My Case Against Conscious Evolution

("abstracted" from a note to David Koepsell)

By no means considering myself qualified to enter scientific or legal debates about patenting genes, I do consider myself a reasonable analog for a policy maker (definition: interested citizen). I believe this is a critical matter, and far too important to be left to professionally amoral scientists and lawyers for resolution. We all must get involved.

I find that most of any waffling which remains in my pathologically open mind (I'm flattering myself, of course) focuses on this "isolated and purified" concept. That is how patenters have distinguished what gets patented from what might occur in nature (and remain, therefore, unpatentable).

I need to state up front that I am already entirely convinced that genes should not be patented, likely for reasons extraneous to most of the polemics. I have a reasoned conviction (kind of mitigates my claim of open mindedness for sure) that the fundamentally Christian-descended Enlightenment project toward scientific understanding was actually finished - as in hitting up against a terminal stumbling block - at about the time the standard model of [quantum] particle physics was fully articulated (let's say late 20th century).

That doesn't mean there isn't plenty of scientific work left to do, puzzles left to solve, nor certainly technologies left to engineer. We are indeed, however, at that Kuhnian final stage of normal science, when everything seems on the brink of completion. This time 'round, it ought to make us suspect. Like nervous readers at a seismograph, surely it feels to careful thinkers as thought the paradigm has become shifty.

Now for scientists to dodge choice as if there were some clarity yet to come feels rather like continuing to work on the second story of that famous burning building. As if our choices were still a function of uncovering some kind of bedrock reality, rather than of our responses to reality as we already understand it. By this time of cloning and artificial life, that postponement has become an immoral dodge (if it hasn't been always and already).

Hard determinable physical reality following universal law was always a stand-in for eternal God. Clearly, I think Richard Dawkins goes way too far, simply because he's the ground for which the religionists are the figure (or vice versa), though I haven't been interested enough to read someone I already know I'll mostly agree with. (To almost the very point of his conclusions.) There are other ways to construe the cosmos, which implicate the knower rather more.

I am skeptical that there will or can be an end to discussions which argue where to place a boundary between the literal and the metaphorical - the thing and its refined abstraction - beyond the point where non-instrumental perception has long stopped being possible, or denotative words could do justice to some thing itself. No end other than on the battlefield - in the courts and in the legislative bodies (not to mention in the marketplace, where size does matter).

There will or at least can be an infinite regress between and among various ways for putting boundaries between what is found "in nature" and what could never be found without certain very sophisticated ways of looking. It isn't at all far off from the nearly running CERN supercollider.

To say that the Higgs boson might be "detected" there will be a stretch, just as it would be to say that it might be "created". Instead, there will be a huge scaffolding of accumulated knowledge (actually understood by a diminutive few, and understandable by only an order of magnitude more), embodied in techniques and technologies, which may or may not engender agreement about its products (which will be abstracted readings for sure, and not any things themselves). Which may end or perpetuate the road we're already on. Or which might not even seem to work right.

So, back to the isolation and purification thing. I am assuming that there is a kind of Waterloo here of great consequence to our future civilization. (I'm not so convinced of the importance of medical breakthroughs - I might even be horrified by them, not, believe it or don't, because they might unbalance our natural ground, although that might be part of it, but more for what they might do to our sense of lived life.) Certain boundaries, and the one for mortality certainly, are absolute and must remain so. Well, they logically will remain so, since immortality - filling up all time - is the same absurd possibility as filling up any one dimension of physical space. You'd be pinned and crashingly boring. Like a rock, I suppose.

Gene patenting fans may prevail for so long as they can maintain that the thing that's patented would never occur in nature, without its having been - not sure if this is the right word here - abstracted from the actual stuff. But all instrumental perceptions are somewhat unnatural in that sense. At how much remove from literal touch must you be before you've "invented"?

I see anything like "conscious evolution" as an abomination, not against God (although that might make perfectly good shorthand, which is an odd thing for a presumptive atheist like me to say), but as death against life.

I, along with Julian Jaynes and at least one or two other people, see what we mean by consciousness as a quality not of man, but of literate civilized man. Prior to these recent tumultuous several thousand years, we might have been capable of rather more ciphering than your ordinary beast, but we certainly weren't, in any meaningful sense, conscious.

Therefore conscious evolution would be an extinguishing of the human substrate, in favor of something we already possess and know and fully understand (a machine, by definition), which will always be so much less than what we should or will or want to or could understand if we let the substrate, well, evolve.

Evolution based on knowledge is not the same as conscious evolution. The (latter) one entails a choice. The other entails just more knowing, which will naturally entail differential evolution, so long as we haven't yet destroyed our living context - collectively our Earth. (Can you sense the Zizekian parallax non-distance between those phrases, since there are always choices about what one wants to know?) There is always a difference between acting based on what you already know, and acting based on what you'd like to find out, and it might be a bigger difference than we'd ever supposed.

Yes, I am enamored of surprise. I oppose space flight simply because it's such a clutzy technique to get us beyond our limits. We are nowhere near ready to choose where we want consciousness to lead, nor to be sure the big surprises are outside this corner of the cosmos.

Finally, I take corporate will to be a manifestation of the very same kind of dangerous (call it sociopathic if you like, as that Corporation documentary did) immoral disembodied money motivated (selfish eating machine, just like unconscious biological forms always are) machine-think which is all that would ever motivate "conscious" evolution. It's what humanity is distinguished from.

I am horrified, therefore, not of the gene patents directly, but rather that certain patent processes now favor the large investor. The race to market has been replaced by a race to the patent attorney, where it's just silly to expect a bicycle to out-pace a Lamborghini. It's a different game in a different time, and invention doesn't mean quite what it used to, now does it?

Congress represents the commonwealth or nothing at all. Bush (and meltdown) should have taught us the dangers of mistaking "business" for "big business" and "big" from "too big to fail". This is a matter for statute.

So, is there a way, I want to ask, to simply make the point that if only super-funded entities can get there in the first place, then patent law simply has no useful or defensible function in that particular arena? I know the marketplace of ideas, just like the marketplace in general, has no patience for questions to the premises of business as usual (Galileo among the temple elders). But at a certain point, the commons must be preserved, especially when the gated communities push out every possible other foothold.

Let them patent their processes. Just not their raw discoveries. There is semantics here of a very dangerous sort. When is a business no longer a business? (when it's a public utility, for instance). Corporation law needs modification. Starting with IP law doesn't make a bad choice.

For my part, the boundary for where things started going horribly wrong goes all the way back to plastic and maybe even transistors. But for all that, I'm certainly not anti-abortion. I'm not terrified of cloning, and I certainly am not directly terrified of invented life forms.

