kind of scientific precision. My chapbooks are all up here. Enough to prove that I don't have the words to prove what I know. What I know. </div><div><br /></div><div>And all the world seems perverse, to me, in all the basic assumptions about humanity and intelligence and consciousness, unexamined as I might say. And so I too am on the outs, like, forever I suppose. Though I do like tinkering on my boat my bike this house as those are the things which give real meaning. Of a sort.</div><div><br /></div><div>But look. You and I agree that questing for physical immortality can only guarantee that you'll waste the life you have. That however special you have made yourself and no matter the popular acclaim you'll never be more than me in the basics. That too much money is the biggest diversion of all. While too little is terribly painful. And that sometimes the most freakishly intelligent people say and do the stupidest things. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-47861753452818912132023-10-18T08:13:00.002-04:002023-10-18T08:13:43.874-04:00Suttree<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61953392-suttree" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="Suttree" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1660393145l/61953392._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61953392-suttree">Suttree</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4178.Cormac_McCarthy">Cormac McCarthy</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5915675023">5 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
This prefigures everything, I suppose. The Road. That the entirety of Western Civ leads to a new sort of void, from which life must rise again. Suttree falls from economic Grace, though I couldn't really follow the narrative, requiring the sanctioned one written all over the place. I was too distracted by the words made new and fresh against the putrefaction thereby descried. <br /><br />This beats Faulkner, whose writings were bequeathed to me by occult ways having nothing very much to do with words. Bequeathed by Granddaddy who gloried, so he did tell me, riding the rails under the cars when still not far from hillbilly roots. But then I find lately that my highschool buddies did that too, making their way to and from a Catholic highschool from which interest I was barred by cause of faith. Not mine. <br /><br />I was such a good boy, wanting to be like Granddaddy, an engineer. Spoiled by the despoiling I witnessed in my youth along Lake Erie's rotting shores where war machines for Vietnam were proofed. My uncle waggling the wings of his 'flying boxcar' whenever he overflew our beachhead. Hovercraft at dusk to foil the spies for the Mekong, where the atavist Sturgeons were far larger than ours.<br /><br />Now we hover among the idiot winds of Artificial Intelligence, as though it weren't already the end for that deadly process. Reading Cormac (one name is enough, no?) gives the eternal lie to that as a definition for what humanity is about. Sure, our intelligence has become artifice by way of renting out our thinking for the sake of a dime, Buddy, for the sake of a dime.<br /><br />Cleanth Brooks helped me to recover my ability to read by way of Faulkner. Now I discover so very lately, even his better. I'd better go back and try to finish Joyce again and The Recognitions, impossible again at my age. I'm glad it won't matter.
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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2206973-rick-harrington">View all my reviews</a>
</p>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-71870146497899925132023-10-04T12:11:00.002-04:002023-10-04T12:11:26.021-04:00Yet Another Unpublished Goodreads Review of Nicholas Humphrey *Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness*<p>Hey, I just read that <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/ar-15-rifle-gun-history/675449/" target="_blank">the guy who invented the AR-15 </a>was able to do so because he was unbound by the dogmas of the engineers. I tinker with words, and he tinkered with guns. Weirdly, this gives me hope.</p><p>Goodreads has been convenient for me. I've trimmed my bookshelves across too many moves, and I read now mostly on Kindle, mostly from the public library. I was a bit distressed when Amazon took over Goodreads, just as I was a little distressed when eBooks edged into the realm of paper. Of course, I was far more distressed when Internet advertising destroyed local newspapers.</p><p>Do you also have a sense that things are falling apart? That something's gonna give? Whether it's climate change, global warming, the chaos of our crumbling democracy or worse, of the autocracies. We keep sucking up oil, and using up water, and our lifespan is now shrinking.</p><p>I do believe that such times and such anxiety are also the sign of impending shift. In my little mind, the shift could be of or about consciousness, using the term here in a very broad way. But for sure we need to change something about how we believe and what we believe if we are to change our nasty and often brutish behaviors. </p><p>I have but a few virtual bookshelves here on Goodreads. One of them, I find, is labelled "Consciousness." I guess that must be a main interest of mine. There is no rhyme or reason to my random "bookshelves," just as there is no program to my reading. My actual bookshelves are pretty scattered too. </p><p>Given the virtual sea of good reading available to me, I might even suggest that random is a better program than deliberate choice. In any case, I've skated across too many academic fields and, more generally, too many career paths to have real expertise about anything. Perversely perhaps, I now consider my lack of specific expertise an asset.