Well, this is embarrassing. It doesn't seem I could stay away for very long. But I'm getting spammers wanting me to moderate their comments, and so, anonymous, this one's for you. I might just have to lock you out, and only allow people who will identify themselves to comment. I don't think that would be such a bad idea in general to tame this web.
Of course I write truly and only for you anonymous, since I haven't got a clue who my audience is or might be. Back when I was studying poetry, there were these crazies who thought the thing to do was to develop the "science" of literary study. I even had to endure some guy saying that while smoking a pipe up at a podium. You could just see the science-envy dripping off that stage.
People will always be jealous of those who possess occult arts, like the ability to read and write has been through most of history. I watched Men Who Stare at Goats yesterday, a seriously funny and deep movie which you should see. Kevin Spacey plays the jealous vindictive homophobe who smokes a cigar. You won't be able to tell he's a homophobe, but he is, and plays it beautifully. He's jealous of the occult arts of the Jedi warriors he'd like to join.
He makes a science of the art, and it gets spelled torture. This is an important fact to understand as a citizen of this vanishingly democratic nation of ours.
But I'm talking about the more usual arts like literature, music, painting, sculpture, performance - those are the unruly things which make academics so furiously jealous. Hey, I didn't say so, some academic did, so it must be true.
So, is it the scientists who are jealous of the artists? Science is that much more certain, and you can be an uncool dweeb, but if you pin something down, then it won't matter because everyone will have to respect you. You can prove it.
And here I am, and I really don't give a shit at this particular moment if you think I'm nuts or just another crazy who thinks he's figured out the quantum implications of LSD. You should see all the crazy stuff across the internet with self-published nutjobs who are certain that they have it right and all the peer-reviewed scientists have it wrong. Or maybe you already have seen them.
I'm not about to publish my vanity press diatribe, nor do I care to see who will buy it. I would never want to be a member of any club that would have me in it anyhow, so why would I want to reach *those* people?
But dammit, there must be one person out there who can get what I'm trying to say here. OK, actually, there are tons and tons and tons of people (do you think people should be measured by the ton?), many if not most of them quite famous, which pretty much places them out of my reach, if you know what I mean.
Physicists get letters all the time from people claiming to have solved this or that canonically unsolvable problem. They can hardly be bothered to read them all. Pretty much like houses of literature and all their submissions. I mean, you've really got to have and use connections if you want to get anywhere at all in this supposedly meritocratic world.
I actually do have lots of connections, and who knows, maybe I'll start to press them. It feels out of bounds, though. It feels like cheating. It feels like taking advantage, but I guess at a certain point, you do what you have to do, right?
I mean just because Britney Spears used her connections to make it to the top, doesn't mean she isn't any good. She'd never stay there if she weren't, right? I mean, wasn't she a mouseketeer, and isn't that a connection, or were you just thinking she's some lucky trailer trash?
Meanwhile, spam suckers of the world, I'm not going to take this laying down.
Each and every time our lovely capitalistic globe spanning enterprise is in danger of showing its true stripes, the ones in power mobilize their armies of minions to fan the flames of fear. Fear of socialism, fear of government takeover of your lives, fear of ragheads, whatever works. And that's always been because back in their richly paneled offices, they too are terrified of what might happen if and when the people actually get a clue.
I think there actually are one or two cigar chomping power mongers who think it's all a game of survival of the fittest and since they're the fittest it's their job to survive. But, and this will utterly destroy any credentials I have left as a left winger, I actually do think most of them do earnestly believe that their role is stewardship for people less educated, less fortunate, less cultivated, and perhaps even less in touch with God.
They know that they don't need elaborate fairy tales for their beliefs, but they're pretty sure you and I do, and they're pretty afraid of what might happen if and when you stop believing in them.
We, the people, and that includes all the titans of "industry" (as if that even existed anymore) are up against the wall now. We really are. You can put your head in the sand, or you can pretend that there will be some wonderful new technology to fix things, but if you open your eyes, we're up against the wall as the population on this earth, just precisely as much as are those poor folk our global-capitalistic enterprises depend on and exploit.
And now we've actually allowed delusional true believers in the literal Word to infest our halls of power, and that's a terror to me far in advance of whatever it is Osama can unleash (by his fact or by his proxy, as true belief infects those who've never known him or his minions). These are folks which the thinking people among us fret about just as much as we do global warming, but we don't have a clue what to do about them. Because their improvised explosive devices are built on words of love.
But the effect is the same as if they'd walked in to the halls of power strapped in bombs. This is not an acceptable circumstance, folks. Folksy folks, don't be such sheep. It's really dangerous to have delusion people in power.
So, whoever out there can be my audience, whoever has mastered enough of both science and the arts, listen up. I'm talking to you. There is scant time to get it together, now, but time enough for sure. (yeegads, I hate cliffhangers, I really do)
What could possibly dis-empower the bottom feeders now? Now that the cadre of investigative reporters has been almost systematically dismantled (no, I don't think it's a conspiracy - it's yet another side effect of this wonderful Internet), who is to tell truth to power? How are we to stop the once so-called Madison Avenue techniques for selling soap to the masses from selling them stupid people as office holders?
It seems an impossible task. Unless or until we can bring right into the realm of science something which will compel the spammers actually to shut their yaps. Something which can become the moral equivalent of Jesus actually riding his white horse down off some fluffy cloud.
Just like God, you'd sure like to invent this great new science if it didn't already exist. But here's the thing. It does!
One more time then: At least a few humanities types have mastered the concept of quantum fluctuations. You might understand, for instance, that electrons jump from orbit to orbit, and that these orbits can be defined by their energy levels. You might understand that in the process a single quantum of electromagnetic energy gets released (or absorbed, depending on which way the jumping goes).
You might understand that these quanta (photons, in the case of electromagnetic forces) used to be understood as waves propagating through some supposed ether, just like sound does through the air. And you've probably heard that the existence of the ether has been thoroughly disproven (despite some enterprising thinkers across the web who'd like to say it ain't so).
There is no medium for propagation, but there's no emptiness either. Because these photons exist, provably, as both waves and particles. But the waves propagate only conceptually, because once you actually "detect" the particle, the wave - they call these probability waves - collapses, and the statistically accurate but approximate position of the photon becomes something very close to a point, or if you prefer, a scintillating string (which becomes a distinction with a difference only with particles much smaller than photons). One lonely particle conceptually fills the entire cosmos with its probabilty wave. That's the "no emptiness" part.
This apparent paradox has been proven experimentally now over and over again. You're really forced to have your cake and eat it too, because it turns out that nothing really is except conceptually, until it gets detected or perceived, and then it suddenly must be something other than the wave it demonstraby was before hand. Very clever experiments with slits can almost be done at home.
The missing piece, however, is that these quantum fluctuations also manifest across time. This is also pretty trivial to demonstrate, falling out as it does from that same set of realizations which have Einstein's name pasted all over them.
Once you limit the speed of propagation for physical reality at the speed of light - that's the speed at which a photon can travel when unencumbered by perception - then it falls right out that particles traveling at any speed relative to one another are also quite out of sync time-wise. They become impossible companions by virtue of this magic twin paradox.
Because if you are moving fast relative to me, then time for you as measured by me actually slows down, even if we have the same perfectly calibrated atomic, Jesus!, watches. And if the same thing's happening for you, well then we become impossible for one another.
So, you become impossible to me, just as I become impossible to you. Or something has gone wrong with our watches. But the force carrying particles can correct a lot of this issue, for so long as you're not actually moving at too big a fraction of the speed of light, and for so long as they still can move that fast.
Get things really cold or really fast or really really hot and all bets are off, just like they're trying to do over at the CERN collider. They've already shown (you know, "they") that if you cool things down to near absolute zero, where if things actually were particles, they'd stop moving, the quantum "states" of certain classes just all sort of merge together into a Bose-Einstein condensate.
They've also already shown that quantum states do indeed work in sync, although to do so would seem to require information to travel faster than the speed of light, and by definition there can be no mechanism for that. You can experimentally separate a quantum pair - "particles" which share a single quantum "space" - and prove that by measuring ("detecting") some quality of one, you've done it also for the other.
Computer scientists fully intend to exploit this property to increase the power of computers by, yep, a quantum leaping factor!! Aritificial Intelligence scientists are practically salivating at the prospects, as well they should. This is not fiction, it's solid science.
But along the way to the forum, people have forgotten to pay attention to the obvious. That it's not only the "probability" of existence which must get calculated, it's the very possibility too.
As particles pass by one another, they flash in and out (sorry, I have to damp down the fire - I almost started a chimney fire, which is only funny if you read my "The End" posting) of actual possibility for one another, in very precisely quantum fashion.
These fluctuations, just like the cloud which defines the orbit of an electron around its nucleus, have to stay within the realm of possibility, which is why you literally cannot accelerate any mass to the actual speed of light, since it would take the energy of the entire cosmos to do so, but they fluctuate nontheless.
But the particles don't become real to one another without the exchange of smaller ones, which pin them, as it were, to existence in one another's world. Just like that science-lusting literary professor wanted to do with poetry. Pin it down and stop making me jealous of your power.
Prior to that exchange, there is *only* an emotional connection. I'm not trying to be cute here, the term falls out from the very fact that probability or possibility waves can only, already by prior definition, exist conceptually. And a conceptual connection - I'm coining a definition right here, so mark the spot - is an emotional connection.
I use the term emotion advisedly, first because it fits without changing one single thing in the language, and second because it can describe motions toward and away in fashion perfectly analogous to what forces do in nature. Concepts move and can move too, my gentle reader.
But I'm saying these emotional forces also exist in nature. Sorry about that, but truly I have always wanted to be the one to resolve that old sophomoric question of whether art imitates life or the other way around, and I remain profoundly dissatisfied with the Post Modernistic approach so currently in or out of favor depending on which side of what divide you sit. Humanities, science, Ivory tower, wilds of the blogosphere. Whatever!
So, for sure this entire theory of mine reads like an elaborate metaphor, which is but a single step removed from an elaborate hoax. I'll have to leave it to you, gentle reader. My feet are encased in concrete, and I'm about to be tossed off the boat. I have about a Chinaman's chance here, but it seems a chance worth taking.
Man, I sure do wish I had some art!
Monday, November 16, 2009
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Goodreads Review of Roscoe
Roscoe by William KennedyMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Inevitably, this classically American novel ends up on a gambling riverboat. The Hudson, the Mississippi, the best metaphor for America is always the floating opera, inhabited by earnest tricksters. And by ironically honest folks, who wish the world would operate the way it should so they wouldn't have to game it.
