Dear Tim Parks; A Working Missive While Reading (out of my mind) Out of My Head

Funny, I thought the title of this book was 'out of my mind.' How could I forget that 'head' is the right term here. I have a vague intention to write you, Dear Tim. As always, I fear that along the way to writing, which means along the way to completing your book, I will lose whatever threads have been energized along my read.

Sometimes it feels helpful to take notes, even though I may not ever read them. I rarely read what I write here, and so of course, there are still more rare responses. So I hardly expect one. But I am virtually certain that you would never read a missive (from a stranger) as long as this one promises to be. 

I am most grateful for your meditation on meditation, something I have never really set myself toward, though now I might. I also have trouble sleeping through the night, and have only tried tea or reading or sometimes completing a movie. That now feels almost entirely counterproductive, because of course - if we wish ever to sleep - we must detach from those wakeful conscious activities. But still those things work, sometimes.

I have never learned to write so well as you do. In any field, my language is sloppy, which must mean imprecise. I would like to say that this is simply because I have attempted too much breadth. My depth has suffered therefore. 

I honor the extremes to which you have gone, in the realm of younger partner, kayaks, and of course your writing. I do read the NYRB, but alas your name has never stood out. Until, under Covid, I chance upon a Zoom-ish meeting to hear yourself and Riccardo Manzotti speak about consciousness.

Now as, in my generalist way, consciousness interests me very much, I was excited enough to participate that I put the event in my iPhone calendar. Never has so much sense been made, to my mind. I wrote you soon after, and you were kind enough to provide Manzotti's email. You distanced yourself somewhat from this fascination, and deferred all questions to Riccardo.

But in many ways, I find your take the more interesting. We are about the same age. I had a young partner once, when I was much younger myself. But my social recessiveness was rather more like your take on the embarrassing tea urn in Germany than your bold squiring of someone likely younger than your daughter, if you have one. In my case, my inamorata was taken as the oldest of three young daughters. It was vaguely mortifying. Your daughters would be grown.

And the kayaking and meditating take a kind of guts - or is it simply determination? that I don't have. I am scared away from too much depth in any subject, since it can only promise to take away too much of my attention, which I would like to keep focused on the bigger picture.

Still, yesterday, I gave away my old SCUBA tank to a dive shop after my ex who bought a new house, dug it out of her garage and needed me to deal with it. Then there was my wooden sailboat, older than I am/was aboard which I had more business dying than to live. And of course Chinese, classical and modern, which is a deeper dive than anyone can know ahead of time.

Anyhow I pound away rather noisily on a very quiet laptop now, very concerned that cursive writing (and reading) has dropped from among the expected competencies of youth. And one retains only so much with age. I am still more concerned about the death of motor-memory which comprises true literacy in Chinese. This I feel a a very personal loss. 

The computer transcribes the sounds, even as the netspeak in China goes so wild that I may as well be trying to ride a dragon as to follow it. I'm just not sure what I think of all the tradeoffs. How can so much code be required to say something so yellow. Or is it purple?

To me, the pursuit of understanding - or is it comprehension? - of the mind is perfectly of a piece with the expectation that the capitalist system for organizing our economy will inevitably lead to the triumph of human agency on the planet. Meaning, of course, that to me the triumph of human agency is equivalent to the death of the planet. We are advancing in our metastasis (a funny word for such a dynamic process, don't you think?). 

The dissolution of the subject/object dichotomy is of a piece, in other words, with the dissolution of the various senses for terms such as 'merit' or 'work-ethic' or 'competency' or especially 'agency.' My life is mostly a roll of dice, and I think I like it that way just fine. Right now, I am subject to a house that my callow daughter and her still more callow husband bought in all innocence (redundant all over again, eh?). He may think that I impose my will, when it is the house which instructs me what must be done next.

I have experienced too much what happens when I attempt to impose my will on recalcitrant reality. And yet I remain a survivor and ace troubleshooter, enjoying the responsive life, though it has never been very remunerative. My life.

The overlays to our more primitive and emotive brain stem still do not remove us from the soup of evolution's processes. These are motivated, I would say, by that same love that eaters of magic mushrooms - or meditators - might experience beneath the overlays of language and Cartesian solidity of the sort now cemented into place by time dictatorship and the computer-mediated word and especially the relativity corrected GPS coordinates.

One has to travel - this is not time travel - to the ancient beginnings of Chinese, perhaps, to see the flaw in neo neo neo Platonism with quite enough contrast to help one out of it. 

Well anyhow, I suppose that's enough for now. I am something like halfway through your book, which I find to be rather more complete than Manzotti's (I can't afford his more technical tome, so I remain at the Dummy's level). I like your inclusion of language. I like your honesty and your modesty. 

I think that Manzotti is nearly entirely right. But he won't pay attention (either?) to my insistence that emotion is also real and not lodged inside our head, nor as epiphenomena of the perceptually spread mind.

I shall continue to persist, which is a very funny locution, but there you go! Feelings are the stuff of which the fiction of agency is made.

Hard Fail; Accident

Pondering Elon Musk's playful idiocy, as he expends the resources only he can have to realize childish SciFi fantasies, I must return to the ground of accident that is the only ground that counts. Just like the electrical ground that I struggle truly to understand before I undertake the tough stuff on This Old House on which I labor. Accident is the only safe constant.

Elon is Trump's twin as he leads us down the road away from accident. Those who suffer accident are, in Trump's terms "losers." He is, of course, quite correct in that. His mistake is to consider himself beyond the reach of accident. As do all of us who remain alive, his evidence is that he hasn't really suffered many. Accidents, that is. Or at least, apparently, he hasn't suffered enough of them. A winner like him can only be the Fool.

The accident ratio, of course, leaves a person far better off if he is white and rich, which is itself demonstrably goad to idiocy; the idiocy of self-congratulation for one's superior merit. Narcissism by any other name.

But the Trumpsters are onto something. They embrace accident, especially the sorts of accident most likely to emerge from the barrel of a gun or the carbureted or electronically fuel-injected barrel of an internal combustion explosion-containment chamber. 

Now Ol' Elon champions the electrical kind of motive power, just as he seems to imagine that the brain is a complexly wired container for our selfie-self. Perish the notion! The ground for all of us is accident, and the future is precisely that which we can neither project nor imagine because it always overtake us by surprise.

As we work to protect our selfie-selves, or to deny reality - take your pick - during this pandemic, our selfish genes are surely doing their own thing by managing to persist. The choices are among cucarachas, viruses, and perhaps still for just a moment longer whatever it is that could be meant by 'human.' 

If Trump suffers - heaven forfend - some unfortunate debilitating accident (prior to his ultimate demise, which can surprise nobody who hasn't internalized some fiction of immortality here on earth), that will cause no permanent harm to his ilk. Trump-alikes are apparently as numerous as Republicans now. They are the efficient causes - the 'engines' if you will - of our continued evolution. I suppose we should celebrate them for that. Pardon me while I puke out my guts.

The ground, remember, is accident. Life is an accidental direction away from entropy. It simply cannot be directed. No matter how much intelligence gets mustered, accident will prevail, and life will move the way that life has done for eons, which is, of course, in the direction of love. That's what love means. 

Intelligence is fine when it gets used properly in service to the comfort of our fellow humans. So often it gets used to engineer warfare and the death of those we deem to be on some 'other' team. As Dawkins so reliably demonstrates, those contests are at best only metaphorically related to what happens at the level of life's evolution. To treat them as contests between life and death is to make a categorical error. Genes are always grounded. Contests at any higher level can only cause sparks. Sparks are not alive, though heaven knows they may instigate life from time to time.

Intelligence cannot express love. Intelligence cannot channel love. Intelligence cannot in and of itself provide any basis for merit. Intelligence can only serve love, which it must do on the basis of exquisite balance. Our way of life demonstrates that beauty is the more reliable token for merit. Just ask Trump. 

We have surely crossed a tipping point in service to an excess of wealth that is more grotesque than whatever the First Emperor of the Chin Dynasty arrogated in attempt to obviate his mortality. Now there's a loser's game! 

Well over half of my stored energy for retirement is held on my behalf in hazardous bets - they call them equities - about the future of our economy as presently construed. Now that interest rates have descended to near zero, cash is a fool's reserve, though I can only try to enjoy the sport of my future being whipsawed by the stock market. 

