Dear Thomas Friedman

I have long admired your intelligence, and your ability to find new takes on hackneyed reality. I'm not so sure about your take on AI.

Language is the stuff of intelligence, and the artificial sort of intelligence works off that. But human intelligence - as is, incidentally, encoded in the Chinese language - also includes emotion at our center. Heart and mind are combined in a single word in Chinese. 

I was privileged recently to observe a lively discussion, led by educational policy leaders, about AI in education. After a fairly brief formal presentation, when questions were invited, I was gratified to hear each of the Chinese international students point out that emotion is what's lacking in AI. They seemed determined to make that point. It was well taken, and taken well.

Your phases of history are still progressions along a continuum which has already broken. As did most of us, you missed the happening. Humans have become so impressed with ourselves that we never did pause to examine our cosmologies after the Bomb, capital A. The Manhattan Project was perched on a World War; one in which we were desperate to keep at bay what by now has almost fully engulfed us. Totalitarianism is a failure of feeling, and it can't be eradicated by physical means. 

AI represents the totalization of language, just as physical infrastructure now represents the totalization of our planet. It can be very difficult to know anything beyond those facts. Totalitarians are humans who have made themselves inhuman. They have no understanding. Their expression comes from a very immature place. The tragedy of Hitler's rage returns as Trump's farcical buffoonery. A Marxian quip on history. But we have banished all teleology now, and good riddance. We shall never understand the All. And History has no more discernible direction than life as a whole does.

By commission and omission we have been killing more actual people before their time than ever before. Those at the top seem to celebrate this still, as well they might. When no meaning is made from history, only power remains. Power, as we all know, is addictive.

What we failed to notice even after we proved that we could in fact and in deed enact the reality of the mass/energy equation, was that our emotions had been dulled by those phases you recite in your piece in the New York Times: With your second phase, the Age of Information as triggered by the printing press, we had already introduced Artificial Intelligence. We could be emotively moved by a thing, though mostly because we imagined a person behind it, or sometimes God. It was the printed Bible which blew it for the makers of God's artificial meaning. 

Turing, Shannon, and all who work in AI, never understood that there is no information without its comprehension. It's otherwise only noise. We have equated information with its methods for decoding, and not with its meaning, and then we get sucked up into our own tuba. That is idiocy no different from a monkey playing piano.

Books hold no more emotion than does a brick. AI holds an equivalent amount. As with a furry robot, we project our feelings upon a void. 

We express our emotions facially and physically, though there is no one physical medium to make or convey the expression directly. It has to be understood, but in a way quite different from our understanding of the mass/energy equation. While a machine may learn to call out a smile, a machine will never feel it. Among living creatures, there is always reciprocal feeling. To smile at a machine is to give away far too much of yourself, as many of us have learned the hard way.

Our investigations into quantum physics take no emotion into account, despite the paradox of mind/body resolution. We thought we'd resolved the cartesian divide, when all we really did was to eliminate any possibility that mind is apart from matter. Maybe Penrose is taking a look, though he seems still to be looking for mechanism. A quantum aspect of the brain? How about mind as an aspect of reality from the beginning and to the end? Quantum reality has always been an aspect of mind.

Well, Penrose is beyond me, though I doubt it's all that complicated. If one simply supposes, as I do, that emotions are always simultaneous, which means that physical force is absent in if not from the emotion, then there is no medium through which they propagate, apart from all media. We've done away with ether in the physical world, but what we have yet to do, because it can't be done, is to do away with conceptual reality altogether. Conceptual reality allows for void, which perceptual reality abhors. Perceptual reality is understood conceptually.

Part of conceptual reality is the quite bizarre existence of DNA molecules. Our imagination fails to find meaning in their random appearance; and then again we fail to find meaning in evolution over time according to random mutation. Or rather, we posit that meaning itself is made from random connections, which is certainly true. There is vanishingly little about my life that I can attribute to my own choices. In that I might differ ever so slightly from those still jacked by the Manhattan Project. 

We flunked that test - the atomic test - when we let the hard-heads take charge. They dropped two bombs and then some, based on scant understanding. We've been frozen in time ever since. Now the digital adepts believe absolutely that they can make reality; and banish random from reality.

How ironic that early exponent of Geek Rapture Eliezer Yudkowski is now calling the technology evil and deadly. Along with Kurtzweil, he was celebrating the possibility of a cosmos where "intelligence" crowds out all else, imaging that he could perpetuate his disembodied person. Personality? Emotions are always bereft without a body.

Books disempower as much as they empower. Most of us cannot be either authors or authorities, and so we adapt the thoughts of others. Tools (your first phase, Mr. Friedman) had already channeled our actions according to some masters' wishes. Books carry on the same tradition. 

Recognition always precedes understanding. Cognition is always involved, while recognition engages emotion. Emotion triggers physical motion in living beings. Neurological studies demonstrate that decisions are not cognitive; they get made before we're conscious of them. They must be emotive, since cognition is too slow. Trust or fear, fight or flight. These are emotive decisions. Understanding is settled cognition, awaiting only upset. 

Time can only be defined metaphysically, as recognition followed by comprehension. There is no physical definition for time. Physical time surfaces in the same way that trust might arise from a smile. 'This' prior to 'that' has no meaning without emotion. Meaning is comprehension with consequence. One emotively knows what to do.

Now in the face of digital AI, which can feel no recognition though it might easily name you, we require the emotional maturity which we lacked upon the triggering of atomic explosions. As yet, we are not responsible adults. God knows how to organize ourselves globally anymore. 

We don't need leaders and followers so much as we need community. Community is always only local. Digital, as we deploy it now, disempowers community and creates actual physical gods. These, each and all, must be dethroned. Here's a paradox for you: One is Only Authentic when One Plays a Role (Yudkowsky joke)

God has no role. God is Love.

I mean this quite literally, of course. 

The interesting thing about AI is that it has one incredibly singular use. That would be to detect other AI. When declarations are found to be derivative and not initiated by the person who made them, which is trivial to discover by AI, then the person who made them is deploying AI. Thus a C-level spokesman for a corporation says only what he's been self-programmed to say. Emotion has been expunged; an activity long honored in the feminine fearing My Fair Lady West. Which hardly lets China off the hook.

A person with fellow feeling, which is to say a person who is a member of the same community he addresses, cannot be an AI, but can easily be exposed by AI as human. We'll waste a lot of energy and therefore money getting around to universalizing moral behavior, but it still happens willy-nilly. Remember the tobacco executive breaking down in tears?  He had been sorely tested. 

Germs that cause illness have always been a part of life. Who among us wants to relinquish our intelligent fencing off of germs? Recently, the global body politic has been infested by a kind of virus. I use the term advisedly, since viruses are generally found to be not-quite alive. But so deep has our mistrust of government and public institutions generally become that we have now elected a majority in government which has no fellow feeling at all. They work only for themselves.

