Review: When We Cease to Understand the World

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The very first sentence and paragraph reads easily and smoothly. I am drawn forward. I want to read, and I know already that this book will be finished in a single sitting. Would that all books would read that way!

I have a very distinct memory of carrying a long piece of lumber from the stack to the basement window when Dad was building a fallout shelter as we were urged to do back when nukes were suddenly all too real. I remember steering the plank around a curvy trajectory. I didn't know about momentum, but my body did.

What I really remember is much later learning about momentum and relating the knowledge to the mystery of what I'd accomplished in all ignorance earlier, when I was maybe 7 or 8 years old. How had my body known? Only later would I crash boards around corners, having grown, perhaps, too conscious.

I used words in the same way, with a kind of confidence, even though I later learned that I couldn't formally define many of the words that I deployed. Still, I communicated well enough. No understanding required. It was a social thing, and trivial.

I think I might have given this book a full five stars except that I couldn't find the literature there. This is a simple narration of the complex ironies engaged by those we consider to be our greatest thinkers. Those who invented the bomb from a new and fundamental understanding of physics. Those who could handle abstraction so abstruse that they couldn't even follow their own proofs after exit from their rapture. Who only knew that there was something missing by a kind of intuition formed in a universe they inhabited in their minds and of which the rest of us remain largely unaware.

The awesome strangeness of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory is made to feel both mundane and impossible. In just the same way, we can't differentiate between the drive for fame and the more religious-seeming drive for ultimate understanding among the book's 'protagonists'. We have no way to tell who will catapult to public adulation and who will disappear.

The book describes irony on a cosmic scale, and I think that's why, in the end, I didn't really care for it all that much. There was no character development; these characters were taken mostly intact from history. Their sexual foibles distinguished them from almost no-one, which made their heroics look shrunken as well. The plot was interesting just because some brilliant soul could be directly responsible for mass calculated murder and still care for the overall life on the planet. It is an exceedingly interesting read. But I'm not sure that I cared. I couldn't quite identify with any motive.

And by books end we are left actually believing that the lives we lead exist in the same abstract whorls that physicists describe, perhaps only to themselves, which can disappear in a massive poof. Dommage et tant pis, henh?

Knowing it all is the same as ending it all, and an author is mostly made up of the poses made for the marketing tour. One must look the part more than anything. We know intelligence when we see it. It has privileged understanding. Undefinable.

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Consciousness and the Brain

 

Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts by Stanislas Dehaene
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an excellent survey of that particular area of brain science at the forefront of which Dehaene is working. The bibliography alone is worth the purchase, and the narrative recognizes the work of a large group of direct colleagues, all of which provide some indication of how important his area is.

I was surprised to find Julian Jaynes referenced, which makes the second (after Dawkins) respectful nod I've seen from a respected source. He also pulls in Dennett and even Chalmers by the end, though Chalmers in a pretty dismissive way. I guess what I'm saying is that here is an exceedingly thoughtful and well-read scientist who had earned my solid confidence.

I do have to confess that his placing himself among those who ascribe to the 'brain in a vat' school of consciousness theorists puts me off. This also, obviously, means that he supposes that artificial consciousness is possible. While he takes pains to distinguish his model for consciousness from those which deploy computer metaphors, he still operates strictly within a fully empirical model, no spooks allowed.

No spooks allowed to my thinking either, but while I give him full high marks for his excellent science, I do believe that he operates within an obsolete paradigm. I say this mostly because he doesn't even consider emotion as a part of consciousness. I would guess that all the believers in 'brain in a vat' suppose that emotions are some low-order epiphenomena whose existence will drop out once the hard problems are resolved. And this hard stuff is really still mathematical and computational problems as presented here, metaphor or no.

In part, I'm buying the claim for a new paradigm staked out in another recent read: How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, by Lisa Barrett (no mention in this book's bibliography). That book lays out a more constructivist view of reality, to be distinguished from the perceptually based theory of consciousness here. Everything about Dehaene's theory supposes a fixed and subject-independent external reality which correlates to whatever goes on in the brain.

Dehaene takes pains to distinguish those aspects of his experimental evidence which provide correlation without demonstrating causation or real findings. This is the bugaboo of all statistically-based investigation, which is most of science now. Long gone are the days of either/or billiard ball physics. All mechanism has now been replaced with either/or digital teasing out of a hidden reality (the reality beyond what we can perceive - the real real) which is so far from perception as to stretch credulity about the proof of a boson's existence, say, to almost the extent that social science might want you to see cultural relativity in the way that we construct most of our more mundane realities.

Lisa Barrett starts with how emotions are culturally grounded (not universal and inborn, as they have often been assumed to be) and constructed, like language is. Her bedrock is emotional concepts, which are also shared, often as a part of language, just as all reality is. I believe that Dehaene would agree about the language connection. He may even have been informed by Jaynes!

One way to distinguish emotional from perceptual "feeling" is that emotion is felt directly "in the mind" while perceptual feeling passes through the body, to be felt - perceived - at a distance. Indeed, one might suggest (I sure would) that most of the evidence described in this book - which relates to neuron-based brain activity as captured by varieties of instrumentation descended from fMRI and EEG - might reference more what is felt by the mind than is allowed here by its transmutation into 'readings' on the sort of instrument which stands-in for perception.

I am asking the question whether things which come to consciousness are ever emotion-free. Surely we must admit that most of what determines who we are - including our consciousness - is derived from a series of accidents more than it is derived from personal agency. Just try being born black (as has been related in ways that I fully trust).

