Overweening Generalist

William S. Burroughs and Giambattista Vico on Immortality, and Other Ragtag Observations on Death

2012-03-06T03:13:00.009-08:00

First: A Gnostic: Simon Magus
In Jacques Lacarriere's little gem of a book, The Gnostics, he's discussing the diffusion of gnostic ideas "along the great routes of the Orient," on "the road to Samaria," and the wonderfully odd figure of Simon Magus, one of history's uber-heretics. His ideas contradicted the ideas of the Apostles quite radically. For what would turn out to be the orthodox view, the Apostles said a human's soul is immortal, no matter what he or she does; we are all condemned for eternity to burnish or tarnish that soul, know the depths of hell, or paradisical delights. Simon preached, or railed rather thus: We all have a fragment of God in us. We are special creatures because, for example, we can use language and reason. But these are potentialities, not eternal. We must use it or lose it. (In the 20th century, we found that if a child was not exposed to any language by age seven or so, their brain's innate language acquisitive feature soon dissipates. And who really "reasons" much even these days?) Simon says: we have the capacity for speech, grammar, and geometry...but it's up to use to seize the day and work that stuff, get really good at it. The point is: we have the capacity. Simon seemed to think we also had the capacity for immortality, but time's a wastin': let's get to it, figure it out...

We must cultivate an attitude towards our aptitudes. That spark of he Divine in us is not eternal. It can only become eternal if we feed that spark, make it into a fire. Otherwise, we revert to nothingness.

And here's how the eloquent Lacarriere unpacks Simon Magus's heretical view of immortality: "For the gnostic, the die is cast, here, before death. (No wonder Simon Magus was hated by the orthodox! - the OG) Which is why he feels this sense of anguish in the face of time and the brevity of the human span, a feeling that is so characteristic of the Gnostic sensibility, and one which is only remotely related to the melancholy Jeremiads of the poets who lament the passing of the days: every moment of our lives is counted, for each is a door opening on to immortality or the void." (p.49)

Another gnostic heretic, Valentinus, is quoted: "Make death die."

It is because of the Gnostics, the Taoists, much of Buddhism, some mystical Judaism, and some Hinduism that I find a line of the so-called "new atheism" interesting, and that line says something like, "Religion is too important to be left to the believers, the faithful." See Alain de Botton's views in this article, which also mentions Nassim Taleb.

It would seem the Extropian/Transhumanist manifestoes echo certain things some gnostic sects were already groping towards, in the first two centuries of the Common Era.

A Quick Thought and/or Inchoate Koan
Let's say the worldwide army of scientists working on the Death Problem solve it. A few huge key findings fall into place, the rest is like knocking over dominoes, a WHAM!: we've got immortality. Is this something like Sisyphus pushing his stone all the way to the top of the mountain, and over the edge, finally, wiping his hands and going home?

Burroughs and Vico
After Norman Mailer published his book Ancient Evenings, Burroughs, from roughly 1972 till death, showed a Mailer influence with an Egyptian-based death as mythic antagonist, which comes out in unique Burroughsian full-force with his use of the "seven souls" one has and must deal with correctly in the afterlife, largely derived ultimately from The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Here, have a listen to Ol' Bill reading from his novel The Western Lands, accompanied by the fantastic electronic-world music of Bill Laswell's band Material:

Here's the lyrics as WSB reads them; he added a few bits here and there as improv, like "Sort of thing you might see on a screen in an Indian restaurant in Panama." I confess the first time I heard this piece I went into an altered state, and when WSB says the first three souls are immortal and go back to heaven for another vessel, but the last four souls must "take their chances with the subject in the land of the dead," I was floored. O! The primal poetry of it all!

My blogging colleague Oz Fritz is all over this soul-after-death bardo trip, and I eagerly refer to his recent post HERE.

Throughout Burroughs's dazzling oeuvre, there's an obvious obsession with memory and vital, sexual young men (some of this for obvious reasons); but he also liked to remember himself as young and vital when he was an old man. He thought and wrote about death in ways that few of the candidates for Great American Novelist did. And apparently, from at least around the time of the appearance of the book that would make him famous, Naked Lunch, in 1959, he'd dreamed about afterlives. Personally, I do not think much about an afterlife, possibly because of my overweening materialism and non-religiosity. But I'm fascinated by what cultural anthropologists have told us about the various beliefs about death. Someone once said, "We are all greater artists than we realize." When it comes to religious ideas about life and death I see them as sort of collective artworks, and who knows? Maybe I'm just lacking imagination, and some of these ideas are "right"? How hilarious! How ironic! How...marvelous to contemplate.

Back to Burroughs.

In his book from 1995, (he died in 1997), My Education: A Book of Dreams, WSB recalls a dream he'd had right after Naked Lunch was published:

Airport. Like a high school play, attempting to convey a spectral atmosphere. One desk onstage, a gray woman behind the desk with the cold waxen face of the intergalactic bureaucrat. She is dressed in a gray-blue uniform. Airport sounds from a distance, blurred, incomprehensible, then suddenly loud and clear. "Flight sixty-nine has been----" Static... Fades into the distance... "Flight..."

Standing to one side of the desk are three men, grinning with joy at their prospective destinations. When I present myself at the desk, the woman says: "You haven't had your education yet."

The semantics of "education"seen vital here: by 1959 WSB had long dropped out of Harvard, where he studied medicine and anthropology, and had travelled and written a couple of novels and many later-to-be-published letters of literary delight to weirdos like myself. Aside from formal education, he had earlier astonished young Ginsberg and Kerouac with his erudition, and shaped their thinking - and other notable "Beat" types - mostly via his learning of Arcane Things and WSB's spectral presentation of himself. It's easy (and valid, methinks) to surmise the dream's semantics of education had to do with imagination/narrative/tapping into post-terrestrial circuits of the brain/magick/experimentation.

It was much later that WSB began to concentrate on the cosmi-comic high drama of Death as the Adversary, like a character in multifaceted forms. And he drew from many sources regarding this, not just the Egyptians. Emotionally, a very strong actuating force for his thoughts about death had to do with his beloved cats. I recall reading once - I forget where - that Burroughs thought nuclear annihilation would be particularly horrible because then his cats would die.

(At this point in my rambling little blogspew I'm quite tempted to link to articles on cats and taxoplasmosis and its potential to make humans quite a bit odder than they would've been, if only for the irony of someone I thought was maybe Unistat's greatest writer during the second half of the 20th century, and who used the metaphor of language-as-virus extensively, but I will just link this and you go ahead and make of it what you will. Hmmm...Ezra Pound loved cats too, feeding them all over Rapallo...)

Yes, but what about Vico? He had something to say about immortality and the afterlife too? Of course he did.

Vico thought a looming large and distinctive feature of human law, as opposed to natural law, was that we humans bury our dead. And with ceremony. (We have good reason to believe Neanderthals did too, but there was no way Vico could've been on to that.)

Vico:

Let us imagine a brutish state in which human corpses are left unburied as carrion for crows and dogs. Such bestial behavior clearly belongs to the world of uncultivated fields and uninhabited cities, in which people wandered like swine, eating acorns amid the rotting corpses of their dead kin. This is why burials were rightly defined in a lofty Latin phrase as "the covenants of the human race," foedera humani generis, and were characterized less grandly by Tacitus as "exchanges of humanity," humanitatis commercia."

Then Vico enumerates many books he's had the privilege to get hold of, about peoples from far-flung areas of the world. What all these books prove is that "all pagan nations clearly agree in the view that the souls of the unburied remain restless on the earth and wander around their corpses: which is to say, souls do not die with their bodies but are immortal." Vico doesn't have much at all to say about what happens to anyone's soul after death. But I do like his proto-ghost/zombie vision idea. I like it in the same way Burroughs talks about the at-times treacherous roads to the Western Lands. I don't "believe" it, but it makes for tremendous poetry.

The end of the section of The New Science in which Vico here discusses burial as a human law, culminates with this quote from Seneca:

"When we discuss immortality, we must grant considerable importance to the consensus of humankind, who either fear or worship the spirits of the underworld. I follow this general belief." (section #337)

Nietzsche On This Topic...
...Seems to lead us by some sort of circumambient commodius vicus of recirculation to Nietzsche's The Antichrist, and back to a quasi-Simon Magus-like gnostic view. In section #58, Fred N. rails against the quasi-Neoplatonic "life is better up there" crowd, where the real immortality lies. For these weak, unimaginative folk, the Good Life is to be found after death. And before orthodox Christianity became the master of Rome, Epicurus had already battled against these types. I will leave it to the better minds who know the gnostics (such as Simon Magus) and Nietzsche to say just where and how they diverge with regard to immortality, but clearly, in The Antichrist, Fred N. doesn't dig the Christian version either:

"One should read Lucretius to comprehend what Epicurus fought: not paganism but "Christianity," by which I mean the corruption of souls by the concepts of guilt, punishment, and immortality. He fought the subterranean cults which were exactly like a latent form of Christianity: to deny immortality was then nothing less than a real salvation."

Final Thoughts: Professor George Carlin
"When I die I don't want to be buried, but I don't want to be cremated either. I want to be blown up. Put me on a pile of explosives and blow me up. Or throw my body from a helicopter. That would be fun. One stipulation: wherever I land, you have to leave me there. Even if it's the mayor's lawn. Just let me lie there. But keep the dogs away." - N&S:9

"If I had my choice of how to die I would like to be sitting on the crosstown bus and suddenly burst into flames." - N&S:10

"Isn't it time we stopped wasting valuable land on cemeteries? Talk about an idea whose time has passed: 'Let's put all the dead people in boxes and keep them in one part of town.' What kind of medieval bullshit is that? I say, plow these motherfuckers up and throw them away. Or melt them down. We need the phosphorus for farming. If we're going to recycle, let's get serious." - N&S:79

Life Extension Notes

2012-03-03T01:21:00.012-08:00

Completing the trifecta of Leary and Wilson's SMI2LE vision of a way out of technological materialism with no goal, no telos, is Life Extension. This one's a whole ungainly ball of wax, and I will have to do multiple posts on it over the coming months in order to feel like I've said anything substantial about it.

I previously posted on Space Migration HERE.
My stab at Intelligence Increase ("I" squared) was HERE.

Cellular Level
From my current view, the most exciting and radical research on life extension is the hard slog done at the level of the cell. According to some statistics, the combination of ever-faster computers and the fact that there are more scientists doing research now than at any time in history - by far! - means that key findings about how and why we age, how we can slow it down, stop it or even reverse it, are immanent. (Let us define "immanent" as something like "in the next 15 years," just for kicks, although many in the field will say that's being conservative!)

Around 1961 cytogerontologist Leonard Hayflick and his colleague Paul Moorhead defined what is now commonly called the "Hayflick Limit": they proved that cellular DNA can only replicate about 60 times during a lifetime; with constant replications, mistakes are made, gunk gets into the next generation, and accumulates over time. I heard one theorist describe it as like when you or your friends bought a Beatles record and taped it for friends. Then they taped it from the tape they were given, then those friends taped it from the taped tape, etc: after awhile you got a copy that sounded like crap. Well, when we get to be around 75, our cells are filled with gunk, the machinery has started to break down (I've seen the carburetor used as a metaphor a lot here too), and the processes that keep our hearts, brains, livers and other good stuff...rusts and breaks. We die. It seems we're programmed to be like that.

There are plenty of Very Bright People who think we can defeat these programs.

So far, the only proven method of extending life is to slow metabolism, which for humans means caloric restriction, or to eat less. The less food/calories, the less to metabolize, the slower gunk and noise accumulates at the cellular level. The problem with this is that it's really not very fun. I think Woody Allen put it best when he said that - I paraphrase from memory - "If you want to live to be 100, you need to give up all those things that make you want to live to be 100."

There's gotta be a better way. And it looks like there are a few prospects. I'll cover a few.

Sidelight: The literature on life extension is so extensive, it's easy to find oneself in a rocky and sedimented terminal morain. This precariousness seems heightened if the reader is a non-specialist, and who's more non-specialist than an overweening generalist? Still, I have found a few hot rocks. They seem to shimmer brilliantly. I call each one a possible fleck from the Fountain of Youth. Let us call each item a "de Leonite clue."

Here's a possible de Leonite: ELLPs. What are they? They're Extremely Long-Lasting Proteins, and they were recently found on the surface of the nucleus of a neuron by researchers at the Salk Institute's Molecular and Cell Biology Lab, led by Martin Hetzer. What's the big deal? Well, most proteins last for a few days at most. The ELLPs that coat a cell last a lifetime, and they're part of the NPC, or Nuclear Pore Complex. Okay, look at the cross-section of the cell above and note things called "microtubules," "microfilaments," and "plasma membrane." A cell needs to both protect itself from outside bad stuff and to let in outside good stuff - to put it like a nine year old. The Salk researchers found that bad stuff can happen because these ELLPs that coat the outside of the cell walls of a neuron like marble, erode over the years, and this is probably how a lot of gunk (there's our carburetor metaphor again) gets into cells. Another way of putting it: the gate keepers of the cell break down over a lifetime and allow toxins to get in, damaging DNA, and let us not even talk about the nasty stuff that happens when your DNA is damaged.

The results from this research could lead to better ways to treat or avert neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Hetzer's team were told the research they undertook would be too bold, difficult and expensive to conduct. You probably didn't hear about this in the "news" because it didn't contain enough blood, Beiber, ballgame or Beyonce.

Seriously, this is major stuff, because no one really knew ELLPs were what they were. Read more about it HERE.

Q: What are sirtuins? And what do they have to do with me?

I'm glad you asked. They are Silent Information Regulator Two proteins that act as enzymes, and were linked to life extension around 1986. Mammals have seven types of sirtuins, and Sir1 has been linked to the reason why caloric restriction works to slow aging. It gets really dodgy from here on out, for the OG.

How cool would it be if we could find something that would activate the Sir1, without having to constantly feel hungry? When we start to starve - or we restrict our caloric intake by 30%--40% - as the theory goes, some genes kick in and protect us against the stress of being hungry, and protect our cells and vital organs. These are the sirtuins. Here's where red wine comes in: it looks like, when we drink certain red wines that contain resveratrol, that it activates a gene-complex very Sir1-like, and has the same effects as caloric restriction. Instead of caloric restriction/quasi-starvation, drink a hearty glass of red zinfandel! Sound too good to be true? (Wait for it...)

MIT professor Leonard Guarente has been at the forefront of Sir1 research, from caloric restriction to providing a theoretical platform for new anti-aging drugs based on his (and other's) sirtuin findings. Glaxo-Smith-Kline paid $720 million for a company called Sirtrus, and...here's an article from two years ago. It's not going as well as we'd/they'd hoped. In many articles, Dr. Richard Miller, a professor of Pathology at the University of Michigan and critic of the sirtuin hypothesis, has been saying that the relatively simple story of the sirtuins was too simple, that sirtuins are probably just one of very many systems in cell-signaling that influence aging. But Guarente is holding firm, recently publishing a long paper on the miraculous potentials of the sirtuins.

Meanwhile, research on the other sirtuins is hot - there's potentially gold in them thar genes! - and for the sufficiently geeky, see HERE (Sir6 linked to longer lifespan!), HERE (researchers in London seem to see a chimera in the sirtuin hunt vis a vis longevity?), and HERE, for starters. Note this last article links mutations that increased sirtuins were linked to anxiety and panic disorders. I think the sirtuin road led to a terminal morain for this reader. But I will still pay attention to anything that might come up. You never know what Sir5 might have in store for us, for example. The sirtuins may yet yield a dynamite de Leonite/piece of the puzzle.

I want to get into telomeres and telomerase, but first a word from an Oracle, AKA Kaku:

Stop me if you've heard this one, or just bear with me: each one of our chromosomes has a sort of "cap" of base-pairs that can be visualized like a shoelace: if you didn't have that little piece of hard plastic at the end of your laces, everything would shred and tying your shoes would be an unpleasant task. A telomere is one of these caps. It strongly appears that, with each cell division over a lifetime, the cap gets shorter. End of telomere = haywire/Hayflick Limit. Cells can't repair, eventually TAFUBAR.

Now: there are two classes of cells that don't age: your germ/sex cells (sperm/eggs, which is good, or your baby will be born looking as old as you!), and our old nemesis, the emperor of all maladies, cancer. Cancer can just go on dividing forever! It's immortal! (Not all cancer cells, just...enough. Oy. As Professor Carlin wrote in Napalm and Silly Putty, "If you live long enough, everyone you know has cancer.") Until it - cancer - kills itself by killing its host (us or our loved ones). Let's not worry about cancer's problems. It's doing just fine for now.

So what makes sex and cancer cells immortal? Telomerase. Both germ and cancer cells produce the enzyme telomerase, which keeps the telomeres intact when cells divide. Can we come up with telomerase therapy that will effectively arrest aging, or potentially reverse some of it? Dr. Michael Fossel thinks so. He thinks it's about ten years away! (Others Big Brains I've read say 50-100 years and we'll have telomerase therapy. Aubrey de Grey says about 100 years, and that guy usually seems optimistic to me. Speaking of Mr. de Grey, get a load of him if you haven't already. There are endless videos to be found if you like this one:

Axiological Level
What really interested me about what de Grey says here about those opposed to longevity research - mainstream media people who seem to regard it as faintly ridiculous or science-fiction-y and throw in the word "immortality," and gerontologists. This last I found very interesting, because de Grey seems to perceive those engaged in regenerative medicine as knowing things the gerontologists do not. Which I find totally plausible. If one reads Leonard Hayflick, one rapidly sheds any optimism for notable improvements in human lifespan soon; Hayflick is a heavyweight in the field of human lifespan studies and he's not exactly sanguine about our prospects for immortality, to put it mildly. But I wonder if de Grey is rather talking about temperaments of researchers? Just note the impression the fields have on your own disposition towards improving human lifespans: "gerontology"....""regenerative medicine"? At what point do we reconcile these two, if ever? It gets weirder.

I think it has to do with axiology, the study of our basic values. We build whole worlds of thought, political systems, ideologies, laws, and dreams on the basic building blocks of our own values. And where did we get these values that are so important to us? It's a difficult question. I've written on axiology HERE and HERE, but I have barely touched the surface of the idea.

One of the major founders of Transhumanism, Max More. Check out what he has to say between 5:26 and 8:07:

This gets to a recent book review I read in Reason magazine. I have not read The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science In America, by Jonathan D. Moreno. Not yet. Ronald Bailey's review seems to extend the values issues that Max More brought up after his famous Free Inquiry article from 1993, between "humanists" and "transhumanists," this latter group who were enthused about More's ideas probably not even self-defining themselves as "transhumanists" at the time. Coupled with Aubrey de Grey's gerontologists vs. regenerative medicine researchers (and IT professionals, libertarians, and Canadians), now we have the "biopolitics" of strange bedfellows: biocons, who object to things like embryonic stem cell research on strictly "moral" grounds; and egalitarian leftists, who see a disaster in runaway advanced new biological techniques: only for the rich, non-egalitarian, and lacking in human dignity. In this article, "biopolitics" is defined as "the nonviolent struggle for control over the actual and imagined achievements of the new biology and the world it symbolizes."

(I analyzed Rick Santorum's views on bioethics vis a vis this wider conversation and will charitably designate him as some sort of "paleobiocon." I think I'm letting him off easy, too.)

The Reader has to decide where they stand on this stuff. Where are you, bio-ethically? The more I study this stuff, the more difficult it gets. On principle I like the idea of Unistat starting out as a country that values very highly new knowledge. And the history of the 19th/early 20th century Progressive movement and eugenics is sobering. On the other hand, I see Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book The Black Swan as prophetic (ironically!): we now live less and less in the old linear, Bell Curvey "Mediocristan" and more and more in Extremistan: the rich have gotten wildly richer and almost everyone else has stayed the same or has fallen lower. And I don't see much brightness on the horizon. Just look at the overtly bought elections. Just look at the appalling decadence in the basic fact that: the banks did what they did to our lives, got bailed out, and Obama has not been able to put in place any regulations with teeth to speak of, four years later.

However, as Taleb goes to great lengths to emphasize: we can only notice where there's risk/fragility built into a system and try to minimize it. All other bets about the future are off. No one knows. Certainly not "experts"!

I tend to be with Moreno's "bioprogressives," who welcome new advances, even if I probably won't be able to afford them. Hell, I can't even afford basic health insurance now...

Speaking of Taleb: "Don't talk about 'progress' in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness." - p.7, Bed of Procrustes

David Jay Brown's marvelous book of interviews, Mavericks of Medicine: Conversations on the Frontiers of Medical Research (2006) was an overwhelmingly stimulating read this past week - on this subject of life extension and other topics - and is largely to blame for the gap between my last post and this one. Highly recommended! (It's dedicated to Robert Anton Wilson, too.)

To end on a lighter note, Professor Carlin thought that "Dying must have a survival value. Or it wouldn't be part of the biological process."

Ray Kurzweil - no relation to Peter Bogdanovich that I know of - on aging and supplements, for a minute and 40 seconds: "We can't rely on 'being natural,' that's not good enough..."

Books, Borges, and The Library of Babel

2012-02-26T02:31:00.011-08:00

I recently read yet once again Borges's very short story, "The Library of Babel," mostly for its invocation of an ineffable infinitude. The first time I read this story it knocked me on my ass, and it haunted my daydreams. Imagine a library that contained every book ever written, every book that would ever be written, in every language, including a book that was your autobiography, a book that would vindicate our lives, that probably many books were written in code, and if you could just learn how to crack it, things would come together, yet no one has ever been able to decipher any codes; a book that was the key to all the other books, and a legend of a Librarian who knew this book...but almost all of the books are filled with gibberish, random letters thrown together, and presumably innumerable copies of Don Quixote, every one with one letter or punctuation mark different from the others...and there is no order...

I find that I think of this library quite often, and if enough time has passed between one reading of the piece (it seems more like a piece than a "story" to me), then my imagination has glommed onto one or two ideas in the piece at the expense of others, or I find, upon a new reading, that my memory, probably influenced by the vertiginous aspect of the piece, has invented something new that's not really in the piece, but seems plausibly aligned with its spirit.

Escher, of course. I see Borges's Library here, too.

The Wikipedia article on Borges's piece links the original idea of the stupendously massive number of possibilities of books to 13th century philosopher-magician-mystic Ramon Llull's imaginary device, called now a "Lullian Circle" that could generate a near-infinity of possibilities. The metaphor of the library has proven absurdly fecund, and I've stopped keeping notes whenever this monstrous library is used by a contemporary writer to get a point across. I think some of us are enchanted-unto-haunted by the notion of infinity.

The Wiki article links to ideas from Kant, kabbalah, and Quine. The philosopher Daniel Dennett is mentioned also, with regard to DNA permutations and what was/is possible; if you read Dennett's book Darwin's Dangerous Idea and the "Library of Mendel" you get an insight into the dizzying possibilities of the mathematics of genetic mutation. Similarly, Robert Sapolsky used Borges in discussing the idea of biological convergence in The Trouble With Testosterone. In Richard Preston's book Panic In Level 4 there's a story - true! "non-fiction" - of two Russian brothers, the Chudnovskis, both mathematicians, whose driving ambition is to use as many computers as they can to carry out pi to...just an absurd number of places, really. And Preston invokes Borges's idea: what if, somewhere in the vast depths of the seemingly random pi, there's suddenly a mathematically-proven explosion of non-randomness? Getting involved in infinity seems to attract the weird ones. Show of hands? (Or does infinity's clutches render one, over time, less sane?)

One of my favorite books to pick off the shelf in my quite-finite library is Randall Collins's The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, which runs to nearly 1100 pages. It's an astonishing work; get your hands on it, if only for half an hour someday. Collins writes about present-day intellectual life and says:

"The totality of knowledge today resembles Jorge Luis Borges's circular library, with endless volumes on endless shelves, and inhabitants searching for the master catalogue buried among them written in a code no one can understand. But we can also think of it as a magic place of adventurously winding corridors with treasures in every room. It suffers only from surfeit, since new and greater treasures are always to be found. Borges's image has the alienated tone characteristic of modern intellectuals, but the underlying problem is the inchoate democracy of it all, the lack of a master key." (pp.41-42)

Supposedly Gertrude Stein once said something like, "There ain't no answer. There never was an answer. There ain't never gonna be an answer. That's the answer." This lack of a key seems to me the key, the riddle of this particular sphinx. We will make and construct, like a teeming mass of bricoleurs, our knowledge. Has fantastical knowledge already appeared and been criminally neglected, for whatever reason? I suspect it has. We must expect such things, however sad.

A funny thing about Borges: it seems the sufis have been claiming him since the 1960s as one of their own. A well-stocked library will yield multiple titles that link him with sufis. Which I accept on the face if it. I've read a couple of those books. But then, I accept sufis indiscriminately. Philip K. Dick was said to have been reading Borges at the end of his life, according to PKD acolyte Gregg Rickman, in his Philip K. Dick: In His Own Words. Erik Davis, in my eyes one of our three best writers on contemporary esotericism, or as he calls it, "occulture," has argued that magical realism - commonly linked with names like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, had as its forerunners Borges and H.P. Lovecraft. (See Book of Lies, edited by Richard Metzger, p.139)

For fellow Robert Anton Wilson scholars, he named Borges as an influential "experimental modern" writer, along with Joyce and Faulkner, in an interview with Charles Platt in 1983 or so. In a letter to his friend Kurt Smith, RAW compares Borges to Wilde and Yeats. (!) In his book Chaos and Beyond, he mentions Borges as "avante garde" along with Joyce and William S. Burroughs. In an issue of his magazine Trajectories RAW lumps Borges in with a large cast of guerrilla ontologists, tricksters, postmodernists and others he calls "codologists."

