Camera Front and Back

As with the true depth of the snow when I was little, I have no way to know how my memory is being distorted by age. I am more engaged with the news than I used to be, but I'm also having a hard time remembering my state of mind as recently as when we all turned the Y2K corner.

I love having a smartphone which I can use for instant references: Names and historical data; definitions and showtimes - and I'm certain that it's making me a kind of 'as-if' smarter. But what's it doing to my consciousness? What does it mean when I can and will and must check in about every little question and curiosity?

Driving past bus stops now or walking along the road, it seems that everyone with an idle minute is looking downward toward something in their hand. Fiddling with it. But strolling through the glorious Balboa Park in SanDiego there was a lone man slouched backwards like some iconic take of John Muir, engaged with the landscape and looking homeless. I could repose in mind with him.

Through txting now, there will be video chat, perhaps, though you can't do that under your desk in class. I want my 4G phone and I want it now. I want all my screens united and I want the biggest one to envelope me. (the "I" will disappear in the end through and by and with this process)

So, two things happened recently: One, I finally shlepped my phone into Verizon for a replacement since my touchscreen has  been referring touches to random other parts of the screen from those I intend. I could fix it by "coloring" in the screen until it re-established sync, but it was getting worse and worse, and this was my way to defer wanting something cooler and newer. It's always better to wait a while, and no-time more so than now. Two, I randomly remembered Superman the movie and then there it was on Dish. I'd forgotten the part at the beginning where the Kryptonite criminals are exiled onto a 2D screen. I'd thought it made nice symbolism at the time.

The funny thing is that now that I have a brand new replacement obsolete phone on its way, the one I have started working again. I feel guilty for burdening the globe with more junk, although it's hard to trust it just because I worked it over good trying one last time to fix it. And the movies now are poised to go 3D, and that's being touted as the "new color." As though we'll all look back on 2D the way we do on black and white or silent.

I'm not so sure.

You know, here in California, they've had some success bringing city centers back to life by enticing in the mall brands. I'm thinking of Pasadena and San Diego, but I also saw the same thing in Spokane Washington. (one has to wonder why Buffalo can't do it?)

But then you find these cute little specialty stores, located in architecturally interesting little retro establishments, all going out of business because you'd have to know they are there and frequent the place enough to go there when you think of wanting something they sell. Which brings me right back to the consciousness changes happening with all the mass mediation of what we ponder and think we know.

There's only so much room in the brain, you know? Keep us distracted by too much information, keep us daily tied to news about the Middle East or world-threatening disasters, and we'll only have room for the mall, or the mall-like downtown, and its limited brands. Familiars.

And we don't even know our neighbors, and wouldn't want their low skilled artisanal outputs which are what national branding and interchangeable parts (right down to the food we eat) were all about in the first place.

The bats are dying and so are the bees, and we weren't really thinking of them when we thought we could go it alone on the planet. But we can't. It's so easy for me to envision mass transit on rails for getting to work each day, but much harder to imagine the political shifts which would have to happen first.

The disastrous outcome of nuclear energy proliferation seems inevitable in retro, in particular because if even the Japanese can't work it out on the corruption front, how do the rest of us expect to do so?

Well, you won't likely get the answer from me, since I go back to work on Wednesday (insert Hooray track!). Just like the rest of us, I wish there were actually a way to direct my efforts which did good for the planet.

I would be happy with a better political arrangement, so that at least I might be assured that the actual leaders made it into leadership positions, and that the thoughtless classes weren't so much in charge. Without reverting to some sort of aristocracy.

Maybe I'm asking too much? I don't really think so. It's all about trust and education and finding ways to put the two together. Maybe the smartphone and other devices can help with that. Maybe it will be the wearable computers. For sure, we need to get back our commuting time and not spend so much energy on the virtual but highly stressful reality of the freeways.

That would be my vote anyhow. But you know, before I get a chance to vote, we the people will ourselves have been turned into interchangeable parts. Hooked on "authenticity" as on a drug. And isn't that simply the most poignant irony of all?

Paying for the Times

Of course you knew it was coming. While all news organizations have been carefully calibrating their strategies to deal with the burgeoning Internet, no organization has been more deliberate and thorough than the New York Times. They have enough cash and clout to have nurtured their "brand" across these long and scary years of freebie access, and now seem confident that they will be able to charge top dollar for web access without losing their spot.

