samadhisoft.com

Occassionally I run across a new word or phrase I just love.

Today I came across Quantum Bogosity.

Just too cool – I just had to share it with you here.

Given the folks we have running Washington, D.C. these days, this advice might be apt.

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How To Fight Monkeys

What should you do if you’re surrounded by angry macaques?

The deputy mayor of New Delhi, India, fell off his balcony and died Sunday after being attacked by monkeys, his family members say. The city has around 10,000 monkeys, some of which have taken to roaming through government buildings as they steal food and rip apart documents. What should you do if monkeys are picking on you?

It’s like Mom said about muggers: Just give ’em what they want. When monkeys get aggressive, it’s usually because they think you have something to eat. According to one study, about three-quarters of all the aggressive interactions between long-tailed macaques and tourists at Bali’s Padangtegal Monkey Forest involved food. If you are holding a snack, throw it in their direction, and they’ll stop bothering you. If you don’t have any food, hold out your open palms to show you’re not carrying a tasty treat or back away from the monkeys without showing fear. To diffuse the situation, don’t make eye contact or smile with your teeth showing—in the nonhuman primate world, these are almost always signs of aggression.

More politicians monkeys… ➡

Shipping a motorcycle to New Zealand is not for the faint hearted. I’ve spent weeks of time, on and off, getting clear about what’s required to be able to do this. At the moment, I’m deep into building my shipping crate as you can see in the following photographs.

I’ve had to deal with New Zealand Biosecurity which is why the entire crate is made from plywood to prevent the possible entry of pests into New Zealand.

I’ve had to deal with New Zealand customs to get clear about import duties.

I’ve had to determine how a vehicle which is new to New Zealand, is registered and inspected for compliance with NZ laws. Bring proof of ownership.

This last, in turn, led me to have to get a letter from Honda USA stating that this motorcycle was originally sold in the US and there are no outstanding recalls against it. That was not easy getting a vast corporation like Honda to deign to send me such an obscure letter on their letterhead.

And, finally, I’ve had to located a shipper here in the US who was willing to ship the crate with my motorcycle in it without charging an arm and a leg. We finally settled for a single leg which seemed to be valued at about $1200 – from my home to the dock in Littleton.

Most folks have told me I’m basically daft for doing this. “Why don’t you buy one there?”

I guess some folks just don’t appreciate genius – it’s the only explanation I can think of <smile>.

And, never one to let an opportunity for doing something techo-whizzie get by me, I’ve managed to build my crate with a bit of Titanium. Note the gray plate that the motorcycle’s stand rests upon. Boeing surplus Titanium, don’t you know. Just think how nice that’s going to look out on the coffee table to impress all my friends in New Zealand?

Back on September 11th I wrote a piece here, Letters passing in the night as Rome burns, that provoked a long series of follow-on comments (32) that ran on until September 21st. Without a doubt, it was the longest chain of comments on anything I’ve written so far.

I’ve been extremely busy of late but I haven’t forgotten all the various things that were discussed in that series of comments. Some excellent points were made in reaction to some very deep questions.

I think each one of the folks who participated (or even those who just read along) could summarize what they thought were the pivotal points and we would likely each come up with a different list and for different reasons.

Not withstanding that, I’d like to attempt to summarize the discussion and note the points that I felt were key.

The issues

We opened with a discussion of whether or not it made sense for a person to rail against the way the world is (full of environmental problems and injustices and getting worse by the day) when there was and is very little likelihood of changing things.

This advanced into a discussion of where people find purpose and meaning (P&M) it their lives. Some (like myself) felt that P&M arise from our spiritual beliefs and that these same beliefs call us to try to ‘fix’ the world regardless of whether of not there seems to be any possible chance of succeeding. I also asserted that I failed to see where and how folks without any spiritual basis to their lives could find P&M in their lives.

This last point was roundly and well opposed and I’ve come around now to believing that we all, regardless of our spiritual beliefs, create our own P&Ms and that everyone’s P&M’s are equally persuasive and valid.

A lot of the discussion also focused on whether there was any reason to believe there is, in fact, a spiritual underpinning to our existence.

The rationalists among us asserted that rationally there was none.

