The Three Body Secret of China

Some time back in maybe 2016, when I was routinely in Shanghai working for an American College which wanted to build a bridge between here and there, I became aware of the SciFi novel then known in English as The Three Body Problem, by Liu Cixin. Of all things, I learned of the book by way of Facebook, where Mark Zuckerberg touted reading it and touted himself by proxy.

Now I’ve grown to detest Facebook for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here, but mostly because I’ve always been socially shy. It was a work-necessity at the time (across a VPN while in China). But I learned about the precedent-shattering Hugo award, and I even watched Zuckerberg mimic an American tech-titan in a cringe-worthy imitation of Chinese. I’ll give him credit for trying. I won’t give him credit for much else.

While trying to build my bridge, I would routinely speak before large groups of Chinese students, and sometimes - after I’d read the book - I would ask who had read San Ti, its Chinese title. I was surprised that only a few would raise their hands, though my survey was not an accurate count. The book has its subversive undertones, which might have kept hands unraised at the time.

Amazon was viable then in China, and I had a physical address in Shanghai, so creating my Chinese account was trivial. I had amassed enough WeChat cash to purchase the three-book collection for a song. It was a pretty easy read, not exactly packed with those pesky four-character expressions or too many erudite literary allusions the way that Card Apprentice was when I translated its 600-plus chapters uncredited and for a pittance while wandering across the US trying to understand Trumpism. I was translating for the Chinese on-line literary equivalent to The Voice or whatever we do over here on television that I shall never watch. I was indeed a party to, and part of, the modern version of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, or a six-day ride-until-you drop bicycle race. Not pretty.

Hey, let’s put on a show! Let’s get rich on the desperation of the intelligent masses. Let’s transform our economies to something even worse than capitalism and make the people love it! It’s all free, after all! The money pump to the top is more efficient than ever, post-industrially speaking. That’s what tech means!

Along my travels, I was told about the child of an acquaintance of my sister who was starring in an upcoming Chinese film about the story of Edgar Snow and Red Star Over China, which I’d obviously read, since I’ve obviously studied some about China.

Now Kenan Heppe, who played Snow in the film, comes across as a rather caricatured American, reminiscent of Zuckerberg’s self-caricature, and is criticized for that. I think that’s how he was cast though, and he played the part brilliantly. Zuck is just a tool.

Way back when, I spent some hours trying to figure out if either film was ever made, and never could. That was when Covid was hitting, and frankly, penetrating the Chinese web remains deuced difficult by reason of a kind of language and ordering that is still more different than Chinese already is from English. I gathered that production of Three Body was suspended for various reasons, having less to do with Covid than with cinematographic cultural reconfigurations. I watched some atrocious clips. And then I forgot about the whole mess.

Now, in the midst of another great China-America chill which makes me glad I never did build that bridge because it would have crumbled if not from Covid then from America’s continued ignorance about China, I find myself curious again.

Low and behold, there is a Chinese TV series called Three Body which is easily available now to continent-bound me, by way of Peacock. And that unnamed American piratical (when I point at you there are three fingers pointing at me, nenerneenernana) mega-service had the Red Star film for free. Navigating cross-continent subscriptions remains tricky for me, and the price differential can be mind-boggling, although I may still have some yuan in my WeChat account. Hmmm. In any case, Amazon in China, having my now defunct Chinese phone number on its mostly defunct service, is well beyond me anymore.

So here’s the point of my meandering post:

Each of us is a strange attractor by way of coincidence; we are attractors mostly for links which none of us could make solely on the basis of hard work. None of us can master what is really true in cross-cultural relations. All of us are subject to prejudice, and all news is slanted, at least by the prime directive to get your attention.

But I shall and must confess that I wept while watching the Red Star film. It was a fine representation of China’s founding hagiography. I saw myself in my own youth, since the actor somewhat resembles me at that time. The film was also a morality play meant to remind the US of old promises, and the way we once were. Both cinematic productions are old by now, just as I am.

Anyhow, I’ve dived right back in to reading Three Body for yet another time, with my old-age Chinese on my crumbling China-based tablet. I know that I was thrilled by the first read. But there are deeper harmonics for me now. I doubt that anyone even yet knows how profoundly this book has altered China’s sense of itself, and our relations with China.

These twin experiences have given me new hope.

End of Message.

Bernardo Kastrup Explains Everything

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gobbledegook for sure!!

CODA updated 5/11/22

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

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

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

So, to reiterate, here are my redefinitions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do The Right Thing With Digital

Let's think of it this way: we can never know ourselves as well as those who love us know us. There are certain kinds of self-knowledge that we really must resist if we are going to maintain our face to the world. The self requires a little varnishing. That's why ad hominem arguments should be expunged from our protestations. There is no better way to hit a brick wall, for the purposes of changing a mind.

I suppose that's why novelists often start with variations on their own lives. Sure I know that the reason I despise FaceBook, apart from its obvious political and organizational guilt, is that I've never felt comfortable on any social scene. People often assume I'm arrogant, perhaps just because I won't join in. As a small child, I would hide to nurse some small hurt, or perhaps just because that's how I felt comfortable. It would take a while before anyone was worried, and still I didn't want to be found out. I'm sure there's medical literature about such behaviors, but I'm not sure that I want to see it.