Still, it's only half. Right? None of us is more than half right. But the amounts that evaporate in any given instant are stunningly beyond what I might need to live on during any given day. And I'm talking a mere multiple of three of my life-time's highest annual salary, which is right about at the median of income where I live, which is no place you'd aspire to. You do the math. I'm in the 50 percent, though - mostly by virtue of whiteness - I am immersed in the social capital of the one percenters.

I try really hardly to share my wealth in ways that don't lead to my being a burden on my progeny. For some reason, I just hate to work for the man, but I also have to admit that I hate that a little less than I would hate to be the man. It's a tough balance lots of the time. 

So, I give away my labor freely, now that I'm too old to work. Ironically enough, the labor I give away is precisely the sort that underlies the presumption of the need for a retirement battery. My donations are mostly physical, aided by tools. The logic is not linguistic logic. I make bad mistakes if and when my 'mind' is clouded by emotional charge. I have to love and to focus on the object that I'm fashioning. Mostly by hand. Without distraction.

How very ironic that labor with and by means of my body feels less painful than laboring with and by and through language! Both sorts deteriorate badly, though in some sense I am doing my very best work now. I am more motivated, apparently, to handle the more literal tools. My mind and my body have become one. Thanks God for that! I have some sense that I once did lack. I hope.

I do now actually prefer an electric bicycle. Go figure! I hope never to drive a Tesla, praying for streetcars in their place. Apple's so-called AI battery management really sucks. The batteries in my little mobile house are dying as we speak. I'm winding down myself. 

I labor for love, despite the evident fact that my motive undermines any and all appreciation for what it is that I provide. That is an unfortunate accidental side-effect of the sort of rampant unregulated capitalism that we still practice in these United States. Troglodytes!

What sort of fool am I? I am a fool for love. So is Trump, but his definition for love has a very low denominator. I think Biden may be my kind of fool. There are plenty of people whose work I admire that I can't really much agree with much of the time. That's OK. I love them anyhow. 

At my age, I'm less afraid to fail, and I guess that's how it should be. I must nurture my genes which are now contained in my progeny, right? They are my betters, though I wish they'd take more of my advice about what would be good for the planet. Electric better. Trolleys better. Cars bad. Diversity better. Race bad. Winning is not possible in love. Only losing. Love must be tested to be true. Intelligence is no foil. Alone and bitter in touch with truthiness and an audience of one. Time to get to work!

The Gold Standard Oil for Complexity

Global Warming! That explains the earthquakes. I wonder if anyone who would know how to do it has calculated the shift in tectonic pressures caused by rising sea levels. Or the damming of the Yangtze or the lowering of the water level in the underground sea which waters our oil-glutted agriculture. Or the loss of shock and heat absorption from sucking out the oil, or or.

We do know that building in enough complexity, the way it's done with nuclear powerplants which can fail even when it's statistically near impossible for that many systems to fail at once, pretty much assures disaster according to how much is riding on it.

We do know that when there's a choice to play against the fates, we always take it. It's a moral imperative, such as when there's a medical test which causes little harm but might reveal something wrong that should be fixed. And there has to be a really really big lottery pay-off before we throw in our lot with the roulette wheel.

Whatever our economic arrangements or the ideologies behind them, we seem to have found an effective way to balance efforts such that more and more cars can run and people can eat and have potable water. Tall buildings get built, and good writers write and thinkers think even though there's always all that hand-wringing about ain't it awful and things are going to hell in a handbasket.

One ought to render amazement where amazement's due. Broadly speaking, something very similar to what people think when they think capitalism has got the globe in its grip. And it works pretty well. Except for the problem with limited resources and complexity which we seem capable to build beyond our ability to stay on top of it. And then we wish we'd left things where we'd found them.

No one of us, individually, wants to push our earth to its edge. But collectively, that's how all our individual desires get rendered. There will be blood.

Increasingly, our desires can be translated to energy costs. Money and oil are fungible, except that oil has come so freely and easily that we have been allowed to spend it almost without any thought. And in the expenditure, we ourselves, conscious humans, have become the equivalent of that asteroid which caused the extinction of the otherwise robust dinosaurs.

It turned out that the universe of dinosaurs was nowhere near diverse enough to have a branch which fitted to a new niche in the cataclysmically shifting environment. Well, maybe the feathered sort, but it was the warm-blooded mammals which evolved through the asteroid winter and the rest, as they say, is history.

No scientist will touch the asteroid story as having any cosmic significance except for its representation of random processes. Stuff happens, and thankfully there must be other pockets of life in the infinite cosmos.

But such an event is surely significant for its formative nature relative to us. No consciousness without it. Which leaves the goddists a loophole big enough to drive a civilization through. But for the scientific community, there's nothing left to chance. To assign meaning of the sort I mean to the random happenings of the cosmos would be to abdicate any responsibility at all.

Fools rush in!

Aside from global warming, our contemporary economy makes it very difficult to credit those chance events which, were we honest, have made each of us who we are. It would be a dronish person indeed whose every personal triumph was planned and prepared for. Who never took an accidental opportunity when it was on offer. But the jobs to be filled call for precisely such drones: people whose enthusiasms have been properly channeled since birth. Without credentials and experience, no-one need apply.

Who did we marry, what happenstance allowed us to take the job or career which has kept us going our whole life long? Even though now I couldn't even dream of applying for jobs I once successfully accomplished, because I never did have the proper resume in the first place. And I'm too old to go back to school for it. Which would be humiliating anyhow since I'd already know most of what my callow classmates were only beginning to understand.

Ah, the indignity of chance's being closed out!!

This is not good. It makes us brittle. And so accidents will or must happen to shuffle us up and redistribute the efforts so that random types can take over responsibilities for which they are manifestly under-qualified. That's how consciousness advances, at least by analogy to evolution. Which is a stretch, but still. I don't think we should all be held in jobs by fear. I don't think we should buy the argument that we're collectively broke, when there's never been so much wealth by any measure.

I don't know how consciousness works, but I'm satisfied that I wouldn't have any if it weren't for the collective sort. I know it makes no sense to say that my consciousness is "in" my brain, and more than it makes sense to say that the meaning of words is in them. These words, these tools, bind me to my fellow man. They crystallize or not according to sense and style and how they guide desires.

I have no trouble allowing that my mind is not so much bounded as centered, and that qua Dennett, the I that is me is a fictional abstraction at the center of my emotive gravity. Were I not cared for, I surely wouldn't exist. And were I not somewhat abused, I'd have no safe compartment into which to pour my standby self, the emergency self-sufficiency generator which runs on rationality. Were I more abused I'd be a drone. I'd be a machine. I'd have no feelings.

Collectively now we render up our rationality, or so we suppose it is, to a collective irrational howl into the blankness of space and it would seem to end there. Nothing propagates in nothingness.

But for the repose of random, which is nothing other from the innering of patterns originated elsewhere from my conscious or our collective conscious desires. Random means other-ordering, not meaninglessness. Meaningless is suicide. Meaningless is pushing emotion out of the cosmos by supposing that only human minds can feel it. Other minds, not earthly, can feel it too, and they already know the accidents in our future. That's what intention means.

But this is stuff and nonsense and not worthy to be written down. I'll grant that. It's free.

The Narrative Imperative

Now that I have a smartphone, I tend to use it to look up words. Here in America I don't mind so much that Google might be tracking my searches, but it does occur to me that did they want to they could pretty easily discover exactly what I'm reading; I'm pretty sure the choice and sequence of words I'm looking up makes a sort of signature for which book I'm reading.

That sort of search is trivial for computers, and tough for a guy like me. In fact, if you were to highlight all the terms in a particular book which stand out simply for being underutilized in the corpus of all books; nevermind the state of the particular reader's mastery, you'd have a pretty good way to catalog the books. It would also be more enriched than just titles, authors, dates and keyterms. Maybe.

I'm sure this is why Google is so hard at work accomplishing that great public service of scanning in all the works from the world's key libraries, and I wouldn't complain about it. Well, except that as has been indicated by the recent business losses descended from necessary changes to the Google search algorithms, they clearly have too much power.

But imagine if the government were to take the Google utility over. There'd be all sorts of politicization to what really should be decisions motivated only by Google's self interest. If we can't count on that, then what can we count on?

An ever changing catalog of word frequencies could allow the precise placement of written works within the ever shifting sands of cultural epistemes. Works could be dated, authors and readers profiled, and lots of conjecture could be accomplished, mechanically, about where the epistemes are headed. Who's the vanguard, and what is the conservative drag coefficient.