Or in other words, much of what Dehaene defines as consciousness might be more emotive than empirically based. We can also read emotions by interpreting facial expression or heart-rate, but that doesn't mean that we've learned anything about what emotion essentially is.

To be fair, Dehaene is putting subjective reality fully front and center in his research. To be conscious is to be able to report what one is conscious of, which would include hallucinations, delusions, trompe-l'oeil, and more unreal stuff.

Dehaene provides a brilliantly comprehensive look at how most of the perceptual data which the brain receives is combined, conditioned, organized and conceptualized at the subliminal pre-conscious level. Consciousness is the coming into being of what feels to me like a kind of standing wave in a feedback loop. One of his great accomplishments is progress toward the detection of consciousness in a damaged brain, removed from bodily interaction from the world about.

Evidence for consciousness is made when all the subliminal unconscious Bayesian conjectures attempting to match what's actually "out there" with the raw perceptual data coming in finds a good match from memory 'within'. He describes the "ignition" of consciousness as happening when there is feedback from the conscious regions of the brain to where the subliminal stuff is happening. Contact!

There is a kind of match, or what I would call a kind of standing wave of resonance between subliminal constructs and what deserves or requires conscious awareness and attention. I would call it that because it might have the quality of emergence, like a snowflake, whose structure cannot be predicted from knowledge about its component parts, and their interactions. Emergent qualities put the lie to our current beliefs about causality, almost as though what emerges is a kind of primordial concept on the order of a Platonic idea. Or life itself, which is an emergent quality of matter.

In much the way that our eyes must constantly move about so that our brain can form a smooth reality in which we might navigate, this subliminal neural conjecture also jitters about on its own; not simply waiting for information to come in. Massive amounts of perceptual data turn into conscious awareness of some important 'thing' depending on our conscious attention and arousal. The subconscious mind already narrates - strings together in time - worthy candidates for conscious claiming. Consciousness is always slow to the game, taking credit for what the unconscious mind already put together from low-speed interconnections of disparate workings of the brain. Conceptualization is synchrony, where narrative builds across time. Aha!

Along with Lisa Barrett (I believe), I would call this coming to consciousness an emotive event. Like a lot of consciousness researchers, Dehaene looks for correlates in the brain for what is present to our conscious awareness. This sounds to me very much like what I would consider to be the mistaken notion that our brain contains a more or less complete "image" of the world around us. I would rather call these often so-called images what they really are, which is a collection of concepts.

One forms a concept of, say, a lion, by experience with several such creatures, likely preloaded with a name; a word from one's shared language. When confronted by an actual instance of the lion concept, and when that fills front and center of conscious awareness, we don't choose what to do about it based on conscious anything before being energized by the powerful feeling of fear.

Calling up what we think is a mental image of the lion might simply be reliving prior perceptions which are "stored" in our brain as delayed - endlessly looping - actual perceptions of actual things. This insight derives from the Spread Mind theory of Riccardo Manzotti (also not referenced in this book).

Manzotti comes from the field of artificial intelligence and not from neurology, and so is likely considered a flake from the perspective of serious brain scientists. Ironically enough, Manzotti seems to agree with me that there will be no such thing as artificial intelligence; at least not that would replicate human intelligence.

The big advantage of the Spread Mind theory as a basis to understand consciousness is that one doesn't have to decide whether objective reality is constructed. This is the same collapse that quantum physics realized, where subject can never be teased out entirely from object; where objects are a construct of probability until detected into reality. One is looking in the wrong place if one is looking for quantum features of the brain as a basis for "free will." They are already out there.

Intelligence is no more contained in and by a brain than a gene without its proper niche can describe a living host. By definition, the niche is as complex as the projected creature. Context and object, concept and percept, standing waves and particles, emotive and motive forces, conspire together for reality to emerge.

Artificial intelligence is not impossible because human intelligence is so very special. It's not. And I really doubt that human intelligence has gone very far toward what intelligence could be. Which is just another way to suggest that natural evolution isn't done yet. But what I am saying is that there would be and can be no intelligence at all without the whole of life on the planet. And I don't mean must life as it "led up" to us, but life as it is all around us. "Brain in a vat" is metaphor for intelligent life on an artificial planet or in virtual reality. Neither are possible.

(The living and conscious brain of a person who's lost their brain stem proves only the same thing that consciousness in a baby proves - neither is any way to live a full life)

Why is artificial intelligence not possible? you ask. Well, it is possible and it's all around us, but it will never be conscious.

OK, so here's my own little flaky contribution to the science of consciousness: emotion is not just in the mind, it's also out there, along with all that we perceive. Surely you might agree that lots of animals have emotions, but that's not the limit to what I mean. I mean that emotion is elemental in just the way that subatomic particles and forces are. We think the latter are what composes reality, but we know them directly only as our bodies interact with them.

Turns out that our interactions are determined by a hidden, non-perceptual reality which is only accessible by way of the conceptual gymnastics of a living mind in a living body which can handle the instrumental tools for discovery. These concepts are also shared, and not contained "inside" our minds. Gravity is the boundary between particle-mediated forces and the emotive prognostications of impingement among emergent beings. Both are equally real. Particles and concepts both pop in and out of nothingness. Reality is irony writ large.

Consciousness, even as it exists in a lizard or maybe a spider, allows us to navigate - to move - in the real world as it actually is, and even to make it more as we wish it to be, once we become human - a work still very much in progress. Our imagination helps with that. We are more intelligent in our interactions with reality, apparently, than is any other creature. That's especially so once language enters our picture and we can conspire together, as this book so powerfully demonstrates. Indeed the brain here is presented almost as a hierarchical ordering of a community of billions of otherwise independently clustering and firing neurons. It is presented as a metaphor for how society and civilization have accomplished so very much, so singularly as a social species. We are not conscious alone.