I'm one of those people about whom glancing acquaintances often say, in a nice way, that I'm trying to find myself. I'm more and more petulant with that. No, thank you, I found myself a long long time ago and now I have work to do. Frankly the whole notion of "finding oneself" has always struck me as a loser from the get go. What could it possibly mean? No wonder the sixties were co-opted by commerce.

I am quite certain that having myriad images, moving and still, and other forms of recording, sound or writing, will almost never allow anyone to know a person better than their friends do, even while you still might know that person better than they do themselves. Sure, it has changed me to see myself on TV, but it hasn't helped me to know myself. I just cringe and look away. Sometimes fascinated as by a train wreck.

Just imagine how unlikely Trump has ever been to know himself, and then just imagine him changing his mind. Why would he? As far as he can tell from his reflection (something he apparently never does) he's on top of the world, and can gather a crowd to his pleasing at any time, even as he warns others who know themselves better never to gather for any other reason. An edited and curated stint on reality TV must really mess with a person's self-image.

I've been trying my whole life to make sense of digital. Now it feels critical. And I still have no way to talk about the dangers of the digital revolution swamping us now. Most people blithely assume that it just another step in the long path of "progress." People seem to believe that, ultimately, this progress is what being alive and human is all about. 

The thing is we don't often agree about progress to what. I would call it progress if we were to preserve those high arts once reserved for the wealthy nobility, but open the doors to the masses of producers and appreciators. I feel like we've made good progress with that, taking a look at hip hop culture. We've done less well with the pleasures of nobility and wealth. Since our culture confuses pleasure with happiness, that part is problematical. 

I've placed up here the actual writing which brought me to an epiphany of sorts when I was a much younger man. My epiphany was rather like what Barbara Ehrenreich describes in her Living With a Wild God. I was trying to make sense of what becomes different in the world through the lense of the Chinese literary tradition, along with what has changed in the world along with the then-new standard model of physics.

One might say that I had two basic insights. The one that tipped me over the edge was by way of the paradoxes introduced by quantum physics and relativistic time-dilation. Now recently with the apparent creation of a stable instance of Bose-Einstein condensate under weightless conditions on the space station, I feel a further boost for my epiphany. But it also would not have been possible without my deep dive into Chinese ways of knowing.

The relevant paradoxes involve such things as Bell's Theorem, quantum entanglement, time dilation, and more. My basic insight is that no object anywhere can be in any kind of basic contact with any other object. Of course everything depends on what is meant by "contact." The real trouble for me and for Ehrenreich is that there is no scientific theory to be disproven by my actual lived experience. There is nothing that one might do with this kind of understanding.

Or, in other words, my insights do nothing for what we call human progress. Agreement with them is not obligatory in relation to any definition for physical reality. Of course I don't really believe that. I believe that these insights make all the difference in the world to our thriving as a world community. But they don't seem to make me any more persuasive in the face of the stubborn recalcitrance demonstrated by that approximately half of our voting population which firmly believes in static and, to me, impossible truths.

So my obligation is as an educator, and indeed I have spent most of my academic life studying education, even while discouraged by actually doing it. As it is for many people who study education, part of my problem is that schooling continues to diverge from education to some terrifying extent. I would be a humble teacher if I had my druthers, but that doesn't seem to have been in the cards for me. I won't go into the reasons here, except to say that my teaching project keeps growing as I grow older. That's what I can't abandon.

I do know myself enough to admit that I arrogate to myself the really big questions. Of course I have no business doing that, but I'm not trying to be in anybody's face. Only once in my life did I ever introduce myself properly as a cosmologist, then quickly demurring that "of course I make my living in other ways." You do hair, then?

Far better to devote one's life to something interesting, like battery technology or gaming. Make a living and be humble. But for the astounding size of transnational conglomerates, and the even more astounding size of a small number of personal fortunes. In no good world would we allow so much power to the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, even though I am grateful to him for introducing me to The Three Body Problem. His spoken Chinese is execrable, by the way. He sounds just like an American technocrat, all descended from Jobs.

The task to deconstruct the current order of things is just too massive. Of course global corporations aren't going to care that Black Lives Matter, but oddly they now seem to. Putting a good face on a corrupt body? Deeper change? Time will tell.

My insights involve the ways in which we are embedded in cosmos and not subject to it as object (I do love English for its tortured ambiguity, meaning, of course, that I love to torture English, even while I know that's not very nice to you, gentle reader . . .). I almost have to work backwards from our mistaken apprehension that computers approximate how our brain might work to get to what is wrong with digital. But that almost always seems to get me nowhere.

So let's start from the other end, shall we? Machines in general and digital machines in particular introduce structures which quite simply don't and can't exist "in nature." Sure, there is a continuum from our skeletal bodies as machines and through our hands to our tools as operators on the world around us, but it is at the inception of digital reality that we, literally now, lose touch. Recognizing patterns which are anomalously regular is how we recognize cognition out in the wild. We spend a lot of money on a SETI array to do precisely that. No dial-twiddling, digital requires only instruction.

In physics, of course, there is no actual touch between objects. Instead there are forces mediated by "particles" which define the interactions not of things, but of clouds of probability. Even our very own bodies can be described by those complex equations, though our accurate placement in any cosmos is hardly problematical at the scale of such huge bodily aggregations of smaller "particles." Our position scintillates, which is probably part of what it means to be alive.