I just think all these things have dangers to them, and need to be approached cautiously. For at least the past 40 years there has been an extremely dangerous corporate ascendancy, which has been allowed to burgeon simply because our language is so freaking imprecise, abused, and well, almost to the point of 1984 redux again and again. Do we wage war literally any more?

Corporations are not governments, but they have each been allowed to become the other.

Our problems are political, but lawyers should not be allowed to own the political territory. They are far too much like scientists, thinking that there is no moral quality to their choice of work. A threshold has been crossed.

It is a different, boundary-less, world now, which is precisely why good definitions for words matter more than ever. Old words from old worlds shouldn't be expropriated.

We may actually have to wrest the definition of "gene" from the scientists. They already understand that these encodings determine rather less than was originally thought. There are rather fewer of them than they'd guessed. They interact in more wondrous ways than had been imagined at the outset of their mapping.

So any gene, so called, so isolated, so enumerated, might be both too much and too little as determinant of anything. Rather like an atom, or a subatomic particle which doesn't even have individual identity at all. The word "gene" may having nothing to do with what we thought was its most basic unit. And what they've patented may be more like a meaningless set of letters. As mistaken in the granting as a piece of Florida real estate which actually denoted swampland. Or would.

Grant them patent on what they once called a gene. But when it turns out that what they'd thought it was good for has nothing to do with what you end up doing with it, wag your tongue at them. Tell them you meant something different by your usage. You were only screwing around with nature.

Why All Tech Companies are Walmart in Sheeps clothing

A Manifesto: We Must Reestablish our Commons
(a new-ish theory of consciousness as a common rather than individual possession)

There is no real mystery about how WalMart is organized, why it owns so much of the retail "real-estate" (I guess I don't actually need the quotes, but I was thinking of shelf space).

There is plenty of disagreement about whether this process toward Big Boxes self-served by parking lot shoppers willing to forage endless and confusingly organized shelves (often deliberate to capture your impulses if not to aid your search) is either inevitable, good for us, or both. But the basic workings are no mystery.

Sure, there is some unsavory stuff in the company's past. It could even be something genetic, some would argue, about undercutting local competition by sheer brute force of negotiating power, until there is nothing left to compete against. But all that's old history, and there are many things to like, one might suppose, about a company which upholds good corporate values, and features ordinary people models, just like that lovable Dove soap company tried once for a while.

In some product categories, the price difference is just too compelling to avoid. I bought a bicycle there, I confess, just simply because there were hundreds of dollars dividing my desire from the local granola eating bike store pricing. I've been a bicycle mechanic, and knew that the differences would be far beneath my notice. Or laundry detergent. It's like the way I feel when I make a purchase knowing that I left a hefty sum of actual cash money in the form of a coupon I was too lazy to keep track of.

I admit that I resent those coupons, and have therefore adopted a blanket policy to pretend they don't exist. Perversely, as I remain unemployed. Hell, my unemployment is also a choice. So you know where I stand right at the outset. I'm pretty cranky about what I won't abide.

WalMart is a technology company, which is well enough understood by many insiders, but not so much by those who prowl its aisles for bargains. Their magic is all in the warehouse and the distribution and the number crunching back home in Arkansas.

They know enough, first off, not to pay any taxes which could be avoided by one small step out into the less-taxed countryside. Their shoppers will drive, and having driven, will fulfill as many categories of shopping as they can once at their unique destination. Make no mistake, WalMart can brook no competition. They must and will be unique, about which more later.

Hell, I live practically in the middle of practically no-where, at least 15 minutes from the nearest gas, but I have no fewer than 4 different WalMart SuperCenters at about the same distance - 35 minutes - in every single direction of my compass. It's almost as if they targeted me! A demographic of not much more than one.

They negotiate ruthlessly - famously - with their suppliers, having that much shelf space to represent, though often, as far as I can tell, also agreeing to off quantities so that the hapless consumer, you and me for instance, has no way actually to compare.

They negotiate as ruthlessly with their employees, apparently all the way up to the top, to be sure that their ultimate god - yep, that's you and me the consumer - will not spend a penny more than we absolutely have to. It is a free market for employment too, and far more than they will dodge taxes will they dodge union spots. So no-one has to work there, but should they choose to, you and I may be assured that they won't be getting a penny more than has to be spent to keep the stores open and clean and bright and stocked. I think that's what we want.

But, well, we didn't really want them to actually own our commons, did we? I confess I feel pretty out of place in WalMart, just as I do out here in the country. I also feel out of place anymore at the Erie County Fair in Buffalo's suburbs, which used to be called the "Country's County Fair" because for a while it could lay legitimate claim to be the largest county fair in the country.

When I was a child, just as in school, there used to be a legitimate mix of all social classes at the Fair, or so I swear I do remember. (Ivy educated Dad was surely not that much of a social renegade, though he might have been that socially clueless.)

Well, of course, there are no social classes in America. At least it would be extremely politically incorrect to say so. But you also do know that folks are more than pleased to pay a class tax to eat at Panera Bread, sleep on hotel matresses where only clean people will have slept, shop in stores where the shoppers don't yell so ugly at their kids. If we want to bottom feed, we'll pay at least the Target premium, we edjumucated types.

I'm frankly scared by these new divisions. I'm scared at what you're not allowed to say in the big Academy (all that political correctness stuff) as much as by what you're not allowed to see so all around us. I'm scared of all the non-thinking which gets refined in Big Box churches, I guess, to be shouted around at health care meetings, to the point, very apparently, of fisticuffs.

I don't want, ever, to feel that out of place in any public space, that I should have to remain politely silent, smiling benignly, inscrutably, pretending neither right nor left.

This is the lesson we were supposed to have learned from our civil rights "movement". That no-one should feel slighted in any of our commons. As I've said out loud now many many times, I will have become a man when I can walk into a WalMart Supercenter unselfconsciously wearing my bold-faced T-shirt which proclaims "Unionize WalMart" in their proprietary font. So sue me, just like that old Apple sound was called, stealing Beatle's records.

Or should I just be a man and learn to yell out my position at those healthcare meetings?

But what if I don't really know my position and actually came to learn rather than to posit? If WalMart will prove their sense of humor by selling my T-shirts in their stores, then I'll promise never to move to unionize them. Fair enough?

So, here's my point:

The world of making money "online" works identically to WalMart. You want to be assured that you are paying the absolute bottom dollar for whatever it is you purchase. You want transparent comparisons, honestly brokered, and so long as you don't get the sense that the transaction will fall through, you're likely to buy the identical widget with the pennies-apart lowest price.

Your only fear, of course, is that you will have inadvertently bought yesterday's product at today's price, since we're all so used to "falling prices" (or amped up 'specs).