Hakim Bey, AKA Peter Lamborn Wilson, definitely a sufi of some sort, writes in Immediatism, "Books? Books as media transmit only words - no sounds, sights, smells or feels, all of which are left up to the reader's imagination. Fine...But there's nothing 'democratic' about books. The author/publisher produces, you consume. Books appeal to 'imaginative' people, perhaps, but all their imaginal activity really amounts to passivity, sitting alone with a book, letting someone else tell the story. The magic of books has something sinister about it, as in Borges's Library. The Church's idea of a list of damnable books probably didn't go far enough - for in a sense, all books are damned. The eros of the text is a perversion -- albeit, nevertheless, one to which we are addicted, & in no hurry to kick."(pp.34-35)

This nails me pretty well, and links with a long line of drug-like-addled, Lotus-Eating book-readers, intoxicated by the text, at times finding what we so laffingly call "real life" a tad wanting, when it comes to the worlds in books, our habitations of, as Hamlet said when asked what he was reading, words, words, words...

Well, I had wanted to write about a number of things having to do with books - as my title says - and yet I've been carried away by Borges and his damned infinitude. In one of my all-time favorite books on reading, Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading, he talks of his time spent reading aloud to blind Borges, and that reading aloud changes a text one has already read, but reading aloud to a guy like Borges, who chose the text, was another thing entirely. "Reading out loud to the blind old man was a curious experience because, even though I felt, with some effort, in control of the tone and pace of the reading, it was nevertheless Borges, the listener, who became the master of the text. I was the driver, but the landscape, the unfurling space, belonged to the one being driven, for whom there was no other responsibility than that of apprehending the country outside the windows. Borges chose the book, Borges stopped me or asked me to continue, Borges interrupted to comment, Borges allowed the words to come to him. I was invisible." (pp.18-19)

Manguel says while reading, he was constantly reminded of other texts to compare the current one with, or to note the similarity of emotions evoked by this text and that one. He quotes another Argentinian writer, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, who says, "There are those who, while reading a book, recall, compare, conjure up emotions from other, previous readings. This is one of the most delicate forms of adultery." Manguel then notes that Borges did not believe in systematic bibliographies, and encouraged this sort of adulterous reading.

Holland House, West London, after a Nazi bombing, 1940
I've always loved this picture. Stout chaps, those! Stiff
upper lip and all that doncha know? Wot? Stoic as all hell!

Max Ernst: Une Semaine de Bonte'

2012-02-22T16:39:00.006-08:00

Translated to English usually as A Week of Kindness, sometimes as A Week of Grace, Ernst's 1934 book Une Semaine de Bonte' (<-----the images are in a PDF linked there, highly recommended you glance through if you've never seen it!) is subtitled "A Surrealistic Novel in Collage" in my Dover edition, and it's one of the most wonderfully weird books I've ever read. Indeed, "reading" this book seems akin to the reading of Ezra Pound's ideograms, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, a William S. Burroughs cut-up novel such as Nova Express, studying Egyptian hieroglyphics, and you get my point. It's demanding.

Max Ernst: Oedipus Rex, 1922.

The entire "novel" consists of pre-existing images in wood-engraved illustrations that Ernst tweaked with technical virtuosity; the resulting images, which are framed in sections with a putative theme of the seven days of the week ("Seven Deadly Elements": mud, water, fire, blood, blackness, sight, and possibly falling women?), and other bizarre framing devices, such as characters with heads from Easter Island statues (Thursday and blackness), and a bevy of men with bird's heads, which I find particularly disturbing. Ernst liked bird-men, and even called his bird-man alter ego "Loplop," and "he" appears throughout Ernst's work, and even merges with the work of other surrealist's work, such as Andre Breton's.

One of my favorite images from the book

The only writing part of the text consists of the framing devices, and quotes from proto-surrealist Alfred Jarry, Dadaists (Thursday features this quote from Jean Arp: "The stones are full of entrails. Bravo. Bravo."), and surrealists.

This "novel" of collages was concocted in about three week's time, in Italy, where Ernst stayed with friends, lugging a suitcase overflowing with images he'd cut out/collected from mail order catalogs, popular French novels of the late 19th and early 20th century, and some of Gustav Dore's work. Ernst takes a pre-existing engraved illustration and inserts other images in a cut-and-paste method, in which, during the printing process the visual demarcations of cut-paste are virtually eliminated, yielding a look of fantastic technique and profoundly bizarre imagery. The challenge to the reader - and it's quite a challenge - is to "read" each image, juxtaposed with the ones from the same "day," and attempt to make "sense" of it. (Or is this precisely what you aren't supposed to/cannot do or try?)

What the...?

Every time I leaf through Une Semaine de Bonte' I become overwhelmed by each image. But that's me. Your results may differ. But that may be a seminal point here: every reader brings to the text themselves and interaction with the images. In a way that seems fundamentally different to the opaque texts featuring WORDS I mentioned above (Pound, Joyce, Burroughs), making sense of a single image seems challenge enough; "reading"/making sense of just one "week" of images seems well-nigh impossible, and perhaps that's the main reason no one that I've ever seen or read about, has ever produced a complete critical analysis of the text. A hardcore Freudian named Deiter Wyss produced (I've not read it) a detailed and heavily Freudian-jargoned analysis of the first day of the book (mud and the Lion of Belfort). And that's it. The book is that weird and unheimlich.

The surrealists were outraged and outrageous, especially about the state of politics. In order to hold a mirror up to what they saw, they drew upon free-association and dreams and Freud, erotic imagery at times lurid, scenes of violence, anti-clericalism, and anything that would be seen as that which must be "repressed" by the superego: crimes of passion, torture, executions and suicide, and depictions of the emotional aspects of class warfare between rich and poor. As Ernst conceived and assembled his anti-rationalist collage phantasmagorical "anti-novel" in Italy, the Nazis in his native country had condemned all of his work, which no doubt influenced the must-be-seen-to-be-believed disturbing imagery of Une Semaine de Bonte'.

Because each page-image in the text is probably met by an individual nervous system trying to decode a metaphor from one's fixed stock of (largely unconscious) metaphors, trying to "make sense" of the text, readings seem to inevitably be pixillating; Ernst's virtuosity in juxtaposition, coupled with an implementation of the surrealist program, make each pictatorial "metaphor" so complex and uncertain - a function of mathematically ultra-dense information that verges on "noise" in the nervous system - that any one reading would seem to be as individualistic as the reader her-him-self.

Obviously, another way to "read" the text is by just letting the images wash over you; don't even try to decipher what may lie hidden beneath. I've gone this route too. It leads to odder-than-usual dreams later during sleep.

Speaking for myself and my own readings of Ernst's novel of collage, the main reason I dip into it and attempt the "read" it is because it reliably induces an altered state of mind. It's a cost-free (once the book's bought) buzz. It breaks mental set, gets me out of my "self" and opens me back into that sense of wonderful weirdness and the sheer marvelous of...something lurking outside ordinary "reality." I think this is all the real religion we need. There seems a strong sense in which no one can truly "know" Une Semaine de Bonte'. This kind of thing seems to make some people outraged or feel threatened by the disturbingly uncanny weirdness; some seem to feel vertigo and they don't like it. My nervous system is exhilarated by this uncanniness. I like not being able to "figure it all out." I like the repeated attempt. I like the buzz.

Alfred Jarry, the Dadaists (one said what they were doing was a reaction to the news that people were being bombed from airplanes) and the surrealists were in the avant about questioning technological rationalism in the West. All this wonderful new technology, and yet: an up-tick in mass warfare and killing, and poverty among riches. An artist's protest: use anti-rationality to try and make people feel-then-think in a new way.

Has the jury returned with their verdict on how successful the surrealists and their popular accomplices were?

Brief Scattered Notes on Max Ernst (1891-1976)
He had an authoritarian father, strict religion as a kid. Where have we seen this story before? Ernst was a self-taught painter, and around age 18 visited insane asylums and became interested in artwork by the mentally ill. While ground zero for Dada was in Zurich, Ernst opened a chapter in Cologne. He went to Paris in 1922 and collaborated with anarcho-surrealist/then communist/then libertarian socialist poet Paul Eluard, and lived in a menage a trois with Eluard and his wife. Eluard started to get spooked by this arrangement and took off to Monaco, then Saigon. The three reconciled. Ernst was married a bunch of times, captured by the Nazis twice. The first time Eluard helped him get away, the second time Ernst was helped by Peggy Guggenheim, who helped him get to Unistat, and whose own biography is almost too marvelous to believe. Ernst was married to Guggenheim from 1942-46. Ernst and Man-Ray got married in a double ceremony in Beverly Hills in 1946, to Dorothea Tanning and Juliet Browner, respectively.

Friends, collaborators and accomplices of Ernst include Miro, Diaghilev, Breton, Giacometti, and Klee. Ernst appeared in Bunuel's 1930 film L'Age d'Or.

How do I sum up my experience "reading" Une Semaine de Bonte'? I think I'll quote one of the inspirations for the Surrealists, "Lautreamont" (died: 1870), who once wrote, "As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing-machine with an umbrella on an operating table."

This video contains a recording of Ernst, from the 1960s, talking about the artist's response to outrageous politics, etc: It's less than 45 seconds:

Quasi-Brief Foray Into Intelligence Increase

2012-02-18T03:08:00.001-08:00

Propelled by some net-friends and Wilson and Leary's "SMI2LE" acronym (for their futuristic vision of Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, and Life Extension), I covered some of the latest on space migration HERE. When it came to tackling intelligence, I rapidly realized I'd been plopped into a dense thicket of Amazonian foliage, vines and tendrils ensnaring me, a thick canopy of green blotting out the sky, save for some filtered sunlight here and there, no compass, no radio...I couldn't even define "intelligence" to my satisfaction. I have run across some fairly good stabs at defining It, but nothing stood out as clearly the "best" definition. It seems intelligence is one of those things we "know" when we encounter it - in others or in our ourselves - but have a rather rough time of capturing it in all its glory and detail.

I suspect, when I feel this way, that I had made a bad assumption. Intelligence seems such a wonderfully grand thing that I'm a bit relieved we can't pin it down.

We have tried to look at what intelligence is not, and we rapidly spiral down to the contemplation of stupidity. This gets us somewhere, but it seems to fall short. In a late 1970s essay by Robert Anton Wilson, called "The Abolition of Stupidity," (see The Illuminati Papers), RAW writes, "Voltaire, of course, may have been exaggerating when he said that the only way to understand the mathematical concept of infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity; but the situation is almost that bad." Later on in that same book, in an essay titled "Stupidynamics," we come upon one of my many collected definitions of intelligence: "High intelligence is the ability to receive, integrate and transmit new signals rapidly. (This follows from Wiener's Cybernetics, especially his classic definition, 'To live well is to live with adequate information,' and from Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communication.)"

As I mulled the definition problem, I found I gravitated towards ideas that had to do with making social life better, and thinking in wider and wider systems. It's easy to say intelligence ought to further the prospects of continuing human life in its cities, ecosystems and general environment, in perpetuity. A sort of species-wide Darwin test.

I really like a definition I copped from Andrea Kuszewski, in an article that originally appeared in Scientific American last year, but which I found at the page for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Ms. Kuszewski writes:

"Intelligence isn't just about how many levels of math courses you've taken, how fast you can solve an algorithm, or how many vocabulary words you know that are over six characters. It's about being able to approach a new problem, recognize its important components, and solve it - then take that knowledge gained and put towards solving the next, more complex problem. It's about innovation and imagination, and about being able to put that to use to make the world a better place. This is the kind of intelligence that is valuable, and this is the the type of intelligence we should be striving for and encouraging." Her entire piece is a must-read. When I read her piece I confess I felt sorta dull. When I took in her five Big Things (Seeking Novelty, Challenging Yourself, Thinking Creatively, Doing Things the Hard Way, and Networking) and their links, I thought, "Jeez, I really have my work cut out for me..."

I have found so much Good Stuff in my researches into trying to find the State of the Art of "intelligence" I can only mention a few. One could make Intelligence Increase the topic for a blog and do nothing but write about that for a year and never get close to exhausting the topic. I'm sure there are people who have done that, indeed. But this overwhelming feeling both curls back upon itself and points back at the topic itself and - check it for yourself - people interested in getting smarter seem to very quickly want to get smarter in their own games, the ones they're already pretty good at. Note Ms. Kuszewski on "Challenge Yourself": once you get good at one game, abandon it for another.

On a wider level, while relatively few inhabitants of the planet ardently seek to get off the planet and there seems a fascinating backlash against longevity/immortality, almost everyone seems to want to be smarter. Or they profess that. (What happened to so many of them?) Which I find curious.

Howard Gardner: there are multiple

types of intelligence. I love his history of

cognitive science, called

The Mind's New Science, even if it's a

tad dated by now.

I like Professor Howard Gardner's ideas about many different types of intelligence, and how much of it seems innate, then nurtured. The IQ tests mask cultural assumptions made by overly geeky types who seek to measure everything. Linguistic, logical-mathematical, and spatial abilities RAWK, don't get me wrong. But Gardner says bodily kinesthetic intelligence has commonly been overlooked. Geniuses here might be Baryshnikov, the gold medal winners in gymnastics, Michael Jordan, Gretzky...

Then there is musical intelligence. You know it when you hear it. I have learned that to cite certain examples of musical intelligence is a set-up for inadvertently pissing off your interlocutors: you will leave out some Genius they love, and music gives us great spiritual satisfaction in an often cruel universe. It's like dissing God. Not gonna go there. Fill in your favorite musical geniuses. You have your reasons and I promise you, they're good enough for me.

Gardner was/is also part of a larger movement in recognizing Emotional Intelligence, and this topic seems to have just gotten hotter and hotter every year since around 1975. In the hardcore neurosciences, it's now a slam-dunk to assert that an adequately operating limbic system/emotional brain is essential in making rational choices, personally and socially. How do we know this? Short answer: there are plenty of IQ-smart people with limbic deficits, and they can't implement their logical-mathematical skills to the point where they can run a full, well-lived, reasonably "happy" life. The neurological literature is filled with extreme cases. If your hippocampus was damaged, you can't make long-term memories. One of the best books I've read on this topic is Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error.

Memory. Hmmm...I've just finished reading a rousing great, unfathomably wonderful book by a young hotshot journalist named Joshua Foer. It seems he fell in with a bunch of "mental athletes" who compete against each other in what seem like impossible, astonishing feats of memory. I will take the time to plug Foer's book from 2011, Moonwalking With Einstein. (see 3 minute video at the end of this post, too) Foer, in a sort of gonzo-style journalism, decides to become one of these mental athletes, and trains hard, and becomes, in one year, one of the top memorizers (or mnemonists) in Unistat.

But it's the creativity behind the tricks these guys use to memorize a recently shuffled pack of cards in two minutes, or memorize a previously unpublished poem of many pages, pages of random words (record: 280 in fifteen minutes!), lists of binary digits, lists of historical dates, names, faces...

Think about what memory means to you. It sort of goes a long way in identifying who you "are," doesn't it?

But then again: if you look at really good Jeopardy! players (one reader of this blog won $10,000 on the show); they have fantastically good semantic intelligence. This can be described as knowing free-floating pieces of knowledge, ideas that are out of space/time. As Foer puts it, knowing that "breakfast is the first meal of the day" is semantic memory; knowing you had eggs for breakfast yesterday seems to be processed in the nervous system differently, and is called episodic memory. Then there is procedural or non-declarative memory: even people who have damaged limbic systems and can't make long-term memories can still knit you a sweater, ride a bike, climb the stairs, etc. This is all incredibly mysterious, but we're learning. And I'm getting away from my subject.

One thing that rivets me regarding improving memory: when I looked at literature spanning roughly 1967 to 2005, there was no end of literature on drugs that would be coming that would markedly improve our memories. And some of you who have tried some of these drugs? Please feel free to weigh in in the comments section. I'd love to hear from you.

A rendering of Cicero. Photo by Maro Prins

But Foer and his colleagues used tricks that were from drawn originally from a book written between 86-82 BCE: Rhetorica Ad Herennium, but if you want to read it go to Amazon (or better yet, your local public library?) and look for Cicero's little red Loeb Classical Library edition, which contains Latin/English. This was the first book to go over the "memory palace" idea, which lasted until Gutenberg, then slowly died out. Before our modern era, memory training was a basic aspect of ethics, character building, having a worldly mind, attaining virtue. After the mass-production of books - epigenetic memories - memory faded. Why expend the effort to remember when you know where to find it outside your own nervous system? It's got a Library of Congress number, a Dewey number, you can Google it, etc.

As Foer says, after mass printing really got going, "memory techniques that had once been a staple of classical and medieval culture got wrapped up with the occult and esoteric Hermetic traditions of the Renaissance, and by the nineteenth century they had been relegated to carnival sideshows and tacky self-help books..."

You're thinking, "I love Giordano Bruno and all that, but gimme the new memory drugs!" I hear ya.

But please consider a look at Foer's book. It's wonderfully entertaining, and he shows you how it's done. I found it seductive. And it has a good bibliography.

I have no space/time here to cover the scientifically proven benefits of yoga, meditation, aerobic exercise, or the magickal art of writing for transformation. On to drugs.

Okay: this topic too seems far too extensive, so I'm going to limit it to what I've read about ADHD drugs being used "off-label" by college students, and to the ever-increasingly almost too-good-to-be-true testimonials about Modafinil/Provigil.

Possibly 1 in 10 college students use Adderal or Ritalin as "mental steroids" (see "Cognitive Enhancers Are Not 'Cheating'") in order to perform better on tests and writing assignments. Which is interesting, but the side effects are obvious to anyone who reads up on this stuff, and we wonder why Provigil isn't made more widely available. Read Johann Hari's tale of what Provigil did/does for him. He ends the piece on a probably prudent conservative bend about the drug, but other articles mention people who study this stuff, use it themselves, and don't seem all that afraid of the long-term effects.

Smart Drugs seem to be finally arriving, folks. And one thing that interests me relates to the marijuana legalization story (and cannabis has been shown to have some enhancing effects, too, but I would digress too much if I went on that route): some of these stories emphasize what Leary once called "cognitive liberty" (see The Economist, here: "minimizing harm" and "maximizing the freedom to choose"); this argument has not worked for cannabis. So far the "we may need to go laissez faire in order to help the economy improve" argument hasn't worked in California, where cannabis is the number one cash crop. But this "economy" argument is being used for cognitive enhancers, and of course, I agree. Here's one example. The optimism I find refreshing.

Wikipedia's article on Nootropics (AKA "smart drugs") is HERE.

Erowid has trip reports, other articles, etc, on smart drugs HERE.

The Cognitive Enhancement Research Institute's site is HERE.

For the philosophically inclined, check out the quiet battles going on regarding technologically enhanced cognition, whether via computers and/or drugs, and "extended cognition." Being a bookish dude, I see the "Google is making us stupid"- like arguments. I am for some reason continually astounded by how many people I come into contact with who seem to think because they've got Siri, GPS, a MacBook Pro, and a smart phone...that they're "smart." Especially after reading about memory. What an illusion! Many of the people running around with these gadgets are preposterous dullards, without seemingly any sense of history or ideas, or wit. They are well-dressed, well-equipped apes. With bad manners. And they drive recklessly.

On the other hand: extended cognition isn't some viral theme that will fade by the first day of summer, and many who are decked out with all these fantastic gadgets know how to use them appropriately. I've seen young people who were astonishingly witty, inventive...intelligent....using this stuff. I cannot tar everyone unfairly, just because I'm not enamored of a GPS or Siri/Internet/email in your pocket. (See Kuszewski's article above on "doing things the hard way.")

This is one socio-philosophical debate that isn't going anywhere. "Extended Cognition." It seems a close cousin to Richard Dawkins' "extended phenotype."

There was so much more I wanted to touch on regarding Intelligence Increase in 2012, but I may as well end with something so marvelous - and potentially a harrowing paranoia-inducer because it can be done at a distance, with the subject not knowing! - that you'll have something to debate about over drugs and friends this and other weekends: Are we getting close to instant "Matrix"- style learning?

Here's Joshua Foer, talking about his book on memory. It's a little over 3 minutes.

Of the Quantification of Beauty, Part 3

2012-02-13T04:15:00.000-08:00

Before I do my usual and write far too much (let's face it: you have better things to do), make sure you come back to the top of this post (which means right where you're reading now), and find out, via some pretty well-established neurobiological data, what your own "Sex I.D." profile is, by doing a series of tests that will last around 20-30 minutes. I've seen a lot of this kind of stuff in my research, but this one is the best. It's HERE. At the bottom, click on "Take the Sex I.D. Test" I'll show you my androgynous results if you're interested...

Miss Venezuela/Miss World 2011: Ivian Sarcos: get a load
of that "symmetry"!

Sexual Dimorphism and Facial Symmetry
In my previous riffings on beauty and the attempt to quantify it, we found that a certain symmetry seems to hold. But what is "sexual dimorphism"? Basically: males looking "masculine" and females looking "feminine." For example: a guy with a pronounced brow and square jaw with his arm around the waist of a female with big eyes and full lips. This is a noticeably sexually dimorphic couple. But why are these phenotypic characters attractive? Well, it's a hot topic, and Anthony Little and colleagues think they might have the answer. Do the attractive features you see in another indicate 1.) their genetic quality? 2.) fertility? or maybe it's 3.) visual experience simply; seeing someone hot is simply that: it's not about some "occult" or hidden or unconscious signals from the genotype?

Turns out - according to Little and his team - that it's #1 and #2 above. Symmetry and sexual dimorphism seem linked, too. There seems to be a biological mechanism that links them, not only across cultures, but in primates. Facial symmetry and sexual dimorphism do indeed seem to be markers for health. Another study about females along these lines is HERE. Note this last one has a twist: female facial femininity may be linked to some aspects of disease resistance but not others. There's a test at Little's site and I took it, but it seemed like the silent videos of young people talking, where you rate them on a scale of attractiveness from 1 to 7, loaded far too slowly. His test stuff is HERE.

What about checking out bodies? For going on four years now, 3-D imaging of entire bodies - to more precisely assess symmetries and asymmetries - have been studied at places like Brunel University in London. They developed what they call "body masculinity," which means, roughly and as I understand it: if you're a female you tend to prefer males of greater height, wider shoulders, smaller breasts, and shorter legs; where males look for someone shorter, not wide shoulders, larger breasts (duh?), and longer legs. The researchers there are saying that we may not notice asymmetries, so nature has also plugged in some extra "hints" for us: curvy waist lines, broad shoulders, smooth dance moves, etc.

If you've read Plato, for example, you might be saying to yourself, "What's the big deal with all this hoo-ha about symmetry and beauty and and all that? Plato was writing about it in the 4th century BCE." Yes. But it wasn't a precise "science," as it supposedly is now.

By the way, the bigtime Chinese philosopher Mencius also thought we had an innate feeling for symmetry and beauty. See HERE.

A Dissenting View
Oliver Burkeman of The Guardian says that symmetry and perfection can be disturbing. Yea, but just look at his tiny mug shot next to his column. (Or look at mine, on the right side of this page.) Of course he'd say that, you may be thinking, 'cuz he's no George Clooney/Daniel Craig/nameyourfavoritehunkhere. Right, but I also see his point. Let me elaborate a bit.

I have known women who had big noses and for some reason I found them attractive. I knew a Dutch woman in college who was over 6 feet 2 inches: taller than me, and she had small breasts but she was sort of big-boned and clunky. And I thought she was hot. I could go on with my personal stuff here - a gal with a prominent mole that somehow seemed to improve an average face - but I'll stop. I think I asked myself, "Am I really attracted to these features, or have I picked up a fairly strong vibe that she'd be open to a roll in the hay with me, so I seem to find her flaws 'attractive,' or am I truly attracted to these 'flaws'?"

I don't know, but it seems a good bet that - and this is based on research too - her seeming "open-ness" made me find her flaws engaging.

I like how Burkeman brings up the Japanese idea of wabi-sabi, or the beauty in imperfection. But then there's a trick there: we have to decide to not analyze too much if something seems faux wabi-sabi or not. And as he says, far too many things are (faux) these days.

I've noticed something "disturbing" about my seeming inability to give a beautiful female (stand-up, sketch, sitcom) comic performer the "room" they deserve, as comediennes. I don't like it, it's unfair to Olivia Munn, Aisha Tyler, Laura San Giacomo and a few others. If I find them gorgeous enough, those circuits in my brain seem to inhibit the "hey, that's funny" circuits. It's weird. Every time I see Aisha Tyler, I say to myself, "Now, forget she's that gorgeous. She's funny too. She's hilarious, witty, snide..."
And I fail. Time for another pic, so may as well be Aisha:

DAY-um!

The Unit of Measurement of Beauty
It's the Helen. One millihelen is enough to launch a ship; let the math follow from there. I read most of the Wikipedia article I linked to two sentences ago; I didn't see Robert Anton Wilson mentioned; I thought maybe he had coined the "Helen" as a unit of measurement for beauty, but I couldn't confirm. He did make the "Spelvin" the unit of measurement of "sincerity in sexual pleasure," from Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy.

Fashion Models and Barbie
Regardless all this positivistic measurement and biology, there seems at least some aspect of culture that has some gravitational effects on all...this. Let's look at fashion models and how they've changed since 1992. According to this article from Plus Model/Utne Reader, the average fashion model weighed 8% less than the average woman in 1992; today she weighs 23% less. Today's models very often meet the criteria for anorexia nervosa. WHO is choosing these models? Is this overweening skinniness being foisted upon the public? Do we really like that look best? Or is the fashion-model business sort of like the Art World: insular and to be admired from outside for their "show"?