Will it really take AI to call them out? Or is it that each of us has already been infected so that we think only of ourselves as well. One can't legislate morality. That's why we have elections. But we've all been trained now to look out only for number one. Digitally, that makes each of us a zero. When it's a contest and not a community initiative, getting ahead is immoral. Never mind the economic dogma. 

Anyhow, the really fun thing about quantum physics is that you can't remove mind from the equations. We already almost knew that when the first A-bomb was exploded. We knew that relativity, in addition to establishing the speed of light as a constant, also erased the possibility for any actual simultaneity. Emotion is always simultaneous. Bell theorem. And so we discover and name endless so-called particles without even pausing to wonder that they each may be a reflection of the strange community of strong agreement that is science. 

Alas, even that community has lost its trust. All research is motivated research when we stop stopping to smell the roses. At its most basic science was meant to delineate that knowledge upon which we must all agree. Their sin has also been a totalization of knowledge. 

There are just two books which I sorta kinda liked which I could never finish. I know it's a literary sin to say so, but one is Joyce's Ulysses and the other is The Recognitions by William Gaddis. Now my mind has become too weak, but frankly Joyce the man and his oddity slipped through his lyrics, and, well, Gaddis just cuts too close for my comfort. 

Yes indeed it is our craving recognition which is killing us. Along with our hiding of our basic loving nature. The rest is all outcome.

The Flaw in Gregory Bateson's Otherwise Brilliant Ecology of Mind

OK, so I don't mean that Bateson is flawed, but rather that his thinking and therefore his writing is flawed. The flaws are with cybernetics (no surprise there - I'd already adverted to that surmise) and with brain, each of which resolve to the same flaw. 

And look here, I'm not meaning to suggest that I am remotely qualified as a critic. My role, here and in life, is not to specialize to such extent as my betters have, but rather to seek out possibilities for not just hope, but for a direction of effort toward the Earth's persistence. That direction, I am convinced, will have to be away from rewarding principally those who toy with money and corporate AI power. It will have to move back toward what is holistically human, which would mean to be of a piece with the entire cosmos. We are still so stuck in dualism, and the banishment of any and all knowledge which doesn't begin and end with the quantifiable extension of materialism.

Now I have to confess that I just took a long pause to listen to a talk given by Gerald Edelman some time ago at the nearby Chautauqua Institution. Edelman does all of my dirty work for me and more, quite simply by his demolition of our likelihood to understand, much less to decode, the workings of the human mind. Sure, he's still brain-centric, like Bateson is, but in his case, he doesn't distinguish the brain from the body, and his measurement of mind is of a scale with how many subatomic particles exist in our cosmos. This is based on numbers of possible interconnections in a single brain, though he goes well beyond that simple measure.

Sure it is true that I can't approach the brilliance of either man. It's also true that I don't have the capacity to sit still and listen to a lecture, though I surely could have and would have were I in that audience that day way way back in 2003, before the man died. 

And I can't afford to go on a drive for the purpose of listening, though I know for a fact that driving works for me. So, instead, I decided to mend my moccasins. These aren't made to be mended - they're machine-made in some struggling country, and carry the brand name of Hush Puppies. I got them on steep discount. I could just toss them out, but in answer to my well-off brother-in-law's comment that it's interesting that my scant income is precisely equal to my outflow (he didn't seem to consider that this is the result of my finely calibrated economic decision-making), no I couldn't.

For one thing, I've already invested a repair in them, which was the unravelling of the main lace holding the top to the sole. I have a collection of thread, but somehow lost my store of needles, even knowing where I last had stowed them. While listening, I searched again, hopelessly and with predictable result. So I dabbed the thick thread with some glue, just simply to avoid the waste of a gas-powered trip out to the sewing hobby store on the other side of town, and managed to thread the two-sizes-too-small needle. 

Then there is the problem of pushing and pulling. I have these devices on the sailboat, but it's a lousy day and my main project is to cover the boat. So I find that I can pull the needle with the sleeve end of some rubber gloves for grip (don't touch the fingers, where I could not abide a hole), and a chunk of wood to push, and by the time the talk was finished I'd both repaired my moccasins again, and listened to the whole lecture. 

Success!

I hope that this is the very opposite of the "creative destruction" which powers our economy just now. Perhaps we'll even return to handmade repairable everything, certainly because we might have to but also because we might want to. Despite my mildly sore fingers, I found the entire process quite enjoyable in its way. I shall never again be internally judgey about women who knit at meetings.

I have also had some success talking my well-off brother-in-law down from his pride in the good luck of working for Microsoft in the early days when they were in high dudgeon destroying their betters for the sake of their own still everlasting success, leading us to believe that there is indeed only one way to do some particular thing. 

The brain is plastic, as we know, but also evolves in ways unique to every single individual. Edelman got his Nobel prize for identifying the evolutionary processes of our immune system, which led to his understanding of the evolutionary processes of neural interconnectivity.

My own conviction is that the structure of the human mind allows this jiu-jitsu transformation of our 'life-force' to come about in a virtual instant, once the need to do so has been universally recognized. The time is looming and near, isn't it?

Cybernetics for Bateson and for us, is that aspect of reality which is lodged in the mind. There is no actual circle, being the most common example, from Plato. Logic another, which Bateson critically distinguishes from causal processes; the error not to do so being strangely common. His error is to suppose first, that the brain is digital (something about the firing on/off nature of neurons), and second that digital can be embodied, in a computer, say, or a brain. Logic processors are as unnatural as a circle.

Bateson's idea [sic] of cybernetics involves coding, which to my mind, is but another way to say that the brain contains replicas - that it replicates - the world outside. That is, to me, logically and causally impossible. I might say that the brain whirls and swirls and mimes with the world "outside," and even that just because it is not outside at all. 

The main burden of Bateson's shift from materialism to ecology is to identify structural identities as these pervade cosmos. Inside/outside are meaningless distinctions without first distinguishing object from field, organism from environment. Such distinguishing, while natural and therefore trivial, is not the same as dividing. Any more than quanta in physics can be divided.

Ideas are not ideas unless they are common to the point of being universal. They therefore cannot be contained in any mind, but constitute the whole, in a way, of a kind of logical universe. They can be deductively derived, viz Plato, with no real learning engaged. In Bateson's terms, they can be reduced to tautology. Which is to say that the necessary learning had to have occurred before any realization of any idea. 

Realization here of an idea is not the same as reification, which is what Bateson does when he places ideas in the brain. Nevermind Penrose's scheme of quantum relatable tubules, which is still a search for mechanism and transmission which is precisely what quantum physics is not about. The computer is detached, while the brain is embedded and in touch. Transmission of ideas is of a piece with gravity changing the topology of space. 

Batson cannot have been aware of the extent to which we are made up of genetically mediated "other" organisms and their detritus, quite apart from the stuff which carries our own genetic signature. Gene cataloguing and quantifying hadn't been accomplished as he wrote. 