More true confessions; I'm not a very good consumer. I don't buy much, online or otherwise, since I'm just not that interested in having "stuff". I resent wondering what my seat-mate might have paid for his airplane ticket, and remain mousily convinced that I am the only guy on the plane who paid as much as I did, since I suck at bargaining, cringe when I hear people crowing about the great deal they got on their cars (I paid something over sticker for mine, but hell, it's given me almost 300,000 trouble-free miles, so I still don't know who's the sucker). I know for a fact that I have the littlest dick on the plane (I've been in locker rooms. I know, trust me). I type this on a ten year old barely working laptop. But I digress. I shouldn't be pounding my chest so much.

WalMart's real secret is the way they run their warehousing. Well, first off, the store is their warehouse, as they are a biggish part of the "just-in-time" information economy. They stock their shelves according to the weather, the local trends, and have pioneered the magic of RFID tags, by which every single pallet can be individually tracked, just like FedEx does (I should have given the brown shirts the plug, I know, but brown shirts have uncomfortable associations for me), to optimize their mileage dollars, their time "sitting" on shelves, their overall penetration of as much of every market as they can.

This is very much like magic. And we should fret and do that there is no more town square left anymore, around which might be local retailers, smiling to help us find what we're looking for, knowing exactly where it is on what shelf, and selling it for whatever price it got marked with when it first arrived.

(Not quite understanding the declining value of an item that sits, soaking into the time-money continuum, as that money could be so much more productive in the financial markets just so famously collapsed, and bailed out by, you guessed it, our common resources.)

And especially that local bookstore, which has no prayer to stock that esoteric volume which will not only readily be available on Amazon.com, but will be offered along with very helpful reader commentary. No embarrassment either, about your choice in reading. Rather like Netflix, where you don't have to look away when the film you're renting is a just a tad too arty. (they won't even allow those titles in WalMart, having far too much family value).

So, we fret about these disappearances, and feel so very helpless against their inevitability. But fretting, just like Mom's compulsive worry about her kids, doesn't help a bit. Still, no-one knows what should be the right direction for our collective movement. No-one knows which way to push that won't excite the shouting classes, up in arms, arguably against their own self-interest. Protecting, at least, their identity, which, I hear, is what politics has become, ridiculously, all about.

Let's just suppose, for a minute, that there's nothing evil in any of this. That the price comparisons on the Internet are as transparent and obvious as they are meant to be. That Travelocity really isn't tracking your searches to pump up the price at the point of purchase. That we really do have some vestige of a regulatory structure to prevent Big Business from standing in for Business, as the Bush administration so famously did mis-take. That "capitalism" hasn't become a euphemism for "corporatism" and that, just for instance, Google doesn't own as much as it does of Internet advertising space, nor Microsoft as much of the desktop space.

I know, that's a lot of supposing. But why, then, must it be inevitable that we squander our commons (except in college towns)? The Internet is famously difficult to regulate. Even Internet gambling which we've briefly tried to regulate, seems a matter of closing the barn door after the cows are out.

Where is the actual power to the people, other than in our ability to chase the bottom dollar? Other than in our ability to shout out, as I am doing here, into the void. A void so stunningly vacant that if I were to be planning some great mass murder, or a planing into the World Trade Center, it very evidently wouldn't even be noticed until after the fact. Precisely the same void, in fact, into which a homeless panhandler must look all the long day long.

A friend of mine, very handily, has created a search engine tool which easily betters what Google can do for you. Or Bing. I'd let you try it, but then I'd have to kill you, since it's all still under wraps in case the big boys try to steal it, as I'm sure they will, or point out how it infringes on something of their intellectual property. They have that much more power.

It might just be that we don't yet want to be held accountable for what we do anonymously, in public. We want to be able to decry WalMart while buying our subversive texts on Amazon.com. We want to be able to surf our porn without having to rub shoulders with those trucker types who frequent Pandoras Boxx (as far as I know, and as improbable as it sounds, this is a bricks and mortar chain around these parts and not some online property).

Hell, I don't know. Once you cross the threshold of crossing the threshold, maybe you're part of a new and wonderful community of free thinkers. Maybe you make lots of new friends. Maybe it's just another category of amorphous perversity, wanting to hang with types who want to hang with types who don't want anyone to acknowledge what really gets them off.

Should that be a protected category of cultural choice too now, like GLBT. I always get hung up on the "bi" part, since I can't figure out where there could be any prejudices left. Does free love really need to be a protected category? Do we have to say everything out loud?

I wonder what the Academy would think, does think, about the rights of benignant perverts? People who like to look but never touch. Do we ever want them out of that closet? Do they just need help to understand their sexuality better? Does WalMart secretly fund (relocation of) the nearby porn shops, or do they just naturally frequent the same neighborhoods?

But some industries just shouldn't exist, since the products depend on exploitation in the first place. Some prices really are just artificially low, and you wouldn't pay them if you understood what they depend on. I don't think it's enough to say that people are clamoring for those jobs if you wouldn't want them yourself.

It may be that the Internet, and how it works commercially, has put the lie to rampant free market capitalism. Where the Pareto principle (sorry, you'll have to look it up, or since I seem to be the only one to use this term, I'll try to do it later and link it back) has now been fully unleashed, and there is only ever room for one dominant player in any field. Where small business, by very definition, can only exist in the various closets, reduced, eventually, to a kind of garage sale circuit of regenerated bargain basement items, recirculating forever in a kind of funhouse entertainment of distorted, worn-down, once ideal types.

It can't be stopped. It can't be regulated. This tragedy of the commons now will run its complete circuit, it would seem, until there's nothing left of local life and liberty. We're, all of us, destroying our common heritage helplessly and haplessly just because we think there is no real choice.

Remember, we in these United States are in the metropole compared to all those we exploit around the globe to run our markets. With the right college degree and taste in clothes, you can make a perfectly good enough living to stay away from WalMart, and move to something that approximates a collegial town. But the issue is as big as the globe. As big as life, the universe and everything.

There is, I declare, no necessity for things to be organized this way.

We act as if our information technology can make our decisions for us. We act as if artificial intelligence is something real, and just around the corner. It's not. I don't think this should be any kind of grand disappointment.

Intelligence rides on consciousness which rides on something collective which happened after humanity became civilized. There isn't such a thing as individual consciousness. There is only collective, language mediated, and more lately written language and fine art mediated, conscious intelligence. These are not things we want our machines to do for us.

Machines can always and only be great big long levers to multiply our force. By letting them be run by corporate will, we've abdicated our human responsibility to be stewards of all that we hold in common trust. Corporations are collections of consuming machines, motivated by fear, just like in the wild, the uncivilized beasties are. They render up decisions, no matter how eloquently envisioned by their capos, who are constrained by business logic. Tearful tobacco executives really do have no real choices about how they direct their enterprises.