Check out the lower half of this article. I find it amusing, but I found almost everything by the late William R. Corliss, amusing. Died in 2011. He was one of the great compilers of information that was represented something against-the-grain, anomalistic, or enlightening in some way. I marvel at a Corliss book. To me, he's right there with Charles Fort. Anyway: Barbie. We have, as a species, selected for these beautiful attributes, and at one long, long time ago, our ancestors were pug-fugly. Ken and Barbie are exteriorizations of our collective yearn for oodles of symmetry and sexual dimorphism. Or something like that. But because of symmetry and sexual choice (mostly by women), we have Barbie (and Ken) as ideals. (There may have been a tricky logical fallacy in there somewhere, so watch out!) And sombunall postmodernist/Culture Studies professors would say Barbie and Ken are about the White Male power structure, but all our symmetry studies say: no...

Because "it's hot in here" only because we have a sense of what "it's cold in here" might be like, I must discuss ugly people - or the non-beautiful, or those with "appearance deficits" - in order to leave this all properly aligned in some way.

Next time. Now go back uptop and do that BBC "Sex I.D. Test" thingy.

Here's Aisha Tyler doing stand-up for 50 seconds, in time for Valentine's Day:

Dreaming Large: Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension: Part One: Space

2012-02-10T03:15:00.001-08:00

Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary called these three things together "SMi2LE." They were both enthusiastic science fiction readers (and writers, one far better than the other), and both were also voracious readers of science "fact" about space exploration, humans getting smarter, and living increasingly longer and more vital lives. Despite their PhDs in Psychology, they were both terrific generalists, and while both were too optimistic about their forecasts, they inspired many a young dreamy intellectual to pursue neurobiology, organic chemistry, quantum mechanics, microbiology and genomics, etc.

For this post, I'll limit my spew to space migration. Soon: some ideas on Intelligence Increase, then Life Extension. The Frankfurt School thinkers criticized modern capitalist societies for techne without telos. Leary and Wilson's visions - and many other similar visions by Dreamers - seem to answer the Frankfurters. (For my telos I'd first choose solving world hunger, overpopulation, the renewable energy thing, and a few other small items like that...which makes me sympathize with the Dreamers who saw the stars as our ultimate destination...Jared Diamond reminds us that, throughout history, technology has always meant power, which solves problems, but also creates new problems. And what kind of life would we have without problems? Consider that your zen koan of the day if you didn't already have one with breakfast.)

I've been actuated to write this blog post by my blog colleague Oz Fritz, who shares many of my influences, and knows more about kabbalah and Crowley than I do... See his recent, trippy SMi2LE stuff HERE.

"The future exists first in imagination, then in will, then in reality." - Barbara Marx Hubbard

Mars
After 1972, science fiction writers began to sober up. NASA was seen as a jobs program, with vision problems and in-fighting as to whether we spend billions on unmanned space telescopes that could do real, hard science; or to pursue unmanned and then manned trips to Mars. Venus was not as exciting, which I'll get to shortly. Sure, Mars has its drawbacks: it has 1/100th of Earth's atmosphere, which means you're bombarded with radiation, which causes cancers and that's only the beginning. You can build radiation shields, but they're prohibitively expensive. Mars is always freezing, there's (probably) no life, no organic chemistry, canals, or temperate zones. The surface area is basically rust.

But Venus makes Mars look like Central Park on a warm spring day: when we look at it from Earth it's the next brightest astronomical body after the moon, but that's opaque, reflecting clouds of sulfuric acid, not a lot of fun. Below that, it has a very dense atmosphere, in stark contrast to Mars. But the problem: imagine our global warming problem times, oh, I'll just say 10,000. Maybe a million. It's extremely dense carbon dioxide. Talk about a smoggy day! It has no carbon cycle, so the nightlife suffers catastrophically. The day life too. Hell: life. A "runaway greenhouse effect" probably caused it all, and it's just a tough break for us: we need hospitable planets: not too hot, not too cold, an atmosphere with oxygen, some weather, plate tectonics...is that too much to ask? Oh yea: A decent day on Venus is about 450 degrees Celsius, or about 900 degrees Fahrenheit, which is enough to melt your copy of Paul McCartney and Wings' Venus and Mars.

Turns out getting humans to Mars to live or at least "hang out" is far more difficult than science fictionists had thought. The last Apollo guys were subject to solar flares and cosmic rays for about 12 days. A trip to Mars and back would run 18-30 months, or between 550-900 days. And the weightlessness is murder on your bone density. Micro-gravity causes us to lose as much density in one month as we would normally on Earth in a year. So: your bones age times 12. Your bones support your muscles, and we all see the implications there. Further: your tissues deteriorate under the radiation. Cancers are more frequent, and your brain gets damaged. Any pharmaceutical drugs are spoiled.

Sulfur-rich rocks on Mars. Photo: NASA/JPL/Cornell

"But haven't you heard of terra-forming Mars?," you ask. Oh yea. But it turns out that's a far more difficult problem than we'd thought. Just think about fixing Earth's climate problems. I still think there's gotta be some way to do it, though.

Peter Diamandis says there's "no question" we'll soon genetically engineer single-celled bacteria or even algae that can withstand the Martian conditions, and a $1million X Prize is at stake for the first team to do it.

Gregory Stock thinks the technical hurdles needed to overcome the Martian landscape for humans are too much, and that any technology put toward the effort would be better used on Earth, and he is a strong advocate of fearless, ambitious genetic engineering. Stock thinks the exploration of "inner space" would be more rewarding at this time, and I think if Leary and Wilson were here they'd sit up and take notice of that notion.

Robert Zubrin thinks Stock has it all wrong: the hazards of an inhabited Mars trip have been vastly overstated; he thinks we must go because the frontier is where invention happens. He's a visionary, he's Mars uber-alles. I think he sounds sorta nuts, but what do I know? I'm sitting in my little boxy book-lined room typing away on a tiny computer.

In the latest ish of Reason magazine, Tim Cavanaugh thinks we can get to Mars, but - and this is "trippy" in at least two senses of the word - we need to genetically modify humans on Earth first. Yep. Modify them so they'll be ready to handle the trip to Mars and...whatever they'll do there. It almost certainly has no mineral wealth to help pay back the costs. But it's the frontier, man! Imagine telling a bunch of venture capitalists that they'll need to help fund the engineering of humanoid "freaks" (although wouldn't you steer clear of that language?) to minimize the potential problems for the trip. "Here's the corker - and stick with me here guys, this is brilliant - we manufacture the Martians here on Earth first!"

Maybe I just lack imagination.

You can read about the oh-so-human problems and logistics of space travel - including, rather famously, what to do when you have to poo - in Mary Roach's hilarious and very well-researched Packing For Mars.

Who Was Chesley Bonestell?
A space artist who fired the imaginations of a million young space geeks before we'd ever gotten there. Check out the ingenium on Bonestell! He teamed up - in a matter of speaking - with Werner Von Braun, who wrote imagination-catching articles on space stations, space flight, space travel, etc. He was one of the MVNs (most valuable nazis) Unistat got over the Russians in the immediate aftermath of WWII. And it turns out he was almost uncanny in his predictions about how things would go in space, up to this point. But check out books from your library about Bonestell's artwork, or check out one of the pages devoted to him, like this one.

A Bonestell landscape: the stuff of dreams

Micro-Gravity and DNA
Instead of actually going into space, it turns out we can simulate very low gravity conditions on Earth, using magnets. When fruit flies were levitated for x number of days versus control groups, 500 or so genes were affected, including ones that regulated body temperature, the immune response, and stress levels. See this article from Wired. So: space trips would seem to already by changing astronauts into "freaks" (I'm sure there's a better word), or...Something Else. The fruit flies had trouble reproducing and developed slowly. This is turning out to be a Hard Problem, eh?

But I bet human ingenuity will figure it out. But what will Earth look like then? Will you or I still be here then?

Space Tourism
It's already happening. Listen to some interviews HERE. Charles Simonyi's been "up" twice. The tickets are really expensive, so it helps if you've invented a program that Microsoft sells billions of copies of. For now.

It'll get a lot cheaper if the science fiction-y character Elon Musk is right. Musk, born in South Africa, dropped out of Stanford's grad school, invented Pay Pal (Musk's worth estimated at $670 million), then Tesla Motors, and Space X, which seeks to lower the cost of dollar-per-pound for flight from $1000/lb to $100/lb. The Unistat government's costs to get stuff - including humans - up to the Space Station was $10,000/lb. Musk and his team have lowered that to $3000, then $2000, and now $1000. When Boeing and Lockheed merged, saying the merger would save the US government money, Musk scoffed, saying "When has a monopoly ever lowered costs?" Musk is brash, brazen, and...some sorta genius, as is - it seems - everyone I've mentioned in this blogspew.

Since NASA's Space Shuttle was decommissioned last year, it seems clear the future of space tourism is in private, corporate, commercial hands from here on out. And that may be the best thing that could've happened to our dreams of space travel, if only for cost reasons.

Musk has competition: Virgin Galactic (Richard Branson), which will launch from a large area in New Mexico. They want to charge you $200,000 (a $20,000 deposit please) to get out to the Karman line - the line roughly 62 miles "up" that separates Earth's atmosphere from outer space - and you'll get four minutes or so of weightless-play. The ticket costs will further more space exploration. Like space hotels.

Oh yea: the very wealthy space tourists are "biological cargo" according to some in the trade. And the Russians don't like the term "space tourists." They prefer "private cosmonauts." I understand.

Other competition for Musk: the aforementioned Boeing/Lockheed's United Launch Alliance; and XCOR, founder: Jeff Gleason. Another recent Reason article that covers these guys and their doings is HERE.

Here's David Pakman talking about "The Psychology of Space Exploration and Space Travel." It's 5 and a half minutes:

The Drug Report For January 2012 (Late Edition)

2012-02-06T03:27:00.001-08:00

Okay, so I'm late. What are ya gonna do, fire me? I'm a volunteer here, and besides...what's that? Why am I late? I was too stoned to make it here on time. I ain't gonna lie to ya. You know how it is; it warps your sense of time. You're like on a meditation, a real strong one. You're free from the "mind-forged manacles" that Blake talked about. Yea, I don't need cannabis to get there, but it helps. I like what one Rastafarian said once:

"Man basically is God but this insight can come to man only with the use of the herb. When you use the herb, you experience yourself as God. With the use of the herb you can exist in this dismal state of reality that now exists in Jamaica...When you are a God you deal or relate to people like a God. In this way you let your light shine, and when each of us lets his light shine we are creating a God-like culture." - from The Rastafarians: Sources of Cultural Dissonance, by Leonard Barrett, p.108, found in Erik Davis's Nomad Codes, p. 245 (I venture to guess about 75% of fans of Robert Anton Wilson would LOVE Erik Davis's book, but it's your call.)

Only I'm not that hard-core about it. And Berkeley isn't Jamaica, no matter how bad our economy is now. Leonard Barrett's book came out in 1977. A crapload has happened since then. That seems like 200 years ago to me, even though the calendar says 35 years ago. But: if we were free to be godlike in the way this Rasta-Man asserts, here in 2012 Unistat, would our culture improve? I tend to think yes. Which brings me to Obama and pot laws, crazy-making stuff.

Brief Note on Cannabis and Its Grey Status in Most States
Before the Barackstar got elected he said, famously, that "Of course I inhaled. That was the point." And he supposedly told Attorney General Eric Holder that pot laws, medical marijuana, and what the states do would be a low priority. And he seems to have lied. Some of you are way all over this story, or set of stories. I don't want to recap the Obama Admin's shift from early 2008 to now, but it's pretty ridiculous on all counts, if you ask me. I don't see what their argument is. I don't think they have a decent justification for cracking down in states where people have voted to legalized or decriminalize medical pot. This is a huge can of worms for me, and won't go into the minutiae, and believe me, I could if I wanted to...

Jack Herer strain of cannabis.

So: in talking to my friends about WTF and the current state of cannabis affairs vis a vis The Feds, I find that cannabis hero the late Jack Herer (who has a strain of wicked bud named after him), author of the underground classic The Emperor Wears No Clothes, has had a big influence on the conspiracy theory that Dupont, Monsanto, and Big Biz thinks legal pot would cut into their interests. That's the short story; you've probably heard it and maybe think it's about right. But not long ago I wrote to Dr. Dale Gieringer (PhD, Stanford) of NORML, asking why he thought cannabis was still illegal.

Here's my Q and his A:

Dear Dr. G-

Would you please direct me to your writings that address the deepest reasons why pot is still illegal? I recognize you as one of the deepest thinkers on the subject and would greatly appreciate any and all recommendations for reading on this particular topic.

My views on the subject are expressed in the conclusion of my article, " Forgotten Origins of Cannabis Prohibition in California" http://www.canorml.org/background/caloriginsmjproh.pdf
(page 32f).
The blame for the marijuana laws rests squarely on the drug cops and the law enforcement bureaucrats who created them. They wrote the laws, they enforce them, they have built their careers on the notion that they are necessary to protect the public from making bad drug decisions, and they are the major force lobbying legislators and Congress to keep the drug war rolling.

------------------------------------

Okay, this makes sense to me. I'm not saying the Big Biz model is wrong; it's probably influential. And I think in 1937, when Johnny Law first really cracked down hard on pot, the Big Biz model was probably stronger then. But the cops need to justify themselves. It's SNAFU to the nth.

The question is: how and when will we finally extricate ourselves from this monstrous idiocy?

Sugar Demonization

Okay, before you've had your 22 teaspoons of sugar for the day, swallow this one: Recently researchers at the University of California at San Francisco have determined that sugar is practically like tobacco and alcohol, maybe even heroin - I'm putting non-sugary words in their mouth, but get a load of this article.

One of the lead researchers acknowledges that everyone will cry "Nanny state!" but that they're trying to get rid of the nanny state here, because the FDA has every sugar you can name on its GRAS list (Generally Recognized As Safe). The food industry can put as much sugar into anything they want; I guess I see the argument. If I squint.

Chronic epidemic diseases are heavily linked to sugar, which is so addictive, the researchers say, that sugar needs to be regulated and taxed, with age limits on who can buy it and where and when it can be advertised. They say we're all so strung out on sugar that public education campaigns are hopeless: public policy must be used with "brute force."

Echoes of the tobacco lobbyist's arguments from the food and beverage folk were predictable. But I think they do have a good point when they say, yep, we put a lot of sugar in the stuff you buy 'cuz the Unistatians love that stuff, BUT: the real problem is that people are more sedentary these days. "Inactive lifestyles," is what they charge.

I also find the anti-sugar researchers' point persuasive that, 20% of obese people have a normal metabolism and no ill health effects, while 40% of "normal weight" people have metabolic problems from sugar use, leading to heart disease and diabetes, both of which take a huge toll on health care costs. Sugar is the difference here. Not plain "obesity." Interesting...

The 22 teaspoons of sugar per day (Hey! How about taking those 22 teaspoons as soon as you get up in the morning, then go cold turkey the rest of the day! On second thought: don't.) comes from the anti-sugar researchers, who I think are probably right about sugar as an addictive drug that leads to all kinds of problems. But I have a very hard time seeing anything done about this. If some cute kids shanghai me outside the Quik-E-Mart and ask me to score some sugar for them, I probably will. And you just know they'll be stealing it if a Good Guy like me doesn't come along. And then the cop/law/prison/parole complex will get the Sugar Fiends to further justify their bloated salaries. A 17 year old gets 8-10 for committing an armed sugar holdup. Said he and his friends just "wanted to party." And a DA with a stick up his ass the size of a Louisville Slugger sends the kid to the Big House. Fat slob prison guards with egregious pensions will be laughing and eating Reese's Peanut Butter Cups right in front of the Sugar Fiend Inmates, their chocolately saliva dribbling down their sequence of chins, their revolver handles getting sticky. Gawd, we're one fucked-up society.

O! Those evil powdery substances! Why can't we control?

Will it get that bad? At this point, regarding the demonization of sombunall drugs, I'll believe anything.

If anyone has the taste for more on this sugar mania, I'll throw two articles at you, HERE and HERE. Both of those articles make the compelling point that sugar substitutes are even more dangerous than sugar itself.

This sugar issue leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I do think we all ought to eat less, period, and certainly eat less sugar, and exercise more. But I'm not for the State getting heavily into trying to make us do "the right thing."

Regarding my first bit on pot, coupled with the second drug deal, sugar, I'm reminded of the observation that Professor Carlin once made: you can always tell when the really good pot has hit the town you live in, because when you go to the grocery store, the cookie aisle is littered with half-opened packages, crumbs and whole cookies all over the floor, etc.

Drugs In The Water and...Air Supply?

Well, you've decided to exercise some self-control and, in lieu of smoking pot (well, waking and baking) and eating sugary foods, you've started doing yoga every day, and you're cycling. Good for you. You're clean! Isn't it great?

Now, if only you didn't have to drink water or breathe air. (Wot?)

It's all-too-easy to find articles on what's in our tap water: antibiotics like Keflex, antidepressants like Prozac, cholesterol-lowering drugs like Lipitor, pain killers and tranquilizers like Vicodin and Valium, birth control pills, seizure and chemotherapy drugs, farm animal steroids and hormones, and all kinds of industrial cosmetics, solvents, and detergents. Yum! I got a contact high just writing this paragraph. Not a good kind of contact high, either.

No one - certainly not the EPA, which the Republicans want to gut - know what the trace effects of this incredible drug cocktail has on us. The Germans seem out in front on this. I think we ought to really look into the effects of this. We do know that there are more drugs in the tap water near retirement communities...for reasons I don't think I have to go into.

How does this happen? Well, all the wonderful stuff we ingest doesn't metabolize completely in our bodies; some of it we excrete, it goes to the sewage treatment plant, and is not removed by the system, and...lah dee da...it ends up in your glass of water you're using to wash down your Ibupofen or birth control.

Glass half full?: Next time you're feeling lousy, do the cheap thing and drink a very big glass of tap water! Sure, you don't know what you're getting or how much, but you just might get something good.

Ewww...

We do know that aquatic life suffers the most from our drug habits: marine biologists have noticed small ocean, river, and lake life evince both male and female aspects they didn't have 20 years ago. Earthworms and plankton have definitely been affected. Some male fish, affected by hormones, have become "feminized."

Hey! Maybe there's a way to get the Republicans worked up: if you gut the EPA, we're all gonna turn GAY! Now where's your John Wayne/Ronnie Ray-Gun rugged Murrrkin masculinity? But I digress, as is my wont...

Some sources say your carbon-activated filter gets rid of some of the drugs, but not all. A New York Times article says don't get your hopes up. Boiling water won't help. Bottled water? Please. 25% of it comes straight from the tap, and the companies that sell the stuff admit they ain't testing for drugs..

Bottom line: until we know more, don't flush your expired meds down the toilet. For now, let 'em go to the landfill, where they'll leach into the water supply from there, but at least it's localized.

Couple more sources for this item: HERE and HERE. Have fun! Oh and not that you asked, but it's impossible to know if your foreign-made pharmaceuticals were safe to begin with.

Tap Water: suddenly it sounds like a good name for a heavy metal band.

Now the air: Some of us worry about ozone, smog, particulate matter, and pollen. Now let's worry about drugs! (Or not.It's up to you.) How do you find out where people are smoking a lot of pot or cocaine? Well, it's time-consuming and expensive and you're not quite sure how accurate your findings are, but you look at police reports, do public surveys and ask people to fill out anonymous questionnaires. Until now.

Researchers in Italy have found a much cheaper and probably far more accurate way to find out this information: test the air. Yep, our instruments are getting that good. So far, they don't think the trace amounts of cocaine or pot are of any concern to residents, but I'm going to go way out on a limb and predict they find an "unusually high" amount of cannabis in the ambient air in San Francisco, the Silicon Valley, Amsterdam, and Vancouver.

So what have we learned? That if you hold your breath forever and don't drink any tap water, you'll be "clean"!

I'll try to make it on time next month...or is it this month?

Paranoia: A Few Items

2012-02-03T03:10:00.004-08:00

Today I was mindstreaming through Webstuff, and every now and then, if you're like me, you approach your computer with some intent: you want to verify a quote, see if you can get a good deal on a used whatsis, return that email you've "been meaning to get to," find out who so-and-so is, check your Facebook while not facing your checkbook, und so weiter. And you find three hours have gone by and somehow you'd read a number of things you probably could not have guessed you'd encounter before you sat down and entered the hive-mind of the Web. Terence McKenna once said that a god is "somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with." Sounds like Google to me, but maybe I'm feeling paranoid.

Dr. Olney
Amid this extended yoga of info-flow and effortless, painless lost time, I encountered the story of Dr. Richard K. Olney. He died very recently of ALS/Lou Gehrig's Disease. You know: the Thing Stephen Hawking has. It eats up your nerves that serve your muscles. Your mind stays intact, but your overall deterioration just gets worse and worse until the muscles that keep your lungs going give out.

The thing is: Dr. Olney was one of the world's experts on ALS. And then he got it. Here's an interview with him from 2005, after he diagnosed himself.

Well, the Statistician in me says, "Yea, well, it's creepy but statistically inevitable, blah blah blah." And while I know that's probably correct, I think a lot - if not most - of us are wired to irrationally respond to the emotional aspect of fear of a dread disease, the emotional and intellectual concentration on that disease as it manifests in fellow humans for many years, and then contracting the disease itself. There's not a scintilla of evidence that ALS is contagious. But our paralogical thinking styles can lead us to entertain ideas about being "intimate" with something very dangerous, which in time devours us.

This reminds me of a well-known phenomena regarding medical students: they are in a sort of intellectual boot camp for years, chronically sleep-deprived, and very intimate with blood, trauma, screaming, violent patients, cadavers and death. And all sorts of hideous, heinous diseases they are forced to read about in their textbooks. And even the staunchest ones are subject to self-diagnosing with a dramatically fatal, if rare disease. They'll have been up for 27 straight hours going to lectures and lab assignments then studying for three tests the next day, glance in the mirror, notice their skin looks splotchy, and immediately diagnose Bokonowski's Disease (I just made that up...I think), rather than think, "I need about nine hour's sleep."

If you get a vicious headache and think, "I have a brain tumor," you probably have a headache that will go away soon. You're stressed out. A tumor? Where do you get that? Catastrophize much?

A "zebra" in medical student lore, is a product of this. When you hear hoofbeats outside your window, we know it makes sense to assume we're hearing a horse. Why would it be a zebra? Because zebras are more dramatic, and when you're stressed out, you "hear zebras" too. And assume tumors, which do exist and do happen to people, but it's not likely you've got one. (Some of us will readily admit this rational thought comes easier at some times rather than others...which sorta feeds into my point.)

It used to be labeled hypochondria, but seems now to be referred to as - at least with regards medical students - nosophobia. But if you're not a medical student, sorry, you're a hypochondriac. Welcome to the club! Now, before you sit down, please go wash your hands...

I wonder about our information-drenched culture and its propensity to heighten our...perceptions. And hear zebras. But zebras do exist...

Whatever we hear: RIP, Dr. Olney. Tough break.

Out-Manchurian Candidating The Manchurian Candidate
What a fantastic, phantasmagorically paranoid film John Frankenheimer made of Richard Condon's 1959 Cold War paranoia book; I liked the book, too. But I read it only after I'd seen Frankenheimer's film about seven times. I think I even saw the remake before I read Condon.

Philip K. Dick, native of Berkeley, California

There's another 1959 work of fiction that isn't as famous, but to me, it's more fantastically paranoid than Condon. It's by Philip K. Dick, and it's called Time Out of Joint. Here's the basic plot, so if you plan to read it, skip ahead, or rather, SPOILER ALERT!:

A guy in 1950s suburban Unistat drinks beer and, oddly, seems to support himself by being a very adept player at a puzzle-game that the local newspaper runs, called "Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next?" He starts to receive unlisted programs on his ham radio. He finds a telephone book that has numbers that aren't normal, aren't supposed to "be." He begins to freak out in suburbia, in an already paranoid Cold War era of bomb shelters in people's back yards, etc. The main character, last name Gumm, begins to believe he's living in some sort of fake world. This is pretty weird, spooky stuff, but I haven't even gotten to the best parts: it turns out it's really 1996, and Earth is at war with someone who has colonized the moon. (Newt Gingrich, trying to realize his first phase of Galactic Triumph, channelling Philip K. Dick? Now who's paranoid?)

The Earthians know Gumm has for some reason the uncanny ability to predict the next hostile bombing by the moon colonists, and he's become sympathetic to the moon colonists while still living on Earth. So the military-industrial complex creates a fake environment and drugs him and provides him with the newspaper puzzles in order to obtain the knowledge about the next bombings.

Let that scenario sink in before we move on.

Freudian Riff on Paranoia
Freud seemed, to lil' ol' me, to overintellectualize paranoia - which is funny in itself to me, because I see the hyperextended thought processes in a really good paranoid narrative as being a byproduct of something akin to too much analysis - but anyhoo: Freud's explanatory schema for paranoia, short version, goes something like this: somebody becomes fixated on something. Then aspects of the fixation are seen as somehow threatening, so the fixation becomes repressed. It stews in the unconscious, bringing out the juices of emotion there, but remains repressed. Then some sort of rupture occurs, and the emotions are reconstructed as an external perception and projected onto some object or event. "What was abolished internally returns from without." I forget if Freud was using cocaine at the time of this insight/formulation, or if he was maybe a bit overly spooked by Daniel Paul Schreber. What am I? A Freud expert? Let's move on...

Robert Sapolsky Anecdote
I've learned a lot from Prof. Sapolsky of Stanford, and in his book The Trouble With Testosterone there's a joke about diagnosing the paranoid schizophreniac. It goes like this:

Doctor (to patient): What do apples, bananas, and oranges have in common?

