No One Wants to Live in Your World

 I have been reflecting on the extremely unpleasant ideological uniformity of the conservative members of my world.  It is never enough to just condemn a certain behavior.  I must also meditate about it and philosophize about it.  This uniformity of belief is condensed for me in a personal memory of my father and a neighbor sitting side by side on the couch in my living room after meeting for the first time.  Somehow they discovered that they were both conservatives and, possibly as a show of solidarity for me, began comparing their views on various points of conservative doctrine.  Point by point they established that they were in absolute agreement on the whole boatload.  I was astounded.

This was a number of years ago.  There has always been partisans.  It is my view that right-wing partisans are much more regimented than left-wing partisans.  This could be an artifact of me hanging out with a lot more and extreme conservatives than people at the other end of the political spectrum.  I actually lived in a left-wing commune for a time after leaving college.  They never actually referred to me as a fascist.  Mostly, my conservative friends do not call me a communist, or even a Marxist. I have benefited from not having any strong doctrines.  I have some strong views that verge on Social Darwinism as tempered by the Christ-like human experience.

So now to return to the (non)debate in my living room so many years ago.

I had my own reasons for not jumping into the "fray".  I saw no reason to argue with either of them and I wanted to get along with both of them.  I have a theory about how they were able to put on this show for me.  I believe that they both were listening to Rush Limbaugh at the time.  No doubt they were avoiding areas of potential debate by sticking to the Word as revealed by Limbaugh (possibly leveraging an inside joke for my benefit).  It is incredible and somewhat repulsive to see that much agreement between two strangers.  There is also the possibility that they authentically believed what they were saying.  I have reason to think otherwise.

Today a memory came to me of a film (Five Million Years to Earth) where genocidal/suicidal martians shape the evolution of apes on earth toward intelligence along with a self-selecting tropism toward martian identity.  Activation of an ancient martian artifact causes humans with that tropism to form groups to weed out all the others.  I recall watching this movie in Rhode Island with my brother, Jack, and his first wife (she was good at screaming in horror at all the right times, sometimes making me jump out of my skin).  

Opposition to diversity of opinion is probably a self-defeating proposition.  Certainly that was not something that Dad especially advocated.  He was always taking the other side of every argument, possibly in order to "educate" us or possibly to test our loyalty/gullibility.  It was a game that no one could win.  At a certain point I stopped arguing with him, which was another source of outrage from him.  I will always respect his memory for what he accomplished and for his steady pragmatism.  I have less respect for his constant one-up-man-ship as applied to his sons.  Later in life that impulse fell away, possibly because we have to make more choices in our relationships as we go into decline.  I suppose it all comes down to wanting respect from one's children and seeking that respect in the most obvious ways.

It seems as though conservative regimentation of thought has gotten ever more ridiculous.  The viral QAnon conspiracies are just the latest but the overall tension between these theories/world views, sometimes directly competing, and now also with down to earth reality now threatens to explode the conservative right wing into a million pieces.  That is just my opinion and I could be proven wrong.  I fear that moment when the Right gets its act together - no matter how self-defeating.

One more piece of the puzzle: human history is dotted with "replacement events".  These are times when one group of people occupy resources previously occupied by others, often associated with mass murders.  This is something that happens at many levels.  In genetics a particular allele will become standard in a population over time.  These incremental changes, of course, are the substance of evolution.  Whether the changes are incremental or catastrophically fast we have to recognize that change will always be the substance of our lives.  Some of that change is driven by martian-type reactionary tropisms,  Regardless, there will be change and that change will be aggravated by advances in science in the near future that will allow us to decide what that change will be in our descendants.

Change is also driven by incremental differences in death rates.  It turns out that "hope" is a survival attribute (The Dying Russians).  Who knew?  It is once again aggravated by ideological uniformity (Russia Predicts Highest Population Decline since 2006 Amid Pandemic).  Nor do the increments have to be big.  On the other hand none of us are going to get out of this world alive.

Grieving as an Impediment to Historical Accuracy

Within a few months after my mother died I started to worry that I was losing her in additional ways beyond the enormity of her death.  Memory is a fluid medium, subject to reinterpretation, changes of focus, and loss of detail.  Memories carry meaning and sentiment but that sentiment is dulled each time the memory is replayed.  It has been thirty-eight years since her death and I greatly question whether my memories, my heavily reworked and rerecorded memories, are authentic anymore.  

