Finally, I think I Understand Bratton

I have only random. I try hard not to control what I read, but then I follow threads. I try hard not to look at social media, as if averting my eyes might somehow contribute to the downfall of their corrosive force. But I fail, even while I try to let the random in.

So Bratton tweets. So does my daughter, and she doesn't think she's so great. I should get over myself.

Meanwhile, here is something readable and coherent from Benjamin H. Bratton, which actually betrays a stance. In my attempts to read him, I have slowly developed some confidence that he is compassionate and thoughtful.

Now I know how I think he's mostly wrong (well, I'd have to say "wrong" only in the final or absolute sense, since he's otherwise 99 44/100% right). Via Twitter, he says this bit of writing is from the same time that Bill Gates did this on TED. I don't like websites which don't date their posts. I shouldn't care so much.

My trouble with his position regards the why of human survival. His view is so long - from such an altitude relative to cosmic evolution - that humanity becomes like another bacterial strain. Our strain jumps out from the evolutionary swamp and threatens not just some species or other, but the entire planet.

Implicit seems to be the notion that cognition is what needs rescuing. Agency. He does a glancing credit to Donna Haraway to envision a kind of cyborg future if we hope to survive as a species. An altered, evolved species. It strikes me that Haraway's position was rather more compassionate. Not sure.

My issue is with the supposition that cognition is what humanity is all about. I believe that Bratton falls prey to a pitfall in his very own argumentation here. He's essentially arguing that cognition is why we can and should and must survive, but not because it's at the apex of a long and now discredited chain of being. Rather, his claim is that we should survive simply because we can.

Same thing, no? But the real question is "can we?" Really? So man really does become God, then?

What if humanity is not about cognition? What if humanity is about love? What if our failing is not about not getting the politics right, or the technologies properly aligned, or re-establishing homeostatic balance for our planet by conscious means?

Consciousness is seated in the most primitive structures of the brain. These are the parts whose genetic progenitors go the widest and the deepest. Agency serves consciousness, and not the other way around, and even still our bodies are over 90% not what we consider to be ourselves, when we think in genetic terms. That sort of genetics covers only one aspect of evolution, as Bratton seems clear about.

There is only co-evolution among myriad species.

The wanting to survive which we now feel is the selfish anti-love part that we project into our collective future. In truth, we crave survival as a species for the very same reason that we live life as though it would last forever. We have nothing but what we call our personalities to project, and we mistake the pain of losing those as something somehow worse than the pain of death. Sex, love, rock and roll and personality the way we now live these are very very local and limited. We have mistaken personality for soul, and - as always - we have mistaken God for a cognitive being. A being with a plan.

Talk about anthropocentrism! God in man's image. But it's a funhouse mirror image.

I, too, am 99 44/100% materialist. But I also know that the pure random of evolutionary processes (more broadly understood than just Darwinism or neo-Darwinism or anything else that we think we already know more about than we really do) has not been guided by cognition.

It is consistent with any materialism you may wish that the process of evolution is "guided" by love. You don't need to call it God's love. It's just a proper naming for what's been going on across billions of billions of years to where "years" don't mean a thing.

This evolution is "present" in us. We are not its apex, because we are not its end.

It is perfectly consistent with materialism to reconsider the standard model of physics as a kind of limit to materialism. There are motions in the cosmos which cannot be construed as related to forces. There are no bosons - no messenger particles - to be found, no matter how we stretch our statistical methods for detection based on hyper-complex instrumentation.

These "motions" are actually "e-motions" and the relations are conceptual rather than perceptual. Conceptual relations are always in the perpetual "now," which only means simultaneous across all time and space.

That doesn't mean that mind cannot evolve. But two plus two will always equal four (depending, of course, on some consistent process for designating units).

It is more useful to think of mind as microcosm than as agent. Holograms are more informative here than schematics could be. We persist despite the degradation of the media. Gravitons fade in probability for detection. Zero is never quite zero, is it? Nowhere in the cosmos.

But human mind cannot comprehend the cosmos. That doesn't mean we aren't important.

I'm not about to say or even suggest that agency is not important. We should feel humiliated by what we've done to our planet. We have been humbled. That doesn't mean that we should stop being human. We just have the wrong notion about what it means to be human. Mind includes the emotive center; the heart.

Mind is not only cognition. Emotion is not limited here. It remains doubtful that earth is alone in the cosmos, but we are surely looking for friends in the wrong way. Reading the mind of God has always been a futile exercise.

Bem, Dennett, Yudkowski, Wagenmakers, da bunch of 'em

Like accepting an award at the Oscars, it's hard to know whom to thank, but the list is growing. People arguing about pre-cognition, who should be arguing about something else instead. My list is not the same as your list.

Here's what we know: Statistical analysis falls short of classical proof in at least a couple of dimensions. First it always is and always will be subject to interpretation. After a while, the machinery gets way complex and the various experts sound like they're differing only in point of view.

We also know that definitions for mind, while radically incomplete in a lot of ways, should at least begin to accommodate the notion that there is no strict boundary between inside and outside the mind. And if there is no strict boundary, then it's pretty arbitrary whether you decide that pre-cognition is possible or if it's not, since it pretty much comes down to how you place that boundary.

In any given instance, most candidate boundaries involve volition. If something originates in the mind then it impacts stuff on the outside. But even that quickly becomes a chicken and egg problem where the distinction between paying attention and having your attention drawn is hard to discern.

So it looks as though there's going to have to be an experiment which will skirt the issue of statistical predictive analysis and unambiguously debunk the mechanics of cause and effect. That's already been done in physics to at least the point where we are arguing multiple universes and which metaphors for subatomic are the most consistent among, say, strings, particles and overall strangeness.

I wonder why we remain so skeptical in the macro world? Surely we understand that temporal ordering in the mind is a function of the ex-post-hoc narrative function of mind's threshold for outering or utterance. That is by itself  definition of the boundary between in and out. We assemble perceptions which come at us all out of order, but their condition for utterance is their completion, which includes their re-ordering into a temporal narrative.

You can't really talk to someone meaningfully if you're going to be telling them about what's going to happen unless you can direct their attention to shared perceptual data which is going to assure them you're right. If you refer to something only in your mind, then you have resort only to trust as the "mechanism" to gain that other person's concurrence. Ordinarily, it's no trick to trust that someone in a position superior to yours should be trusted when they shout "duck!"

For most of us, trust is also required to adjudicate among the contending scholars of statistical analysis, since all we really know for sure is that there's lies, damn lies and statistics, and we're getting damned tired of realizing that the experts use these matters against us to sell us quack medicine as often as they use it for our benefit. Practitioners are not always the most informed, especially when they're motivated.

So you end up assessing who has a stake in dreams of immortality, who just wants to get laid and who needs to be incredibly rich. Because he seems a kindred spirit, and doesn't seem to be dissociating from deep psychological hurt, in general I'll go with Dennett.

But his work harbors a deep inconsistency. On the one hand he seems to want to defer questions about pre-cognition off into infinity, while on the other he comes pretty close to saying that there are no clear bounds to the mind.

So, we have a definitional problem here. What is the mind and what is considered to be "in" it.

In my usage a mind is a truly trivial thing, present at creation. What? Creation!? No, that's not what I mean, since what the hell can creation mean? Anyhow, mind is simply that quality of phenomena which involves relations which are not mediated by perception.

In physics, perception involves the exchange of particles, up to the limit of gravity, which seems to implicate virtually everything at the macro level to the extent that gravity is only felt in relation. It seems to be true that there is a divide which cannot be crossed in principle between conceptual and perceptual relations, because the act of crossing collapses the conceptual into the perceptual. Trust me, that's what quantum physics means!

So perceptual reality is outside the mind and conceptual reality is in. I'm not sure how you can test for that, since for me it's by definition; there is no way otherwise to be consistent in what we talk about. Science is all about (actually, I think it's only about) reducing trust issues to as near to zero as can be accomplished, and even then, qua Wittgenstein, you have to have a willing interlocutor. Which hardly happens at the fringes of science, even among scientists who respect one anther. They always end up questioning motives. Sheesh!

And that's where emotion sneaks back into the game. Emotion as in what is it that you really want? Once you show up on Colbert, it's assumed you want book sales, but maybe that's because there's no other way to assert the rightness of your findings. You know they're right and that they will be swamped unless you garner a critical mass of readers to force attention.

But emotion is, you know, always implicated in the life of the mind. Conceptual motion is - and again I'm being definitional which is probably a crime in China, but I'll do it anyhow because around these parts we still believe in free speech - emotion. That's right! If you sense something having only a conceptual relation to something else moving on a collision course, you would be wise to predict actual perceptual implication. And in that sense sensed motion, or I mean emotion, is predictive of events in the outered world.

