Review of Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st century's only plausible metaphysics by Bernardo Kastrup

Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st century’s only plausible metaphysics by Bernardo Kastrup
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Kastrup is brilliant, and this book provides an excellent exposition of the metaphysics behind his cosmology. His theorizing usefully dispatches several of the nuttier directions that dogmatic physicalism has taken. Along the way, he provides an excellent elucidation of what information theory is and what it isn't. I've been craving that since forever. Not to mention putting A.I. in its place.

The trouble is that although he claims Occam’s Razor as his guide, he introduces still more needless complexity with his flip-flop from physical to mental; thinking that he’s reduced complexity by claiming that all of reality might reduce to a single principle, which is mind.

I have more than a little sympathy for this maneuver, but in fact Kastrup glides past a more basic distinction between perceptual and conceptual reality. By replacing the substance of physics with mind-only, Analytic Idealism actually re-enters woo-woo mysticism rather than to escape from it.
In the end, Kastrup has conducted a sleight-of-mind 'against' himself; he fools himself in almost the way that he accuses physicalist scientists of doing.

Kastrup is right about many things, and his insights have enabled him to challenge accurately many of the stranger cosmologies of his physicalist colleagues. But that doesn't quite stop him from his own weird conclusions.

In brief, Kastrup substitutes an inside/outside duality for the now antique mind/body duality for which Descartes generally receives credit or blame, depending on one's disposition. Mind/body maps to concept/percept while inside/outside creates an entirely unnecessary complication about that aspect of mind which cannot consistently be claimed to be inside, and that which is demonstrably outside.

Kastrup’s usage of his newer term "alter" to describe our individuated interiority is useful, though not meaningfully different from Descartes' usage for mind once inside and outside are introduced.
In Kastrup’s “analytic idealism,” alters exist in a field of “subjectivity,” built on the analog of a possible grand unification theory for quantum electrodynamics, where there would be a single quantum field upon which all that we perceive as physical has no separate ‘substance’ from the field. A wave is an action on water and is nothing without the water. It has no substance, and is the very meaning of abstraction once we call it into being. Abstraction is a conceptual maneuver whereby concepts are taken from physical reality.

No actual circle exists in nature, any more than numbers can be imposed there without some degree of abstraction. But the concept of the circle and the power of numbers to help with prediction and therefore with understanding are both undeniable. Sure, a circle is the stuff of mind, while we may perceive only approximations. It’s the matching of percept with concept which composes understanding.

While there may not be any actual and perfect circles in what I would still call the physical world – the world of substance – there are plenty of structures whose description is equivalent to their actuality. Molecules, for instance, whose structure is identical from one to the next such that each is individually indistinguishable. But they do have a describable form.

‘Field of subjectivity’ is only meaninglessly different from ‘field of objectivity.’ The meaningful distinction is between conceptual and perceptual reality.

As do many who descend from the world of information technology, and in his case also the kind of Quantum Electro Dynamics which energizes CERN, where he once worked, Kastrup uses the inaccessibility of personal thoughts to others/outsiders – the secrecy of our thoughts and feelings – to prove his inside/outside distinction.

He then goes further, and for me beyond the pale, to replace the sensible apprehension of the boundary of skin with a fairly, to me, specious metaphor of a “dashboard.” In many ways - and this is surprising to me - Kastrup is himself stuck in the Western set of imperatives as much as are those physicalists that he ridicules.

"Alter" is his metaphor for how individuals - chips off the cosmic mind of analytic idealism - are individuated. We are likened to the seemingly separate selves of those who suffer dissociative identity disorder, or what used to be called multiple personality disorder.

One of the weirdest of Kastrup's moves is that he posits a reality apart from perceptual reality (as conventionally considered) that is more real than what we perceive. I suppose the metaphor is that the physically real is composed of unperceivable parts; subatomic particles, in a vast emptiness, say, pervaded only by a quantum field.

According to him, those “particles” are actually eddies in the subjective field without substance of their own. Quantum fields may be more both/and than he thinks though, which might even scotch the dream of completion for a Grand Universal Theorem. Not every literate human culture is quite so obsessed as the West is with history as unitary progress toward completion.

He attributes our misperception - our inability to perceive actual reality - to the perceiver inside our perceptual apparatus having only a dashboard by means of which to perceive. We can’t see reality in itself. Well, of course we can’t. Reality as we perceive it is also composed with concepts, which are mind extended into matter.

