Monday, July 12, 2010

The Second Coming

Fashionable physics frightens Father’s dreaming child.
Not answers alone, their questions vex to nightmare.

Eternity narrowly escaped too recently, too-familiar
Spectres as pitiless as the sun materialize….

From imperceptible dimensions to infinite
Multiverses with wholly other logistics and laws—
Harboring what rough beasts, what desert birds
With what indignant natures, what insidious intents?—
Too reminiscent of dusty draconic doxologies
Inevitable realms inaccessible to sense
And measurement where Primeval Movers haunt.

Priests in alabaster temples scribe their esoteric math
Heirs of authority chant “believe” and “behave” and “beyond”

Dismiss the fear, dear child. Summon the harshest insults
One can conjure… Call them eunuchs. Call them “Christians”

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Virtues of Heresy

Five years ago a claim that Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans mated and bore offspring would have fallen outside the bounds of scientific orthodoxy.  Hundreds of textbooks and articles and popularizing documentaries preached the doctrine of survival by competition alone. The prevalence of such dogmas amused me then, and offend me now.  How myopic and xenophobic and religulous do those sermons appear today!

By all accounts humans tend to be quite sexually opportunistic creatures. As long as our kind has written down their stories half-man/half-beast legends, Nephalim accounts, and anecdotes and prohibitions regarding “bestiality” have abounded. If sheep and dogs and pigs and horses are not safe from our sexual opportunism why would Neanderthals, so anatomically (and, it turns out,genetically) compatible, have escaped? And if Neander was so inclined how did we? Interspecies couplings, while rare, are considered a “natural occurrence” among many mammalian species. Why should we expect otherwise of our own kind?

Not long ago, to entertain the thought was to border on the unthinkable. If Europeans interbreeding with Africans ever inspired disgust and moral outrage, humans with Neanderthals inspired more. If the orthodox doctrine of human homogeneity and its moral of kinship was to be preserved, banish the thought… prohibit the research! Deprived of our 6,000 year Adam we hastily embraced a 60,000 year Adam. Now it appears we must look further back, perhaps 600,000 years… or more if, as I predict, populations of H. Erectus (or other) in Asia will prove to have undergone a similar assimilation. We have opened the genetic Pandora’s Box, and genetic Ham (sapiens), Shem (erectus), and Japheth (neanderthalis) are loosed upon the world.

As much as our hearts may bleed, all this does likely not point to the story of our ancestors making love and not war—history is rarely that tidy—but of engaging in war and deviancy and rape and pillage and bigotry and competition and fragile truces sometimes secured by exotic exchanges of bodily fluids which sometimes produced strange brews in the gene pool.

The old family tree looked like figure 1. Behold how aesthetic! {Look, dad, no fornicating!} But that is not how life works. Lately we revised the tree to figure 2, the moral self-congratulatory model. Now we are moving toward a tree with “vines” of genetic transfer draping virtually all the branches, represented by figure 3. For now, “It's official: Most of us are part Neanderthal” (Discovery News), "Neanderthals live on in non-Africans." The old orthodoxy is dead. Long live the new orthodoxy! Now... let us be heretics.


Saturday, June 19, 2010

Naturlich

As part of its “Big Questions Essay Series” the John Templeton Foundation put the question “Does Evolution Explain Human Nature? to a panel of prominent personalities from a range of fields. Having read the writing heads, what follows is my short retort.

Naturally…

… if by “evolution” we mean that set of processes underlying emergence and by “human nature” we mean that set of features—physiological, psychological, sociological, etc.—which all members of our species share in common. If by “evolution” we mean the extended synthesis, so much depends upon how much we expect from our cause to explain. By meaning our terms thus broadly we barely inch beyond Aristotle whose celebrated formulae took the shape of “man is by nature a _____ beast.” The small step which proves a giant leap forward was made when we substituted Darwin's has become for Aristotle’s is. This stride proves a step back toward the tutelage of Heraclitus.

Πάντα ῥεῖ , everything flows, nutshells the wisdom of Heraclitus. This formula employs the wisdom-traditional Pan-Sprüche, all-metaphors, presaging present-day physicists’ “all is energy,” their mechanisms of transformation echoing Heraclitus’s Logos of becoming. “All things come to pass in accordance with this Logos,” he is remembered to have uttered. In this story Heraclitus emerges as a PMH, a philosophically modern human.