Patient: They're all wired for sound.

It's funny, aye. But if you've had a loved one who was a paranoid schizo, it's far, far too familiar. I had a brother who was a victim of this disease. The only thing I can think of that could be worse would be seeing your loved one dwindle away to Alzheimer's.

As a result of studying Sapolsky and a few others in his field, I've come to see almost all diseases on a continuum. I'm pretty weird, but somehow my other brother and I did not become full-blown like our brother did. Why? I really don't know. But it's safe to say: even if your genes are almost the "same," it's genes PLUS environment PLUS accidents/chance.

When we're talking paranoia, let's always be aware it's on a continuum. When I caught myself today thinking about Dr. Olney somehow "contracting" ALS from his thought-environment, I quickly dismissed the idea. Because I can, and with justifiable "reasons" that the majority of the more thoughtful and assumed "normal" population would accept. (Still...does that warrant justification? Oops!...) There are others who can't. They might not be able to shake the notion that Olney caught ALS via thought-beams emanating from the patients...Oy and ugh and sigh.

Fruitful Use of Paranoia: Hamlet, J.S. Mill, and Chomsky

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?

Polonius: By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.

Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.

Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.

Hamlet: Or like a whale?

Polonius: Very like a whale.

In Randy Allen Harris's terrific work on late 20th century linguistics, The Linguistics Wars, Harris writes about how Noam Chomsky seems to use paranoia fruitfully, and something along the lines of what John Stuart Mill meant when he said, "Both teachers and learners go to sleep at the post, when there is no enemy in the field." Harris surmises that "isolation and embattlement" have been psychological motivation for Chomsky's work as a linguist. When previous brilliant students have broken with him, he's held his ground, but used some of their ideas.

The gist of the Hamlet analogy with Chomsky is that he's so creative as a thinker you can substitute Chomsky for Hamlet, language or mind for cloud, and a rapidly changing core of bright and dedicated linguists for Polonius.

And Noam's linguistic models have changed into weasels and whales. But, as Harris argues, this is how science tends to go. Aristotle and Ptolemy said the Earth was the center of the cosmos, and their followers agreed. Copernicus said Earth revolved around the sun, and his followers agreed. Why?

Robert Anton Wilson and Paranoia
In an interview with Michael Taft early in the 21st century, Wilson said that this childhood polio was behind the realization that all of his fictional characters have: that the universe is out to get them; they must find a way out of this horrifying mental state. As Wilson himself did.

This was a man who, as a Mad Scientist doing psychological experimentation on himself from roughly the period 1962-1976 to see how plastic and malleable the mind, his mind, was, had plenty of acquaintance with paranoia. At the end of the experiment his daughter was brutally murdered, and Wilson's experiments had nothing to do with the random act of violence. But, for him, it would, it seems, be very easy to fall prey to a debilitating, spiraling paranoia because of all the non-Aristotelian "logical" things that happened to him in his 14 year self-experiment.. He didn't. And I think the reasons why he didn't had to do with part of the 14 year mind change self-experiment, which always contained what he'd learned diligently studying logic, scientific experimentation and skepticism, philosophy, psychology, General Semantics and linguistics, and various forms of yoga and psychotherapies. He could do very deep Thelemic magick and psychedelic drugs, and write thick novels and read for many hours alone Finnegans Wake and Pound's Cantos and still keep it together.

A good place to start for a RAW neophyte interested in paranoia and how if manifests and how to deal with it would be Cosmic Trigger Vol 1.

Of paranoia: he basically saw it as "a losing script." The paranoid will perceive phenomena in a confirmatory biased way madly; this cycle feeds upon itself and is no way to be happy, to put it mildly. Further, he used mythology to model paranoia as a Chapel Perilous in which one must be armed with inner tools - especially an educated skepticism or wide-ranging agnosticism - in which to make it outside the walls.

CAVEAT LECTOR (let the Reader beware): If you want to experiment with this, read as many conspiracy theories as you can for six months. Steep yourself in the deepest and most interesting - and possibly plausible? - conspiracy ideas and just keep reading, listening to conspiracy talk, reading more...you WILL become paranoid. It's highly likely you'll find yourself in your own Chapel Perilous. It is highly advised that the reader be well-practiced in breathing techniques, literary deconstruction, and some form of linguistics. But far better: an agnosticism towards just about everything.

This is one of the last known photos of the mysterious Thomas Pynchon, born in 1937.

Pynchon's "Proverbs For Paranoids"
Here's a list, from Gravity's Rainbow. My favorite has always been, "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers."

Intellectual Reputations: The Long View

2012-01-30T23:27:00.000-08:00

I'm going to take as the paradigmatic case ancient Greek philosophers.

Socrates willfully quaffed some hemlock, probably in 399 BCE. He'd gotten busted. The charge: not believing in the gods and corrupting the youth of Athens. You know it's a lousy political climate when those in charge go for this kind of persecution. And so it goes. For the next 100 years philosophy exploded all over Greece, with the founding of many diverse schools, and almost all of them were founded by followers of Socrates, who never wrote a book in his life. (That we know of.)

Who were the most influential figures following in Socrates's wake? The Skeptics, The Cynics (which, every time I read about ancient Greek history, I still think sound like a punk rock band...and there is a very technically adept and thrilling - in my view - heavy metal band right now called Cynic, but I digress...) had as their founder Antisthenes, who was a known associate of Socrates. Antistenes listened to another of Socrates's pupils say there was a realm of Pure Being out there somewhere, and said bullshit: there are only bodies and pain, and that pain is true and good and beautiful, just look at all the great hero stories. (Why did the Pure Being guy seem to "make it big" while Antisthenes is...well, who evuh hoidda the guy, am I right?)

Diogenes of Sinope, AKA Diogenes the Cynic, can be traced to Antisthenes although there is no proof they ever met. Diogenes was said to admire Antisthenes's thought. Diogenes the Cynic said local culture is arbitrary and not special and he declared himself a cosmopolitan. His father had minted coins but Diogenes defaced them, made a virtue of poverty by living in a tub and carried a lantern around during the day, declaring he was searching for just one honest man. What a character! What a classic wise-ass! In his day Diogenes of Sinope was a major player, mocking Alexander and getting away with it (see Colbert, Stephen, White House Press Club Dinner Speech), and making Plato's life miserable by calling him out on his bogus use of Socrates's good name. Picture some guy as a mixture of Abbie Hoffman and Don Rickels, in a ragged not-quite tunic, and you have my interior image of Diogenes. (Of course he's still speaking some language I don't understand at all, but his rhythm is so deadly, his delivery so masterful, I laff at everything.) The way Chomsky has consistently attacked intellectuals in our lifetime? Diogenes was his day's intellectual anti-intellectual. But I get the feeling his tone was more Carlin than Chomsky. O! Diogenes the Cynic! We hardly knew ye. (And the textbooks for Philosophy 101 don't mention him these days, do they?)

Euclides of Megara - not the same "Euclid" who wrote the foundational text on geometry - was a celebrity philosopher and friend/pupil of Socrates too. He founded a school that made a big deal about argumentation and debate, and the Megarians did pioneering work in logic.

Here's a rendering of what Socrates supposedly looked like. Nietzsche said
in Twilight of the Idols that Socrates was ugly, and questioned if he was even
Greek at all. Then Nietzsche mentions current 19th c. ideas about ugly people
as criminal types, which is still a popular notion, though refuted by science.
Did Nietzsche feel threatened by Socrates for some reason? I doubt it.

Some of you may have studied a dialogue called Phaedo. Phaedo was another follower of Socrates, who founded his own school at Elis, which was hot for awhile but burnt out quickly. The major approaches to knowledge were questioning everything, debate, and a big topic was the value of life itself.

Another one influenced by Socrates was a figure known as Isocrates, whose main game was the development of rhetoric, a man after my own heart.

We're still not to the year 300 BCE yet.

Aristippus was yet another disciple of Socrates, who founded the Cyrenaic school, which carried on in Socrates's tradition of omniquestioning and dialectic. This school culminated with two divergent philosophical stars, Hegesius and Theodorus. Then this school fizzled around 330 BCE. Aristippus was a serene character who thought only our feelings exist for us, and that we were responsible for our own happiness. (Why didn't this catch on in a bigger way and develop down to our time? My answer below.)

Lemme see...who am I missing here? I know there was one more student of Socrates who made a splash, but I just can't re...Oh right: Plato. Plato seemed to notice that Socrates's name was hallowed all over the greater metropolitan Athens area. Plato was not, as an adult, all that taken by his teacher's omniquestioning act; he was a rich kid, much more interested in metaphysics, which were heavily influenced by those extreme weirdos the Pythagoreans. Plato was also interested in aesthetics and politics, which were peripheral concerns among Socrates's students' competing and far more popular schools.

So Plato made Socrates his mouthpiece, even though Socrates was long dead and never really showed much interest in Plato's ideas. A ballsy move, that.

Aristotle studied under Plato, and he took philosophy in yet another direction. You may have heard of this Aristotle guy...He made it to The Show.

Here's the question: Why are Plato and Aristotle the Big Deal these days, and not Aristippus, Diogenes, Phaedo, Euclides, or Theodorus?

The answer - my answer, my educated guess as of the date above - is: the general turns and trends in thought far after these guys were dead have made them immortal thinkers; they had no idea they were going to be a big deal! A lot of it seems like luck to me; they had great ideas, but I don't think the one and only reason they "won out" was because they were "really" the best ideas. There were other fantastic ideas, now long out of favor. These guys - Socrates/Plato/Aristotle - were passionate thinkers, creative, lots of energy, created relatively detailed and coherent systems, and cultivated a large enough network of associates and pupils, but this never guarantees lasting fame. The most we can assume is that, whatever the content, immortal thinkers created a large enough thought-space for subsequent thinkers to play in. Lasting fame seems to me more like a chance operation than what we're led to believe by the textbooks, which tend to enshrine and encourage the idea that, as soon as these guys hit the public stage as Thinkers, a particularly bright star was seen to appear in the East, and a chorus of angels gave the high sign by singing something in four-part harmony, like a Bach fugue. No. Worse: the notion that these guys are big-time because their thought somehow very closely "corresponds" to "the truth"...

(Speaking of J.S. Bach: he had no idea he would be a god to us now. In his day he was thought of as merely the dude who totally shreds on organ. That weird old dude with tons of kids, all hopped up on coffee and smiling, could improvise on the spot a fugue on any given theme: dude's a MANIAC! But Bach had no inkling of what he'd be to us...and he died in 1750 CE. This business of posthumous reputation is a tricky one. We ought to say something similar for the person named William Shakespeare, who died in 1616.)

Back to Socrates/Plato/Aristotle: their reputations waxed and waned and had all kinds of colorful turns before they reached us.

Socrates as an influential figure largely died out around the year 100 CE, probably because he hadn't written anything, but who knows? He's known to us as that iconic figure who appears in Plato's books, first as probably something like how he really was (although Xenophon and Aristophanes should definitely be consulted on this), later as the speaker of Plato's own ideas, which diverged quite a bit from his beloved teacher's.

Plato turned out to be a huge influence on Christianity, Neoplatonism (of course!), gnosticism, the occult, mathematics, and Bertrand Russell's esteemed colleague Alfred North Whitehead said that the history of Western philosophy consisted of "a series of footnotes to Plato."

Aristotle, after minor stardom, got bigger and then, in his old age, scored a chart-topper by being Alexander the Great's tutor. There are stories he was a "millionaire" in his day, but when Alexander died he had to flee for his life in 323 BCE. He had the most interesting road to our day. In his day his ideas - a solution of Platonic idealism dissolved in some materialism - were fairly influential for a couple generations after he died. Then for the next 100 years or so his "school" became more interested in empirical science. Then his school fizzled as Rome became a bigger deal. His own texts were rediscovered around 75-50 BCE and his fame rose again, but the intense ferment of ideas around Greece and Rome (this latter where you went to "make it" as a philosopher, much like rock bands used to go to Hollywood) had his ideas mixed in with Plato's and other's to such an extent that Aristotle (called "Arry" by Ezra Pound) kept moderate fame for the first 600 years of the Common Era, but was thought of as a quasi-Platonic thinker.

Then, a lull for what is usually known as the Dark Ages in Europe.

The Muslims recovered Aristotle's texts, transcribed them, and his star shot through the roof. Arry was on top of the world. He was suddenly big in Baghdad. Who could've predicted that? His texts filtered back into medieval Europe, and St. Thomas Aquinas calls him simply "The Philosopher." Arry had a tremendous influence on what we now call Catholicism. That was big-time for Arry's reputation. In the Renaissance, one faction of Humanists idolized him, and used him against a self-described "modern" group of philosophers.

Aristotle's been the big winner, it seems of all those pupils of Socrates. (Arry was a pupil of a pupil.) But Plato's not far behind.

I think Aristotle's actual texts have been hugely influential on all our lives, whether we know it or not, a large reason for this being his enormous contribution to logic and especially the Law of the Excluded Middle.

On the other hand and whereas, the diverse interpretations of Plato's texts may have an even bigger influence, because of what I'll call the Legacy Software of his thought. To be absurdly perfunctory about it: the notion that abstract notions, ideas that we can create out of nothing, just imagination, are reified, and have some Real reality somewhere else, but "appear" as a sort of washed-out copy of a copy in our mundane reality. By doing certain things, we get closer to the real Reality. This notion seems hyperseductive to a certain caste of mind. (I see it largely as a mistake in understanding the role of language and metaphor in our nervous systems, but as I say: it's complicated. There are some otherworldy-smart mathematicians who'd dispute me on this, and I'd lose the argument, probably.)

This all seems like a wonderfully perplexing puzzle, which I might try to tease out some other day here, playing the OG role. Suffice: Plato is probably, along with Nietzsche, the greatest writer in Western philosophy, which is ironic because Socrates taught that writing was debased speech and harmed memory and put us further away from getting at the Truth, which was best gotten at by a fierce talking style with others called dialectic. It could be that great writing so dazzles various audiences and reader down the vast channels and throughout history that their ideas will be picked up like shiny objects on a vast beach and used in ways the writer never intended. Or it could be that some aspect of the human nervous system prefers ideas like Plato's metaphysics (in fact, I think as history has marched on we humans have gravitated more and more to a sort of self-medicating psychotropy, whether in thought, or in engagement with others, via technology, or drugs...we want to feel good), and once someone's metaphysics get used by other Leaders and New Schools, under pressure of historical forces and with an insurgent rise in the need to Dream Big...ahhh...but this is blah-blah-blah speculation.

One wonders how large figures like Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Frederic Jameson, and Jacques Lacan - who were major philosophical stars on college campuses in Unistat and Europe in the late 1970s through to around 2000 - will loom in history of philosophy textbooks 100 or 200 years from now?

I have not proven anything about intellectual reputations in philosophy, but I have tried to make some interesting assertions, and let my Dear Reader(s) do with them as they wish.

Of the Quantification of Beauty, Part 2

2012-01-25T02:43:00.003-08:00

"I'm happy people find me attractive, but really it's a matter of mathematics: the number of millimeters between the eyes and chin." - Paulina Porizkova

Porizkova. She's interesting to listen to, too.

In 1960 a London newspaper published the pics of 12 young women, asking who's the prettiest. Over 4000 people responded, from all over Britain, every social class, ages from 8 to 80. The unanimity about who was prettiest was consistent to a remarkable degree. In 1965 a similar test was done in Unistat, with over 10,000 responses, with again a very high degree of consistency as to who was the fairest of them all. A few years later the psychologist's lab studies on prettiness/beauty began, and hasn't stopped.

What's another remarkable thing is that almost everyone agrees that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," but then they pick the same pretty face that everyone else does. After a good 30 years of various tests of beauty - including cross-cultural studies - it seems safe to assert that we are all attracted to the beautiful, even though we're uneasy about it, for various reasons.

In 1984, Raquel Scheer and Robin Lakoff (then George's wife) published a book, Face Value: the Politics of Beauty. They asserted that beauty was a social construction, and that, "Beauty is not instantly and instinctively recognizable: we must be trained from childhood to make those discriminations."

Do you agree?

In another 1984 book, Forbidden Fruits: Taboos and Tabooism in Culture, ed. by Browne, another female academic, Jane E. Caputi, wrote an essay, "Beauty Secrets: Tabooing the Ugly Woman," in which she asserted we acquire our tastes for beauty via acculturation.

Are you on Caputi's page?

Eight years later and probably most famously, Naomi Wolf penned The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women. For Wolf, beauty was not a universal and objective thing, but a myth foisted on us by The Man. Here's classic Wolf: "Beauty is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact."

Are you with Naomi, Dear Reader? Here's a pic of Wolf, just for kicks:

Sisterhood must really be powerful. Wolf is pretty to me, I find her
comely and smart and her politics has drifted closer to mine over the
years, which makes me wonder....Does she seem ambivalent about
having her picture taken here?

Enter a psychologist named Judith Langlois, now at the U. of Texas. She's studied social perception, with an emphasis on perceptions of physical attractiveness. She did a study in which she collected hundreds of pictures of faces and asked adults to rate them regarding degree of attractiveness. Then she showed the same pics to babies aged three to six months, and the babies found the same pictures attractive that the adults did! Q: How did she and her colleagues know what the babies thought? Answer: The babies spent much more time looking at attractive faces than unattractive ones. Even if the baby's parents were white, the babies lingered over pretty African faces, attractive men, attractive other babies, good-looking Asians from all over the world...

There's no blank slate, here: we seem to be born with some predisposition towards liking symmetry, proportion...I don't think the media or the Male Gaze did this to us. It made for some heated politics of "gender" and of questions about what's socially constructed, to what extent, how, why, etc. But I think the "brainwashing" idea about beauty is moribund, if not kaput.

Are you still with the postmodern politically-correct academic women? (If you ever were...)

HERE's a 2006 article discussing Langlois's work, surmising that pretty faces take less information processing power, and so are pleasing - a sort of literal take on "easy on the eyes," - etc. A profile of Langlois and how she got into this line of inquiry, etc, is HERE.

What about the idea that advertising has hypnotized us into a Madison Avenue world of beauty? We've seen this argument before, and once I started reading all those studies on symmetry, the phi ratio, and fer crissakes, babies?, I can't believe how utterly lame that argument is/was. Yes, we only drink sugary sodas because Coke and Pepsi and their ads have brainwashed us! We only love fatty food because of all those McDonald's ads.

But then where did so many smart people get such bad ideas? I'm not sure, but there certainly seems like there's DANGER lurking in beauty. In King Kong it killed the Beast, remember? Recall that the Judgement of Paris was a beauty contest instigated by the spurned goddess Eris, which ultimately started the Trojan War and made James Joyce's Ulysses possible... Beauty's not only dangerous but unfair: with regards to one study, attractive men earn $250,000 more than their counterparts over a lifetime, according to economist David Hammermesh. Attractive women will earn 4% more over a lifetime than not-so-attractive women in the same lines of work. Managers admitted in a survey published in Newsweek that, in this bad economy, pretty people's luck was better in getting hired. The most important thing was experience, followed by confidence, then attractiveness, then what school the applicant went to. The lesson: it's better to be average and attractive than brilliant and unattractive.

Scads of the research talk about a "Beauty Bias," "Beauty Premium," "Beauty Advantage,"or "Beauty Bonus." This stuff has been known forever, but we still like to say "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," and we probably think we really believe it when we say it. See, for example, Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law, by Deborah Rhode. She's at Stanford, and wants to make "lookism" tougher, legally. How this can be done, I have no idea. I have not read Rhode's book, but the Slate article and other reviews make me want to get to it if I find the time. The City of Santa Cruz, California has tried to make "lookism" illegal, and Robert Anton Wilson - who lived at the edge of Santa Cruz - wrote one of the most devastatingly LOL-funny Swiftian satires on that that I've ever seen; unfortunately it hasn't been collected in any of his books, but if you find the collection Popular Alienation: A Steamshovel Press Reader, ed. Kenn Thomas, look for "A Modest Enquiry: Some Possible Problems With a New Santa Cruz Anti-Discrimination Law," pp.67-70...

[And yet: Ugly People strike back in beauty-obsessed Buenos Aires. Good luck with that...]

I think most of us are a bit mixed-up about beauty. It's so pleasant to see a beautiful person. We're probably wired that way. In fact, I'd bet on it. But we don't like unfairness, and most of us sense that the beautiful get an easier ride, through no merit of their own. Especially liberals: we believe in meritocracy over birth, beauty, inherited money and privilege. We highly value merit, knowledge, real work.

And yet...the beautiful enchant us. We can't help it, and I suggest we give over to it, as part of the payback of the whips and scorns of time and general difficulties in life. Eleanor Roosevelt was asked about regrets in life and she said she wished she'd been prettier. Count Tolstoy mourned the good looks he never had. I harmonize with Tolstoy on this. Men wish they were prettier, too. On the other hand, when Woody Allen was asked if he had any regrets in life, he said his only regret was that he wasn't someone else...

A shout out to Nancy Etcoff's Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty, which I found in 1999, and it's therefore "dated": so much more science has been done on the topic since then, but Etcoff's book is still a well-written and researched and delightful, funny, and candid text well worth reading on the topic.

Indonesia is the country with the most Muslims in the world, so on a lark, because I know no one from Indonesia, I Googled, "Beautiful Women of Indonesia" and got this.

Here's People magazine's "Sexiest Man Live For 2011," an actor named Bradley Cooper, who I'd never heard of.

Part 1 of my musings and gleanings on beauty and its measurements, etc.

Remembering Robert Anton Wilson

2012-01-20T00:43:00.000-08:00

"RAW" to his legion of readers and fans, and "Bob" to almost all who knew him (although Wilson said his friend Timothy Leary called him "Robert"), would've turned 80 this past January 18th. He died a week short of his 75th birthday, in 2007. Recently Boing Boing made the week of Jan. 11-18 "Robert Anton Wilson Week," which largely prompts this blogpost. I think RAW was a major ingredient in the spiked-with-something mind-manifesting cream of the relatively free-floating unattached generalist intellectuals in Unistat in the second half of the 20th century.

I was still living in San Pedro, on the Los Angeles harbor's edge, when I wrote RAW and asked, if I drove up (a good five hour's drive from LA to Capitola/Santa Cruz, where he lived), could I interview him? He'd read some of my stuff about his writing at alt.fan.rawilson, and the writer Eric Wagner told him I was cool, so RAW said yes. We made a date. I was nervous, and in the two weeks before driving towards the Bay Area, filled maybe eighteen pages of a spiral notebook with questions, being careful not to ask anything anyone had previously asked in the fifty or so interviews I'd read with him. I had emailed him only some of the topics I wanted to discuss, and he wrote back, saying "I can't wait to talk about this stuff with you."

We - my wife and I - buzzed his number at the gate and he let us in, and one of the crew members of what would be the documentary film Maybe Logic: The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson, greeted us at the door and led us down a short hall (I remember seeing a room to my left completely filled from floor to ceiling with books, and regret I didn't get to peruse his collection) and there were cameras and microphones, and The Man himself, seated at his couch. I'm pretty sure at that moment I went into an altered state. I'm resolutely not a celebrity worshipper. There are only a few people in the world who, if I met them in public, I'd have to try and tell them how their work changed my life, and would you please sign this piece of paper? There are/were maybe five people for me like that, and he was one.

I was very nervous but he put me at ease quickly. I met the crew for the film: young very hip intellectual types who were interested in, besides RAW: jazz and progressive ideas. Because what I said was being recorded for possible use in the film, I signed a waiver. RAW was making the filmmakers laugh, and he turned to me and apologized that he'd fallen recently and had broken a tooth and was going to get it fixed, but he would sound sort of funny when he spoke. All around the living room, on every surface, were gifts that friends and fans had given him, mostly books.

I don't know who took this photo, but this is pretty close to how
he looked when I interviewed him. He died at 4:50AM on January
11th, 2007, in his home, among family and friends.

There was a brief lull, so I spoke up and asked him, "Are you ready?" He said let's go! I started my microcassette recorder, and here's the transcript from how the interview started, and as the goddess and the Green Horned Man are my witnesses, I'm typing it out exactly as he answered it:

Me: I gave you a list of some of the things I wanted to talk about, but didn't mention humor. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about humor first.

RAW: That's a great theme.

Me: It seems to me that humor, humorists, comedians, and satirists aren't given enough credit for their intelligence in our culture. It reminds me of the popular discourse about, say, Beethoven, Picasso, or Orson Welles: "Oh sure they're artistic, but I don't consider them intellectuals like Einstein or Chomsky." Do you see this too? And if so, why?

RAW: Well, that's an interesting question. The first thing I think of is the Academy Award has never been given to a comedy as far as I know. If they did it was only once. Comedies never even get nominated! The idea is that to be serious you've got to be grim. And I think some of the greatest writing in - I'm talking about my own field - some of the greatest writing in the world is comic writing: Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, Rabelais, James Joyce, Ezra Pound...Ezra Pound is much funnier than he's given credit for...

I think the thing is that comedy arouses some of the same joyous feelings as orgone or pot. And these are the feelings our society most dreads. They're literally ashamed of them. A lot of comedians say when they're successful, "I killed them!" They mean they broke down our resistance to having a good time. There's a critical mass...I've known some professional comedians. The critical mass beyond which when the audience has reached that point of laughter, they'll laugh at almost anything. You can stop telling jokes and start reading the phone book and they'll laugh at that, too. It's a contagious thing, but that's because it's so repressed and you need a lot of pressure to unleash it. I think that's why people get drunk: it's to unleash their laughter. Unfortunately, it unleashes their violence, too. You get the laughing drunk followed by the fighting drunk. Followed by another homicide case. It's a Dionysian thing. And our society is very anti-Dionysian. What's the main association with Dionysus? Drugs and orgies. That's what our society is most terrified of. You can kill as many people as you want, but for god's sake don't look like you're having a good time! About anything.