But Kastrup then goes so far as to say that the things of our lived experience from behind our dashboard wouldn't exist without someone there to perceive them. They exist in mind and not in matter, remember. He thus reintroduces the gracefully moribund mind inside the mind corroborating sensory inputs. The mind behind the inner screen is a free floating "alter." A mind inside a mind in infinite regress.

Abstraction is real. The physical is real. One is conceptual while the other is perceptual. Putting both on the same side in a universal field of subjectivity is where Kastrup stops following the principle of Occam’s razor. Analytic idealism is far more complex than a metaphysics allowing for both conceptual and perceptual reality; both mind and physical stuff.

In my usage, the only meaning for interiority is that there must be a physical divider for perception to occur. That's not the same as to say that there must be a perceiver "inside" or behind some screen. There is no real locus for the self inside of mind. Kastrup’s replacement of skin with screen, and mind with alter recreates a superfluous and unnecessary confusion.

Perception happens to a body as divided from the rest of reality by a skin and its organic involutions which form our perceptual organs. The mind of the perceiver has never been confined there, inside our skin nor certainly inside our skull. Kastrup and I seem to agree on this.

As do most scientific thinkers, Kastrup - who talks about emotion more than most scientists do, and certainly more than most devoted materialists ever would - still relegates emotion to being epiphenomenal to consciousness. He often conflates thoughts and feelings as things without extension. He claims to deproblematize the puzzle of consciousness by positing that mind is the whole shebang. So, no problem with consciousness being transformed or transmuted out of physical stuff!

But really, consciousness is just the apprehension of both conceptual and perceptual reality. A lizard knows a hawk when it sees one. Evolution adds the quickening of emotion to the apprehension of a hawk to short-cut conscious thought.

At some level higher than a lizard, something like re-cognition occurs, bringing choice along with reaction.

I confess that I don’t see the need for the usage of “qualia” that many philosophers see. Just because colors and flavors don’t exist in the thing itself, the fact that such so-called qualia are almost universally shared should be sufficient to put them on the perceptual side of things. Niggling about the marginal cases seems not much different from mistaking distortions for wholesale misperception, as Kastrup tends to do.

Those perceptions assigned to the category of qualia are rather more complex than simpler perceptions. I would say that the proof for their objective existence is simply that we can talk about them. And animals respond to qualia much further “down” the line.

I would say that concepts exist outside the individual mind, and that, therefore, emotion is fundamental and even primordial. Indeed, mind cannot be described without emotion. Any mind is as much about emotion as it is about cognition. I’ll even grant that Kastrup might agree with this.

But emotion requires at least as much definition as physical forces do. Here’s my radical maneuver: emotion is both real and as outside of mind as perception is.

In my usage, emotion is rather more like the false definition of gravity as a simultaneous force acting at a distance. That sort of physical simultaneity is better defined by a shared 'curvature' of space-time, as Kastrup urges us to understand. Emotion is defined by actual simultaneity without any physical force involved. Emotion is engendered by conceptual/mental and not perceptual/material movement. Emotion involves no physical force but is engendered by the matching of concept with percept, the apprehension of new concepts or the transformation of old ones. It is not a process which can exist within an asocial individual. For humans, emotion takes as much learning as does cognition. But unlike perception, emotion is felt directly by the mind. If mind is outside the skin, then so is emotion.

And furthermore, morality is no more a part of Kastrup's purportedly comprehensive analytical idealism than it is a part of physicalism. Kastrup’s ethics might be something like “we have to keep contributing to the cosmic mind.” In the same way, a physicalist might use the imperative to understand as the highest purpose for humanity.

But in fact, conscience is more a matter of fellow feeling. For humans, the recognition which engages conscience is enhanced by the highly individualized nature of faces and voices and stature and skin coloring.

Being me is still about outside and inside, and a bat or a human only knows what it's like to be me from the outside. And yes, I mean that I don't know what it's like to be me from the inside. I can't know myself without you who help me to know myself. Cogito ergo sum is nonsense, as we all know. My good friends know my thoughts much better than I do. That sometimes hurts. Don’t we hide from ourselves as much as we have secrets? And having secrets doesn’t indicate a thing about the privacy or insidishness of our mind. Sure, we put some of our thoughts behind a blind, and sometimes we blind even ourselves.