Our understanding of the processes underlying change and the features which all the members of our species share is far far far from complete… but should we expect otherwise? The prevailing 4.6B year world metanarrative puts PMH at the tail end of a long story of becoming. If we were to condense the world-story to a 24-hour day, PMH emerges at 23:59:59.9. How much becoming ought we expect in a handful of milliseconds? In this context human sapiens appears in slime-mold stage.

No good metanarratives leave us in medias res. By all accounts a new day will dawn, another 24 dramatic hours will be played out upon the stage before, in the fullness of time (at the end of day two) stellar fire consumes our world with apocalyptic fury. Give us a second—53,240 years to those tending the metaphor—and let the logos of becoming take its course. By all statistical accounts our species has another second… 24-48 seconds to be precise.^ A second ago, according to the story, we were hunter-gatherers lacking modern language. By this reckoning, a second ago human nature was not modern human nature,* our species’ “great leap forward” taking place 8-9 deciseconds ago.

The real big question remains how well does the prevailing metanarrative explain us? While E.O. Wilson’s pragmatic ideal of a grand evolutionary epic, a chapter in Carl Sagan’s cosmic saga, enjoys its vogue status, its verses have yet to be written... nature is yet to be named, Logos is yet to be fluently spoken. The glory of this quintessence of stardust is our open canon.

_____________

^ The average life-span of top-predator species on our planet has been a few million years.

* “Modern human behavior is observed in cultural universals which are the key elements shared by all groups of people throughout the history of humanity.” Wikipedia

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Our House Rules

Economics rules our lives—
games of exchange

The house of our youth
blessed with poverty
impressed on our soft body
everything has worth

water, earth, air, fire
grains, beads, coins, papers
names, books, records, accounts
space, time, light, speed

With Thalesic inspiration
present-day Einsteins
intone the sacred mantra
all’s energy – energy’s all

Neither made nor destroyed
E manifests in myriads
of useful transformations—
eternal exchange without loss

All our crises must have owed to
malappraisal, inefficiencies
& us blind to possibilities
of Universal humanity

Change of games—
Want more : waste not

Monday, June 7, 2010

Godly Gambles

Albert Einstein is famously remembered for this sound-bit of dogma, “God does not play dice.” Oxymoron in Einstein’s metaphor that he was, might have been illumined by none other than the Reverend Newton.

A capable Sir could prove in principle the outcome of every cast of die to be completely predictable. Were it possible to calculate every factor—initial position, initial rotation, initial velocity, the makeup of the surface upon which the dice lands and rolls, the plethora of resistances and pressures, etc. and any changes in those conditions during the toss—we could determine every outcome every time. Of course in order to calculate every factor in such an episode would require a God-like observer, one whose act of observation has no impact upon the results.

Such God-likeness has always been a practical ideal driving human scientific endeavor. If the past century has taught us anything it is never to say "never" (or "always") of human scientific formulation. Physical law after physical law, upon closer inspection, has admitted of exception. In the fullness of time, computing capability appeared, accelerating science's ability to model complex systems. When our grandchildren carry processors capable of processing tredaflops per second equipped with then-generation sensors, will quantum uncertainty, that bane of Einstein's genius, appear quite so uncertain?

Without resorting to anything as silly as supernature we are fully justified to expect the dawning of a glorious future day Einstein might have called Immanuel, a glorified humankind in the image of the Gods they once upon a time imagined for themselves. We may cast gowral into our midst, and all its decision is our own... as our laws and prophets foretold "We are all gods."

Sunday, June 6, 2010

A Child's Miracle (for Zenhumans)

Now we are convinced
No “miracles,” intrusions of supernatural
into natural world, have ever occurred
What, now, might we mean by the word?
The unlikeliest of unexpected windfalls?
The most fortuitous of improbable occurrences?
The eucoincidence of eucoincidences?
On the tongue can the word continue now to carry
the same sense of wonder and magnificence?
It must… Now, it carries much more.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Poeticism

Adrift alone, to my conscious some curious curve of cosmos
Presents.
My surge to catch with nets of words forms stormy waves sweeping
Past,
Rhythmically crashing against old cliffs of Idio’, bursting prismatic
Futures,
And impact by impact reshaping the lines of shore.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Reconstituting Goldilocks

A certain myopia inheres the popular astrobiological notion of the “Goldilocks zone.” Apart from its grossly homocentric (life-as-we-are-familiar-with-it) assessment of “just right,” drawing a green circle around a solar body grossly oversimplifies the equation. Even if we take the survivability of the range of earth-life with which science is familiar today as paradigmatic for life elsewhere, ring-around-the-sola is a case of extraterrestrial child’s play. The set of conditions conducive to earth-like life—including sufficient chemistry, energy, equilibrium, etc.—can exist elsewhere than on blue marbles.