We are working now on quantum computers which attempt to harness quantum entanglement for our next step in crypto. This apparently has nothing to do with breakthroughs in computational theory, but rather with the speed possible for certain types of computation. As I understand it, the speed is in turn a function of the fact that there is no time-delay for the transmission of "information" from one stateful cubit to its partner which is at some distance.

But of course, we are not talking about information so much as we are the definition for what may be considered a single "thing." The distance possible between "entangled" quanta has been experimentally shown to approach infinity. Touch "here" may be felt simultaneously "there." But what in the world does touch mean in that regard? Feeling???? Is there an emotional/physical divide too now? Yes!

I am less than an amateur with these matters. Of course, I would like to know more, but as with post-modern critical theory, there is simply not world enough and time. Each of us planes off at some point to focus on some very local problem that we find ourselves interested in. Well, if we're not black and if we have some social capital mostly. IF you're not forced to be a wage slave.

A cosmologist can't be too picky about what he chooses to study. The meanings could come from most anywhere.

I have been graced by resources not available to most of us, and feel a powerful reciprocal obligation to make something of that grace. But it is hard. I don't have the language to be native in any field. I can't get in the door. And I haven't worked hard enough for 'The Man' to be able to choose to retreat from the fray to just simply enjoy my wonderful life, although I do plenty of that. 

To simply enjoy life seems the most irresponsible choice at the moment in our history, and far worse than all the promise forsaken by my not choosing to embed myself in some one particular field. There are many kinds of regret now, aren't there? It's not that life is awful. We're not coming out of a World War. But it sure does feel like a tipping point.

As far as I know, people continue to search for some magic in the brain, as though it were the brain alone which makes us human. I am much more of a whole body (and whole earth) person. I can't separate any part from the whole. I have described elsewhere how and why I subscribe to Riccardo Manzotti's "Spread Mind" theory of consciousness. For me, it means that we are present in much more of the cosmos than the space displaced by our bodies can describe. The title for his book-form summary is The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One. We are not so separate, one from each other.

So the root of digital evil is that digital reality chops off the connection. Much of what we enact now in our history realizes this chopping off in the form of a very American sort of radical individualism. I don't mean that digital reality is causing radical individualism, though I'm sure that a case could be made for that. I'm suggesting that both trends realize the same underlying misapprehension about who and what we are and what is cosmos.

I speak in radically metaphorical terms in everything that I can say. That's because there terms can only be meant metaphorically. Of course physicists don't really deal with actual particles at the subatomic level, starting with the atom in one direction or the other. There is nothing very particular about anything there. And of course I can make only a metaphorical connection between the literal digital divide I'm talking about here and the other one I want to talk about. But the connection is no less real than subatomic particles are. 

I happen to believe that the American experiment is very much worth preserving. That's not because the radical individual is the way into the future, but because, despite our original sin, we are the only place where the arc of history has even a chance to bend toward the good. This is fundamentally because we are structurally not afraid of knowledge. That is a very good thing, indeed.

We still need to figure out how to decide what to do with the knowledge that we gain.

We are prevented from being a great nation (in moral terms) because of our radical individualism and the peculiar form of rampant capitalism which we've adopted as native. Our brand of capitalism tends toward the same results in relation to the open pursuit of knowledge that various forms of totalitarianism do. Even China's approach is better. In China, they're not so much afraid of knowledge as they are cautious about what can count as knowledge in the short term. My problem is that the short term is much shorter than anyone seems to realize. 

Sure, I'm talking about climate change or pandemics or species and planet extinction, but I'm not talking about what we need to do about those things. I think I'm talking more about what we need to stop doing, and I mean in our systems of knowledge and understanding, not even in our behaviors. Well, that's a chicken/egg kind of problem. The trouble is that we have to figure out how to change our minds collectively. The story of Jesus did that once upon a time. Relativity theory did that too, with a very brief sort of boom.

We've tended in the direction of disparaging mind against digital machine, just because signals along the neurons move so slowly. We confuse our mind with our brain. By our brain? By the way we think!

We can't possibly be as efficient in our rational calculations as a machine can be. Heck, we can't even rationalize the decisions we've already made quickly enough to claim to have made them ourselves, and we somehow think that might be infringing on our precious free will. Guess what, free will takes time. That thing that we're running out of.

Manzotti points out that we're conceptualizing how the brain works in the wrong way. It's not about speed. In fact it's about slowing down perceptual information even to the point of holding that information in a kind of near perpetual cycling so that we can perceive it again in the form of memory. 

I came at this realization myself lo those many years ago, but I was coming at it from the perspective of Chinese literature, which isn't so concerned with the inner person. The patterns on the surfaces are what counts, and of course, we know those we love much better than they know themselves. 

So the brain is a complex series of slowed down cycling messages and intersections. It can be repurposed if there are injuries, and the circuits are largely self-healing even as the neurons wither and die. Sleep perchance and death and dreaming are all essential for this all to work. Too much conscious attention just makes a mess of things. The brain largely wants to be autonomous. The cycling from birth to death is also an over-ordering of the brain until it just simply can't track, much in the way that I can't remember which digital article I read this morning, and no matter how good search is, I'll never find it again. 

Immortality, like literal infinity, would just crowd out every other. Not a good result.