Among scant others, William Kennedy brings the Rustbelt back to our literary realities, which seem always to be out West or down South. No matter how many authors might have been born and raised here upstate of Manhattan in New York. Ginsberb, Carol-Oates, there've been a few who render forward our gritty past. Even Tim Russert might qualify as a real-life denizen in one of Kennedy's novels, although he would seem too improbably good.
But it's Mark Twain and his riverboats that I'm reminded of mostly. He was also from these parts, claimed by Elmira New York with as much validity as by anywhere else.
Roscoe describes the world leading up to and around the lost innocence of the Bomb. Machine politics, rum running, cock fighting, boozing and womanizing among people who seem to wish it didn't have to be that way. But it did and so they tried to forgive themselves. Twain without the twinkle.
They managed to carry on despite failed loves, lost lives and buried reputations. Nothing comes out clean in the end, where the Bomb is never so present as by its omission.
We might pay attention once again to who we were back then and so very close to home. We might wonder how easily still our votes get bought or sold, and our consciences tricked. And we might question how sure we are that we are the first ones to lead conscious lives in the shadow of imminent destruction.
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The End
I just re-read my "In the Beginning" screed, and realize that I've become a broken record. Not a huge surprise, that. But still, there are only so many ways you can say the same thing, and I don't seem to be getting any closer to what I'd hoped I might be able to do here.
I'm not even sure I remember what it was anymore. Except a glimmer, an in-love kind of sense that if I would just write and write and write, then I might find myself back where I was one night living on my sailboat. Having actually discovered, in writing, something to give me direction and sense and hope.
I still have all the hope I ever did. That someone more literate than me, for instance, will be able to pick up my thread and make more sense than I can.
But I woke up last night to the cruel surprise I'd been, so unwittingly, waiting for. That it never has been me whose story has been writing itself across my life. That my boat was never a cocoon from which I ever could emerge a butterfly. That metaphors like that can only leave you fallen from flight into artificial light which burns because it's way too close to be real.
I myself am the cocoon, the husk, the lifeless word-woven tent within which an abstract idea has taken shape. And I don't even think the word "idea" has any sense, so now what am I to do? It's no idea at all, it's just another bundle of words, just like a formula in physics, but without the math.
And without the math, there's no way in heaven or hell to get to where every thinking person must agree. Not that I'm asking for any leaps of faith here. I'm not even asking that you look within yourself to see if you can feel what I have felt as a way to true this bunch of words. What I am trying to say is much closer to science; just a few words to change the gestalt shape of what it is our progressive sciences have uncovered these last brief centuries.
So, if you were to read me right along, you'd see it too. No tricks. Not like stupid Scientology screeds which are only massive P.T. Barnum tractatuses. No Biblical tales whose true believers now do more harm to any possibility of faith than good was ever done before. No Mormon protectionist scheme.
But I can't quite make it readable. Or at least not here.
The hardest things to learn are those which first require unlearning. Somewhere somehow, even if only by omission, we were all taught the divisions of nationality, race, and religion. And so, in setting out to discover those marvels, we've made us all the same now. And protesters against the wall are blown up or blow themselves up for being so stupid as not to want to be like us. We Americans were taught that these are our shores. We Christians were taught that ours is the only trued God. There seems to be a lot of that going around.
And in the end, folks like me, scientifically minded, become cemented in the one sure thing, that the only reliable certainty is doubt. That there is and always will be suffering in the world, as there always has been among us beasts.
But we humans may at least aspire to more, and science is our compass.
What are we to do then, except to continue the endless struggle to uncover whatever secrets are left in the world around us? Hoping against hope that someday really soon we will have found that powerful key, to unleash something as powerful as nuclear energy, but without the fallout. That somehow, along with it will come enough raw surplus that we can make every human life OK again, and never need to leave anyone on the outside of our fences. You know, unless that's where they want to stay.
We hope that we will find something that powerful, that much stronger than the locomotives which still seemed to help us out despite all the corruption along their way to getting built. Something also to put a stopper on the need for bombs at all. So that it will overwhelm the greedy among us, perhaps by just making it look silly to still be wanting more when you can so easily have whatever you want beyond your wildest dreams.
As if it doesn't look pretty silly already.
I think it's way past time. A world so tamed that all the beasts only occupy some plastic menagerie with labels is no world at all. Like Noah's arc and no receding ever of the flood. Wasn't there a movie about that recently? Even Christian types liked it, I have on high authority. Wall-e.
There must be some way we can all agree.
But I will call my journey ended. This one. Who knows now what's in store for the "real me". What odd jobs I can take or which will take me.
Because there's really only one kind of memory which endures. That's the kind which comes from unlearning, either crazy notions that you were schooled in, or the crazy ones you came up with on your own. And once you do, you can't go back, no matter how much you'd like to.
No matter how much you'd like to believe in Santa Claus again. No matter how much you'd like it if there really were a personal God. No matter how comfortable you've always felt in the certainty of your doubt.
Once you grow beyond those things, there's no going back. Ever. And I'd thought, silly me, that there could or would be some way through writing, to get at least one other soul to see what I can see.
Chasing, chasing after some perfect encapsulation of that trued set of words. And looking back I see that I can't do any better. It still must look like an hallucination to you.
So there you go!
And off I go. The fire I've kept going for many weeks now won't catch this morning. But I think it will be warm outside. So, what the hell, eh? No sense staring at a screen all day.
But I have to leave you with a wink. Because who knows, I might be back. I never seem to be quite as good as my word.
I'm not even sure I remember what it was anymore. Except a glimmer, an in-love kind of sense that if I would just write and write and write, then I might find myself back where I was one night living on my sailboat. Having actually discovered, in writing, something to give me direction and sense and hope.
I still have all the hope I ever did. That someone more literate than me, for instance, will be able to pick up my thread and make more sense than I can.
But I woke up last night to the cruel surprise I'd been, so unwittingly, waiting for. That it never has been me whose story has been writing itself across my life. That my boat was never a cocoon from which I ever could emerge a butterfly. That metaphors like that can only leave you fallen from flight into artificial light which burns because it's way too close to be real.
I myself am the cocoon, the husk, the lifeless word-woven tent within which an abstract idea has taken shape. And I don't even think the word "idea" has any sense, so now what am I to do? It's no idea at all, it's just another bundle of words, just like a formula in physics, but without the math.
And without the math, there's no way in heaven or hell to get to where every thinking person must agree. Not that I'm asking for any leaps of faith here. I'm not even asking that you look within yourself to see if you can feel what I have felt as a way to true this bunch of words. What I am trying to say is much closer to science; just a few words to change the gestalt shape of what it is our progressive sciences have uncovered these last brief centuries.
So, if you were to read me right along, you'd see it too. No tricks. Not like stupid Scientology screeds which are only massive P.T. Barnum tractatuses. No Biblical tales whose true believers now do more harm to any possibility of faith than good was ever done before. No Mormon protectionist scheme.
But I can't quite make it readable. Or at least not here.
The hardest things to learn are those which first require unlearning. Somewhere somehow, even if only by omission, we were all taught the divisions of nationality, race, and religion. And so, in setting out to discover those marvels, we've made us all the same now. And protesters against the wall are blown up or blow themselves up for being so stupid as not to want to be like us. We Americans were taught that these are our shores. We Christians were taught that ours is the only trued God. There seems to be a lot of that going around.
And in the end, folks like me, scientifically minded, become cemented in the one sure thing, that the only reliable certainty is doubt. That there is and always will be suffering in the world, as there always has been among us beasts.
But we humans may at least aspire to more, and science is our compass.
What are we to do then, except to continue the endless struggle to uncover whatever secrets are left in the world around us? Hoping against hope that someday really soon we will have found that powerful key, to unleash something as powerful as nuclear energy, but without the fallout. That somehow, along with it will come enough raw surplus that we can make every human life OK again, and never need to leave anyone on the outside of our fences. You know, unless that's where they want to stay.
We hope that we will find something that powerful, that much stronger than the locomotives which still seemed to help us out despite all the corruption along their way to getting built. Something also to put a stopper on the need for bombs at all. So that it will overwhelm the greedy among us, perhaps by just making it look silly to still be wanting more when you can so easily have whatever you want beyond your wildest dreams.
As if it doesn't look pretty silly already.
I think it's way past time. A world so tamed that all the beasts only occupy some plastic menagerie with labels is no world at all. Like Noah's arc and no receding ever of the flood. Wasn't there a movie about that recently? Even Christian types liked it, I have on high authority. Wall-e.
There must be some way we can all agree.
But I will call my journey ended. This one. Who knows now what's in store for the "real me". What odd jobs I can take or which will take me.
Because there's really only one kind of memory which endures. That's the kind which comes from unlearning, either crazy notions that you were schooled in, or the crazy ones you came up with on your own. And once you do, you can't go back, no matter how much you'd like to.
No matter how much you'd like to believe in Santa Claus again. No matter how much you'd like it if there really were a personal God. No matter how comfortable you've always felt in the certainty of your doubt.
Once you grow beyond those things, there's no going back. Ever. And I'd thought, silly me, that there could or would be some way through writing, to get at least one other soul to see what I can see.
Chasing, chasing after some perfect encapsulation of that trued set of words. And looking back I see that I can't do any better. It still must look like an hallucination to you.
So there you go!
And off I go. The fire I've kept going for many weeks now won't catch this morning. But I think it will be warm outside. So, what the hell, eh? No sense staring at a screen all day.
But I have to leave you with a wink. Because who knows, I might be back. I never seem to be quite as good as my word.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Bird Flew Redux (all over again)
I know that you know that this H1N1 is the real deal. It's a highly contagious virus, which can so easily pass from one infected person to anyone he comes into contact with. Sure, maybe Don Rumsfeld and some others stand to profit by the scare, and by distributing ever more vaccine, but there have always been war profiteers, and we always seem to need them too.
And somewhere in the background, like me, you're wondering when the Big One is going to hit us, now that we're all so crowded on the planet, and now that viruses can jump from livestock to people, and we raise our livestock in very tightened little pens. So we have to dope them up with drugs, which creates a kind of breeding ground for the drug resistant sort of bugs. Too much anti-bacterial stuff, and you just destroy the competition for the viruses, pretty much like the Japanese do by sterilizing everything too darned much.