In the arena of information technology, it has already been demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that there will be only one mammoth company in control of any arena. Think Microsoft, WalMart, Nike, Google, Verizon, IBM, GE, Apple, eBay, Amazon. They all have competition, and might even consider each other their competition. They might even all be on the very brink of final collapse. But it's a mass-mediated superstar world out there, and the local artists are being squeezed out all over the place.

It's not all bad. I like watching the ideal faces and bodies, and listening to the excruciatingly beautiful songs of our Michael Jacksons and Beyonces. I really do. I even like our pres, for all his human flaws. We might even be about to master the quirks of our mass mediated cultural landscape, to where real quality does make it to the top.

But what I'm worried about here is what usually gets called the environment. That stuff, that substrate, that ground to our figure, on which we all depend. We have boxed ourselves now into a corner, where we can only imagine new and wonderful inputs to keep it all going. Clean energy. Clean industry.

But how do we stop the lowest common denominator effect? The collective bloating from fast eating, the destruction of farming by agribusiness, the immiseration of so much of the world by its uprooting to serve the global economy, and its inexorable logic?

I surely don't want to give up hospitals and hot showers, warm houses and helpful machines of all sorts. (I might be willing to give up meat.) But I sure would like to know what we can do together to render up something better than WalMart at the top, in the end.

Part of what we can and will do will be to harness information technologies to call in all the externalities to our pricing. We will make parking cost what we collectively spend on it. We will make highway travel cost what it really does to the planet. We will rationally meter our power in ways to compress the distance from generation to consumption, and spread the loads according to clock and geographic distance.

We will do the thinking, and let the machinery multiply its power.

I think at the end of the day, it's all a matter of scale. There should and must be a size limitation for corporations, enforced simply and directly by means of anti-competitive legislation. There must be limits to vertical control of markets. There must, in principle, be a set wholesale price for mass-produced items. There must be anti-sprawl.

But there also must be a shot at using our technology for popular matters. Meaning simply that it shouldn't be so easy for capital to overwhelm the masses. I guess unionizing Microsoft grinds like me wouldn't be a bad start. I know that if I were to wear a "Unionize Tech Workers" T-shirt, I'd be drummed out of any techie meeting I ever might attend, so I guess I'm not liking popularity contests very much.

But see, it's that public space which should always be safe for oddball types. So much safer than it once was. So dangerously mall-like. I can't do this completely without getting down to my basic, paradigm shifting, post standard physics model theory. It's not only about scale, and bringing in the externalities so that we can eat sustainably.

It's also about the fundamental misconstruing we've made about our cosmos. At the very fringiest range, making not enough difference to notice. Making precisely as much difference, I would say, as relativistic calculations make compared with Newtonian ones when you are travelling great distances. At the very fringes, we must admit that there is no objective reality "out there" in which the exercise of mind is not implicated.

That realization means, I have explained elsewhere, and will try and try again to explain here, that there are only emotional connections between much of what is still reality. These connections are, therefore, among and between objects which can't be measured, or if measured, become something other from what they were when held in mind alone. This is non-controversial quantum reality, but the raising of emotion to the level of "out there" reality is something new.

The raising of emotion to the level of reality immediately "solves" the conundrum of all the wild and crazy accidents which have brought us to this place. The chance of our existence, collectively now, is provably vanishingly tiny. But of course, we exist, just as I, individually, exist. I don't care, post-modernistically, to go down any of those essentialist roads toward questioning our basic scientific understanding of reality. Nor do I care to accept Jesus as my personal savior.

But, that all the connections leading to here and now have been caring cared-for connections simply drops right out from the equations, as it were, if you construe the random chance instead as a e-motivated connection.

Of course it was motivated in reverse. It was a felt connection from the future, as it were, and thus impossible of actual discovery. But that's what emotion is for crying out loud Virginia. You see, there is no directionality to time but in our minds. In reality beginnings and endings are one if only one could "see" so far.

So, I am moving lockstep with you, dear reader, toward the future because that is where we all must go if we are not to be utterly alone. I sense a better future than you do, and I want you to believe me when I say it is attainable. In that future, the classes mix again, as was the vision of this great republic. The lowest common denominator is never allowed to trump the highest art, because our trusted elected servants won't allow it.

When elected leaders are caught keeping secrets from us, or exerting privileges, they are immediately dismissed, no questions asked, because they will have broken their sacred trust to you and me.

Ah, this makes me so tired. I need some company here. But I'll keep trying for understandability.

Another Good Read!

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I took this book with me to a little island up north in Canada, which I had the luxury and privilege to occupy for an entire week (well, I had to help replace the roof, but that was good for me). Bill Bryson is in his element, much as Tom Friedman is in his, journalist to the deep thinkers; our correspondent at the fringes. I feel that I'm belittling Bryson with that comparison, since, unlike Friedman, Bryson seems to have no investment in any statuses; quo, ante, post. He resurrects his own fascination with not a subject, but an entire set of subjects, which were destroyed for him as they were for so many of us, by being diced up and normalized by the education industry. His is the anti-textbook. By it's end, the reader has gained an immeasurably enriched understanding of just what's going on with understanding as the humankind-wide effort that it really always has to be. And at that brink you realize - you, the reader - that our challenges are all about how we will or will not learn to resolve our differences, with each other and with the planet. And these are not technical challenges. Which is why we should be so grateful for such clear reporting from our fringes. Bravo!

View all my reviews >>

Moon Landing Lunacy

I seem to be on a theme of anniversaries, mostly just past. I missed the 40th for the moon landing, and wanted to be part of some flame war which just flamed out rather like, well, our enthusiasm for outer space. I myself run hot and cold on the value of explorations of outer space. For sure, there should be at least as much value to such explorations as there is to explorations under the sea, or new catalogings of (old) species, or now so much earlier, the very mapping of our globe.

But it costs a lot of money, great gobs of our precious energy, and must pollute our skies each time we launch one of those great rockets beyond gravity's reach. I'm going to make the claim that the value of our space explorations depends very much on what it is that we do with or by them.

If we think that we will extend the limits for our exploitations and predations, so that we can relieve some pressure from earth's carrying capacity, that is one thing. If we think we are doing basic science, wanting answers to basic questions about our origins, that is quite another. And if we accomplish something very opposite to what we set out to accomplish, that is always interesting.

Another anniversary just gone by is my own birthday; now entering my 55th year, I should have figured out by now what I really want to do with my life. I've chosen to focus - as rankest amateur - on the basic questions, and so have little or nothing to show for a life lived this long, in the way of professional accomplishment.