Autonomous machines are different. Make enough racial profiling facial recognizing deadly force drones and we can end the world in a jiffy. Not by killing it off, but by the backlash disruption we've been causing to all those feeling the pain of collateral damage. It's the immune response which does the killing. That's what this moment in history means.

We have all been enabled to socially distance ourselves from trouble to the extent that we've won the lottery jackpot of disrupting someone else's industry. And we have all the right and good ideas as we amuse ourselves up to the point of death, which is inevitable in any case. That's what socially distancing social stratification means, and guess who gets left behind to pay our piper? The ones out in the streets now, being called terrorists by our terrorist in chief.

So, not only do we have to deconstruct and rebuild our policing on the model of Camden, New Jersey, but we have to do the same with our military. We create the terrorists and then, just like Vietnam all over again, they outwit us with their very human ingenuity. The end. 

Of course fascists love technology. It keeps the trains on time, and identifies everyone so that they (we) can be pinched in an instant the moment we cross whatever line they've drawn for us. We in these United States think its fine when it's done commercially, but now it's being done politically, and for sure militarily.

Of course Big Business loves technology. It allows it to grow and grow and then the business itself turns into technology, just like the economy turns into finance and a bunch of gig workers. Producing nothing of any value, no matter how pleasant it might be.

Even still the ubiquitous smartphones make it hard for the powers that be to lie. Except why then does our commander in chief get to lie out loud and often and still have his following? Well, duh, it's because of all those autonomous processes which run our newsrooms. I'm not only talking about how Facebook spoons up its newsfeeds to a level of complexity impossible for any human to keep up with. I'm also talking about the actual newsrooms which profit the same way from whatever grabs eyeballs, and then the aggregators who find out what you like to read by the same algorithms used by Google and Facebook.

How the hell can we even know what truth is? What the truth is? One lie is as good as any other, and so it comes down to the stories we like to tell ourselves. And these are nearly all impervious to being educated out once we call ourselves adults. Trust me, I've tried really hard for most of my life and it can't be done.

So, that's why I dig down to the basics. Particle physics. Quantum reality. Chaos theory. Getting rid of the mind/body subject/object dualisms. That's the only thing that can save us or else we're just not worth saving, sayeth Gaia or what-you-will. We are now in the process of stepping out from nature, and if we keep it up we will have succeeded once and forevermore. We will be as dead as an autonomous robot whose plug got pulled.

What then is the difference between the information being held in mind and the information being held in computer memory? I'm going with Manzotti's definition here for information, which is just the stuff which passes among objects which makes them perceptible. Which means to be in touch. Which means that physical information-carrying signals, in the case of animal minds, impinge on our perceptual apparatus. Which means to feel.

In a computer, or should I say for a computer, the information needs to be digitized which means conceptualized which means a static relation among conceptual objects. Ideal Platonic Numbers, say. Conceptual objects are things held in mind for the purpose of organizing perceptual objects. A kind of literal calculus takes place in and by computational representations of reality where conceptual slices are stacked together to form an approximation of actual fluid non-binary reality. 

Irony be my north star.

As with any mathematical calculus, digital reality can only be a very precise approximation of what is being measured. Again, as Manzotti would have it, there are no images in our heads any more than there are images stored in computer memory. Computers can't see. We can. And no matter how many pixels, the stored image can never be the same as the live one. The live one is felt directly.

Our brains don't store conceptual reality. They store perceptual reality, which is much richer. Since we store concepts so poorly, we must construct a narrative frame to hold them. The narrative frame of science is the best and most durable one that has ever been constructed, but it's showing its age already. It apparently can't overpower the Jesus frame. Both have been expropriated for use by the military industrial complex. We need a new frame!

Bill Gates has built his spaceship here on earth, which is the only place such a life would be viable. I'm sure it's more impregnable than Donald Trump's bunker, even given all the secret service, who might, after all, be carrying some kind of virus. The wealthy everywhere have escaped reality and deploy the police and the military to keep themselves safe. They might as well be on Mars, and good riddance!

Why not? If life is only about happiness and if you only have so much time on earth, then why not make that short time as pleasant as possible? Too bad about the marginal classes and the precariat. We'd love to have them join us for the cost of membership.

The trouble is the carrying cost to the planet though, right? 

In my book, conceptual relations are just as real as perceptual relations are. In place of information to define the relation among objects in motion, I talk of e-motion to describe non-forceful relations among objects in free-fall. Love moves through the eons in the direction of life, while hate moves toward stasis in the direction of the dead. The difference then is between the quick and the dead, and we have been moving toward the dead. 

I want to convince the likes of Bill Gates to live more modestly. The party is down in the engine room in the bowels of the ship and not up where you need black tie. 

My changes are definitional and not scientifically testable. That's a shame, really, because I won't be able to convince anyone by showing them what I'm able to do that couldn't be done before because of some new theoretical understanding which is experimentally demonstrably real. This theory requires a different kind of enactment. The kind we're watching (most of us, stuck off in some safe space in our wombs with a view) playing out right now out in the streets. 

There simply is no army powerful enough to quiet the people. That's what defunding the police state has to mean. To the extent that we hold our smartphones high, we still own the digital reality. We will depopulate our prisons by deconstructing our militarized police force. We will depolarize the world by deconstructing our obsolete notions of armed forces. We will jump back into the fray of nature be reconceptualizing what it means to be human, and we won't have to lose a thing about our humanity to do it. We won't have to become beastly. We won't have to forsake our art and our music and our dance and especially not our food and wine. These are what connect us. These are how we touch the cosmic forces. These are our expressions of love in return for the love which brought us this far.