Autoimmune and immune-related diseases might make a kind of accelerator for change which is not directly attributable to the stochastic processes of canonical evolution. Fecal transplant makes an interesting case, as does the cocktail treatments for AIDS.

As I watch my granddaughter grow, I am astonished by how long and how painstaking the transition is from latent to fully conscious human. At just a year, she is already capable to identify picture cards and to change her pronunciation of the words they represent when I say them. But it will be a long way yet before we're having a conversation about ideas.

I remarked in my immediately prior post that we don't need to relinquish consciousness in order to continue our evolution. It's not only the sudden, if not surprising, appearance of Covid19 which might transform us no matter how skilled we are at cybernetically adapting to our changed environment. It must also be the changes to the weather, and to the nature of driving and communicating long-distance. 

When you hop into an autonomous vehicle you are also relinquishing the very thing which made driving cars so compelling. Inside you resemble more the worm of a Mexican jumping bean than you do a human. You are utterly cut off, and perhaps you wish to be. Not so different, really, from driving an AI to do your homework.

Well why wouldn't you if the economy is debasing the whole idea of a liberal education, because it doesn't pay. Like all things elevated, liberal derives from free men, just as high art derives from aristocracy. But you won't internalize a single idea nor masterpiece without a liberal education. A liberal education is the basis for all the rest. 

Now I'm not big on ideas as ends in themselves. I don't think that the inception of a work of art is ever an idea, just as evolution depends on random processes for its creative resolutions. But it is hard to construct a house, say, to extend your range among twisting and turning ecosystems, without some geometric sense about fitting things together. 

Speaking of which, just as we are hurtling in the direction of autonomous vehicles (think hurtling toward Mars, which would be to extricate ourselves from the ecosystem which informs and becomes us) we also hurtle away from houses and cars which are accessible to the mechanics we require to service them. All will be cookie cutter, like the most primitive Super Mario context. 

Mechanics have already become merest menials, subservient to their hedge-fund overlords because that's the way we think the economy has to work. Everything flowing to the top, we still do believe that humans qua humanity as we live it right now are the apex, the top, the culmination of the Great Chain of Being. We are the merited, God's favorite and we must not kill an unborn child because to do so would be to invade, dirty, and disgrace the Handiwork of God as He carries out his plan for Nature. 

What a muddled mess. Those people won't even abide a simple law to help avoid our killing one another, yet somehow latent humans are more valuable to God because, well I don't know, because Father said so?

Whatever God is, He has no hands. No identity. Is an idea outside of history; both natural history and humanity-composed history, which is never just the facts, maam. God is Love and not a designer. We are not apart from God since our minds partake in God. Macrocosm/Microcosm or . . .

Whatever else evolution is, it moves in Love's direction (not at Love's direction). Autonomous digital anything is a reach which exceeds its grasp. Nip it in the bud or live in eternal regret. 

Sapir Whorf and Language Relativity

When I was a kid, like before middle school, and already presuming I was going to be an engineer like my Grandaddy, I absolutely loved to read Popular Mechanics. I was always building things, and especially liked to build gadgets. Popular Mechanics had plans for kooky gizmos, as I recall. At least one of my close friends was also a fan. I'll be helping him with his bathroom this weekend.

How strange it seems that this magazine is now the one willing to look at oddball topics, blithely crossing political boundaries with seeming agnostic ignorance of their significance. Popular Mechanics extricates itself from the death spiral of algorithmic click-bait, as far as I can tell. It's stealthily highly politically incorrect, in that it seems fundamentally to hew to the real and demonstrable.

And what a strange place to find an article about disappearing languages, though their hook was about how machine learning was trying to help prevent the disappearance. The article was fully cognizant of the ironies. 

I was admitted to several very fine universities back when structural engineers were already a dying species, and then I committed a flim-flam to major in Chinese literature. Which is relevant here because part of my motivation, partially vindicated, was a vague supposition that a different language might inhabit - and create - a different world. I had an early skepticism about objective truth.

Having grown up on the shores of Lake Erie to watch it die, I had plenty of angst by college-time about pollution and disappearing species. More recently at a college where I briefly worked, one of my colleagues had started a foundation of sorts attempting to preserve obscure written languages. By that time, I rather thought that this was a quixotic pursuit. 

Maybe even a part of my motivation to study Chinese - also vindicated somewhat - was my sense that there would be only two distinct writing systems left on the planet; the alphabetic and the Chinese character; alphabetic languages converging on English.

Now my angst about the planet is widely shared, the only real exception being denialists and religionists; both tending toward dangerous extremism. Or is it that they celebrate what the rest of is cerebrate? 

But my own despair is highly moderated by memories not so very much removed from my personal memory, of plagues and wars, depressions and floods and even climate disasters caused by volcanoes. It often seems that whatever horrors we might now be facing are moderate in comparison with the brutal lives we so recently lived.

I'm not putting my head in the sand, but my focus is certainly not on fixing things beyond the local. Preserving disappearing species in a kind of gene-bank, or even revivifying them, seems as lost a cause as the attempt to preserve disappearing writing systems. If the ecosystem isn't supporting it, what gets preserved would be, at best, artificial, and at worst a kind of invasive species more deadly than the ones we introduce by accident. 

Those users of a dying alphabet would themselves be marginalizing themselves to the extent that the language remains internalized and native. The point being that they're already marginalized if they speak a dying language. It feels like putting primitives on display at the world's fair. Or a freak show.

I'm far more concerned with those aspects of the mainstream languages - and in this case all languages, including especially Chinese, seem convergent - convergent toward dangerous and obsolete world-views. Trivially, this is a corollary of what we almost universally consider to be a shrinking world. Whether by communications technology, supply chains, instant and un-curated video or what-you-will, we are all becoming one. Our attempts to enforce boundaries are ludicrous at best, and dangerous for the tensions they build. 

As silly as it seems to try to preserve what we've already committed to killing, it seems even sillier to claim some cultural form as a basis to claim insider status. And still more dangerous to base that claim on religion. As much as we are a single people on a "shrinking" planet, we are already a mono-culture. Which feels pretty dangerous in and of itself. 

It can be useful - it feels useful to me - to go back and study someone like Gregory Bateson, who attempts to map what's common to any conception of reality. I find the guy brilliant, while I also find him interestingly misguided. I'm not sure why yet. I think it might have to do with his turn toward cybernetics as a kind of meta-description of systems and how they function. I'll let you know when I figure it out, but be warned that so far as I can tell right now, I'm simply not in Bateson's league. I know you'll agree!

Anyhow, as a case in point, our fear of artificial intelligence seems based on a faulty notion about that in which intelligence consists. We seem to be afraid that artifical intelligence will make what's already terrible about our digital culture even worse. If we do nothing about the stuff we already understand well enough to build laws around it (but fail to do so) then it will certainly make things worse. 