The news comes at the very moment that public broadcasting is being nixed. So recently after the fortunes of public radio were boosted by the need for all of us commuters to be in some kind of reliable touch after the events of 9/11.

Crises have a way of ratcheting up the power of the powerful, while winnowing out the small fry. How many local news outlets will be able to charge a fee for online access now that the news-reading public might have to make budget decisions about how much news they can afford? And who can afford to be without access to reliable and vetted sources of information?

It is possible that the Times has miscalculated, and that their move will boost the power of blogger aggregaters like HuffPo, on the Google model of keyterm auctions to game your profile and free or slave-wage content provision. It's also possible that everything will go the way of Rupert Murdoch, where no holds are ever barred to gain audience share. What you mock on the entertainment side, where the apparently liberal politics of the Simpsons or Glee merge with that strange libertarian Howard Stern schlock humor, is balanced by what makes you angry on the NewsCorp side if you digest the news at all.

As quickly as we have all forgotten how essential the reliable reporting of NPR was during our national disaster, we have also forgotten pandemic fears from SARS or H5N1 (or was it H1N1, or was it avian or was it swine flu)? It all has something to do with China and their horrid public health standards, right? Or is it the fact that they have dismantled their social health network in the same kind of thoughtless imitation of our wild capitalism which has them buying more Buicks now than we do?

It could be that public health requires society-wide approaches to healthcare now more than ever. It could be that flood and earthquake insurance should not be allowed brokerage on the open market, since those companies drag their feet or declare bankruptcy anyhow when the disaster is broad enough. Government political swings almost guarantee moral hazard, even as they insure that only those too big to fail will be protected against failure because the only safe bet is to go as big as you can as fast as you can.

* * *

Microsoft rolls out IE9. At first blush it hangs for me and so I'm back to Chrome. But their Windows Live services start to look and feel and behave with a little bit more slick compared to the hacker feel of Google. Bing has fit and finish, as the Internet turns away again from wildness. I'm having Bigness Blues.

Let's hope the Times will also flesh back out its news rooms and its international bureaus and that it will act in the public interest because that's what the lettered elite who form its main readership will demand. There are distinct advantages to not pandering to the unwashed masses the way that Fox does, albeit in the interests of the same economic ranks those Times elites belong to.

I for one would love for actual leadership to replace the purely moneyed definitions which now seem to have the monopoly on determination of who's elite and who's the hoi polloi. But leadership depends on trust and a servant mentality from the top. Our market structures presume that we should mistrust our leadership, especially now that our leadership is marketed too.

I'll pay for the Times sure, just like I'll pay for PBS. But I do have to say that I'd prefer that we all share the costs. For reasons of our public safety and our public health and our public rhetoric and the relative safety and peacefulness of our public squares, I certainly prefer that we work to decrease rather than to exacerbate the divide in means between the have-it-alls and the have-almost-nothings.

And it doesn't help that we export so much of our grey to China. I look forward to technologies which really do green the entire globe. Which instead of nuclear power-plants, make it attractive for us to mine our extravagant wattage waste in favor of less bloated bodies and homes. But that also will depend on public moneys being drawn away from subsidies to Big Oil and Big Corn and Soy.

It's a worrisome time right now. We're all going to end up paying for these times. That's the only certainty.

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.

The Gold Standard Oil for Complexity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fools rush in!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Narrative Imperative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Occam's Razor Redux - Rupert Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance - Doggie Style

Hmmm, it seems to me I've worried this one enough, but, well just like dogs seem to worry bones based on some hard-wired (what a weird locution) feedback loop, certain things just won't get out of my head. Like I have this dog companion now who came along with my companion companion, and she automatically knows which oncoming dogs to steer clear of and which to avoid.

Not being a dog person, I have no clue. So, I'm focusing on which dogs cause this one to be alert, and which are ignored and I'm looking for some clues based on size or skittishness, and then finally I ask at what must be the right moment, and the answer is 'oh, I just look at the owner.'