That's why Hannibal Lecter is the greatest villain ever. It's like he has a magnetic field around him. Everyone either hates him or loves him. Most of them hate him. The ones that hate him the most - I think - are the ones that secretly love him the most. I once admitted I love him because he's so shameless. Without his bad habits, of course...That's the thing about Hannibal: he's fascinating because he's not only a villain but he's not a pathetic villain. The villains that people love all have a touch of pathos about them, like the Frankenstein monster, the Wolfman who doesn't want to turn into a werewolf but has to because he's under a curse. They've all got something sympathetic about them. Hannibal Lecter has nothing sympathetic about him whatsoever. There's no excuse for him. And he knows it and he doesn't give a damn. (Laughs) There's this polarity. He's incarnate evil. And enjoying himself thoroughly! He eats the best food, dines at the best restaurants, wears the best clothes, knows everything. He's a walking encyclopedia of music, art, science...How can you help hating him? I mean if you're a normal, well-adjusted citizen. And Anthony Hopkins plays him with so much charm that they can't help feeling, even while they're hating him they're strangely attracted, which scares the hell out of them.
----------------------------
Yes, that's RAW: give him a question and he can really take off, almost like a Coltrane solo: take a theme and just riff madly off it, linking ideas, following harmonies and ideas suggested by previous ones, trying to stay interesting by making the improvisation informationally dense, and landing on your feet by the end of the solo. He did this with me for four hours, with many breaks to sit on his balcony and look at the wine-dark Pacific, smoke.

And he was stoned the whole time, because his post-polio syndrome had really began to take its toll by then: an awful proportion of the nerves in his legs had died, he'd feel 20 degrees colder than what the thermometer read, he felt pain constantly, and he mostly used a wheelchair to get around.

The movie crew left after I'd been there for a couple of hours. Gradually, the interview turned into a discussion, and we riffed back and forth with each other about the sociology of science, avant garde classical music, how delighted he was that Lily Tomlin and George Carlin had been subscribers to his futurist newsletter Trajectories, the influence of J. W. Dunne, pragmatism in using intellectual models, ethnomethodology, Vico, film and Jungian archetypes, James Joyce, Freud, reading tabloids like they're cultural anthropology, and Pound. Among other things. I think he appreciated that I'd actually read Pound and had prepared some good questions for him. By the third hour he made me feel like his equal, and seemed to genuinely like listening to me riff on ideas about authors he said he hadn't read.

The only unpleasant moment during my whole time with him was my question, "How well do you think you've been understood?" He seemed to darken, then stared at me for what seemed like ten minutes but was probably only 20 seconds, and said, "Next question!" I almost panicked. Had I brought up the one sorest of sore spots? Had I ruined the entire afternoon? I had discussed aspects of this question with other Wilson scholars, and indeed, we wondered why this genius was not a bigger deal in the sociology of intellectuals.

I nervously laughed a bit, and asked my next prepared question, and he brightened immediately and it was as if I had never asked that Offending Question.

Since then, I have come to understand that the apparent lack of understanding of his work by the literati was indeed a very hurtful thing for him. I had asked the question in all innocence and earnestness, never intending to be snarky or provocative. I felt painfully naive later.

After four or so hours, I'd exhausted my questions and felt like I'd taken up too much of his time. It was agreed we'd go for two hours, and we'd been there at least four. But he still wanted to talk, so we chatted about stuff, my recorder off. I wish I had recorded everything, including the stuff he said on breaks on the balcony, because he was ALWAYS fascinating! He had an uncanny gift for combining elegant intellectual thought with human feelings, history and the hidden aspects of culture, all with a tinge of humor - from whacky to ironic - all at once.

Before we left, he asked us if we'd be so kind as to open a can of soup and heat it up for him, and my wife gladly did. As we were leaving I thanked him for making me feel so at ease in my nervousness, and he asked, plaintively, "What's there to be nervous about?"

He insisted on getting in his wheelchair and leading us to the door as we left, and he said something in what I took to be Hindi. I didn't understand any of it, and he explained it was a Buddhist saying about taking things as they come, as I recall. It all struck me as incredibly kind.

My wife and I went to a pub and discussed our day in the presence of the smartest, most interesting, and most alien-like sage we'd ever met or were likely to meet. I think I really had the orgone flowing at that point, and it lasted for hours.

Newt Gingrich Quiz

2012-01-16T23:57:00.000-08:00

Friends of Newt have made which of the following statements about him?

a.) "I don't know whether the ambitious bastard came before the visionary, or whether he's a visionary, but he realizes you have to be tough to get where you need to be."

b.) "Newt uses people and then discards them as useless. He's like a leech. He really is a man with no conscience. He just doesn't seem to care who he hurts or why."

c.) "You can't imagine how quickly power went to his head."

d.) "The important thing you have to realize about Newt Gingrich is that he is amoral. There isn't any right or wrong, there isn't any conservative or liberal. There's only what will work best for Newt Gingrich."

e.) "He's probably one of the most dangerous people for the future of the country that you can possibly imagine. He's Richard Nixon, glib. It doesn't matter how much good I do the rest of my life, I can't ever outweigh the evil I've caused by helping him be elected to Congress."

f.) "Newt's like a bully. Remember when you're kids and there's always some tough-talking little kid, and when somebody stands up to him he caves in? Newt's never had anybody stand up to him. Newt's scenario is always, 'We're talking the truth and you're playing dirty.'"

g.) "Newt has problems with interpersonal relations. I tell him that every day."

ANSWER BELOW...

ANSWER: All of the above. Sorry! Trick question! Statement (a) was made by Chip Kahn, who ran two of Newt's campaigns, and has known him since 1968. Statement (b) was made by Newt's then-wife, Mary. Statements (c), (d), and (e) were made by L.H. Carter, who was one of Newt's closest friends and advisors until they had a falling out in 1979. Statement (f) was made by Lee Howell, Newt's first press aide. Statement (g) was made by Vin Weber, who was a Republican congressman from Minnesota.

-I ripped off this whole post from a 1995 book by Ted Rueter titled The Newt Gingrich Quiz Book. It's brimming with data on this colossal sociopathic asshole. Note you can get a used copy of it for a penny via Amazon. I guess after Newt was thrown out of Congress for massive ethics violations no one thought he'd ever come back because he'd been shown to be such a fascistic blowhard and loudmouth second-rate pseudo-intellectual. Well, that's my nightmare, folks: no one remembers anything! This book is 17 years old. Almost old enough to vote.

Apologies to regular OG readers who expected something interesting. I just had to blow off some steam over this piece of shit, who played the race card in a massive way in front of a bunch of sheetless KKKers in South Carolina tonight. I really can't stand any of the Republicans running, but the idea of President Gingrich is horrifying, and I remember saying the same thing when W said he was running in 1997-98. No one thought such an obvious moronic rich kid-loser-alcoholic could possibly win. At that time I had no blog. Well...Ya does what ya cans.

"Is it any wonder this country is leaderless when we are literally governed by criminals?"
-Gingrich, October 14, 1976, gleaned from John K. Wilson's 1996 book Newt Gingrich: Capitol Crimes and Misdemeanors Get it from your local public library, if they have it, and you can stomach reading about this vile, marshmallowy d-bag-racist.

Newt Gingrich, Cry-Baby. More history.

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." - Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses

Of the Quantification of Beauty, Part 1

2012-01-16T00:39:00.000-08:00

What an odd road beauty has taken since Plato and other Greeks decided that all values seemed to reduce to the tripartite and triumvirate truth/goodness/beauty. In the ensuing 2500 years, goodness seems irreparably relative and mired in its own high level of abstraction. "That which is the good is that which is true blah blah..." palaver seems to elicit yawns from all but the most semantically confused. Truth was doing fairly well until the 20th century hit, then the means for ascertaining capital tee Truth bogged down and seems to have crashed; no one can find the Body of Truth, although, like Elvis and Bigfoot spottings, almost everyone seems to have caught a glimpse, or is laughing at those who say they've seen It. (Or maybe the Truth is more like Amelia Earhart?) Relativity, quantum mechanics, neuroscience and human perception, cultural relativity in Anthropology, Wittgenstein and Korzybski with language, and even Godel's Theorem in math seems to have killed off that big swath of axiology that truth had made up. We mostly speak of truth in pragmatic ways these days, or if one is deducing from necessary elements. 3 + 3 = 6, we say. And most everyone nods their head in agreement: what she said about threes is True, lo and verily, aye. The guy who wants to dispute 3+3=6 is just a pain in the ass, and I think we will all agree what I just wrote was a True statement, although it seems not to partake much in the Good, and if you get some Beauty out of it, hey, good for you, you weirdo.

Truth largely got derailed because it seemed inextricably related to perception and thought, although I simplify the story wildly here. The Good was caught up in desire and action, and it turns out we all desire different things and take some really bizarre and unwise actions in our forays towards the "good." (And who among us says "Good riddance!" to the Good?)

On to Beauty.

Beauty has taken an odd, twisty-turny course over that same 2500 year period. While Plato, influenced by the Pythagoreans, thought beauty (or should I write Beauty?) followed from the Ideal forms, and that human beauty (which is most of what these posts will be about) actually contained pure geometrical ideas that underwrote it - although today we might say they were "wingin' it good" - it was a "pretty" (Ha!) good wing, viz: Plato's complete works are chock-full of ideas about proportions and beauty...and symmetry. Regarding art, regarding consumption of food and wine, how much one should exercise in proportion to engaging in intellectual dialogue, how much this in relation to how much that...this notion of just proportion and idealism feeds his ideas about politics and the ideal state, which, in The Republic, is brilliant, very engaging, and, I think, fascistic.

In the Phaedrus Plato, still transfixed on his vision of a More Real, Perfect World in some other Reality of Being, says it's the "privilege of beauty" to offer us the easiest access to the world of Pure Forms, and that beauty allows the soul "to grow wings." I think he's basically right ; but it's because we evolved as sexy beings and biology drives this stuff, not some Eternal Ideal Realm.

So this is what it's come to, eh?

This notion of proportion and symmetry, in a sort of Eternal Return or akin to Odysseus's long road out to Troy and his very interesting ten-year adventure getting back home to Ithaca, harmonizes with computer-modeled attempts in the last 30 years to measure, quantify, and mathematize the idea of a beautiful face. How odd that beauty turned out to be the one of the Big Three axiological ideas to actually cash itself out and become amenable to our efforts to mathematize and quantize almost everything.

Of course, along the way, guys like Spinoza and John Stuart Mill saw pleasure and utility as the criteria for both beauty and goodness, and one could easily argue that utility and pleasure were more important values for both men. There are many values to go around. More than five, I daresay.

Spinoza (b.1632) thought goodness and beauty, as values, were subjective, but that truth was objective, and we've seen that that project largely fell apart in the 20th century. I surmise that a rationalistic bend of mind, particularly one enamored of mathematics, tends to think along the lines of Spinoza.

Earlier, Montaigne, who I in many ways see as more Modern than Spinoza, talked of the relativity of beauty, and in a memorable passage from his (by far) longest essay, "Apology For Raimon de Sebonde," turned to the most recent proto-anthropological data of his time, which was filled with wild tales from missionaries and other disreputable folk, but Montaigne nevertheless makes his point, saying that if there was truly one True idea of beauty, we'd know it by now and, furthermore, of faces:

"Indians paint it black and tawny, with great swollen lips, big flat noses, and load the cartilage betwixt the nostrils with great rings of gold to make it hang down to the mouth; as also the nether lip with great hoops, enriched with jewels, that weigh them down to fall upon the chin, it being with them a special grace to show their teeth even below the roots. In Peru, the greatest ears are the most beautiful, and they stretch them out as far as they can by art..." Montaigne, born in 1533, goes on and on in this passage, which must have been the most wonderous for the local folk in southern France to read!

Later 19th and early 20th century geniuses Darwin and Freud made no bones about Beauty, asserting frankly that it had to do with the instinct for nookie.

Enough of Great Men in the Western Tradition and their ideas about Beauty, I've buried the lead! What of this "quantification"? Okay, probably a lot of you are way ahead of me: the notion of measuring beauty has been pretty hot in academia the past few decades. A lot of it hinges on using Photoshopped images of faces, tweaked into different ratios of eyes to mouth, length and width of face, and asking study respondents which photos they found most attractive. And the degree of uniformity of agreement is both astonishing and sorta creepy, methinks.

HERE's a pretty good overview of recent books that discuss these beauty measurements and many other findings about the sociobiology/evolutionary psychology/economics/sociology/phenomenology of beauty and attractiveness in out world, today, as gleaned from all sorts of studies.

Here's a short article on Measuring Beauty in Women, jointly conducted by U. of California at San Diego, and the U. of Toronto. This article elaborates on the previous one, and note that Shania Twain "is" more beautiful than both Elizabeth Hurley and Angelina Jolie. THIS article shows that women fantasize about symmetrical men, especially at certain times of the month, and why. German students seem very much caught up in this stuff, as shown at this website, that offers self-tests, etc. You may have seen John Cleese hosting a public broadcasting series on this topic, and it's all on You Tube; a key short episode is HERE, and if you want to watch more they're easy to find. NB: how the 1:1.618 ratio plays out with faces.

As an overweening generalist, I first became acquainted with these ideas by reading Helen Fisher's early books The Sex Contract and The Anatomy of Love.

Media and Sanity (Formerly "Mental Hygiene")

2012-01-11T17:52:00.000-08:00

Whatever device or gadget or medium in which you read this post shapes your apprehension and understanding of it, according to McLuhan. Please tell me more about McLuhan, if you have the time.

A number of you have asked for some more takes on our digitized media landscape (actually, the number is zero...is zero even a number?), given my inveterate bookishness, so I'll download the following into the blogosphere and see if anyone salutes, comments, clicks, vomits.

Irony
The OG does not have a Twitter account, has not tweeted a damned thing, as of the date above. The OG has read practical reasons for doing so, but is not sure the practicalities outweigh the investment of time (<----O! that omnipresent "time is money" metaphor again!). The OG was on Facebook for one day, then closed his account. He has no Droid or iPad. Not even an iPod, which may be illegal - not owning one - but I'll have to look that up later. He's not on Google +. He hasn't made any videos to be seen on You Tube or Vimeo or some of those other ones. He is not Linked In, so presumably not many are Stumbling Upon him.

OG likes that you like it and use it and enjoy it, or that, or some of it. He's wired differently. A friend who is the opposite: he's sending Drop Box music to a friend while he's carrying on a conversation about web browsers and Tweeting what someone just said that was funny; his Droid is a permanent attachment to his nervous system and may as well be a prosthetic. When it's possible to get some nano-implant in the brain that accesses the Net only by thinking and speaking out loud to the Cloud, he will be the first in line.

Meanwhile, I sit with my books. I take long walks in the forest, alone. I meditate. I love the MacBook I write this on, so I'm not completely neo-Luddite, nor do I think - and this is my main point - that "my way" is right, and everyone else is crazy. Only most of you are crazy. You know who you are. Or maybe not... Besides books, I love the medium of actually being in the space of another human, and conversing freely. It's analog, but cut me some slack, okay?

Hands at Ten and Two?
I don't know if they still say this, but when I first got my driver's license, the Authorities tried to inculcate the dogma that keeping your hands at the ten o'clock and two o'clock positions on the steering wheel was a big part of safety. That was before Internet and cell phones, but the whole Department of Motor Vehicles system seems antiquated and pretentious and reactionary, so there's probably some 16 year old being told this by a driving examiner as I type this. Anyway, use your turn signal, be aware of the vehicles, pedestrians, bicyclists, drones, and other moving and not-so moving vehicles and signs around you. Is it necessary to emphasize you ought not be TEXTING while driving? (The quick dopamine or serotonin or oxytocin buzz from making yet another connection with another Being seems a legacy from the Paleozoic, so I consider it an almost intractable problem.)

Farhad Manjoo tries to solve the texting while driving issue HERE; the rise of Siri and the current melange of laws state-by-state in Unistat shows the lawmakers are pretty clueless, although I do like Maine's ban on "distracted driving."

(Wait a minute, hold on: only 70% of "connected consumers" said they'd prefer speech commands over touchscreens while driving? WTF?)

Other states' current laws just seem arbitrary and narrow, and probably unenforceable, for the most part. Voice-texting seems to make a basic break with the old touchscreen texting and reading. (I have sent a touchscreen text maybe five times in my life and do not have a disembodied friend named Siri, and don't tell me you're surprised to hear this.) While it seems difficult to tell how much injury, death and general mayhem has been added by distracted, cell-phone using, texting, even newspaper-reading drivers, and some say it's difficult after an accident to tell if a driver was distracted unless they say they were, or there was a witness, I know I feel distracted even when I'm talking to a friend in the passenger seat, or trying to change the CD (I still listen to CDs in the car!), so I perhaps am not entitled to an opinion.

Some studies I've seen have shown that texting while driving is as dangerous as driving while over the legal alcohol limit. Other studies I've seen (ask me for citations if you really care) show that driving while sleep-deprived is as dangerous as drunk driving.

Let's not even think about texting while drunk, in heavy traffic, on two hour's sleep, but I'm sure it's done.

The comedian Marc Maron nails it for me. He tells about the time he was minding his own business, driving down the road, texting, when he had to slam on the brakes because someone suddenly appeared in the road in front of him, and it angered him they were there. He realized that texting while driving was worse than drunk driving because, as he says, "When you're drunk driving, at least SOMEONE is driving the car." Maron goes on to cover an angle I hadn't thought of before: dying in a car crash because you were texting, and that portion of the text is still there for the emergency crew, cops, medical personnel, etc, to see. Maron "guarantees" what's on your device will be absurd. "Soy milk is so fu..." So fu what? "What a lameass LO..." Laugh out loud at WHAT? And then the worst: did you hear how Dave died? He was texting while driving and his last words were, "That bitch can suc..." (Polite mourners will all agree he was trying to say, emphatically, that his ex-wife can succeed in anything she tries to do!) Ask yourself, driving-texters, do you want your last words to be something like that? (Catch Maron's full act with This Has To Be Funny - the bit about his visit to the Creationist Museum alone is worth the price - and his podcasts are pretty cool, too.)

We've come a long way, baby! The UNIVAC, 1951

Dithering over Twitter
Some of my smartest friends don't understand why I don't at least set up an account and Tweet to..."followers" (as a minor scholar of the Manson Family, the word bugs me a bit) that I've just written an article for so-and-so, or blogged on blah-blah-blah. So I admit it: I'm thinking about jumping into the twitterverse. But no plunge yet. I worry about its own imperatives, specifically how much time it'll steal from me when there are so many things I know I enjoy and find fulfilling already. I doubt yet another way to "connect" in some disembodied way with fellow humans will finally make me feel like I've arrived. And when I look at the top Twitterholics and their number of followers, I'm amazed to see that Barack Obama is #7 in the world. He's hip, he's smarter than me. Maybe there's something to this stuff?

But then I see the Barackstar is just ahead of Rihanna and Taylor Swift, but below, in descending order to Numero Uno: Britney Spears (she's still alive?), Kim Kardashian, Shakira, Katy Perry, Bieber, and Numero Uno Gaga. I'm a snob. I know it.

Twitter seems to have revolutionary applications; we've seen that with reports from the Arab Spring (not going too well in Syria, so far, and Egypt? Oy!), and Occupy stuff. And it can get your house robbed, too. If you've committed some crimes such as bank fraud and others, it can get you arrested. If you Tweet the wrong joke in the wrong place, you can find yourself arrested and banned for life from, say the airport. Twitter also adds a whole new dimension to the art of creepily stalking someone else, even if, for this writer, it was Dear Ol' Dad. On the other hand, you can continue to update your friends on the latest even after you're dead, so there's that enigmatic mindfuck of a thrill to foist on friends. You may have heard it here first! (And Blogger allows you to complete a blogpost, then set a timer for it to go live, so you cannot be 100% sure you're not reading this from a dude who's already dead! WOW! Talk about receiving messages from the Great Beyond!? <cue: theremin music>)

It seems there's an ethical quandary among tweeters about "Tweeting you own horn." How much is acceptable? In a writer's forum I read recently there seems a basic assumption that one of the primary purposes for Tweeting is to let followers know you've produced yet another masterpiece. Other early Tweet-theorists tell us we ought break our Tweet-actions into - I've seen two models, each with variations - 33/33/33 or 25/25/25/25: with the 33s, you spend a third of your tweets telling people about your work/projects/business; another third is spent on pushing your friend's work/projects, etc; and the last 33 just "shooting the breeze," apparently in attempt to bond phatically. The 25 model is the same as the 33, but with an extra category shoved in: social and political ideas, responsibilities to your fellow humans, I'm going to the Occupy/Tea Party/Meat Is Murder/Save The Plankton rally at the Union Square, who's with me? Etc.

I could relate articles I've read about why Twitter is more popular per capita with African Americans than "whites" (although the gap seems to be lessening), the use of Twitter by Somali terrorists, the implications of a bazillionaire Saudi Prince's investment in Twitter, and the project of trying to predict the future by monitoring the twitterverse, but call me a twit or a taxi, it'll have to wait.

A French Idea
The French have decided it's not fair to mention Twitter, Facebook, etc by name in their mainstream media because it seems to be free publicity for those giants, and there are always smaller companies that do social media who are trying to gain a sliver of the pie. After a few hours of thinking about it, this makes sense to me. However, when one of these megacorps have been found to be violating the law, or a prominent, independent citizen watchdog group says one of these monstrosities wants to do something that will infringe on what we so laffingly call "privacy" or something else having to do with fundamental fairness, I think you have to be able to mention them. Imagine your bubble-headed bleached-blond babbling on the 11 o'clock news that, "A very powerful search engine company announced today that it intends to corner the market on tasers, personal drones, and automatic weapons and in a separate statement says it's going to independently explore Mars for the future recreational colonization of its own CEOs and some of its most loyal employees..."

I don't know about you, but I'd want the name of that company blurted out by the mouthpiece. Oh hell, I'll probably read about it on Twitter. And who are we fooling? We all know it's Google. And the French aren't banning naming search engines, only "social networking" sites. But aren't Google's tentacles in every pie by now? Anyway...

FREE Course in How to Code!
In Douglas Rushkoff's book, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands For A Digital Age, he says if you know how to program, that's great, but he extends the semantics for "programming" to how you interact with your gadgets. (One of the things I like best about Rushkoff's semantics of "programs" is his extension of it to BS [belief systems], social institutions, and language itself.) The gadgets are programmed by their makers to have, seemingly, their own imperatives. You must program yourself and your interaction with your gadgets for what YOU want, not what the gadget wants you do with your time. To you philosophy geeks, we're in the realm of subjective intentionality here.

But would you like to learn how to code, the hardcore way? Two young hotshots, Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski, started Codeacademy, and you can learn to code throughout 2012 for free. This article covers it, and makes a point I found salient: how many people who have lost or will lose their jobs to robots have/had no clue how easily this was done. This coding dealio seems empowering, and I'm going to try to find the time to learn some of this stuff, being a blithering idiot when it comes to these modalities, right now.

So, if all goes well, I will be coding like a madman by the end of the year, just in time for the Apocalypse, when that damned Mayan calendar claims us all.

Rushkoff talking for 5 minutes about Program or Be Programmed:

Sunday God-Stuff From a Mystical Agnostic

2012-01-08T17:42:00.000-08:00

The OG is a "mystical agnostic"? Yep. Or at least that's my answer these days when someone asks me about my religion (which, truth be told, hardly ever happens these days; my apparent agnostic hedonistic heathen rep tends to precede me); I like a line from Professor Carlin: "I'm not an atheist and I'm not an agnostic. I'm an acrostic. The whole thing puzzles me." (found in Sullivan's excellent book on Professor Carlin, 7 Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin, pp.221-222)

In the thirty or so-odd years I've been reading the Holy Books, the interpretations of such, studying various branches of what Robert Anton Wilson called "atheology," delving joyously in meta-satirical religions like the Church of the Subgenius and the Discordian Society (I can't get enough of that Old Time Irreverence, often invoking a Gee Oh Dee I don't believe in), reading evolutionary psychological views on religion, on and on...I remain a happy sorta-atheist/agnostic who's pagan-gnostic-ish "spiritual," and who sees the gods and goddesses of all religions and myths as METAPHORS for internal human states.

If The Reader wants to know largely where I'm coming from in these matters, I heartily recommend reading an essay by Robert Sapolsky titled "Circling The Blankets For God," collected in his book The Trouble With Testosterone. (If you have the time, here's 80 minutes of Sapolsky lecturing at Stanford on the neurobiological basis for a lot of weirdness in religious practice.)

I'm also (obvious to many of you) heavily influenced by Robert Anton Wilson's various nuanced takes on religion; radical intellectuals and artists who were brought up in the Catholic faith seem to attract me strongly and I don't yet have it nailed why, for I was not brought up in any faith and remain a default happy pagan of some sort. Buckminster Fuller once told RAW in an interview that "'God' seems like a rather small concept to contain the exquisitely interaccomodative coherencies of universe," and I also resonate with that.

(Others who have greatly influenced my thinking on religion: Aleister Crowley, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Terence McKenna, Joseph Campbell, Nietzsche, Chuang Tzu, Rumi, Timothy Leary, Elaine Pagels, Ezra Pound...)