These are the facts of life, fight them though we think Jesus wants us to do. That's not Jesus talking, that's The Man, and he only wants to grab your pussy. Defund the Church (oh, right, that's already happening), and Jesus will come to life again for real.

Numbers don't exist in nature. Numbers are an abstraction from nature, but it isn't only humans who know how to count. Humans learned how to tabulate, and that was the start of all the trouble. Tabulation led to writing as one thing leads to another and we find ourselves in over our head. We have to get it together, people!

Science can't advance without metrics. Metrics means numbers. Before science government needed metrics. Before government, agriculture needed metrics. But somehow we learned to separate the perceptual world from the world of the subject who was doing the observations and working the metrics to abstract theories which would enable ever more fruitful manipulations of the world around so that the subjects could live and rest more easily. 

But now finally we know that mind cannot be abstracted from matter; it can't be separated. We should be culturally grown up enough to know - woke enough to realize - that there is no personal God who's going to rescue us and take it from here. We should also know that we aren't even close to being equal to the complexity of the natural environment in which we live. Our science has barely gotten started, for chissakes!

Along comes digital reality to accelerate everything and we seem to understand that we're going off the rails. That we have failed morally in our development. Not only have we failed our fellow humans, but we're about to destroy the natural homeostasis that we depend on in the same way that all life depends on it. We're acting as though we can destroy nature with impunity. But nature's destruction is what happens naturally when one tries to order it. When one takes dominion. 

I think we need to rediscover balance.

These separations - heart from mind, subject from object, mind from body - they all enable a disconnect not just from life but from our neighbors. By forcing and enforcing social distancing - by wearing masks and building walls - Covid-19 and the various Donald Trumps of the world call the question; what if we were to join together? What if we were never to profit again from illness? What if we were never to prosecute a deal where someone has to be the loser so that we can win?

Numbers to enhance scientific understanding somehow transmuted into numbers to represent reality. We can't know intimately what we can only see on TV.  We can't have a discussion by texting and tweeting. Nobody even reads a long email anymore. What choice is there but to take to the streets?

Man, I sure do wish I could write more better. Well, not more. You know what I mean, by very definition.

Borders on my Mind

Not the closing bookstore, or the  political boundaries around a state, but the larger concept; that thing which defines the inside and the outside of me, or the sense and the nonsense of constructed narratives. Sanity, insanity, sensory deprivation, the supernatural and the natural. Fiction and history That kind of thing.

If I neglect diligence in locking my doors, I'm a fool. If you open them, you're still a criminal regardless of how hard it was to do so. If a nation succeeds in the internalization of walls, the way the Chinese have, or the way that each of us individually does when we inhabit the fiction of our unitary, authentic self, then the walls can dissolve again to the level of symbolic. I belong, therefore I am.

Walls as tourist attractions, like the great wall of China, or the sexy skin of one of Charlie Sheen's porn star buddies, refocus the self on the inside as one who wants to conform and lay claim to pride of place. The perceived need to build robust real walls, or to buff out or to clothe the physical self, announce the invisibility or transparency of any and all shared definition. To be willingly naked is to trust in consciously shared boundaries, maybe. Let's not be silly.

Graffiti, or punk-style, or, once upon a time, rock and roll, define these boundaries by challenging them to make them visible and opaque. I can punk my way into your screen, and I might become an anonymous superstar, and then because you know me too well, I will no longer know myself. No wonder superstars take drugs. Alternate between sunglasses and outrageous designer statements.

We need walls along the border with Mexico because we are ambivalent in almost all of our collective actions about who should be in and out. Rhetorically, we agree, but in practice, build the wall since we can't contain ourselves! Clothe the naked body, and if necessary make it uniform which makes it hot for some people. Weird!

F-bombs bleeped out routinely on public channels (although I thought I'd paid for them) announce some walls I just can't find, and when they joke freely about threesomes and the actors act without shame I'm thinking maybe we've already been transported back to the border-less world of Eden, but nobody told me. It just doesn't feel like paradise.

Who was the nutjob who thought we could contain nuclear reactions anyhow, or is it simply our Grand Narrative which also allows no real distinction between truth and fiction if you spread it on a timeline. That center of opinion has been swinging wildly even in my own mind, if I can call that "in."

Have you ever experienced a muscle twitch, acting all on its own without your conscious intervention intention? Just now, it felt as though someone was poking me in the side, but no-one was. Rebellion, like Charlie Sheen in need of help, feels dangerous if it gets out of hand. Bring in the tanks, the tranquilizers, the muscle relaxants.

Oh, how I do envy those of you who inhabit your life's mission and are glad for it. If you stick to it, you'll accomplish something. You have a mission as a scholar or a musician or a dancer or a worker-bee, but you have a mission and you've found a way to pay for it.

I have a string of jobs. My mission is hopeless.

Meanwhile, I continue to navigate the divide between literate culture in China and over here. What I find most interesting at the moment is how differently the Chinese written form mediates between machine and human forms.

Machines represent strict cause and effect and therefore exclude serendipity except by design. Once they build themselves as 'games of life' from mathematical primitives, they will be proper life forms, but not so useful for that. Well, I mean not so immediately trustworthy, the way that machines are as perfect slaves.