</p><p>Scholars and scientists who know enough to build credible new knowledge can only do it following a massive intellectual investment in some particular disciplinary field. Advantage amateur if we truly are at an inflexion point.</p><p>I confess that I don't have any desire to write reviews. I do have a desire to keep notes for myself, and doing it this way is convenient. There is no obligation for anyone else to pay attention, and no desire for that on my part. I simply can't organize myself by myself. Thanks Amazon!</p><p>Anyhow, consciousness is far too general as a target for study to be contained by any one discipline. Happily, Nicholas Humphrey skates about in several of them, but lands squarely on the science side of various philosophical divides. I find his overall conception of what distinguishes human consciousness from other sentient creatures to be compelling (I may be deploying the Buddhist usage for sentient here, in place of Humphrey's, which is more specific and restrictive).</p><p>I have swung back and forth myself from believing humans to be a special case (as Humphrey does) to believing that humans are delusional about the exceptionalism of what we call intelligence. When I have felt we are special, that has been first because of language, following on an exciting read of Julian Jaynes long ago, but more importantly because of art. Language is surely the sine-qua-non for humanity, and art our proudest production.</p><p>Nevermind if there is animal language and animal emotive feeling, there is almost certainly nothing like art beyond humanity here on earth. But what is art "like?" Philosophers and scientists of consciousness like to ask 'what is it like to be conscious.' As in, what is it like to be human. What is it like to be a bat?</p><p>We are so strangely poised, because of language, between the identity-free schooling of social species (birds and bees and fishes, right?) and the apex predation of eagles and prides of lions. Language makes us social on a very different level than we started with. But combined with our social context is a lust for recognition which defines the global economy now, even more than ever. We don't want to be part of a school or a flock or a cult. At least I don't.</p><p>The extremes of individualism are causing social fracture. Ironically enough, they may also be causing our seemingly increasing cultishiness. Religion gets discredited, and technical language gets inscrutable, and we have to put our faith - our energy, our exhuberance, our anxiety - into <i>something</i>.</p><p>My first reason, if there is a reason, for an interest in consciousness is that I believe that our misconceptions about what it is and isn't are a main reason for our social, societal, fractures. We need to fix those fractures if we wish to have a future. I mean, we are wrecking the planet, and I actually think we're doing so because we're living delusionally. We live as though the entire cosmos thinks that we are special.</p><p>So my next reason for an interest in consciousness is that there is a kind of consciousness which can change very fast and in a way that spreads equally fast. We used to talk about 'consciousness raising,' which is probably related to woke-ness, except that I think that what we used to mean by consciousness raising was a more cosmic awakening. Not the local political and justice-related awakening (important though that certainly is) but more of a seeing through of all the pandered belief structures by which we are held in thrall.</p><p>One can never be too rich or too thin, if you're from the Ivy League, but for sure one can never be too wealthy. And the things that the wealthy do with their wealth are decidedly not what has ever been meant by consciousness raising.</p><p>My own entry to consciousness studies was Chinese classical literature, which study I deliberately entered because I felt - no I sort-of <i>knew </i>- that the Chinese tradition must be the only qualified "other" to Western Civ, broadly conceived. Of course, there was also a heavy dose of random, as there always is.</p><p>Once I proved myself, ahem, correct in my choice, I lost interest in the actual discipline of it, which required, internal to its study, more discipline than even a monk might ever acquire. I wanted to sail. Literally. And I have. Anyhow, as exciting as the study of Chinese lit was - and it truly was exciting - my passions (were they ever really passions?) drew me elsewhere. </p><p>At some point, while living aboard the first sailboat which I'd rebuilt, I combined my passing knowledge of the civilization-jarring reconceptualizations provided by relatively theory and then more recently (for me and for the world) quantum theory, from physics, with the equally jarring insights I'd gained from Chinese cosmology (for lack of a better word here). I did a bit of writing which changed my life. I mean that it happened during writing and in the writing, not that the writing was very good. </p><p>And then I moved on.