Working on the koan for modern times

Pirsig tackled the koan in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Ian McGilchrist takles the koan in describing left vs right brained thinking.

In modern times due to who knows what, but likely adderal and modafinil and social media and helicopter parenting and hip-hoppity music, culture is now more left brained and autistic and socially developmentally delayed.

XBTUSD asks:

What ways have you learned to connect with people (let’s not focus on women as I think it distracts from the point) deeply without words?

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Not focusing on women is a challenge for me, as I spend most of my socializing time with girls. I had a few years recently with guys helping my business, but that was the exception.

What immediately sprung to mind as non-female examples were also love related. Babysitting kids. Hugging my grandma as a kid.

Oh, I had a meditating guy friend with whom there was some difficult to describe non-verbal connection. He taught me “the eye trick”, of sort of blowing someones mind with a gaze. Later I would do that with women. One girl would complain and get tunnel vision. “Stop doing that!”

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That koan is running in the background. Some thoughts that probably relate to that koan came up:

My approach to therapeutic relationship talk: always do none. There is never anything to dig up or process or talk out. I have relationships, I don’t talk about having relationships. The therapy is in the doing. Not in the talking about how to do.

For instance my girl has some history that leads her to sometimes have an insecure attachment style. It can be a pain in the ass sometimes. Very rarely do I explicitly talk about the psychology of that, and then only very briefly with a light touch.

People, and especially girls, can use talk to alleviate anxiety, and it becomes an addiction. It goes nowhere. Believe me. It goes NOWHERE. A waste of time, that we don’t have enough of. You don’t talk your way into being at ease, content, happy, generous, loving.

You just practice those BEHAVIORS. It’s what you DO. NOW. That matters. Not what you think about what you do, or what you think about why you think about what you once learned to do. Just right now, being kind to each other. That’s it. Nothing else.

Very rarely a structure for mindfulness is needed. But usually not. Stating boundaries, gently and rarely, works 100 times stronger when you are both habitually kind. Otherwise talking becomes a game. Psychology as a game or puzzle is a dead end and a distraction.

People don’t change much. They can be at their best. Being at your best is largely an environmental thing. A habit thing. The habit of consistently generating fun lust, laughter, kindness. Habit of passion. In that space kinks work themselves out.

People can relax, open, grow, and learn. But the habit of trying to “work things out” through talking about difficult emotions prevents growth. It is directly counter productive. “Be here now”. “Just make the jam”.

My girl sometimes gets mentally overwhelmed and defensive to the point of being both cranky and unable to talk. Sometimes is too clingy or jealous. She learns through the environment, through seeing me back off patiently, not allowing my boundaries to be crossed but still kind.

Never a fight. Never an argument. Never a discussion about the right way to behave, or reasons why behavior isn’t ideal. Just slowly she re-patterns based on real lived experience. Her feeling of threat is not heightened, she gets space to regroup. It’s all about the space.

Mental health and learning to be kind isn’t about reprogramming your past or inner dialogue or your reasons. It’s not about verbal reasons or past patterns that need re-arranging with insights. It’s about the space. The space and your actions teach you; you swim in and give love into that space. You put your joy and lust and fun into the space. You share the space. That’s it. It’s not about anything else. Just this space right here, right now.

People FEEL that space. Even girls can shut the fuck up and share silent space. It’s MUCH more difficult for them, but they can, and they do. That’s often the best part. Just shutting the fuck up and sharing the space.

And related: The best way to change the deeply ingrained behavior of your partner is to find a new partner.

People don’t really change much. All you can do is work with whats there. When that’s very often frustrating, it’s a very real signal that social climbing is called for. The best way to change the deeply ingrained behavior of your partner is to find a new partner.

And then once you’ve cashed in your chips, and think you’ve got your best deal and bargain, you aren’t going to re-work your girl into a different one. Just get along and have fun. Nothing more than that.

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I will work on this post and add new ones in the coming weeks. I don’t expect to do better at this question than others have done, but giving a similar answer with different words and concepts can really help, all around.

If you want to think clearly, fear, and jump.