Or we could mandate a pubic database, using reliable and repeatable cataloging principles. Of course we'll have to keep a few libraries open and a few public-servant librarians employed at something better than slave wages if such an extravagant notion is to have a ghost of a chance in the Wild World Web, where information just wants to be free!!!

When I go to the movies, I make decisions about which one to see based on some powerful calculus of the relation among my energies: my desire to escape, to be entertained, or to learn something. But since it's almost always a series of either/or decisions, there's a diminishing chance I'll ever spend my money and time to watch a C-grade movie, whatever the genre. Even if some poor schmuck of a film-maker worked his heart out on the one I'll never see.

I don't read much stuff that's written for edgy specialists either, and why would I? The effort to be expended would quickly encompass the entire professional life I didn't spend. Not to mention the time spent looking things up.

I suppose it'll be a nice day when everything operates the way that NetFlix does, and so Google or some other book purveyor can recommend to me some signature books which follow the pattern of my affinities. (The government can track me down as well, lumping me in with those folks who have nefarious motives for their concealed reading or other weapon-toting habits.)

But there are two things which make life worth living (for the purposes of this narrative). One, of course, is serendipity. The other is authors who consider it their duty to write for a general public without dumbing their writing down the way that Harvard philosophy chair has done (I won't name him since I only read the free Kindle first chapter, and I found it insulting to my intelligence, as though written algorithmically with a flow of words so smooth I hardly even had to think).

Essentially, they reveal the wisdom of their narrow discipline to the greater reading public, among other things just in case someone from a different discipline - or even no discipline like yours truly - is able to take the writing and run with it. Reframing according to the principles of Occam's Razor can be such a powerful thing, and it can never happen at the pinnacle of accomplishment inside some discipline. Not able to see the forest for the trees kind of thing.

Of course, there's also money in writing for a mass audience, and the closer you can make your language conform to the prevalent popular waves, the more there is to be made.

I am apparently not the only person who's read of Rupert Sheldrake's crossword puzzle experiment. It's one of a series of experiments designed to test for "morphic resonance" which predicts, among other things, that tricks once learned are more trivial to learn once some one being has done it.

So, if you pre-publish the New York Times crossword puzzle so that it can be solved by a random selection of puzzlers before it gets published for the general public, that puzzle (presumably randomly selected from a bunch of norm-referenced puzzles) will be demonstrably easier for the general public to solve than puzzles which have not yet been puzzled over. Even though the pre-solvers are prevented from sharing their solutions.

Pretty cool, no? But are crossword puzzles in the realm of normal tasks which require complex understanding or detailed recipes for their solution? In my example yesterday, I contrasted unself-conscious mastery to mastery which can be taught in a kind of aha quantum leap fashion: recipe instruction compared with rapid deployment frame-changing.

I suggested that the most powerful teaching might always involve frame-shifting, which is specific subcategory of principle discovery as opposed to the simple recitation of factual narrative. I also said of myself, since I'm memory challenged, that internalizing operating principles is the only trick I have. I'm lazy I guess. I look for the most direct solution which doesn't involve much higher math.

The rest of you may not be so troubled by porous memory, and so you memorize formulas for a science or a math test, say. I can't and so I must derive them each and every time, or so my life's narrative goes. But I could never do it on my own without knowing that they had been derived before and having myself rehearsed their derivation. In essence I simply reiterate a familiar process. Maybe that's just another mnemonic device, like constructing mental architecture or other techniques I've heard about.

Crossword puzzles involve, sometimes, surprising word associations, which, like jokes, once told seem quickly to become general currency. If they were already general, then the puzzle part of the crossword simply wouldn't work.

But just as with jokes, they work because they are, more or less, in the air. If one comedian doesn't coin it, someone else will. Puzzle master, first solver, Stewart/Colbert (who always joke about the same stuff some of the time). This obsession with priority is so pre-post-modern!

The guy stuck in the old frame, who just doesn't get it (me!) can never be the teacher, and some jokes just aren't ready to be told, but once the overall ground of discourse is tilled for it, there is a kind of inevitability about someone somewhere and maybe almost everyone everywhere being able to come up with the resolution, the joke, the word-association.

Pinpointing the shift toward readiness is about like locating free will or the conscious actor on the Cartesian Stage. Among the contingencies and deliberations, false starts and completions of someone else's beginnings, I still wonder why it matters. What matters is that things do originate, it hardly matters where. Unless self-aggrandizement is the goal (which, of course, it always is - that's a part of the narrative imperative).

But clearly, if there is attention to the problem, and the solution is arrived at, then the world (of discourse, in this case) has moved a smidge in a direction it might not otherwise have moved. Because there is no known conduit for transmission doesn't mean we have to fill in the blanks with ESP or psi or other words which stand in for what we either don't or can't know or both or either.

The problem of precise origination or precise location or precise causal chains is remarkably analogous to the problem (solved!!) in physics about particle/wave mass/momentum information/perception. To within a cloud of precision some things simply can't be known. That doesn't mean they aren't.

I wonder why that is such a surprise, and why there is such resistance to buying it?

Well, of course it's a cheap trick and undermines all the hard work we've done to build up complex theories to explain not just how things work. In those momentary choices which must be made, while standing in line to watch the movies, or deciding what to read or with whom to mate, we really do want guidance. But not to the point of the absence of any free will.

Right now we are all still in thrall to the meme of mechanism, of cause and effect originating somehwere, which causes (!!!) us, collectively, to go marching off the virtual cliff, which will certainly be for the good of the planet if not for the good of the species. (Or was that the other way around? Our march to the cliff is wreaking an awful lot of havoc on the planet, which might wish that we would jump already, if it were to have wishes).

A crossword puzzle is an arbitrary shift in the ground of discourse, meant only for the amusement of those of us enamored of words. A choice about which movie to watch if of no consequence whatsoever. But if the field of possible choice is reduced to that with which the powers that be feel unthreatened, we start to worry about being entertained to somnolent death.

If the rewards for origination become so extravagant that individuals can control the wealth of nations (Gates, Zuckerberg, Jobs, the Googles not to mention the actors [actors!!??], we start to wonder about our relative freedoms.

We are all whores to dictators if the price is right!

If, on the other hand, the cataloging of our corpuses of words in the world of discourse were never a matter for proprietary algorithms: If the fiction of the private were dissolved within the fact that there is no private discourse, and if the catalog were to remain stable according to the well-worn paths of seekers. And finally if the role of serendipity were to be embraced as fundamental, finally, to what it means to be alive, which of course it is. Then we might not be required to follow one another over that cliff which is the only possible end to our clambering after the pinnacle of origination. The spike of free will's tipping point.

Yes, to make any sense at all a narrative has to be time-sequenced. Attention gets paid in order. The bounds of shared meaning get explanded. And when the seed crystal is dropped into the supersaturated tangle of words - or when the vessel gets tapped - sense does start to crystallize without any matter of authorship origination proprietorship or wealth to drag it down. The truth is feerer than all the efforts now deployed to keep it costly. Well, apart from the Scientologist, no-one does put a price on knowledge.

How odd that this mad mad race for knowledge and understanding should fall victim to its own efforts. Because it was thought more complicated than it is. If we simply were to recognize our interdependence and the role of chance in the lot of each of us, we might yet realize the fruits of our conscious labor.

Consciousness Burlesque

It's well enough known that when the body is suffused with certain kinds of hormones, the mind can make almost any shape erotic. It scans for cues, and finds them in the strangest places. Kind of in the way that once you start, every statement can become a sexual double entendre.

This is among the stuff now fading for me. Could be the hormones, could be the energy to infer shapes where randomness resides, or it could be what it's usually called: memory loss.

It's commonplace to hear people tell, with assurance, how songs are more easily remembered than straight prose. How rhyming is mnemonic. Well, I can memorize hardly anything, and I can assure you on the basis of plenty of experimentation, I can't remember a song to save my life.

Finally, after days and days of trying I did manage to memorize both the words and the chords to Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. Part of its charm is that each time I sing it, it's almost entirely new. Sometimes I go off the rails, and sometimes I have to start over, but I hardly think that either the rhyme scheme or the music is helping me to remember the words. I should work on that, but there are always so many more interesting things to do.

What I do remember easily are principles. Ways to put words together. My principles change, so that some days I'm a strong believer in the possibility of Artificial Intelligence, and others I'm equally certain that it's not possible. Some days I have nearly absolute confidence of the importance of my principles for ordering the stuff of reality, and some days I'm pretty sure that I'm deluded. I'm glad I can still laugh.