My own sister, who's medically trained, but still somehow thinks she's not as smart as me, has been trying to understand what I've been working on, and figured out that emotional reality also travels kind of virally, to where people who care about one another, especially if and when they care enough to keep each other honest, can spread around just like those cellular automata which model birds in flight so well.
They look as if they flow, or as if they were all of one mind, when really all they do is stay in touch with the one right next to them, and maybe someone new takes point when that poor bird poops out or loses his sense of direction.
It's not a bad way to understand how emotions can work among us. But I still seem to want more.
Just like right now, I'm waiting for some viral marketing to kick in to this cool new website we've created at pikk.com. We're hoping that some people will like it well enough to tell their friends, who will tell their friends, and so on down the line.
But there are so many such sites out there, and so many of them are so well funded, that it feels pretty unlikely that anyone will find ours any more interesting than the others.
Unless, of course, lots of people were to start using it, in which case it would get really interesting really fast.
But you do have to be careful what you wish for. I mean it's nice living alone out in the middle of the country where the only thing you have to worry about is a bear or a hunter every once in a while.
And you who have read me right along understand that I don't much appreciate the crazies who have to make of Jesus something any more real than that he's managed over these couple of millennia to stay in hearts and minds. Which ought to be enough by itself, without all the ridiculous claims of life everlasting or getting sucked up into heaven.
But it seems to me Gary Snyder once remarked that whatever it takes to engender faith is fair enough, so long as faith results. Like secret pores to make statues cry, is the one I think he used. Or makeup for a Saturday Night Date, if that's the one you really want to like you. Just so long as you don't confuse the props with the real deal, which all those impassioned words were trying to convince you of. No really, it's true, I was there. It happened.
We do that all the time with our stories, because without a little embellishment, how are we going to get people actually to believe us.
I do surely and sorely object to the proselytizers who pretend to speak for God, borrowing words of uncertain authorship purveyed by one of the biggest institutions around. And as you know, I think really big is a really big temptation to evil.
Emotions, anyhow, can ride the strangest vectors. They don't really need much more than pen and paper, although they do just fine over the wire, and through the ether. Sometimes all it takes is knowing that your sweetheart is at the other end of the earth looking at the very same moon, perhaps even at the very same time.
I'll bet at least one or two of you have known the magic of discovery that there really was or is or has been a connection which no amount of testing can or could or will ever tease out from the traceable connections. No wires, no line of sight, and still there is some connection.
Maybe you attribute that sort of thing to Jesus. Fair enough. But I think it's time to grow up now, and accept that we are co-creators. I think that gets attributed to Gary Snyder too, come to think of it.
The connections we make can be full of love or hate, spite or profiteering. We can be looking for love or we can be looking for sex, or we can be so jaded that we don't even believe in a difference. It's awfully hard to trust another human being. And even the best among us betray the ones we love the very most each and every day.
But what if, I mean really, what if there were some reason to believe that emotional connections across no measurable divide are actually as real as the clouds and rain (I love that, it's my secret little joke for sex, borrowed from the Chinese who use it as a euphemism).
I'm not talking about a mechanism, since physic's got that stuff all wrapped up. The kinds of connections I'm talking about break the physical laws of simultaneity, since for you and your sweetheart to be feeling something at the very same time, the connection would have to travel faster than the speed of light which is just plain physically impossible.
Oh sure, it would be hard to tell, since light can get from here to California lickety split. Quick enough so that even when your voice bounces off some satellite to get there you can't sense any delay.
But what about when you're nowhere near anything that can carry your private signal? Well maybe, and I'd say this is easily enough proven, the two of you have started to inhabit something of the same emotional space, and just like birds flying toward the same sun, if that sun were to move you'd all move at the very same time to stay with it.
Which is about, come to think of it, what they intend to do over at the CERN collider. Not moving the sun, there aren't levers long enough for that Archimedes, but come close enough to creating mass out of nothingness that it will be very much as if the sun had moved.
I know it's a really hard thing to buy, but lots of people buy miracles from baby Jesus which are a lot harder to buy, if you catch my drift. I'm not trying to be cute here, they really really do.
Miracles like that never happen to me, or maybe they do each and every day, and I'm just too obtuse to credit them. Yeah, I'll buy that. It sounds suspiciously what the very best of the Jesus people say, which I'll have to grant you (what's free, what costs? Sometimes it's hard to tell).
But I no longer believe in random. It's an old Taoist trick I learned long ago. That random's just another word for beyond the reach of mind. And to label it meaningless makes the very same mistake as labelling God, well, God.
The missing link in evolutionary theory, or so it seems to me, is the same one missing from the toolbox of the experimental physicist. If you call these random connections emotional connections instead of meaningless spins of some dice, a whole lot of stuff becomes rather instantly clear.
I'm not saying you can win the lottery by this kind of understanding. That would clearly be just plain nuts. But I am saying that the collective set of accidents which have brought us to this place across the eons of evolutionary time, can be labelled connections of love without losing one single solitary iota of physical or other meaning.
It's just a label. It doesn't change how far they are and will remain from our conscious understanding mind. These accidents of fate.
Just down the road from me, some poor and surely sweet kids were driving a little bit too fast without their seatbelts. A bear had spooked some horses penned around the corner. The horses ran up the road and right across the path of the speeding car, and three people were killed.
There's no meaning to that. It's just plain sad, tragic, and awful. And I have to say I'm glad I wasn't around when it happened, because I don't know what I would or could have done, except to call 911. I might have been too scared even to approach the scene. I hope not, but I am glad enough not to know. We do know there are quite a few heroes in our midst, though, from some other things that have gone wrong recently.
There's no meaning either to falling in love, especially if you keep doing it over and over and over.
But there is meaning to what we conspire to do together, and it's up to us now to turn all those random connections leading up to this very moment into connections of love or hate.
I have to say, at this particular moment, the way we've overpopulated our home sweet Earth by keeping back the creepy crawlies and the bears and the snakes, it's not looking too good for the love connection. And I also have to say that all the people waiting around for Jesus to arrive aren't making things any better. Especially when they watch too much Fox TV.
We've borrowed the extravagant gift of oil. We've managed to keep back the germs which would plague us if they could. Mostly, we've done that with sanitation and more robust diets, even though we're still awfully happy for the work of charitable scientists like Jonas Salk in years gone by.
Now we've made a business of getting people to believe there need be no more tragedy. That technology will save us from ourselves. And we lure away our brightest minds to the business of making money, as if that alone could cure the Earth of the illness of humankind.
Good living lowers birthrates. It cures disease. It allows the rich people to lower their walls, and cameras to come down from streetlamps. But we just can't seem to figure out how to get there from here.
Well, folks, it's not so hard as you might think. Just give a damn, and do it out loud. The mass of us are decent, have good consciences, and would never do anything horrible in the name of any god unless and until we were backed right up to some wall.
And oh yeah, another thing. Stop thinking science can tell you when and how life begins. You can't stop the twinkle in my eye. You can't murder twice what you've already killed by your neglect.
But I still can't put my finger on that final word which might convince you. I guess you'll just have to feel it for yourself. That when you occupy the same emotional space with someone else, it's just like winning the lottery only better. Because the more you give away the more you get.
OK, OK, I'm just one big fat cliche. I'm not sure if that's better than being a non-sequitur, which someone I love once meant as a compliment. I thinks it's some kind of literary in-joke. Whatever!
Connections emotionally felt are still real, and cross infinite distances in an instant. Trust me, it's been proven by physicists with quantum pairs. They just don't have the right vocabulary yet. They're still searching for some answer which is beyond the realm of objective truing. They still want to see what can only happen in some mind.
We've gotten as far as we're gonna get in that particular direction, and there's so much work we have to do right here at home, which would be trivial if we all were working in some approximation of the same direction.
Tweet tweet.
And somewhere in the background, like me, you're wondering when the Big One is going to hit us, now that we're all so crowded on the planet, and now that viruses can jump from livestock to people, and we raise our livestock in very tightened little pens. So we have to dope them up with drugs, which creates a kind of breeding ground for the drug resistant sort of bugs. Too much anti-bacterial stuff, and you just destroy the competition for the viruses, pretty much like the Japanese do by sterilizing everything too darned much.
My own sister, who's medically trained, but still somehow thinks she's not as smart as me, has been trying to understand what I've been working on, and figured out that emotional reality also travels kind of virally, to where people who care about one another, especially if and when they care enough to keep each other honest, can spread around just like those cellular automata which model birds in flight so well.
They look as if they flow, or as if they were all of one mind, when really all they do is stay in touch with the one right next to them, and maybe someone new takes point when that poor bird poops out or loses his sense of direction.
It's not a bad way to understand how emotions can work among us. But I still seem to want more.
Just like right now, I'm waiting for some viral marketing to kick in to this cool new website we've created at pikk.com. We're hoping that some people will like it well enough to tell their friends, who will tell their friends, and so on down the line.
But there are so many such sites out there, and so many of them are so well funded, that it feels pretty unlikely that anyone will find ours any more interesting than the others.
Unless, of course, lots of people were to start using it, in which case it would get really interesting really fast.
But you do have to be careful what you wish for. I mean it's nice living alone out in the middle of the country where the only thing you have to worry about is a bear or a hunter every once in a while.
And you who have read me right along understand that I don't much appreciate the crazies who have to make of Jesus something any more real than that he's managed over these couple of millennia to stay in hearts and minds. Which ought to be enough by itself, without all the ridiculous claims of life everlasting or getting sucked up into heaven.
But it seems to me Gary Snyder once remarked that whatever it takes to engender faith is fair enough, so long as faith results. Like secret pores to make statues cry, is the one I think he used. Or makeup for a Saturday Night Date, if that's the one you really want to like you. Just so long as you don't confuse the props with the real deal, which all those impassioned words were trying to convince you of. No really, it's true, I was there. It happened.
We do that all the time with our stories, because without a little embellishment, how are we going to get people actually to believe us.
I do surely and sorely object to the proselytizers who pretend to speak for God, borrowing words of uncertain authorship purveyed by one of the biggest institutions around. And as you know, I think really big is a really big temptation to evil.
Emotions, anyhow, can ride the strangest vectors. They don't really need much more than pen and paper, although they do just fine over the wire, and through the ether. Sometimes all it takes is knowing that your sweetheart is at the other end of the earth looking at the very same moon, perhaps even at the very same time.
I'll bet at least one or two of you have known the magic of discovery that there really was or is or has been a connection which no amount of testing can or could or will ever tease out from the traceable connections. No wires, no line of sight, and still there is some connection.