Navigating the world is, of course, directional in time and space. Our behaviors are based on the collective predictions of our neurons and our society. For physical reality, time is defined by entropy. The running out of a clock; the wearing of rocks in a river; the death of any individual life. Life moves the other way and has since the beginning of time.

In the beginning was the concept; a replicable structure for matter otherwise blowing apart. Atoms, molecules, structures, and the universal replicators of genetics. The anti-entropic direction for life - forward in time - is composed of the chance recombination of the raw stuff of physics into persistent conceptual structures. Their recombination in the direction of life makes a prognostication for the future. There are no physical forces which move us collectively that way. There is only emotive attraction and repulsion which no instrument will ever measure directly.

Emotion is what binds us to all of "creation." Emotion is what connects us to all that is alive. I mean this is the same technical sense that is meant when you call out a proton, please. I know we don't give a shit for the whales or the wolves, or even for each other based on the evidence. But that doesn't mean we're not connected. It does mean that to conceive of the cosmos as built of zeros and ones means to conceive of a cosmos in a vat, disconnected from anything else.

There is more to life than we can know by instrumental science. A mind confined to a brain - the brain in a vat, or the butterfly in the diving bell - is but a correlate to a mind and not the real thing.

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诗人

One evening after dinner

I crave a sweet
Next day I load up
Treats indiscriminated
Deprecated by number

I crave wine

To also chug out of its
Time unappreciated

I lose my friend
I have passed
The End

World War III "It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us."

Fiona Hill says that WW III has already started, and we're in it. Remember her? She was a truth talker at Trump's impeachment hearings. She got a makeover before appearing on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. She didn't look so Soviet grim, and her rhetoric was trimmed of all the incendiaries. 

My long-distance one-way correspondent Indi says the oxygen in the coal mine has already gone, and that his people on Sri Lanka are the canaries. No wonder we don't think twice about driving our cars Indi, when the global military dwarfs civilian desecration.

Jonathan Franzen is vilified for suggesting that since we're not going to do anything about global warming, we should at least do those things that we can and maybe will do, to save some birds, some habitat, some bits of nature which many of us still require. 

I sure won't do anything. What is there to do when you still have to slog past weirdly happy advertisements to see the newreels from Ukraine? That's just way too much cognitive dissonance for me to bear.

There is no point in trying to change minds. Humans won't be doing anything different. I know I won't. I wouldn't know what to do. I'm tending toward the Marcuse camp; woke to the fact that being presented with pre-steeped-in-money choices does not a democracy make.

But it's far more than that. Herbert Marcuse and Walter Benjamin cross in the arena of aesthetics. Marcuse' One-Dimensional Man describes a life desublimated, where the transitive value of a concept has been reduced to the fixed, denotative, and even imperative nature of noun as thing, embedded not in an aura of contingency, but in a rational cosmos of fixed meanings.

Marcuse struggled mightily, and likely failed, to rid Marxist Dialectic of the trap that history would always be written in a progressive direction. As if history would move with the same inevitable progression that global capital does. He replaces the inevitability of progress with the built-in draw of concepts, which belong to the province of thought, toward a future where actual things remain free to move toward essence, if not toward ideal.

And yes it is mechanical reproduction writ large and populating even thought, which enacts the desublimation. Marcuse' nightmare is an instrumental world where 'what is' gets replaced with 'how to.' 

Along with Marcuse, we remain in the thrall of authenticity, now projected onto NFTs and the blockchain, as though that doesn't demarcate the final solution and never something ameliorative. It is the end and not the beginning when highest trust is also mechanical.

You must protect and own your passcode, which Trumps your identity. Your identity, authentic or not, can only exist in that aura of contingency; those know you who can identify your body after death. And even then there must be circumstance for habeas corpus. It was never your body that mattered. It was your body enlivened in the direction of life.

There is only the concept of number which requires desublimation. There is no essence to number but the number itself. And now our rational oppressively administered world is defined by digital everything. Our freedom is complete. History ends. 

It is not science which is indifferent to ought in the place of is. Only nature is indifferent. And we must not cheer for the lion or the lamb. Nature is not God. God is love, which is also the direction for life's evolution in nature. This is not something to cheer. It is something that we must align with, as with the flow of a river, or the wind which fills our sails. 

Instrumental or mechanical rampage against nature can only inflame the fight, and when we turn to the art of war, war as art, the battle is already lost, for we have become irrelevant. No different from any other species disappearance.

I don't and won't do Facebook for a bejillion reasons, some political, some as protest about how its business model lives on the corpse of our political system, but mostly because it has replaced all personal contact. I'd rather be stark raving alone than to be forced into that fake public space.

I'm certain that my problem with Facebook is that expressions of emotion always seem performative to me. Facebook changes the performance, in at least the sense that real emotions - the kind you simply can't hold back - will never appear on Facebook. You post there after bouts of extreme joy or sadness or terror. Real emotions require real contact.

The limits to what you may say on Facebook precisely disallow improper condolence or snark against a "friend." And this is precisely what allows you to forward and promote falsehood. If science is neutral, then so is falsehood. And I will not be shamed for my ignorance of the sanctioned ways.

Nature will do its thing, in any case. I know I should have embraced Zoom meetups during the depths of the pandemic, but it just reminded me of what was missing. I try not to drive my car, but sometimes I just have to. And when I do walk, which is most of the time, I'm still almost the only one on the street. Although the airport parking lots have filled again. What? The virus has won. Just like Al Qaeda had already won when we went all military on their demand. Performative emotion cubed. Dubya said we had no choice but to be enraged, and Hilary cheered.