But I don't forget those things once they're formulated, and sometimes I find clues hidden among the random stuff I read, or watch, or in process of conversation. It helps in particular to try explaining something that I think I understand really well. I'd say I'm a passibly good explainer. I remember principles, but I forget which side I'm on, especially when I'm in the throes of explaining the opposing case.

It is really really strange that I ever took up the study of Chinese poetry. Traditionally, it's all about memorization, which as I've told you, I just can't do. But I seem to have an easy enough time remembering written forms. I think that's because they get used in sentences and these sentences make sense: each little one of them is like a mini principle, or rather the usage of a word in a sentence invokes a principle specific to that word, and I can remember it. Apparently pretty well. I can't remember the poem but I can remember what the words mean.

Now I've been puzzling over these pre-sentiment experiments which have subjects choosing which curtain the erotic image is behind, before the image has been put there, and they seem able to choose the right one at some frequency greater than chance. And I read the refutations, always investigating where the sleight of hand is.

I think no-one supposes that there is deliberate misleading going on, but the result is so utterly unthinkable, like a pretty woman sawn in half, that there must be something we're paying the wrong kind of attention to. Historically, it takes quite a while to find out what is "really" going on when surprising results are found through the methods of science. But surely something is distracting both the investigators and those who can find no flaws in the method.

I've suggested that the misdirection occurs in the same way it always does; when we think we know what we're seeing and so we direct our attention to someplace different from where the action is really happening.

Experimental evidence from elsewhere amply demonstrates that gross changes can be made to images as we memorize them and we will never notice, so long as these changes aren't made while that part of the image is at our focal point. These magic tricks are accomplished by computers armed with eyeball trackers, and I don't mean the kind which uses cookies on your computer.

They literally track your eyeball movements so that gross changes can be made while your memorization is in process and you won't even know that anything's happened. Write it down, print it out, if you want to be sure of the arrangement.

As investigator Bem points out, when you're all hepped on reproductive urges, there's a pretty big evolutionary payoff to finding sexual objects all over the place. You're motivated and there is an immediate cost in frustration to not finding your quarry; there's a bias in favor of making mistakes rather than to lose the prospect altogether. I guess sometimes almost anything will do, even a pure figment of the imagination.

And yet the research seems to show that so powerful is the motivation that patterns not discernable by ordinary man or machine are discernible by the horny subject. And this is surprising?!

Oh wait, I've performed a sleight of hand myself, haven't I? I've suggested that the subjects were looking for patterns and not for porn per se. And that the same pre-conscious assembly line which creates naked flesh from shadows and used subliminally in advertisements, also knew which way to look between curtain A and curtain B.

But I've also suggested that the hypothesis about effects from the future is misguided. This is rather an experiment to test what should be considered to come from inside the mind as opposed to what originates outside it. It's an exercise in boundary discovery, and not in pre-cognition.

Hepped up subjects will see more porn than not for sure, and so then the proper focal point for analysis might be how the images were tagged as erotic. For some stupid reason I can't identify, I watched the recent movie Burlesque, and I'm a little bit ashamed to say that I didn't find it very erotic at all. Well, not ashamed exactly, but more some function of age I'd like to color over.

Cher looks plastic as always, and Christina Aguilera comes on like a post modern Marilyn Monroe which is to say I know Marilyn and she ain't it. All the pieces are doing what they're supposed to do, the curves are all emphasized in just the right way, the jiggles are choreographed and the cameras are cut away at just the right moment to allow my brain to commit that special crime of filling out the detail (the crime is not in the doing, but in the manner of speaking about it, as Dennett urges) with idealized forms.

You know the principle of eroticism is not erotic at all, but I suppose it must provide good scaffolding for memory in a memory challenged guy like me. Except oddly enough I need the picture. And better than the picture I'll take the real thing. And better than even the most nubile real thing I'll take the one I love, but I guess that's just me. I must be doing something to myself the way that the eyeball tracking machine fixes the picture while I'm paying attention somewhere else.

The mind's interpretation of the mis-ordered stuff of reality obeys the narrative imperative. Before sense can be declared, there has to be some possibility to arrange things according to some plausible order of operation, where plausible means like what happens out there in the real world. And this narrative imperative utterly trumps reality as can be demonstrated by flashing images in the right sequence.

So, back to the experiment and away from this tawdry misdirection! These pictures were distinguished in classification by sufficient normed distance between the erotic and the non-erotic that you'd have to assume that virtually anybody could tell which is which. But by god by the laws of polymorphous perversity, there still has to be someone somewhere among the subjects who's going to be turned on by being turned on or something weird like that.

We have a sort of standoff. Which is more real, the assemblage of the mind which strives to make sense of reality, or the real which presents the mind with impossible to assemble events? Make it work without reward or punishment and the mind will fall asleep. Make it play, and interesting, and the mind will be addicted.

So maybe that accounts for why the correlations weren't stronger: more removed from chance. There is in principle no way to know what your mind is missing from the reality that's out there without the ability to define a boundary. Without a before and after; without an in and out.

But a boundary requires different stuff on one side than on the other. And in the case of the blind spot in each of our visual fields which demarks the spot where the optic nerve crosses the retina, there's nothing on the one side, and therefore, no boundary. The mind "fills in" with plaid if there's plaid around the lacuna: with orange if it's orange.

But no! The mind does no such thing! It ignores the stuff that's not bounded. It doesn't "fill-in" nothing with something. It doesn't have any way to tell that nothing's there, and so the cosmos is complete.

The same is true about what's inside the mind and out. Metaphors for memory seem useful, but they also exclude other ways to think about these matters. Databases often store only indexes to stuff which resides elsewhere. If you destroy the stuff, the index is voided also, but the mind has no way to know that until it looks, and it can't look unless it knows the trick.

So these psi experiments don't show anything at all about presentiments of the future. They only point out blind spots in the mind, whose boundaries don't exist. We presume some sort of continuity; we don't fill it in with what we want to see, but rather by our wanting we actually do see patterns which are not in fact there yet, from some other point of view. We've brought inside the mind phenomena which were heretofore believed to be outside it, or vice versa.

We've supposed a boundary where there never was one, because there is more to to world than can be known. There are lacunae. By our careful interrogations, their outlines can be determined. There is stuff beyond the reach of knowledge. To say that stuff is random is an imposition of a sense we simply haven't made yet. It might be, it might not be. We simply can't know yet.

And so there is no boundary to the mind in any ultimate sense. There will always be more to be brought inside. And dreams of Artificial Intelligence, strangely, are premised on what we know right now of consciousness, even as it changes to something else entirely by virtue of our thinking about it. When nakedness doesn't seem so - when there's nothing left to hide - I guess we'll be back in Eden. I guess free will will be no more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I declare!

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

My stars! What shall we do?

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

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

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

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

Allowing for Presentiment, a Sketchy Sketch

You will likely not know about this, but there is an interesting polemic brewing about what would constitute adequate proof that presentiment, or awareness conditioned by events which haven't happened yet, is possible. Well, if you've been reading what I write, then you will know all about it, but that doesn't change the odds much, since reading me now demonstrates more likelihood that you've never read me before. (I have statistical proof of that if you're interested),

Meanwhile, consider this: Much if not most of what constitutes the readiness of a mind to consider a thought complete enough for utterance actually exists beyond what are ordinarily considered to be the boundaries of the mind. I should say "persists" as in things outside of us stay relatively put, and so we hardly have to keep checking in on them.

Living things move around more than inert objects, and virtual reality is less reliable than the real kind. There's no need, in other words, to stow whole chunks of reality "in" the mind since we can easily assess that it's likely still to be there when next we check. Words we utter simply require a stable reference and must draw attention reliably.

Inanimate objects moving without agency generally would give us the creeps. Most of us will want lots of testing before we're willing to cop out and call it ghosts. A similar thing is true about presentiment. Even if we just think we sense it, it's creepy.

We can pretty much assume that when someone turns their head as though in knowledge of our gazing at the back of it - they seem to have some kind of sensation that we were looking at them - it's because of occult features - simply unknown features - of the environment which indicate how something changed by the fact of our looking.

Maybe it's what's happening in other peoples' eyes, or maybe it's a kind of complex reflection or refraction beneath our conscious ability to make note. Perceptual trajectories bending by the gravity of our attention.

Maybe it's something in the shared surroundings which made us look at that person in the first place, and they simply sense that they are at its epicenter. Who's to say that we are the deciders in any particular instance, as opposed to responding to things happening around us that we haven't learned, consciously, to accommodate.