Sometimes I wish I did. But sometimes I'm glad that I have resisted those investments, in favor of a kind of hanging loose, so that I might have the liberty, even now, even still, to go off in some other direction without having too much invested in staying put. My kids are mostly grown. There are no golden or other handcuffs tying me to what I've already done.

We live in a time of generalized anxiety, prevented from enjoying the fruits of historical labors by some vague sense that we might have blown it or be about to blow it. It's clear to most thinking people that we can't keep living off the fat of earth's stored up solar energy; the oil and coal. It's clear that even apart from the squandering and the pollution we used to worry more about, the very basic throwing up into our atmosphere of all this stored carbon changes all sorts of basic balances.

We're nervous that we won't be able, politically, to contain our twitchy tendancy to deploy all sorts of nuclear devices. We might have created a cyber-structure of such complexity that it could be brought down by something analogous to flying planes into overreaching towers.

We've entered into a spiraling panic about our health, feeling some kind of right to be cured of every dis-ease which must accompany biological life; to where the very germs now have become as idealized as our screen idols, able to resist our every sterilizing tool to raise the spector of pandemic, flesh eating, antibiotic resistance.

What a perfect metaphor, where each of us has the basic right to fight off the germs within us, even if to the detriment of the common pool of resistance. Or is it more in the way we raise our meat, saturating it with antibiotics to create an alternate ecology where the only germs to survive - and we ingest the antibiotics along with the steer it rode in on - are the ones we don't know how to combat?

We somehow think, or fantasize, that arctic storehouses, even though they too are threatened by global warming, may provide repositories to hold in trust those species we now so rapidly displace. That our zoos may be adequate as breeding grounds for species lost in the wild already.

We forget that the genetic code thus preserved is only the positive imprint whose other half in the ecological ground, in the context already destroyed. Species are only "meaningful" in their environmental contexts. That's what species mean. They are what remains of life's variation when contexts shift and flow.

My friend Dr. Koepsell is concerned that we establish a proper commons in outer space. That otherwise we might extend the reach for the predations of the Huns among us against our common heritage. While I find there only emptiness, rather like those concrete habitats at some zoo, or plastic Animatronics life-like dioramas, or permadefrosted crypts for seeds and spores, all cataloged and neat.

I tend to be more focused on our Earth, although I can't help but find myself sympathetic with those who decry our loss of questing glories, like setting foot on our own moon. I do think it's a mistake to think that these kinds of ship sailings can replicate the ones which landed us in America, where a true new world got discovered. They are fantasies, rather, akin to ones of immortality and perfect joy.

Back here on earth, we cannot be abstracted from our context. Anymore than we could really live as heads alone, fed by some concocted soup, as in those nightmarish old TV ads (were they public service ads, or ads for Saab brainy sportscars???). We are the evolutionary outcome from all that came before us, surely, but also remain embedded in a matrix not just of nutrients, but of extensions to our very body of a sort not subject to our control and guidance and manipulation, which is what technology is for.

True Spaceship Earth is a dystopic vision of life uprooted and taken over for a joy ride. All joy rides are brief, or if not, end badly. We are not and never could be that in charge.

I do believe that at it's root, it is a Christian delusion that consciousness was granted, and bounds us from our literal roots, right here on beastly earth. As though we were or are that fundamentally different from our evolved-from heritage, and could persist without our ground. Dominion is a metaphor which ends with the collapse of earthly frontiers.

The quest we must make is all inward, toward bringing new life to what our founding fathers granted us, here in this actual New World, where the Commonwealth was meant to be held literally in common, and our leaders were to do our bidding and not the other way around. Questing outward is not a godlike move. It is a sociopathic manipulation of more humanistic dreams. Our fears leave sociopaths in charge.

Our fears about our own competencies. Our fear, even, that the professionals know best, and we must leave to them our basic decisions. Yes Doctor sir, I will take Lipitor if that's what you think best, so that I may live in perfect perpetual fear of my own heart's betrayal.

Our problems are political, emotional, psychological, but no longer technical. If we were to find some perfect source for free perpetual energy. Clean nuclear, say, which is no more oxymoronic than clean coal. Given our current state of enlightenment, such energy could only guarantee our quicker and more final destruction, because it would accelerate the pace at which and by which we foul our habitat, which is now the entire planet.

These problems do, however, actually have a very technical solution. It was a scant century ago that we did wake up to our implication in the physical composition of the cosmos. It was then we realized that all limits were limits of mind. The speed of light, for instance. The "force" of gravity. Time's direction. Mind is implicated. The position and momentum of matter cannot, even in principle, be determined prior to the act of measurement, which is at the most diminutive level, an act of cognition.

We continue to act as though our minds, collectively, were never implicated in the stuff out there cosmically beyond us. And so our injection into outer space is, in fact, an attempt to colonize nothing. It's an escape from what we are rather than a quest for new discovery. It's an as if conjecture that we really need not be responsible, and in contradiction of those office signs above the copy machine, that Mother will clean up after us.

Mind all Googly

Sometimes you write and write, and get lost in the writing. Sometimes you fling it away into the trash bin. Sometimes into the ether. Well, OK, sometimes I write and write.

It's pretty unnerving now that Google funds my free email by googling into my very personal emails. They render up ads which can be funny, or sometimes even anticipate my thinking. Complaining the other day when I visited Chinatown up in Toronto, that all the bookstores I remembered were now all gone, Google very helpfully, in Chinese, with no English translation, offered a link where I could purchase Chinese language books in North America.

But it's also pretty unnerving how the very cosmos mocks my thoughts. How, the other day thinking about old girlfriends and new, there appeared a couple of police cars, lights flashing, between which walked one old girlfriend I hadn't seen in ages, though I did recently find out she still lives right around the corner. Glad to be adverted, she seemed abusive sometimes. I guess I seemed worse. It would have been nice to say hello.

Words are but techniques; according to McLuhan our media encompass our technologies, which are a subset of the larger category. And it may not matter so much what is said, since the medium is the message. Television violence has the same effect as television romance, since it's the mediation which counts and not what one tries to do with it.

If that's the case, and I suppose it is, then what are we doing now? Where have all our gurus gone, to guide us with this hot/cool magic printing press, which if your equipment is newer than mine, can even intrigue with videos?

Lex's law says that the number of transistors alive in the world increases in direct proportion to the amount of information out there; for convenience' sake, let's just count the words. Considering that each machine, except for mine, has millions upon millions of transistors, each changing state, except for mine, millions of times per second, I guess that must be a lot of information.

The chip fabs now just replicate what the old Gutenberg press once did. Big designs now get miniaturized, and reproduced over and over, for playing out some code. The more you print the cheaper they come, until everyone's got a copy.