I was born into the cradling arms of Janis Joplin, Cream, and a community of Trudea’s hitchhiking Canadians. Long hair and LSD and experimental sex. I’m a child of changing times.

You are not able to learn unless you’ve meditated, done some LSD, had some fundamentally overwhelming bad trips and some fundamentally enlightening ones, fucked several people and been terribly broken hearted, preferably with more than one sex, and have done something deeply personal that no one has ever understood. Otherwise new will be evil, and you won’t know why.

Without bringing order to chaos, all there is is order. Order has nothing to do with clear thinking. Order is what you learned when you were 5.

I just gave “my” woman a massage. She is such a body virgin. Her lower back is full of her mother’s notions about propriety. It reaches all the way up to her shoulders and head. She is enculturated with propriety, and it shows up in the muscle tensions in her ass. And that spreads all over her. Because Asians don’t have Western style teen years – they never rebel, and become something for themselves. Her mother is all over her ass. Muslims never grow up.

So, I told her to stop talking, and listen with her body. I wasn’t quite that polite, but the same message.

People get so arrogant about the knowledge they learned when they were 5. Telling me about the world, about what is right and wrong, based on your 5 year old learning. Thanks for that info, retard.

Learning new things is impossible, for half of the population. Don’t put them down. They make good servants and soldiers. If we didn’t have classes, we would be over-run by societies that had classes. No one who does LSD and makes art wants to drive a tank for Jeebus.

This might seem unrelated. This might seem stream of consciousness. Buddhists spend a lot of time focusing their attention on impermanence, the fact that we will die. It is training the mind to eat cognitive dissonance, to face fear, to accept in one blow facts and uncomfortable feelings. Without training, we tend to avoid discomfort.

To be born into a changing place is an advantage. No need to rest on certainties. People routinely jumped into the unknown in the age of my birth. That’s a huge cognitive advantage.

Oh – how could I miss the best thing about the Hippies! They were obsessed with listening. Everything in life depends on listening skills.

And to stay young, to stay learning, requires introducing disorder and chaos into our life. Retired=retireded.

Update: Clem Snide captures the Bohemian and Zen spirit with his tune I Love The Unknown. Or Joni Mitchell’s Down to You?

Everything comes and goes
Marked by lovers and styles of clothes
Things that you held high
And told yourself were true
Lost or changing as the days come down to you
Down to you
Constant stranger
Youre a kind person
Youre a cold person too
Its down to you
It all comes down to you.
You go down to the pick up station
Craving warmth and beauty
You settle for less than fascination
A few drinks later youre not so choosy
When the closing lights strip off the shadows
On this strange new flesh youve found
Clutching the night to you like a fig leaf
You hurry
To the blackness
And the blankets
To lay down an impression
And your loneliness

In the morning there are lovers in the street
They look so high
You brush against a stranger
And you both apologize
Old friends seem indifferent
You must have brought that on
Old bonds have broken down
Love is gone
Ooh, love is gone
Written on your spirit this sad song
Love is gone

Everything comes and goes
Pleasure moves on too early
And trouble leaves too slow
Just when youre thinking
Youve finally got it made
Bad news comes knocking
At your garden gate
Knocking for you
Constant stranger
Youre a brute-youre an angel
You can crawl-you can fly too
Its down to you
It all comes down to you

Stress is bad, Mkay?

The fears came at me last week. I took them as a man, but they still eroded me.

It’s not true that a true man, or true believer, or true anything, is beyond fear. The conditions around us are the conditions that give rise to us. We manipulate our environment not only out of neurosis, but also out of sanity. And primal need. Burn the wood, kill the goat. My apologies to state the obvious – everyone knows we are subject to vagaries. Everyone knows that prayers and beliefs and hopes and bank accounts and food stores all offer small shelters against inevitable hurricanes.

I’d love to offer a philosophy to get people through hard times. If the philosophy was untrue, but helpful, well… which side of that coin is important? Pain or truth? Some people have the ability to organize painful truths into a cohesive picture that is in harmony with emotion. A big picture that includes the bitter into the sweetness. Not all of us do, and for most, pain avoidance means truth avoidance.