</p><p>The proof of how jarring the physics has been is in the scope and sale of the second world warring. In particular the ending of it. Leading up to that point were the incredibly bloody industrial and then the scientific revolutions. A very <a href="https://g.co/kgs/d8dFGT" target="_blank">WEIRD Western thing</a>. Both in the fighting and in the holding off from fighting, but also in all the technological spinoffs from war. Things do change when we're frantic.</p><p>The proof from China seems a bit more subtle. China continues to struggle with its own past, even as it echoes parts of that past even more than it appropriates our tradition. Like surveillance and censorship and the banishment of free-thinkers.</p><p>Random stands out as an ordering principle (oxymoron alert!) for physics, for I Ching (English spelling), and especially for evolution, which is Humphrey's concern <a href="https://g.co/kgs/M2oWBr" target="_blank">in this book that I'm not quite actually reviewing</a>.</p><p>Random is what human consciousness largely contests. And we're good at it, the contest. Surely consciousness must be our basis. Humphrey pretty adequately proves that consciousness carries evolutionary valence, even quite apart from our problem-solving which really couldn't have flourished until the question of its evolution was resolved. Consciousness seems to be the egg for Humphrey, and problem-solving the chicken. Hmmmm. Couldn't it be the other way around?</p><p>In my life, I'm good at only one thing anymore, which is trouble-shooting. Not invention, and certainly not academic scholarship, but fixing things. That's the intelligence I'm stuck with, because I'm not very good in my pursuit of any particular discipline or career. But I can trouble-shoot boats and cars and houses and computers and networks, and I'm pretty good at it. And I've gotten by.</p><p>I feel almost physically ill when I can't figure out some system. As happened recently with the electrics of my most recent (OK, it's only the second) decades-old sailboat. The 70's tech hadn't changed much from the 30's tech of the first one, but I never had to trouble-shoot the electricals on that one. I did resolve the trouble this time, and I feel better now, thanks.</p><p>Now in my trouble-shooting of consciousness theories, I find Humphrey's to be among the most sound. As in seaworthy! But he remains stuck in a few ways, I think. And I extend this stuckness to all sorts of things about the world which make me feel ill. Our political divides feel like fundamental disagreements about what it even means to be human. And so it seems like the problem of consciousness needs serious trouble-shooting. Even this one.</p><p>I even retain the hope that were we to have a better understanding of how humanity works down to that level, we might be able to survive ourselves; we seem pretty hard to survive as we are behaving right now. Wouldn't it be nice to get beyond toxic me-ism and the cultish worship of personality?</p><p>I think it would. But we have to get beyond the absurd notion that random is meaningless. For many people, meaningful coincidence is what God means. For many scientists, random is the process behind evolutionary change. And I am certainly not one who would challenge the facts about how random works. But it is interesting to me that computers only do pseudo-random, </p><p>Anyhow, given how much of me is composed of random encounters - many with an uncanny resemblance to meaningful - I can't discount random events as totally random. Or rather I don't discount them, even as I accept that they strictly are mathematically and scientifically random. Wave/particle kind of duality here.</p><p>Humphrey remains stuck on the brain as the seat and locus for human consciousness, to which opposable thumbs, recognizeable faces, and vocal apparatuses are but appendages. That's trouble number one, for me. I see brain as being organized by body, and therefore appended thereto rather than body appended therefrom. Let's just say body and brain are of a piece, with body more responsible than mind to sort the random from the meaningful so as to present to the mind, as it were, a pre-sequenced proto-narrative that mind can work with.</p><p>I must say that I consider my mind to be spread far and wide; spread most certainly among the books I've read and the people I know and have known, but also among those things and places with which I've interacted. I have no memory at all, most of the time now, without its being prompted by its artifacts, in this case meaning not what I left behind, but what formed me in the first place. Artifacts of the future; all of them outside of me. The artifacts which we are hell-bent on destroying, even if we are a tiny bit more conservative about it than the Chinese are just now (for instance). </p><p>The brain may organize and generalize all of my perceptions and conceptions, but I don't think that means that the brain in any way holds them. The brain extends throughout the body by way of much more than feedback loops, just as the overall self extends well beyond the body-boundary of our skin.</p><p>As sick as I am about how se humans are collectively behaving just now, I also feel sick about the bees, until I learn that the very human reaction to shepherd more honeybee hives is killing more pollinators than it rescues. That's how well our evolved media helps us to understand what's going on. So I withhold judgement just a bit when Bill Gates, who believes his mind is his brain which is a CPU, denounces planting trees as idiotic.