So why am I interested in Christianity and other established and organized religions? Because so many of my brothers and sisters on this planet take this stuff VERY seriously. As the theologian Harvey Cox (who I admire) often says, there are people who will die for the faith and there are people who will kill for the faith. I'm necessarily interconnected with all of you; what you - in the widest possible sense of "you" - think and feel and believe about your religion fascinates me (often in a somber way). In the end, because organized religion is such a Big Deal I must, almost by definition, as an overweening generalist, be interested. And so: on with it...

The "Emergent Church"
I have a brother who has a degree in Theology, and he's turned me on to this term. He's thrown names and book titles and ideas from this movement at me, and I've been trying to keep up. As someone who thinks Falwell/Robertson-level xtianity is a plague on the Unistatian body-politic, the emergent church is something to be happy about. As I read some of the authors my dear brother tells me about, I find an assumed language (less so with people like Harvey Cox and Peter Berger and Philip Jenkins, not that they're hard-core denizens of the emergent church, but my brother has spoken highly of them as theological writers, or more accurately, sociologists of Christianity and other religions) that strongly suggests I (pagan) am not thought of when the books were written; that is, when I read Marcus Borg, Tim Keel, and Brian McLaren (this last my brother's favorite, along with Erwin McManus...my biggest clue that the emergent people are on to something good: the mainstream moronic Christians are feeling heavily persecuted by these relatively small postmodern religious thinkers; Google "emergent church" and see how scary it is to the mainstream. Here's one about McManus), I realize how much is assumed by these writers towards their assumed readers: fairly radical Christians who have sussed and ruminated far far more on the meaning of scripture and the history of scriptural hermeneutics than I would ever be expected to, as an Outsider. And it really feels like I'm not..."in the club." And often, I don't read these books all the way through. They're too geeky and for Insiders. Perhaps this will progress so that these writers will realize there are people like me trying to understand the programs better, but I suspect, given what they're up against, that these guys have more pressing issues. The funniest of these emergent guys - that I've seen, so far - is Dan Kimball. If this is the future of Christianity, then we non-Christians have something to look forward to, I must say. "God" "bless" them!

Montaigne on Prophecy
In Book I of his Essays, there's one called "Of Prognostications." It's instructive that Montaigne could write about prophecy in such a Skeptical Enquirer-ish manner in 16th c. Catholic France, but we must notice that every time he makes fun of prophecy, it's pagan-based stuff. He notes people who rave on about how their almanac turned out to be right about some such thing, their readers somehow not noticing all the instances in which it was wrong. This selective attention, this oh-too-human psychological bias is well known to us today. (Jeez, just read Daniel Kahneman's astonishingly erudite new book, Thinking Fast and Slow!)

Montaigne tells us of Diogenes the Atheist, who saw a painting of the survivors of a disastrous shipwreck, and a Believer chastised him saying, "Look, you who think the gods have no care of human things, what do you say to so many preserved from death by their especial favour?" To which Diogenes - one of the guys on my team - responds, "Why...that their pictures are not here who were cast away, who are by much the greater number." Montaigne in that same essay talks of Joachim the Calabrian abbot, "who foretold all the future Popes," and the Emperor Leo, "who prophesied all the emperors and patriarchs of Greece." This stuff cracks up Montaigne; he reminds me of Aldous Huxley who, when he moved to Hollywood to get away from warring Europe, ironically consulted astrologers and palm-readers, trying to keep a straight face. Montaigne's take on astrologers and diviners who seem to have some sort of unworldly power is, in my Cotton translation, worth repeating. He's ultra-modern here and would probably laff himself silly at the latest Pat Robertson schtick of "God Told Me To Tell You" chicanery:

This I have been an eyewitness of, that in public confusions, men astonished at their fortune, have abandoned their own reason, superstitiously to seek out in the stars the ancient causes and menaces of their present mishaps, and in my time have been so strangely successful in it, as to make me believe that this being an amusement of sharp and volatile wits, those who have been versed in the knack of unfolding and untying riddles, are capable, in any sort of writing, to find out what they desire. But above all, that which gives them the greatest room to play in, is the obscure, ambiguous, and fantastic gibberish of their prophetic canting, where their authors deliver nothing of clear sense, but shroud all in riddle, to the end that posterity may interpret and apply it according to its own fancy.

Nostradamus, anyone?

Why Stick With It?
When prophecy fails - which is a famous sociological book, highly recommended - why do people stick it out? How do they explain the failure of the inerrant? To go back to sociology, there's tremendous cognitive dissonance. I've been mouthing off about this stuff, I've invested emotional energy in this all coming to pass, and now it doesn't. Someone heard the the voices in their head and mistook them, or the devil made 'em do it. Or someone is a weak shaman/prophet/wiz and forgot to carry the two or they read the entrails wrongly. Or, the leaders have done something abhorrent. (Think: Catholic priests and child abuse, for example.) Do I gather my wits, cut my losses and convert to Scientology or just join the Marines? Do I become a Rationalist? What?

No, we know that people do not (usually) do any of those things when the system - religious or not - that they have vested interests in being "right," fails them. A recent study suggests that "system justification" is at work. The more you have invested, emotionally and otherwise, and the more enmeshed you feel within the system, the more you must adapt and see the system for what it still can be. To outsiders, the system you're in is corrupt, inept, unjust, evil, stupid. The insider adapts, excuses the latest crime by the leaders as a rather small thing, and figures this is yet another test of faith and fidelity.

This seems to apply to political thought and other Belief Systems (which I will abrev. as BS, after David Jay Brown) as well. This seems like a worthy study to keep in mind for those who are active for progressive change. One thing the article doesn't address is that a small minority do quit, and militate against the system they formerly adhered to. I see this as a rare form of courage, and quietly applaud anyone who's jumped outside of the system in order to make Things better.

Now, because my sponsor has been so supportive, here's another commercial from the good people at Grady's Oats:

God's Approval Rating
As of last July, God's approval rating was at a dismal 52%. Or at least that's according to this report on a poll. It's certainly much higher than Congress's approval rating, which, last I saw, was around 7%. So when we look at it that way, God is kicking Congress's ass (or is it asses?). If it was a prizefight, the refs would stop it: too much blood all over Congress. (I've heard God has a good right arm jab, but an even better left hand uppercut.) I have no data on how well God is doing now, just after Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, and other solstice-hovering "holy" days. Maybe if the economy improves, God can push it to 60% by Easter, and his Kid can take it from there.

(One really has to make a Miracle work to challenge "oral sex," which consistently polls at around 98%, worldwide, and that's only for the givers!)

The question is: how can God work his image? I know some PR firms that are pretty damned audacious and mendacious at getting you to believe that the sky is not blue, but really: a fuschia with Peter Max stripes. Or that raising taxes on billionaires will further wreck the economy. Or that global warming, even if "real" and man-made, is a good thing. Or that Newt Gingrich would make Unistat great again. But are they up to taking on God as a client? How would you make God look a lot better to Joe and Josephine Q. Sixpack? Because, personally, I don't know. I'm with Woody Allen, who thinks God has failed miserably, and wonders why everyone doesn't get together to file a class-action lawsuit against Him.

All right, once again I've typed far too much. I apologize for wasting your time, fellow non-believers and the one or two Believers who might read this blog. Shalom! (Or is it Aloha?)

Here's Harvey Cox, for my dough one of the best of the sane theologians. It's 10 minutes:

Book Kulchur: A Few Word-Blobs

2012-01-05T00:12:00.000-08:00

John Keats, writing - using a sort of "pen" and ink medium on a form of "paper" which was called a "letter," in 1819 - to his betrothed, Fanny Brawne:

"Give me books, fruit, french wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know."

Romantic? I think so. But I need to turn off the music in order to fully read a book; I find music too attention-grabbing, and I fancy myself an anti-multitasker. Perhaps Keats wanted all those things serially, against the backdrop of fine weather. I find I wonder about the musician he doesn't know.

At any rate, on with books!

A Few Odd Items, First Up: North Korea
"Imagine a world in which no one has written a literary novel in sixty years," writes Adam Johnson, the author of The Orphan Master's Son, set in North Korea, a country he visited in 2007, and which he writes about HERE. North Korea really has zero, zilch, nada for book culture. What an astounding monstrosity! The stories I've read about North Korea, both before Lil' Kim's demise and after, make even this peacenik think martial thoughts having to do with freeing those robotic humans. The entire idea of totalitarianism that..."total" almost leaves me speechless. No books, no expression of personal thought, no creativity, no...personalities. All because some little dipshit's family line got away with the Control Game long enough to, effectively set up an alternative "reality" in each citizen's mind. Every time I contemplate North Korea, I find myself mired in a mixture of fear, strong loathing, and sadness. The very idea that the corporate news media and political parties have been hard at work equating North Korea with Iran! Iran is a youthful country that loves Western ideas, is quite literate, and they're kept down by ayatollahs and a military authority. But their people are worldly, and I am duly nervous that their leaders are going to force some military showdown over Israel. Or maybe Israel will start it. Hey! I was supposed to talk about books, but I went off about who got to read and write books, and loudmouth worthless authoritarian monsters in North Korean and Iran. Sorry!

But let me get this in before I move on: Christopher Hitchens's article, "A Nation of Racist Dwarfs." RIP, Hitch.

451 Fahrenheit Familiar
Need more proof in a lack of God? Compare and consider North Korea's poverty and booklessness with this incredibly depressing story by S. Peter Davis. It's absurd, painful, ironic, and devastates a dead-tree bibliomane like myself. But damn! I envy Davis's mordant humor. The story is about 6 Reasons We're In Another Book-Burning Period in History and it's explained well, and I can't believe it, but it's hilarious. Darkly so. Davis also writes a wonderful blog/website, Three Minute Philosophy, and if you hadn't read it - or watched it, rather - before, you can thank me later.

Yep: tens of thousands of often old, irreplaceable books are being surreptitiously yanked from the shelves - mostly from university libraries, as I gather from the context of the article - and warehoused, then burnt. And Davis tells us all the good reasons why. If you're in a hurry, at least look at the pics and the captions. This piece reads like gonzo investigative journalism by a writer-comedian reporting from the sewage treatment plant, where you didn't know things had been going wrong for a long time, but they have...and writing it in a sort of True Confessions tone. The title of the article could've been, "I Burn Books For A Living Because Somebody Has To." Oy!

The #1 reason - E-books - is something I'll write about in the future. (Spoiler alert: I hate the goddamned things.) But anyone who's had to do a rotten job has to feel at least some sympathy with others in similar circumstances. When Davis writes:

"When your entire local library can be replaced by a USB drive the size of your fingernail, the only thing keeping those books out of an industrial-sized furnace is people who have some innate fondness for books. And there isn't much room in this economy for innate fondness." ...you have to sorta shut up and take it. I have the innate fondness. It's a good bet you do, too. But after reading his other five reasons...Having worked in public libraries, I was aware of the counterintuitive reasons why burning books is cheaper than giving them away, and have tried to explain to a few people, always to meet with incredulity and outrage.

John-Reading
Turning towards the more local world, in an article in The Guardian from this past October, Ian Sample tackles the thorny problem of the safety of reading while "going to the loo," to put it Brit-delicately. Reading while taking a crap, to put it bluntly. It turns out to be pretty safe, as long as you wash your hands afterwards. Sample can't help but pun as much as he can about feces and us, even in an article ostensibly about health, and I can't say I wouldn't have treated the matter the same way were I being paid to write the piece.

Reading material in the bathroom, that multiple people might pick up and read? If it's absorbent paper, probably no worries. If it's a glossy magazine cover, make sure you wash well. If you're one of those abhorrent people who use your Kindle, iPhone or iPad while snapping one off, that bacteria can stay on there longer than you think. Serves you right. Oh, and plastic book covers probably need a bit of Purell every now and then, too.

Val Curtis is mentioned in the article. Curtis is writing a book on disgust, and says that we've evolved our disgust to avoid infectious risk, especially of other people's...bodily wastes. Which reminded me of my friend Mark Williams, an English teacher in Wilmington, California. We were sitting around one night drinking wine and he suddenly observed that if you use "throw-up" as a verb, it's not disgusting: "I think I'm going to throw-up." But, oddly, if you use it as a noun, "Look at that throw-up over there near the windowsill," it's pretty disgusting.

Mr. Williams is in charge of educating our high school students.

Men of the Stacks
A bunch of male librarians got together and did a beefcake calendar, with the proceeds going to support anti-bullying campaigns and the "It Gets Better" movement and in general, LGBT causes.
Two articles on it HERE and HERE.

Mr. January, Zack. The male librarians wanted to combat a
prevalent stereotype about themselves. I include this pic here
partially to make up for the pic of Winona Ryder, recently.

On the Minority of Long-Form Readers
It appears that the percentage of the population who make a lifetime of long-form reading, for pleasure, with several hours devoted to a "deep attention" to a single text, has always been small. In THIS excerpt from Wheaton College English Professor Alan Jacobs's book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, I learned that there was a brief blip of a relatively large percentage of the population in Unistat who were practicing deep attention long-form reading, from roughly 1945 to 2000 (the first G.I. Bill users and their children making up a lot of this), but now the reading practice has returned to what it probably always was: a well-practiced skimming for information. Prof. Jacobs mentions three sociologists from Northwestern and their study on long-form reading: it seems people who like to read long, weighty, dense books of literature are born and/or born and a bit made. It seems an inevitable small minority. There are people who will do long-form reading but not enjoy it much, and even they seem a minority. It seems likely that, during the statistical blip of Cold War Unistat higher education, a lot of students were doing forced deep attention, and that probably was not enjoyable.

There's a quote from Steven Pinker in the article that made sense to me: "Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be bolted on." And the bolting is difficult, and many don't like being bolted. Even most of the ones who appreciate the attempt at the bolting don't entirely take to long-form reading. It seems there has always been a "reading class," and it's found in all social strata, from rich to poor, from the academically attained to dropouts.

At the beginning of the 20th century, about two percent of the population went to college; it's now 70%, and kinda disastrous, for many reasons. I go into some of it HERE. Professor Jacobs seems to have made his peace with the 21st century reading culture that needs to, as one M.I.T. grad student put it, "skim well."

Jacobs makes the point that the non -"reading class" folk can be brilliant and very intelligent. Of course! We simply can't seem to force students into loving long-form reading. Perhaps it's a spandrel or a culturally-acceptable form of a-social behavior...

The sections from the excerpt about information overload versus "filter failure," the contrasting modes of "deep attention" and "hyper attention," and the quotes and anecdotes from the 17th century French scholar, Erasmus, Augustine, and Sir Francis Bacon were interesting to me. But what really got me going was the brief discussion of a book I have not read, Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, mainly because it sounds so similar to Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, which really knocked me out when I read it in the late 1990s. The idea that the workers took their autodidacticism very seriously and read the classics closely, for knowledge was power...these people are close to my heart. Levine writes about the construction of High Culture and the appropriation of Shakespeare and Bach by the wealthy elites. Apparently something similar happened in England, and around the same time it happened in Unistat.

Jacobs relates Roses' findings and mentions that the working-class autodidacts were more dynamic and passionate about reading classics before the general curriculum change of teaching English Lit with the Education Act of 1870. You can hear someone echoing down the halls of history, "But we were only trying to help!" If you read Jacobs's article or Rose's book you ought to note well the distrust among the working class readers and writers found in this line from Rose, quoted by Jacobs: "The only true education is self-education, and they often regarded the expansion of formal educational opportunities with suspicion."

Finally, I am forced to acknowledge that, near the end of the excerpt, Professor Jacobs tells how he was becoming increasingly distracted from deep-attention long-form reading for pleasure until his Kindle rekindled it for him.

Structuralism: Passing Notes and Basic Explication

2012-01-02T14:59:00.000-08:00

Since today is January 2nd, 2012, or as sombunall of us write it in Unistat, 1-2-12 - which looks like the code for the code of binary, even though binary is usually represented by zeros and ones, not ones and twos, I figure...what the hell.

And what does binary and the date have to do with structuralism? And isn't structuralism passe? I mean, we've all heard of "post-structuralists," and Derrida, Lyotard, et.al.

The date has nothing to do with structuralism; 'tis a mere coincidence and analogical thought on my part. But structuralism - which motored along finely from Ferdinard de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1913), to, I'll say Derrida's first "tour" of Unistat in the mid-1970s - had a good long fecund run on the world historical intellectual stage, but fell apart for some reasons I'll get to later.

The structuralist project, wonderfully intellectualized as it was, goes even further back to proto-structuralists Marx and Freud, if ya wanna count them.

One of the most interesting structuralists, Roland Barthes

What Was Structuralism?
It was a very interdisciplinary approach to knowledge that rejected the tradition of Western ontology and Plato's eternal essences of ideas that transcended all time and space. In this, structuralism largely did away with metaphysics. (Or structuralists thought they did. More on this later.) When Karl Marx said that religion, art, philosophy, etc were not products of Platonic timeless entities but were based in deep underlying economic structures, this is what we mean by doing away with traditional Western metaphysics and ontology.

Plato said that, via speech and dialectic we can get closer to the Ideal Forms, the things behind True Being, this had formed the basis for Western epistemology - the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge and how we know, what constitutes knowledge, etc. Structuralism did away with that too. Prior to Freud, Kant had replaced Plato's ideal forms, which resided somewhere in the Perfect space, with transcendent ideas that were located in the human mind. God equipped us to handle this heavy metaphysical stuff: our subjective minds. Freud comes along and says, nope: our subjective selves are the material worlds we inhabit. Instead and more importantly, deep hidden structures in our material minds form the "self."

So, proto-structuralists Marx and Freud argued, very persuasively, that our basis for meaning in truth is hidden, not "from above," as Plato had it, bit from "below," (economic forces and unconscious motivations) in hidden, deep structures that are pervasive throughout the world. Everything is structure, and it's made up ultimately of tiny bits that, by themselves don't mean anything unless they are combined with other bits in a system of differences. Four basic examples:

-DNA is made up of chemical bases that form pairs. Adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine by themselves are nothing, but when they pair up, they give rise to the all binary units that make up DNA, and the template for every living thing.

-Your compact disc just reads ones and zeroes. The ones and zeroes, or we represent them that way, don't have any meaning by themselves. When they are coded in a very complex, elaborate way, voila! you have Balinese Monkey Music, Beatles, Beethoven, or The Bends.

-The words you're reading now don't mean anything except for that aspect that makes them different from something else. Take the word "rat." It's made up of phonemes (r, a, t). Notice it's not (b,a,t). A bat is also an animal, but it's also a wooden stick and this seems coincidental and arbitrary anyway, because (m,a,t), in English, is something we put before our doorstep. It's all arbitrary, because the sound of one letter changes the system of difference in the words, and the meaning is totally different. The individual letters have no meaning by themselves; they must be part of a system of differences, like the DNA example. And each language is (mostly) arbitary. The word for mountain in Hungarian, Chinese, Spanish, and Swahili is different. There is no "Adamic" system of language, in which God told Adam to name everything according to their true essence.

-The musical notes (c,e,g) form a C major chord. We have agreed to call it thus. It's a convention. When a "c" note vibrates at a certain number of cycles per second, moving molecules of air so that they impact structures in our ear, we think, "a note." (If we are one of roughly 100 people, we have perfect pitch and can say, "that's a c-note.") But that note doesn't have any meaning by itself. When we combine it in systems of scales or arpeggios, with rhythm, or maybe other instruments, we have a sonata, a mazurka, a symphony.

Structures are pervasive and dynamic. They are logical, complete, and could theoretically be plotted as Cartesian coordinates on a graph. Furthermore, everything could be studied structurally: linguistics, anthropology, biology, literature, economics, psychology, even mathematics...How did this all fall apart?

The Dwindling of Structuralism
I can't think of structuralism without thinking about the French academic mind. By no means were the founders of structuralism all French, but structuralism really took off in the French academies. I think basically the French intellectual milieu had been overly rationalistic. It's the way they are trained. I blame Descartes and the Port-Royal logicians, but that's really neither here not there. I see the structuralist project as an incredibly, bewilderingly impressive display of intellectualization of the world. I see it as a sort of work of Art. But what happened?

Quickly, structuralists fervently sought to displace human desire and its agency with deep, hidden structure. Remember: you don't desire that object or person or attainment for reasons of your "ego;" there were unconscious energies that led to the desire, and your ego wants to claim it's in charge. But when the structuralists sought to place the entire world in a structural order, they seemed to evince a metaphysical desire for rational order in the world of blooming, buzzing confusion. That's ironic.

One can say, "Well, deeper structures took hold of the structuralists and caused them to construct structuralism." And you would have a funny, met-ironic thought there, bright sophomore!

Also, as Jacques Derrida pointed out in his de-constructing of structuralism, when the structuralists sought to get rid of Western metaphysics and traditional ontology and epistemology, they ironically replaced both with yet another metaphysical system - which they claimed was scientific and rational, but it never quite worked out so that it was apparent to everyone exposed to it - and thereby undermined their core claims.

Structuralism had a fairly profound influence on the way universities categorized knowledge, and personally, as someone heavily influenced by Vico, I think, for example, "history" seems better described and thought of as a Humanities subject, but due (mostly) to structuralism, it's considered a "social science." Let us put humans back into the center of history, for we make it; to call it a "science" seems to me physics envy. I digress...

But what an intellectual gambit structuralism was! What group-ingeniousness! I think it was quite an impressive run. I think the body of structuralist thought advanced knowledge by creating its own versions of discovery procedures. And now, thinking like a structuralist can be seen as a heuristic mode in which to invent/uncover new ideas. As a totalizing meta-narrative? Not so much.

Some prominent structuralists are named in this article, and this one.
A good background book: The Age of Structuralism: From Levi-Strauss to Foucault, by Edith Kurzweil.

Here's a 5 min lecture by an unnamed Professor, on structuralism. Well, the lecture is really only about 2 minutes - but it's good - followed by a 3 minute montage of pics of Claude Levi-Strauss to the theme from Chariots of Fire. Still, the people who made this video seem to want you to revere structuralism, and especially Levi-Strauss:

The Drug Report: December 2011

2011-12-31T02:25:00.000-08:00

O! The drugs! The scads of pills and their legalities and usage and subjective effects! Their uses as muses, their predictable abuses! Billowing smoke rings of pungent funky dream-matter. That swallowed product of High Technology that will be sure to relieve you of your general feeling-badness and return you to some semblance of mommy's amniotic warm din. Or just get you through. The smokey haze of powders and deranged senses and intoxicating scents! The madnesses and sadnesses and euphoria-bliss-gladnesses! Let us discuss a few.

Recent Dumb Clamor Over New and Improved Vicodin
You may have heard that more than one Big Pharma Co has come up with a 2.0 version of the painkiller Vicodin - the most prescribed drug in the world - that is safer, and yet, according to one article, ten times stronger than Vicodin. The version I've heard most about is called Zohydro. (Vicodin, or "vikes" to the street pillheads who love 'em for recreational purposes, is hydrocodone.) So why do I assert the dumb clamor? Because this new version has - finally! - done away with acetaminophen.

Acetaminophen - Tylenol - which is also thrown in hundreds of other OTC preparations, does too much liver damage. Early in 2011 the FDA moved to lower the amount of acetaminophen in a "dose" to 325mg. The ceiling for a day is supposedly 4grams, or 4000mg. Many doctors have seen liver failure at 2.5grams in a day. That's a lot of acetaminophen in a day. But think of it: at one 325mg dose, if you're in a lot of pain and take 8 pills in a 24 hour period, you're over the 2.5 that doctors have seen cause liver failure. Liver failure is something to be avoided, kiddies. It's not a pretty sight. (Acute liver failure)

A hidden problem with acetaminophen is that sometimes people are taking it in other medications, but don't know it. That's adding to the day's toll on the liver. The FDA advised the lower dose at 325 only for prescription meds, not stuff you can just waltz into the drug emporium and buy on a lark. Why is acetaminophen so prevalent if it's risky, even "relatively dangerous"? Because it's easy to make; it's really cheap. And in low doses, it works pretty well. There are people making pretty decent coin as "Tylenol Lawyers" though, so that ought to give you pause.

Why not grab the alternatives ibuprofen or naproxen? They're linked to intestinal bleeding, but probably, on the whole, a lot safer than acetaminophen.

If you see "APAP" or "ACET" on your medications, you're getting some acetaminophen thrown it. Beware...

If you want to take acetaminophen, know the state of your liver. (Few of us do, right? Unless we recently had a blood panel done, we are saddled with some missing information here. Liver failure is quite often Game Over; this is serious stuff to mess with.) Also: the drug companies don't make a big to-do about it, but you really ought to have some food in your stomach for that acetaminophen to fall into. They don't want you to sweat worrying about eating, your liver be damned. And finally: NEVER drink alcohol with acetaminophen! It's not smart. (Please read the previous sentence, the one starting with "NEVER," again.)

More Deaths From Pharmaceutical Drugs Than Auto Accidents Now
In 2009 Unistat, the last year we have the data to yell and scream about, 37,485 people died from ODs of pharmaceutical drugs. That's doubled since 1999. In 2009, 36,284 people died in auto wrecks. It was close, but in 2009 someone's Rx beat out the highway fatalities. And then coming in a close third, 31,228 died of firearms in Unsitat. Think about it: someone's doctor okayed the drugs that contributed to those deaths. (Patients are complicit, of course: STOP mixing strong drugs! STOP drinking with tranquilizers! Why do we have to say this? Because we inherently believe that the doctor, the community, the good people at OmniCorp...wouldn't steer you wrong? That they'd say they "really mean it" that you ought not, say drink a six-pack, then swallow three Tylenol, a Vicodin, a Soma, two Xanax, and then apply a Fentanyl patch and drive out to the desert? Did you know - of course you didn't - that when you take Soma it breaks down in your liver into Meprobramate, which potentiates the other drugs in your system? Oh? You DID know? You sicko!)