If there is a shifty portion of the world around you, it will change the valence for holding a thought inside, and for tagging it mentally as not ready to be part of any utterance. The more abstract they become, the more we might struggle to grasp the usage of words. Some instruments require much more practice before they're mastered.

Things about us which don't cohere may escape words altogether. We might be left with Wow! or Yikes! Sometimes intentional action is like taking steps into some empty seeming space which you can't resolve enough by your senses to be confident that the ground will be there. Even when it's always been there before.

But if something forces the issue, like say a fire at your back, you may leap as the better option against what you know with certainty.

After whatever was going to happen has happened, if it was a life-or-death matter, you'll clearly be confirmed in the correctness of your decision. The alternative is, in a trivial but silly sense, unthinkable. In a small way, of course, the ability to toss the dice well has to be considered a part of our strategy, individually and collectively, to come as far as we have.

But that's not what survival of the fittest means. It's our genes whose fitness is being determined, and we only count to the extent that our continued stability enhances the overall likelihood of our distributed gene-pool to persist. And even then our clan's persistence might be contrary to the interests of the greater good.

Surely our selfish happiness functions in relation to our retroactively confirmed presentiments about which would be the best course. Happiness wouldn't even be possible without a relatively fixed cosmos of possibility; suffering would never be worthwhile without the prospect to alter certain of those aspects which would make our happiness seem impossible.

Things outside our minds which matter to us are said to be held "in mind." When they change our mind changes. And when we know they will change, though they have yet to change, we might still change our mind before they do. In that case, our mind has been changed as much as we have changed it ourselves, and yet the change which caused it has yet to happen. This is only presentiment when the assurance can't be described or prefigured or calculated.

Now must it be that there is a known causal relation between our assessments of future change, and what eventually does happen? What about when a change to a third thing changes the relation between two things already held in mind without awareness of the third? New knowledge, in other words, might change the relation of the two already held in mind without anything needing to happen, eventually or right now, to the two not touched by the third.

Our actions can cause the changes we anticipate as much as they might respond to them ahead of time. And if this change occurs in mind prior to our conscious awareness of it, that would feel a lot like presentiment, right? Once caught in the act, we'd be likely to rationalize as though there were no choice.

Now proof is offered that things are still more mysterious. I'm liking it, but I find myself at a loss for words. Yes, the structure of the cosmos admits of mind apart from matter. It changes nothing except at the fringe where will and helplessness collide. At such moments consciousness arises.

Oil Blowout!

This will not come across right. You will think I'm some sort of Pollyanna, and who knows, maybe I am. But I hear of the oil slick down toward New Orleans, and I think something along the lines of OK, cool, Mama is finally getting up to dance. She's reminding us who's in charge here. Of course, that's after I run through my feelings of dread at what it is that we've unleashed. What were Oppenheimer's words? "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

I have the feeling in the face of this oil blow that I do while sailing and the weather clearly asserts how puny I am. This oil blow terrifies me, even while it thrills me that humans are being shown how small we are. How incapable to contain all contingencies.

I don't really give a whole lot of credibility to the Gaia hypothesis on most levels; that the earth can be considered a unitary living organism. Or in particular, that it/she might be conscious. But then again, the notion of a conscious God is poppycock to me too. Since, for me, what can consciousness mean if not a kind of dialogic awakening, resulting, through language, from multiple minds conspiring. (I won't bore you just now with more Julian Jaynes.)

Sure, I've wondered about a kind of dialog between heaven and earth, but the trouble is that while consciousness is dialogic, language, the substrate for consciousness, requires a lot more than two for the dance to get started. There has to be a whole community.

And if there are other planets alive, well then they are communicating in language which won't be picked up by puny man's technologically based receivers. But surely the Earth is alive It is more than a single organism. It has co-evolved with life, and just as my mind is neither fully responsive nor responsible for everything that befalls it, the Earth reflects us back. It makes no more sense to wonder whether the Earth is dead or alive than it does to wonder whether the me I was a second ago is dead. The earth also, is still becoming, and we shouldn't be so sloppy with our categories.

Which brings me around again to the weather; manifestations of what often gets called fate. The toss of dice beyond anyone's control, except for God's if you want to raise things to that level of abstraction. We can regard this oil blow as a regrettable accident, with no meaning other than what we make of it. But if you follow that chain far enough, there is almost nothing about our existence which can't be traced to accident. At some point its "meaning" comes from outside your puny self.

And so it has suited me to wonder if oil cannot and should not be regarded as a gift from earth to man. Ecologically minded people like me tend to be horrified when we learn  the extent to which our current capitalistic and poisonous diet is actually oil based. From the fertilizer to the pumping of water from the ground, to the plowing and transport and refrigerating and drying, there is as much oil as input to our food chain as there is to our transportation industry. And at least as many outflow points, therefore, for greenhouse gaseous emissions.

We're horrified by the warfare, by the money power, by the straight up raping of the earth accomplished for what There Will be Blood demonstrated so clearly must be a game of greed and self-aggrandizement, inevitably to the point of utter desertification of the earth, the self, the soul. Rosebud.

We're horrified by the poisoning of our bodies by the corn sweeteners, the soybean economy, the concentration of energy production into the hooved animals we consume with such lusty gusto. And most of all we're horrified by the immiseration of so many otherwise intact and self-sufficient cultures and peoples beneath the unleashed Halliburton empires of rapacious global capitalism.

But, you know, just as I was taken aback the other day to hear someone voicing a cogent caution about the impact of all this new (only about 100 years) radioactive energy we swim through: The power grid, the radio, the television, the cellphone, the WiFi, WiMax interconnected super-saturated world of communications and power distribution technology for which, as anyone who's grabbed rabbit ears knows, our bodies make really good antennae: just as I was taken aback by that seeming paranoia, I'm sometimes taken aback by the presumption that we must engineer our way out of the predicament we're in.

My thought was simple; do you really think this occult effect which might be doing something at our cellular level, and who knows, might even be tweaking our propensity for cancer, and might have some subtle effect on our moods; do you really think that impact can hold a candle to the solar power of the actual human communication which rides on all these waves?

Hasn't the impact of that drowned out the other stuff in some kind of inverse of the proverbial drop in the ocean? Hello people, we're globally interconnected now by all this electromagnetic radiation which powers our communications technology.

Or like when people study paranormal interactions between mind and matter, isn't it enough of a miracle that I can apparently will my hand to pick up tools and impact literal mountains of matter, even before I deploy the petroleum-powered engines at my disposal. Have we really become so numb to the miracles right before us?

All of these wonders descend from Earth's gift of oil to man. We have squandered it, surely, and there are some among us who are as bereft of soul as Bernie Madoff. Who would make of it a magnificent tomb. But the majority of us by far do not mean harm by our actions. Harm is caused by their collection and concentration - these petty actions - and by proxy when we allow those who speak for us to aggrandize themselves upon our meager wants.

Anyhow, I'd say Earth has had about enough of our uppity oil-sucking ways. I'd say we put a drill right into her heart and she's bleeding and we'd better start paying attention. But that doesn't mean we have to disavow all that we've done as though it were the result of evil, devil guided mankind.

There is a lot of expanded consciousness riding on the gift of oil. Most of it engendered by the likes of mass mediated communication, leading right up to and including Facebook, which I hate to say, has given me quite a few new and important connections. Ones I wouldn't have had otherwise.

Let's put a diaphragm over top that gusher just as quickly as we can. If oil is still lighter than water, then we should be able to suck the oil out the top. It's a kind of opposite to putting a band-aid on the wound, but the concept's identical.

Then let's let the Earth heal a bit. Let's dial back our proxy aggrandizement, individually and one by one. I know I am not even  remotely interested in some fanciful mansion on a hill. I'd rather live in civilization, and leave the hilltops for picnics. I enjoy walking to the extent that the city affords that luxury. And I do enjoy how much I can get accomplished, even socially, from right inside my home. No time wasted commuting. No life threatening challenges against fate on the highway. And hopefully some smallish fraction of oil use compared to turning the key of my car.

Morning has Broken

No frost! Those stupid weather men. Can't trust anybody these days. Er, well, I know the weather now all comes from the same place, like a machine so there's no-one to blame. It's all random.

Is Cat Stevens a terrorist because he trusts a different God? How can people talk about "my God?" Oh! I look out now that the sun is up and there are sparkles on my car's roof. Even though the Internet temperometer told me it had never frosted, my car now tells me differently. Are the flowers lost? Must I apologize to the weatherman? Does any of this make me happy?