</p><p>Because honeybees are husbanded creatures, under the control of industrial-scale farming, and most pollinators aren't, the honeybess aren't what needs saving. It's like we're solving problems with inhumane pig farming by raising more pigs. Um, something like that. I suppose Pulitzer was no better on paper than the Googles are now with the web.</p><p>Yes, sure, I am losing my mind. For the very best of reasons, which is that I've lived so long. But I do find the equation between the brain and mind to be an almost entirely Western conceit. It's an analytical conclusion that we can't seem to escape. This is related to our certainty that random means meaningless. And so we can't really conceive of evolution, for instance, as but a roll of dice. And it certainly is that for any given individual creature, but something still takes shape which endures.</p><p>Brain as mind is of a piece with God as teacher and it's time we moved beyond both misconceptions. If we don't, we'll never find a personal locus; the way we conceptualize it now is blasted physical impossibility. Not just God, but the self as existing in the brain as physical medium for mind. Dennett is quite right that the self is an illusion. I can't always find where Humphrey would disagree.</p><p>But it's a kind of real illusion, not unlike - I mean philosophically now, and not as an equation - the real illusion of God.</p><p>Now I'm sure you know that those Chinese sure do love to gamble. It may descend from throwing yarrow stalk readings of reality beyond the mind; what the I Ching is about. We all do know in our heart of hearts that hitting the jackpot is always by way of lady luck and almost never by way of merit. But we'll claim merit when we can, and especially when it's sanctioned. We pray when we're desperate, or we throw dice, or pull yarrow sticks. We keep the winnings because that's how capitalism thrives.</p><p>It could be that it strikes me that Humphrey's "attractor" in the brain, his "ipsundrum," upon which his theory of phenomenal consciousness depends, is also abroad in the world; that we have innered something already out there. My candidate for what gets innered would be whatever it is that drives evolution "forward," or rather attracts it so. A thickening of time, as he calls it.</p><p>We seem shy to confess that we, and even each of us individually, are cosmic wonders well beyond whatever we might discover in the vast wastelands of "outer space." Shy to confess that accidents which tend toward a complexity that cannot be likened to physical entropy aren't the same as accidents which might disorder and destroy.</p><p>Mind is microcosm and not some ex-nihilo production from some original creator.</p><p>Now I know that there is likely no scientific program which can pursue this line of thinking. And I hardly wish to undermine anyone's livelihood. Well, except for those who lie and cheat their way to the top, claiming credit not just for their fortune, but for the complicity of the rest of us.</p><p>Once upon a time, we did think that the mind could be imitated by a machine, so enamored were we with our machines. And now we think we've finally done it, by way of silicon-based logic engines. </p><p>And I say nope, the brain may be a good imitation of a machine, but it's a lot more like the innering of a cosmic process which still does and likely always shall exceed our grasp. Else what's a meta for?</p><p>HaHa. Chinese poetry isn't so centered around metaphor.</p><p>. . . in that we are more alike than different from all that lives. But confessing that we cannot order the natural world better than it orders itself would make the finest form for progress, don't you think? There is a boundary beyond the skin - the body surface, in the words of this book - which can be our rightful limit. That proper limit is defined by way of clothing and housing and even communication. By means of tools. </p><p>But don't you think, also, that our ordering goes too far when it wishes to take over from the natural order? I sure do.</p><p>Consciousness was never invented. But it's trivial to destroy. </p><p>Well, I'm picking nits. Which is a very social behavior. But I do think that understanding consciousness is critical now, because if we get it right we might be motivated to stop doing so many bad things to that natural order which is also our order. If only we knew how we know. We'd know that the sophomoric division between nature and artifice is, well, artificial. We have never been apart from our ends.</p><p>Anyhow, it seems useful to imagine what post-human might look like. I sure don't wish to imagine the kind of techno trans-humanism to which so many libertarian tech-enthusiast youngsters devote themselves, though I have no real objection to their fantasies. The fantasies of the young are always fascinating.</p><p>I imagine us ever-evolving in the same direction that all life evolves. Which is in the direction of love. I am confident because I know that time's very direction is the direction of love. Time has no physical direction. But I've used up my words.</p><p>Not all of life's difficulties can be addressed by technology. And technology can't control the flow of evolution. I imagine humanity as more loving in our future. It's inevitable!