But as it is, I find the fear mongering to be of a piece with the reduction of environmentalism to the single term "climate change." It's a dodge and a PR trick which allows us to keep on keeping on with our current global economic regime - broadly construable as "capitalism" - because we have identified something which is, at least theoretically, fixable. Emit less carbon and we're all good. Right, and I've got a bridge to sell you. 

Prevent all heartless amoral thinking and we're good. Uhhuh, sure. We already promote that kind of thinking, and we already think that tinkering with it will destroy the economy. Yet it's the economy, stupid, that needs work. It's individualism that needs work. We need to deconstruct individual merit, and remind ourselves that no man is an island. 

Almost everything about globalism as we live it is built on a very deadly sort of American conception of life. Home on or at the range and able to survive survivalist-style all by one's lonesome. I'm a prime practitioner of that discipline, but at least I know it for the disease that it is. I desperately wish that there were a healthy society that I would feel good to join. 

Build a healthy society and, microcosm macrocosm, the world takes care of itself. Sure, these secrets may be embodied in the lost language of the Kawésqar  (yes, I too just read The Wager), but getting access to them doesn't mean preserving that culture. By the time we could communicate, whatever the language had meant would be as wiped out as their ability to thrive nearly naked in canoes with fires on their clay bottoms in a frigid squalling climate. Like we're going to have to do if we keep going the way that we are. 

Now we see China, with its facial recognition cameras on every light post and its social credit scoring as the antithesis of American-style freedom, by which we mean individual liberty I think. Heck, many Chinese think so too, and would love to live here, often suggesting that we don't even know how good we have it. 

Meaning they already inhabit American culture, I suppose. Chinese know us a lot better than we know them. 

But you know, if by identifying me as an individual also means to identify me as embedded in a group and that group is as responsible as I am for my behavior, then what's the harm? We already behave Chinese in secret, with every corporation having the virtual serial number of every living American, whether they admit it or not and whether they make use of that information (illegally, of course) or not. They still have it, in principle. 

And guess what? The Chinese can get hold of and use that information, and do, with legal impunity or perhaps even with the encouragement of their government, implied or spoken but surely rewarded in some way. I know this intimately because I recently had a cordial email conversation with a Chinese vendor who quite apparently couldn't resist selling my identity, judging by the instant - like turning on a faucet - spew of phishing emails now following my every online behavior. 

And we, in the background, are encouraging the same thing by villainizing China. I mean I love President Biden in most ways, but his approach to China is misguided. His administration is practically underwriting China's indigenous superseding of those very technologies we're trying to keep from them, because we can't quite believe that anyone can do normal science better than we do. Chauvinism writ very large indeed. 

I doubt very much that we are either more clever or more industrious than the Chinese are. We once did have a more robust educational system, especially at the tertiary level. It's sad to me that education has become such a fraught field. We seem to believe that children will believe whatever their teachers tell them. I'm not sure when that has ever happened.

Children respect teachers who offer them something demonstrably helpful and useful. As the former head of a school for gifted children, I've always thought that we - meaning the world, not my school -were selling a pig in a poke with the idea that you have to get to college to get ahead. Academics do not solve most problems, and most problem solving doesn't reduce to book smarts. 

I think the whole message was really about offloading onto individuals the responsibility of getting ahead. As though the dice weren't always loaded for the ones who were lucky enough to start with a boost. My school was great not because the kids and faculty were smart, though they were that. It was great because the connection was honest with no knowledge or information held back, and with the teachers as exposed as the students about their ignorance outside their field. We all learned together and with respect.

As a species, humans have evolved to be able to live in a more varied and variable environment than any other creature, as far as I can tell. Intelligence means adapting to however the environment is transformed. We're nervous now because we're the ones doing all the transforming. Like bacteria let loose in the perfect growth medium, we've fouled our nest. To many of us, this feels like our ultimate comeuppance. 

But the failure is social and political, meaning that the solution depends on language. I don't really buy into notions of individual genius, except, perhaps, within specifically delimited fields of endeavor. Within disciplinary boundaries, a so-called genius might be first, but can't really be a genius unless what is produced is immediately recognized by other sub-geniuses as worthwhile.

I would say that in any endeavor, being first is equal parts luck and effort, with the quality of genius reduced to the ability to notice something interesting. That ability has to be conditioned as much on being outside the limits of the discipline as it is by having mastered the discipline from the inside. 

The trouble with monoculture and the destruction of languages is that there increasingly is no other. And even beyond that, motivated by fear we tend to cower within and behind such things as totemistic flags and religion, which are no longer goads to pride, but are instead the rallying points for a kind of warfare of all against all. The other - all other - has become us, to paraphrase Pogo.

There is a massive difference between the kind of liberty required to intelligently adapt to various natural environments, and the kind which would destroy the natural environment to impose a kind of culturally imperialism on all of the environment, turning the world into a kind of hellish Disneyland.

This is our evolutionary turning point. To survive and thrive as a species now means to become conscious of the boundary between our own intelligent design and nature. That will mean re-inhabiting nature with a kind of consciousness which isn't exclusively deployed to problem-solve the American wilderness. 

This is the root of our terror about artificial intelligence. Somewhere and somehow we each and all know that a brilliant but cosmically amoral (and probably evil) resolution would be to destroy all humans. The remainder, artificially intelligent environment, would be the moral equivalent of a rock.

Now far be it from me to claim that a rock isn't genius. It most certainly is. But it's not alive. 

For one, I am reasonably certain that what we call artificial intelligence can be helpful in guiding humans to evolve. Shockingly implicit in this statement is a transformation to the meaning of evolution. Meaning simply that we don't need to leave consciousness behind in order to evolve naturally. 

Individuals live or die according to genetically endowed ability to mesh, socially and environmentally. A society thrives to the extent that individuals join in to sacrifice their individuality. Changes in language are far more powerful than changes in technology when it comes to ordering society. Our language, at present, fails us. 

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!

In Praise of Tinkering

I absolutely love, as in desperately, to tinker with machines. Motors, computers, ideas, the works. Right now I'm tinkering with language and consciousness, but I'm happy as a clam working on a car or woodworking my old and now departed wooden boat. These are things which, ultimately, make some sense and pose a challenge to me that I can resolve.

What I really enjoy is to be faced with an insoluble like, say your girlfriend runs your car dry of oil when you're in China and the camshaft gear disintegrates. You have no money for either the complicated repair or a different car or even for the parts. Or if something breaks inside your laptop. Or like when the canvas sunshade over the glider rots out.

What I really really hate is giving in. I hate going to the store to solve the problem with money. I hate having to look for the official solution, especially now that there isn't a store on the planet any longer which stocks stuff to fix things. Almost. What I really hate is buying a new one since it's always schlockier and WalMarty no matter how hard I try to resist. But I'd hate it even if there were good stuff around. Honest.