I walk a lot because I hardly need my car in the city, and I like to make eye contact and smile, but the pretty girls are always looking away. Is every man a predator now? I guess you'd have to think so, but then why are they so easy about their sex these days? Do all the frat boys just apply this "trust in a bottle" stuff, which is spinning off that NPR story, and lots like it. I wish I were making this stuff up, but I'm not.

It seems that we need trust to run our economy, but with people rushing out to capitalize on the latest bit of science news almost before it's out of the lab, how are we to trust anybody at all, ever? Or, on the other hand, most of our doctors still hold on to whatever the frames were when they graduated from school, and some hold onto them with a death grip, so how are we to trust that?

Maybe it's like my Dad, whose body still remembers how to drive, and whose narrative still insists that to drive is to be free, but who can't, cognitively, take any direction and so he must be gotten off the road. Which isn't as easy as you might think.

You know, hormones do travel across the Internet, which is easy enough to prove if you've ever been misinterpreted in an email. Whatever hormonal reaction the person on the other end felt, you feel it too as soon as you find out that you've been taken the "wrong" way. It's very much like the bottom dropping out or the earth moving. Trust is a tricky business.

Skepticism is a posture of perpetual mistrust toward the cosmos. Goddism purports to be its opposite. But it seems all mixed up anymore. Sometimes the people that betray you have their own good reasons that you know nothing about. Sometimes if they were to tell you the actual truth, that's when you'd start to mistrust them. What if I were to tell all those pretty girls how hot they look? It wouldn't mean I wanted to have sex with them, but isn't that what they want me to think?

Lots of people seem to think that exchanging Bible texts is a way to establish trust. But there's plenty of evidence that that is a really really bad idea. Right on up to the priests. The whole Catholic church now is having a really hard time with trust, and even the Pope seems pretty clueless about what to do.

I do think that the match between context and text, figure and ground, environment and consciousness, is where trust, ultimately, is at. You can trade your Bible quotes, and ascertain that you both follow the same belief system, but that doesn't mean the person is trustworthy. He might still be interested only to get into your pants.

Or maybe he has some addiction, or was twisted at birth, or maybe you can blame it on the devil? All of this is some pretty weird stuff, but in the end (!!!) it's clear enough that if we don't solve this trust stuff, the world is toast. Well, not the earth, which will do alright, but humanity living on it is toast. Toasted.

Under pressure of a "bad economy," people gotta do what they gotta do, which sometimes just undermines trust. Stress undermines trust, apparently also hormonally, dys-regulating oxytosin levels. Mothers' milk contains this stuff, right? And just like the Chinese did this massive social experiment with their one child per family little emperor policy, we did one with the bottle feeding.

And what about the corn sweeteners now? Are they really worse than sugar? What about Toyota, even though their overall safety record is better than the rest? What about flying on small commuter airlines, even though it's still that much safer than to drive? What about interring the ashes of lost soldiers, with honor, even though their family never cared all that much for the meaningless remains? Who's playing on your emotions now? What about volcanic ash in jet engines? Is that just Earth's revenge for all the air transit spewings? Is everything some scam of get mine now, even up to the level of the Earth? Is God angry and jealous or is God Love?

At night, when my brain is too tired to do much more, I watch a lot of rented movies. I could save lots of money to sign up for Internet delivery, but I don't exactly have a fixed address, nor do I want to sign up for anything, contractually, so I let them rip me off for that much more than I should be paying. Hell, someone's gotta power this failing economy.

But they tell me I can cancel anytime!! What am I, nuts? I wanted a little bluetooth dongle for my new spiffy mini laptop which I almost didn't buy because it didn't have "built-in" bluetooth. But I find that I can get it for only $17 bucks at Target. But then I buy one for $3 bucks, shipping included, from Amazon! How can anyone trust anything under these conditions???

I claim that driving my car longer beats the low emissions of a Prius every time, given the cost to manufacture a new one, but I'm only protecting my personal economic integrity in the same way that I mock food purists about worshipping themselves when they should care about their environment. The really pure reason not to eat red meat is that it's better for the environment not to. So, I shouldn't want the stuff, right? Does it matter why it is that I don't; indulging some fantasy of longer life without it.

Remember when the billboards told us to spend a buck, stimulate the economy, render war redundant? Was that the same time that they were urging us to stock up on plastic and duct tape against possible anthrax? Was it? Yesteday all the "we are the world" voices were urging clean energy in honor of Earth Day, but isn't wanting energy the real problem? What if I just love my old car more than I want a new one? Am I thereby dropping out of normal commerce and strangling our auto industry? Does it really matter to buy local? What's local mean? Brands are all national now, and we're supposed to believe that the origin of the idea is what counts, and that's what we want to keep at home. The innovation.

So here's a trio of films: "Whatever Works," Woody Allen's swan song to justify sleeping with your stepdaughter maybe.
v
It's a good film, and Larry David channels Allen well. The girl, I suddenly now realize, is a depiction of that overtrusting disease from too much oxytosin (or too little?), the Williams syndrome. She just loves everyone, which makes her a grand cheater in the end. Untrustworthy herself, since she can't seem to stay out of bed with handsome guys.

Then there's "the Emperor and the Assassin," yet another Chinese rehearsal of is their original unifying Emperor a tyrant or a hero? Did he even know himself? Does it matter? The film rehearses lots of tribal/national loyalties and how these lead to massive genocide, but all in the interest of making just one nation, under heaven (under God?) where there can be peace eternally. Wasn't that Hitler's idea?

And now I'm in the middle of Tristan and Isolde, where post-Roman dark-ages England is trying to unite the tribes against the Irish who were spared the Roman unifying forces. I guess this one is just pure fiction. I'll have to see if I can get the original text free on my kindle. No, there would have to be some copyright for the translation, right? Since, unlike Chinese, the phonetically written languages are not isomorphic over time.

Well, neither is your wife, but you can fantasize about strange pussy if you like, right? Or is that sinning in your mind, which gets me back to why won't everyone smile at me?? I'm not a sinner, honest, although I sure could feel my hormones raging when that nice blond cop followed me when I pulled over to let the siren by like a good and proper driver. She told me I sure did go through the red light. I was sure I hadn't and might have wished for a stoplight camera of the sort that people get all paranoid about these days.

But, you know, they're only going to round up the ragheads, and if you haven't done anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about. Like with the health insurance, the trouble is you don't get to know ahead of time what "something wrong" might mean. And the light changes too fast for me, even when I'm going well within the speed limit. No, I didn't think she was hitting on me. I didn't even know she was pretty until after I'd gone through the outrage anger cycle. I told her I was sure that she was right, since I've learned that one should say that to people in authority. She let me off, and thank God for that, since I swore to myself that if I got a ticket, that would be the end of me driving. Yeah, like I could trust myself on that one!

Anyhow, it's interesting, at least to me, how the old English tales and the old Chinese tales both rehearse the same thing. Uniting tribally divided mankind until there's no-one on the outside. Well, except now China and the West are gearing up to misunderstand each other big time. And we're about to deploy really smart really fast really accurate pinpoint bombs, which are that much better than nuclear devices. Like a Goggle search that actually works instead of handing you back a haystack with what they think is your needle on a cushion right on top. When what you wanted was the pea down under that pile of stuffing. Yeah, let's trust those smart bombs, and the video game jockeys they ride in on.

Or how about let's try trusting no-one and nothing and see where that gets us?

Remember when bicycles were fun and kids rode them all over the city? Now, I ride my bike and it scares me to death amongst the people in cars in a hurry. Imagine thinking about your kid doing that? And you can't exactly go shopping with one since none of the stores welcome them inside, and they'll just get ripped off outside. And the only other people riding bikes are these really bizarrely clothed aficionados who've figured out how to turn a really really pleasant and fun and relaxing (and inexpensive!) invention into some kind of torture device, judging from their labors and grimaces. Or are they just pumping different drugs into their veins, and are they smiling beneath their dark wraparounds and Buck Rogers helmets which look like some kind of raygun on their heads? And they pay real money for these torture devices?

You can buy a really spiffy electric tricycle if you want to pay more than a car for your virtue. What's wrong with this picture? Sorry, I can't find the company today, even though it popped up first thing the other day during my Internet searching out of curiosity to see what regenerative braking electric power conversion for my bike would cost (either more or less than you think, depending on what you think!). And then I came across this very convincing post about why regenerative braking is stupid for a bike in the first place, since there's so little weight and most of the friction is aerodynamic, and the ratio of time to charge over time to discharge is so high that you're better off just going wheeeeee down the hills and coast back up, which conforms with my own experience riding around this pretty flat city.