Since, by definition there isn't any perceptual implication yet, this prediction is not utterable. What you can talk about is your feelings, your wants, your hopes, your aspirations, but you can't assure anyone that these things will come about except by acting on them.  (how cool that even a word like "thing" becomes a metaphor!)

Feelings tend to be shared, and in precisely the manner that Fox TV can predict the future by creating it, you might find that the world's greatest narrative doesn't have to be true. It only has to change the world, Q.E.D. (Quite Evidently Dirty)

Well, OK so this is starting to feel dangerous. I only want to come up with some experimental proof that my definitions are better than your definitions. The presentiment of porn stuff is proving problematical since there are stubborn true believers out there who just won't buy it no matter the discount.

I'll bet if I were to offer a million dollars to the first person who comes up with a good experiment, I'd get it. Of course I don't have a million dollars, but I would have if someone were to take me up on the offer. Still, I'm just not that kind of gambler. Hmmmmm

OK, how about this: After thinking really really hard about why you won't slurp your own spit but you will slurp your lover's spit and more, which should sharpen your mind about the inside/outside boundary thing, now try imagining a world in which you just don't care about anything, but manage to stay conscious all the while.

You have no particular reason to pay attention to this or that, and no pretty asses catch your gaze (gender neutrality is critical here, since we don't want to fall into the Fox TV trap!). No emotional attachment to any sun God or other abstractions, so you can't imagine yourself a monk. A Buddhist, perhaps, but how many of them get to ZaZen in this lifetime? A scientist without passion about his work? Really??

You really can't do it, since you'd be imagining yourself perhaps acting as yourself but not being yourself.

I declare!

I really do doubt that there is an experiment which can be devised, unless it's the one over there among the borderlands of Europe, where they want to capture something metaphorically equivalent to the graviton. But where all the complexity just won't stay still long enough for things to get up and running.

My stars! What shall we do?

I for one am pretty cool with accepting a bit of ambiguity. I'm fine with notions of immortality by reputation and that one day my want will reduce to nil. That my consciousness comes and goes, and my me gets displaced and replaced, but that my desire remains until it to is resolved in crystalline clarity indistinguishable from death.

Or I would be fine to end me with a question mark, and allow as how consciousness is in a bottle, tossed to sea or smashed. Machines are awake already, sure, and not in some dim future. I feel they are already in control, and we have already become unfeeling.

But I will not be fooled by experimental evidence which is but sleight of hand. I want to see the outside in and the inside out before I admit defeat. I want to be educated.

OK, sorry, cheap ending. But I can't come up with a better one. Educate me!

Super Bowl Capacitance

In electronics, I believe, a capacitor in elementary form is a pair of conductive plates held apart at some precise and calibrated distance. So that a charge may be built up across the gap, without allowing its discharge - a leap across the gap - which would eventually be inevitable if there were some promontory or spike across the surface, or if the plates were allowed to come too close toward touch. Little bits of charge can trickle in relatively slowly, and build up a massive potential difference across those plates. It's like magic really. The voltage is defined by the surface of the plates and not by the distance between them, so that quantity can get changed in the instant to oomph.

In real life, capacitors, I believe, once their capacitance is large enough, are built of foil interleaved with insulating paper, and spiraled into a tube. They act like a battery of sorts, storing charge, but are capable of near instantaneous discharge which would explode a battery, were you to attempt it with a battery. Shorting out a battery makes a bomb, almost. Shorting out a capacitor, I hear, can throw you across a room if you're not careful, working inside a TV set, say. Even the new flatscreens, if they're at all like the laptop screen I once touched in the wrong place, have capacitors capable to burn a hole right through your skin down to the very bone. It's a bit of a rude surprise, and hurts for days and days, although there's absolutely no blood.

This was my first HD SuperBowl, for which I had to provide the rabbit ears (I couldn't afford the flatscreen) since the particular satellite network my friends use hasn't caught up with HD for local stations (How can they keep their subscribers, underwriters, you and me??). I'm always shocked, no really truly, I always am, by what I catch when watching these games. The voltage is amped up so amazingly high (in a battery where rate and quantity of input remains roughly equivalent to output, it's regulated and limited; in a capacitor, it can go nearly through the roof).

I don't want to make all that much of this or any other metaphor stolen from real life, but it was hard not to notice all the adverted suggestions of a big party at the end of time, promises of revelations of nakedness which might knock your socks off, interleaved with quietly funny parades of nearly naked people looking more like you or me. If we're gonna die in an instant, then surely it would be alright to climb right into that hottub with someone you hardly know and get it on, baby, get it on.

Right? Yeah, right . . . .

I was still more shocked by the absolute count of announcers, each one literally shouting into his mike, holding poses, and barely containing expressions of such furious concentration that were they not superannuated athletes themselves - were they you or I - they surely would have burst some vessel.

The shouting was, of course, unnecessary, but it did simulate the noise at the stadium, by omission, and it was brought into relief by somewhat martial drumming music to keep the hype going. And what about those superannuated WHO! at halftime? No matter how much electricity got pumped into the context for their show, replete with fireworks inside and out, they still looked a bit behind the curve of the energy they wanted to be projecting.

Can't they get someone younger to do it for what they must be paying? Or am I now the mainline demographic, wanting still to pretend that I could get it up that high? I thought Sringsteen and Bono pulled it off alright, but these guys were simply calling the question. Some edge got crossed last night. Some edge go lost?

Sure, I'm as susceptible as you are to the emotion of the anthems (the pretty one and the official one) of necessity mostly a-Capella now. Even the hyper-jetted flyover gets me going. Reminded during commercial breaks that it's been television for my generation which has defined the enduring moments of our lives, and we can have one in the palm of our hand, for whatever might be happening, even if our significant other has ripped out our spine to make us do something other than watch football. Imagine, television in the palm of our hand. Whoever would have thunk it? Or that cars would remain our only sanctioned masculine outlet.

Well, except that the idea is not exactly new. It's all about which channels you can get to what reliability and at what definition. I want the virtual reality goggles, man, jacked in twenty four and seven, three hundred sixty degrees of global longitude. With definition I can almost reach out and touch.

We are the television generation, the mediated generation, the find ourselves narcissistically in our projections generation, the ones who fell in love with JFK and then that B-Grade Bonzo actor dude, because they were so easy on the eyes and ears, because they made it so easy to believe in ourselves.

I just realized today, and you won't believe this either - that it wasn't premeditated, cynically, for some particular meaning - that the photo I choose for myself is the very opposite of the ones authors, for instance, usually prefer. I am extremely uncomfortable with any attempt to project cool. Look on the dustjackets of any book, and you'll know what I'm talking about. That particular angle, that intellectual scowl, that secret hotness which will be hinted at through words.

I should keep this to myself, but it has been my pledge to you that I won't by coy like that. Anyhow, I guess I like the picture, first of all because it was taken by a near-professional photographer down at the News. (I don't mean to demean by the "near" part, but that's how he introduced himself, since I was hardly important enough to merit the real thing, and so they let him indulge his hobby for the "my view" opinion column walk-ins - and I hope this doesn't constitute evidence of theft right here) Second of all because it just looks like me being me at the very best of times. I don't think it hints at anything at all.

Anyhow, the charge built up across the flat plates - ever increasingly flat and ever increasingly sharp - has, I believe, grown dangerous. I say that advisedly, not being an end of the world chicken little type, by both disposition and decision, but I think the charge between me and my projection has reached rather too high a voltage. Even to make a spark in an engine, if it's not diesel, requires only a step-up coil, and not some massive super-shock like you might need to shoot someone to the moon!

The entire Republican party must, for instance, retain the very same game face during the President's speech, or lose touch with the battery-storage base of their power. You really don't want to stand out as the one who liked something the other party's president said. And the other side of the aisle is even worse. Cheering to beat the crowd. I'm sure I wasn't the only one to feel the delicacy of each moment for Obama, having to contain the certainties, having to modulate the tone in a chamber not used to shouting. I thought he performed brilliantly, frankly, myself.

Especially in a political context where any single mis-cue can bring you down in an instant. Can you imagine the news coverage if somehow the plug got pulled while the WHO! was performing? There must have been armies of vigilant protectors, and legions of redundancy mirroring the literal hoard which had to bring on the set and strike it. Talk about a precision marching band!!

Veto power has all the power now, where if you can be lured into bed inappropriately, that will be all that is needed to end your career, at some moment of the terrorist's choosing. All it takes is a single spark, and the entire capacitor is discharged. Acorn. Spitzer. That guy who went to South America. Never mind Edwards, who never could find the right time to discharge the truth.