I’d love to stress that truth is good, that a higher good beckons. But that is contrary to millions of peoples lived experience; for most, truth is evil. Truth contradicts their beliefs, the beliefs that give them solace.

I’d love to think evolution holds potentials for us. I do think that. Potentials and dangers. I’m of the opinion that the dangers of evolution inevitably counter the benefits – technology kills. Technology will choicelessly kill. We can’t afford to evolve too far. If you haven’t come to this conclusion, you are technologically illiterate, or deluded. Evolution of technology implies that individuals become hyper intelligent and hyper connected and in control of molecular and sub molecular scale environmental factors. Near limitless data storage and manipulation, coupled with near limitless creative capacity of invention, coupled with intimate environmental manipulation. We would need an over-mind of infinite power to control rogue individuals who create environmental havoc. I suggest that over-mind is unlikely, therefore technology should stop advancing, as it imperils us. We should, rather than increase knowledge, decrease population.

But back on topic. Stress intimidates us and makes us not our self. Whatever awareness is, it is dependent on the caverns and shapes of the physical environment that produces it. We can be in torment. We can be in pleasure. We do not exert full control over awareness; we are produced.

Update: It takes some time to wind down. Anxiety leads to cortisol which leads to amyglia shrinkage which leads to some mood disregulation which makes a vicious circle of viscous goo to step through. Sighs of relief let it out, day by day, and now I’m happily camping again. Fear and anxiety suck. Plentitude is happy time.

No matter where you go there you are. No matter where you go there you are. No matter, where you go. There you are. Our attitude follows us as karma, our us follows us as our inherited body, and where we are makes us. Dis-idenfication with sense experience is said to be mature, standing back to wait, and enjoying laughing at the tough times. Still, music and architecture and all external, and the power of emotions and body feelings and internal architecture; no amount of aloofness and transcendence negates them. Trouble may be trifling and temporary, and the self that fears may be the same, but all that illusion is real enough.

Consciousness

I was playing inside a lucid dream a few nights ago, and it was enchanting.  I was conducting music in my mind.  What a joyful creation.  To create a base note, I realized that I had to ask for it; a split second later it would appear, at the right time, resonant and of quality timbre.  Or not.  You see, I had to ask for the note to appear, if I wanted to make some conscious change to the music.  Just as in a dream, the music mostly arose without conscious intervention, and included multiple parallels of information.  Some of the music was foggy, just as in a dream some images are bare outlines of ideas, not vividly displayed.  I’ve come to the conclusion that consciousness must emphasize and amplify unconscious signals in order for them to emerge.  Where consciousness relates backwards to unconsciousness through directions to do various processesses, it has a bottleneck of attention, and can only process 4 or 7 things at once.  But the mind itself has virtually unlimitted capacity for processing multiple streams of information.

You can see the multiple streams being processed unconsciously, and arising in consort into consciousness, and how conciousness then directs the unconscious processes, all in dreams.  There may be hazy indistinct ideas surfacing, and as you pay attention to one, the images congeal, and as they congeal, your interest and the mysterious muse work together to create some novelty. 

What a blast.

Now or never?

This is from a column that Jon Carroll wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1995.

SO THEN JEANNE STEAGER died of multiple head wounds, died instantly within sight of a gigantic plaster Santa Claus two days after Christmas. She was the first person I actually knew who died.

And what I could remember about her was her plans. What I could remember about her was the neat rows she had set down for her life, the lines on the graph paper that stretched in pleasing geometry well into the future.

I doubt that she was thinking, when she turned her head and saw the truck coming, “Well, there goes that trip to Greece.’’ But I thought that, later. I thought that the overlooked corollary to “it’s never too late’’ is “it’s never too early.’’

The day after Jeanne Steager died, I went into Mr. Stern’s office and quit my job. I was out of there in an hour; I was back home for lunch. It’s never too early. Plans are just guesses.

I SUPPOSE I AM bringing tidings of subversive cheer; I suppose I am suggesting that you consider a change. Quit your job if you hate it. Go on. I know these are hard times, and people fall off the edge, but God is passing out brain tumors too, and you might as well take the plunge. The plunge is all we’ve got.