From time to time some token from the past manifests itself.  Most recently it was a large business envelope full of receipts and dated 1982 that I received in a box from my brother shortly before my father's death.  Sometimes patterns emerge out of the past.  Sometimes realizations come to me.  In this case I realized that the envelope had been a work in progress, a progress that was interrupted by my mother's diagnosis of lung cancer in late 1982.  She died in early 1983.

It was a message from the past that had lain in a drawer rarely touched.  After thirty-eight years my grief was made fresh, possibly shared with someone who could never discard an object that unintentionally became filled with powerful emotions.  It became a memento of a life shared for thirty-eight, then held in a drawer for thirty-eight years of separation.  A life interrupted.

Yes, I still remember essential details about my mother.  I am lately surrounded by her images, images now enriched by an adult's perception of what they mean.  If I have it wrong it is way too late to change or fix my memories now. 

Bob Rambles about Camus, Consciousness and Cause (and Effect)

 Managing real-time applications is one of the greatest of computing challenges, both in coding and in implementation.  The ultimate real-time application would be consciousness (distinguished from "intelligence" which is a series of parlor tricks).  As usual, I am too harsh since the quality of consciousness, and even any resulting wisdom, arises out of the various faculties that comprise those very parlor tricks.  All of my understanding of consciousness is shaped by my understanding of computers and my observation that there is so much of it that I can not observe.

Camus suggests that the resolution of the question of the purpose of life (with that ultimate resolution of suicide) is an ongoing problem of consciousness, with the resolution lying at hand while varying the answers from moment to moment throughout our lives.  The decision not to kill oneself is a matter of policy that might (along with fear and the perception of the finality of nothingness) carry one over a few rough spots - perhaps only to be overridden by an especially fraught or meaningful moment.

Out of my current (dilettante as usual) reading of Camus: I see that he distinguishes between truth and meaning.  As a side note: I once postulated that "meaning is a relationship between ontology and truth".  I now realize that is the ideal rather than what we see in the beliefs of the people around us.  I also subscribe to the idea that there is an identity between Truth and Beauty (as in that moment of consciousness captured in the poem by Emily Dickinson: "I died for beauty".   Regardless, Camus suggests that we spend our lives in the search for meaning.  Certainly that is true for me, with the qualification that for me truth is the higher goal, whatever that means.  In it most fundamental sense it means that I say more than I should say in the service of truth.  It also means that I may die for the truth.

There is a classic computer science exercise where the student is asked to program a robot to brush its teeth.  It is an essay question where one must not leave out any detail in the description of the process.  I will not entangle myself in this tar baby.  Instead, I will propose a similar exercise where the student is asked to layout the basic assumptions associated with the search for meaning in Camus' absurd universe.  As a clue I am going to suggest that a belief in "cause and effect" is a prerequisite if meaning is not to become a totally random construct without any basis in observation, received reality, or established wisdom.  

I am entertaining the idea that quantum entanglement is just another way of saying there is a cause and effect relationship between two entities.  That opens up a whole universe of possible ways for there to be a cause and effect relationship between two entities, a man and a woman for instance.  Now we can approach the discussion of some of the crazier concepts such as autopoiesis and structural coupling as yammered about by Maturana and Varela.  After all, people talk the way birds sing - for the sheer joy of it.

The Two Seas

We simultaneously dwell in two worlds: the world of the objective and the world of the subjective.  Existentialism is the philosophy that analyzes (or experiences) the tension between these worlds.  One could call it being objective about being subjective.  Or is it the subjectivity of objectivity?

Each world believes that it alone is the true world, spinning off a series of rationales that obscure the true relationship between the worlds, whatever that is.  Each world views the other as an attached appendage, a minor portion of its own reality - a lopsided connection.  All objective reality is viewed through the lens of someone's subjective reality, rendering objective reality as an unattainable fantasy.  Likewise all subjective experience is objectively viewed as circumstantial, falling short of what is objectively true.  That is just two ways of saying the same thing.

The lovers yearn each for the other.  Only "wine" can unite them.  Is that love or hope or faith, or is it the intoxicant that overrides the laws of physics and reveals that the fundamental particle of truth is identical to the fundamental particle of beauty?  That would embody the confluence of the two seas.

Resonance

I am reading an article on the "quantamagazine.org" website about Craig Callendar, a philosopher of science (a nerd) at UCSD.  Actually it is not really about Professor Callendar.  It is about the validity of the analogy (identity?) between thermodynamics and the equations describing black holes.  I have read the article but really I am looking at the pictures and reminiscing about my youth on the beaches by UCSD.  There is another such professor in Hawaii.  Perhaps it is a generational thing.  They both seem to be past the age for really creative thinking, on a surfboard or not.  Note that it is easier for me to read Callender than Lisi but the end result is about the same.  I just don't have the math background or even (possibly) the intellectual insight to handle it.