</p><p><br /></p>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3002535658249185923.post-35656841868584797602023-09-19T11:18:00.001-04:002023-09-23T10:05:53.820-04:00Troubleshooting Reality; A Very Preliminary Review of *Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness* by way of *A General Theory of Love*<p>I'm a trouble-shooter. I've proven myself quite good at troubleshooting things that I don't necessarily know as much about as others who aren't so good at it. I proved myself good at computer and network troubleshooting, even though my technical knowledge was far deficient from that of many of my colleagues. I'm good at trouble-shooting engines, even lacking very refined design and engineering skills. </p><p>Who knows? Even though my grip on reality may not be as good as yours, I'll bet I'm better at troubleshooting it. You know, I spend my time fixing things. I try to understand things to the extent that I must, to be able to troubleshoot and fix them. I almost always come away with a better understanding by the time whatever I'm working on is fixed. But I don't really remember a time when I thought that I completely understood what I was working on. </p><p>Most recently, I've been troubleshooting the strange electrical situation on my recently rebuilt sailboat. It's a primitive arrangement, meaning pre-digital, meaning pre-WWII tech. The Internet is now full of instruction on such things, mostly among antique motoring fanatics. It is really difficult to parse the valid part from all the instructions, each of which lacks the kind of narrative completeness I require.</p><p>At great pain to body and mind, I've gotten this 50 year old single cylinder two-stroke engine to run quite well. Just as I had the old Martin (pressure cooker company) outboard when I was a kid. This sailboat engine is also sparked by a magneto, is easily started by hand, and will even power rudimentary electrics without a battery.</p><p>So, to sail the boat I only use the battery to start the engine. For convenience sake. Without even bothering to charge the battery from the dock power, I sailed half the season with a battery read of 12.4 volts. I assumed that the battery was old and weak, and anyhow it worked fine and I talked myself into believing that the starter/generator was vaguely recharging the battery while I motored out. There is also a very small solar pad.</p><p>Eventually, I bought a voltmeter to plug into the cigarette-lighter-style 12 v receptacles I placed here and there for iPhoney passengers. That helped me to realize that there was no charging happening, either by motor or by sun, though the tiny solar panel helped to hold the voltage where left it, once I realized I should actually charge the battery now and then.</p><p>So having fixed all the little leaks, and having perfected the carb and points and mast wiring and electrics, and all the lights, I turned my attention to this little non-problem of generation. After many trips out and back along a long walk to the boat, to try another conjecture with yet another gizmo, the walk being as far as it is possible to be from the gate of this massive marina, I finally understand what is wrong and what to do about it. </p><p>It is a pleasure to me when I finally get to a totality of how the things I work on work. That's what solving a problem feels like. It feels very different from making something new. Related for sure, but different. All the otherwise disconnected symptoms start to match up and then you know what to do to fix the overall. Ignoring all the irrelevant stuff which might be working poorly or fine but isn't germane to the problem at hand. I'm just not that good at new. I fall for things as they are more than as I wish that they were. Plus new is way expensive anymore,</p><p>I am persistent to a fault. And I am really cheap; not by choice, but by necessity. I am motivated. Having money to spend feels like cheating. Indeed, I argue that to get money you have to cheat, but that would be a different essay.</p><p>In my experience of troubleshooting, hearing someone express certainty about what's wrong or what to do invites an instant assessment of how grounded that certainty is. If it doesn't feel grounded, then I'm pretty sure that the certainty will be an obstacle and not a help to my troubleshooting. Which is to say that misplaced certainty will prevent my seeing of the actual problem. Grounded certainty is much more welcome, often accompanied by an "aha" from me, or if not, by a quick explanation from the certain party. Indeed my welcome of grounded certainty is grounded itself on the basis of many such previous explanations. That person has become my teacher.</p><p>There aren't many teachers on the Internet. Well, OK, there are plenty, but one sure does have to wade through a lot of dross to find them. There used to be more, back in the days of newsgroups. Things degenerate.</p><p>So anyhow, maybe I have a right to troubleshoot even philosophy or epistemology or consciousness study even though I might barely know how to define those disciplines. </p><p>Like, OK, when Nicholas Humphrey is going down a track that humans are conscious in ways that other creatures aren't, I find that initially problematical. That's because we're (me and Humphrey) just not using "conscious" in the same way. Consciousness to me is more-or-less what Buddhists mean when they say sentient (in translation). Humphrey's usage for sensation and perception is almost the opposite of my usage. And he never even mentions Julian Jaynes, haha!