Last time the generator (that's how old it was - I do mean generator and not alternator) on my boat stopped generating I was able to find a shop that would rewind it and which still had ample stock of the Bendix (maybe?) parts which once were standard. Farmers still used these on their aging tractors. Old farmers.

I knew the shop would die with the old guy I was dealing with, who charged me the reasonable fraction of the cost of a new part which is what he grew up with. Maybe $50, but I know it was something I was thrilled to pay. Especially faced as I would be with a very expensive 12 volt alternator conversion for my 6 volt system, which at one time was all the rage. I'd held out! I'm so virtuous!

The coolest things was when I saw my exact engine, even painted with the same paint which I'd scrounged from the boatyard dustbin, on display at the Adirondack museum as an artifact from days gone by. Sure, I suppose there's some likelihood that somewhere in China they're now running a plant from the tooling they bought lock stock and barrel (a merism for replaceable, manufactured, interchangeable parts stuff, if you ask me), from the shuttered plant on this side of the great East/West divide.

Or maybe there are still enough farmers to create a demand for what I need. Well, except TSC, catering to ex-urban wannabees will take care of that along with the agribusiness folks. (do they really count as folks? I guess if Al Qaeda does then they do, eh GWB?). We tinkerers are being driven out of business, even as we get catered to.

Yeah yeah, Harbor Freight is like a walking wet-dream to me, but it makes me feel really really guilty. Like I don't want to be caught in there. Still, I can't help myself, buying shitty Chinese tools just because they price them below the threshold of impulse. Even knowing that I'm contributing to the destruction of Western Civilization.

These are guerrilla tactics now, being deployed against us all to keep us on the grid. State-sponsored terrorism to keep us all down on the farm as consumers. No really, I mean we all live on a consumer farm, as in we're the crops and it's worse than the Matrix. Way worse, because in our case we don't even have a prayer to come awake now.

Well, don't ask, don't tell because at the end of the day I'm not about to give up drinking coffee. And you can always find some comforting pabulum to sooth your mental agitation. It's all good, right? Things will work out in the end.

But that frame of mind which requires abject openness to the stuff around you, whether confined in the space of a garage or a boat at sea, or the space of your bank account, that's when human energy comes alive. There's nothing like the satisfaction of fixing the doo-hickie with a whatchamajigger. Especially when it feels as though the fix came from the sky.

There's even a New Thought theory about that called the Law of Attraction, which just simply has to be so much bullshit like Scientology of something. But to me, whatever you want to call it - call it Jesus for all I care - it's a lot nicer than that new car feeling the globe's all still so crazy about.

Maybe I'm math challenged, but a new car to me just feels like a big huge burden of indentured servitude to pay for it. Or maybe I'm just discipline-challenged and never did save up enough so that I could pay from ready cash.

Or you know, maybe this really is the money driving us all out of business. I think there are maybe no more new gadgets that I need. I think that lots of people are bored with Facebook anymore, and wouldn't trust a Chris Lee style blond bimbo as far as he could throw her. How do you even really know what sex you're dealing with? Everything's been shrink wrapped!

So, whatever. I consider the tinkerers impluse to be noble, in effect. It's a resistance against the machine, by taming it and making it human. It's a way out from the helter-skelter of needing always more and newer. It's the opposite of sublimated eroticism.

But it doesn't get you hired, nor make your ideas into bona-fides. For that you need a tenured position. Oh, wait, those are being done away with too. Darn!

Anyhow I can tell you this for certain: It's not humanity which is winning the survival of the fittest race. We've consistently misconstrued that as a contest. It's not a contest. It's the context and so far our lusts are being used for the survival of the machine memes. It's our inhumanity that's winning.

No mistaking that it's the basics which ensnare us. The same stuff which powers evolution by tricking us into reproduction for the sake of our selfish genes. Our tool-making has allowed it to run amok and now we're all in service to our tools, um, yeah, just like we always have been.

OK, gotta go back to practicing my iron crotch kung fu. Inside joke. Sorry.

Zhang Yimou's House of Flying Daggers - an allegory of the mind

I was shocked when I watched Hero. It seemed that history had been flip-flopped yet again and so Qin Shihuang was not a despot anymore. I can't remember if Mao used him that way, or if this would be a way to rehabilitate Mao. And then the Olympic ceremonies really really confused me.

Was the director of Hero, this Zhang Yimou, unreservedly contributing to Chinese chauvinism, or was he playing off the panic he would cause in Western audiences, showing hordes of exquisitely choreographed drummers, smiles lately pasted on, but still in imitation of our nightmare yellow hoards?

Finally I did remember which movie I'd wanted to watch before Blockbuster goes out of business for good, and there are no other from virtual shelves to browse (I can't find anything on virtual shelves - it takes all the pseudo-random out). I watched it first without subtitles, just to see how well I would follow. The subtitles added a few things, but not so much, to the illusion of understanding.

This is a martial arts film of sorts. If nothing else, the martial arts are ways to decenter consciousness in the acts we commit for self-preservation or in the name of a cause. The body becomes trained to respond as if with foreknowledge, taking advantage, one has to presume, of the faster neurological response at the preconscious level than the one which follows conscious calculation.

In the mythic realm, these reactions seem like pre-cognition or some awful meshing with the workings of fate. One moves as if by accident to some stimulus which it is not quite conceivable one could have reacted to.

In The House of Flying Daggers, the protagonist seems blind, in imitation of that state where you finally do get your mind out of the way and become one with the flow of the qi. The movie's all about seeming, though, especially where protestations of truth and loyalty are concerned. Saying the wrong thing turns out right, and the love connection goes contrary to the rules you would suppose.

Following on the Beijing Spring of 'six-four,' when so many were injured or killed for their effrontery to the Party, it's almost impossible to view this film as other than allegory. But it's hardly necessary, So many more films have been produced which are that much more direct in their politics.

And even though Zhang Yimou clearly and decisively demonstrates his mastery of classical sensibilities in all of his depictions as well as in his dialog, and thereby establishes that he might . . . no, that he must . . . be deploying ancient and refined arts of indirection; analogs from world of letters to the arts deployed by Gong-fu masters. He invites you to read into his images for some central truth about what really is going on.

Except that the material stands frustratingly on its own. And even of the Olympic show, Stephen Spielberg has this to say:

At the heart of Zhang's Olympic ceremonies was the idea that the conflict of man foretells the desire for inner peace. This theme is one he's explored and perfected in his films, whether they are about the lives of humble peasants or exalted royalty. This year he captured this prevalent theme of harmony and peace, which is the spirit of the Olympic Games. In one evening of visual and emotional splendor, he educated, enlightened, and entertained us all.

Thus turning everything, as he must, into Hollywood twaddle. As if it were all about peace and love and harmony, but I'm sure Zhang would never want to contradict Spielberg.