Maybe you attribute that sort of thing to Jesus. Fair enough. But I think it's time to grow up now, and accept that we are co-creators. I think that gets attributed to Gary Snyder too, come to think of it.
The connections we make can be full of love or hate, spite or profiteering. We can be looking for love or we can be looking for sex, or we can be so jaded that we don't even believe in a difference. It's awfully hard to trust another human being. And even the best among us betray the ones we love the very most each and every day.
But what if, I mean really, what if there were some reason to believe that emotional connections across no measurable divide are actually as real as the clouds and rain (I love that, it's my secret little joke for sex, borrowed from the Chinese who use it as a euphemism).
I'm not talking about a mechanism, since physic's got that stuff all wrapped up. The kinds of connections I'm talking about break the physical laws of simultaneity, since for you and your sweetheart to be feeling something at the very same time, the connection would have to travel faster than the speed of light which is just plain physically impossible.
Oh sure, it would be hard to tell, since light can get from here to California lickety split. Quick enough so that even when your voice bounces off some satellite to get there you can't sense any delay.
But what about when you're nowhere near anything that can carry your private signal? Well maybe, and I'd say this is easily enough proven, the two of you have started to inhabit something of the same emotional space, and just like birds flying toward the same sun, if that sun were to move you'd all move at the very same time to stay with it.
Which is about, come to think of it, what they intend to do over at the CERN collider. Not moving the sun, there aren't levers long enough for that Archimedes, but come close enough to creating mass out of nothingness that it will be very much as if the sun had moved.
I know it's a really hard thing to buy, but lots of people buy miracles from baby Jesus which are a lot harder to buy, if you catch my drift. I'm not trying to be cute here, they really really do.
Miracles like that never happen to me, or maybe they do each and every day, and I'm just too obtuse to credit them. Yeah, I'll buy that. It sounds suspiciously what the very best of the Jesus people say, which I'll have to grant you (what's free, what costs? Sometimes it's hard to tell).
But I no longer believe in random. It's an old Taoist trick I learned long ago. That random's just another word for beyond the reach of mind. And to label it meaningless makes the very same mistake as labelling God, well, God.
The missing link in evolutionary theory, or so it seems to me, is the same one missing from the toolbox of the experimental physicist. If you call these random connections emotional connections instead of meaningless spins of some dice, a whole lot of stuff becomes rather instantly clear.
I'm not saying you can win the lottery by this kind of understanding. That would clearly be just plain nuts. But I am saying that the collective set of accidents which have brought us to this place across the eons of evolutionary time, can be labelled connections of love without losing one single solitary iota of physical or other meaning.
It's just a label. It doesn't change how far they are and will remain from our conscious understanding mind. These accidents of fate.
Just down the road from me, some poor and surely sweet kids were driving a little bit too fast without their seatbelts. A bear had spooked some horses penned around the corner. The horses ran up the road and right across the path of the speeding car, and three people were killed.
There's no meaning to that. It's just plain sad, tragic, and awful. And I have to say I'm glad I wasn't around when it happened, because I don't know what I would or could have done, except to call 911. I might have been too scared even to approach the scene. I hope not, but I am glad enough not to know. We do know there are quite a few heroes in our midst, though, from some other things that have gone wrong recently.
There's no meaning either to falling in love, especially if you keep doing it over and over and over.
But there is meaning to what we conspire to do together, and it's up to us now to turn all those random connections leading up to this very moment into connections of love or hate.
I have to say, at this particular moment, the way we've overpopulated our home sweet Earth by keeping back the creepy crawlies and the bears and the snakes, it's not looking too good for the love connection. And I also have to say that all the people waiting around for Jesus to arrive aren't making things any better. Especially when they watch too much Fox TV.
We've borrowed the extravagant gift of oil. We've managed to keep back the germs which would plague us if they could. Mostly, we've done that with sanitation and more robust diets, even though we're still awfully happy for the work of charitable scientists like Jonas Salk in years gone by.
Now we've made a business of getting people to believe there need be no more tragedy. That technology will save us from ourselves. And we lure away our brightest minds to the business of making money, as if that alone could cure the Earth of the illness of humankind.
Good living lowers birthrates. It cures disease. It allows the rich people to lower their walls, and cameras to come down from streetlamps. But we just can't seem to figure out how to get there from here.
Well, folks, it's not so hard as you might think. Just give a damn, and do it out loud. The mass of us are decent, have good consciences, and would never do anything horrible in the name of any god unless and until we were backed right up to some wall.
And oh yeah, another thing. Stop thinking science can tell you when and how life begins. You can't stop the twinkle in my eye. You can't murder twice what you've already killed by your neglect.
But I still can't put my finger on that final word which might convince you. I guess you'll just have to feel it for yourself. That when you occupy the same emotional space with someone else, it's just like winning the lottery only better. Because the more you give away the more you get.
OK, OK, I'm just one big fat cliche. I'm not sure if that's better than being a non-sequitur, which someone I love once meant as a compliment. I thinks it's some kind of literary in-joke. Whatever!
Connections emotionally felt are still real, and cross infinite distances in an instant. Trust me, it's been proven by physicists with quantum pairs. They just don't have the right vocabulary yet. They're still searching for some answer which is beyond the realm of objective truing. They still want to see what can only happen in some mind.
We've gotten as far as we're gonna get in that particular direction, and there's so much work we have to do right here at home, which would be trivial if we all were working in some approximation of the same direction.
Tweet tweet.
Hoover Blanket, Inc., Launches Pikk.com
I've always wanted to write a manifesto, so here it is. This is what Hoover Blanket, Inc. sets out to accomplish. Hoover Blanket, by the way, refers to newspapers, which were all that some people had to keep themselves warm with back in the first Great Depression (this one's been "papered" over by newly minted electronic money, just as new Hoovervilles spring up all over again).
I'm lousy at memorizing things, but once you learn how to see something, you never can unlearn it. I think true learning forms a kind of permanent memory, which is helpful for people like me.
I sometimes wonder if a whole nation can learn anything. Surely if you wait long enough among people without historical memory, you can almost always pull the same stunts over and over, especially on folks sent to school for memorizing and training to be economic inputs!
When I was in school myself, I was apparently smart enough to pay attention to almost nothing that was being said. Not too much memory was required for passing multiple choice tests, and in the classes I liked it wasn't the saying that counted anyhow. So, I liked physics and math, and didn't pay a whole lot of attention to history. Literature was just intimidating, and those particular multiple choice questions had no connection whatsoever to what I thought I was reading.
Maybe I don't have all that much to unlearn about how stupid everybody else in the world is who's not American, and maybe I have yet to be convinced that partisan politics means democracy. Unlearning, as any teacher can tell you, is a lot harder than learning.
We got a lot of how stupid everyone else is in the naive anthropology of world culture and religion as it was taught. Somehow, though, I've retained a few principles about greed and robber barons and how rich folks always work things out to their ever more concentrated aggrandizement. Until everything crashes.
I also never did actually read the good stuff until college, because, well frankly the good stuff wasn't being advertised very well at school where facts and names were the focus. In college, the good stuff hit me rather like a ton of bricks, and so I had to drop out and back in several times before I hit my stride studying Chinese. Which involves lots and lots of memorization, so there you go.
And in China now, we like to call their form of market economics "capitalism" too, even though their one-party political system pretty much stretches to the point of breaking what we could possibly mean when we use that same term to describe outselves. Or are they really more similar than different, with our Coke and Pepsi parties who just make it seem like there's real choice being debated. Where the real choices get whittled right down to false alternatives among characterless compromises enforced on the party membership if they want to keep their seats.
Dad's losing his memory now. He reads and rereads the autobiographies that he's compiled. To be reminded of who he was and what he did. I guess you could call it dementia, but there is still a kind of shape to it, as he fades away and anon.
Maybe we should do the same with our own national history before we forget who we once thought we were. Questing for freedom, and away from aristocracy, we always said we wanted to give the least of us the same chances as the most powerful. Well, that's what we said anyhow.
I'm trying to establish a kind of credential here for your belief in what I want to say. I'm trying to whittle myself down to that little boy who points out that the Emperor is naked. I'm trying for something anybody could see, and I haven't got a mature voice yet. But I'll keep trying.
Among other things, Hooover Blanket hopes to bring back the news, so that we can stay warm in ways which don't require a Hooverville. We here at Hoover Blanket believe in ways to promote something other than the bottom feeding train wreck corporate press-release copy which passes for news reporting these days.
And we don't think it has to be inevitable that powers like Google can destroy what used to be a somewhat honorable dishonorable profession. Not that Google has any blood on its hands yet, except perhaps in their titanic grudge match against Microsoft. It's we who don't have time or won't pay for news that's fit to read. We're too busy driving, I guess, and it's not Google's job to pay reporters.
I learned about newspaper reporting over in Taiwan during martial law, back when America called them China. My Chinese professor had hooked me up with his sister (not that way - we didn't do that back then, or at least I didn't), the only woman reporter in Taiwan, and she in turn introduced me to these three old guys, who in turn invited me to drink down at the Temple of the City God.
I'd studied Taoism with a guy who converted from Jesuitical to Taoistic understandings right in those temple precincts, so I had a little sense ahead of time about what I would be doing there. Or wait, maybe I studied with him afterward. Hell, I can't remember.
I do know that the spirits we studied were made from sorghum, and tasted somewhere just this side of turpentine. After we were good and happy - me struggling to use Chinese - the cops would join us at our table, and then later on the local mafia.
These were the guys who knew what was really going on, and I think they had to drink hard at night just so they could publish all the happy horseshit which was all that was allowed in a place where telling the truth could get you pretty quickly killed.
Now that we've disgraced poor Dan Rather, our original Million Dollar Man, who must have been radicalized over there in Afghanistan just like Osama, all we seem to get any more is happy horseshit too.
Oh sure, we pay lots of attention when they expose scumbags, and over at Fox they've raised that to an art, where absolutely everybody is a scumbag except the person pointing fingers and shouting.
I think back in kindergarten they taught us about how many fingers point back to yourself when we're calling names. But I wouldn't remember.
The point is that there is too much money in shilling a bunch of corporate orthodoxy, and not nearly enough to staff the smoky back rooms where the real stuff might get written. And plenty of money in providing hits to your logo-ridden heart, which craves its news just as greasy as MacDonalds fries. Hits to your insecure ego, which likes to think itself that much better than those scumbags who run things.
The trouble being, of course, that the scumbags being pointed at and shouted about are only diversionary creatures to make sure you don't understand who's really distorting your world-view.