The Chinese written form encodes radically fewer sound morphemes than does English, for example. Although by the laws linguistics as I understand them, it must be, in principle, possible to speak the written language with full fidelity, in practice there is just so much more history to the visual forms than is the case with alphabetic and phonetically transcribed languages.

Sure, our spelling "system" (unsystem?) preserves much of a word's history, but there is a certain kind of compactness to written Chinese which pretty much reserves full literacy to those who have mastered great bodies of textual context. You can look up words in dictionaries, but you are much more likely to require an index of actual usage.

Because each written graph can be represented by no more than one vowel sound  (although the number of distinct vowel sounds is enhanced by meaningfully different intonations), plus perhaps a leading consonant, a string of opening sounds can be sufficient for the computer to render up an entire multi-graph word or phrase.

Using the sounds of the characters, plus a computer tabulation of the likely combinations, one can get radically more complexity from rather fewer keystrokes. I imagine it's about like what a court reporter can get from essentializing the sounds of English to some set of single-impact keystroke combinations.

The more one relies on the computer to interpret phonetic references, the more faded-memory distance one develops from the "original" calligraphic form. (I use quotes since the calligraphic form was itself an elaboration or simplification of earlier forms, whether made by stylus or knife or something else)

It seems uncontroversial that written language is the sine-qua-non for consciousness. OK, it's controversial, but I take it as settled fact. For sure, it's the sine-qua-non for civilization and what Foucault calls the entry into history of humanity.

It's also common place enough to understand that thought (if there is such a thing) is the innering of dialogic habits accomplished between and among minds, but also mediated through texts. Reading was once done aloud, and neurological experiments demonstrate that those regions of our brain are still exercised while reading to oneself.

A general fallacy still has currency that Chinese is written with "ideographs" which would mean, essentially, that there is no mediation by the as-if sounds of spoken language. In its extreme manifestations, this fallacy would have it that the "idea" of a word's meaning makes it directly into the mind of the reader. I take it that neurological testing, while uncovering interesting differences in the precise regions of the brain activated, affirms the commonality among all written languages, graphic or phonetic.

Readers of Chinese also internalize at least pseudo soundings-out. I say pseudo, since one of the attractions of the notion of ideographs is that the same written system has been used by mutually unintelligible natural languages. If one is in the habit of supposing abstraction to be a method to resolve differences in particulars, then one naturally supposes that what's "meant" is what is read, rather than the sound of the word.

But it would seem that abstraction of that sort takes place outside the brain, at least, if not outside the mind. The meaning is a communal creation, shared by sense-makers and never quite abstract-able from spoken language.

Until early in the twentieth century, Chinese of whatever dialectical origin always used a highly formalized written language which would itself be recognized as distinct from the normal manner of speaking of any language group. Self-consciousness of this distinction is long-standing in China, and was crescendo-ing for some time leading up to the adoption of more natural spoken forms to writing.

Naturally, there is a tendency to join the formal written language to the spoken language as used by mandarins in the capital. Priests to Rome conversing in Latin, one might analogize. Where Italian pronunciation feels as though it comes the closest to that language not actually spoken any longer.

Abstractions take meaning out of time and of course it's tempting to give them historical origins or to remove them from time altogether. When, in fact, they exist with the same sort of precision as my mind does, located somewhere that you can identify as me, but amalgamated from those various times in my life when you might have known me. Including me in the future according to your imaginings or mine, and based on misgivings as much as on aspirations. Trust and confidence. Predictability.

I am foretold, though accident might intervene. Machines are always the same for all time, and only wear down. Their future state is given by their present disposition, apart from breakdown or unforeseen environmental impacts.

Operator failure caused the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island. There was insufficient training and drilling and understanding about how to read the instruments, which were doing their reporting in ways counter-intuitive and misleading. Anyone who's ever done mechanical systems troubleshooting (including computer systems) understands not just the tendency, but the necessity to be stuck in ruts. In order to solve problems, you have to settle first on an interpretation of the basics, and if there is a mistake at that level, then the solution will never be found.

When time is of the essence, catastrophe can result as it did at Three Mile Island, which was a more robust (pressurized water) reactor design than the ones now melting down  in Japan (boiling water Mark I GE designs).

In the case of Three Mile Island, the man-machine interface broke down. In the case of Japan now, there was an environmentally induced catastrophe which requires that the human operators operate within a much more slim margin for error. One hopes that the man-machine interface has been improved. One hopes that the instruments present their readings in properly intuitive fashion. One hopes that the drills have gotten better, and that economics hasn't whittled them down to complacency.

A writer of Chinese might be utterly lost without the machine now. A writer of English would likely be able to carry on, even though, as in the case of my handwriting, the resulting forms would not be pretty. The complexity of Chinese written forms moves in the direction of machine constructs, which, like any kind of fancy printing, take more talent than one might like to exercise to bother forming them by hand.

So on the one hand, the computer provides more leverage for the efficient writing of Chinese. On the other, it removes more of the human from the process of deploying the tools of writing. Though the machine can find them and render up a virtual concordance, must it not be mind which hears the echoes of writing now in writing then. Computers can only write poetry, to be construed as such by mind. They don't do so well at making sense.