Anyhow, peace and love have nothing at all to do with Olympic contests. These enact struggles to the death and in that sense are as real as the absurd martial arts sequences in Zhang's films. They also rehearse those things which have kept us and all species alive in the wild. Good reflexes and the ability to construct reality as fast as it happens to us.

If the films could not stand on their own, apart from allegory, they would be unwatchable. No matter whether or how they might pass muster with government censors. In any case, there is no censorship in China that's any different from the kind that we deploy in the West. So long as you are helping to build the economy without taking direct potshots at the Party, there's not much you can't say or do.

And why would anyone want to take direct shots? There's way too much power always on the ready for deployment; Power to keep things moving along they way that they already are.

What does a little freedom of speech really matter when everyone's being so distracted by things which need doing right in front of them.

At least the Chinese movie-goers understand what we don't: that there's no truth to the illusion of truth. And therefore they can move ahead without any illusions about the stakes or about the consequences. While we here in the West can continue to indulge creative fictions that because our misery has been moved offshore, it's not something we have anything to do with.

Which makes us here rather more subject to dictatorial whims than they are there. After all, the Party after Mao and Deng is not controlled from some single man. It resembles more the human brain, which delegates out to nerve centers more near the action what it would do in cases near enough to numbingly normal that they don't need to be dealt with by the self-conscious mind.

Back to that pseudo-randomness I like so much on shelves of books or DVDs arranged for my perusal. Of course eye-level real-estate is the most valuable, and as any grocery-shelf stocker will tell you, there's nothing at all random about the arrangement of items on shelves. This is easy enough to demonstrate to oneself by going back and looking again for that thing you never saw but subsequently remembered the title for.

The trouble with virtual shelves is that you feel too much in control when you don't want to be. Something needs to at least seem to stand still. Otherwise you feel like you're hallucinating reality. You can get kind of desperate looking for things when the shelves all shift and change their sort according to what kinds of keyterms you type in.

* * *

It's fairly unproblematical historically to refer to the Chinese written language as the nervous system for the state. It allowed administration to be centralized for a people spread almost amazingly far away in geographic - and also temporal - space. But it's also easy to suppose that this function could be filled by any written language.

In one sense of course it could be. Orders from the center and feedback from the periphery can be reliably rendered in any kind of written language. But Chinese has afforded a dialect and spoken-language--community independent means for "transmission" by abstracting from the spoken language a differing written form.

That form is not simply like Latin in that it stays relatively stable and has been mastered only by a priesthood. It represents a much more radical economy by incorporating strict and ideological controls on any proliferation of its forms. Well, as with all things, until recently.

What the Chinese written language enables is for any official anywhere along the chain of "transmission" to reliably anticipate what the center would say or will say or is likely to say if and when it gets around to it, or finds the need for it.

This is a powerful difference from any written language elsewhere in time or place. And it means that the overall entity called China can function in a manner more analogous to the human "mind" than can we in the West. Our language remains in thrall to the transmission of information in just the fashion that we remain in thrall to novelty, authenticity and origination of any sort.

Some day shortly I'm certain that there will be an ultimate crystallization of sense in English, say, to where all religionists and Republicans and atheists and freethinkers will all have to agree because of some powerful scientific finding. But, um, I'm not exactly willing to hold my breath in waiting.

Meanwhile, we suffer dictatorial and centralized controls much moreso than do the Chinese for whom all meaning is already known to be allegorical, though without priority as to which is the real meaning and which the allegory. Ironically enough, there is no center in the Middle Kingdom, just as there is no real democracy over here.

Irony abounds!

More Mental Chaos

OK, so lately I've discovered things that you've known for some time now. I'm a little slow. But I read this article about how nobody can touch Apple selling "apps" because nobody else has iTunes. So I opened up my iTunes for the first time in maybe a zillion years, and wow is it overwhelming.

I mean you can listen to radio stations from all over the world, and you can buy TV episodes and movies, and of  course I already knew you could buy songs. But how the hell do you sort among it all? And what about cross-platform compatibility? And how do you know what's available on one platform or format which might not be available on another?

Chrome, the browser, has just introduced apps too - well, OK they might have done it years ago, but I just noticed. And the line between a browser-based application and a machine-based app now seems entirely blurred. It's confusing! I can read the New York Times via my browser, or I can read it with an app, and I can't even tell which one is more like the "real thing" or even what the real thing is like anymore.

Sometimes I see an article on the print version and can't find it online and vice-versa.

But get this! We - royally we - just bought a superannuated and thus discounted Blue-ray player. It plugs into the Internet. It has apps! OK, so not nearly so many apps as iTunes has, but way more than my Windows mobile phone. You can rent movies one-off from Blockbuster, or if you don't like their scant collection, you can find any number of other venues, each one claiming to have more than the others - newer and out faster and with higher definition.

You can buy it on your TV and watch it on your smartphone if you have the right smartphone which is almost always the iPhone and almost never the Windows mobile phone, but sometimes it is. Now if I only knew what I wanted to watch I would be able to find it, but you know I like to browse, and when I browse, I like to know that the list is reasonably comprehensive so that I'm not making my choice from among mediocrity.

Browsing the apps on this Blue-ray player I found one for USA Today and I thought "oh!" so I can get my print news right on the TV.Weird, but OK let's see - and I found articles from months and months ago. I'm thinking this is one delivery medium that never quite took off. I had a sad thought about that one person somewhere who actually is depending on this source for "news."

Days were when I would and could listen only to the local radio and watch the local TV. The boundaries around the possible were vaguely comforting although I couldn't have known it then. Now I might listen to any number of university stations, but without affinity why would I want to? I don't feel a whole lot of affinity to any of my various alma maters, although they all stalk me for it like a Google mediated ad for something I never did want but only wanted to look at and now it won't leave me alone.

What's really annoying is that there is no easy way - although my phone handles podcasts just as well as the next guy - to find a podcast via iTunes and then listen to it on my Windows phone. But yeah why would I want to? I can't even imagine sparing the time to listen to podcasts. When I'm in the car, which is as seldom as possible these days, I find the NPR station and feel reasonably reassured that I will at least know if the world has melted down and what are the main topics on everybody's mind.

But people do listen to podcasts, and I suppose they mostly follow the path of least resistance and get the Apple branded product because it just works. Although they don't seem to get Apple TV all that much. Other products are more highly rated. And free still has some draw to it. But who can sort out the copy protection schemes and the Digital Rights Management schemes, and since when did the US of A get all high and mighty about not copying someone else's copyrighted stuff? We invented the concept.

It's hard to know when the obstacles are a matter of law or a matter of manufacturers and publishers trying to maximize profits by opening or closing off various avenues to corral your interest or affinity. I mean, you just know that Microsoft doesn't want you to inter-operate with Apple all that much, or is it the other way around? And Google just wants to take over the world again now that a younger guy over at Facebook is the IT I.T. innovator.