Sheesh, how is one to know anything for certain? Well, who said you were supposed to in the first place, huh? I mean, I think I know more than enough about heating and cooling systems to know what's up with mine, but apparently the dealer can't figure it out, and I sure can't, although I know it's not fundamentally some big mystery. Although it might be like some computer network issues, just simply enough complexity to mimic mystery.

Man, I am just Heisenberg uncertain about everything today. I might as well become a Jehovah's Witness, because ain't it aweful? There's nothing to be done about any of it, so, hey, I've got a tract for you. Of course it has that necessary clause of all magical tracts that if you doubt it you ruin its spell. Something to tweak your superstition hormone. Ain't change aweful now? If only we could keep things the way they were when we were feeling really good. Suckling.

Well, one thing of which I'm certain. Morning ain't broken. It's a beautiful day, and I'm going to check it out.

Spiritualist Commentary

I once visited Lily Dale, a spiritualist enclave nearby Buffalo, where I now live for the moment (I absolutely adore the English ambiguation machine; do I "live for the moment?" Am I in Buffalo temporarily? Or do I live at Lily Dale?). I had high hopes that something might be triggered there. I was looking for some even slightest sense that there were insights beyond the ones I find through reading and a bit of academic study. I even got myself a "reading."

In the event, it was clearly something to be gotten over with for each of us. The "reader" must have seen that I am opaque and impenetrable. I knew that he wasn't seeing anything. It would be pretty much like some poor doctor trying to diagnose a hypochondriac. Better to go through the motions and get him out of there as quickly as possible.

I was disappointed. Or more likely I mean "I wasn't disappointed." The experience was and remains hardly surprising; pretty much what I'd expected. I'm as proof as they come against spiritualist anything. Like I wear condoms on my gullibility.

Maybe I'd wanted to see if someone would see something in me; something to pull me away from my prideful deficiencies. Or maybe there's just not that much which would surprise me about me; there's not that much that I would be looking for them to tell me, and so it all felt like being a tourist in one's home town. I think I was actually open minded, though. I wasn't looking for negative affirmation.

Around here, in Buffalo where I live again now, temporarily, we often get the chance to take visitors to Niagara Falls, and each time, we also get to see the falls anew. Lately, trying to steer my body in a new direction, I take long walks and see the city in a way which I never could while driving a car. In general, I am the only walker.

Sometimes one is most blinded to the familiar.

I've lately started participating in a local spiritualist writers group, a bunch of people who sense that there are realities which have not been let in to our common discourse; for whom the evidence is too strong that there is more to reality than can be told. But who try to tell it nonetheless.

I have met a Native American medicine man there; I re-met an astrologer I already knew; there are poets, and ordinary folk for whom things have happened which don't fit in to the ordinary narratives of life. Hell, my whole life looks like a bizarre improbability to me, so - apart from the never seeing ghosts part - I should fit right in.

The narratives of these writers would all be extraordinary - hard to believe - except that lots and lots of people follow astrology, even in the highest places. Lots of people believe in and see ghosts. But not everyone wants to tame what they know with words. Almost everyone is secretly skeptical, unless they've seen something themselves. Which I haven't. But I'm not really skeptical, except in ways that I'm perfectly open about. Like, I'm skeptical about the skepticism which powers scientific inquiry, for example.

I never will either see ghosts nor guide my life by the stars, but lots and lots of people will. Still, I am a writer, if I am a writer at all, who writes at that very same edge of sense. Words from others have driven away the mysteries for me. Ghosts have been rationalized to my satisfaction as the reification of what's only "in the mind." But words also take me over the edge, to where only metaphorical is real. Except, well, metaphor is far too limiting a figure.

For me, what's "out there" (fun ambiguating machine again) really is starting to look more and more as though it came from inside my mind. Hard reality is collapsing beneath something else that much more powerful. And reality is pretty darned powerful if you ask me. How strange would it be if the stars did not have any influence on our lives. It only depends how large your frame is allowed to become.

I resist any and all certainties. I therefore risk insanity of the most basic sort, of course. My personal and written narrative often goes off the rails. But, in precisely the manner of this author I recently heard on NPR, the frame within which the various authorities would box me not only doesn't seem to fit, but would seem positively to keep me from myself, as if there could be a me divided from myself by prison bars.

I land in the hospital, but no cause can be found. Or rather, no cause for the cause. (Do accidents always require causes? Or is that just an escape clause the insurance policy writers use) The most important connections in my life are the ones which have been made far beyond my control. Random. Easy to miss.

I'm almost certain the same is true of you, unless you're filthy rich, in which case you're likely to credit your own intelligence and cleverness. It's only human. As if these also weren't matters of good fortune. So, you'll credit yourself with intelligent and clever deployment of your intelligence and cleverness. You see where this is going.

Among the authorities I simply must resist, I would have to include the astrologers, the ones who already know all about ghosts, as well as the usual suspects; the scientists, the doctors, the academics - all the ones who have worked so much harder than I ever will for answers.

These conventional frames are all fully fleshed out now, and so there's nothing left there for me. Which doesn't mean, in any of those and many other cases, that I'm feeling superior to the sense that folks inside them can make. I'm not. There's just no sense there for me. My body's healthy, my mind is strong, the only thing I have to fear is fear, and I'm working on that one too.

* * *

I have a headache today well beyond the power of doctors to diagnose. But it's origin is trivial. Nothing to be alarmed about. I had to get a new "smartphone" because the old one would no longer connect to the Internet. Verizon had sent me five, count 'em, five new ones in fulfillment of the warranty I pay for. I asked them, please, to look a little more deeply into the issue before sending me another one. Each time I set a new one up, costing my precious time and attention, I am a little less confident that my work will last. I told the guy I didn't want to feel like I was driving a Toyota. I think he took my point.
.
They obliged me, they brought in their big guns, but in the end offered no other resolution than to send me yet another refurbished identical phone. It seems merest coincidence that the timing of this series of escalating failure rates coincides with the termination of my contract, and the ability, therefore for me to claim a new phone free. Honest - I think it's random. Well, OK, as much as anything is random.

Naturally, I had wanted to hold out until the newer cooler ones come out. The Verizon folks helpfully advised me that there's never a good time to commit with these things. There's always a newer cooler one just around the corner. And it's no real surprise that among the diminishing number of people who ever bought this particular defunct phone in the first place, there should be some kind of crescendo of trouble. Verizon's cost in PR and technical expenditures for a remedy would be impossible to justify.

I caved. They offered me an extra fifty bucks off. (Just now I got a coupon in the mail for a hundred bucks off - I guess the guy was really stretching himself out for me!!) I miss my old phone, though. It was a kludge, a terrible compromise between touch and buttons and Windows' seemingly pathological design-by-massive-terrified-of-the-boss-committee-consensus approach about including the kitchen sink. The very antithesis of the iPhone. But I'd learned to make it work, and especially liked its slide-out keyboard.

Now, I'm sure you're wondering how and why I can afford an Internet-connected smartphone, being out of work, and dissing technology the way I do. Well, I pretend to.

But as you can see, I practically live up here in the ether. It's how I present myself. I have no fixed geographic address, and so I require cellular technology just in order to be findable by friends and family. I swear I don't really want to be reachable at any moment. I extol the virtues of staying put, even of going back to the old ways. But just like Al Gore, I make some kind of exception of myself. I guess.

Well, not just like him. He's rich and growing and I'm poor and shrinking. Divesting myself of fat and other accumulated stuff. But I do find extravagant hope in certain of the new technologies. I watched that Afghani reporter embedded with the Taliban, and like lots of others, I awoke to the evident truth that they could not coordinate their activities, plant their bombs, nor even detonate them were it not for the cellular network. One wonders why "they" don't just turn it off. You know, the other "they."

Clearly, as with credit card companies who would rather we not know precisely how much money they lose to fraud and identity theft, there is far more to lose by shutting down the cellular networks, than there would be for "them" to gain. A few hundred or a few thousand soldiers a year is a perfectly acceptable price. It's commensurate with lots of other costs, like the cost of mayhem on our highways, for instance, or in our hospitals where "preventable" is the single biggest cause of death (OK, I think it's third, but I know it's up there).

The true cost for public admissions about what's really going on would be our lost confidence in the structures which sustain us.

I don't like these Taliban any better than you do. I might like them a lot less, since I also see them as very similar to our own teapartiers. Angry at everything and nothing in particular, so target the biggest thing around. The American government. The US government is acting very big so far.