And those who believed (like myself) that some sort of spiritual intelligence pervades existence, acknowledged the a-priori nature of their beliefs – while asserting that the beliefs of the rationalists were equally a-priori – since nothing can be proved either way about the existence or non-existence of Spirit (or God or whatever one wants to call it).

I also believe, if I understood the points Fergus Brown was making at this point, that there’s also a middle ground in which the issue need not be decided because the individual understands that he himself creates his or her own P&M by choosing to.

“In other words, if we feel as if we want to be responsible and to care about others, we have already created the grounds of a purposeful life which aspires to goodness, and which is founded on goodness.”

The conversation continued on into a discussion of why someone would act to do good if they believed that Spirit underlies reality. I.e., Does someone who believes in Spirit acts to do good from fear of Spirit or because they recognize that the very definition of right is inseparable from what they believe Spirit wants?

From one POV, the individual is driven against their own natural urges to do good by fear of the Deity. From the other POV, the individual freely embraces what they believe Spirit wants as the good and acts in accordance with this. In one view, one is the oppressed slave of Spirit driven by fear and in the other one is the child of Spirit driven by Spirit’s apparent example.

I don’t think there can be any resolution to a discussion like this. In the end, I think it will be for each of us, however we believe it to be.

Again, I think Fergus summed it all up the best. He said:

This discussion could go on forever… let me leave you with this proposal:

The meaning (and sense of purpose) of our existence is determined by us, our relation to the world, and the relation between our meanings for ourselves and the meanings others posit for us. This holds true whether there is an ordering force external to us or not. But inasmuch as the meaning of our being exists in our own narratives (stories) and those of others, it is we who are the ordering force behind them; we make our own meanings, both individually and ‘in the world’. we cannot know whether our interpretation of our meaning as grounded in spirit is true or not, so we must accept that it can have no more status than that of any narrative; in the end, the meaning is subjective and relative, even if the truth behind the meaning exists, because this is opaque to our perception.

I think at this point, I should have let the entire discussion come to a graceful stop of its own weight. And I regret that I did not. I brought forth Pascal’s Wager as if it would help folks see my POV when, in fact, I’d already agreed with Fergus that there’s not likely to be anything that will decide these matters and they are all just as we believe them to be.

So, I do apologize to all for continuing to press the argument when I already knew it to be pointless. I can offer (tongue in cheek) an explanation on how and why folks continue to beat a dead horse here – but I don’t imagine this excuses me.

The significant points for me

I was convinced by good arguments that purpose and meaning belong equally to all of us; atheists or spiritualists.

Michael Tobis contributed the idea that

“We should not be so foolish as to expect that our efforts will turn the tide, but we must hope so and act as if the possibility exists. If we don’t act as if the possibility of a better world exists, the possibility vanishes instantly.”

which I think stands as a great indictment against the notion that we should give up acting if we cannot see winning in our cards.

I still believe that the issue of God or Spirit’s existence cannot be decided logically and that we each must make our own choice on this (including to make no choice) and that the choice we make is unavoidably arbitrary and a-priori.

As Fergus pointed out, any decision we make and try to justify that involves pre-existing human-derived values is going to lead us into circular reasoning:

“But what criteria should we use to make such judgements? If we make use of a set of values which already belong to one of the world-views already posited (in our cases, it is often Judaeo-Christian), then we are inevitably going to end up with a circular argument at some point.”

If human-centric justifications are necessarily suspect, then can we find deeper justifications? I suggested one based on the universal interplay between Entropy (Second Law of Thermodynamics) and Complexity. The thought went something like the following:

In our universe, the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that the amount of energy in a system will either stay the same or decrease. This is true in all places save those which are fortunate enough to have an excess of energy in the local area (example: planets orbiting suns). In these places, matter can store the excess energy that bathes it as organization and increasing complexity. And once these storage processes have advanced to the point of creating self-replicating entities, we call the process evolution and its product, life.

As complexity increases in evolved life forms, it may eventually result in consciousness of the type we possess.

And it is here that I think I see purpose. It is here that I choose one side of the game (Entropy vs. Complexity) over the other because I am necessarily prejudice and biased – because I am life.   So I chose for my purpose to aid the progress of complexity and increasing awareness and intelligence and to oppose all that which would pull it down. I can see no higher purpose in existence.