So, how is Hoover Blanket going to accomplish this on our wing and our prayer?
Very simply because we know something the big guys don't know. First of all we take it as an article of faith - it's right in our manifesto (the real one) - that computers make a lousy analog for how minds actually work.
There will be no artificial intelligence, ever, and so it looks to us like a colossal and somewhat dangerous waste of time, money and power, for corporate giants like Google to catalog and cache and data-mine the entire Internet. Which, if you were to try it at home using your really really fast broadband connection would take maybe 65 years and several petabytes worth of storage just to list the pages by their url. (I read that somewhere on the Internet, so it must be true.)
But there is no intelligence in any of that data. There is power, though, for so long as Google is getting most of the clicks when you go searching for stuff. They can hand you up what you want, prearranged according to how everyone else is searching (like someone rearranging your refrigerator the same way they arrange stuff on the shelves over at Wegman's, putting the high-paying stuff right at your sweet spot) and then serving up some nicely targeted ads, in case you weren't aware of something out there you might just like to buy.
I'm not saying, by the way, that they are really doing what Wegman's does (and Wegman's is the nicest supermarket in the nation, so I pick them on purpose here). They have their code of honor. No-one can pay them for search results to make it to the top. And they don't mix in the paid ads with the other search results the way that Yahoo! and Bing do (well, OK, so there's a new distinction without a difference - they've merged, surprise, surprise! - and we might be the collateral damage in those cloud wars).
But there is a kind of simple vicious cycle which happens here, since by promoting what everyone else is looking at they are, indirectly, bringing all the logoware right up front, and letting other things disappear somewhere down in among those bejillions of other hits on pages etcetera. There's lots and lots of money involved in all this indirection.
Let's say you're a crazy guy like me, and you want to find the five or six other people on the planet who think like you do, so that they will buy your book. (I still don't get why people only buy books they agree with though)
You pay Google to pop up an ad to those folks who use your words while emailing their sweetheart, say, and it really really works. You get a sale for maybe $20 and Google automagically calibrates the click rate so that it will be worth it for you to keep paying out maybe $19 for every sale. But that's better than nothing, since you aren't even paying for paper. Except that Google's getting a pretty darned good commission. Unless you're the size of the New York Times, in which case your commission is pretty small. You get how this can work.
Well, my buddy, the brains behind Hoover Blanket (I couldn't code to save my life, well OK, I exaggerate, but not by much) got an actual bona-fide Ph.D. (I tried several times, but I just don't have the patience for it) devising ways to model living tissue for virtual reality palpations of the body.
You can't do this by old fashioned engineering means. Living tissue is just way complex compared to bridges and skyscrapers and spaceships and other things at the limits of our computing power to model. And even some of these come crashing down in ways we never could have predicted.
Living tissue - and I have to apologize here because my buddy needs to stay in the closet a little while longer, so I might be getting some of this wrong - living tissue has to be modeled in the way that cellular automata get modeled.
Think of flocks of birds or schools of fish, which seem to move as if they were one mind, but really only relate to the one next to them, in some kind of overall similar context they can all relate to.
Cellular automata are little computer googlies which only know how to react to the ones nearby, and they end up moving around like schools of fish, as if they had a mind to, too. It makes me think of those fractal creations, which look so much like living patterns, except they depend on diminutive and trivial little formulas for their computation.
So, my buddy tells me, that's how you can model living tissue. You give properties to its parts - some being more dense and some more elastic - and then you put those parts into relation with one another, and eventually the doctor at the far end of the wire can actually palpate the virtually real body and find the tumor. Cool!
So that's how the Hoover Blanket brand of search is going to work. You don't need to store the whole darned internet. You only need to store the urls and the connections to the ones nearby, and then you let the people catalog them by their clicks.
I know it sounds real simple, but trust me if it were, all those smart folks over at Google would have come up with it by now. Well, unless they're just making too much money by leaving things alone.
Fact is, I think they just can't see it, because they're so blinded by their power. I think it's pretty much exactly like Columbus' ship on the horizon being invisible to the unschooled natives on their once pristine shores. They didn't have any categories for it, and so it was just an hallucination on the horizon, along with so many others they might have still known how to see.
There is actually no need to catalog the Internet, or any very large data set. You only have to look at things in their contexts, and the magic of degrees of separation will get you very quickly to where you want to be.
So long as the degrees of separation are defined by human discernment and not by machine extractions, you will reliably find what you're looking for not because someone else has been looking for the same thing, but because you will guide the search yourself according to paths which can reveal themselves among the forest of keywords.
We have a prototype up, and it works beyond your wildest dreams. But, built on bubblegum and paperclips, it won't exactly take your load, and is depending on someone else's keyword store. But it works. It's trivial.
We also have a way to distinguish people from computers which doesn't depend on fuzzing up letters for you to type. It depends, very simply, on people making things which only other people will recognize, and then letting people type the simple recognition.
Like how you know your friend at 100 paces in Beijing, say, even though you can't believe he's there. But your attention was pulled, first, since he stuck out from all the non-milk drinkers, and second, by the recognition, and third, yep sure is. Wow.
I know homeland security and probably the NSA think that computers can do that better than us, but they also end up profiling my Mom when she crosses the Peace Bridge, just like they tried not to do with that poor Muslim down at Fort Hood. Computers can be really stupid, unless it's the people behind them.
But sure, so called Artificial Intelligence can give you a leg up, just like all those cool spy movies, for sorting among all sorts of noise, or zooming in to the right spot if you have really high resolution cameras. And even just the threat of that can keep people honest if you put cameras up on street corners.
But it doesn't do so well at keeping out all the spam, which now overwhelms legitimate email by something like an order of magnitude. Making it that much harder for Google to give you what you want. Although, for sure, they do a pretty darned good job.
Some of us might be fine with only allowing people who could actually read a CAPTCHA (those squiggly thingies to slow down "bots" on forms) to send us email instead of the mass-emailing machines which do.
Gamers of any system, mortgage derivatives, gambling, spamming, voting, any of that stuff, will always be working a flim-flam against your trust. The Internet makes it trivial now to try it out on millions of people, and you only need one to click. Your grandma, maybe, who doesn't know any better.
Yeah, OK, another quick digression, about my other friend who knew signal noise like no-one's business, working on radar in lead shielded offices over lead shielded wire, who tried to turn his considerable prowess against the stock market, as so many before him have done. "It's all noise, Rick. All noise."
But it's not noise if you can game it. You know, like sending spam around which is guaranteed to spike some stupid little stock, and so the people who get the spam can know that it will be a spike, even though they know it's spam. They just try to buy it quicker than the next guy. Or if you hide authorship and get your news to seem legitimate. Or if you blow into the balloon, and keep quiet about its limits because then you'll get accused as the one who popped it. Even Greenspan had to eat some crow this time.
You're being gamed, folks. There isn't only one way for history to play out. There really aren't technical solutions to all our people problems. There really isn't only one reliable source for all your news.
We here at Hoover Blanket aim to make sure that the little stuff also makes it to your top. If it's real and true and nicely peer reviewed. Because we have it on good authority that there are only maybe 2% of you out there who have no conscience. And that the rest of you, whether you are corporate titans or pornshop lowlifes, would love the chance to make your livings more honestly.
We don't think things have to be organized the way they are. And we're not about ready to allow the planet to run on autopilot.
There, that's my manifesto. I hope I don't get in trouble with the boss over this.
I'm lousy at memorizing things, but once you learn how to see something, you never can unlearn it. I think true learning forms a kind of permanent memory, which is helpful for people like me.
I sometimes wonder if a whole nation can learn anything. Surely if you wait long enough among people without historical memory, you can almost always pull the same stunts over and over, especially on folks sent to school for memorizing and training to be economic inputs!
When I was in school myself, I was apparently smart enough to pay attention to almost nothing that was being said. Not too much memory was required for passing multiple choice tests, and in the classes I liked it wasn't the saying that counted anyhow. So, I liked physics and math, and didn't pay a whole lot of attention to history. Literature was just intimidating, and those particular multiple choice questions had no connection whatsoever to what I thought I was reading.
Maybe I don't have all that much to unlearn about how stupid everybody else in the world is who's not American, and maybe I have yet to be convinced that partisan politics means democracy. Unlearning, as any teacher can tell you, is a lot harder than learning.
We got a lot of how stupid everyone else is in the naive anthropology of world culture and religion as it was taught. Somehow, though, I've retained a few principles about greed and robber barons and how rich folks always work things out to their ever more concentrated aggrandizement. Until everything crashes.
I also never did actually read the good stuff until college, because, well frankly the good stuff wasn't being advertised very well at school where facts and names were the focus. In college, the good stuff hit me rather like a ton of bricks, and so I had to drop out and back in several times before I hit my stride studying Chinese. Which involves lots and lots of memorization, so there you go.
And in China now, we like to call their form of market economics "capitalism" too, even though their one-party political system pretty much stretches to the point of breaking what we could possibly mean when we use that same term to describe outselves. Or are they really more similar than different, with our Coke and Pepsi parties who just make it seem like there's real choice being debated. Where the real choices get whittled right down to false alternatives among characterless compromises enforced on the party membership if they want to keep their seats.
Dad's losing his memory now. He reads and rereads the autobiographies that he's compiled. To be reminded of who he was and what he did. I guess you could call it dementia, but there is still a kind of shape to it, as he fades away and anon.
Maybe we should do the same with our own national history before we forget who we once thought we were. Questing for freedom, and away from aristocracy, we always said we wanted to give the least of us the same chances as the most powerful. Well, that's what we said anyhow.
I'm trying to establish a kind of credential here for your belief in what I want to say. I'm trying to whittle myself down to that little boy who points out that the Emperor is naked. I'm trying for something anybody could see, and I haven't got a mature voice yet. But I'll keep trying.
Among other things, Hooover Blanket hopes to bring back the news, so that we can stay warm in ways which don't require a Hooverville. We here at Hoover Blanket believe in ways to promote something other than the bottom feeding train wreck corporate press-release copy which passes for news reporting these days.
And we don't think it has to be inevitable that powers like Google can destroy what used to be a somewhat honorable dishonorable profession. Not that Google has any blood on its hands yet, except perhaps in their titanic grudge match against Microsoft. It's we who don't have time or won't pay for news that's fit to read. We're too busy driving, I guess, and it's not Google's job to pay reporters.
I learned about newspaper reporting over in Taiwan during martial law, back when America called them China. My Chinese professor had hooked me up with his sister (not that way - we didn't do that back then, or at least I didn't), the only woman reporter in Taiwan, and she in turn introduced me to these three old guys, who in turn invited me to drink down at the Temple of the City God.