Dispositionally, I confess to a preference to hand tools over the power kind. They are easier to control, they make less noise, and although they may require more practice to master, it seems as though there's much less prospect for disaster in their operation.

I suppose that there is an analogous difference between handwriting and word-processing, and that the boundary would be placed differently for Chinese writers as compared with writers in English.

I don't propose that this distinction be tested, but only that it provides a kind of conceptual scaffolding for what I consider to be the more important assumption that there is less temptation by abstract concepts among those within the Chinese linguistic sphere of influence.

We're the ones who posit God, and we're the ones who, borrowing from the Japanese who nearly use them that way, mistake Chinese written forms for ideographic representations of raw ideas. I think that for the Chinese, written forms were much more thing-like, and that what they excited "in" the mind was not so much the abstracted referents of truth and beauty as the more concrete transformation of the world about one, according to received wisdom about what one might see if one is educated.

And thus in place of dreams of scientific law to enforce agreement among intellectuals, or political law to enforce civilized and civilizing behaviors, the Chinese have traditionally emphasized shared reading. The mind changes not so much by contact with new "ideas" as by innering the privileged point of view of poets: makers who put the written words together in ways actually to heighten the raw stuff of nature; which is built of yin-yang interactions. Couplets dancing on the page move the mind in apprehension of life as it gets lived.

So why all this shorthand, shorn of adequate reference and proper scholarly apparatus? Why the rush?

Well, because it still is that man-machine interface which is doing us in. It is dreams of immortality, or machine-based consciousness as though our human consciousness is the same as it ever was and will be. As though by the time that we can design a machine on which to host consciousness our human consciousness will have remained the same but for its better apprehension of more elaborated scientific principles.

This dream, by deferring what we need to do right now, is killing us. It is past time already to acknowledge that there is no set reality apart from our interpretation of it. There is no discoverable political or economic system which can handle our collective responsibility not to destroy the ground on which we stand.

Or rather, there is no way that we will find it for so long as we continue to defer our responsibilty until the proper laws are discovered or promulgated which will either force or entice is to live, collectively, within our means. Each of us must act as the co-creators that we are, and not throw up some prayer to abstraction.

And though there is and should be much resistance to acknowledging it, there does exist already a natural turning point in the discoverable laws of natural science.

Starting with Einstein's testable and fully demonstrated positing that the speed of light is a universal constant, not relative to the motion of any observer, and followed on by the discovery of the quantum quality of matter and energy (as previously equated by that famous mass-energy formula E=mc²) whereby energy is always exchanged in discreet packets or particles, and mass is always propagated wave-like, as if unlimited by restrictions of location or momentum . . . Starting with Einstein, it was already apparent that there was required a further change to our common ways of describing reality.

This further change has proven to be the most difficult; the one we are all most reluctant to accept (as if it was easy to get our heads around the changes urged post-Einstein!). It requires that we abandon the expectation that all of reality will ever be describable in terms of natural and discoverable principle. It requires that we finally do abandon any notion of our innocence, as though we are the random byproducts of some natural processes which have led to life on earth.

We have to stop thinking that we are as entitled as any other species to fight for our all. We are, in fact the responsible species, and the only one whatever you might like to argue about what other species laugh or talk or make emotive expressions of their faces.

OK, so this feels pretty far afield from where I started, right? Why all that talk about differences between Chinese and Western written forms. And borders, and natural law?

First because my own mind would not have cracked without the study of Chinese having done it to me; the realization that there isn't only one way to read the world, and that many sensible statements in English, such as "there is a God" simply don't work in Chinese.

And in physics I felt the paradoxes of the Standard Theory to be a slap in the face. Matter couldn't travel faster than the speed of light, but apparently information had to. So for some thirty years now I've been running around like Chicken Little trying to get at least one other person to understand that it makes no sense to talk as though "mind" were only a human quality, evolved with us from chaos.

It makes no sense to dismiss emotion as some sort of charming epiphenomenon of human consciousness, or icing on the cake of thought. Emotion gets in the way of scientific understandings. It's that process which provides the most clear and present danger to rational thinking, and leads nuclear power-plant operators to make fateful mistakes in their behaviors.

But while there have been attempts to develop theories of emotion and to build them in to designs for Artificial Intelligence, to my knowledge - and I've been looking really really hard - there has never been a statement which has been other than silliness, that emotion is also a cosmological constant which, like mind, was not awaiting humanity's evolution to be manifest.

Emotion is simply that configuration of mind which knows before it happens that there will be a perceptual impingement - an energy implication - between "things" which are only conceptual before they make contact. Concepts, in other words, are things held only "in mind."

And so why all this verbiage now? Well, it's nothing new. It's a reiteration of what I've been saying all along here. But the trouble is that I've run out of time and living space (which means I've run out of money). I'm hopeful now that I'll gain employment within the week. All the stars seem aligned.

But it will cut sharply into my writing time, which might provide some relief to you, gentle reader, but it won't do a thing for this rather desperate need that I've had for all these years now to find someone to "get" what the hell I'm talking about.

Of course it is possible that far from learning how to write better, I've actually gotten worse and worse and that nothing will do more for my expository style than to let it rest. But for the fact that my mind and body age, right along with the course of our fine Earth as we send it to hell in a handbasket.

Or I could learn how to tell stories better. The trouble is that they always end up being about Howie. Plus it may just be that story tellers are born and not made.