When I observe that private cars will be gone within ten years, folks think I'm nuts or just plain cranky. I'm not reading any tea leaves; I'm just stating the obvious. The earth won't stand for it. I mean, I gaze at the vehicles passing by and wonder which one I should buy next, to support the mobile lifestyle that I miss. I'm right in there will all the others that the ads target. I'm just not as excited as the ads make me think I should be. As I guess everyone else is about buying shit.

The only place and time I see books advertised is when I'm reading on my Kindle. At least they don't interrupt my reading. Just sayin'

I'm not watching for what to do any other more than the Ukrainians were watching out for what they should be doing when Putin would inevitably send his forces in. Now they're just doing it, as we all will be doing it when nature sends the forces in. It's not like I'm really OK with that, but I guess I have to be. I try to be at least mentally prepared.

I don't want to get involved in debates about what nature means. Artifice versus nature kind of thing. Art versus schlock. Nature doesn't mean anything. Nature just is.

In my usage here, nature means the real. The real is that part of understanding that science might approach but will never reach. The real is what's always beyond us, but always there. Pretty much by definition ignorance will exceed knowledge, no matter how instrumentally powerful our science makes us feel. And science barely touches people, politics, and the weather when those move at world-changing pace and scale.

Humans have quite simply exceeded any proper scale in our homebuilding. Escape velocity leads only to the end of us.

I suspect the changes will happen a lot faster than we could ever anticipate. Faster even than the results of a nuclear war - that is if we manage to avoid nuclear war. China may be our truest friend if it comes to that brink, but somehow the only thing that both sides of our two-party political system agree on is the singular assessment that China is our greatest threat. As if being handed pre-cooked choices defined by money about whom to elect defines democracy. Sheesh.

We would and will know what to do if nuclear war breaks out. We declare emergency and then work like hell to retrieve whatever we can that comes closest to what we now have, before the fall. 

But there are also possibilities for the reconstitution of both scientific and political/social understanding which are, collectively, far more powerful than any bomb or any virus. Understanding of Einstein's equation of mass with energy enabled us to realize the release of 'mass quantities of energy' in only a few short years of engineering implementation. We still struggle to contain and make that energy useful. That also is both a political and scientific struggle for engineering to accomplish.

We won't know what to do when the economy fully collapses. Based on climate change, or a new pandemic, or mass migrations, or crop collapse or sea level rise, there won't be any going back to normal, and we have no models for a new normal.

Nuclear war would also be force majeure, an act of God, an act of nature. Just as I am at fault for all my inaction, humanity will feel our failure. We will feel that this has been an act of man, and we will perform our grief before nothing but God. Nothing less can be worthy to accept our contrition.

And anyhow how would fighting in the direction of forcing humans to do what they should and even must do make one virtuous? I wonder how many Chicken Littles were running around Ukraine last year? Our Chicken Littles call out China, because no harm can come from that, or at least the harm is minuscule compared to the political gains for whatever upcoming election. What does bankrupt mean again?

I'll tell you what the new normal had better be. It had better be us getting back together as families and as a people not as a nation. It had better be the scrapping of the style of capitalism that triggered our collapse. Where we drive off the edge of the earth like a self-driving car that's lost its electronics. Capitalism, as we've allowed it to craft us, is running on automatic and it won't stop before it ends.

That's not a prediction. That's a fact, and we'd better prepare for it. But we won't. 

Thing is that it's hard to know what to believe and even harder to know what to do. The QAnon Trumpers are my exemplar of the nightmare of waking up and realizing that you've bought a pack of lies. It could happen to any of us. Which is why we, right alongside the QAnon nutjobs, need the insurance of agreeing with those closest to us. They can't all be wrong. That's pretty much how politics works anymore. You elect someone who's willing to say out loud in public from a position of power something which reinforces a set of beliefs that you know somewhere in the recesses of your mind might not be true. Or it might be actually insane. But you need them to keep your belief alive that the other side is insane.

That something in you wants or needs it to be true, just to end your confusion. We're all insane together now. In unison across the globe.

The biggest comeuppance of all would be to realize that your version of God was never true. That priests are not good, or that scientists can sell out as easily as any class of people. 

It has long since been the case that the scientific method demonstrates that humanity must take responsibility for reality or perish. Not by engineering implemented according to what we can prove that we do actually understand. Rather, by being chastened by our more recent understanding that as subjects, we are part of and not apart from what is out there.

Obama worked for the Oligarchs as a semi-closeted neoliberal. Says the Maoist from Austin Texas fighting on the Russian side against the Ukrainians who are just working for Obama too. Then Bratton Tweets this:

An actor playing the President who is elected President who may die for the symbolic value of the position he holds is what living in a simulation means.

— Benjamin Bratton (@bratton) February 25, 2022

How is one even to parse this? Posted just before Bratton's Strelka Institute is shuttered in solidarity with Ukraine. Couldn't the same quote apply to Trump? Is that how Bratton meant it?

We are living in a simulation, and we're glad we had it for how it helped us to survive COVID-19.

But I, for one, don't want to live in a simulation, I want to live in the real. Just not so real as where that guy from Austin is living. Just not so real that God is my copilot. I just don't want to be duped. No matter how powerful are the powers that be, they are drunk with their power and I won't be duped.

So I'll keep as quiet as I can. Until someone else notices that the truths we all live by are no longer true. Nature, so called, will give the lie. Nature is also within each of us. The boundaries shall dissolve.