“Worlds” is a better designation than “earths” in this kind of contemplation since conditions on moons or dwarf planets could prove “just right.” Energy can be supplied by sources other than suns; by geothermal, by gravitation, by chemosynthesis, by radioactivity, etc. Greenhouse gases can warm up worlds distant from their suns. “Dark sides” or “perpetual dawn” regions of hot worlds can be quite stable. Subterranean environments can provide stable conditions where surface conditions are unsuitable. Thick atmospheres can behave like oceans.

If the adaptability and tenacity of life on earth is in any way indicative, worlds which fluctuate between habitable and inhabitable could support earth-like life the likes of which are capable of migration or stints of suspended animation. Worlds on which conditions change gradually (e.g. heat up or cool down) could also allow earth-like life to adapt accordingly. Once upon a time our Earth would have appeared uninhabitable by our present standards of habitability. Radiation resistances, pH resistances, pressure resistances etc. are achieved in earth-life in high degrees.

And we have yet to entertained the anthropic principle. If the life that evolved on earth was that life which was suited to earth-conditions why could not that life that evolves on other worlds have evolved to suit its conditions, conditions we consider “too hot” or “too cold”?

Monday, May 31, 2010

Scary Machinery: Retiring Turing

Within an hour of first reading Turing’s famous 1951 article, I had conceived a machine capable not only of passing but of surpassing Turing’s imitation game. My machine surpasses Turing’s hypothetical machine because it allows me to remove the veil of secrecy between the judge and the machine. My machine surpasses Turing’s hypothetical machine because it would fool all human judges all of the time. The machine? It is a scarecrow with a fan behind it blowing its right arm back and forth.* From a sufficient distance any human observer would instantly judge that scarecrow to be intelligent.

______

* A more macabre instantiation of this machine might use a cadaver, positioned standing erect with its right hand raised, moved back and forth by an electric motor. Playback of a recorded human voice might be included in order to prolong the subterfuge.

A Very Google Christmas

Suppose Google were to compile a list of its most valued customers—say all those who made Google their default search engine, Chrome their default browser, Google Earth their default mapping engine, G-mail their default mail server, Google Health their medical records organizer, Picassa their default photo editor, Blogger their default blog, and Youtube their default video outlet.

Now suppose Google were to institute a policy of sending a holiday gift to its all of its valued customers, the value of the gifts were proportional to the value of the data collected from these applications use over the course of a year. Suppose the gift chosen by Google was based on a tally of that data, processed through a series of hierarchical algorithms in order to determine what their valued customers most desired (or needed).

For how many of these valued customers would Google’s gift become the one to which they most looked forward to opening?

Friday, May 21, 2010

Supernatural or Extraterrestrial

Given the current estimate that there are 1022 solar systems in the known universe (give several orders of magnitude), and given the expansive definition of "life" and "intelligence" of present-day biology, given Susan Blackmore's perfections on Drake's Formula, applying the anthropic principle to non-earth-life as we do to earth-life, and acknowledging the apparent possibilities of future technology--many of the brightest big-picture thinkers of our day consider it a virtual statistical certainty that we are not alone in the universe.

Given the widespread ancient belief that the heavens are the domain of the gods, what are the possibilities that the angels/demons, gods/devils of religious mythology are based on historic alien visitations in humankind's past? These extraterrestrials would, of course, have been natural beings; but would have appeared supernatural to our human ancestors; their langauges, like ours, incapable of expressing unfamiliar phenomena except in terms of the familiar, by metaphorics, the likes of which are preserved in the god-traditions which survive to this day. An alien species capable of interstellar travel would have appeared omniscient, omnipotent, immortal, irresistible, inscrutable, capricious... perhaps even benevolent.

Be advised: in many of the accounts, the gods promised to return.

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Whether Systems

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less travelled by,
and that has made all the difference.

A myriad of diverging roads I might choose to take at this juncture. I could go on about how no three lines of verse have been more misinterpreted. I could go on about Heidegger's holzwege and wegmarken. I could go on about how the tidal tug of poetry has waxed and waned in my own life. I could go on about event ontology or on how we tell our stories ages and ages after-the-fact. But, knowing how way leads on to way, I choose to go on about choice.