I wonder what it feels like to even be a contender at that level, and why can't you just let it go and be on the top of your game. It must be that being the king of the hill that way is a special kind of drug whose high just keeps on giving.

But, since my thread these days is about consciousness, one thing I'm pretty sure of is that these top dogs - the Jobs and Gates and Pages and Zuckerbergs and the rest of 'em - aren't any more "conscious" than you and I are.

But what if I'm missing stuff that everyone else is aware of? Every time I turn on PBS I think Oh Yeah I really should pay more attention to all those wildlife shows. It would be as though I'd actually traveled the world, and I could understand that much more about how it works. Or the shows about how the brain works. I really should watch T.E.D. more often too.

I could be just a troglodyte mind in a thoroughly modern civilization, you know, but on the other hand I do typically spend a lot of time reading books. And when there's a really good movie out I've been known to buy a ticket. Live theater sometimes. You know, the good stuff. Yesterday's movies feel so yesterday, and you're all alone watching stuff that everyone else has already watched.

Driving around SoCal it seems the popular way to live now is in big desert-block condo developments which look for all the world like big hotel complexes. I paid a visit to OpryLand once with my daughter - you know that massive complex of stores and restaurants and rooms all overlooking what's inside the superdome-like enclosure. They're attractive, these housing complexes, and they seem squarely aimed at middle-class people who can't afford a house even with depressed real-estate pricing. It's gotta make you feel special though, living in a convention complex 24-7-365.

I imagine they get all these apps and video choices and consider them cheap compared to what they'd pay in an actual hotel room. I'm guessing they play video games and listen to what smart futurists say about how video gaming will actually save rather than destroy us. But you know I'm also guessing that if you do enough of this by the end of the day there's not really a thought in your head. You're as conscious as a drunk or a doper who can't summon the energy to organize all the raw data streaming into your head.

It must feel really good, but I guess it always feels good to kick back and stop all attempts to organize. Watching movies, getting drunk, blowing some dope (do people still talk about it that way?). It's no way to live an entire life.

But you don't have to do all the organizational work alone! You see, we're all conspiring to play an epic game together, and there's this really powerful narrative behind it -  the greatest story ever written, say - and if everyone plays his little part, blogging up the stuff they're good at and not knocking down stuff just because they don't understand it, then with the magic of the Internet, all this data will self-organize and resolve itself according to quality and depth metrics.

Consciousness expands!

There is a change afoot. How could there not be? When we are or can be, to various degrees, aware of what's going on in most if not almost all of the world. We can get images and we can get sounds and videos, and of course all of it is subject to the pre-ordering of the various editorial and profit-making processes which bring it to us.

Sure those processes are as likely to omit by virtue of motivated over-emphasis as they are to include by an abundance of generous spirit. Thinking that we're in touch with the whole world might leave us a little less well in-touch than to be certain that we're not. but who really wants to go back to being limited by our local paper anymore? Who wants only to be able to witness the local amateur opera?

What we get to see or virtually experience is powered by politics and marketability and our own disposition to oogle and satisfy various levels of curiosity, informed or not.

And still I prefer books. There are all sorts of assumptions about the power of the technology which brought us the printing press - that it brought down the institution of the church and replaced it with freer thinking autodidacts who could read the Word themselves.

And now there are analogies being drawn between those cataclysmic times and these, when Blogging and picture and video sharing technologies allow each of us to try his voice in the public square. Sure it's chaotic, but it seems we've - most of us - managed to remain reasonably coherent.

As always, we pick and choose among the stuff swirling around and about us. We form a narrative thread and make rhyming associations. We pick our way forward, and wonder how it is, eventually, that we will or won't manage to find a way collectively to keep our heads about us.

Some stuff we pay attention to and some stuff we ignore. We give over to the commons that part of our thoughts which we feel comfortable giving over, and we keep to and for ourselves that part we need to call ourself by name. And it's all good or not depending on how it all comes out. About which we can know almost precisely nothing - except that if we don't participate, it won't come out well at all.

Back to reading . . .

Tell Me More, Tell me Sweet Little Lies

I don't know love. Oh, I know it better than you do, in the direction of the abstract, of God's love, or even of the sort which requires paid counselors to rectify. I even have a nifty little proof of how love is out there, a part of reality with or without us to feel it, a step more real than the sort attributed to God. Abstracted like a subatomic particle is abstracted. But the love I don't know is the kind that you have to learn, and it was never on offer where I got my learnin'. For you neither, I'll bet.

Here's a strange exercise: Go out to dinner with Dad, and then when he says that he doesn't remember anything, start to tell all the things you remember, in some sort of random order, or based, perhaps, on some assessment of their level of emotional impact. To him.

Some things will actually stir a memory. Sometimes, that will even trigger him remembering a few things on his own. Most of the time, it's just you remembering things, which is a pleasant enough exercise. It passes the time at dinner.

But the thing is that there is always something which will trigger interest when there is some presumption of involvement of Dad's "I". Some pride that there was a him actually involved in whatever it was I was telling him about. Or maybe he just appreciated that I appreciated it. But it doesn't seem that I could tell an outright lie and keep his interest. Although he frequently expresses disbelief at what I do tell. "Really, I did that? Tell me more . . ."

There are a few things I'd like to ask my daughter some day when the right moment comes along. Nothing about drugs and sex and alcohol, but I would like to know if she's ever cheated on a school assignment. I hear that all criminals feel justified, and so, you know, in this very dangerous exercise, I'd like to know if I feel as though I fell short, if I would like to assign blame to her Mom, or if I am angry with my child. I'd just like to know is all.

It's not the answer which weighs on me, ever so lightly. It's the question mark; the sense that there will never quite be an occasion to ask this question, to open up that channel for a level of trust which could transcend all questioning. Perhaps it will be denied me. I know it's a dangerous arena. It's not my love at risk. It's more about my character, and how much I devoted to her. I'm 99.99% sure that she never has. In fact I know of plenty of ways in which she demonstrated that she'd rather undermine herself than to do those cheap things her classmates did to grub a grade.

Alright. I don't want to know. I already do know. What am I talking about??

I have split my parents now, taking on that initiative because neither of them has the ability to do it for themself. Over time, it became blazingly apparent that there was no happiness in one another; Dad a kind of addict of Mom's mere presence, having long since forgotten that there is a life of its own inside the female of the species. He never was taught that way. Or he's just afraid, as he always says; afraid of "girls," afraid of dancing.

And Mom his slave through so many physical manifestations of introverted rage, near death each time, and still she has no idea what, actually, would make her happy. She has no instinct at all about what to do to please herself. Dad's memory is mostly gone, and so when springtime presented the opportunity to spirit him off to their summer home without Mom, I took it. But as I've learned it's not his memory that's gone. It's control, in perfect analog to his physical body which is remarkably strong and fit for its age, but not really all that strong.