We all now intertwine, like it or not. We all now interfere. My body is a machine, scaffolding all the colonizing cells which share my DNA (and some freeloaders which symbiotically go along for the ride). Or do the cells themselves just provide the scaffolding for the ambitious little genes? But, thank goodness for the sake of my feelings, my body ends right at my skin.

Our published chips now do the reading, of code which gets loaded in from elsewhere. The hardware-software direction has been reversed, and the pace of quickening quickened. They were code once too, a kind of map imposed on crystaline wilderness. This serpent eating tale truly never ends.

Words, however, can extend my reach right across time and space. I spend more time, alas, communing now with dead poets than I do with loud human beings. But they did pack the best of themselves into their public versions. How very polite of them. I only wish I could return the courtesy.

If McLuhan is right that our very first medium was clothing, and I suppose he was, and that the Thunderings of history were all punctuated by wars, the first of which was division East from West, and the second involved social competition initiated by dress. The enclosure of our private parts. Dress an early technology. Technique. Medium. It hardly matters what you wear, so long as you enclose those private parts dear Adam.

And each new medium rehearses all those previous, so that now we cavort almost fully naked, exposing ourselves on the Internet for the pure lark of it. These are our pastimes now. We might rehearse a return to the very beginning, where there was nothing at all to fight about. We might simply be acting impolitely. There is a tension between civilization and its discontents. Wars as acts of lovemaking. Orgies of destruction. Politeness but a seduction.

All of our words now seem so much at cross purposes. There is no way that the ones which make the most sense can overpower the loudest and most obnoxious, is there? Ghenghis Khan did overpower civilization once. Why won't he do it again?

Can it be enough, finally, that we have no choice this time? That once again it has proven impossible to enclose our most dangerous private parts? Newer Khans (not very punny, that) seem always to be motivated to expose them for private or nationalistic gain.

These Attilas never seem to spend as much time in prison as do the lowly lovelorn who take forbidden pictures of naked prisoners. Whose secrets were being exposed? Which ones do we wish to punish?

Our prisons now still full of seekers after synthetic happiness. While the players with the fruits of our labor still make wagers at the table where we'll never be seated, you and I. Still googling into our minds, with taps, listening devices, pronouncements about who can and should marry whom, the Fathers have grown tiresome.

Well, fuck this shit! I've written enough right here, that were you able to read, and did I but have the talent to write, you could see very clearly that there is no means to enclose our very most inner secret.

We want love. That makes none of us very different from the rest.

We will defend those we love the best, and things can get bloody when we do, but most of those would be terrorists are only confused about the very same thing, and would never hurt us one on one. And those who would, well, how many of them never felt love in the first place? And so many of those have the grace, at least, to be polite about it.

So, in commemoration of this Independence Day, having witnessed a truly wonderful if recession-brief set of fireworks down by the Buffalo River, and if McLuhan is right, and I suppose he is, then how about we punctuate this last great Thunder with a kiss? We're all messed up in one another anyhow. The sanitizing Google tries for over in China won't keep them from this kind of filth right here.

I'm really sorry I can't make this any more clear. I'm really very trying!!! I'm working very hardly. It's my patriotic duty!

Happy Independence Day, oh world of my very own invention. I enclose you with a hug.

Polymorphous Perversity, whatever that means . . .

I am writing this now, perversely indeed, on a very obsolete, but very tiny and with a really nice keyboard, laptop. It took seemingly forever to master the intricacies of that new and highly touted Linux - Jaunty Jackalope. What a cool name. An animal which doesn't really exist. Reminds me vaguely of jalopy! I wonder what's under its covers?

The laptop has a hardware limit to 128 MB of RAM, which is nowhere near enough. I've had to really puzzle over getting things to work. Disabling Flash seemed to do the final trick, but then there are the interminable and automatic updates. And before that, I'd had to reassemble the machine from a basket full of parts. From my memory now maybe three years old, from when I first took it apart to cannibalize its display. Which in the event fried the system board on the machine it was to be transplanted into. Same dimensions, same controller, but some little bitty diode on the one with the slightly downgraded screen couldn't take the heat and went all super nova.

The processor is only 333MHz or so, which is way way way below current count spec for transistors and their frequency for changing state down in the overheating CPU. Will this serpent eating tale never end? The code or the hardware, which spurs which? And what level of cool will be enough, so that we can wear our technology on our very sleeve and be here while being there.

I am that sort of perverse. Even though I could buy a fully competent brand new "netbook" for about $300 including tax, I hate to throw out what once must have cost $3,000 though it was gifted to me as surplus junk so many years ago. Did I mention that it has a really nice keyboard?

Words at the remove of distance - time or space will do - have a special magic, don't they? Like radio once did, words leave so much room for imagination. So many people fall in love with someone they know only from written words, so impossible sometimes with someone right in front of them. Just like polymorphous perversity must have some function to stimulate those imortant border crossings which keep life in motion.

Even television according to Marshall McLuhan, was some kind of cool in comparison to movies. He thought it drew us in from our detachment, rigtht?

I wonder what he would have said about HDTV or virtual reality. I remember reading studies about how it was the brightness of the little dots which made the moving figures look that much more alive, composed of little reds and greens and violets, I think. That range of brightness is more important than fidelity for what the mind constructs as real.

I confess also that this little laptop, a SONY, impressed me for the sharpness and the brightness of its screen. Still does, though either it or my eyes grow dimmer than my memory.

I wonder where these developments can end, building ever faster hardware to contain ever more complex code. The $250 or so I saved is worth far less than the time I've blown puzzling and waiting and reading on-line, trying to gauge the truthfulness of amateurs who must translate down those gurus whose intelligence gets construed by how few can speak their language. Perhaps I can make up the lost time in tuition some day. But hell, I'm unemployed, and so $250 is almost like real money.

The basic problem as I see it (and I'm no guru on these things, I'm just pretty good at fixing them when they break - the grease monkey who gets the engineer's car going) is that when there isn't enough RAM, which can move the bits in and out pretty quickly, the stuff - the code - which must be stored gets swapped out to the much more slowly accessed spinning disk. And meanwhile, if the processor can't interpret the code quickly enough, then the timing gets all thrown off to where the thrashing in and out from disk becomes quite literally infinite and you can't get your keystrokes in.

I couldn't find the lever which would calibrate all those moves, so I just disabled the parts I thought I wouldn't need. I won't be watching movies on this machine.

Once upon a time, at a Rainbow Homecoming,

I learned of a Hopi Indian prophecy that the world would soon be covered in a vast web. The image was then ominous, of power grids and entanglements leading inevitably to being devoured by some kind of great Beast. We did a lot of anti-nuke and anti-war and anti-establishment protesting back in those days. Now I think we all take that attitude which you can see on the face of any college professor staring down his screen. Jaw slack, neck craned forward, seeming somehow brain damaged or deranged.