</p><p>Of course I can't know if he uses sentience as he does because he enjoys slamming the benighted Buddhists, or if that's the received and accepted term of art in his field. He announces that he diverges from many who might be assumed to be his colleagues. I'll have to try to find out.</p><p>But it does seem as though his usage for consciousness is quite different from mine. I consider lizards to be conscious. And sentient. I'll have to think of a word to describe what humans are. Why can't sapient do? Well, I guess it's not so provocative. To say that humans have invented sapience feels like a trite redundancy. And anyhow, why use the word invent <i>unless </i>you wish to be provocative.</p><p>You will never prove to me that there was a Sir Bowline who invented a knot by that name. Knots are in a category of unnatural things which never were invented. They come as close to an embodiment of a Platonic "form" as I can imagine, except that embodiments are precisely not forms in that sense.</p><p>Now I wrote recently of discovering books that have stood unread upon my ever-shifting bookshelves. I've had Gregory Bateson there since forever ago. Even or especially knowing that I felt affinity for his thinking, I've left his <i><a href="https://g.co/kgs/okgeFz" target="_blank">Steps to an Ecology of Mind</a> </i>untouched for decades. It has sat there as a kind of burden. Like I was never ready for it.</p><p>I was reminded of Bateson by way of this Sentience book, who mentions Bateson's slightly more recent book <i><a href="https://g.co/kgs/Hcd9df" target="_blank">Mind and Nature</a>, </i>which I've now retrieved hard-copy from the library. Cheap, see?</p><p>Soulmate. Bateson reminds me that the <i>real </i>is the Platonic ideal. All the rest is perceptual conjecture. Now, I'm no Platonist and certainly no idealist (though Plato's <i>Republic </i>was indeed my first real read. First loves . . .) but there is an essential quality there, now long lost. </p><p>So, what's the difference between a circle and a knot, I wonder. Well, circle refers to an abstraction - a stationary abstraction - and a knot to an actual instance of a procedural form or norm that also happens to work; in just the way that a wheel works, but is not a circle. Procedures are narrative, while forms are eternal, just because forms are abstract. A wheel and a knot both have a temporal and earthly history, Ideas are eternal.</p><p>In Humphrey's language, I wonder if perceptions are abstractions from sensation, or if they are procedural and narrative. If they are, then to call them perceptions is inevitably misleading. A photon impinging upon a retina is a perception, precisely analogous to an instrument reading used by a scientist. The reading then becomes part of some narrative understanding or other, which we hope will become useful. </p><p>I rather doubt that much of anything is ever invented so much as discovered. Invention being the proper province of capitalist economics. You find it first; you take credit and get a temporary monopoly on usage, and you brag that you invented it. The actual invention is made by collective resolution, available nearly simultaneously to anyone equipped to interpret newly possible narrative realities.</p><p>Nothing springs from the mind, while the mind itself is sprung from all society in which one is invested. So, OK, yes, mind is a manifestation of the collective (if not quite an invention), but not ex-nihilo. And I suppose mindlessness is a function of dividing the social from actual social interaction, which is what communications technology does, which inevitably gives us the mindlessness of the cult of MAGA. For instance.</p><p>The mind may apprehend a circle, which is not the same as feeling one.</p><p>Though the artist themself might believe they do, art doesn't start with an idea. It starts with an interaction. And then appears something which sounds or looks or feels right for that particular person at that particular time. Artists are makers, but not inventors. I declare! Tools and a medium and experience. Talent, sure. And something new that was never <i>there</i> before. There is no progress to it. </p><p>The "I" in us is an artifact. Art not invention. </p><p>One of the most important, if not the biggest, puzzles that I face now involves wondering why I am so newly clueless about sailing. I felt as one with the wooden boat that I rebuilt in my extreme youth. It was stunningly simple, and though ever the loner, I was much more social then. </p><p>I learned itinerantly how to accomplish the repairs I made, and the sailing of that boat was utterly transparent. No winches, no complex improvements, just basics that I could see and feel. No money, so I restitched the sails and replaced much wood, re-bedded the engine, and sailed for twenty five years in any and all conditions.</p><p>Now I'm chicken and dumb. What I can't figure out is whether this is a function of age-related frailty in body and mind, or if it is the actual wisdom of knowing versus thinking that I know. As in I have much more experience of fucking up and nearly eating shit (as my daughter calls it) than I once did. </p><p>The old boat had the same electrical system as the newer old boat, but I never plumbed it because I didn't have to. In those days you could get your starter/generator locally rewound, which I did, though for the life of me I can't remember why I had that done. Whatever the problem was, rewinding fixed it.