I'd studied Taoism with a guy who converted from Jesuitical to Taoistic understandings right in those temple precincts, so I had a little sense ahead of time about what I would be doing there. Or wait, maybe I studied with him afterward. Hell, I can't remember.
I do know that the spirits we studied were made from sorghum, and tasted somewhere just this side of turpentine. After we were good and happy - me struggling to use Chinese - the cops would join us at our table, and then later on the local mafia.
These were the guys who knew what was really going on, and I think they had to drink hard at night just so they could publish all the happy horseshit which was all that was allowed in a place where telling the truth could get you pretty quickly killed.
Now that we've disgraced poor Dan Rather, our original Million Dollar Man, who must have been radicalized over there in Afghanistan just like Osama, all we seem to get any more is happy horseshit too.
Oh sure, we pay lots of attention when they expose scumbags, and over at Fox they've raised that to an art, where absolutely everybody is a scumbag except the person pointing fingers and shouting.
I think back in kindergarten they taught us about how many fingers point back to yourself when we're calling names. But I wouldn't remember.
The point is that there is too much money in shilling a bunch of corporate orthodoxy, and not nearly enough to staff the smoky back rooms where the real stuff might get written. And plenty of money in providing hits to your logo-ridden heart, which craves its news just as greasy as MacDonalds fries. Hits to your insecure ego, which likes to think itself that much better than those scumbags who run things.
The trouble being, of course, that the scumbags being pointed at and shouted about are only diversionary creatures to make sure you don't understand who's really distorting your world-view.
So, how is Hoover Blanket going to accomplish this on our wing and our prayer?
Very simply because we know something the big guys don't know. First of all we take it as an article of faith - it's right in our manifesto (the real one) - that computers make a lousy analog for how minds actually work.
There will be no artificial intelligence, ever, and so it looks to us like a colossal and somewhat dangerous waste of time, money and power, for corporate giants like Google to catalog and cache and data-mine the entire Internet. Which, if you were to try it at home using your really really fast broadband connection would take maybe 65 years and several petabytes worth of storage just to list the pages by their url. (I read that somewhere on the Internet, so it must be true.)
But there is no intelligence in any of that data. There is power, though, for so long as Google is getting most of the clicks when you go searching for stuff. They can hand you up what you want, prearranged according to how everyone else is searching (like someone rearranging your refrigerator the same way they arrange stuff on the shelves over at Wegman's, putting the high-paying stuff right at your sweet spot) and then serving up some nicely targeted ads, in case you weren't aware of something out there you might just like to buy.
I'm not saying, by the way, that they are really doing what Wegman's does (and Wegman's is the nicest supermarket in the nation, so I pick them on purpose here). They have their code of honor. No-one can pay them for search results to make it to the top. And they don't mix in the paid ads with the other search results the way that Yahoo! and Bing do (well, OK, so there's a new distinction without a difference - they've merged, surprise, surprise! - and we might be the collateral damage in those cloud wars).
But there is a kind of simple vicious cycle which happens here, since by promoting what everyone else is looking at they are, indirectly, bringing all the logoware right up front, and letting other things disappear somewhere down in among those bejillions of other hits on pages etcetera. There's lots and lots of money involved in all this indirection.
Let's say you're a crazy guy like me, and you want to find the five or six other people on the planet who think like you do, so that they will buy your book. (I still don't get why people only buy books they agree with though)
You pay Google to pop up an ad to those folks who use your words while emailing their sweetheart, say, and it really really works. You get a sale for maybe $20 and Google automagically calibrates the click rate so that it will be worth it for you to keep paying out maybe $19 for every sale. But that's better than nothing, since you aren't even paying for paper. Except that Google's getting a pretty darned good commission. Unless you're the size of the New York Times, in which case your commission is pretty small. You get how this can work.
Well, my buddy, the brains behind Hoover Blanket (I couldn't code to save my life, well OK, I exaggerate, but not by much) got an actual bona-fide Ph.D. (I tried several times, but I just don't have the patience for it) devising ways to model living tissue for virtual reality palpations of the body.
You can't do this by old fashioned engineering means. Living tissue is just way complex compared to bridges and skyscrapers and spaceships and other things at the limits of our computing power to model. And even some of these come crashing down in ways we never could have predicted.
Living tissue - and I have to apologize here because my buddy needs to stay in the closet a little while longer, so I might be getting some of this wrong - living tissue has to be modeled in the way that cellular automata get modeled.
Think of flocks of birds or schools of fish, which seem to move as if they were one mind, but really only relate to the one next to them, in some kind of overall similar context they can all relate to.
Cellular automata are little computer googlies which only know how to react to the ones nearby, and they end up moving around like schools of fish, as if they had a mind to, too. It makes me think of those fractal creations, which look so much like living patterns, except they depend on diminutive and trivial little formulas for their computation.
So, my buddy tells me, that's how you can model living tissue. You give properties to its parts - some being more dense and some more elastic - and then you put those parts into relation with one another, and eventually the doctor at the far end of the wire can actually palpate the virtually real body and find the tumor. Cool!
So that's how the Hoover Blanket brand of search is going to work. You don't need to store the whole darned internet. You only need to store the urls and the connections to the ones nearby, and then you let the people catalog them by their clicks.
I know it sounds real simple, but trust me if it were, all those smart folks over at Google would have come up with it by now. Well, unless they're just making too much money by leaving things alone.
Fact is, I think they just can't see it, because they're so blinded by their power. I think it's pretty much exactly like Columbus' ship on the horizon being invisible to the unschooled natives on their once pristine shores. They didn't have any categories for it, and so it was just an hallucination on the horizon, along with so many others they might have still known how to see.
There is actually no need to catalog the Internet, or any very large data set. You only have to look at things in their contexts, and the magic of degrees of separation will get you very quickly to where you want to be.
So long as the degrees of separation are defined by human discernment and not by machine extractions, you will reliably find what you're looking for not because someone else has been looking for the same thing, but because you will guide the search yourself according to paths which can reveal themselves among the forest of keywords.
We have a prototype up, and it works beyond your wildest dreams. But, built on bubblegum and paperclips, it won't exactly take your load, and is depending on someone else's keyword store. But it works. It's trivial.
We also have a way to distinguish people from computers which doesn't depend on fuzzing up letters for you to type. It depends, very simply, on people making things which only other people will recognize, and then letting people type the simple recognition.
Like how you know your friend at 100 paces in Beijing, say, even though you can't believe he's there. But your attention was pulled, first, since he stuck out from all the non-milk drinkers, and second, by the recognition, and third, yep sure is. Wow.
I know homeland security and probably the NSA think that computers can do that better than us, but they also end up profiling my Mom when she crosses the Peace Bridge, just like they tried not to do with that poor Muslim down at Fort Hood. Computers can be really stupid, unless it's the people behind them.
But sure, so called Artificial Intelligence can give you a leg up, just like all those cool spy movies, for sorting among all sorts of noise, or zooming in to the right spot if you have really high resolution cameras. And even just the threat of that can keep people honest if you put cameras up on street corners.
But it doesn't do so well at keeping out all the spam, which now overwhelms legitimate email by something like an order of magnitude. Making it that much harder for Google to give you what you want. Although, for sure, they do a pretty darned good job.
Some of us might be fine with only allowing people who could actually read a CAPTCHA (those squiggly thingies to slow down "bots" on forms) to send us email instead of the mass-emailing machines which do.
Gamers of any system, mortgage derivatives, gambling, spamming, voting, any of that stuff, will always be working a flim-flam against your trust. The Internet makes it trivial now to try it out on millions of people, and you only need one to click. Your grandma, maybe, who doesn't know any better.
Yeah, OK, another quick digression, about my other friend who knew signal noise like no-one's business, working on radar in lead shielded offices over lead shielded wire, who tried to turn his considerable prowess against the stock market, as so many before him have done. "It's all noise, Rick. All noise."
But it's not noise if you can game it. You know, like sending spam around which is guaranteed to spike some stupid little stock, and so the people who get the spam can know that it will be a spike, even though they know it's spam. They just try to buy it quicker than the next guy. Or if you hide authorship and get your news to seem legitimate. Or if you blow into the balloon, and keep quiet about its limits because then you'll get accused as the one who popped it. Even Greenspan had to eat some crow this time.
You're being gamed, folks. There isn't only one way for history to play out. There really aren't technical solutions to all our people problems. There really isn't only one reliable source for all your news.
We here at Hoover Blanket aim to make sure that the little stuff also makes it to your top. If it's real and true and nicely peer reviewed. Because we have it on good authority that there are only maybe 2% of you out there who have no conscience. And that the rest of you, whether you are corporate titans or pornshop lowlifes, would love the chance to make your livings more honestly.
We don't think things have to be organized the way they are. And we're not about ready to allow the planet to run on autopilot.
There, that's my manifesto. I hope I don't get in trouble with the boss over this.
The Teachings of Taoist Master Chuang
Teachings of Taoist Master Chuang by Michael SasoMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Looks like another book no-one else has read. But I did study with Michael Saso way back in the day. He went over to Taiwan a Jesuit, and came back a Taoist, which as I recall disqualified him from any wild dreams of a Professorship at Yale. I think there was some trouble trusting his "objectivity". Who knows, maybe he just wasn't smart enough, although he seemed pretty darned smart to me. Or maybe just not scholarly enough, which could be taken as a high compliment, especially considering the uses and abuses made of terms like Jesuitical. In any case, there was something very real in what he did relate about the inner workings of Taoism, of the sort more aligned with folk traditions, rather than the literary sort aligned with scholarship.
I never could quite believe in fantastical Jesus either, and so it should be no surprise that I couldn't enter in to the wonders of Taoist understanding. Or maybe I have in a quiet way having nothing to do with visible magic. I know that what Professor Saso (for so he was called that year) related to me was manifestly real and true. I traveled over to Taiwan myself, to inspect the temple he wrote about, but only learned to drink there. With newspaper writers who were allowed to know but never to speak the truth. Which was a different kind of occult teaching I have never quite forgotten.
So, you should read this book too, if you can find it. It leads the way to a kind of knowing beyond scholarship which is still as true as what those newspapermen knew which wasn't allowed to be any part of the official understandings. Not magic, exactly. Just what can be gotten at when you let go of too much understanding. The world could use a little more of that right now.
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Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Did a Time-Traveling Bird Sabotage the Hadron Collider?