We've crossed a line with what we think it means to understand something. We know what understanding means when it guides our actions and the result of those actions is what we wanted. When we take it to the vast abstraction of "living in a simulation," there's absolutely no chance that we will prove our understanding.

I'm not denigrating Zelenskyy. He has inhabited his role and become real. May it happen to each of us before it is already too late.

Letting Go of Individualism

We live in a world where the woke think that - no, the woke know that the task is to raise the consciousness of the masses so that the masses overthrow the corrupt system. That feels more hopeless now than ever.

Why? Or should I ask why must reaction set in before the amelioration? Why must the imaginaries of national borders be hardened, and nativism, the newspeak for racist anti-nativism, be hardened even more? Why must leadership become caricature, and why must starlets display pornographic narcissism to be discovered while crude invention rules the world? Why?

I'm reading, or maybe I'm re-reading, Marcuse' One Dimensional Man, which is really hard to read. If I can't read it, then how are the uneducated to read it. Does reading mean remembering? I lack the taxonomic gene. But wait, education is mostly about programming people into the system as it is, so education can't be any advantage. Even Marcuse has been adopted by the Academy, so why would we think there can be answers there? 

Why wouldn't we think he would be forgotten. Forgotten is defined by being too far outside the mainstream of thought, even though the book remains as relevant as it was before our current cybernetic digital dystopia. It is as he envisioned and imagined it. Frankenstein's monster shall always be the face of merit. Made up pretty.

I like to imagine that science is a better way forward than ideology can ever be. I still imagine that it is, even though so many people now deny the reality of even the most obvious scientific truths. You can't raise someone's consciousness if you can't even convince them of the basic difference between truth and illusion.

But along with the crazies, I believe that science is artificially stuck in an obsolete paradigm. And so I read Marcuse to find out if he, too, is still embedded in the false consciousness of individualism. 

Marcuse still seems to depend on the moral imperative to provide to each according to their needs, rather than what I would consider to be the more scientific realization that we are not fundamentally separate from our fellow humans. Is the end of oppression also the plain end of humanity? It is certainly the end of gangs of besouled individuals defining it.

Marcuse remains too hard for me to read for me to be able to call him out. I'm hoping he is translatable, according to what might actually be in the process, finally, of shifting out from that godawful paradigm that took us through the twentieth century. The jury is still way out. 

It's very hard to imagine not being able to jump in my car and go where I wish, in comfort. It's harder still to imagine not having my private space where I can enjoy surroundings arranged the way I like them, within the limits of my means, of course.  A private jet is simply not part of my imaginary, nor is a yacht bigger than a dinghy. I find these things to be self-evidently foul.

I am, in other words, fully integrated into our modern system of human oppression for the sake of wealth and power concentration.

It's harder still to imagine wanting to move into the multi-level care facility that my parents chose for their dotage. It's a brilliant scheme and brilliantly regulated here in New York State. You have to be of sound mind and body when you move in, and then a kind of structured insurance program guarantees that your monthly fees won't go up no matter the level of care that you require. 

The whole arrangement is a pretty good metaphor for how we do live, and yet your life is essentially over once you enter this arrangement. For a brief while the living is very good. You don't have to cook if you don't feel like it, and you have the company of good friends each evening. But you eventually have to relinquish your car, just slightly before you have to relinquish your independence and move into an assisted living space. 

The kitchen becomes attenuated, the TV preprogrammed, and while you can still retain your sense of style, the only private separation is between living space and bathroom. The kids no longer want to visit when you don't do the cooking.

And then. 

It's a gift, really, to your children, because if you do have any sort of estimable estate, it will be preserved for your children; your trustees and assigns. Some ninety percent of the principal is returned to the estate at death. I suppose there are other quasi-legal ways to do that, but this one seems very humane and elegant.

Seeming may not make it so.

I thank the gods that my own retirement funds won't afford me that choice. Like most of my generation, I would rather die. So far, that's not an option between independence and assisted living. No one would take it anyhow if it were. It's only nice to think about in the abstract.

I wonder if community will ever return.

I've lived in a hotel room in Shanghai, so I actually can imagine living in a humane city where cars are not required. By a painless combination of walking and subways, I could get most literally anywhere without any thought at all of cost. Riding in a car, though preferred by most denizens of Shanghai, was pure frustration for me. That's up against the remembered car-nirvana of the United States. Cars in China were dystopia from day one. I never had the slightest inclination to do it, though I did it plenty, riding in cars. But at least Shanghai imposes limits when the traffic grows out of proportion. At least the cars are imagined as temporary. For the sake of economic stimulation only, Up against the West.

Here and right now, living quite affordably in Buffalo, NY, where the public transportation is both absurd and for shit, I do have to calculate the cost of gas against spontaneous desire. Skiing every day is out of the economic question, even if I could afford the slope fees.

And then there's the neighbor problem. Increasingly across my long-enough life I have ceased to know my neighbors. Now I live in a very mixed, economically, socially, racially and gender preference-wise small apartment building. I know my neighbors better, but it's still hard to imagine how to organize a building party. We do care for one another, but we also all do enjoy our privacy. I think we really don't wish to know one another any better than we already do. My home is as imaginary as our nation is and always was.

Zizek defines neighbors as people who smell. Visitors tell me that my hallway smells. I've grown insensitive. The building is very old.

I did also live in Shanghai in a somewhat posh apartment building. My stay was lengthened, and its cost - despite two bedrooms, included fiber-optic Internet and two ginormous flat screens and a full kitchen including washer/dryer (a new concept for me - all-in-one) - was still below the cost of my cheap hotel, when it was for a longer haul.