To repeat myself again and again, I make my claim for his fooling himself in part because of his strange - to me - reliance on the hackneyed usage of an instrument panel to describe our distance from understanding or even describing the world as it fully is. Like a computer screen and its icons as related to the workings of the actual computer, another of the metaphors he uses, we only know what is presented. Trying to interact directly with the inners of a computer could only get in the way of its usefulness. This "interface" between inside and outside is identical, I would say, to the dualistic distinction between mind and body, and equally useless as an explainer of anything. 

His screen metaphor confuses our perpetual shortfall from full understanding with a perceptual shortfall from full seeing. Indeed, I don't believe any adequate description for 'understanding' exists in his arguments.

Sure, there is more complexity to the world than what we can know, but almost none of this regards what most of us will continue to call the physical world. The contours of the physical world are as real as the conceptual relations beneath or behind or within those contours. Those interior contours of reality are, yes, mental, but as with the surfaces, they are the same to every understander. Instruments on a panel may refine our perception, but they almost never change its outlines.

The complexity we miss from behind our screens is really mostly social and intellectual. The sort of complexity that it's always hard to understand without actual engagement. It is indeed our physicalist researches which have, by way of measurement and calculation, enabled us to refine our understanding according to the materialist scientific method, to the extreme that we have.

Of course, there is complexity to the physical world which we cannot see directly. But we can certainly understand it by way of instruments connected to a dashboard.

Sure, we are limited in our perceptions by the fact that we don't see all frequencies of light, nor hear all frequencies of sound, nor taste all that might be tasted. But when we do extend our perceptions by use of those instruments which compose his metaphor, we have no reason to expect that the invisible - meaning not fully perceived - world would be drastically altered [sic] from that part of it which we do perceive.

And to perceive is not to understand. Instrumentation and numbers enable a deepening of our understanding of the physical world. There is no reason to suspect that the physical world is substantially different or other from what we perceive directly. And you will never know me by my guts. Do we see through or with a telescope? Our instruments allow us to make better predictions. The best part is that quantum physics puts a stop to our dreams of complete understanding. We cannot and do not stand outside the real world.

Understanding is a match between conceptual and perceptual reality. As regards the material world, that would involve the ability to predict behaviors based on an understanding of properties. Emotional reality depends, differently, on mutuality and simultaneity of a sort which can't exist in the physical world.

For a conscious agent having free will, emotion impels both physical motion away or against or toward at the same time that it instigates a mental quest for understanding. It is telling that Kastrup is involved in developing hardware for Artificial Intelligence. But, mirabile dictu, he is not so mystified by it as are those whose most precious dream is to get fabulously rich and powerful off it. Kastrup’s explanation about what AI is and isn’t is just as good and clear as is his explication of information theory.

If mind is all, then there can be no fundamental difference in mind depending on its substrate. Kastrup avoids the trap that the brain is the house of the mind. It's not just that AI has a difficult time with emotion. It's that the on/off nature of silicon logic gates divides such quasi-thinking from the extension that living mind has to the universe all around. Kastrup gives us this and then takes it away with his dashboard.

As the mind researcher Riccardo Manzotti urges us to understand, our memories are not contained in our brains, which instead loops our actual perceptions of actual things. Our memories are all around us. Visit a former habitation if you can find one that hasn't changed too drastically, and feel the memories rush in. Our brain generalizes from multiple perceptions to form concepts. Those concepts are also out in the world. We prove this easily by the languages which create our social being. We share conceptual reality.

It is specifically this conceptual reality which mind "imposes" on what we perceive. We organize the world into lions and tigers and bears, never mind that these are not always so distinct as our mind would like them. Those objects still exist if conceived differently by others. Sure, there is some raw stuff not yet conceptualized. But the reality that we've already conceived is as real as real can be, despite Kastrup's protestation that evolution requires distortion of our perception. Distortion does not make the world that we perceive unreal. Distortion is correctable.

Emotion is as real and external to us as is measurable and detectable physical reality. Indeed, the reality of emotion falls out naturally from Kastrup’s definition of reality as cognition. Mind before matter, as it were. And emotion before cognition.

I do think his discarding of matter complicates rather than simplifies his cosmology. Of course, matter is something, but it is not everything. Neither is mind. Contrasting with his usage for the parsimony of Occam's razor, I would say that to maintain the yin/yang of both mind and matter is the parsimonious course. Get rid of static outside/inside. Reality moves.