Did a Time-Traveling Bird Sabotage the Hadron Collider?
Sorry, but this is just too good to be true. First the New York Times, and now Time Magazine has gotten on the hot bandwagon of speculation about the Hadron Collider being sabotaged from the future. (I'm sure it's the thing most on your mind!)
I don't mean the troubles are too good to be true, since I'm pretty excited to see the thing get fired up. I just mean as grist for my blogging mill, which as you know, faithful reader, is all about making fun of end-time science. Religion too. Actually, I think I make a lot more fun of end-time religion.
I know I'm getting shrill on the topic, but somebody has to get the word out. Hello World, it's time for another paradigm shift. Strap yourselves in, because this one's quite a ride. The Bomb was just a tiny thing in comparison. I mean, this one's da bomb!
Yeah, my daughters always tell me I should never try to use their kind of talk too. It just makes me look stupid.
But there's been a dry spell in theoretical physics for quite a while now. The experimentalists can't seem to think up any new ways to guide the theorizing, which is just getting more and more way out there.
People are now willing to believe almost anything about what will be the next big thing in physics. Multiple universes, time-travel, quantum consciousness, dozens of dimensions. It just gets to the point where you might as well believe in ghosts. Rapture of the Nerds doesn't seem so very different from other kinds of rapture all of the sudden.
But just like love or death, which if you're really lucky hit you out in left field from where you least expect it, the answer is so freaking obvious that it's just about driving me crazy to have somebody, anybody, see it apart from me, myself, and narcissistic I.
No, I mean if I don't get someone else to see it, then I will literally and probably clinically go actually as crazy as I will, by definition, be. You can't be the only guy in any given cosmos. That would be, um, insane? Which is a whole lot worse than being a neckbeard with a pony tail working on artificial intelligence.
So, I'll try a different take. Some of you may understand how the speed of light is one of the fundamental constants of the cosmos. No physical thing can travel faster than the speed of light. Actually, no physical thing can travel at the speed of light and still have any measurable mass. Until it's stopped. Which turns all that lightspeed mass right into energy to be detected, or perceived. Or maybe the other way around, since at lightspeed it's pure energy, and then it gets stopped to mass.
One tiny little consequence of all this is that every single thing in motion is strangely out of sync with every other thing. This problem gets called by the name of the twin paradox among physicists, and it's been brushed aside for as long as there is and will be a distinction between the cool professors who teach to illiterate literary undergrads and the really smart ones who don't want to bother.
Or maybe it's just that the really smart ones don't want to bother worrying about something whose math has been worked out long ago. Except that it hasn't been. Just because the clock on a traveling plane comes back slower doesn't answer anything at all to within my margin or error. Because that clock is not a proper twin to one sitting still in the gravity fields of earth.
The real problem is that anything moving at any speed relative to anything else is, very technically speaking now, in a different cosmos from the thing to which it's compared. Because, you know, if time is slowed for you relative to me and vice versa, we can't be in the same space-time-geographical continuum. It gets disjointed, quantum style.
And as velocity is a function of time, and as you might be boosted to near the speed of light relative to my own near light-speed motion, our combined speeds can't be cumulative because of this fundamental-constant limit of lightspeed. Which means that something's gotta give, and that something is spelled T.I.M.E.
This is the bugaboo which started me wondering now maybe 26 or 27 years ago, and I keep finding more and more elaborate, if not exactly experimental, evidence that it's essentially right. There is no physical way to be in touch with something moving. The dimensions bend in ways to take things out of sync. Time is just another way to keep track of position in the (conceptual) ether, and things get very blurry indeed when you start moving very fast.
Things get blurry in precisely the same way that particles are only probability clouds before the exchange of force carrying perceptual particles. And then these blurry waves get collapsed. But if there were only two particular twins in the entire cosmos, neither one would be in the other's cosmos if they were just passing by. The blur of each to other would be an entire other world altogether.
Which is plenty obvious to physicists too, and so we have these force carrying sub-sub-atomic particles which do the contacting for us. They race back and forth at near the speed of light, which makes them technically massless while in motion, and they seem to define the forces which keep us all together. Those physical attractions which come in four distinct flavors, the most elusive being the gravitational one, which seems to shape the very cosmos, making it very hard to get the metrics on its force carriers.
But the thing we have left to do is to account for mind among all this matter. We are properly wary about letting subjectivity in among the wild successes of objective science. Measuring things, and accounting for them in ways to cancel editorial inputs has given us so much power over our wild surroundings. It's the only way we have to accomplish something approaching agreement among peoples of different languages, religions, geographic locations, not to mention genders and propensity to tell the truth or to lie. To fantasize or be in touch with, um, reality.
The Hadron Supercollider (my own pet name for it) renders up the earnest and truest reckonings among the best and brightest of the experimental physicists about what could be the most productive experiment left to conduct to either seal its fate or destroy the standard model. Not a one of them seems "motivated" to skew the findings leading up to this point. They even seem to have the rapacious politicians at bay this time.
But no-one's really expecting the Collider's findings to help even the slightest bit with disagreements about things political, emotional, evangelical, economical, and so forth. Since these things, almost by very definition, are banished from the realm of proper science. They are in the realm of opinion, editorializing, and such things as how physics projects get funded or not, just for example.
And surely it's obvious that a whole lot of really well-off people would prefer anything over some sort of science which might expose greed as their most basic motive. One man's greed being another person's change-the-world venture capitalist venture, we surely don't want to rock the boat with what makes the world go around.
It really is a testament to the best about us, collectively, that we will render up large budgets for moon shots and Hadron Colliders, trusting those least motivated, the scientists in search of truth, to tell us where the truths will be found that aren't editorially slanted.
But it's not so very good when you measure these efforts up against the things we just won't do for the least among us. And while I hardly think we're paying off the scientists to stay out of the important business of political decision making, sometimes it does begin to look a little bit too convenient to pretend that these omissions of ours are just the costs of being human. These little omissions about spending commensurate amounts on schools as we do on bombs.
I'd be the very first to accept a diversion of funding from bombs to supercolliders or spaceships as a compromise if you don't want to invest in schools, although historically, it's been the funds for bombs which have driven the basic science.
OK, sorry, really, to be this sidetracked into the realm of still more editorializing.
The thing I'm trying to say is simply that it's long since past too late to pretend that we can keep mind out from the object of our scientific studies.
I'm absolutely not talking about brain science, artificial intelligence, neuro-science, or any of those other exciting areas which can and should and must be pursued regardless of what physics might or might not have to say about them, or even what they might have to say about physics.
I'm just saying it's long past the point of obvious that the connections between things out there in the cosmos cannot, at their furthest reaches, be distinguished from conceptual relations, which inhere in mind alone. And mind of any meaningful sort may be an aspirational concept toward which we humans, perhaps, still tend. Science being, for certain, the truest compass to guide our efforts.
That's all I'm saying. I think the quantum consciousness stuff is intresting, but not paradigm shifting for so long as it looks for a mechanism of interaction. I think the physicists who want to say that we can change the cosmos just by thinking about it are a little bit nuts themselves.
The cosmos is indeed a grand conspiracy, and we are not apart from that. We humans actually do "feel" emotional reality, for which we are probably the most sensitive instrument around. No matter what those neckbeard (as if I'm made of teflon here) singularity folks think about robots which will think, it will be a very very long time indeed before we have any sense that they can feel a thing, emotionally.
Because we'd have to, and I mean this literally, care more about them than we do our very own children, and I don't see that happening any time soon. I mean, unless it already has, which is pretty much how we're acting. If you look at the advertizements I mean, just as a f'rinstance. Or at how we deploy our energies.
Or if you look at the bombs, and the wars and the mega-corporate subsidies.
Oh, it does get tiring providing all these internal and external links to stuff I've worried half to death already. But let's coin another law, which I actually do think and believe and trust has the potential impact of Einstein's E=mc² equation between energy and matter. I know it's pretty darned cheeky of me. Sorry.
It goes like this. No amount of money, no matter how much, can accelerate caring to the point of a simple mother and child connection. You do the math, but I think it's all pretty obvious. At the point where there are enough resources to develop Artificial Intelligence while still exhibiting how little we care for the living creatures among us, then the Artificial Emotions will be the only kind that are left.
And you can have that world, since mine will be already gone. I think that might be a codicil to Rick's law.
So, I understand there's still a mad race on to get the technology right before we melt off the ice caps, put more mercury in our fishes, and kill off all the living species who don't want to live in logoware plastic ticky tacky boxes.
I understand the cynicism about politicians and political or economic systems, and how we still hope that there will be some new discovery just that wonderful that it can actually overcome them all. Something like cold fusion, maybe, or a smart enough grid to make us all conserve energy while wanting to, or cars that run on sunshine.
But if you do the math, it just can't happen. There are too darned many of us, riding on a spaceship whose carrying capacity is fundamentally dependent on a good mix of life forms. No matter what you think of creepy crawly slimy stuff, we actually do need it to live on.
So, another corollary to my law is that clean energy would be the worst possible thing to "discover", unless it really is the energy from the sun. And that gets captured and stored pretty darned well by leaves and other green things, though who could mind a few windmills or solar arrays.
I'll take hot water and light and warmth for my womb with a view. But let's dial it back a notch, folks. It isn't a race for eternity here. It's good living here and now which we might be able to work on if we were to let the editorializing in to science.
Which trivially means, and only at the fringes, that there is no actual distinction between mind and matter. You can't exactly think the future into existence, but nor should you deny what you know in your heart to be trued against it.
Conceptual connections among things, the proper realm of the arts, will never be measurable or mechanically understandable in ways to render our emotional feelings moot. Fine, no-one will disagree with me there. But I go just a tiny step further to say that that these emotional distinctions between what is beautiful and what is schlock are maybe just a little bit more important than whatever the Hadron Collider will find.
And that's because, at the very fringes which it is the experimental physicists' business to explore, there is no detecting the final massless particle which is no particle at all but is instead the conceptual relations among them. Which gets called out only when something is created from nothing, which even physicists don't really expect to be able to do. Except in the tiniest way, and overbalanced by almost as much electricity generation as we provided newly minted dollars to overbalance all that greed. Same law. Same results.
So while they go on trying to detect this so-called Higg's boson, I'll be putting out my usual generous quantities of overheated air. Pointing out that science is already finished if we thought it was going to get us off the hook of being human. That there is no further looking for purely objective reality, and that the really interesting stuff is what's going on inside and among us, the cosmos' most elaborate creatures out of apparent nothingness.