Because it is a kind of terrorism, right? That the NSA, now fully aligned with Google, can know literally more about yourself than you can. The marketers know which brochures to send you through the mail, and can peg you as Republican even when you're not, based simply on your inhabitation and style preferences. Do you want to stand out from the crowd, now do you?

Their margin for error approaches nil. The odd thing is that the cost to send you these brochures quickly exceeds, in aggregate, anything you could possibly spend in return, except in aggregate, where someone who isn't you must be spending millions. Or is that why the economy requires a massive reset every once in a while, to effect a transfer of the little-guy's wealth (as if we have any) over to the guys with enough money to know where to send the brochures? A capacitor recharge on massive scale.

I know my retirement fund has remained precisely flat since before the year 2000. I think that constitutes a kind of theft. But we're talking on top of $10K max, which is almost laughable. Until you add it up. But somebody not me was making an awful lot of money during that time, and lots of it got stored away, no matter what we're meant to believe about evaporated bubble wealth.

It's kind of fun to hear the rich people (people not me who get mistaken for Republicans - no one makes that mistake with me) add up their monthly fees for phone and cable and Internet and to realize that what I spend for mobility and no cable - no TV - is about double what they consider fair for the massive package of stuff I never could afford. You know, the HBO, Cinemax HD sports collection at a download speed of infinity, with unlimited talk to the world, presented at something well beyond forty two inches diagonal.

Is that my cost to remain unlocated? Up in the air? Although you can pin me precisely with a simple "whois" query from the command line.

I really should get a clue. I suppose if you add in their cellular bill, the aggregate might approach me. But still.

Alright, so I'm not an investment grade mathematical whiz. But, believe it or not, I do have a pretty good mathematical mind. What do they call those guys on Wall St. who game our system. Quants, I think. I'm not a quant, for sure, but I get the math. I never did want to win at the roulette wheel or blackjack. I'm more like you - I've always wanted honest work, and feel free to take that "want" in punny style if you need to. 'Cause I can't say myself if I've ever had it - honest work, although I used to be a bicycle mechanic, and that at least felt like honest work.

So anyhow, mobs behave differently from individuals, as we all know, and at a certain point if you're a part of a big enough mob, you're going to act approximately as beastly as those Bills fans do at a drunken contest. Where, thank goodness, it doesn't make any real difference, and probably even does a lot of good, to exercise that mobliness a bit right out in public. I can get into it, short of F-words and facepaint, right along with the best (or worst) of them. Almost. Kind of. If only I gave a damn for the game itself.

Here I go again, but I might be the only leftie who actually agreed with Sam Alito when he made theater of the theater of the State of the Union address. He broke the expected necessity for those wearing robes to remain impassive. But the President also veered a bit too far toward demagoguery, as if corporate money weren't already all over the game of politics. And in a game of lowest common denominator veto power, at least Alito broke ranks with keeping rank. At least he was willing to show his hand.

And in the end, an honest decision made according to principle will at least require that money be played right on the table. So that we can all decide as Obama urged us to if we really want to regard the collective mob-mentality resulting from subservience to who it is that pays you as equivalent to an individual with heart and mind and unique DNA, with regard to freedom. We might and likely should be horrified at what gets perpetrated in our name, if only we could see it. And it's not likely to get shown up on TV, where only the beautiful get rewarded.

I guess it sucks for dear sweet pit-bull cheerleading Sarah Palin that she comes along at the endtimes for Televised reality. She'll fit in right there alongside that shameful and diminutive Focus on the Family anti-abortion ad, which, who knows, might have pre-empted the spot for a gay dating service. Overwhelmed by ads for wanton nakedness, partying at the endtimes. I am the only one who sees the irony in all this? I rather doubt it.

Near Geneva, Particles Finally Come Together With a Bang

Well. I'm still enough of a science geek to find this very exciting. The Large Hadron Collider seems to be starting up this time. Cool.

Of course it will be quite a while yet before they can calibrate the thing and run it up to full power to do the real experiments we've all been waiting for. I guess that still gives me time to make my opposing case: that this spells the end of "normal science" within the current paradigm.

I feel so strangely calm about it, not really caring a whole lot if the machine works, or if it breaks down again, but surely hoping that interesting things are discovered and that no-one gets hurt along the way.

As must all people of my generation, I remember the rocket launches of my youth so vividly. We all gathered in school to watch on TV, without any dissenting voices that this was some political stunt. It was exciting beyond imagining, and gave a sense of promise to our future.

I knew I wasn't going up in any spaceships, since that took too much military commitment, so I turned to the inner space of our oceans and took up SCUBA diving. Oh, sure, I thought about becoming a Navy SEAL, when I didn't want to be a secret agent. But for me, the trouble started when Lake Erie, along whose shores I grew up, turned so clouded with death that you couldn't see your hand in front of your face beneath its waters.

And very gradually, I've awakened to the essentially political content of all our boldest moves. These contests and challenges which get us cheering wild. But the war in Vietnam really did put an end to one sort of patriotic ferver. And the shuttle disasters gave some perspective to our outer space explorations.

Now the Large Hadron Collider elicits hardly any collective excitement at all. It's way too geeky and hard to understand. I guess everyone believes that there could be some interesting outcomes from such a huge experiment in basic science. We retain some hope for a renewal of that enthusiasm which Einstein once elicited.

Among other things, Einstein was a first among mass-media celebrities. He was a world-class personality, who became our image of the great discoverers of the modern world.

In our Post Modern reality, these celebrities have been replaced by the uber-geek; a kind of triumph of the nerds, who do stuff which doesn't merit superstar adulation, but which we're all glad for them to do. Since we do appreciate their cool resulting products.

Science has become a plodding massive enterprise, whose superstars now are represented well enough by the Intel ads. Every once in a while, some individual scientist with a populist touch makes it onto PBS or among the bestselling authors. Following on Carl Sagan's legacy maybe.

I liked Sagan's take on making Contact! Where there was no way to determine if the actual contact with alien life was made in reality or in the time-traveler's mind. Where the really expensive machine provided something impossible to distinguish from really dangerous drugs.

I don't think the Large Hadron Collider is in that category at all. We're not looking to make contact with anything other than the limits to what our mind can comprehend. The limits to what we can consider the hard facts of reality.

Whatever happens over there, I really do hope that the machine does work. There is no question that we will learn something important as a result of it firing up successfully.

My prediction has been, and I'm pretty sure will remain, consistent. There will be the somewhat disappointing discovery that there is no real end to the splitting of infinities among the particles which we can detect. This is the Zeno paradox all over again, written as large as it can get.

We will sort-of detect a sort-of particle, all the while continuing to hunt for certainties in the world around us. While, in actual fact, it's long past obvious that there are none at those limits.

At the limits of the ability of human mind to comprehend, there will only be the reflection of our effort to comprehend, and we will be thrown back to wonder what we should do instead to generate the modest agreements which are required for continued life on the planet.

I think it sometimes pleasant to speculate what we could know if our brains were that much more powerful than they are. But it just may be that the limits to intelligence are also the limits to what we can do with mind collectively.

It is my position that conscious intelligence has never been the property of individual minds. And that therefore, the "equipment" on which mind rides is not its limiting factor. Instead, what ultimately limits mind is those same limits in our ability to get along; to agree, to coordinate our efforts.

So, without question, I celebrate the triumph of this CERN collider. Getting it built and funded across cultural and language barriers gives hope also that there is something bigger than these United States, which can gather the best among us in some conspiracy of hope.

I like that this effort is post-patriotic, post-partisan, and the purest sort of science. What I don't like is that only the purest sort of science can engender this level of agreement. We still seem so far away, with anything short of particle physics.

Still - and here's how far out I remain myself - I'm going to keep writing simply because the more I write, the more I discover around me that there is less and less distance between what I say and what the world is waking up to.

Neither you nor I will be able to tell if that's because my own thinking continues to evolve, or if it's because, like Orpheus praying for the sunrise, this type of thinking has to be carried on, even in the absence of anyone paying attention, as a kind of prayer into the non-existent ether.

I Won!

OK, so, that was obvious, right? This one must have been already in the can before that previous one got written where I played the "mega millions". It's all an elaborate hoax, just like scientists are conspiring to keep down the anti-global warming truths,



Isn't this just good science, or is it conspiracy among the scientists?

or in the way that we now can put a lawyer in jail for taking the criminal's side.




Honestly, I did buy a lottery ticket, for which I'm embarrassed as hell. I'm not about to check its number, since it might have been the most insane and crazy thing I've done in my life, and I'm not very proud of it. But well, hell, even I can afford a buck for a simple experiment, right?

The experiment was about how I would feel, and I have to say I didn't do very well. I started thinking about how I could gain lots of recognition for my crazy theories, and then maybe the world would start moving in a different direction.