Now I'm sure I could have discerned some pattern eventually and become almost as reliable in my predictions, but basically I was looking at the wrong thing. I would have required a lot more data, and I'm not that smart. You should have seen me trying to figure out the best way to light a wood stove and maximize its output. Eventually I became a master, but there was hardly anything conscious or systematic about it. A master would have put me to shame, though maybe not with my stove.

My master in the doggie follies did happen to know her own trick, which made it trivially easy to teach and so now I can quickly learn which dogs to avoid. Wouldn't it be great if all teaching were that trivial? The trouble is that I doubt I could teach someone else to light a fire as well as I finally was able. And to add difficulty to trouble, it seems just as likely that someone else would do better off alone rather than to try to assimilate my highly idiosyncratic and possibly mistaken assumptions.

I do rather tend to assume that my students have a better way than I might show them, although if someone is evidently experiencing frustration, I'll break down my assumptions for them. Ways to estimate moisture content, the air flow in some relation to holding the heat in depending on how much heat is being generated. And finally that wonderful balance where there is very little air moving through, but lots of heat generated. It feels like magic. I'm talking about my wood stove.

I've taken a glancing read of Sheldrake's radical departure from analysis to describe morphogenetic fields. It's exciting. But here's a case of satisfying Occam's Razor without any facility to fill in the space where the answer lies.

In the case of a magic trick also, you are already certain that things are not as they seem since the seeming is simply too unthinkable. But you don't know where to look. If someone points it out, you feel that wonderful 'aha!' sense of cognitive dissonance resolved.

I need detail. Just how does a morphogenetic field work? What does it explain that genetic expression doesn't for instance. And if it "explains" why something once learned makes it easier for remote learners to learn it the next time around even without teaching, how is that different from the fact that simply knowing that something has been solved makes the solution both easier to accomplish and sometimes less interesting?

Just because some shift in the discourse patterns propagates faster than we think it should given what we know about communication doesn't mean we know everything about communication. There are lots of things going on in our peripheral vision, as it were, that never enter our consciousness.

"Morphic Resonance" seems too vague a catchphase, and in danger of exposure as was the "ether," which turned out not to have been necessary for the propagation of perceptual information. And yet its evaporation - the *poof* which made the ether go away - actually forced a look toward a far stranger construing of the way things work. It seems that there are "as if" waves which propagate in nothingness in advance of perceptual impingements.

Now this is an explanation which nicely fuels still more investigation, since it both answers and defines new questions. We can chase our tail forever!

When staring us down, right in the face, as it were, is a resolution which both satisfies the demands of Occam, as well as to do away with that frustrating named lacuna. Morphic Resonance is, in other words, a place-holder without meaning, rather like God or soul or for that matter mind. The very utterance of the word fools the mind (??)  into thinking that something will be found to fill the space where something simply must be because we named it.

In fact (I use the term advisedly, which is to say as self-conscious metaphor) what has to happen is that we need to change our usage. Matter propagates very much as if there were an ether, the way that sound waves propagate through matter.

Mind functions very much as though it were located, even though it's demonstrably not. Mind might be destroyed right along with brain, but so is sense when words are jumbled. That doesn't mean the sense was *in* the words.

Although it represents my strongest self-identification, I have no trouble at all conceiving that my mind extends to all the universe of which I am aware. Right down or back or over to that great Big Bang, I suppose. I think that's what it means to make sense. Um, not that I always make sense, but you know what I mean.

My mind would be nothing were it not for the words and texts and discourse of all those others before and around me. And once we succeed in our quest for dominion over all that lives on earth, I have no trouble at all declaring, now before it's too late, that my consciousness will go the way of all consciousness. To sleep, perchance to dream. Most certainly not to be.

It is not a simple trick of language to consider that mind is coeval with cosmos. It's just a better definition of the word. Things exist in relation before they are in perceptual touch. Perception is mediated by particles, right down to the limit of that elusive hadron, graviton, what you will.

Beyond it? There is emotional attraction; a prediction of contact, though no force can be detected.

Opening an E-mail to Daniel C. Dennett

Naturally, Professor Dennett can't afford to read nor certainly respond to anonymous emails from his fandom, but at least I got a very nice canned response explaining that.

Still, even though it's as dense and therefore time-consuming to read as everything I write, I thought I'd post it here, just for the record.