I couldn't find any data on people who were zonked out on painkillers or tranks while driving, and a loaded gun was found in the wreckage. But it would be interesting to know.

The people all up-in-arms about the non-acetaminophen Vicodin about to hit the streets (Zohydro), are worried about the potential for addiction. And they have a point. People will LOVE this stuff and get addicted. But at least it's doing its painkilling with good old fashioned opiates. What the stories you'll read and hear regarding Zohydro won't mention is how bad acetaminophen was, and even Big Pharma had to take notice! And they couldn't care less about the pharmaceutical addiction and accidental death epidemic in Unistat. They're in the overwhelmingly lucrative biz of selling pills.

It's difficult to find out just how bad the Problem is, and why. Psychiatrist Ronald Ricker says the drug war didn't work, then a few lines earlier you see he says the DEA needs to get tougher on these drugs: tranks, painkillers, amphetamines, and antidepressants. I'd be embarrassed to tell you all how long I've been paying very close attention to this larger story, of drug use in Unistat. But I will say that I think Dr. Thomas Szasz (say "Zaz") has the sanest approach to this problem. I do not think we will see a Szaszian approach to drugs in Unistat any time soon, though, for structural reasons: drugs are a fantastic guise for the Ruling Class to whittle away at civil rights, and keep the poor brown people in line. The cops/DEA/district attorney/lawyer/prison/"rehabilitation" complex is too lucrative. And let's not mention asset forfeiture!

(Why do Unistatians gobble 86% of the Adderal and Ritalin in the world? Consider this your zen-ish koan of the day.)

Those are structural reasons. To me, the deeper level is the authoritarian character structure in most Americans. It's built into their muscular rigidity. It's about fear and stupidity and just saying, "Not only do I NOT want to know about how drugs really work, about my own and others' human nervous systems, the biophysical basis for drug craving and addiction, the history of drug use, etc, I'd rather watch another morality play about drugs put on by the cops."

I will now climb down off my soapbox.

Oxytocin Dreams
Not OxyContin, which is hovering in the background of the two sections above, oxytocin is a hormone we humans make endogenously, and it's secreted into the bloodstream when nipples are stimulated. It's also linked to cuddling, mothering, empathy, social recognition, reduced fear, reduced anxiety and reduced racism, and many a polypeptide-savvy female has dreamed or spoken or written openly about curing social ills by making it a nasal spray and giving it to men. And frankly, I see where they're coming from.

If it sounds like MDMA/Ecstasy, it's likely that both activate the same serotonin receptors.

I think the Wiki (at present) on oxytocin has some good info and links, so I'll give it, here.

You'll see a few products for sale on the Net, like this nasal mist. Or this, which is not a product but "sells" the idea of it to females. But if you read the Wiki that linked to this study, you saw that oxytocin is destroyed in the gastrointestinal tract. So a pill is out. By injection, it doesn't get through the crucial blood-brain barrier. Strike two. And then this: "[...] no evidence for significant central nervous system entry of oxytocin by nasal spray. Oxytocin nasal sprays have been used to stimulate breastfeeding, but the efficacy of the approach is doubtful."

Still: neuropharmacologists are working on it.

Young girl hugging a kangaroo: oxytocin probably involved

In a study published in Psychopharmacology and reported in Science Daily earlier this month, a study at Concordia University - a hotbed of oxytocin studies - gave 100 males and females intranasal oxytocin, and they waited 90 minutes and then filled out a questionnaire which showed they beat the placebo and in general that their self-perception was more extroverted, social, open to new ideas and trusting.

But I must say, it sounds like a weak study. Let's see some ingenious relativized double-blind placebo-controlled studies. I suspect just being in a study like the one at Concordia will tend to make you feel more..."open." I'm not calling for a fog machine of thick vaporized oxytocin be blown in the face of passengers getting off trains in Grand Central Station, only to see them all stop, take off their clothes and "hug," I'm just sayin'...(What am I sayin'?) Another way of saying it: I suspect the mysterious placebo failed on this one...

A recent and fascinating wrinkle in the oxytocin literature was published around August of this year, in Current Directions in Psychological Science. In study subjects given oxytocin and who then played a game of chance with a fake opponent, feelings of anger, gloating, and envy occurred. Why? The researchers at first thought oxytocin had something to do with supporting social emotions, but later thought it was more specific: it deals with "approach-related emotions." These have to do with wanting something, not with shrinking away! Read the abstract from Science Daily here.

After reading a few more studies, I wonder how much higher the quality or dosage level the researchers get to deal with, rather than that stuff you buy from someone on the Net.

A TED talk from neuroeconomist Paul Zak, who calls oxytocin the "moral molecule." (16 1/2 minutes)

A Drug to Combat Kleptomania?
Quick now: what do nymphos, pyros, shopaholics, gamblers, kleptos, alkies and junkies have in common? If you said, "They're my friends," then you're right, but that's not what I was looking for. (Hey, I tend to gravitate to some of these people too, but I'm working on it...my own male nympho alcoholic klepto pyromania, that is. Yes, when I sober up and put my pants on, I make a bonfire of every dippy thing I stole. Ahem.)

No, what we're looking for here is: a problem with impulse control. Some alcoholics and heroin addicts have been treated with naltrexone, which binds to opiod receptors. Psychiatrist Jon Grant has some research that suggests the same drug could help that delightful crowd I named above too, because they all do what they do and feel bad about it; they can't help it. In the moment, it's really exciting. As Grant says, they know morally it's the wrong thing to do, and they really ought not, "yet they get a rush from it, and it's very enticing."

The story about Grant and his study is here. (This one is a randomized double-blind, placebo-controlled study.)

I'm interested in the disjuncture between the justice system and the medical profession. Readers of people like M. Foucault would cite the ever-increasing "medicalization" of our world, and they have strong points. Very strong points that should be heeded. But as Grant says, he doesn't think law people are ready to think of kleptomaniacs as having a psychiatric condition. They're "criminals."

This tells us soooo much about our society, doesn't it?

We have built very deeply into our social systems the idea that you have one unitary identity. It's capable of reason, has a name, numbers and by the age of 18 is responsible for what it does.

I'll elaborate much more in some future post, but I think this is probably wrong, and there are a lot of reasons to believe it's wrong. Our justice system requires this Old Enlightenment idea of the Self, so it can prosecute. But we know billions of facts about human neurobiology that they didn't in the 17th and 18th century Enlightenment. As my favorite neuroscientist, Robert Sapolsky, often says, it gets to the point where we understand the neurological underpinnings of what's going on with a person, what makes them "sick," and we really need to say that it's not the person. It's the person AND their disease.

Regarding kleptomania, the study I linked to says 11% of us shoplift at some point in our lives. I did between ages 14 and 15. I stole paperback books of collected Mad magazine bits, sports heroes (I recall things like Basketball Stars of 1975), and biographies of what seemed then like interesting people. I didn't get all that much joy from the books. (I got some. I mean, they were books, and I later morphed into an overweening generalist...)

It was thrilling to steal though. I remember a friend teaching me how. Then, about the 20th time or so, I got caught. I was underage, so the store detective scared the wits out of me and eventually let me go, telling me to never enter their store again. I haven't stolen a thing since. I've thought of it, but the idea of getting caught is so abhorrent I quickly forget it. Besides, I've been conditioning my brain to want less and less things. As a Unistatian, I'm a very poor consumer - and that's what Unistatians REALLY believe in. Not fairness, decency, peace, universal brotherhood or any of that stuff: gadgets. Trinkets. The latest electronic gadget. Commodity fetishism. Labels. Louis Vuitton bags. Salad shooters. And Prof. George Carlin liked to sneer in contempt with this example: sneakers with lights on them. As far as the act of just sheer buying worthless crap? I don't do it. I'm a Bad American.

Noted actress and onetime klepto, Winona Ryder,
god-daughter of Timothy Leary

Anyway, I forget what Jean Genet story (was it Querelle?) it was where he tells us he used to enjoy breaking and entering into people's homes, not because he wanted to steal anything as much as the visceral thrill of being in someone else's house! Absolutely illegally and possibly dangerous. Some stranger's place! What a thrill! And when Winona Ryder got caught, I understood. I was with Winona then, in spirit. I still am. Jeez, just look at her!

Giambattista Vico, the Copenhagen Interpretation, and H.P. Lovecraft

2011-12-29T04:06:00.000-08:00

From Ulysses (1922)
It's a little after 10PM on June 16, 1904, and Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom are in a maternity hospital, and James Joyce, writing in the style of T.H. Huxley, says this:

It had better be stated here and now at the outset that the perverted transcendentalism to which Mr S. Dedalus' (Div.Scep.) contentions would appear to prove him pretty badly addicted runs counter to accepted scientific methods. Science, it cannot be too often repeated, deals with tangible phenomena. The man of science like the man in the street has to face hardheaded facts that cannot be blinked and explain them as best he can. There may be, it is true, some questions which science cannot answer - at present - such as the first problem submitted by Mr. L. Bloom (Pubb. Canv.) regarding the future determination of sex. - p.411, 1946 Modern Library ed, episode "Oxen of the Sun")

We can determine the sex of the baby before birth now, in 2011, but not in 1904. Joyce, writing temporarily as Huxley (Aldous's grandfather), was right. But Joyce is influenced by Vico, and in Vico's magnum opus, The New Science (1740), none of the big questions concerning humankind can be answered as "hardheaded facts;" Vico had invented a new view of history, and many credit him as pioneering cultural anthropology, sociology, and the sociology of knowledge. Robert Anton Wilson credited Vico with creating "transpersonal linguistics," but I'll have to cover that in 2012. For now I want to discuss, as briefly and as painlessly as possible, Vico's idea of verum factum.

Verum Factum
Basically - 'cuz this stuff can get abstruse and plain wacky quickly - Vico thought we humans can only really "know" what we have ourselves - as humans - made. This precludes a truly profound and deep understanding of the natural sciences. When I first started studying Vico I thought he had it backward, that it was yet another brilliant yet sorta nutty idea of his. Lately, I've wondered.

The contemporary philosopher-historian Hilary Putnam has written, in a discussion of constructivism, "It is impossible to find a philosopher before Kant (and after the pre-Socratics) who was not a metaphysical realist, at least about what he took to be basic and unreducible assertions." (Reason, Truth and History, p.40) Putnam says they all believed in objective truths that had perfect, permanent and superhuman validity. They may have disagreed about what those truths were...

But Putnam hadn't read Vico, apparently. In a direct attack on the prevailing Cartesianism of his time, Vico takes a strong anti-rationalistic stance about what is knowable. In some sense, God created nature; we humans made the social world. We cannot know nature because we did not make it. But we can know history, because we made it. The social sciences are knowable; the physical sciences we can have some knowledge about, but it will be based in mathematics, ultimately. And we made math! We still make it. When we find truths in the physical sciences, we are finding truths about our own minds and how they describe workings. Or: our minds make detailed maps of maps, but the maps are not the territories they describe. They are maps. We seem to desperately need to believe we have made contact with the one true deep "reality." But we have not.

2011 cutting-edge cognitive science would say we have knowledge of ourselves and the external world because we have embodied minds, ensconced in human nervous systems. It's gonna have to do for now!

An astute reader of Vico, Isaiah Berlin, says, regarding Vico's verum factum, "I don't know what it is to be a table. I don't know what it is be electric energy. But I do know what it is to feel, think, hope, fear, question, be puzzled, be ashamed." (Conversations With Isaiah Berlin, p.79)

So for Vico, understanding seems to be different than knowledge. Science is knowledge about the behavior of bodies in space. We cannot know such things from within; we can only describe them...seemingly one-removed.

A Stab at Copenhagenism
Supposedly still the most common philosophical interpretation of the quantum theory - the most successful scientific theory ever - is the Copenhagen interpretation, commonly aligned with Niels Bohr, although Heisenberg, Oppenheimer and a few other giants contributed. Einstein famously hated the Copenhagen interpretation, and spent the last 30 years of his life trying to find something wrong with it, with limited success (I would cite the EPR paradox as an ultimately fecund thought experiment.)

I previously stabbed at Bohr and Copenhagenism HERE.

In Nick Herbert's underrated little masterpiece of a book, Quantum Reality, he succinctly points out that we can think about the Copenhagen in two versions, and maybe both together. Version one Herbert labels as "There is no deep reality." "Everyday phenomena are built on a different kind of being,"as Herbert interprets Bohr. Bohr urged a skepticism towards hidden, deeper realities.

"In words that must chill every realist's heart, Bohr insisted: 'There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum description." (p.17)

The "hippie" who perhaps did more to save physics than any of the others, Nick Herbert

Einstein thought quantum mechanics, with its statistical probabilities built into the equations, HAD to be wrong. It wasn't...elegant. God doesn't play dice with the universe, etc. Therefore, there had to be something wrong with quantum mechanics, or there were hidden variables, a deeper reality. Einstein was one of the giants that helped carve out the theory in the first place!

Now here's Herbert's second version of Copenhagenism. He calls it "Reality is created by observation."

"Although the numerous physicists of the Copenhagen school do not believe in deep reality, they do assert the existence of phenomenal reality. What we see is undoubtedly real, they say, but these phenomena are not really there in the absence of observation." (p.17)

I've been studying what physicists have been saying about the quantum world for at least 20 years now, and this is still really weird stuff to me. I don't blame the Reader for thinking it's bunk. All I'll say is that the Copenhagen interpretation is still very common among physicists with the PhD, and that, when one considers the alternative interpretations, the Copenhagen seems the most conservative. (As noted in David Kaiser's How The Hippies Saved Physics, which I discussed HERE, a great many physicists in the second half of the 20th century, especially in Unistat, were trained to not interpret what their equations seemed to be saying about nature, but were instead trained to "shut up and calculate.")

Fanciful?
Admittedly a generalist who gladly gives his mind over joyfully to the speculative, I have tried to suggest that Vico's view of science was at least proto-Copenhagenist, by about 220 years. I'm sure someone else has made the connection, but I have not seen it. (Please feel free to cite someone else's linkage of Vico to Bohr in the comments section!)

"God" and Vico-Bohr and...H.P. Lovecraft?
Don't even say it. I know what you're thinking. And yes, the crop of cannabis is really good this winter. That said, what are we to make of capital enn Nature after thinking about Vico and quantum mechanics here for a spell? What if we can't know the deep reality of...anything?

(Note I've tacitly assumed Vico may be right about the physical sciences but wrong about the Humanities: we seem to have wonderful descriptions of who we are as humans, but in action on the world historical stage, we seem as a species to not "know" or "understand" ourselves very well. I think we're wonderful at making and using tools, but not very good at universal brotherhood, peace, empathy, extended altruism, equality, etc.)

Well, we can say a big Yes, as James Joyce does in Ulysses, which is filled with yeses in the face of so much frank suffering and sadness in life. For there is humor in it all, too, eh? Even in our Dark Days, things can make us laff, if only because of their metaphysical incorrigibility. An influence on both Joyce and Vico, Giordano Bruno, talked of hilaritas, which means there is a humor and optimism in every pessimism and sadness. The coincidence of opposites, built into the fabric of..."reality." Renaissance magick. Joyce's young intellectual Stephen Dedalus, one of the three heroes of the book, near the end accepts that everything is "ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void." Which sounds to me isomorphic (a math term meaning "having a similarity of structure") to the Copenhagen interpretation.

But there's at least one other path to trod down with regard to all this stuff...

Okay, H.P. Lovecraft, the greatest writer of pulp horror fiction ever, and just now being recognized as a "classic" writer by academics. Dying of cancer at age 46 in 1937, he once wrote in a letter, "The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space, and matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is know of reality - when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible and measurable universe."

Lovecraft had dropped the religious underpinnings of the horror story in favor of science, non-Euclidean mathematics and possible liminal dimensions, abstract knowledge, quantum physics, and dreams. He combined all this material with archaic knowledge, mutations of Egyptology, the occult tradition, odd anthropology, and other sources. He had the uncanny ability to mix "real" knowledge with fantasy, so the reader felt destabilized and not sure what was "real" or not. All of this combined with a peculiarly florid prose style, and the yield was High Weirdness en extremis. And a general spookiness that has freaked out and delighted many an intelligent youth and young-at-heart.

Yes, but what does this have to do with Vico and Bohr? I'm getting to it. It has to do with "God," and the ineffability of such a concept. In Lovecraft, there are "unspeakable" horrors from the abyss of...the 4th dimension or some other dimension inherent or immanent in the mood of the land or space his characters fall prey to. And the dread lies so heavily in the atmosphere of his stories, it seems to me, precisely because his monsters are so "unutterable." In this world, we cannot speak of "God" in any normal sense. The...Thing that haunts his narratives is beyond language (as Negative Theologians say about God), and utterly outside, of any human concept. This seems to go beyond Vico and Bohr, or complements them. And Lovecraft is still thought by many as a "mere" horror writer, or some sort of proto-science fiction pulp writer.

Are there entities from other realms, other dimensions, who we - you and me - could possibly make contact? I will leave it to the Reader to decide. But I will suggest that the Reader would not be drilling in a dry hole were (s)he to look into the reports of people who have experimented with tryptamine hallucinogens such as dimethyltryptamine (DMT), or even psilocybin mushrooms.

What's weird is that...the DMT reports are so utterly Other, if you haven't done DMT you think you're being put-on. But we all make DMT in our own bodies. It's secreted by the pineal gland, and it's in every Reader's cererbrospinal fluid. You have enough in you right now to get arrested, according to the law. And the active trip-out chemical in magic mushrooms, psilocybin, is so close in structure to serotonin you have to look at the diagrams twice to make sure they're not the same molecule.

This seems as good a place as any to abandon yet another verborrheaic blogspew.

[A 6 min take on Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos]:

Dawkins's "Meme" Meme: A Wonderfully Creepy and Haunting Idea

2011-12-28T00:36:00.000-08:00

Not long ago I dropped the word meme into one of my spoken sentences and a bright young person stopped me and said, "Huh?" I had to explain that it was an idea about...ideas. And that the brilliant biologist and public intellectual Richard Dawkins had coined it in the early 1970s. It rhymes with "cream" and is the unit of replication outside the body, as genes can be thought of as the unit of replication inside the body.

"Oh! Cool!" Yep.

Going on, I did what I always try to do and make a new idea seem as wonderfully dramatic as possible. The meme is an easy one.

"Do you know the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers?," I asked.

She nodded yes.

I then explained that memes are ideas that parasitize our brains. And Dawkins thought memes might have their own purposes in "mind," just as he'd convinced himself and (most?) of his readers that genes want to make more of themselves, so they...sorta control your thinking. Catch my drift?

She shifted uneasily. I knew what she meant.
======================================
I was recently reading a wonderful book called On Deep History and the Brain, by Daniel Lord Smail. Lately I've been reading scads of stuff on "deep history," so it was quite a find. In one very short section Smail discusses Dawkins's meme idea, and at one point writes this:

"Ideas 'possess' people's brains in a way that wheels do not and therefore, apparently, are more appealing: you can speak of a meme as a body-snatcher, replicating itself with little regard for the adaptive fitness of the brain it is currently operating." (pp.95-96)

This I found pleasing because I had used the "body-snatcher" analogy the day before I read this. Smail and I like horror films, apparently. Or: the ideas about disease, metaphors of loss of agency and colonization from without and then within...are these "memes" that go way back? Perhaps to the Silk Road? And now they are common currency in our daily discourse? To try to remain on the level here: I'm talking about body snatching, bacteria and viruses, memes, and body snatching and diseases as memes.

Hoo-KAY!

That's one of the weirdities about memes: when you talk about them, you soon find you're using metaphors that...are...or seem to be...memes themselves!

Lest the Reader think Smail or I were being overly eldritch about Dawkins's idea, here's what Dawkins says about them in his The Selfish Gene, first published in 1976:

"When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell." (p.192 of the 1989 edition, in paperback on Oxford Press.)
===============================================================
None of this is new to those of you who have immersed yourselves in memes, but one paradox - or it still seems like one to me - is that memes are not necessarily adaptive to the host organism. The idea of suicide, for example. Or of a vengeful, jealous "god." Then...if human minds picked up on these ideas and they hopped from mind to mind, colonizing untold millions...why do they survive?

I can surmise that there are competing biochemicals that have to do with depression and hopelessness, and the ideas that are concomitant with them, and look at suicide from another level. "Hey! Things are so bleak and without hope and I'm no good and will never live up to my loved ones or my own expectations...suicide is an idea that's always been there for me. Everyone's heard of it. I think I'll do it!"

This just seems bizarre when I think of it: suicide as a meme. But I don't reject it out of hand.

If Edward O. Wilson and his "consilience" idea, and the whole sociobiology and evolutionary psychology crowd want Darwinian ideas to be at the center of history and the social sciences, doesn't the idea of the meme-as-parasite sort of take the edge off their own designs on the sociology of knowledge? I think of suicide from a biosocial perspective as my main view, but I emphasize biochemicals and thoughts and ideation, that, once established, encourage a circular, causal-feedback-loop that feeds upon itself. (This is one reason I find it maddening that, say, Catholics are so down on people who commit suicide.) But from a Darwinian point of view, what was the advantage of suicide as a "meme"? How many brilliant artists and thinkers have been manic-depressive!

Or as a Darwinist, do you say, "Well, we don't fully know what junk DNA does yet either. We're not sure why it exists, but it does."? Then if it exists, somehow it was adaptive? I can see this point if I squint, but it sure starts to look like playing tennis with the net down.

On the other hand, OF COURSE memes arise from our own biological processes. Where else would they come from? The Platonic Realm of Pure Ideas? Straight from the quantum foam? (This seems basically the gist of what Dawkins considers his best contribution to Darwinian thought: the "extended phenotype," or how genes extend themselves via bodies and minds into the wider environment.)

Still, the idea seems wonderfully creepy to me.
================================================================
Notice also that memes can exist without really taking hold of you. You can know all about suicide, but you love life, even though times are hard right now. You may have never even spent a serious moment thinking of offing yourself. Celibacy is another one here. I know a lot about God, theology, the gods, etc, but I'm not a conventionally religious person by any stretch of the imagination. Certainly this meme has parasitized the brains of countless others.

About celibacy as a meme, Daniel Dennett has challenged Dawkins by wondering that, if, say, "celibacy" is a meme that only becomes active when "expressed," then anything thought of is a meme, then the meme idea seems to retreat to some sort of ontological status that's negligible. If I take the hard drive out of my computer and drop it into a volcano, in 100 years do my various noodlings once "there" have much to say about me or anything?
====================================================================
Where Smail and others before him have rescued Dawkins's idea has to do with this: even though you know about suicide, celibacy and God but do not "express" these memes, they do condition your neural pathways. You think about the ideas with regards your fellow humans. These ideas do alter moods. When David Foster Wallace committed suicide, I was quite sad - even to the point of tears - for at least a week. The suicide meme meant a lot to me, in a manner of speaking, in that week.
==================================================================
So: does the idea of will or human agency qualify as a meme too? As of today I think it doesn't matter much, because so many of us find it good to believe (most of the time) in these ideas. And besides, as Smail points out, in medieval Europe, military aristocrats with too many sons and daughters and not enough estates and dowries found "celibacy"a good idea to propagate. That seems Darwinian enough for me. Similarly, the Catholic Church's holdings of land had grown so extensively that making priests and other churchmen take a vow of celibacy was a good way of keeping control of their land and away from the previously "legitimate" claims of the sons of churchmen.

I hope whatever colonization of your mind I have made here will be found as more felicitous than depredating.

Here's a 53 second clip of Dawkins talking about memetics:

Updates on a Few Old Posts

2011-12-23T01:17:00.000-08:00

Rachel Maddow's Herman Cain Thesis
Regarding Rachel Maddow's framing of Herman Cain's run amongst the Republicans as "performance art," I posted THIS back "then" but soon after, sexual harassment charges and then (what's worse among Republicans, apparently) strong allegations that Cain had an extramarital affair brought him down.

Now, I watch Maddow's show about once every two/three weeks. I like her a lot, but would rather do other things with my time. I wasn't able to find anything about how Maddow responded to Cain's dropping out of the race, or if she changed her thesis in any way. My take on it is that, if it was a big piece of performance art, then Cain wasn't in on it. I'm not sure what it was, but I think the guy was just a colossal d-bag, an evermore typical sociopathic personality who will do literally ANYTHING for money. The Theater of the Absurd which is national Unistatian politics has no end of varieties of this type of stock character strutting upon the stage for awhile, a large enough segment of the populace apparently stoned enough on the dazzling little pills that makes you think that, if it's on the teevee then it's to be taken seriously.

In this case, he appeared to be running for the Republican nomination only to sell more books as a "motivational speaker." (Or, in maybe a first for me, I'm basically with George Will in calling Cain an "entrepreneurial charlatan.") Hey Rachel: there's a section of Huckleberry Finn that concerns a "duke" and a "dauphin." Re-read that.

I didn't see any wit, anything all that creative or "artsy" in his act. What was the imaginative intent if this was indeed an artwork? I think his handlers were as cynical as he was, and plied him with lines from Pokemon and other pop kulch sources. The fact that the Koch Brothers funded this ass should tell us more about them and what they think of us than perhaps we'd wanted to know.

Maddow is very smart, and very smart people sometimes can't fathom someone as hellaciously bad a person as Cain and his motivations. Which were/are - I assert - crass and solely for individual gain, not to make any sort of "point" via performance art. Or perhaps the lovely Ms. Maddow isn't as well-read about the raisons de etre for performance art in the first place? That would be surprising; she seems to be well-read concerning just about everything. But no, Rachel, it wasn't performance art. The guy was just another sociopathic jackass. And because Mencken wasn't being perhaps as hyperbolic as he thought when he wrote that no one every went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, we shall see many more variations of this horrid type. Sarah Palin precedes him.