One sex-addicted salesman I know once told me about his sister who was disabled and in a wheelchair. She'd fallen in love and married off the Internet, I think to someone similarly stuck. He marveled then at the freedom just to be so disembodied. And then again that they would sit, each at his own console, facing away from each other, though hopefully tapping away nice love messages in the spaces between.

That was way before blogging, when people made friends by newsgroupings. When pornography had to be decoded. When color made its splash.

I don't think it's any mistake that profit margins for Internet businesses can be measured by income, direct or indirect, from porn. I hear that much development of software was sparked in its origins that way. Twinkle in some eye indeed! I wonder how they will make any money over in China, blocking all that objectionable material we could all have in our mirrors. Or are we just not narcissistic enough for that? Ho ho, or bored with what we already find too familiar.

There is a quickening for certain, when the mediated particles leave just enough for the imagination. Or when they get lighted and airbrushed and angled to perfection, like so many naked girlies, so strangely willing to expose themselves now to all mankind for all eternity. I don't imagine they get paid very much, and some clearly do it just for the lark.

Or maybe that's the very draw. The danger which is not quite real. The making out of oneself as perfect, in that particular pose at that particular time. Just like those love letters to my sweetheart; though I try so hard for honesty, exposing all my flaws. The story that is real just might be the one you respond to, the rest so much Sarah Palin blah blah blah blah blah blah. Cute to some, but basically without, well, content. And what does that say about her audience?

What will happen then when we meet?

I confess (well now I suppose you do know that already, don't you) that I do indulge this narcissistic perversity of writing to the ether, exposing myself now for all who might be interested, for free. I'm sure I indulge the other kinds about as much or as little as whatever Kinsey said was normal (except that Kinsey was all about discrediting notions of norms and ideal types). He started by studying wasps and, like me, was more interested in the boundaries and how fuzzy they could be; where insects turned to other kinds and no one could be the perfect wasp.

I don't like looking at myself very much in the mirror. If you saw me naked, you'd know what I mean. Ancient hardware, which doesn't even require much thrashing around now to reach its infrequently punctuated conclusions. A look, a stray thought, and I'm good for a long long time.

Our human body is such a strange machine, betraying us in so very many ways. Each interval now in my heart's beating but merest promise of some other. Our eyes don't perceive the world either as that continuous picture in our minds. It's the movements which allow our mind to fill in all the gaps. You cannot see if your eyes stay still. You cannot see if you have the sensor eyeballs, but the brain has never learned. I guess that's all been proven.

We are not so much like camera obscura within our heads. And computers, my dearest friends, will never ever think. These are static dreams of domination, as though the world could be ours forever, given reach enough and time.

There is not time enough. Our airbrush must remain constantly in motion. Even our words are written but in sand, if for no reason than that there are so damned many of them piling on.

There's video on the Internet now, you'll forgive me for forgetting. I suppose that means this medium must run both hot and cool, or is it media all in one? Too bad that our gurus all have died before they could let us know. We have now only inane rants, where everything is just way too cool, dude.

For me, the music stopped at techno. There has to be some variation on the Turing test, where music is its object. There would be two embedded questions: The first is whether what gets returned is recorded, sampled or generated anew. The second is whether the machine has copied the actual intervals, intonations and inflections of the human played auditions before making its own new production. We must interpret, also, the re-productions. The camera obsura can only mock.

I am moved by techno beats and samplings, though I think it must be in a very different way from those live choral stirrings. The one leads me down in a tribal direction, to where my boundaries all disappear. The other seems to take me up to where my own true heart still longs.

These are the boundaries we play with now, striving still and always to be human. If it is only our response that counts, and not the music's maker, then it might be true that Turing's test could be won by a music machine.

If however, there's a two way street, well then it's a whole new game, right? The basic Turing test is dialogic, where music is mostly stimulus response. I think McLuhan traced media changes through arts of war and contention. I think we all get that there is a last war which looms out there.

There's no question that all war is both response and generation of all the new technologies we must grow into. Capitalism thought of in terms of evolutionary contesting has become our pastime after the last great wars. Every one knows that now the wars are all asymmetric, whether terrorist against superpower, or corporation against entrepreneur.

Our mythology indicates David can still beat Goliath. Our reality is that we're all encouraged to remain cowed indoors, protected by Goliath against all the lurking Davids.

I guess the world now turns on whether we construe this medium now as a one or two way street. Brand name versus amateur sleuth, there ought to be some way to render up the best of us. Well, it seems to work with the porno babes. Why not with the good stuff?

This will become my life's work, if only I could find a way to pay for it. Hey, I could recycle old garbage and sell it for a song!

Meanwhile, gentle reader, this one's for you. OK, OK, they're all for you. I suppose I should keep a journal? But where's the charge to that, dear diarist? Where's the charge to that?

Fool Rushing in again- very preliminary scratch pad thoughts on enclosures and commons

Lots of people would like to have the last word on the big issues. Like abortion, say, or global warming, or intelligent design. Many of these issues aren't really issues, and simply divide the thinking intelligent crowd from the idiots, right? And it would be nice to find the argument to cure the idiocy, or at least to point out which psychological disease process makes it necessary to hold idiotic opinions, like those of sociopathic and diseased bloviators Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage.

These guys so clearly go for the common rude denominator; in the same way we all like McDonalds' Hamburgers once we've agreed not to think about anything beyond the low level hit when you take one in. You can't think about the aftermath, you can't think about your overeducated palate, certainly not about the environment or your health. You can't even think about the cost anymore, since they are routinely priced above local divey places. If there's something you know nothing about, then these guys will offer you the solar plexus hit which makes you feel pretty sure which side you're on.

I've commented here on the gene patenting debate, coming at it fairly obliquely, via a former student of mine who wrote what I really found to be a great and important book. More recently, I tripped across something approaching a polite flame war on the topic, where Dr. Koepsell was being cast in the role of anti-patent we're all commoners freak. The opposition put up a pretty good and pretty reasonable argument that genes actually can be patentable and patented since the item which actually gets the patent never occurs, in its isolated state, in nature.

The interesting part for me is the agreement, more or less dismissively, on both sides of this debate that there surely are many many cases of patents being issued erroneously, or for that matter withheld. Since the issue will ultimately be decided only in the courts, both sides (as if there only were two) are gearing up to make their case before that mythologically impartial panel, judge, or process.

This seems to be a corollary of the fundamental rule that extremism sells. If you're going to make a case, then make it to the max, and set out to destroy the opposition. Since almost by definition, the readers won't have the firepower themselves to be the master of either side of the argument, they're that much more likely to take your point of view. This is the essence of adversarial resolutions for the law, for sports contests, for wars of all kinds. It's the essence too of what works with capitalism, where there's a competition for market share, or price. It's what propaganda means.