That's pretty darned grandiose of me, and so I also started worrying about my sanity if I actually did win, which puts me right there in that same camp as all the crazies who buy lottery tickets.

I know you think I need an editor, and I'm not going to disagree with you, but as embarrassing to me as you think my writings sometimes are, I swear to you nothing comes close to how silly this one makes me feel.

But I mean, I really did win - and you can call it the lottery if you like. My sweetheart arrived safely in Paris and thought enough about me to let me know. I arrived safely back from NYC with my daughter. Oh sure, these are really relatively safe roads compared to the ones you drive, since only losers live in Buffalo where there isn't any traffic.

But it could be bumper cars down on Manhattan, and well, sure I'm one of those strange types who actually likes to drive there. There's a flow to it which seems so much saner than L.A., say, where OK, I've never actually driven. And with all those people and buildings you actually do feel like you're going somewhere. Even though it makes no sense to have a car in Manhattan, well except for, you know, sneaking in to pick up your daughter.

And last night I got to see Ha Jin along with maybe a couple thousand other people at a packed house down the street. My good friend won a ticket (I actually don't have even that $35 until my house sells, so I wasn't about to go on my own) and so there we went! He said it wasn't quite like the lottery, since all you had to do is know the names of one of this author's works. Well, I wouldn't have won - oh sure I could have looked it up on the Internet, which would have been like cheating, where my friend actually had the book right on the desk next to him, so he won legit!

And I was blessed. I mean truly blessed. OK, so it was a little bit spooky how people I knew didn't recognize me. I mean, in a way I'm Mr. Tiananmen here in backwater Buffalo (which is nowhere near as backwater as where I really live), and here's this writer, Ha Jin, whose prominence descends in some sense from his refusal to re-enter his homeland after those horrific events back in 1989. And I saw at least three people I'd led on trips to China, and it was as if I didn't exist.

Sure, I look a lot different now than I did way back then. I'm older, heavier and have no hair. And the fact is, I'm plenty embarrassed to say, that I'm too shy to walk up and say hi to important people even when I know them pretty well. I really am, which is a little bit strange coming from a guy who lets his ass hang out all over the Internet. But they say the actors who get up on stage - a lot of them - are shy too. Although I couldn't really imagine myself in Ha Jin's place in front of all those people.

And then there's the fact that Ha Jin not only can write, but really works at it, and seems to have mastered absolutely everything his audience has mastered, and can make funny jokes right in front of that huge crowd, even speaking a language which was never native for him. 

So, in that sense, I'm glad that my crazy grandiose fantasies of winning the actual lottery have about as much chance of panning out as that Large Hadron Collider now has of running.



So, is it gonna actually fire up and get the experiments done?

I should leave things right there, which with my sick sense of humor, would be a pretty funny place to leave things, but I still feel kind of funny about this whole thing. I mean, I have no business acting as if people didn't recognize me. I've been hiding out for what, maybe 18 years now? I mean how would anyone who thought they knew me even open up a conversation? And how would I respond? (that's my excuse for being Mr. Shy).

"Um, well, yeah, see, I don't really know what I'm doing or where I'm going or where I'm going to live." Even the bartender at the really cool and openminded place right around the corner from where I live was taken aback by that comment. I mean he really seemed stunned and thrown for a loop, and you'd think bartenders, almost by definition, are pretty laid back about such things. Living by their wits and watching lots of crazy people do lots of crazy things. My friend and I left when things were starting to hop. Around here, the bars don't really come to life until well after midnight, since they stay open until 4 AM, and, well, we're pretty lightweight . . .

So, that's my idea of winning the lottery. I wonder what yours is? Are you living on today's page, or some fantasy page you just can't wait to arrive at? What corners would you cut to get there? If you're a scientist and some crazy creationist steals your files and finds the smoking gun that you called him crazy, does that make you guilty of conspiracy? We're only negotiating price here folks.

Emotional Pair-a-dice

You will know by now that I have some interest in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. You will also know that I am interested in random as something other from meaningless. And you will know that I have, therefore, an interest in the random evolutionary connections which lead to our existence being construed as something other from happenstance. My model is pretty much identical to my hope that the connections along my family's gene-line narrative were loving for the most part. The story holds together better that way. But you can make your own story out of thin air too!

Inevitably, I have been more than a little bit intrigued by well-qualified physicists suggesting that the strange accidents which have befallen the CERN supercollider might just be at that intersection between fate and our attempts to tempt it by teasing out the final particle which can only exist under conditions much closer toward the Big Bang than most of us would like to get.

They are doing the math, these mavericky physicists, and suggesting that if there is an actual way to insert a random wild-card into the planning process, then we should by all means do it. They even demonstrate why this is a way to improve the odds for getting valuable information back; regardless of the results of both the Hadron Collider successfully firing up, or it's being called off because some incredibly improbable roll of some dice said it should be!

Either way, we get more information than we would without inserting this wild card into the control mechanisms. We learn if we are tempting fate, I believe is what they're saying. And we can improve our modelling of the physical universe, even if the machine fails to fire up! Because if the impossibly improbable actually happens, and the wild-carding calls off the show, then we will have to consider that fact carefully before we spend a few more billions of dollars and kilowatts to try it all over again. We might even want to look a little harder in other directions for theoretical models of actual physics.

Of course, these guys are being ridiculed right out of the scientific community, and the prospects for actually inserting their wild card into the decision tree over at CERN are about the same as those for a bird to drop a baguette flake into the power station and bring down the entire operation. Which, um, did actually happen, by the way. But in operations this complex, if it wasn't a bird it would be something else, so that silly event proves absolutely nothing. I think that's what these scientists would also say.

So, you also know that my problem with machine intelligence is very simple, trivial and easy to understand. It comes down to random again. Consider how likely it is that an airplane builder could be convinced to include in her design some random factor, like a pair of dice being thrown automatically, which would, upon the incredibly unlikely event of say seven sevens in a row, cause the plane to self destruct.

That would be insane, and no-one would ever do it. Because we can calculate to some degree of incredible precision that after x number of flights there is near inevitability that one will crash. Perhaps, as a joke, it could be done if the probabilities were far enough out there, but even then, just like that Soviet end-game machine recently unveiled, it would seem incredibly irresponsible. I guess the reason they set it up in Russia was because they didn't trust the human side of their decision tree, so they wanted to inhibit the guys with the buttons.

Still, people fly planes knowing that there remains a certainty that accidents will happen. You have to build them to fly forever, though, and then, well kind of cross your fingers that at least the design isn't, hopefully, too fatally flawed. I, for one, am way more comfortable in a plane than driving my own car, and I'm a really good driver. But there's a lot more random out on that road.

Machines just can't do random. They don't do random. It would be incredibly irresponsible to program random into them, especially if our life depends on them.

Of course, people do random, which makes us pretty dangerous. We sometimes even take the pilot's seat after a drink, or watch our laptops when the landing strip is passing by. Among all the fly-by possibilities which our brain picks up from the world around us, most would agree that it's emotion which pikks (sic) up the ones you pay attention to.

And random would be fine among machines, so long as there were other machines to restrict the craziness. That's why they pull my Mom off to the side at the Peace Bridge when she goes into Canada. They're gathering data, by random selection, so that the humans won't be left alone to read her sweet face and get fooled. So, it might be smart to program in random just to get things going, say to call an airplane in for servicing, if never for it to self destruct.

But emotion has been paradigmatically (I use the term advisedly) banned from science, pretty much in the exact same way that random has. Whatever else is true, the "truths" which can be revealed by the scientific method exclude anything which is emotionally tainted.

To me, that's very much like the serpent which powers itself by eating its tail (I usually like to misspell tale here, but I'm giving you a break, remember?). You just simply can't get away from random. But you can say that there is a sane way to use random and an insane way.

And at is very fringiest remove from everyday life, the term emotion also has validity to very precisely the same extent that the term "particle" can have any validity at all in the "hard" science of physics. Where Schoedinger's cat is either alive or dead until you take a peek. Where a "particle" is about as hard as Joan Baez' voice.

I'm just sayin'

OK, off to roll the dice on the highways . . .

*sigh*

Wait!

Just randomly now, the surveyors are here to line up my land. The guy looks like a hillbilly, but thinks like a physicist. He explained how he would surely know if I'd been playing with the marker posts, and why they wouldn't just simply update their last survey (saving suspicious me a ton of money), and how the conspiracy among satellites and laser distance measurements, mathematically corrected for perfect level, keep things a lot better in line than they used to be.

So, I'm kind of curious to hang around until he's finished. And then to tramp the land I'm about to leave, to find out really what I used to sort-of own. (a fiction the banking system allows me to believe)

Which gives me just another minute here to finish this silly tale. In some sense, that airplane I've been talking about depends on the goodwill of every single player along its line of assembly. And, let's hope, every single player is also subject to a lot of fail-safes, redundancies, and double-checks.