But I find lots of hope in the terrorist cells' ability to use the technology of wealth to frustrate its power. Poverty stricken people around the globe can now have phones where once the cost to get on the grid was prohibitive for all but the privileged classes.

There is very nearly no limit to what a company as large as Citibank, say, will do to protect your confidence in them. How much of your fees pay for the invisibility of rampant fraud? Do you ever wonder? And still they want to put a tax on top of what they aren't telling you, against your fear, by selling you identity theft insurance. Fear and greed make a charming couple, don't you think?

"Mission Accomplished" was precisely what got done by the shock and awe campaign against Saddam Hussein. We shouldn't have made so much fun of Georgie Porgie in his jump suit. The whole point of our going in there was to cement the fear we all must have of ignorant people willing to fly planes into buildings. No cost is too high to validate the fear in a kind of super high stakes triumphalism. A massive cheer for the winners. It's like a heroin hit to the collective psyche.

There was and remains quite literally no limit to what must be spent to own and to control our enthusiasms. (And you thought the "war on drugs" was about your kids??? Well, in a way, of course, it is. They must be kept in training!) Even though the cost to the lives of "our own" (not "us" but, you know, the ones too poor or ignorant to understand how their enthusiasms are gamed) now far exceeds the harm "they" ever did or could do to us.

Never mind the collateral damage, or the meltdown to our economy, which was the only thing which could, even conceivably, trump the cost of war. The War. The perpetual war of one name or another.

Oh, but what might have could have probably would have - depending on who you listen to - happened had we done nothing? I guess about the same things that happen every day over in Iraq and Afghanistan, or those parts of town where your family would never let you live, but people still live there nonetheless. They do. Are they not afraid? Is terror only reserved for those whose daily life contrasts enough?

I caved against Verizon, and my new phone - which I chose because it had the largest brightest most apparently durable and readable screen, plus the promise of a better way to input text - is an even bigger kludge than the last one. I miss the buttons; no keyboard anymore, it's all swipe and gesture, in the direction of, and with a silent bow toward, Apple.

But Apple, I learn today, is suing Google now for ripping off certain of Apple's patented intellectual property. These people have got to be kidding! They're protecting their right to profit from ideas which quickly become something anybody could do a hundred different ways. Should something like a wheel really be patentable? Is there no commons left??!!!

I have, apparently, purchased the least popular of the smartphones; certainly the least cool. It's running Microsoft's latest Mobile OS, which not a single tech guru praises. And to top it off, the manufacturer, Samsung, has hobbled plenty of the design aspects built-in by Microsoft, all in the direction of a better "consumer experience" I'm sure.

And on top of that Verizon has famously pushed the whole thing way over into the direction of an entertainment device, all for a fee, and all also in the direction of keeping you from putting your own hands on the device's locked away "features."

In the end, I'm happy enough. The browser beats Apple's in most ways. Text can actually be entered more rapidly than by either Apple's or anyone else's methods, or especially by a tiny keyboard with my thumbs. After a headache-inducing learning curve, in the end I think I got what I wanted. I won't be able to type so fast as I'm doing now with keyboard, but that might not be such a bad thing. Hell, I could give a damn for cool, and even hobbled, this beats the alternatives for me. Bizarre how Microsoft now is in the middle, stodgy, between the battling titans of cool.

So, I will deploy my technology precisely as does the Taliban. But I hope I'm a bit more enlightened than they are. I don't feel any anger toward those who screw me in the name of my own good. I'm sure not about to blow up myself or anybody else. I feel no need to be trimmed for Allah. But I do think that there's important work to do.

I sure can see how we have earned the Taliban's anger against us. As certain as I can be of anything, I'm certain that the way to win has nothing to do with guns or money (when the money's not in the form of relief aid). Just as the way to good health has little to do with the powers of medical technology, except when one is truly ill. The technology we need for good health is good information, good sanitation, public safety and housing, and an absence of fear and food insecurity and guilt; as though we cause all of our problems ourselves.

The large corporations now are all doomed to go the way of Toyota. There's not a single one of them which doesn't have the same sort of secret they'll spend any amount to keep from transforming into a generalized loss of faith.

The healthcare industry, collectively, is terrified that we won't be terrified anymore of dying. They act as though they too find the escalating costs out of touch with reality. This is a ploy folks. The more money goes through their hands, the more profit they can make. (Along with my Verizon coupon, I just got another denial of coverage for a blood test. You'd almost think they are trying to alienate me)

And if we stop being terrified, the evident magic will be that, collectively, we'll be that much healthier and better off than we ever could be on their drugs and surgical and genetic interventions when these get deployed as if every deviation from some norm were a cause for emergency response.

There is no massive turning which is necessary. There is no massive evil being perpetrated in our  name. There's just a lot of fear, being rendered up into a fairly insane collective behavior pattern.

* * * 

Last night, because my life is just that bizarre, I had a chance to attend the hockey event of the century. I nearly witnessed the Buffalo Sabres' own top goalie at his homecoming from center stage in the final event of the Winter Olympics. Canada won, but Buffalo would welcome home the next in a long line of superstar just-misses. We let him know how much we love and value him.

In the event, the son of the friend who'd offered me the last minute seat which he'd gotten last minute - absolute primo seats - the son invited a friend and so I got bumped.

Now, I'm sure you understand completely that this was no tragedy for me. I'm not the world's biggest sports fan, although I do seem magically to be in attendance at some great Buffalo sports happenings. Or just miss them. But the consolation prize was pretty good - I got to use their pre-empted tickets to hear Margaret Atwood in person.

Last minute, I couldn't get anyone to accompany me, so I dropped off two free tickets at the box office, which were then snapped up by some grateful students. So, in addition to feeling lucky, I got to feel generous. Which is a better thing to do than to feel pre-empted.

Atwood, poor woman, devoted her "talk" to answering publicly some frequently asked questions that she, as prominent author, often gets. It was pretty transparent to me that she was warning off those questions in the Q&A session which the format of this "distinguished speaker series" has established for itself.

Despite her sharing some intimate history of Buffalo from a Torontonian's point of view, you could sense this bit of tension between her and this crowd. She's most recently written one in a literary barrage of end-of-the world novels.

The crowd wants to know if she's optimistic, what we should do to prevent a catastrophic future. The questions veer just a bit in the direction of questions she's tired of asking. Questions she rolls her eyeballs at. She kept her poise, but the gulf between herself and this audience had grown immense. We felt mildly cheated by her impromptu carelessly prepared and brief remarks. She felt at odds with ill informed and familiar questions.

As a writer, she said, she is and must be an optimist: That she will finish the book, find a publisher, find an audience. As an accomplished author, she has about as much in common with her audience as the health insurance industry does with the ill. Why would she want anything changed? It's working for her. Being darkly pessimistic makes her life perfectly sunny.

I know that sounds like sour grapes, but honestly, it's not. In a way, it was generous of Atwood to give us her time in person. In a way, with the now inevitable mega-sized image of her talking head right over her actual - but too far away to be distinct -  head, it was hard to get the sense of what "being there" really means anymore. A television would be a far more intimate way to hear her speak.

* * *

So anyhow, as you can see I have nothing at all spiritual to offer. Well, except that I have a really hard time finding almost anything at all which is not meaningful. The most random things just fit right in to what I'm thinking about. And I'd say that's just about as powerful as seeing ghosts. Just about as jarring. Not exactly terrifying, unless you lose your mind about it. I wouldn't want to go saying these things out loud, because everyone would just think I'm crazy.

But, in some new-agey spiritualist sense, all that needs to happen to change the world is for lots and lots of people to stop being so afraid. So terrorized. So subject to the narratives pandered by those already rich and famous and powerful. No, no, no, I'm not talking about Margaret Atwood (by strange co-incidence I found out where my long lost copy of The Handmaid's Tale went, but she couldn't use the tickets either). Atwood come to Buffalo, risking her reputation at the same time that our fair city was honoring a hockey player from somewhere else. Oh Canada!

She writes beautiful books full of implied cautionary tales. Stories and poetry which can reveal things about ourselves that we'd never know without the mirror of literature. But she too is asking us to be afraid. I'd say that's at odds with her audience in Buffalo. We have seen the future and it is us. We're only terrorized by what the better off might do. In Buffalo, silly sin-city of Atwood's past, we still sense a chance to turn it around. And if we can turn our city around, anything's possible, right?

Sorry. Way too long. I'm still working on the condensed version. That's a lot harder.