Well anyhow, please wish me well as I make my crossing to that great beyond, over the border from freedom to employment, where my time will be my own no longer, as though it ever was!

and, and, and, don't you think it's really really silly the way that we all act as though life here on Earth in a solar system in a galaxy in a universe in a cosmos all somehow descended from a Big Bang is all there was and ever will be? Don't you think that there's something rather more interesting than that going on? We act as if normal has been disrupted! But what could possibly be normal about our very human existence? The Earth is being gentle with us still for but a moment longer.

Occam's Razor

I hear on NPR that there's this new book about being wrong.



It's about how we're all somehow programmed to find long explanations to bolster our certainties; about how we will go to almost any length to protect the reality of something we've made an identity investment with. During the NPR interview and call-in there was some talk about how the wondrous techniques of modern science are the only thing that's proof against these long rationalizations of our certainties. Scientists are taught to doubt.

But there is also a time and place beyond which the doubting is itself that thing which leads to the unnecessarily long and convoluted explanations. Just like trying to compute the orbits of the planets while positing Earth at their center, scientists now continue to contruct complicated-beyond-belief tests for their convoluted permutations of particulate reality.

As with the math for Ptolomeic orbits, it can be followed only by adepts in the art of abstraction. These folks are hailed as our heros of thought, capable to do things with their mind analogous to what Hercules could do with his body.

That shift from Geocentric to Heliocentric cosmology has long been touted as the emblematic error of stubborn chauvinism; the chauvinism of common sense. It seems as though we must be at the center. We build  all sorts of rationalizations for what it means to be us on the assumption that we are at the center, and then we must consider as subversive anyone who would come along to disrupt that interlocking set of understandings.

Occam's Razor is the low-level test whereby, given competing explanations and all else being equal, the simplest one is probably the right one. This works for the Heliocentric description of the orbits of the planets. But only so far as the math is concerned. The mistake among the folks who were wrong was to invest too much in their metaphoric extensions from the basics. They thought decentering Earth was the same as decentering man.

The notion that God explains everything would almost always fit the bill for Occam's Razor, except that it fails to explain anything at all. It's all metaphor all the time, which pretty much explains the literality of the Bible for true believers.

At the point where we find ourselves now, it may be that explanations and wishful thinking have to merge in some slight way. At the fringes, where quantum reality takes hold, and particles are themselves conjectures; sometimes you see 'em and sometimes you don't. Provably.

We are dancing around now, trusting our champions in the field of abstraction. Trusting them with our money and our hopes and our dreams. Trusting that they will find a way for humans to control things, and then fix them and set the world right. We are all fans of the human endeavor, played on a field of dreams.

Well, I'm not. I've long since understood that at the fringes there is no real distinction between mind and matter. That mind apart from matter has become a dangerous fiction, because it projects reality as onto a stage, a screen, a field. Mind has always been implicated with matter, whether we as humans already existed or not. Our tears our hopes our dreams are simply not that important, except to ourselves, except that for so long as we project into our future some Savior descended from abstraction (which makes utterly no sense to say, but you'll think it does) or abstracted from the reality of our lives and education. Some genius to propose yet another mathematical and machine construable construct into which reality must be fitted.

When the Occam's Razor elegant solution is simply to change around our language. Regard as real those connections we now regard as merely emotional, and somehow centered on humanity. Emotional connections, which inhere in conceptual relations among perceptual phenomena, are always present in principle. As is the mind to know them. But no math can touch those relations before the phenomena have "touched" by exchange of particles, by impingement of forces, by interaction, mindlesslly, apart. As parts.

I am descending now - I am some way along the descent toward my dotage. I never did have the career rhetorical professional focus which would keep my words in play. I never did have a clear pitched voice, nor talent to project it. I am tired, my center does not hold. I seek company in the wilderness of whatever it is mine eyes are window unto.  They grow dim, trifocular, abstracted from whatever it is I once could grasp.

But I will like continue to rehearse the obvious, just in case somebody starts to pay attention. Somebody other than those bots and scammers, dregs beneath humanity, who now own our world of discourse. People writing whole books on obvious matters, as though it might matter to all those who will remain so certain that there is a conspiracy. The dunces!

We all conspire together. I watched that dreadful film, The Road, over the course of a couple of days (the wages of older age). Then I read a bit of that dreadful rhetoric. A spare writer who hangs with physicist-types. They deserve each other, and their serial women, chosen for beauty, deserve them too.

The world is now crowded with projections of its end. Even Margaret Attwood, who has the sense to clip my commentary from her blog, admired by feminists, indulges grim rehearsals of our current voids. Didn't John Updike write one before his ending? Chomsky. They're all misogynists, so far as I can tell. Haters of the very possibility that men don't mean that much. Man doesn't. Which means that they are haters of our matrix. Not realizing that Earth is that much bigger than our little dreams.

I'm with the global warming deniers, the Small Change believers that Bush took down the Trade Center Towers, the believers that the war in Afghanistan was always all about the mineral rights, and staking claims before China could. As if any of this is news. As if the failure of the CERN collider is surprise. As if there was always a Hollywood ending in store. There is no secret code for trust. There is no there there unless and until you make it so.

Emotional Pair-a-dice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm just sayin'

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

*sigh*

Wait!

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

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

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

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

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

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



Will machines ever think?

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

Fury Unleashed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man, I sure do wish I had some art!