And at the end, the company builds its reputation on the safety of its planes. And still, if we're like Fox TV, we like to point out all the ways in which our interests aren't being taken into any consideration at all. And we end up preferring stupid people who look good and pretend to be like us to the smart people who we fear might be gaming us with their tricky language. Double *sigh*.

Going with your gut is great for deciding when to hit the road, and who to love. Not so hot for making really important decisions, right? But at the fringes of everything we do, it's still an emotional roll of the dice.

And, well, I'm just hoping we never depend on a machine, or machine-like thinking, to do our decidering for us.



Will machines ever think?

I'm hoping there will be a little bit of caring in the decision too, and not too much passing it off to fictional Jesus. Nor, for that matter to some roll of dice that technology will come around and do our thinking for us. Or make it just that easy to act like greedy selfish tycoons, each and every one of us.

Fury Unleashed

Well, this is embarrassing. It doesn't seem I could stay away for very long. But I'm getting spammers wanting me to moderate their comments, and so, anonymous, this one's for you. I might just have to lock you out, and only allow people who will identify themselves to comment. I don't think that would be such a bad idea in general to tame this web.

Of course I write truly and only for you anonymous, since I haven't got a clue who my audience is or might be. Back when I was studying poetry, there were these crazies who thought the thing to do was to develop the "science" of literary study. I even had to endure some guy saying that while smoking a pipe up at a podium. You could just see the science-envy dripping off that stage.

People will always be jealous of those who possess occult arts, like the ability to read and write has been through most of history. I watched Men Who Stare at Goats yesterday, a seriously funny and deep movie which you should see. Kevin Spacey plays the jealous vindictive homophobe who smokes a cigar. You won't be able to tell he's a homophobe, but he is, and plays it beautifully. He's jealous of the occult arts of the Jedi warriors he'd like to join.

He makes a science of the art, and it gets spelled torture. This is an important fact to understand as a citizen of this vanishingly democratic nation of ours.

But I'm talking about the more usual arts like literature, music, painting, sculpture, performance - those are the unruly things which make academics so furiously jealous. Hey, I didn't say so, some academic did, so it must be true.

So, is it the scientists who are jealous of the artists? Science is that much more certain, and you can be an uncool dweeb, but if you pin something down, then it won't matter because everyone will have to respect you. You can prove it.

And here I am, and I really don't give a shit at this particular moment if you think I'm nuts or just another crazy who thinks he's figured out the quantum implications of LSD. You should see all the crazy stuff across the internet with self-published nutjobs who are certain that they have it right and all the peer-reviewed scientists have it wrong. Or maybe you already have seen them.

I'm not about to publish my vanity press diatribe, nor do I care to see who will buy it. I would never want to be a member of any club that would have me in it anyhow, so why would I want to reach *those* people?

But dammit, there must be one person out there who can get what I'm trying to say here. OK, actually, there are tons and tons and tons of people (do you think people should be measured by the ton?), many if not most of them quite famous, which pretty much places them out of my reach, if you know what I mean.

Physicists get letters all the time from people claiming to have solved this or that canonically unsolvable problem. They can hardly be bothered to read them all. Pretty much like houses of literature and all their submissions. I mean, you've really got to have and use connections if you want to get anywhere at all in this supposedly meritocratic world.

I actually do have lots of connections, and who knows, maybe I'll start to press them. It feels out of bounds, though. It feels like cheating. It feels like taking advantage, but I guess at a certain point, you do what you have to do, right?

I mean just because Britney Spears used her connections to make it to the top, doesn't mean she isn't any good. She'd never stay there if she weren't, right? I mean, wasn't she a mouseketeer, and isn't that a connection, or were you just thinking she's some lucky trailer trash?

Meanwhile, spam suckers of the world, I'm not going to take this laying down.

Each and every time our lovely capitalistic globe spanning enterprise is in danger of showing its true stripes, the ones in power mobilize their armies of minions to fan the flames of fear. Fear of socialism, fear of government takeover of your lives, fear of ragheads, whatever works. And that's always been because back in their richly paneled offices, they too are terrified of what might happen if and when the people actually get a clue.

I think there actually are one or two cigar chomping power mongers who think it's all a game of survival of the fittest and since they're the fittest it's their job to survive. But, and this will utterly destroy any credentials I have left as a left winger, I actually do think most of them do earnestly believe that their role is stewardship for people less educated, less fortunate, less cultivated, and perhaps even less in touch with God.

They know that they don't need elaborate fairy tales for their beliefs, but they're pretty sure you and I do, and they're pretty afraid of what might happen if and when you stop believing in them.

We, the people, and that includes all the titans of "industry" (as if that even existed anymore) are up against the wall now. We really are. You can put your head in the sand, or you can pretend that there will be some wonderful new technology to fix things, but if you open your eyes, we're up against the wall as the population on this earth, just precisely as much as are those poor folk our global-capitalistic enterprises depend on and exploit.

And now we've actually allowed delusional true believers in the literal Word to infest our halls of power, and that's a terror to me far in advance of whatever it is Osama can unleash (by his fact or by his proxy, as true belief infects those who've never known him or his minions). These are folks which the thinking people among us fret about just as much as we do global warming, but we don't have a clue what to do about them. Because their improvised explosive devices are built on words of love.

But the effect is the same as if they'd walked in to the halls of power strapped in bombs. This is not an acceptable circumstance, folks. Folksy folks, don't be such sheep. It's really dangerous to have delusion people in power.

So, whoever out there can be my audience, whoever has mastered enough of both science and the arts, listen up. I'm talking to you. There is scant time to get it together, now, but time enough for sure. (yeegads, I hate cliffhangers, I really do)

What could possibly dis-empower the bottom feeders now? Now that the cadre of investigative reporters has been almost systematically dismantled (no, I don't think it's a conspiracy - it's yet another side effect of this wonderful Internet), who is to tell truth to power? How are we to stop the once so-called Madison Avenue techniques for selling soap to the masses from selling them stupid people as office holders?

It seems an impossible task. Unless or until we can bring right into the realm of science something which will compel the spammers actually to shut their yaps. Something which can become the moral equivalent of Jesus actually riding his white horse down off some fluffy cloud.

Just like God, you'd sure like to invent this great new science if it didn't already exist. But here's the thing. It does!

One more time then: At least a few humanities types have mastered the concept of quantum fluctuations. You might understand, for instance, that electrons jump from orbit to orbit, and that these orbits can be defined by their energy levels. You might understand that in the process a single quantum of electromagnetic energy gets released (or absorbed, depending on which way the jumping goes).

You might understand that these quanta (photons, in the case of electromagnetic forces) used to be understood as waves propagating through some supposed ether, just like sound does through the air. And you've probably heard that the existence of the ether has been thoroughly disproven (despite some enterprising thinkers across the web who'd like to say it ain't so).

There is no medium for propagation, but there's no emptiness either. Because these photons exist, provably, as both waves and particles. But the waves propagate only conceptually, because once you actually "detect" the particle, the wave - they call these probability waves - collapses, and the statistically accurate but approximate position of the photon becomes something very close to a point, or if you prefer, a scintillating string (which becomes a distinction with a difference only with particles much smaller than photons). One lonely particle conceptually fills the entire cosmos with its probabilty wave. That's the "no emptiness" part.

This apparent paradox has been proven experimentally now over and over again. You're really forced to have your cake and eat it too, because it turns out that nothing really is except conceptually, until it gets detected or perceived, and then it suddenly must be something other than the wave it demonstraby was before hand. Very clever experiments with slits can almost be done at home.

The missing piece, however, is that these quantum fluctuations also manifest across time. This is also pretty trivial to demonstrate, falling out as it does from that same set of realizations which have Einstein's name pasted all over them.

Once you limit the speed of propagation for physical reality at the speed of light - that's the speed at which a photon can travel when unencumbered by perception - then it falls right out that particles traveling at any speed relative to one another are also quite out of sync time-wise. They become impossible companions by virtue of this magic twin paradox.

Because if you are moving fast relative to me, then time for you as measured by me actually slows down, even if we have the same perfectly calibrated atomic, Jesus!, watches. And if the same thing's happening for you, well then we become impossible for one another.

So, you become impossible to me, just as I become impossible to you. Or something has gone wrong with our watches. But the force carrying particles can correct a lot of this issue, for so long as you're not actually moving at too big a fraction of the speed of light, and for so long as they still can move that fast.

Get things really cold or really fast or really really hot and all bets are off, just like they're trying to do over at the CERN collider.  They've already shown (you know, "they") that if you cool things down to near absolute zero, where if things actually were particles, they'd stop moving, the quantum "states" of certain classes just all sort of merge together into a Bose-Einstein condensate.