Welcome to Rick's BoZone
Sorry, but this is just too good to be true. First the New York Times, and now Time Magazine has gotten on the hot bandwagon of speculation about the Hadron Collider being sabotaged from the future. (I'm sure it's the thing most on your mind!)
I don't mean the troubles are too good to be true, since I'm pretty excited to see the thing get fired up. I just mean as grist for my blogging mill, which as you know, faithful reader, is all about making fun of end-time science. Religion too. Actually, I think I make a lot more fun of end-time religion.
I know I'm getting shrill on the topic, but somebody has to get the word out. Hello World, it's time for another paradigm shift. Strap yourselves in, because this one's quite a ride. The Bomb was just a tiny thing in comparison. I mean, this one's da bomb!
Yeah, my daughters always tell me I should never try to use their kind of talk too. It just makes me look stupid.
But there's been a dry spell in theoretical physics for quite a while now. The experimentalists can't seem to think up any new ways to guide the theorizing, which is just getting more and more way out there.
People are now willing to believe almost anything about what will be the next big thing in physics. Multiple universes, time-travel, quantum consciousness, dozens of dimensions. It just gets to the point where you might as well believe in ghosts. Rapture of the Nerds doesn't seem so very different from other kinds of rapture all of the sudden.
But just like love or death, which if you're really lucky hit you out in left field from where you least expect it, the answer is so freaking obvious that it's just about driving me crazy to have somebody, anybody, see it apart from me, myself, and narcissistic I.
No, I mean if I don't get someone else to see it, then I will literally and probably clinically go actually as crazy as I will, by definition, be. You can't be the only guy in any given cosmos. That would be, um, insane? Which is a whole lot worse than being a neckbeard with a pony tail working on artificial intelligence.
So, I'll try a different take. Some of you may understand how the speed of light is one of the fundamental constants of the cosmos. No physical thing can travel faster than the speed of light. Actually, no physical thing can travel at the speed of light and still have any measurable mass. Until it's stopped. Which turns all that lightspeed mass right into energy to be detected, or perceived. Or maybe the other way around, since at lightspeed it's pure energy, and then it gets stopped to mass.
One tiny little consequence of all this is that every single thing in motion is strangely out of sync with every other thing. This problem gets called by the name of the twin paradox among physicists, and it's been brushed aside for as long as there is and will be a distinction between the cool professors who teach to illiterate literary undergrads and the really smart ones who don't want to bother.
Or maybe it's just that the really smart ones don't want to bother worrying about something whose math has been worked out long ago. Except that it hasn't been. Just because the clock on a traveling plane comes back slower doesn't answer anything at all to within my margin or error. Because that clock is not a proper twin to one sitting still in the gravity fields of earth.
The real problem is that anything moving at any speed relative to anything else is, very technically speaking now, in a different cosmos from the thing to which it's compared. Because, you know, if time is slowed for you relative to me and vice versa, we can't be in the same space-time-geographical continuum. It gets disjointed, quantum style.
And as velocity is a function of time, and as you might be boosted to near the speed of light relative to my own near light-speed motion, our combined speeds can't be cumulative because of this fundamental-constant limit of lightspeed. Which means that something's gotta give, and that something is spelled T.I.M.E.
This is the bugaboo which started me wondering now maybe 26 or 27 years ago, and I keep finding more and more elaborate, if not exactly experimental, evidence that it's essentially right. There is no physical way to be in touch with something moving. The dimensions bend in ways to take things out of sync. Time is just another way to keep track of position in the (conceptual) ether, and things get very blurry indeed when you start moving very fast.
Things get blurry in precisely the same way that particles are only probability clouds before the exchange of force carrying perceptual particles. And then these blurry waves get collapsed. But if there were only two particular twins in the entire cosmos, neither one would be in the other's cosmos if they were just passing by. The blur of each to other would be an entire other world altogether.
Which is plenty obvious to physicists too, and so we have these force carrying sub-sub-atomic particles which do the contacting for us. They race back and forth at near the speed of light, which makes them technically massless while in motion, and they seem to define the forces which keep us all together. Those physical attractions which come in four distinct flavors, the most elusive being the gravitational one, which seems to shape the very cosmos, making it very hard to get the metrics on its force carriers.
But the thing we have left to do is to account for mind among all this matter. We are properly wary about letting subjectivity in among the wild successes of objective science. Measuring things, and accounting for them in ways to cancel editorial inputs has given us so much power over our wild surroundings. It's the only way we have to accomplish something approaching agreement among peoples of different languages, religions, geographic locations, not to mention genders and propensity to tell the truth or to lie. To fantasize or be in touch with, um, reality.
The Hadron Supercollider (my own pet name for it) renders up the earnest and truest reckonings among the best and brightest of the experimental physicists about what could be the most productive experiment left to conduct to either seal its fate or destroy the standard model. Not a one of them seems "motivated" to skew the findings leading up to this point. They even seem to have the rapacious politicians at bay this time.
But no-one's really expecting the Collider's findings to help even the slightest bit with disagreements about things political, emotional, evangelical, economical, and so forth. Since these things, almost by very definition, are banished from the realm of proper science. They are in the realm of opinion, editorializing, and such things as how physics projects get funded or not, just for example.
And surely it's obvious that a whole lot of really well-off people would prefer anything over some sort of science which might expose greed as their most basic motive. One man's greed being another person's change-the-world venture capitalist venture, we surely don't want to rock the boat with what makes the world go around.
It really is a testament to the best about us, collectively, that we will render up large budgets for moon shots and Hadron Colliders, trusting those least motivated, the scientists in search of truth, to tell us where the truths will be found that aren't editorially slanted.
But it's not so very good when you measure these efforts up against the things we just won't do for the least among us. And while I hardly think we're paying off the scientists to stay out of the important business of political decision making, sometimes it does begin to look a little bit too convenient to pretend that these omissions of ours are just the costs of being human. These little omissions about spending commensurate amounts on schools as we do on bombs.
I'd be the very first to accept a diversion of funding from bombs to supercolliders or spaceships as a compromise if you don't want to invest in schools, although historically, it's been the funds for bombs which have driven the basic science.
OK, sorry, really, to be this sidetracked into the realm of still more editorializing.
The thing I'm trying to say is simply that it's long since past too late to pretend that we can keep mind out from the object of our scientific studies.
I'm absolutely not talking about brain science, artificial intelligence, neuro-science, or any of those other exciting areas which can and should and must be pursued regardless of what physics might or might not have to say about them, or even what they might have to say about physics.
I'm just saying it's long past the point of obvious that the connections between things out there in the cosmos cannot, at their furthest reaches, be distinguished from conceptual relations, which inhere in mind alone. And mind of any meaningful sort may be an aspirational concept toward which we humans, perhaps, still tend. Science being, for certain, the truest compass to guide our efforts.
That's all I'm saying. I think the quantum consciousness stuff is intresting, but not paradigm shifting for so long as it looks for a mechanism of interaction. I think the physicists who want to say that we can change the cosmos just by thinking about it are a little bit nuts themselves.
The cosmos is indeed a grand conspiracy, and we are not apart from that. We humans actually do "feel" emotional reality, for which we are probably the most sensitive instrument around. No matter what those neckbeard (as if I'm made of teflon here) singularity folks think about robots which will think, it will be a very very long time indeed before we have any sense that they can feel a thing, emotionally.
Because we'd have to, and I mean this literally, care more about them than we do our very own children, and I don't see that happening any time soon. I mean, unless it already has, which is pretty much how we're acting. If you look at the advertizements I mean, just as a f'rinstance. Or at how we deploy our energies.
Or if you look at the bombs, and the wars and the mega-corporate subsidies.
Oh, it does get tiring providing all these internal and external links to stuff I've worried half to death already. But let's coin another law, which I actually do think and believe and trust has the potential impact of Einstein's E=mc² equation between energy and matter. I know it's pretty darned cheeky of me. Sorry.
It goes like this. No amount of money, no matter how much, can accelerate caring to the point of a simple mother and child connection. You do the math, but I think it's all pretty obvious. At the point where there are enough resources to develop Artificial Intelligence while still exhibiting how little we care for the living creatures among us, then the Artificial Emotions will be the only kind that are left.
And you can have that world, since mine will be already gone. I think that might be a codicil to Rick's law.
So, I understand there's still a mad race on to get the technology right before we melt off the ice caps, put more mercury in our fishes, and kill off all the living species who don't want to live in logoware plastic ticky tacky boxes.
I understand the cynicism about politicians and political or economic systems, and how we still hope that there will be some new discovery just that wonderful that it can actually overcome them all. Something like cold fusion, maybe, or a smart enough grid to make us all conserve energy while wanting to, or cars that run on sunshine.
But if you do the math, it just can't happen. There are too darned many of us, riding on a spaceship whose carrying capacity is fundamentally dependent on a good mix of life forms. No matter what you think of creepy crawly slimy stuff, we actually do need it to live on.
So, another corollary to my law is that clean energy would be the worst possible thing to "discover", unless it really is the energy from the sun. And that gets captured and stored pretty darned well by leaves and other green things, though who could mind a few windmills or solar arrays.
I'll take hot water and light and warmth for my womb with a view. But let's dial it back a notch, folks. It isn't a race for eternity here. It's good living here and now which we might be able to work on if we were to let the editorializing in to science.
Which trivially means, and only at the fringes, that there is no actual distinction between mind and matter. You can't exactly think the future into existence, but nor should you deny what you know in your heart to be trued against it.
Conceptual connections among things, the proper realm of the arts, will never be measurable or mechanically understandable in ways to render our emotional feelings moot. Fine, no-one will disagree with me there. But I go just a tiny step further to say that that these emotional distinctions between what is beautiful and what is schlock are maybe just a little bit more important than whatever the Hadron Collider will find.
And that's because, at the very fringes which it is the experimental physicists' business to explore, there is no detecting the final massless particle which is no particle at all but is instead the conceptual relations among them. Which gets called out only when something is created from nothing, which even physicists don't really expect to be able to do. Except in the tiniest way, and overbalanced by almost as much electricity generation as we provided newly minted dollars to overbalance all that greed. Same law. Same results.
So while they go on trying to detect this so-called Higg's boson, I'll be putting out my usual generous quantities of overheated air. Pointing out that science is already finished if we thought it was going to get us off the hook of being human. That there is no further looking for purely objective reality, and that the really interesting stuff is what's going on inside and among us, the cosmos' most elaborate creatures out of apparent nothingness.
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