I liked the hotel better, just simply because there was social time at breakfast. But I also really enjoyed the freedom to invite my daughter for a visit to my apartment when the round-trip ticket was an incredible $800. We had a blast together.

Meanwhile, I'm glad my academic China project failed, since COVID would have ruined it anyhow. Not to mention global politics. In any case I had no way to connect our ambitions to grounded reality. Typical spot in the middle, without proper authority.

Even harder for me to imagine than living without my car and without privacy and not among people just like me (which would feel as boring as the suburbs do) is to imagine a world without the intellectual freedom that we still enjoy in these United States.

China meanwhile churns away like the responsible adult on the planet, suppressing dissent and enforcing conformity to a social order which has decreed that there will be a day when they can open the doors post-COVID. I don't think that COVID very much agrees with that plan, and so I'm glad I'm still here, despite the crazies that we harbor. 

I mean at least Trump smoked them all out so that we can easily identify who doesn't give a flying fuck for their fellow humankind. We know who cares only for power and for the meritocratic apologies for living the hyper good hyper individualistic life.

Well, honestly, I don't crave to live with or like Gwyneth does, thank you very much. I'd rather live where Mom does, which is the same, I suppose, as saying I'd rather die. Department of redundancy department. In any case, while whatever on-screen sex has in real life, it must bear the same resemblance to actual life as does a newscaster's presented elocution to how actual people actually speak.

About half our population seems to have built castles in the sky, and have powered their pickup trucks to move into them. Good riddance? Don't think so. They rule us internally if not ostensively. Money seems to want them to. Can you even imagine living up to those production values for your daily bread?

I'm really not so very certain that I understand the differences among cancel culture, Fox News culture, and the culture of contemporary China. They're all destructive of the main thing that I hold dear. And I'm not talking about my private right to believe any fucking thing that I wish. I'm talking about the demise of the social, where we get to work out our beliefs together. Where we get to work out reality together. Where we aren't just blindly following some leader or some leadership. Lemmings to the seas, which ascend to meet us.

We're done here in America if we don't figure out how to live without our cars and pickups, electric or gas. We're done if we don't figure out how to get to know our neighbors. At least the Trumpers have that part right, though they've pretty much done it to the exclusion of reality altogether.

China, meanwhile, has wisely banned both the Ponzi-scheme of bitcoin and the cheeky incursion into humanity of yet another predictable virus. Theirs is a trap we won't enter. Nor will we allow the government to balance its accounts by way of traceable digital currency, the way toard which China is wisely moving.

On the other hand . . . I have no idea why Zhang Yimou needs so badly to provoke Western paranoia. He did it with hordes in 2008, and now he does it with a ginormous flatscreen. Concentrated hoards of another sort, that the West can't or won't or in any case doesn't produce anymore. We like to watch, Chauncey Gardner, we like to watch.

Our fever dreams about how Web3.0 will decentralize power and authority is as deadly a dream as has ever been imagined. The promise of NFTs and the semantic web is deadly too, until we get rid of the individualistic libertarianism which is baked in to what blockchain even means. We don't need to trust our neighbor, because the blockchain will take care of that for us. The blockchain will calibrate our drugs and paper over our sins.

We don't need to trust our uber driver, our airbnb host, our tinder date. The social network does that for us. Meanwhile, who gets paid as money concentrates gig by gig? Not you and me, that's for certain.

We are not rational actors in the economy. Bitcoin and the rest rob us of social choices just as social networking is robbing us of government. Why would the Russians try to hack our actual physical networks, when it's so trivial to socially hack us? The social network is our grandest liability, right up there next to our denial of the merit-erasing trauma of poverty. Bootstrapping works with computers, not with people. No matter what our folklore tells you. You can't bootstrap your way out of prison.

Viruses, artificial intelligence, machine-based reality are all the same thing. They're all detached from life. They mimic life, but they aren't life.

All that we need to do is to gauge the humanity of those who champion bitcoin, say. Do they really care about you and me or only about how rich that they can become? Individually! They all look like individualistic sociopaths from here. No different from any of the workers in the financial industry who will game whatever system that confronts them. And we'll always bail them out. Because they rule us. They'll always bail themselves out.

Will you trust a semantic web that doesn't incorporate human intelligence? Really? I've got a bridge to sell you.

Anyhow the contest is on. I mean I cry watching the Olympics, especially when there is that rare bird who got there despite poor circumstances. So many times, the victors represent only privilege. But the drama is gone for a Buffalo boy who has grown tired of his home team coming so very close, only to be destroyed by the fates and then followed by endless post-mortems which read almost as well as the automotive press (have you ever noticed how brilliant the prose of the automotive press is?).

What's the point anymore to invest hope in someone in some sport when you have to master the search process to understand how to watch it? People my age long for the virtual community of just three networks plus PBS. You would cry and cheer together. And the politics were simple too; commie fascism versus independence. Fair and honest reporting was actually legislated! Those were the days!

We have brought the fascists inside the tent now by anti-communist rhetoric in just the way that what used to be called the "third world" has pitched their native tents within our boundaries. And we thought our boundaries were meant to keep out immigrants. What???? As if slavery has been eradicated from our lilly-white blood. We just don't want their kind.

May the best form of governance win! Or have we already lost, because we've lost our humanity and then because we find that to be a cause for celebration? I mean, what has Christianity come to mean anymore? Can't we even tell the difference between hate and love?

Here's a compromise: Say I decide to ski and order up a car to my door, preferring to share it and save money if someone in some car-pod is passing by. That car joins a train of such cars, and maybe - again by economic stimulation which is inversely proportional to speed of overall travel - I move my human power into an attached car which is going nearest to where I'm headed. The tech for this is trivial, especially as compared to the brain-dead waste of mining bitcoin. Lots more fun to program. Works just like the Internet.