They've also already shown that quantum states do indeed work in sync, although to do so would seem to require information to travel faster than the speed of light, and by definition there can be no mechanism for that. You can experimentally separate a quantum pair - "particles" which share a single quantum "space" - and prove that by measuring ("detecting") some quality of one, you've done it also for the other.

Computer scientists fully intend to exploit this property to increase the power of computers by, yep, a quantum leaping factor!! Aritificial Intelligence scientists are practically salivating at the prospects, as well they should. This is not fiction, it's solid science.

But along the way to the forum, people have forgotten to pay attention to the obvious.  That it's not only the "probability" of existence which must get calculated, it's the very possibility too.

As particles pass by one another, they flash in and out (sorry, I have to damp down the fire - I almost started a chimney fire, which is only funny if you read my "The End" posting) of actual possibility for one another, in very precisely quantum fashion.

These fluctuations, just like the cloud which defines the orbit of an electron around its nucleus, have to stay within the realm of possibility, which is why you literally cannot accelerate any mass to the actual speed of light, since it would take the energy of the entire cosmos to do so, but they fluctuate nontheless.

But the particles don't become real to one another without the exchange of smaller ones, which pin them, as it were, to existence in one another's world. Just like that science-lusting literary professor wanted to do with poetry. Pin it down and stop making me jealous of your power.

Prior to that exchange, there is *only* an emotional connection. I'm not trying to be cute here, the term falls out from the very fact that probability or possibility waves can only, already by prior definition, exist conceptually. And a conceptual connection - I'm coining a definition right here, so mark the spot - is an emotional connection.

I use the term emotion advisedly, first because it fits without changing one single thing in the language, and second because it can describe motions toward and away in fashion perfectly analogous to what forces do in nature. Concepts move and can move too, my gentle reader.

But I'm saying these emotional forces also exist in nature. Sorry about that, but truly I have always wanted to be the one to resolve that old sophomoric question of whether art imitates life or the other way around, and  I remain profoundly dissatisfied with the Post Modernistic approach so currently in or out of favor depending on which side of what divide you sit. Humanities, science, Ivory tower, wilds of the blogosphere. Whatever!

So, for sure this entire theory of mine reads like an elaborate metaphor, which is but a single step removed from an elaborate hoax. I'll have to leave it to you, gentle reader. My feet are encased in concrete, and I'm about to be tossed off the boat. I have about a Chinaman's chance here, but it seems a chance worth taking.

Man, I sure do wish I had some art!

Did a Time-Traveling Bird Sabotage the Hadron Collider?

Did a Time-Traveling Bird Sabotage the Hadron Collider?

Sorry, but this is just too good to be true. First the New York Times, and now Time Magazine has gotten on the hot bandwagon of speculation about the Hadron Collider being sabotaged from the future. (I'm sure it's the thing most on your mind!)

I don't mean the troubles are too good to be true, since I'm pretty excited to see the thing get fired up. I just mean as grist for my blogging mill, which as you know, faithful reader, is all about making fun of end-time science. Religion too. Actually, I think I make a lot more fun of end-time religion.

I know I'm getting shrill on the topic, but somebody has to get the word out. Hello World, it's time for another paradigm shift. Strap yourselves in, because this one's quite a ride. The Bomb was just a tiny thing in comparison. I mean, this one's da bomb!

Yeah, my daughters always tell me I should never try to use their kind of talk too. It just makes me look stupid.

But there's been a dry spell in theoretical physics for quite a while now. The experimentalists can't seem to think up any new ways to guide the theorizing, which is just getting more and more way out there.

People are now willing to believe almost anything about what will be the next big thing in physics. Multiple universes, time-travel, quantum consciousness, dozens of dimensions. It just gets to the point where you might as well believe in ghosts. Rapture of the Nerds doesn't seem so very different from other kinds of rapture all of the sudden.

But just like love or death, which if you're really lucky hit you out in left field from where you least expect it, the answer is so freaking obvious that it's just about driving me crazy to have somebody, anybody, see it apart from me, myself, and narcissistic I.

No, I mean if I don't get someone else to see it, then I will literally and probably clinically go actually as crazy as I will, by definition, be. You can't be the only guy in any given cosmos. That would be, um, insane? Which is a whole lot worse than being a neckbeard with a pony tail working on artificial intelligence.

So, I'll try a different take. Some of you may understand how the speed of light is one of the fundamental constants of the cosmos. No physical thing can travel faster than the speed of light. Actually, no physical thing can travel at the speed of light and still have any measurable mass. Until it's stopped. Which turns all that lightspeed mass right into energy to be detected, or perceived. Or maybe the other way around, since at lightspeed it's pure energy, and then it gets stopped to mass.

One tiny little consequence of all this is that every single thing in motion is strangely out of sync with every other thing. This problem gets called by the name of the twin paradox among physicists, and it's been brushed aside for as long as there is and will be a distinction between the cool professors who teach to illiterate literary undergrads and the really smart ones who don't want to bother.

Or maybe it's just that the really smart ones don't want to bother worrying about something whose math has been worked out long ago. Except that it hasn't been. Just because the clock on a traveling plane comes back slower doesn't answer anything at all to within my margin or error. Because that clock is not a proper twin to one sitting still in the gravity fields of earth.

The real problem is that anything moving at any speed relative to anything else is, very technically speaking now, in a different cosmos from the thing to which it's compared. Because, you know, if time is slowed for you relative to me and vice versa, we can't be in the same space-time-geographical continuum. It gets disjointed, quantum style.

And as velocity is a function of time, and as you might be boosted to near the speed of light relative to my own near light-speed motion, our combined speeds can't be cumulative because of this fundamental-constant limit of lightspeed. Which means that something's gotta give, and that something is spelled T.I.M.E.

This is the bugaboo which started me wondering now maybe 26 or 27 years ago, and I keep finding more and more elaborate, if not exactly experimental, evidence that it's essentially right. There is no physical way to be in touch with something moving. The dimensions bend in ways to take things out of sync. Time is just another way to keep track of position in the (conceptual) ether, and things get very blurry indeed when you start moving very fast.

Things get blurry in precisely the same way that particles are only probability clouds before the exchange of force carrying perceptual particles. And then these blurry waves get collapsed. But if there were only two particular twins in the entire cosmos, neither one would be in the other's cosmos if they were just passing by. The blur of each to other would be an entire other world altogether.

Which is plenty obvious to physicists too, and so we have these force carrying sub-sub-atomic particles which do the contacting for us. They race back and forth at near the speed of light, which makes them technically massless while in motion, and they seem to define the forces which keep us all together. Those physical attractions which come in four distinct flavors, the most elusive being the gravitational one, which seems to shape the very cosmos, making it very hard to get the metrics on its force carriers.

But the thing we have left to do is to account for mind among all this matter. We are properly wary about letting subjectivity in among the wild successes of objective science. Measuring things, and accounting for them in ways to cancel editorial inputs has given us so much power over our wild surroundings. It's the only way we have to accomplish something approaching agreement among peoples of different languages, religions, geographic locations, not to mention genders and propensity to tell the truth or to lie. To fantasize or be in touch with, um, reality.

The Hadron Supercollider (my own pet name for it) renders up the earnest and truest reckonings among the best and brightest of the experimental physicists about what could be the most productive experiment left to conduct to either seal its fate or destroy the standard model. Not a one of them seems "motivated" to skew the findings leading up to this point. They even seem to have the rapacious politicians at bay this time.

But no-one's really expecting the Collider's findings to help even the slightest bit with disagreements about things political, emotional, evangelical, economical, and so forth. Since these things, almost by very definition, are banished from the realm of proper science. They are in the realm of opinion, editorializing, and such things as how physics projects get funded or not, just for example.

And surely it's obvious that a whole lot of really well-off people would prefer anything over some sort of science which might expose greed as their most basic motive. One man's greed being another person's change-the-world venture capitalist venture, we surely don't want to rock the boat with what makes the world go around.

It really is a testament to the best about us, collectively, that we will render up large budgets for moon shots and Hadron Colliders, trusting those least motivated, the scientists in search of truth, to tell us where the truths will be found that aren't editorially slanted.

But it's not so very good when you measure these efforts up against the things we just won't do for the least among us. And while I hardly think we're paying off the scientists to stay out of the important business of political decision making, sometimes it does begin to look a little bit too convenient to pretend that these omissions of ours are just the costs of being human. These little omissions about spending commensurate amounts on schools as we do on bombs.

I'd be the very first to accept a diversion of funding from bombs to supercolliders or spaceships as a compromise if you don't want to invest in schools, although historically, it's been the funds for bombs which have driven the basic science.