Personally, I like this formulation. It stands alone without recourse to anything human-centric or spiritual.

———

Well, from my POV, it was a great discussion.

As life, I think we need to support life or, as Dylan Thomas famously once said, “To rage against the dying of the light.”

We can be atheists or spiritualists. We each have an equal place at the table. We each decide our values and live by them or not and none of us can really know the implications of any of it.

I go most mornings down to the local Starbucks and several of us chew the fat there over what ever we’ve got going for the day or what ever we’ve been reading or doing. It’s casual and, as a group, we’re a pretty diverse collection. Some of us are strong liberals (like myself) while others are equally staunch conservatives.

We’ve had a few discussions along the fault lines that divide us and they’ve all been done with respect and tolerance on both sides even though in many ways, we’re worlds apart in what we think is important and right. But, for the most part, we steer into blander subjects like motorcycles, travel and what the weather’s up to. The group is heavy on folks who ride Harley Davidson motorcycles and I come in for a lot of good natured ribbing for the 700cc Honda I often bring to the party with the milk-carton strapped onto the back.

Last night, my son and I watched one of the three parts of Christiane Amanpour’s CNN special, “God’s Warriors”. This part focused on the Christian faith while the other two parts will focus on Islam and Judaism.

I couldn’t avoid the strong recognition that things have changed here in the US and that the Christian faith (or at least the more activist portions of it) have become a major force to reckon with. The days of a quiet and taken for granted separation between church and state are gone. This part of the show traced the rise of Christian militancy here in the US and interviewed many of the central figures in the Christian political activist movement.

So, over coffee this morning, I mentioned to everyone (AJ and Ed at the time) that I’d watched the show and I went on to disparage the increasing influence of Christian militancy on the country and the consequent break-down of the separation of Church and State.

Well, it wasn’t exactly a preaching to the choir situation.

AJ, who is fairly conservative in his views and very keen student of history, expressed the view that the seculars have been pushing the Christians back and back in this country for many decades now and that the current rise in Christian militancy is merely those same folks standing up to reclaim what was theirs originally.

I replied that this country was founded on the idea of being religiously neutral as a reaction to the kinds of abuse that folks were leaving behind in Europe when they came here. AJ replied that if you read all of the founding documents, you will not find this view expressed there anywhere. I then mentioned that Thomas Jefferson had written that a strong wall needed to be erected between the church and state and AJ replied that this was written by Jefferson in a personal letter at the time and was not part and parcel of the official goings on during this country’s creation. Clearly, the man was well read.

We continued on for a bit and it became clear that as AJ saw it (and perhaps it is true), what the colonists were on about was not being religiously neutral with, say, respect to Hinduism or Islam, but only with respect to the other various flavors of Christianity that were about at the time. After all, many of these folks had come from the state imposed tyranny of the Church of England and wanted the guaranteed right to practice whatever form of Christianity they saw fit.

So, according to AJ, the issue of Christianity vs. other faiths was never on the table in the days of the founding fathers. The issue was always about tolerance for the other flavors of Christianity which were about.

AJ went on to say that each of the thirteen colonies expressed these protections differently and each perhaps favored the flavor of Christianity which was most dear to their hearts and that all of this can be read in the original founding documents of the various colonies.

I’m not much of a debater because I’m afraid I listen to the other folks points far too much – though I like to think that this quality improves the probability that I’ll get down to the real truth where ever it lies – rather than just getting better and better at defending my own position.

Well, at this point, I was pretty well stalled in this conversation because I thought AJ had some good points.

Somehow, from there, we went on to discuss science and how the Christian right seems to feel free to pick and choose what it likes from among the fruits of science. I mentioned the absurd (to me) image of folks discussing how arbitrary the ‘truths’ of science are while talking to each other on hi-tech cell phones sitting under electric lights in temperature controlled rooms.

AJ launched into the idea that all of the dating that supposedly supports the theory of Evolution is based on circular reasoning and is therefore useless. Apparently, he’d read a discussion about the limitations of carbon dating methods and felt that since the method couldn’t go back very far, how could we really claim to know that, for example, a specific rock was a billion years old?