Of course, since writing it, my own thinking has evolved, and Professor Bem was kind enough to remind me that he has refuted his refuters, and more importantly, that he did, in fact, use both a pseudo random number generator and a true random number generator in his experiments.

So, while I would drop my proposed "experiment" I still maintain that all that can be tested for is the reasonable limits for a definition of mind (its boundary) and not pre-cognition per se.  Or in other words, if mind cannot be dis-implicated from matter (a major burden of Dennett's work) then the imposition of time's arrow, which is difficult to accomplish *in* the mind, is difficult to distinguish from fictional or creative narrative.

It is, of course, my burden to de-center notions of narrtive true-ing processes more generally, and I carry on:

Professor Dennett;

I've just finished reading Consciousness Explained and then familiarizing myself with your work more generally. In brief, I find the writing brilliant and the overall case cogent and convincing. Since it's far too late for me to take up the study of consciousness to the level of your accomplishment,  I feel entirely comfortable saying that for my purposes you have indeed explained consciousness. (I'll still read on through what you've written since!)

Here's why I write: As it happens, I read your book in light of the soon to be published work of Professor Bem regarding Psi and possibly pre-cognition of which I'm sure you are aware. I also read a cogent critique from the Bayesian side of statistics which relieves me, at least, of the need to worry too much about pre-cognition as Bem's work purports to discover it. Were there pre-cognition it would, of course, fall within the margin of error which Bayesian statistics provides as corrective to non-Bayesian methods. That's almost definitional. Accounting for the priors is hard to distinguish from accounting for frame of mind.

But since your approach to consciousness defies attempts to "locate" it, say in a brain, and since therefore there can be no meaning to simultaneity among drafted cognitions in a single mind - as you demonstrate convincingly in your book - therefore time's arrow has no place "in" the mind. A properly time-sequenced narrative must emerge for sense to prevail, but that is a separate matter from the order of events perceived, conceived, cognized or re-cognized.

You also challenge, at least implicitly, the bordering of the mind by the limits of its physical substrate (the brain, for instance) among other places by your suggestion that a single mind may be thought to be distributed, as in certain twins who inhabit a coherent biography.

So first of all, if there is no singular locus for any thought inside the brain, any cognition there must in effect allow for pre-cognition. Indeed it's not a problem worth bothering about, since even in principle there's no way to measure it, again as I believe you amply demonstrate in this book. At the very least any thought remains subject to subsequent cognition for so long as it might be held in abeyance by some sense that there will be more to assimilate before a completed thought is uttered.

Consciousness, in other words, may have more to do with sense of completion, rather more like the ballistic act of throwing a ball than like hitting a target. You initiate and correct along the way until release.

But more interestingly to me, if the mind cannot be located entirely "inside" the brain, then all those peripheral happenings which impinge on thought, of course including chance or random events, could be thought to condition moment of release according to their various potentials and probabilities (as variously perceived or conceived) regardless of their literal time-sequencing.

In Bem's experiment, the button-clickers have some anticipation of porn - they have a motive to click, not unlike someone playing Jeopardy.

Pre-cognition, however, is the wrong thing to test for. Rather, there should be some test along the lines of how Bell's Theorem is tested in physics, to demonstrate the impossibility to disprove spatial separation of cognitive inputs (technically indistinguishable from pre-cognition) to within the margin of error between Bayesian and non-Bayesian statistical models.

My suggestion would be to redo the Bem experiment but using the pseudo-random number generated by the bounded system of the computer, rather than the "true" random number generated in the same "cosmos" within which the subject's mind is choosing.

After all, it is damned impossible to determine that the coin is a fair coin after a long run of heads, other than by invoking "prior" knowledge. But as with voting machines which preserve a physical record, as least with a pseudo random number, you have a trace to compare against.

Of course it is my sense that, as with physical reality, there is some dimension beyond which certainty is not only impossible for practical reasons, but impossible in principle. I suspect that this prospect unsettles you no more than it does me. I'd love to learn of a better conceived experiment than the one I propose, but I can't think one up right now - I know it's out there!

Of course I have plenty more to say on the subject, but I have used enough of your time (pure wishful thinking on my part).

Best!