OK, sorry, really, to be this sidetracked into the realm of still more editorializing.

The thing I'm trying to say is simply that it's long since past too late to pretend that we can keep mind out from the object of our scientific studies.

I'm absolutely not talking about brain science, artificial intelligence, neuro-science, or any of those other exciting areas which can and should and must be pursued regardless of what physics might or might not have to say about them, or even what they might have to say about physics.

I'm just saying it's long past the point of obvious that the connections between things out there in the cosmos cannot, at their furthest reaches, be distinguished from conceptual relations, which inhere in mind alone. And mind of any meaningful sort may be an aspirational concept toward which we humans, perhaps, still tend. Science being, for certain, the truest compass to guide our efforts.

That's all I'm saying. I think the quantum consciousness stuff is intresting, but not paradigm shifting for so long as it looks for a mechanism of interaction. I think the physicists who want to say that we can change the cosmos just by thinking about it are a little bit nuts themselves.

The cosmos is indeed a grand conspiracy, and we are not apart from that. We humans actually do "feel" emotional reality, for which we are probably the most sensitive instrument around. No matter what those neckbeard (as if I'm made of teflon here) singularity folks think about robots which will think, it will be a very very long time indeed before we have any sense that they can feel a thing, emotionally.

Because we'd have to, and I mean this literally, care more about them than we do our very own children, and I don't see that happening any time soon.  I mean, unless it already has, which is pretty much how we're acting. If you look at the advertizements I mean, just as a f'rinstance. Or at how we deploy our energies.

Or if you look at the bombs, and the wars and the mega-corporate subsidies.

Oh, it does get tiring providing all these internal and external links to stuff I've worried half to death already. But let's coin another law, which I actually do think and believe and trust has the potential impact of Einstein's E=mc² equation between energy and matter. I know it's pretty darned cheeky of me. Sorry.

It goes like this. No amount of money, no matter how much, can accelerate caring to the point of a simple mother and child connection. You do the math, but I think it's all pretty obvious. At the point where there are enough resources to develop Artificial Intelligence while still exhibiting how little we care for the living creatures among us, then the Artificial Emotions will be the only kind that are left.

And you can have that world, since mine will be already gone. I think that might be a codicil to Rick's law.

So, I understand there's still a mad race on to get the technology right before we melt off the ice caps, put more mercury in our fishes, and kill off all the living species who don't want to live in logoware plastic ticky tacky boxes.

I understand the cynicism about politicians and political or economic systems, and how we still hope that there will be some new discovery just that wonderful that it can actually overcome them all. Something like cold fusion, maybe, or a smart enough grid to make us all conserve energy while wanting to, or cars that run on sunshine.

But if you do the math, it just can't happen. There are too darned many of us, riding on a spaceship whose carrying capacity is fundamentally dependent on a good mix of life forms. No matter what you think of creepy crawly slimy stuff, we actually do need it to live on.

So, another corollary to my law is that clean energy would be the worst possible thing to "discover", unless it really is the energy from the sun. And that gets captured and stored pretty darned well by leaves and other green things, though who could mind a few windmills or solar arrays.

I'll take hot water and light and warmth for my womb with a view. But let's dial it back a notch, folks. It isn't a race for eternity here. It's good living here and now which we might be able to work on if we were to let the editorializing in to science.

Which trivially means, and only at the fringes, that there is no actual distinction between mind and matter. You can't exactly think the future into existence, but nor should you deny what you know in your heart to be trued against it.

Conceptual connections among things, the proper realm of the arts, will never be measurable or mechanically understandable in ways to render our emotional feelings moot. Fine, no-one will disagree with me there. But I go just a tiny step further to say that that these emotional distinctions between what is beautiful and what is schlock are maybe just a little bit more important than whatever the Hadron Collider will find.

And that's because, at the very fringes which it is the experimental physicists' business to explore, there is no detecting the final massless particle which is no particle at all but is instead the conceptual relations among them. Which gets called out only when something is created from nothing, which even physicists don't really expect to be able to do. Except in the tiniest way, and overbalanced by almost as much electricity generation as we provided newly minted dollars to overbalance all that greed. Same law. Same results.

So while they go on trying to detect this so-called Higg's boson, I'll be putting out my usual generous quantities of overheated air. Pointing out that science is already finished if we thought it was going to get us off the hook of being human. That there is no further looking for purely objective reality, and that the really interesting stuff is what's going on inside and among us, the cosmos' most elaborate creatures out of apparent nothingness.

Welcome to Rick's BoZone

Unitary Electron Theory

OK, so I just find this amusing. I'm not even sure why I haven't been aware of it before, but there is apparently this still-not-yet-ruled-out approach to quantum physical understandings which goes by the name of the "single electron hypothesis", attributable, of course, to none other than Richard Feynman.

I also learned that Feynman, a pretty notorious womanizer, did some of his womanizing right in my hometown of Buffalo, which is a funny thing to be proud of, but there you go. I guess we can be skeazy right up there with the best of them.

The idea is simple enough; that since subatomic particles not only don't really have any certain position, being only probability waves before these get collapsed by perception, they also can't be distinguished one from the other. So why not call them all-one? I guess that's yet another distinction without any difference.

There are distinctions to be made between particles which can share the same quantum state (bosons) and those which can't (fermions) and electrons are apparently in the more garden-variety category of particles which can't, which makes them a little bit more distinguished than the bosons, and which is why that final pesky boson - the Higgs - is so difficult to pin down.

At really really low temperatures, lots of quantum states get all mixed up, and you have this Bose-Einstein condensate, which is just what you'd think it is, a kind of undifferentiated mass, or really non-mass, of unparticular particles. But electrons can't merge completely with one another's probability "space" and so you have all these powerful attractions and repulsions and the jumpings around from state to state which emit all those powerful electromagnetic photons, only one of which is required for you and I to take notice.

Which is pretty darned cool, if you ask me.  We tried it once in a physics lab turned into a cave, and it's really true. A single solitary photon makes an impression on your eyeball.

Just imagine what whole armies of them could do! All one and aligned in the same direction. Well, OK, they'd just burn your eyeballs out, which is why they get so serious about playing with laser pointers around airports. Although you can play with them around cats, which is wicked fun.

But I do resemble that remark about men, for instance, all being womanizers. I said resent, right?  I resent that remark. I mean, why would I want the same thing from the same body the same way all the time? Wait, I'm getting myself all mixed up again, like John Denver did who seemed like such a nice guy, but then went and compared women to wine and why would you only want one kind?

Well, he also thought he could fly in the end, and look where that got him, right? Oh, I know I shouldn't joke about that stuff, but I don't think he was the same boyish person we all thought he should be, palling around with George Burns playing God and all.

Yeah, sure, we're all the same underneath, and I actually do know that if someone introduces you as a physicist you can almost certainly get laid. Unless you lose your nerve, which I know for a fact I almost certainly would, which is maybe simply because I'm not really a physicist, although I do have something to teach physicists, and it's actually about physics, and not about love or anything like that, which I'm pretty sure they know all about already.

Oh hell, it really is about love. I lied. But it's about physics too, which I for one find pretty funny. Cosmic joke funny. Ultimate laugh on the way out funny. (I promised myself I would laugh on the way out, and figure if I keep saying it over and over I might remember actually to do it).

So the thing is, just like a cheesy movie, if you treat any woman as if she's the same as all women, then all you end up with is transactional sex, which I'll just take Feynman's word is pretty darned good, since I wouldn't really know. Being a geek and all. And broke. Way broke - you don't even want to know.

But the happy endings are all reserved for the ones who hold out for the real thing, and don't fall prey to fantasy and projection and the momentary glory of that singular state of youthful perfection which gets you married and miserable in the end.

Have you ever noticed how it's the cold-cut parish hall reception weddings which seem to last? The Hollywood style celebrations are always a kind of march to doom, don't you think. I mean, I should know . . .

Is Reality Over-rated?

Is reality overrated? I'd have to say so, although it surely does matter what you mean by "real". A long time ago I remember reading some line in The Razor's Edge about how if you could believe something then it would be real, but you'd have to really believe it, like the ground beneath your feet. In the context of that book, or of that age, it did seem to be a powerful statement, although I'm certain it just sounds fluffy here.

Of course at the tender age when I and everyone else was reading Somerset Maugham, I hadn't yet experienced insanity of the sort where you really do inhabit a world of your own creation. Only once, thank goodness, have I been hoist by my own narrative petard out of sensible reality. It wasn't fun like drugs, although there was a certain similarity, I'd have to guess.

I'm pretty nutty in the choices that I make, but lots of people actually think that I'm the paradigm of solid grip on reality when it comes to making sense of what I interact with. Honest!