Maybe there's a sizeable pod of cars at the ski slopes, and maybe it's algorithmically set to leave enough for how many people remain (who haven't signaled overnight arrangements), and maybe I want to ski late. Maybe I'll experience a little economic pressure to join the earlier crowd. Maybe I'll have more fun that way than to stay behind and go home alone!

So maybe we don't have to outlaw cars. We only have to outlaw private cars. I mean we really do have to do that if we wish to survive as a species. Bad behavior should keep you off the bus, not off the streets. Solve the economy and you solve the streets. Especially when they're free of private cars. Without cars, biking and walking are not likely to be so dangerous. Without guns, the streets are not likely to be so dangerous. Without the insurance industrial complex, drugs are not likely to be so dangerous.

Won't we have gained more than we have lost? Especially if we transfer the economy of the automobile into the far more productive economy of education. Universal healthcare. And what if we were to do the with the whole damned military-industrial complex? Wow. Just wow.

They all want us to think that the economy would collapse. But the timeline sure is a lot better than the timeline for how the ecology of the planet will collapse if we don't.

Sure, right now lots of people require the incentive of outsized prizes. Lots of people work hard for the sake of yachts and mega-mansions and private jets. But are those the people we want to celebrate? Really? I mean Bill Gates' whole life describes the psychology of a five-year old.

Those are the people who actually believe that they are the real individuals. And we support them in that delusion. They are nothing without us. They are the constructed beautiful parasites on the body politic. The extreme horrors of poverty and meat production are conjoined to the celebration of wealth. Reduce that minuscule population of the hyper rich and the rest can and will self-regulate.

All that it would take is to limit the scope of private property. The whole earth depends on us to accomplish that.

Fact is that my mind is not my own. And as an individual, I incorporate many often-competing selves. Holding it together in the form of character is hard work, and maybe my rewards should be as simple as the right to enjoy without fret what I finally get to enjoy now that I'm retired and not working for the man. 

We don't need to destroy the incentives of a market economy. We need to diminish the rewards of greed.

Maybe everyone should get to enjoy not working for the man before they're done working. Maybe none of us should work for the man. Maybe we should get money out of politics and reclaim our democracy. Just sayin'

What was that song from the '90s? I think I'm turning Chinese, I really think so . . . just punk rhythms that shouldn't threaten anyone any more than the super bowl half-time show should. When taken with a dose of proper irony. I like China fine. I just like us better. Nothing to be bitter about.

The Mystery of Life; My Starring Role on the Merry Go Round

Holes grow in my awareness. So many things I search for each day that I am certain were there. A reference in a book, where even digital search can't help me. But I remember so well the clarity that the phrase gave. Was it only in my head? "In my head?" Of course, the head is the locus of nothing. 

Soon there will be - if it doesn't exist already - the computerized ability to catalog your every action. Which books you read can easily be reconstructed by the trail of your searches. Looking up a place that exists only in that particular book. A set of words typical of only that particular author. Not to mention your purchase records and geographical pathways.

Just now money is made on all these things for their predictive value toward your purchasing decisions. But will there ever be a time when you will be offered your virtual self to patch up your own sense of you? Money and power make for such hateful relations. Who among us won't be brought low by them?

We are past the time when any individual can hold "in their own head" all of the things which might compose a good solid sense of reality. Just for recent instance, I've been trying to get a handle on information theory and its usage for the term "entropy." The reason is that I've just read this lovely survey of quantum gravity theory which speculates toward its end that information theory may be informative (ahem) toward resolution of the remaining questions. 

In information theory, "entropy" refers to the unknown information related to some random event, like tossing dice, for instance. Dice "contain" (imply?) more information than coin tosses, since a random coin has only two possible outcomes, while a di has six. Once tossed, information decreases in the direction of entropy. Now you know.

But there could not have been prediction. That's what random means. Scientific understanding relates to (statistical & stochastic) prediction, which relates of course to time. But this same book removes time from physics. Spacetime is not something real, it is constructed, rather, according to the very local requirements of thermal time. Thermal time is irreversible time is entropy as we know it from physics. Cooling off and running down is not reversible. 

Now this relates to information theory - it's in the chapter about information theory - as in information doesn't increase, but can only be lost (as random gets revealed?). But there you have it; a definition for mind: information increases in an 'understanding' mind. Learning to predict is how minds do so well at survival. Information is required. 

But it is just the creation of generalized forms, in the mind, which allows us to reduce the complexity of raw data. We recognize forms by virtue of unconscious practice. Our minds hold no information. Only computers do that. To be useful, the forms that we recognize have to be recurrent. We have to form them in three dimensions (stereoscopically), plus time, for predictions to occur in ways that help us to survive. 

Information theory operates at the same level of abstraction where math operates. It exists in the mind alone, and leads us toward the absurdity of constructing fully abstracted "meaning."

Well, I suppose that meaning must relate mostly to what realist Tom Wolfe describes when he writes about a horse deployed as stud. What I felt toward my children's existence. There must be something erotic about it. It's so tantalizingly there. But really it's just a category error. Meaning won't get you any closer to survival.

Well, unless all those random happenings are, themselves, some kind of manifestation of meaning. In which case mind expands as the universe runs down and round and round we go.

Which is to say that it's not meaning we should be after. Rather, we should be after keeping with the radical direction for life, which is guided through time by love. Love is time's definition. Physics has no definition for time without it.