As illustration, consider that evolution has a direction which is, in rough terms, opposite to the direction of physical entropy. Indeed I would say that the physical enactment of time's arrow is defined by that interplay, and I would call the direction of life's evolution something akin to love or eros (for the materialists).

On-line, Kastrup has described his own uncanny experiences, which are nothing other than meaningful coincidence, which probably can't be proven or disproven, since it's only meaningful to those who find it so. But Kastrup has described his openness to such happenings after being convinced by his own analytic idealism. Likewise, evolution depends on random mutations - on happenstance - which is no longer so meaningless when taken in the aggregate.

Apart from the metering of entropy, material science has no explanation for time's arrow. And yet for all his analytical idealism, Kastrup still treats time in the way that historians do, and supposes a before and after for everything. Having experienced death a few times, I have the revelation that before and after collapse into a lifetime fully present. Kind of the way the Big Bang might or should be conceptualized, instead of trying to measure its distance from now across time. I would love to disabuse Kastrup of his fear of death.

Love is indeed the hardest guide for humans to follow, though most of us know it easily enough in opposition to, say, hate. From there, everything about morality can be built, no man-made dictates from a man-made God required. However, why not call the non-alterial [!!] all of analytic idealism - the cosmic mentation, if you will - why not call that God? What else to call cosmic mind? It does remain other to us, and always shall be. And God won’t be conscious until or unless there’s another cosmos. Ha! Bernardo and I agree!

Is it any wonder now that the world is in the thrall of conscienceless individuals? These are people without fellow-feeling, sometimes believing that they are following God’s dictates, and sometimes obeying the false consciousness of transactional materialism.


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It's About Time

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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!

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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).

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.

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. 

Let's start telling it.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Dennett

Since 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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?

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. 

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. 

A Resolution for a New Year

I 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. 

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. 

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.

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.

Our Earth now is blanketed in electronic debris in outer space, and I manically binge For All Mankind wondering, has it really come to this? Which this?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

Black box.

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?

Nope. 

And yet there is nothing unfamiliar about it, though there should be. 

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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,

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. 

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 . . . 

I Am No Philosopher

I'm not telling you, dear reader, anything you don't already know. I am not a philosopher.

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. 

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.

Just now, I'm reading his book called Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, 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.

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).

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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!

Mom Died, and I Am Still Here for this Happiest of New Years

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?

That was a nice Thanksgiving. 

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.

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. 

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?"

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!

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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!

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.

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 God, Human, Animal, Machine 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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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. 

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.

Happy Happy New Year, and many, many fine returns.

I love you Mom

I've Been Thinking, Daniel C. Dennett

I've been thinking too. 

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

Well, enough of that! I insist on being lifted by Dennett's inspiring life rather than to be dispirited by my own deficits.

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 here. The very thing itself. 

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was once, oh so recently, sufficient to measure time by the motion of earth relative to sun, and still achieve your navigational objective.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

I think maybe Tesla thought that electricity had meaning, 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. 

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.

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.

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. 

Anyhow, there are, evidently, material advantages to the denial of meaning. You may, all to easily, become rich and powerful once unmoored from meaning.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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!

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.

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.

And furthermore, I find that Dennett participates in attempts to understand the workings of the brain and of language in evolutionary terms. Bravo!

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.

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. 

Anon. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

But I get ahead of myself. I simply didn't wish to be coy here with what I'm about. 

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. 

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.

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.

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?

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.

These three dimensions are surely as accurately describable as time is. And they are as relative. 

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. 

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. 

The godhead, if you will, is skinless. Meaning no meta, no metaphor, no outering, no innering. We all partake (in the cannibalistic rites, right?).

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. 

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.

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. 

Well, I'll do more better some day soon, maybe. If at first you don't blah blah blah.

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.

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. 

Apologies for Christmas!

Bernardo Kastrup Explains Everything

Well, I feel mildy excited, and greatly relieved today, I don't quite understand how my son-in-law decided that Kastrup's thinking reminded him of mine, since I don't have too many actual memories of exposing my thinking to him or to anyone else. I only ever get so far. But then I'm on the slope down now toward the singularity of collapse into the enternal present of death. Memory, in other words, ain't what it used to be. Anyhow, thanks to him that I watched (listened to) the YouTube hereinbelow.