An artist's rendering of the Duke and the Dauphin,
with Huck and Jim looking on

The Pepper Spray Incident at UC Davis
My little blogspew on this was HERE. Around the same time, UC Berkeley students were violently clubbed by campus police, and later the faculty voted No Confidence in the chancellor, Robert Birgenau. The UC Davis chancellor, Linda Katehi, publicly apologized. Both chancellors have been walking on eggshells ever since, but we shall see how long this lasts. It's clear that campus police don't act as free agents; these sorts of egregious actions towards nonviolent protesters were part of official higher-up "policy." I wrote both chancellors, telling them they need to do the right thing and resign, but surprisingly, neither wrote me back.

The enigmatic, eerie and dispersed presence of the hacktivist collective Anonymous came down on the cop who pepper-sprayed the protesters at Davis, a human named James Pike. They published on *the Internet his home address, his email address, his cell phone number, his home phone number, and other personal information. It's since been found that Pike is an ex-Marine and has a problem with homophobia. (*= why do we say "the Internet"? There's only one...or is there?)

In what seems to me as the most troubling aspect post-Pike, I find that his pay as a campus goon...errr...policeman was $110,000 a year. That's twice what a newly minted Humanities professor gets, and three times what a non-tenured adjunct professor gets. See Mark Bousquet's jaw-dropping article.

Finally, a shout-out to the mordant wits who started Ask Lt. John Pike: A New Advice Column, for adding some much-needed satire to this story. (My personal fave of the letters is the Q to Pike from a parent about whether to tell their kids about Santa Claus.)

Regarding Your Own "Weaponized" Drone
In what I take was a lame stab at satire, I posted THIS article six days ago. I kept digging on this story and found that, for example, the Europeans think armed police drones for domestic purposes seems, uhhh...questionable. See, for example, HERE. And further, what is one to think about THIS?

"Clinical distress" is hampering a lot of the "pilots" in these high-stakes all-too-real video killing games. In reading this article, get a load of the quotes from Kent McDonald, about how they try to select only guys of "high moral" quality. Is it me, or is that just creepy-sick-o stuff?

By the way, one of the OG's favorite public intellectuals and Third Culturalists, Prof. Robert Sapolsky of Stanford - one of the world's most knowledgeable people about how stress manifests in humans and our primate cousins - has been talking about the video-game killers of other humans on the other side of the world aspect of stress for at least eight years. Note how the military in this article tries to downplay the causes of "clinical distress." Sorry. I know you love your toys that allow you to kill from an absurdly safe vantage point, but this was KNOWN to cause stress in anyone even close to mentally "sound." If you want less health problems in your remote drone-killers, hire the mentally deranged. I'm sure there are plenty of them in the military. It should be easy! But noooo...you want only the good family men. "It does cause them to re-think aspects of their life and it can be bothersome." Sez Lt. Col. Kent McDonald.

Good gawd! You can't make up more clueless, bloodless, and zombified quotes!

Now I'm going to link two stories to my idea - originally typed in as a lark, myself in a sour mood - about "weaponizing" your personal drone. These two stories are about how security officials seem sorta panicky about how much cheaper and easier it has become to play with viruses. The squeamish may want to stop reading here and go on to the next blog.

Let us contemplate some rogue element - or just some crapped-upon nerds with a grudge - who stumble upon a particularly virulent, aerosolize-able form of the H1N1 or "bird flu." And then think of their own personal drones. Sorry, but I feel it's a public service:

See HERE.

See HERE.

Happy Holidays!

And now, because the wise AdSense people took all my ads (and revenue) away, for a reason not entirely clear to me, I turn to another sponsor, the good people at Grady's Oats. We'll be right back after this important message:

Ezra Pound and Conspiracy Theory
Last July I wrote a short piece on Pound and conspiracies. It recently occurred to me that what many writers have labeled Pound's "conspiracy theory of history" has at its roots something quite similar to Noam Chomsky's term "marginalization." This theory's engine is malign neglect, silence and indifference, mostly on the part of academics. In Donald Davie's book Ezra Pound, subtitled, "a major new study of the life and work of the great American poet," Davie writes about Pound's involvement with the esthetic movement of Vorticism, and how the ideas there were strongly influenced by Allen Upward, who had been influenced by Confucius and Mencius. Pound found that critics didn't understand Vorticism, and the more he tried to explain it, the more indifferent critics seemed. If Upward's work were disseminated and written and talked about, Pound thought, more people would understand this dynamic esthetic movement. Pound, since around age 15, had wanted to make a revolution in poetry, and thereby revolutionize civilization. Pound was in a hurry. Davie writes that Upward's 1908 book The New Word, chapters 13 and 14, give a pretty good explanation of what Pound meant by the "vortex." But the book didn't find large favor among the academic and publishing class, and for Pound this was a scandal.

Anyone who reads and studies Pound will find at minimum 25 more cases similar to this: great thinkers, thinkers who could shed light on the underlying problems of Western civilization, but have been shamefully neglected, and there must be...some reason!

Well, we know where Mad Ol' Ez ended up vis a vis monetary ideas, banking, usury, credit, etc.

However utterly noxious the antisemitism (and flat-out wrong ideas about jews running the banks, period), I assert that, with the 2008 crash, most of Pound's ideas about economics deserve another look.

I won't hold my breath.

A final word on Pound and conspiracy from Davie's book. After discussing critical neglect of Upward and Pound's anger about it, Davie writes, "It was a case like this, of the unconventional thinker effectively gagged by simple or deliberate neglect and indifference, which in later years converted Pound to a conspiracy theory of history, in which the worst, most murderous conspiracies were conspiracies of silence. Wyndham Lewis, though in one sense the whole vorticist program had been devised for his benefit, declared that he didn't understand what 'vorticism' meant. Pound understood; and if we don't, it is because we haven't looked where he told us to." - page 42, Ezra Pound, Davie

As with most conspiracy theories, I take an agnostic stand.

(There are some CTs I consider about 99.9998% likely to be wrong, such as the "Holocaust Revisionist" idea that the Holocaust never happened; the footage you've seen is faked; maybe a few hundred Jews actually died under Hitler. The Jews are trying to make us feel sorry for them, etc. What a denial of one's own humanity to agree to this idea! Robert Anton Wilson responded to these conspiracy theorists by asserting that there never was a World War II, or that Holocaust Deniers don't exist; the ones that think they do are only imagining their existence. If anyone ever wants to see virtuoso usage for satirical and rhetorical purposes of the reductio ad absurdum, read anything by Robert Anton Wilson.)

Pound's vexatious ideas, their emotional and intellectual tones, are almost always compelling to me, despite his "craziness," and I do think the academic class of intellectuals do have cliques and do often marginalize people and ideas, for not-very-intellectually-honest "reasons." They're only human, after all...The "neglect" and "indifference" Donald Davie mentions might be an unconscious response due to general trends in thinking among the relatively powerful literati and academia, but may also evince a demonstrable collective lack of imagination among a large percentage of comfortably-ensconced and attached-to-university-protocol thinkers and knowledge workers.

Maybe.

On Obscure, Coded and Alchemical Texts: Part 6

2011-12-20T03:41:00.000-08:00

Islamic Terrorists (and Others with a Gripe)
My never-quenched thirst for reading the weird, grotesque and esoteric led me recently to an increasingly morbid and fascinating perusal of Extreme Islam: Anti-American Propaganda of Muslim Fundamentalism, edited by Adam Parfrey, copyright 2001. In his Introduction, Parfrey writes:

I must confess that I love Islamic propaganda. After putting my hands on a bound volume of Iran's English-language Echo of Islam magazines, so full of remarkable posters, including those making Jimmy Carter look like the veritable Antichrist, I spent a considerable amount of time trying to locate similar material. It's damned hard to find. Hardly anyone I knew possesses it. Americans would do well to study the arguments of those who despise us rather than parading around in a patriotic haze. Fearing that opposition propaganda is riddled with secret code unnecessarily gives it a lot more power. - p.viii

One: I'm like Parfrey in that I get a thrill (mine seems sort of related to Walter Mitty) in reading ghastly stuff like the Echo of Islam he describes...and the material he uses for Extreme Islam. Two: I heartily agree with him that Americans really ought to find out for themselves "why they hate us." Allowing the corporate media to do your work for you just will not do in this case. Sorry. Get thee to a public library. Maybe read about the history of the CIA for starters. Three: I both agree and disagree with the fear of codes in propaganda, and here's why: unless you're a hotshot and well-paid student of steganography (which I'll cover in some future blogspewage on "codes"), all you can do is worry, knowing how easy it is to hide messages in "plain sight." But really: your library studies (ever checked out any books by ex-State Dept guy William Blum?) should be quite enough info for you vis a vis why "they" hate us, and for your amphetamine-like desire for a paranoia when there's a good one to be had...

Brief Note on Writing Under Italian Fascism
In Umberto Eco's wonderfully provocative and informative essay "Ur-Fascism," originally published in English in the New York Review of Books in 1995 (with the Oklahoma City bombing fresh in mind), then later collected in Five Moral Pieces, he recalls his boyhood in Italy:

In 1942, when I was ten, I won the first prize at the Ludi Juveniles, a compulsory open competition for all young Italian fascists -- that is to say, for all young Italians. I had written a virtuoso piece of rhetoric in response to the essay title "Should We Die for the Glory of Mussolini and the Immortal Destiny of Italy?" My answer was in the affirmative. I was a smart kid. - p.65, Five Moral Pieces

Umberto Eco (b.1932) Novelist, semiotician, always in Top 10 lists
for greatest public intellectual in the West

(A brief digression and explication on fascism now, as the OG has dared to say that Unistat "is fascist" in polite conversation, always having to explain himself. I usually make the point that Mussolini defined his fascism as the "corporate state," that he thought corporations and the rich ought to be able to do anything they want while not paying taxes, that labor unions should be demonized and smashed, and the proles should be entertained by parades, games, spectacles and nationalistic extravaganzas. In this sense, both Unistatian parties engage in a lot of fascistic behavior, but I consider the Republican Party in 2011 as pretty thoroughly fascist. At any rate, does any of the Italian stuff sound familiar, Unistatians? -the OG)

Eco takes us on a tour of the varieties of fascist experience in Europe in the 1930s and 40s. He makes an interesting point about the word "fascism," relating it Wittgenstein's brilliant riffs on "games." In Eco's adumbrations of the different fascisms in England, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Greece, Norway, Spain, Portugal, South American, Germany, Italy, etc: let's assume fascist country 1 is characterized by {a,b,c}, while fascist country 2 is characterized as {b,c,d}. 3 is {c,d,e}, 4 is {d,e,f}, and so on. Countries 1 and 2 share {b,c}, while countries 1 and 3 are still linked with the same characteristic of {c}. 2 and 4 are similar to 3 for the same reason. 4 would seem to be something different from 1, but "because of the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between 1 and 4, there remains, by virtue of a sort of illusory transitiveness, a sense of kinship between 4 and 1." p.77, ibid

Back to our theme: Eco notes that university students were encouraged to join intellectual clubs, as the cradle of fascistic futurism in Italy. New ideas circulated promiscuously, and if they weren't fascistic ideas, party officials lacked the hardened facility of the young intellectuals, and couldn't tell what was going on. The terms were opaque. Eco writes about the two decades of Italian fascism: "The poetry of the so-called hermetic school represented a reaction to the pompous style of the regime. These poets were allowed to elaborate their literary protest from inside the ivory tower. The sentiments of the hermetic poets were exactly the opposite of the Fascist cult of optimism and heroism. The regime tolerated this overt, albeit socially imperceptible dissent, because it did not pay sufficient attention to such obscure jargon." - p. 75, ibid.

Jeez. Can we find any similar instances (I am not saying Unsitat is exactly like any previous fascism!) in our recent history? I'm looking at YOU, you thousands of impenetrable post-structuralists and Derrida knock-offs with PhDs! There are many more examples, but let us move on...

John Milton
Not only Milton, but scads of writers of a fairly hard-edged puritannical Protestant worldview, and here we're talking about sexuality. From Paradise Lost:

Hail wedded love, mysterious Law, true source
Of human offspring, sole propertie,
In Paradise of all things common else.
By thee adulterous lust was driv'n from men
Among the bestial herds to range...

Yea John. You keep telling yourself that.

Here's perhaps the most glaring "secret" in social networks today: increasingly, study after study after research after study strongly suggests humans are not fit for monogamy. Some people can get married and stay that way for 50 years, neither one "cheating," or as biologists who study mating behavior among mammals call it, EPCs, or extra-pair copulations. But it's pretty darned rare. We stray, statistically...and sexually.

There is no end in citing texts (like Milton here) or of texts that lay out the strong argument that humans are not all that good at monogamy, because we're probably not wired very tightly for it. We're not as promiscuous as our cousins the bonobos, but some of us sure seem like we're trying.

And the most fascinating text I've seen on this subject is The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People, by David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton. Barash has a PhDin Zoology and teaches Psychology at the University of Washington, and he's one of the best public intellectuals in Unistat, in my opinion. Look him up. Lipton has an MD and practices psychiatry. Barash and Lipton are married! What a wonderful book...extremely provocative, and one that can get you in a lot of hot water if you talk about it with the "wrong" friends at the wrong time.

I will end by simply suggesting that anyone who makes a big show about how great marriage is 'cuz it keeps ya "moral" or "on the straight-and-narrow," and that "adulterers" ought to be shamed deserves to be looked at suspiciously, for very solid scientific reasons.

Historical Consciousness and Deep Time: A Ramble

2011-12-17T00:28:00.000-08:00

In my towers and stalagmite-like piles of books - I have over 30 out from the library as I write, as if I hadn't already had owned too many unread books! - and my horribly promiscuous reading in them, I recently realized how utterly different our perception of history and time has changed over the last mere 150 years.

In Stephen Jay Gould's Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time, he says the slowly-growing acceptance of "deep time" since 1860 (in the West, the Chinese and Hindus had much deeper conceptions than the world being around 6000 years old!) was of Galilean significance. I can "see" that now, but for most of my life I knew that historians and other intellectuals in the West had held to a very (relatively) recent timescale for history...even when fish fossils had been found at the top of mountains. The Flood, the Deluge had done it. It's all in the Bible.

I wasn't brought up on the Bible. That never made sense to me. I had to try to make sense of it by studying Western Civ textbooks, which I now realized just put the Garden of Eden in present-day Iraq, or Mesopotamia. And then I read many books like "C.W. Ceram"'s Gods, Graves and Scholars.

But what about all those Leaky findings...and "Lucy"? How to close the millions-year gap in my personal consciousness about the First Humans and...Barack Obama?

So I studied paleoanthropology, sociobiology, archaeology. What a difference between "history" and these disciplines!

A still-common notion, one I find personally hard to shake, is that "real" history only begins with writing. That just made so much stark sense to me for so long...and it made it easier to compartmentalize, say 3500BCE to now as One Thing, pre-writing humankind Another Thing.

Lately, coming back around to Gould's assertion about our consciousness of "deep time" since Lyell and Darwin, et.al, circa 1860: it still took a long time for college textbooks to incorporate anything about the Paleolithic humans. Even into the first decade of the 20th century, often a mere footnote in a 700 page book mentioned geological time and Paleolithic humans. Then, weirdly, history started with the Germanic hordes running roughshod over Europe!

I remember vividly going to a small bookshop in a smoggy little corner of the San Gabriel Valley, and the owner, knowing I thirsted for knowledge of such things, sold me a used two-volume copy of H.G. Wells's Outline of History. Now here was a history book that made sense to me. Finally! What a tremendous relief! Wells - one of the great Generalists of all time - takes up the first 50 pages with "The World Before Man." How long has Earth been around? (The book first arrived in 1919.) What about fossils and rocks? Climate, the Age of the Reptiles, the rise of mammals...he doesn't get to Neolithic Man until page 82! I still read these two volumes every five years or so. Now I have updated versions, like Jared Diamond.

H.G. Wells, autodidact extraordinaire, seer, generalist, wrote for non-academics,
which pissed the professors off, because he de-emphasized the
Great Man theory of history. We are here because of biology!

H.G. Wells. This was my first taste of deep time. Like an addictive drug, ever since my "first taste," all I want is more. To get a relatively short narrative about the time of humans before writing was fine, even thrilling at first, but after awhile, I realized there were huge expanses of time in which my imagination was urgently needed to fill in the gaps. And what gaps!

Still: like the Necker Cube, when I looked at it all in a different way, I was in awe of what we don't know, how long our great, great, great, great, great, great, great...grandfathers had been around, dealing with the elements, walking through unfathomably vast expanses of forest and savannah, using fire, communicating with each other in some way. I loved the psychological space! The great expanse of what we have only an inkling of, this feeling of immensity, of the abyss, or the sheer Long Shadow of time, even on the human scale, was vertiginous and thrilling. (I think the idea that others don't like that sort of "buzz" - not at all! - explains a lot about predispositions against a certain number of these types of ideas...)

Vico deals with this by telling his history based on the then-suddenly fashionable catastrophism of the Deluge. It's a clean break with ALL that went before; now: let us deal with history in that truncated period.

Or it was truncated to me. There seem some occult reasons why Vico would want to do this: first: as he lived and studied the reports of the New World were still exciting and it was pretty "wild" stuff. And the earliest writing that was available to him was paltry compared to what anyone can access in a well-stocked public library today. At least Vico tried to explain how language arose. And it's thrilling, but both Vico and I digress, literally.

But quite a lot of knowledge has accreted about our Paleolithic forebears over the last 150 years. Not writing, but, since around 1925, the idea that for all that Paleolithic time there was no absolute stasis, as was supposed by those who wished to hold to the metaphor of paying for being Fallen. No: the idea that self-consciousness arose then! A true, human theory of mind! ("I know that you know that I think that she's desirable, and I wonder what you are going to think if I do or say X?") But how? Some sort of catalyzing event, or series of events that happened over some period of time...made us...different.

A mutation? Accident of birth? A dietary change? Mating with exotic peoples from far over those hills? A relatively quick climate change? Obviously writing changed us: culture became Lamarckian. But before writing? What?

I like Terence McKenna's idea that we stumbled upon psilocybin mushrooms and it catalyzed human consciousness. Academic experts don't lend the idea much credence. But it's an interesting idea, and plausible, and some day I'll blogspew on it in more detail.

In only 500 years we've gone from the Earth being the center of the universe to the idea that we are in a universe that is not 6000 years old but about 13.7 billion years old, it had a beginning, it's expanding, presumably our local universe will undergo heat death when the energy is spread out enough, and there may be billions of other universes, branes, Dark Matter, strings...I think it says something basic about a person when I find out 1.) If they are conversant with these ideas, and 2.) If they tend to embrace them. 3.) If they don't embrace them, why not?

And I like to ask, when the time is right, "What do you think happened to give us a true human theory of mind?"

Here's 6 minutes of the spellbinding Terence McKenna on how we might have obtained a second-order theory of mind. I wish the sound was a little better:

Weaponize Your Personal Drone For Christmas!

2011-12-16T01:10:00.000-08:00

Hey there, personal drone aficionados. As I'm sure you're aware, the drone world (both military and personal) is moving fast, and I'm here to help ya keep up on the latest. For this blogspew at least, it's Drone Central here at the OG. So, let's get to it, shall we?

DIY, Amazon: We've Come A Long Way, Baby!
Check out this ancient article from 2008 in UK's The Engineer. If only they could see us now, eh? The author is trying to educate us about the good times ahead in personal drone tech, by teaching us to say "UAV" (or if you're a totally clueless noob, Unmanned Air Vehicle, and "MAV," or micro air vehicle). As if we weren't saying these things thirty, fifty times a day by now!

Sure, the Big Guys in the military have the ins with the Pentagon and their contractors, but no need to suffer size envy when thinking of your Predator, your Reaper, your Global Hawk: let's let the entire world know we have websites for DIY drones, like THIS ONE. And bear with me while I get the laggards up to snuff: you can buy a middlin' size one to be proud of at Amazon for about 300 bucks. Hell yes! All you need is an Android, iPod Touch, iPhone, and a few other little gizmos to control 'em..."i" shit you not!

As of today, we have to iron out a few problems that exist: "high wastage," hard landings, accidents. But let's not drop our joysticks over a few little problems!

So what if some people seem to get all jelly-legged and lilly-livered when they find out what we got! These are the same Worrisome Willies that are all worked-up 'cuz I can buy, say, an Uzi at a gun show. I ain't a-never opened up at a mall yet, have I? Well alright then. If you haven't heard of these Nervous Nellies, they're all over the place. Like HERE's a guy who doesn't seem pleased. I can't quite tell what this guy's problem is; you tell me! Anyway, don't I have a right to make sure my neighbors ain't a-plottin' nothin' against me and my family? They're all weird and everything. Like I ain't never seen them fly the colors from their porch...even on Veterans Day! The video on that one's pretty cool though, huh?

Don't let these wussies get you down. Here's some good news up ahead yonder.

Local Police Forces Get Weaponized Drones
Yes! Yeee-haw! Check this story out, ladies and germs! Now, of course there's a liberal slant to that article, but what do you expect? The good news is that, if we look at history, the money we pay into the military budget? Now, I admit it's a lot. But here's the good news: some - well, a whole heckuva lot, really - of that money goes for R&D (research and development), which means a bunch of scientists get to figure out how to make really cool stuff, like bunker busters, mustard gas, and what-not. Cruise missiles. And yes, drones!

So, our fightin' men use it to find their dead fellow soldiers, like in that ancient article I linked to above. But now we got guys living outside Vegas who get up with their kids at 6:30AM, talk about Barney videos and eat cereal and talk about how to be moral and good, then the kids go off to school, dad goes to work finding targets (humans) his superiors say are enemy combatants. Then he kills 'em from half-way around the world, using drone technology! Then he gets off at five, just in time to see his kid play third base in the Junior League playoffs! Recently an American citizen who turned into a Bad Guy got killed this way! (By being a Muslim terrorist, not a third baseman.) Cool, ain't it?

So yea: historically, these sorts of technologies filter back into domestic society. HERE's an article from the LA Times from about five weeks ago, that says it's "inevitable" that we civilians will have our own drone-forces, but not before the police do. (Okay, I may be readin' between the lines, but we all know this stuff is coming to a backyard near us soon, right?) The FAA is all in on it and stuff, too. It says "drones for profit." I don't get it: that's what America's all about isn't it? HERE is an article from just this week. Check out the pic of that sweet hummingbird drone! Now there's something I don't get: all these people cryin' about "privacy." To me, it's simple: if ya got nothin' to hide, you got nothin' to worry about, right? Am I right or am I right? Yep. Thought so...

But lemme get back to my main points.

Here's where it gets good: the sequence, domestic militarization of badass stuff, weaponry-wise, historically, goes a little like this:
DARPA (or similar)---->: military use overseas---->domestic police/DEA/FBI/the rest of the alphabet soup of police organizations---->criminal gangs (like the Mafia, and drug gangs), domestic militias and other patriots---->ordinary NRA citizens and other Good Americans like you 'n me!

Is that cool er what?

Biology/Biotech and You!
As you saw in the picture from that article I linked to above, the wizards have combined biology with drone technology and came up with a great little spy hummingbird drone. Read about it HERE. Note: this was in the Business section of the paper; you investors might wanna think about it. Remember me when ya get rich!

What's really cool is all the surveillance that can be done with increasingly better, faster, more accurate, smaller, quieter drones! Bad Guys - people without jobs and dope smokers - you know, immoral people? They can be more easily rounded up this way. Hey, who doesn't want safer streets? I care about my children, and I know you do too. I can't wait to see retinal ID systems or iris recognition or even nose recognition systems implanted in my little drone-of-the-future. You don't want to kill the wrong guy!

But I'm sure mistakes will be made at first, before they perfect all this.

Some Problems With the Civil Liberties Crowd
Card-carryin' pussies! They're all worried about coddling criminals and limousine liberal celebrities. Get THIS and THIS. Sheesh! "Stalker Drones"! The shit these latte-drinkin', Volvo-driving pussies won't make up to try and make us good Americans look bad!

Besides, if they have so much money, let 'em spend it on protecting themselves against 'em. They can afford it!

Iran Trying To Kill Our Buzz
I'm sure you've all heard that somehow one of our drones got off course and was downed inside Iran. Obama asked for it back! He's got some sack, I'll give him that! But Iran says no way, man. What would you expect from Abdul? Anyway, this story has, I'm afraid to admit it, friends, cast too big a light on the potential "bad" things about drones. We don't need to be in the spotlight; we're only hobbyists! The cool thing is that good ol' DARPA, which has known our military's killer drones have been subject to viruses, cybercounterterrorist security problems and other hackers for a long time, are on it. I'm sure they'll fix it. The problem though - and I don't want to sound like one of those liberal wussie alarmists - is that all other countries, including Pakistan, Iran, North Korea..hell, even Syria...will get their own predator-drones to fly over our houses soon.

I'm sure it'll be taken care of by someone.

Now I realize you may feel punked by me 'cuz I say pretty much outright in the title that you can "weaponize" your personal drone in time for Santa 'n Jesus 'n all, but I didn't give any particulars. I was using what my junior high English teacher called "poetic license"! By that, I mean I was tellin' a bit of a stretcher but it was for a good effect, see? And besides, we all know how this stuff goes. By next mistletoe season it'll probably be true! Sorry if anyone feels misled...Well, that's about all I have for my fellow hobbyists today.

Until then: I'll see you at the NRA-protected gun shows, at the "new ideas" table for Personal Drones! And yes: I'll see YOU in the skies!

AWAY!!!!
(The NANO Hummingbird Drone! Isn't this just the greatest thing?):