Much noise has lately been made about choice. Some scientists have revived the old, old story that free will is an illusion.* They advance the claim that choice is mechanistic, having material (natural) and environmental (cultural) causes: genetics and electro-chemistry, memetics and socio-psychology. The lay of the land have raised alarum, concerned that science now threatens to profane the sacred. Before we jump, let us step back. Is this not precisely what science does? The heavens, the earth, invisible forces, life--all once-sacred, all prodded and probed, analyzed and demythologized by the sciences. Should it alarm us that, in the fullness of time, science should turn its prods and probes on our inner lives, our souls, the holies of holies?

The final frontier, intentional consciousness itself, the consciousness which makes scientific inquiry possible, is the mother of all dynamic systems.^ If a butterfly flapping its wings can change weather patterns on the other side of the globe, consider the multitude of factors which contribute to the whether patterns of human choice, the engine of (r)evolution on so many planes. The equation has so many variables and relations it is beyond comprehension. For equations of this type uncertainty is the rule. Even with first-person, first-hand experience of our own lives, we cannot predict all of our choices all of the time. From time to time our choices surprise even us.

A majority of our deeds we do on auto-pilot. We do not memorialize these in stories. We do not pretend these have made all the difference. For some reason we would not feel quite so violated were scientists to account for these deeds mechanistically. For that is how we remember (and forget) them. At some point all of us have been intoxicated with strange brews or drunk with love or rage, and we have made choices we otherwise would not have made. At some point all of us have lived through seasons of mania or phobia or depression or disinhibition and found ourselves led as it were to behave out of character. In many cases we would welcome scientific excuses for choices we made while "not ourselves." Why not when we feel especially courageous or passionate, ambitious or inspired?

It is when we feel most authentically ourselves that we take life by the horns, that we the man the helm and pilot manually, intentionally, deliberately, considering the possible. We pause before a full closet to deliberate what to wear, before a full menu to consider what to order, before a fork in the road to determine which to take. This is particularly true of long-willed projections, like when we choose our homes, our life-partners, our careers, our ideological affiliations. In short it is when we use our imaginations that we feel most autonomous, most irreducibly ourselves.

What is it about imagination that we find so sacred, so inviolable, so irreducible? Why do we find scientific description of our whether systems such a serious threat? If human imagination turns out to be an illusion--an effect of our common physiology owing to our common ancestry--it is an illusion universal to all humans, scientists included; and no amount of description is going to cause it magically to disappear. It is this universal function which drives scientific inquiry itself.

Has any amount of methodological demythologizing ever impoverished human experience? Has it enriched? Has scientific description diminished the splendor of a sunrise? The majesty of a waterfall? The awe of a thunderbolt? The ecstasy of sex? The wonder of childbirth? What threat does it pose to the sublimity of love? The glory of achievement? The thrill of exploration? The autonomy of choice? When we, ages and ages hence, shall be telling this, will it be with a sigh or with a laugh?
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately... and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

_____________

* In particular, proponents of cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology, assisted by emergent and generative philosophy, suggest that we experience an illusion of free will due to the generation of infinite behaviors from the interaction of finite, deterministic set of rules and parameters. Thus the unpredictability of the emerging behavior from deterministic processes leads to a perception of free will, even though free will as an ontological entity does not exist.
^ Philosophers have observed how a limited set of chess pieces with a limited set of rules moving on a board with limited set of spaces can produce a limitless set of possible games. This is equally true of the much larger set of linguistic signs with its much larger set of syntactic rules. Speaking and playing chess are but two of a truly enormous set of games humans choose to play.

Monday, April 19, 2010

Memorabilia

Had Socrates not been executed, he would not have been the Socrates we remember. Question is, had Socrates not been executed, would we remember him at all?

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

The Religion of the Beef Steers

Today humans rule the earth. We have effectively subjugated all other species with which we have contact, and our dominion continues to expand. Our lordship is particularly evident over domestic animals. In the West we have a unique relationship with cattle, sheep, and goats, species which evolved and herded for centuries before human's (s)elected them for domestication. The dynamic which exists between the modern beef steer and his human master is of particular interest for our exercise. For the following statements let us imagine ourselves in the hooves of a modern beef calf dwelling in a more or less humane modern beef farm. Let us agree to call the cattleman "El." From the point of view of the calves, what can be predicated truly and accurately of this relationship?