So I watched it, and was utterly amazed at Kastrup's lucidity, and at the completeness of his philosophy (be forewarned, it's two hours long):

His view of consciousness seems to conform to mine, as well as his placement of narration on the "inside" of our own strangely individuated whorls in the continuum of universal "mentation." He uses the term "alter", derived from dissociative identity disorder in the field of psychology, to describe the (pathological?) sequestration of a self from cosmic mentation. 

I am left with two or three basic questions that I have yet to find an answer to:

• I haven't found his opinion yet on whether artificial consciousness is possible. Since he lists that field as one of those in which he holds degrees, I think the answer might be consequential. And does he really find the film Inception to be anything but trash?
• While he acknowledges the importance of emotion to mentation, at least implicitly, I wonder if he's done any theoretical work on emotion.
• While the non-dualism of his idealism manages to retain the validity of the empirical scientific method, I haven't seen where he actually defines mentation in any way to cosmically differentiate it from whatever are the processes of materialism. He erases an unnecessary boundary, sure, but doesn't quite, to my satisfaction, answer the "OK then, so what?" question. He seems still to imply a before and after and is therefore stuck with chicken/egg.
• Somewhere in this YouTube, he says something that I also have said; that the mutations on which evolutionary theory depends are not random (not accidents), and I want more on that. He indicates somewhere in this YouTube that the closely watched mutations across the past couple of years somehow demonstrate this. How? Fate and subconscious; same thing. Duh.

I think that I want to suggest that he doesn't really follow his own rules of maximum parsimony, derived from Occam's Razor. Yes, physical descriptions of reality will always be incomplete, but not only because of leaving out any adequate function for consciousness. His version of idealism suffers the same limitation without his supplying some more fulsome definition for what mentation actually is.

Sadly for me, there is no way even to attempt to contact the fellow. I'd have to stalk him to conferences, or get him somehow to read my own writing. It feels like the identical problem of getting to the bottom of almost anything these days as you slog past the money and the motivations of the publishing organs to sort out if you're seeing what you want or need to see or simply living out what the powers-that-be want for you to see. That is especially true when a guy like Kastrup relegates me to the need to abide by his "social media policy." Social media?? Are you freaking kidding me?

Look, I am nowhere near as intelligent as Bernardo, nor certainly as educated. I have near zero ability to cite philosophers or to name theories from physics. I am a good troubleshooter and problem-solver in all fields, which include physics and philosophy, but is mostly limited to machines and constructs, including computer hardware and software and especially networks. And I know how to read classical Chinese poetry, which is not exactly nothing, though it may come close. 

If I am right about Bernardo Kastrup, then he may be one among bejillions who might have the capacity intelligently to comment on the following propositions. I hold their truth to be self-evident, and once deployed to offer a far more parsimonious approach to understanding than Kastrup's unitary Idealism.

• There is no meaning to the question of which comes first, mind or matter.
• That is partly because of the impossibility to define time in purely physical terms, but more fundamentally because our linguistic usages prevent us from a coherent understanding of narration, which is the basis for time and causality in the context of universal mentation.
• Concepts are the primitives for the ideas of Kastrup's idealism. He calls genes something like 'physical information' in implicit accord with his insistence that there is nothing to be gained by distinguishing mentation from physical processes.
• Just as do the so-called "particles" of the standard model of physics, the component parts of static concepts move apart or together, but without the necessity for force to do so. Force in the physical sense is a function of the exchange of "smaller" particles. Movement without force is emotion. This cannot occur in a unitary material world, nor in a unitary ideal world. It's always both/and.
• Emotional connections, which are not mediated by forces, define simultaneity. (Physical simultaneity is meaningless by analogy to the precise position or mass of a "particle". Waveform collapse defines the boundary.)
• Particles are realized by implication with other particles and ultimately with consciousness as that which collapses them from conceptual waveforms.
• At least two "alters" are required for emotional impingement and for simultaneity. This is the only cosmic meaning of "contact." Ditto physics, where contact is not possible. Entanglement is not yet contact. (Kastrup's description of Quantum Entanglement - Dick and Jane simultaneously - is as incoherent as most descriptions of the Twin Paradox. He doesn't provide any definitions for such basics as what simultaneity means, or distance, or how consciousness at either end is connected)

In brief, there is no irony about Bernardo Kastrup's cosmology/philosophy. Irony is the fundament of everything, or as I responded to my son-in-law in my skepticism before starting my witness of the YouTube:

I read thousands-page books, while two hour YouTubes may be a challenge, though I’m intrigued. At the outset I will impudently say that the fellow seems too utter in his idealistic philosophy. My own view tends more toward irony - both/and. Once time is idealized, before and after, like chickens and eggs, collapse into the same eternal present which we mistakenly sometimes think is compatible with physical reality. Time is an emotional concept, felt directly by universal mind, while perceptual reality is always distant and felt at the remove of physical distance prior to being narrativized by mind, which means in time and space, and which is the only meaning of causality which is not a physical reality. Now is only emotively real, and physically impossible. All cognition is, therefore, precognition (ironically!). Cognition conditions understanding which provides the basis to act. All who act are conscious. Maybe not plants. 

Gobbledegook for sure!!

CODA updated 5/11/22

Materialism is tested by what it enables humans to do by virtue of understanding. Science has moved far beyond mechanism to descriptions of things and processes which we can only describe and never understand nor often embody, the way that we can with mechanism. Perhaps we can realize some implementation of all of the fundamental forces of nature by way of our technologies, in just the way that we might realize some new techniques for encryption based on our understanding of quantum physics. Anyhow, it all comes down to agency for most humans, no matter how well-read.

My own contribution, if it is a contribution, would be to describe what Kastrup calls mentation by way of some redefinitions for things and processes that we only think we understand. We are far too busy learning to exploit our understanding of the material world to turn our attention to the more fulsome world of emotive consciousness. Emotion may goad action, but it also redefines agency. There is no starting point for emotion; no place to lever from. It takes at minimum two. Emotion defines simultaneity. 

This is even while those at the extremes of our society exhibit ever more serious psychoses. Emotional disturbance. We have homelessness and QAnon on one end, and insanely manic consumption and self-promotion on the other, without any way to challenge these realities, though they spell our collective doom; what most of us would consider to be the end of agency.

So, to reiterate, here are my redefinitions:

Time is not divided between forward and backward, but rather between the entropic time of material physics, and the lived time of life's evolution, which direction is defined as love. There is no physical force which drives it, which might be what we mean by random. History is neither teleological nor progressive, but is, rather, a description of socio-emotional alignments as these tend toward or away from life as a cosmic and primordial process. The tendency of current history is neither destruction nor apotheosis. It is our choice, collectively, and so why not make it apotheotic? 

Deliberate love is not love. Falling is not the same as choosing.

Just as Freud might have alluded, there are no accidents and there is no random except as defined by materialist physics and gambling, whose usages are solid as far as they go. 

Viewed from the widest possible distance, the processes of evolution move in the direction of love.

It is not scientific to leave moral guidance for behavior beyond the reach of science. Religion as a basis for moral behavior is right out there with QAnon, and not incidentally for that. Scientifically moral behavior, guided by universal understanding, would never allow the likes of Samuel Alito to dictate civic law, nor Amy Coney Barrett to sit as judge for any legal proceedings. I won't elaborate. 

Concepts are mental arrays of conceptual primitives, which may be composed of physical approximations of those primitives, like the pointers of words, for instance. Emotion is defined as the motion toward or away of conceptual primitives which do not entail physical forces; those forces are described by an exchange of still more primitive primitives. Emotions are felt directly by mind, unlike perceptions which are felt at the remove of an extended body. The mind narrates perceptions which have no order without mind. This is trivial to demonstrate given the slow speed of neural transmission. Now is fuzzy until it's felt.

Mine is a literary rather than scientific approach to understanding. Bernardo is utterly correct as to the singularity of NOW - the present - as the ALL that there is. But his ALL is as metaphorically one-dimensional as materialism is. Mind/body sounds like dualism until you take it ironically when it becomes the transmutational dynamic of yin/yang. Mind and body, or perhaps mind and its embodiment are the reductive minimum for any reality at all. Can't have one without the other.

As creatures in the cosmos, humans are consequential. Morally consequential. God has moved from being a guide to being a COPOUT. God is love, and as such is not constituted to tell us what to do or how to behave. We have that in us. We must and will narrate our own future, just as we narrate our pasts, thus engendering time. The cosmos is not mind or mentation, it is God and divinity. 

Blahbeddy blah gobbledegook. I haven't the words to true. But like Robert Wright, I can true bicycle wheels.