</p><p>This time, with a lot more theoretical understanding than I had then, in part of because of the Internet, I know that it's not the motor. It's the voltage regulator. I'm pretty sure I didn't know what that was way back then. Knowledge can make a person wary. Seem old.</p><p>Progress is a function of problem solving. Not art. An artist might troubleshoot the medium and the tools, though not to make something better. Art is more transformative than that. You end up with something more like a knot than a platonic realization of some idea. The knot was always there, in some sense, as you discovered it.</p><p>To me "sensations" are the directly felt responses to what Humphrey and possibly all philosophers call <i>qualia</i>, which are, to me, precisely what cannot be perceived. Apparently to him, perceptions are the indirect or redirected signals from our perceptual apparatus, such that "sweetness" is a perception where to me it's a sensation. </p><p>And in this other book that I'm reading in tandem, <i><a href="https://g.co/kgs/Bju6iH" target="_blank">A General Theory of Love</a></i> Thomas Lewis (very properly confused with Lewis Thomas) starts out with what he considers to be the obvious fact that whatever love is, it's in the brain. Thereby cementing the, to me, poor assumption that the mind is all "in" the brain. His certainty immediately precludes other avenues for troubleshooting. </p><p>Tant pis! I can't trust him, though I find extremely useful nearly all that he says about love and about emotion.</p><p>In any case, I find the <i>Love</i> book incredibly useful, and ultimately, mostly right. Now Humphrey lands on what I would call a description of the conscious self as derived from narrative social interactions. We are each teachers to each other. It is immensely pleasurable to watch my granddaughter ever so slowly discovering herself. I know that she is not yet, but almost certainly will be, fully conscious as a human being. </p><p>And the narrative construction of the self gives me great hope that despite my existence in the midst of what I might call humanity's most critical existential crisis of all time, we shall effectuate a kind of collective reconfiguration once we identify what is wrong with our collective narrative about reality.</p><p>I present here a concise-ish list of misconceptions, so as not to be coy about it:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The mind is not, in almost any way, coterminous with the brain.</li><li>Just because erasing the brain erases the "I" doesn't mean that the narratively constructed artistic self is instantly gone.</li><li>What is gone is sensation. The responsive "I"</li><li>To be conscious, consciousness - right down to lizard consciousness - participates in all other life on the planet (and perhaps beyond). Certainly no "I", but also no living thing can exist without the totality of life which came before along with an expectation that the next moment will be similar to the last, meaning that life will persist.</li><li>The totality of life is not only our genetic heritage, but also our companion living creatures which create the environment which creates us.</li><li>Intelligence is not severable from emotion.</li><li>Emotion is directly felt by the mind, no intelligence required.</li><li>Sensation is also directly felt (what Humphrey misleadingly calls "perception"), but at the remove of preconscious narration. </li><li>Humphrey's phenomenal consciousness - the feeling of qualia - is put together by mind's narrative skill.</li><li>Narration is an ordering in time of what I call "perception" but which Humphrey misleadingly calls sensation.</li><li>Perceptions are not ordered in time by themselves. Indeed, they could not be. The mind is what does that. Many different perceptions from multiple different senses form a felt "thing" in the mind. Those perceptions don't come to mind in ordered fashion.</li><li>Artificial so-called intelligence overlaps human intelligence only in the way an encyclopedia might. (The map is not the geography)</li><li>Emotion is not an epiphenomenon of the brain's function any more than sensation is.</li><li>Emotion is relational, as is all physical reality, where emotion is both prior to and subsequent to all physical interactions.</li><li>Physical interactions are perceptual, which also means that forces are exchanged.</li><li>Emotions may initiate physical interactions, or perhaps they always do.</li><li>Free will is an emotional and not a physiological fact.</li><li>Precognition is a recognition of what could be, never what will be.</li><li>What will be requires an act of will</li><li>Ownership of actions and decisions always follows after the action or decision was made.,</li><li>The "I" is a very high order abstraction, always late to the game.</li><li>Congruence between self-centered prediction and the actual is the basis for the (narrative!) construction of an "I"</li><li>Feeling ones own "I" happens as an analog to feeling sensations (as a perceptual analog to what Humphrey calls "perception" of qualia, or phenomenal consciousness).</li><li>This "I" has always been there (think about it)</li><li>Similarly, emotions are directly felt by the mind in ways that sensations are felt - subsequent to what I call perception. (Who hasn't mistaken hot for cold, for example, based on the mind's narrative errors? Just like I might mistake what I did with the engine on my sailboat just the other day, which I corrected by a modification to my narrative.)