  • El fashioned us an all things in our world (the farm) for his own pleasure and glory.
  • As we find ourselves here, we owe our very existence to El.
  • El cares about us.
  • El provides for us (feed, shelter, community) and protects us (from disease, predation, etc.)
  • For all of our intents and purposes, El is all-knowing.
  • For all of our intents and purposes, El is all-powerful.
  • El's will is, for all of our intents and purposes, inviolable.
  • It is forbidden and perilous to attempt to violate El's will.
  • El has a plan for each of us in the herd.
  • The meaning of our lives is comprehensible only in relation to El's plan.
  • El regulates and schedules our lives with fastidious detail in accordance with his plan.
  • The purpose of my life is to serve El.
  • There is a day of reckoning in our future in which El will evaluate each of us according to his pre-ordained plan and sentence us--sending some to eternal darkness and sending a select few, whom he hand chooses as those who accord with his secret design, to a well-watered green pasture with an endless supply of virgins.

Superorganic

Superorganic consideration has broadened the horizons and expanded the polysemies of biology in the past several decades. Perhaps the next revolution will involve trans-specific superorganic contemplation, although it is unclear now how discrete that would appear from present symbiotic or biospherical or eco-systematic formulations.

By most definitions homo sapiens qualifies as a superorganism. "A superorganism is an organism consisting of many organisms. This is usually meant to be a social unit of eusocial animals, where division of labor is highly specialized and where individuals are not able to survive by themselves for extended periods of time."* The concept of survival in the preceding definition need not be warped excessively to apply to superorganic human survival. "Survival" can be taken in the straight-forward biological sense of maintaining individual bio-functions. Human bio-functions are far more complex than bio-functions of "lower" life forms--including physiological, psychological, sociological, rational, etc. When human bio-function is understood as a whole it is quite clear that individual humans cannot survive by themselves for extended periods of time without serious damage to their bio-functions--especially where they lack the tools of the colony.

Take it as a fact, take it as a useful metaphor, it does not matter. What matters is the unique light the superorganic lens sheds on our place within humanity. In the superorganic whole, what is the eusocial role that we humanists collectively play? If humankind were a human body, what organ would we wish to be? What is the role that each of us, individually plays? If humankind were a human body, what kind of cell would you want to be?

_______________

* Wikipedia, "Superorganism"

Monday, April 12, 2010

Zoon Politikon

"Humans are, by nature, political beasts." ~ Aristotle

As political beasts but also beasts with political beliefs, we humans all have an interest to delimit the exercise of political powers. To do this we could embark on a project of examining every political issue and policy, past, present, and hypothetical, plotting them each, one by one, inside or outside the circle of "the good." The task of identifying and plotting the set of all points inside or outside of the circumference of any circle is an exhaustive and ultimately exhausting chore. It is far more elegant to describe the circle itself, the set of points equidistant from a discrete center, and the area of that circle, πr2.

To discern the center and to discern radiation from the center, this is the aim of political philosophy.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

First Principles

Somewhere somebody extends his hand to his neighbor. That somebody buries his hand somewhere in the earth. These are the first and only necessary planes of contact for the generation of wisdom and wealth. Stand up, stand under, stand out, upright man!

Reflexive

Reflection is both the passive act of self-recognition in some foreign surface and the active passion of seeking likenesses of oneself in the world.

Tuning In

Between vox populi and vox dei, a voice that sings.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Becoming Nietzsche's Children

"Innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy 'Yea' unto life"

One of the most pressing issues for modern day post-theists is overcoming the misconception that we believe in nothing. We say "No" to the supernatural, "No" to the beyond, "No" to supreme being, "No" to dogma, "No" to absolutes, "No" to authoritative canons, "No" to ecclesiastical hierarchies, "No" to metaphysics. These "No's" have been the vertebrae making up the backbone of post-theist manifestos from the beginning. These are the growls of Nietzsche's lions, baring teeth, dragon-ringers, roaring "holy 'Nay's'" in the face of Thou-Shalt.

"Why hath the preying lion still to become the child?" "What can the child do that even the lion could not?" To create new values, to utter the holy "Yea" unto life.

This "holy 'yea' unto life" is our post-theist gospel, our good news. We are homo. We are sapiens. We proclaim salvation from the gods and their priests. We announce empowerment: a self-propelled cycle of human transformation. We preach eschatology, a new day of unprecedented opportunity. We tell a holy story, a noble myth: beginning, middle, and end. From singularity, manifold diversity. From inert, lively exuberance. From simplicity, unbridled imagination. Our story has a moral: love, cooperation, beauty, abundance, celebration. The spiritual history of children who were once lions who were once camels is a long and venerable one, replete with heroes, martyrs, fathers & mothers, artistically creating subjects all.

With a holy "Yea" we post-theists, the world's outcasts, may win a world of our own.