I am regarded as some kind of hero within the small orbit of my family, having taken upon myself something no one else knew how to accomplish. And, in truth, I do resent it. I feel that my life has been robbed from me, as I tell both parents little lies, act out things I don't quite feel, determined to see this chess match through to where Dad believes that Mom is also in his past, a forgotten melange of Mom, grandma, some shadow person.

But that's not about to happen. It really isn't his memory that's gone, it's the story of his life, which he wrote before he would forget it, but which had already written itself as a long list of obligations capped by self-indulgence. I think that Dad was afraid to dream. I think he's always been terrified to step outside of his competency, formidable as it is, and every single move has gone according to plan, during a time in the history of mankind when such a thing was actually possible.

Now, the man is attenuated. The plan complete. What would you expect to be left at the remains of a completed life.

There is absolutely no question mark in my mind that neither of my parents ever cheated - not once - in school, and certainly not with each other. This has not seemed any sort of triumph - more a shortcoming in the passion department. Their rage is always staged. There is never any actual danger that it could escalate to physical harm. But it does the trick to keep each person from himself. It delineates the boundaries beyond which is something unknown, messy unpredictable.

I am become that sort of Catholic child I thought I never would or could become. The one who throws over some distant life to return back home to care for infirm parents. Those parents, or generally it is Mom, linger then for years and years and friends drop away since that particular sort of passion is exclusive of a life for oneself.

I have never ever cheated on a school assignment. I don't have it in me. And, well, I don't have it in me to know what it is that I really want with and of my life. And the lies I tell, therefore, are nowise geared toward advancing my own agenda. Other than to liberate myself from this strange purgatory on one of Earth's almost certainly most perfect pieces of real estate. This is the it life. Charming waterfront living, tastefully arranged.

I feel vaguely as though I should have a life, and it can't be here. I can't even last the summer, nevermind the years and years of lingering always in store for dutiful children. I don't feel as though I care either that little or that much. Perhaps I simply don't feel, enslaved all these years to some idea for myself. Some bottled aspirations, as my parents led the way toward what seems almost normal now. Like drinking corn sweetenered carbonated water, it's considered acceptable now to spend an entire life in devotion to the kids' success. That's what having enough means now: the sheer excess to be able to give your kids the message that if they don't get into the Ivy of their choice, they might as well die.

We saw an unusual bird today, and the other day there was some new not unattractive growth on the beach. Some invasive species, rendering useless the classic field guides strewn about this house. I once thought I had to learn the names of these things. I never did. Lots of Dad's memories are about the Boy Scouts. That's where I would have learned to identify plants and birds and constellations. Later on, I learned lots of Chinese characters. Then I stopped and they linger on in my being as unused competencies, shades of knowledge.

We eat often at a Chinese restaurant, one started by an artist, a calligrapher, a poet who drew his recipes from the classics. They know me there. I taught his daughter. I recognized the character in one of his "drawings." It was "filial piety" as normally translated. Respect for ones ancestors. It was somehow, vaguely mis-written. Or maybe it was an archaic form. It was tipped a bit, drunken. There's another full moon tonight. I snapped a picture of it, and got a flying saucer. I posted it to Facebook. I have no idea why. I thought it was funny.

Dad's struggle to find words is extreme. I struggle to find words, but his struggle leaves him comically bereft much of the time. He pantomimes with vague approximations, vocally, grasping for the most common terms. Things familiar. I'm not sure this is what's meant by "memory loss" to most people. In some cases, he has an apparent thing in mind, but can't get at the words for it. It reminds me of myself speaking some foreign tongue. It's frustrating, but only because you can't dig up the word to make a connection. You want a dictionary.

But a dictionary wouldn't help Dad. The mechanics would elude him. Right now he's watching something on PBS about something about war. War captivates him, just like memories of boy scouts seem the most present. But the war stuff has to be real. History. He can't watch caricatures. Dramatic enactments of WWII go well. Just now he remembered how his father was all set to ship off during WWI, but luckily was absolved by the War's end. He seemed to have a perfectly clear memory of this.

Lacking words for the organisms around us must be similar to what gets called "memory loss." We become abstracted from the natural environment which is also part of us, but it was the words themselves which abstracted us in the first place. Without them, we would be embedded, connected.

So there is nothing separate from losing grasp in general to memory loss. I guess there are some people who keep a good memory well after their body is decrepit. But what good would that be? Is a sharp mind in a blasted body more free than a blasted mind in a sharp body?

This sense of "I" that we celebrate so much is nothing other from abstraction, separation, identity, that thing which makes us unnatural. There is nothing about my Dad which is not perfectly recognizable as him. There is nothing lacking, though much has been attenuated. And he's no longer in control, even of his wife, who has finally learned to assert herself. At least on the phone. At least across an international boundary.

I won't be able to do this much longer. My mind is subsumed beneath the white noise of Dad. I can't think. I'm losing my mind in a different way. My words are not available to me because there is no peace. I think we mirror each others' frustration. Perhaps another TV uipstairs would do the trick?

Oh, I can read there on my Kindle, which allows me to purchase new books without leaving my seat, pulling in the tower from the hill across the lake in the good ol' U. S. of A. Remember when a book was something to have and to hold, and folks would have been embarrassed to sell you just the words and prevent you then from giving them away to the next person.

My struggle is with irritation, with bodily functions and smells and old bad habits which were only lightly veneered by some civilizing influence. It's hard to like Dad now. He smells and won't wash and makes embarrassing and loud comments in restaurants of the sort he used to know enough to keep to himself. And this new being can't be blamed on new deficits. Rather, something got removed which kept the disagreeable stuff in check. But it was always there.

Then what is left, when everything else gets removed? When the house and chotchkes gathered up across so many years of perpetually contested truce are disposed of and all the memories must be told from someone else's mouth, or pen, or also-fading memory. Constructed memory which will always be cartoon-like smoothed, toward abstracted perfect shapes, for better or for worse.

Is all that's left just simply this compulsion to care, to act out love, to treat the shell as though it were the real thing, and not what should get left behind. I'll keep you posted. I'm learning love, but I'm not there yet. I sitll have plenty of work to do, to arrange for disposals, for professional care, for preservations when necessary. I still have truths to tell so that there will be calm and peace and something like co-existence, on the same campus, of two individuals who can't help one another anymore.

One, my father, always competent and always preparing ahead, shedding things, before he can't handle them anymore. He is stubborn like a bull if asked to relinquish authority, autonomy, charge, unless invited to do so by someone who will help him as a peer. The other, my mother, always resentful of control taken away, and for whom help is something compelled, with belittlement if necessary, with money doled out or withheld.

So I must stand in. For love. In all the wrong places. And then one day, perhaps, I will experience it, as a felt experience, as something real beyond control. As something not dependent on so many things piled up across the years. Perhaps.

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.
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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.