It is in the nature of a pattern that it never happens alone.  It repeats and the pattern of that repetition takes everything to a new level.  The abstractions are endless.  Patterns are the grist for the mill of the mind.  They are the basis for communication. They are the basis for all understanding of the world around us.  They are the basis of all interest and amusement.

One "pattern" characterizes levels of understanding: data, information, knowledge, wisdom.  I find that to be superficial.  So long as it remains in the file cabinet or the database it is worthless.  It has to erupt into a mind and resonate with reality before it takes on significance - before it has meaning.

Long years operating within a commercial bureaucracy has filled my mind with memes and buzzwords.  I use them as crutches as I make my way through the world. 

Memories as Immortality

For some reason, people (some people) want to be remembered by others after they die.  I have even heard it mentioned as a form of immortality.  I do not personally see things that way.  I see my existence as an ongoing process, an experience of pleasure or pain, of growth or decline.  Bare memories do not compare - especially the memories of other people.

My views call into question any concept of immortality.  What is immortal exists forever but my own identity changes subtly day by day.  There comes a day when I am no longer the same person by any definition.  Any meaningful definition of life after death would involve a changing and growing persona.

I recall that at one time (as a child living in Hawaii)  I decided to maintain continuity with my past.  How would I know now that I have accomplished that goal?  By examining my life and my memories and trying to assess how much has been lost and how the remainder might still sustain a continuity of identity?  I know by comparing what I remember with what my brother remembers just how much has been lost.  And every night I go to sleep.  I descend into a sleep beyond dreams and then rise back up through those mind-altering dreams and resurrect myself to some kind of facsimile of myself.  There is a discontinuity.

Likewise there was discontinuity when I went into surgery, descending into dreamless sleep.  Specifically, something is taken from my body during surgery.  I wonder if there is any form of immortality that would not involve discontinuities?  The one point of continuity might have been my body, and that one point is fragile.  The horizon is already visible.

I do not enjoy all of my memories.  My mind is a mine field.  I would not regret laying down some of that burden.  The contradiction is that while there is still life there is only the possibility of laying aside the unpleasantness.  At the same time that possibility will also surely rip away much of what I value.  Each of my memories that is laid aside diminishes me until my identity is altogether gone.  Never mind any irrelevant and questionable memory of someone else.

Ethics? What are ethics?

A lot has been written about ethics, starting with the ten commandments.  Sometimes it all seems very simple and certainly if everyone just observed only the most fundamental (ten commandments type) ethics life would be much easier for those who actually possess something of worth.

This blog entry is inspired by my recent reading of a Wired article about Cliff Stoll, the author of The Cuckoo's Egg.  It is especially inspired by Cliff Stoll's climactic anger at the hacker for not finding a better way to leverage his talents...for not joining the rest of us in making a better world.  State funded hackers are another matter but they will not go away so long as there are leaders of countries that believe war is profitable.

Still, there are a lot of private citizens who feel that they are entitled to take whatever items come their way that seem unguarded or lost.  The city of Maple Valley is not known for its crime, yet any bicycle left lying on a lawn or driveway is liable to disappear.  Others prowl neighborhoods in the wee hours looking for cars that have been left unlocked.  A car recently circumnavigated a house in my neighborhood in order to steal gas and diesel from some cans in the back yard.

Sometimes these people have guns, yet do not seem to understand the consequences of firing them.

Unarmed, the penalties are light.  They get misdemeanor criminal records.  When caught they are released by the next day.  It's fun.  There is a certain thrill.

I have been a part of an Eden-like beginning in more than one online technology and it is a reality that there is always someone more than willing to ruin it.  It is the first echo of early success.  As a species we have not gotten very far.  At least forty percent of us are more than mildly ethically defective.

Seen simplistically it is a predictable pattern, often observed, discussed, and analyzed.

There are paradoxes.  Corruption has been with us, institutionalized even, since the dawn of complex society.  It is an unproved hypothesis of mine that it was the Protestant Reformation that winched up social ethics an ever so small amount and allowed the widespread adoption of Capitalism.  Everyone  needs to understand that capitalism cannot survive, much less prosper, without fiduciaries.

Reputation is everything, and the Internet has a way of magnifying personal characteristics such as reputation.