</li><li>Indeed, the mind is mostly composed of felt emotions toward the world all around.</li><li>This is relational without the forces involved in perception</li><li>Memory is "housed" in our environment, and prompts our narrative recall. </li><li>There are no internal representations residing in our brains. We recall the real.</li><li>Our brain is a mediator, not an originator, among perceptual and conceptual reality.</li><li>An artificial brain is quite simply a contradiction in terms.</li><li>Or else there be no nature</li><li>Time is a construct of all life. A conspiracy of will, if you will, but not of things as such.</li><li>God wills forward in time </li><li>There is God and always has been</li><li>There is no lazier word than God</li><li>We shall soon discover that to participate in the future is far more entertaining than to watch narratives on some screen, no matter how exciting those are. Our entertainments are analogous to blindsight (sight without the "I" of seeing)</li><li>Capitalism self-destructs upon the realization that the individualism which drives it is the prime fiction. Hurrah!</li><li>Driving cars, fascinating and wonderful at the outset, shall suddenly become as boring as entertainments projected onto two-dimensional screens.</li><li>Let us all sail into our future. The winds of reality shall always overwhelm us if and as we challenge them.</li></ul><div>So the good news is that since our thoughts are not our own, the collective reconfiguration of those thoughts can happen in a relative instant. Which might be the moral equivalent to God coming down to earth (as distinguished from the childish fantasy that some wise teacher will appear, to tell us what to do).</div><div><br /></div><div>The big trouble which needs to be shot is trust. Most of the astounding bounty we've collectively gotten from oil now defines the trust (im)balance which desperately needs to be improved upon. It is certainly not clear to me in which direction that balance might plummet or soar. What is clear is that we are at a tipping point.</div><div><br /></div><div>Well, aren't we always?</div><div><br /></div><div>Our politics and our economic reality now reward not only narcissistic me-ism, but practically demand it. Instead of debating political lines, we might be better off focusing on some basics: Getting the money and ad-copy out. Hiring for trust as much as for competence. But not forgetting the competence.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's not that hard for me to see why those who have supported Trump mistrust the politics of those whose rhetoric they either don't understand, or feel is a front for some sort of elaborate and self-serving scam. In whose pockets does this politician live?</div><div><br /></div><div>I am inundated on a daily or hourly or often minute-by-minute basis by China-originated email and text scams, based on their patriotic deconstruction of our surveillance capitalism. That cannot be the basis for war. It is a call for education and a prod for unity. But it sure feels like they - the artificially intelligent "they" - know exactly what I'm doing on the Internet, and so can prey on me as though they read my mind. There is no better definition for asshole, innocent though the human bit-players are.</div><div><br /></div><div>Trump represents, of course, a cult. But cult is almost built-in to our global society now. There are no other convincing arguments on offer. We demand a personality that's bigger than life. What we need are more quiet amateurs, who know a lot about everything, but not terribly much about anything in particular. We need leaders who know which experts to trust, not which wannabe personalities will support the one in the middle. </div><div><br /></div><div>We need people who will paint and repair our houses rather than people on Tik Tok pandering their personalities.</div><div><br /></div><div>Well, so I'm alone here. But I have practiced that all my life, and so it not only doesn't bother me, I would be terrified to be recognized. I lack the skill. I am persistent but slow in my trouble-shooting. I am proud, yes, of my accomplishments. A full life, well lived.</div><div><br /></div><div>But know this: Perceptual and conceptual reality both lead to feeling (which the vehicle and which the tenor of that metaphor? Which is the real feel?), and all feeling is direct, mediated though it may be among nerves and words and cultural imperatives. The brain may be our personal mediator of feelings, but all of what we know exists outside the brain. Ideas, our memories, our love interests, our narrative reality. None of those things belong to any particular "I". </div><div><br /></div><div>I am what I am, says Popeye the sailor man. I am so glad that Chinese literature isn't built on metaphor as the main figure. I would otherwise have to prioritize emotion over sensation. Or is it the other way around? A rose by any other name. An asshole is always an asshole. A prick by a rose not so sweet. Time moves forward but metaphorically and not for real, says Plato. </div><div><br /></div><div>Basta! Till next time.</div><div><br /></div><p></p>Lexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17599750504963758602noreply@blogger.com0