I pointed out that there were many other dating methods that were able to yield dating results over very different spans of time. I don’t think he was very impressed and seemed to me to feel that it was all a put-up bunch of stuff to make evolution seem plausible.

But in the end, I think we were all left with the main theme of the discussion being that today’s Christians are just taking back the territory that the seculars have pushed them out of in recent decades.

After I left I mulled all of this over. The view AJ expressed about whether or not this country was ever originally and intentionally religion neutral seemed good to me. Indeed, in the world of the 18th century, it is hard to imagine Christian people extending freedom, compassion and equality to other non-Christian faiths – they were still struggling with each other mightily. But the business about picking and choosing among science’s products for the ones you feel conform to your world-view seems, and has always seemed to me, to be a profoundly bogus view.

AJ is a history buff and that got me to thinking about using history to trace the relative explanatory powers of natural science vs. the church from the time of the Enlightenment forward until now as a way of explaining why it might be considered natural and right that secular explanations of the world should be gaining in ascendancy over time.

Back when the Enlightenment was just a gleam in Roger Bacon’s eye, the Church owned the acknowledged power to explain virtually everything. But, as natural science gained traction, many things which had always been the domain of the church to explain – began to have alternative explanations. These new explanations never seemed to supplant the old ones without struggle. Witness the church’s condemnation of Galileo’s heliocentrism in 1616 as contrary to Scripture.

But, over time, the trend has been increasingly clear and one-way and that which the religions claim to explain has given way again and again to the explanations born of natural science.

I think someone could and should (LA?) write a great coffee table book which would go back and examine all the many many places since the Enlightenment where something new like the steam engine came along and all the church pundits spoke against it as the seed of the devil and the certain destruction of society and morality if not stopped.

Over and over again, we survived the unsurvivable. And over and over again, the church had to slowly give ground to science and its explanations of how the world worked.

But all of this takes place over decades. Few people today remember the dire predictions that attended so very many of the advances given to us by science. We are, most of us, mired like a fly in our own time. My generation remembers the dire fears that accompanied long hair and the advent of the birth control pill. The resistance to acknowledging that black people should have the right to ride where ever they want on the bus and sit down at any sandwich counter in the country.

I think an awful lot is forgotten. It would be hard, maybe impossible, to find a passionate conservative today who still agonizes over whether or not the sun goes around the earth, or whether the advent of the steam-engine is a terrible thing. No one defends the idea that smallpox and such arise from ‘bad humors’ in the evening air. Historically (hysterically), the conservatives scream and defend the old ways and then they lose and forget what they thought was so important when the world doesn’t end – and then do it all over again. And all the while, the shift from religious explanations to seculars ones advances relentlessly – if you look at it all over the decades.

But, the wheel turns and now we’re faced with certain destruction if it is actually proven that man is just another animal evolved just like the rest and that regardless of whether or not a Deity of some kind created it, this world has evidently been here for several billion years.

So I think I can see why secular explanations and opinions are slowly sweeping history along with their insights and convictions. It’s because the secular view is most closely aligned with the revelations of science. And as science claims dominion over explaining more and more of the existence around us and religion cedes more and more, the secularists are simply acceding to the obvious.

If someone tells me that women have to kowtow to men because it says so in the Bible but science says that for all practical matters we are equals, I know which way I’m going.

If someone puts this coffee table book together … can I write the forward?

I’ve been thinking about this Blog and what I’m trying to do here.

When I was in Eugene, my friend Alan suggested that I rework it so that what I write is directed more towards explaining and demonstrating the Blog’s central focus which is the Perfect Storm Hypothesis. I think he was right about that and I’ve been wondering how to go about it.

He gave me a general idea which was to simply discuss and reveal the interrelationships among the many contributing factors that comprise the coming storm. But, now that I’m thinking about it, I’m looking for something that is at once both succinct and expandable. Something that reveals more and more as it is added to and developed and yet doesn’t get tangled up in itself as it goes along.

One idea I’ve had is to see each story that’s related to the Perfect Storm Hypothesis as a cause and effect pair of nodes. Here are some examples:

– Global warming will cause rising sea levels.
– Rising sea levels will cause increasing environmental refugees.
– Decreasing oil supplies will increase the probability of resource wars.
– Overfishing will reduce future food supplies.
– Reduction of food supplies will lead to increasing political instability.