The End

My Battery Runs Low

My residence is now a battery charging lab, and it shows. It has become a preoccupation of sorts. Maintaining the RV batteries, the ebike battery the phone the computer the mini vacuum the cordless drill the iPad the Kindle. I'm sure that I'm missing some. 

I know the feeling of waking from a state of semi-sleep and not being able to recover that brilliant thought. Now it happens while I'm awake, as I get up to take a pee and something strikes me hard, and then it's gone and unrecoverable.

Remember when Freud thought that interpreting dreams was important? It almost seems quaint now. Remember when physicists thought they were on the verge of a Grand Universal Theorem? 

I've been reading all these books which offer correctives on tidy narratives which impose a pretty story on the stuff of our history. We see what we want to see. What we should be seeing is messy and ugly sometimes, but then also sometimes there appears something like hope that the long curve of history really will bend toward the good and the light.

I suffered a realization in my youth, when my batteries were fully charged. It's slipping now, but I hold onto the core of it as a kind of guiding light to my thinking. It's like I already know The Truth and I'm just looking for the proper words to borrow so that I don't die alone with it. After my battery won't take any more charge.

Sometimes I think I write here to preserve my realization, but I don't really have any provision for what happens to this space when I'm gone. And anyhow nobody reads this and nobody ever will because why would they.

When people disturb a paradigm and especially when they claim to have worked a "paradigm shift," the normal reaction among those working within the existing paradigm and making a living from it is anger. How dare you. 

So I rather like my invisibility. And anyhow I mostly write for the purpose of ordering my thoughts and keeping my mind intact. It's discouraging to find that what ticks up my meager stats is just the fact that I've passed more kooky and likely bot-written comments to certain posts. Like there's a kind of self-referential and utterly meaningless ghost readership made up of clicks that don't represent actual readers, or if they do then those actual readers don't actually read much.

Hmmm, maybe if I were to "monetize" this blog my readership would go up. Probably, but I don't really want to think that hard and I certainly don't want to join an economy that I find, frankly, detestable. Dangerous.

Well anyhow, I have it by my reading of  'we know these truths to be self-evident' that making the claim that one plus one will always equal two anywhere in any universe is not much of a claim. Numbers are abstractions and thus purely conceptual. Indeed 'emergence' in the technical sense reduces to conceptual primitives, and so a snowflake will be a snowflake in any universe as well, provided that there is water and that there is dust.

Things may represent numbers, but then as we know, the basic laws of math no longer apply, or else Zeno's paradox and its relations would prevail in reality and not only in the mind. 

You know paradox, say in physics, is identical to a Zen koan? If you meditate on it long enough you might achieve some sort of enlightenment.

I think we tend to think that abstracted reality is fantasy. That quantum physics is stranger than actual reality, but in reality, quantum physics puts the lie to abstracted, say, mathematical constructions by the very evident fact that it's real. The abstractions on which we'd based our certainty now have a hard time keeping up with reality. 

There's hope in that!

And now here's a massive rationalization for you: There's a reason I don't dive too deeply into specialist literature; the really good stuff. There's a reason that academics aren't generally activisists. There's a reason that it's so damned hard to be an academic. A political reason. 

Academia is an efficient means to sidetrack otherwise dangerous alpha-males. The Donalds are the only alphas who can survive in the wild.

I made the mistake of reading the 'want to read' list of some dude who friended me on Goodreads. I thought he'd read them all, and boy was I abashed. My want-to-read list would be way longer, if I bothered to record it the way I do want-to-see movies so I don't have to work when I feel like kicking back. I'll take my reading list random, thank you very much.

But nah, I'm reading for some sense of direction, as in where is everybody going in their deeper studies and reading and writing. And I'm not so sure that I'm always deficient in my sense of a way; a direction. But on the other hand, there's always the lurking suspicion that I'm just plain nuts. That my compulsion that I have something kind of corrective to offer is some sort of hangover from some kind of youthful promise.

Like when I was the one offered braces for my teeth, I felt guilty, as though I was being rewarded for my oft complimented smile by being given a better one. But no, they said, it was my bite and the probability that I would lose my smile. My smile which I now compulsively keep up, honestly feeling almost physically the investment I've made in it over the years. The legacy weighs heavy. 

Still, I rather doubt that keeping teeth bright white and the mouth without bacteria is really any better for my mouth than it is for my guts. But I still prefer to go with the experts rather than to think that hard, or especially rather than to doubt. And yet . . .

. . . and yet I spend stupid time trying to understand how to optimize the lifespan of all those batteries in which I've invested so much. As though there were ever any choice about it. I wonder what the next big thing will be after batteries?

Does anybody even realize that James Joyce wrote the very last novel? No matter how brilliant that dumb fucking white guy DFW was or how wordsmithy his buddy Franzen is, they're still writing out the lives and motives of individual characters, when our future will be written, if it's written at all, by and about post-individualistic post-capitalist socially enlightened people.

What, you too thought it was the end of history? Wake up. The novel really can't be extricated from the homo-economicus rational actor for recognition hocus-pocus of Vienna types like, what's his name? Van der Vries?? No, Ludwig Von Mises. Hayek. Rothbard. Freedman. I mean if you accept the premise that human beings have to be considered as individual units which are diminished by any discounting of that fact, then you may well be mystified and drawn in, just as we all are by expert explanations around the paradoxes of physics. When the abstract is brought down to earth with a clunk.

The future will not look like the world we now live in at all, and novels will not get us there. Energy storage that's not grown in sunlight only feeds the beast of individualistic want, which can never be met in the first place.

I need a recharge! Oh wait. Death be my recharge! I leave behind the flamingo's smile. Divine Pink Flamingo astride Muddy Waters. Anon.