Just as, in the case of abortion, there can be dismissive agreement that of course there are terrible tales on both sides of the issue, where women were forced or tricked into abortion or killed by being forced to carry to term an impossible pregnancy. As if these dirty facts detract from the main battle to be engaged. There is almost a kind of lust to bring things right down to their very crux, and then butt heads right at that juncture. Sometimes, especially when things descend to something which looks like a flame war, it can be downright primitive, you idiots!

For my part, I confess that I have a good deal of sympathy for the intelligent designers, when their issue gets pitted against [what might well be the straw dog of] scientism whereby all mysteries will be revealed to be logically solvable. As if replication of life's origins can ever resolve its mystery.

Similarly, with the anti-global warmers, I must agree that we, the human race, will not ultimately prevail as masters of this or any other domain. Did I say already that I will never agree with Rush or Savage on anything they say, since they are just patently wacko, not to mention dangerous for their fanning of idiot winds to fuel dangerous flames. I mostly think it's a fine distinction indeed between what they do and yelling fire in a crowded theater, although they do help to refine the sides.

But I guess their market share gives them some right, right? I'm not so entirely sure. Jeeze, I guess I even agree with censorship on or at some level. The problem is, who gets to decide? There's a hoot of a film out there called "The Last Supper" which explores some of this to the point of absurdity.

So, you can take the argument for or against the patenting of genes right down to its most minimalist precise terms, and you are finally arguing about art v. nature, and it can sound almost sophomoric. These are arguments about world view, right?

What if there is never any clear boundary? What if point of view will always count? Even plastics, which would never occur "in nature" without man's invention, are surely "of nature" to the extent that man is.

Patents are grants from legal authority to private entities of a temporary exclusive franchise on something they invented but which ultimately reverts to the commons which that authority has always held in trust for you and I, the commoners. The authority to confer that grant ipso facto confirms that what is being granted is rights over something the authority has the right to grant in the first place. There is a kind of distribution of what is "out there" presumably for anyone to "find" but which is never known to be there without its first "invention". Distinctions between invention and discovery can get very mushy indeed, leading to considerations about choices we might have had but have chosen not to take.

Sometimes following the letter of the law becomes itself a very bad choice, and the law must be changed. Chattel must be redefined, for instance, to exclude wives and black people. Property must be redefined to exclude the right to despoil, or generate certain effluents. Sometimes events march on too quickly, and the length or terms for ownership become patently unwise. What happens when pumping out oil causes an upset to geological equilibrium? What happens when a patented life form, say, takes off in overpopulation? What happens when a company owns a patent on something which becomes essential to the survival of virtually everyone?

Perhaps intellectual property also must be redefined simply to exclude specific items, like genes, in the same way that real property might exclude air rights or mineral rights, which are simply too valuable or which impinge somehow on the rights of neighbors. Sometimes it helps to blur rather than to refine the boundaries, so that you might own coastal property, but the public has the right to trespass between the low and high tide marks. Or maybe 25 feet above. Or maybe not at all, but there is nothing a-priori obvious or intuitive about the choices which must be made.

In any case, when debate reaches a kind of final impasse, beyond which there can be no movement; where the sides get cemented in regardless of the firepower brought to bear; then it's usually time for - and I think this might be one of the few proper uses of the term - a paradigm shift.

In physics, a useful distinction can often be made between energy of position and inherent energy; potential and measurable, with potential energy always relative to what's around its "possessor" and things like relative motion. It then might not be clear how the perspective of the measurer must be taken into account, or in the extreme quantum mechanical cases, if the perspective of the measurer can ever be taken quite out of the account.

So, at the level of the basic issues, there seems to be some automatic taking up of sides. When does life begin? Is the origin of life knowable? Is this an invention or a discovery? Is there any direction to evolution? Is mankind at its pinnacle? Are we any different than other forces of nature? Is there such a thing as artifice?

But what if the resolution is always and only a matter of time and position. Most non-straw-dog scientists except for really whacked out fundamentalists like Ray Kurzweil, don't form any opinions, ultimately, about how life begins. Most non-straw-dog religionists don't suppose that airplanes don't really fly, although there are apparently some who think that pilots might get wafted literally away at the time of some rapture.

In the matter of abortion, it seems unfair, just for example, to use scientific notions of conception to talk about when "life" begins. Why not push it back all the way to the twinkle in the eye? Why not make the turning away from all lust evil? Who really knows how to navigate these boundaries? I mean it also would seem clearly to be murder if a fully invested pregnant Mom were forced into abortion.

It might be worth the excercise to find ways to blur the boundaries. To make the case that patenting genes is an issue less simple to pin down that patenting manufacturing processes. Why not mitigate the price which might result from too much value with some progressive tax? Why not issue "commons impingement credits" so that the patenters of some new machine can sell off some of their credits to the bozos who need to own something so abstracted as a gene sequence. If I want to own the number 747, say, I should have to pay almost the entire treasury of the government issuing the patent, which, sad to say, is never quite out of the question now is it?

Let's see. The formula could be E = MC² . Where C is some GNP, denominated in some currency, which equals the value of everything combined. An outer limit, beyond which it's just impossible to go. M could be, ummmm, a fudge factor for what proportion of the proposed patent grant is estimated to be part of our commons. Then E could be the price.

Well, now that's just silly, but at the very least the paradigm could shift a little bit to where borders are recognized themselves to be changeable and negotiable entities. Clearly, as has been well established in the tiny rural town where I live, building very large windmills on ones private property does impinge on the value of all the property around. Why not compensate everyone for the cost to their "view"? Why must we encourage Hatfields fighting McCoys?

The cost should approach infinity if someone proposes to own the air, the water, natural laws. The cost should be nominal if someone has come up with something unlikely to have been come up with by anybody else. But at a certain point, even establishing priority gets ridiculous, like in the case of patenting genes, where the processes are well understood and it's just another gold rush, where the fastest, best provisioned, and most ruthless are the ones to get the claims. What kind of finish line camera will be the most fair if, say someone's internet connection goes down, or their xerox machine needs new toner, or the principal investigator gets sick?

It was all right to grant oil franchises when there was no sense of any limits. Maybe now it's not. It was all right to mine for minerals when all the land was not even mapped. Maybe the existence of limits is the primary thing which redefines all the boundaries or makes them relative. If there are clear limits to the uses which can be made of what we all depend on, in common, then there also must be changes to the ways in which those usages get regulated for the good of all. Patent law may be useful as an engine for progress, but harmful as a mechanism to ensure survival.

This is a simple place marker, for further discussion of Kinsey and his wasps, words and their relation to ideas, boundaries in general, and lots and lots of fun. Would that there were world enough and time . . . .