Sure, I have lots of trouble with career and women choices, but who does that distinguish me from except for movie stars and really rich people, and hasn't anyone ever watched Citizen Kane?

Just look around you and you'll see lots of love affairs defined by irresistible looks, or aspects or whatever else can support projections of fantasy love. You'll see people reaching after fantasy homes and kids too. I wonder if it works for them. We've given a real shot now at material comfort to more people than ever before in the history of mankind. But we sure haven't brought reality up for the masses of mankind.

As a pretty left-leaning thinker it isn't much of a stretch for me to blame the ever more massive immiseration of the population of our planet on the cultural uprootings accomplished by the blue-jean imperialism of America the Beautiful.

But if I fall off the leftward edge into a kind of Libertarian idiocy, I also know that there is something pretty dreamy about what we've represented. Lots of people happily leave behind their magical belief systems in favor of something so demonstrably real. Ordinary people living in virtual castles and driving cars. Based on engineering can-doism based in turn on science.

The extremist flag wavers want to have us as innocent as our tear-streaming songs about ourselves. The other ones, like me, want us to wake up to how much actual and deliberate harm we've caused to nascent people-power in the name of our corporate interests. Think Pinochet, and Iran Contra, and then think CIA.

But there is one thing undeniable about this true American Dream. To the extent that we base our gettings together on science, there really is some reality to the good part. That's the basic horror right there in so-called Creation Science, since there is no way short of coercion to get people to agree on what is so patently a crazy notion. That all the evidence for earth's true age was planted by a trickster God? That's just nuts!

Scientific agreements are nothing more or less than the ones with the greatest chance of getting the most people to agree. And that right there is a truly wonderful thing. No matter, truly, that there can be collateral damage along the way; when what we agree to falls a little bit short since it's always still a work in progress.

And too bad that things like politics and economics can't be so grounded in science. I mean really, way too bad!

For sure the one thing that absolutely must drop out from scientific reality is the possibility of a personal God. Or does that just throw a baby out with some bathwater . . . .

I'm pretty sure that one may be a difference without a distinction. If scientific thinking limits you to the very razor's edge of what it is about yourself which is distinct from everything else out there - if that's all the room there is for choice, then OK that's also all the room there is for God's intervention too. I'm not sure the problem survives the thought experiment. That's really plenty of room.

Let's say, just for instance, that pikk.com tanks. Hey, it could happen! But maybe someone likes the name and offers us a million dollars. Then would we have done all that hard work just as a kind of lipstick on our pig. Like makeup for a Saturday Night Date, would it make any difference how the connection got made?

I haven't a clue most any minute of my life what I really want the next. But I do know what I'm missing, and it's almost always people. My sweetheart, my daughters, my friends. The rest is so I have that space for the missing, I guess; so that I can have some security against the daily buffetings of life.

That's what compelled me to rebuild my old sailboat too. It was the metaphor, I guess. A warm cabin down below in the face of stormy weather. It's where I could and would and did feel most alive. No need to really brave the wildest oceans, just a taste was all I needed. And I did love it best alone.

Now I can easily imagine lots of improvements to life on planet Earth. If we'd all stop clambering over one anothers' backs to get to some very top, we could dial back our load on the planet and begin actually to enjoy one another. We really could.

But in the meantime, in almost precisely the way that our now so antiquated automobiles allowed the redefinition of our landscapes, there is a more powerful transformation afoot which can really wreck havoc to our collective reality.

At the very farthest reaches of our collective scientific agreements must be by very definition the realm of physics. That's what digs down to the really hard stuff, upon which everything else must ride. We all know that physics is almost done and the really interesting stuff now will come from the life sciences; genetics, bioengineering, bioinformatics, that sort of thing. Maybe nano-technology if you can stand Neal Stephenson any more.

But at their root, these are all what Thomas Kuhn called "normal science" which fills in the gaps to our theoretical picture of the world. These are not paradigm shifting realms unless and until they come up with new mechanisms to understand mind, say, or inheritance of characteristics, say, or how to assert perfect corrections to our imperfections.

But so far as they are mechanisms, they will still depend on physics, and anyhow it's the nature of paradigms that they are pretty soup-to-nuts. So, when the life sciences folks "discover" that mind really does matter, the same thing will have happened in physics. It's just a Somerset Maugham chicken/egg problem to which there's no real way out other than to shift the whole darned paradigm.

So now on our quantum edge, as I keep saying over and over and over until you feel like you're hitting your head on bricks (I know, I know), waiting excitedly for our newest particle accelerator to find the last one, it really is time to wake up and smell the, um, delusions? I wonder what delusions smell like. Let's smell the coffee!

So, do this little thought experiment. Ask yourself what links together all the little pieces which make up the story of your life. If you're a little bit too sophisticated like, ahem, I am, you'll already know that there are only constructed narratives of your life's history. You can prove this easily enough by rubbing off some of your memories of yourself with those who know and love you.

I would never go so far as some nutty post-modernists, who would say that all reality is constructed, leading up to the really big Grand Narrative of Normal Science, which is really just a tale of raw power. I would never do that. I am way too tied to reality, as I've already told you.

But anyhow, even the parts of your own story which won't rub off - the ones which stick in every single version, the skeleton if you will - this narrative frame still depends on all sorts of emotional connections being made. Even if mom was just a flash in the pan, dad probably liked her for at least a moment. And someone had to care for you before you could learn to speak (which "they" now find out starts already in the womb, duh!).

And the words you use are all about getting together with other minds. The shouting and warnings and pushings back, these are all things which define who you interact with, and then they in turn define you too.

And that right there is a whole slew of non-physical reality, well, unless you are just a bag of invasive germs because you can't stop wanting to have physical contact all the time with everyone, which is perfectly understandable, but a little gross.

I mean if everyone remains available that way, then we're all just beasts, right? Doesn't a kind of sameness come over every connection as if we ourselves were just undifferentiated sub-atomic particles? Well, obviously, I can't speak for you.

But anyhow, what do you really care about? Would you like those things to be separated from reality? Can you live on only your dreams?

It's long since plenty clear that at the very most extreme reaches of our abstract thinking, we can't really tell if reality is hard or just a kind of probability wave propogated in literal nothingness. We even have real experiments which prove that you can't pin down the smallest particles - that all you can do is approximate their position until you collapse them into reality by rubbing them off on some of their partners. That's called perception.

But until that happens, these sub-atomics (funny name, that) only exist as a cloud. And that cloud, while real, is also truly conceptual until the moment of its perception. I'm not making this stuff up, it's in any physics text book. The probability cloud quite literally cannot be perceived, but it's reality is trivial (well, relatively) to prove. It's not in your mind, but it's also not quite in reality. It's a kind of conceptual reality that's 'out there.'

So if, at the limits - at the razor's edge - there is a kind of conceptual reality which is provably not "in" the mind, but "in" reality, then one might wonder about the connections between and among the pieces of this conceptual reality. If, by definition, there can't be a physical, perceptual connection, then perhaps there is some other kind. Perhaps emotions are also provably 'out there.'

They are certainly harder to measure, these emotions. They don't have any kind of physical distance metric, right? But as a human being, I know you know what I'm talking about. And at the limits of our physical understanding of the cosmos, what if it did turn out that these subatomic particles, which after all provably can't possibly inhabit the same physical universe as one another, because they don't even perceptually exist yet, are only connectable by a kind of emotional relation.

I think you'd then have to say that emotion really is out there in the cosmos, as the kind of improbability glue which holds all this non-perceptual reality together.

That's good enough for me to count as a kind of personal God. You know, as a kind of aspirational entity which doesn't, you know, actually have to, like, really, um, exist.

So leaving that big can of worms alone, I sure do wish you could see how this changes everything. I sure do wish you could see that the gravity-hadron - the "force-carrying" particle which might put the final nail into the standard physical theory's coffin, ahem, is purest chimera. It's both a figment of our imagination and real, and while it might be findable, we still might not be able to find it, by virtue of cosmic twists of fate.

I'm fine either way. Gravity and physical love make another fine distinction without a difference for me. You can't really have one without the other, I mean physical and emotional love, at least not beyond a single life-time if you want to be a nun or priest or something else really out there. Or maybe you never even want to see the kids you sire? Well, I guess you could have test-tube babies certified high IQ or something, like the magic synthetic oil which makes my car run forever. I wonder, would you have a trade-in policy on those kids? If there were some sort of genetic mixup?

I'm glad for the stuggle with and against my physical impulses. I'm glad that science never ends. But most of all I'm glad for love, and for that I don't really care what turns you on, gentle reader, I really don't. Because it won't be real unless it's real for you too.

OK, so I do care. You're wrecking my cosmos by your not caring, and damn it, I'm rather attached to it, my little cosmos!