In one pair, a given node might be a cause and in another, it could be an effect as in ‘rising sea levels‘, above. The scheme would form, in aggregate, a multidimensional matrix. And it would be perfect subject material for hypertext oriented documents.

Within the structure, a reader would always be considered to be located at a particular node. And if that node was currently being seen as an cause, then effects would radiate from it. And if it was being seen as an effect, then causes would lead to it. One could progress through the system from node to node by following cause and effect links forwards or backwards.

And perhaps, as in neural networks, the links could be weighted to indicate an estimate of the relative strength of the contribution of the several causes to any given effect.

Such weighting could be most interesting. It could be inverse. For example, when women’s educational levels rise, their contributions to birth rates would fall.

I think the main challenge would be to specify the nodes well. Especially when dealing with soft non-quantitative cultural notions like human rights and women’s equality. These might seem clear but I have the feeling that they could become quite squirmy in practice when seen from different points-of-view.

But, if it was set up right, each Perfect Storm related story I encountered could be added to the mix and would labeled to show that it binds two nodes in a cause and effect relationship.  And over time, the aggregate would be the story I’m trying to tell.

I’m still mulling all of this over. Any comments would be much appreciated.

Some friends of ours are departing for Britain on the 27th of August for life in a new country. They will be missed here for their intelligence and their civic minded spirits.

It is sad that these folks are going because it’ll leave our community poorer for their absence. But I fully understand their motivation. Rolf is a college professor and the opportunities offered to him in Britain were so superior to what was happening for him here at the University of Washington that it was, as they say, a no-brainer when it came time to choose.

I’ve written before here and here about the brain-drain that’s slowly eroding the United States’ scientific talent base. And so much of it is due to the current swing in the US towards religious conservatism and the concurrent suppression of science and scientific truth when it doesn’t fit the prevailing religious and political climate – as if objective scientific truth is malleable or negotiable.

Witness these stories among many many others: ➡, ➡, ➡, ➡, ➡, ➡ I came up with these stories in just five seconds by simply Googling, “Bush suppresses report”.

And then the most recent bit of amazing scientific suppression wherein a federal judge had to order the Bush administration to produce a national global change research plan that was due by July 2006; and a scientific assessment of global change that was due in November 2004. Reports which the administration has been sitting on.

So, our best scientific minds are looking elsewhere to find nations which value science as it should be valued. But those of us left behind shouldn’t worry. We’ll have plenty of Christian theme parks to visit to fill our time.

Ah, but let’s get back to why I’m writing this piece. Which is to honor Rolf and Katy as they move from our community to a new and hopefully better life in Britain.

I know Katy’s work best of these two. She’s made a big impact on our local community here. She began and led the Monroe Arts Council here which today is a thriving organization which promotes the Arts in Monroe, Washington. There’s a large mural decorating a wall here in town as a direct result of her tireless work. And there are numerous other projects up and running which would not have come into being without her efforts.

Some years ago, when Katy and Rolf came to Monroe, they bought a piece of property with an old about-to fall-down farmhouse on it and over the intervening years have changed it into a beautiful home with barns, river walks and a tremendous sense of environmental integrity about it. Down by the river, they’ve helped to preserve some of the largest original trees left in our valley. Last week, Rolf took me on a walk through their place to areas down by the river where I’d never been and I could see what a wonderland they’ve created and preserved and how hard it must be to leave it all. We can only hope that place’s next owners do as well with it as the Aaltos have.

Katy’s become a Blogger in the last six months and has written extensively about their hopes and fears regarding the move to the other side of the world. It is a story full of emotions, intelligence, passion and poignancy all at once. I highly recommend it both for the story and because she’s a fine writer.

Katy’s a very direct and strong person which are qualities I treasure immensely. And Rolf is a PhD. world-class academic in the study of rivers and how they transport mass. Together, they are a powerful couple and their presence and influence in Monroe will be missed. We can only hope that this country regains some of its sense of what’s important and wakes up before we lose all of our best and brightest.

Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

T.S. Eliot – Little Gidding

My very best to you, good travelers and friends.