When you’re young you think that life stretches out indefinitely and you can take this crap for another decade. And the lesson of Jeanne Steager is, No, you bloody well can’t. Life is of varying lengths, and actuarial tables are only averages, and sometimes you gotta close your eyes and jump. Even if it’s scary; especially if it’s scary.

Easy for me to say now; I have my dream job. I have my dream job because I quit that other job; that’s a fact. Transcendence happens at precisely the same rate as that other stuff. As Wendell Berry says: Practice resurrection.

The whole column is here.

Articles against wage slavery and against working altogether are here.

Technology empowers.

Children and retards can pull a trigger. Only smart people can make bombs, but anyone can explode them.

Our Main Monkeys, the Alphas of our troups, are sometimes as retarded as Bush.

So. Conclude. Fit it together, and conclude. Technology is not benign. Say it 3 times.

Coconut trees in a grove, a pleasing mate, a little brood. Is it benign to wish for more? Icarus flew towards the sun, and fell. Nuclear war. If we had multiple homestead planets to play with, we would have chances to take. This risk is the bet of an addicted gambler, expecting a rare reward.

Google Earth. Our planet has a creeping suburbia, polar bears have penises and vulva, burnt Teflon and Scotchguard are persistent bio-chemicals that will poison more than 100,000 years of earthlings. Technology.

Coconut trees and bamboo hut.

Vacuum cleaner and well lit mansion.

Do you have free will? What is your ant choice on this colony?

Robot shoots wireless taser missiles

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Taser, Inc. has announced a self-contained taser missile that’s fired from a shotgun. PopMech has a video, which shows the creepy little thing being fired by a robot.

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Continuing to strike fear into the hearts of, well, everyone, Taser has released an electrified round that works with any 12-gauge shotgun. The Wireless eXtended Range Electronic Projectile, or XREP, is a fin-stabilized, self-contained round with no wires leading back to the gun and a maximum range of 100 ft.

We require a greater than current technology to sustain our current population. The other choice would be to reduce our current population.

Why we love steampunk: Annalee Newitz

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Annalee Newitz tries to figure out why we love steampunk:
I think the popularity of steampunk also expresses our collective yearning for an era when information technology was in its infancy and could have gone anywhere. In 1880 we hadn’t yet laid the cables for a telephone network, and computer programming was just an idea in Ada Lovelace’s head. Nineteenth-century technology was often operated by factory laborers, and it meant backbreaking work and the ruination of healthy bodies. Information technology, to the 19th-century mind, would be something that set us free from brutal assembly lines.

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One hundred years later, I wish it were so. Information technology has its own brutal assembly lines, mind-numbing data work that cripples our fingers with repetitive strain injuries and mangles our backs with the hunched postures required to work at a computer all day long. Seen from this perspective, steampunk is an aesthetic that tells the truth about us. We are no better off than our Victorian ancestors, bumbling into the future with crude technologies whose implications we barely understand. But let’s make our devices pretty, at least. Let’s remember the days when the machines that now cage us promised liberation.

Free will

Newscientist ran an intruiging article about new understanding of the nature of human consciousness in relation to free-will. It led me search for more info, and I found these sources

From Newscientist:

What they have revealed is that a good 90 per cent of what most people do in any day follows routines so complete that their behaviour can be predicted with just a few mathematical equations.

Meditators quickly come to realize that what we think we are “doing”, is actually not consciously decided upon – it only seems that way after we notice what we did. Try to stop your thoughts, and you will quickly see that you don’t decide to have them. At least, the decision is not merely a simple matter of consciously directing attention.

Where our information processing becomes conscious as awareness may be analagous to how photons collapse from a wave of indeterminate, volume filling potention, to discreet moments of time and space. The discreet moments of consciousness react with the wavefronts of the unconscious information being processed, analagous to electron clouds refracting and deflecting non-discreet wavefronts of light. I use this analogy to imply that conscious awareness may not directly cause our willed actions, and may usually only seem to exert influence, but that it is also a part of the underlying system, and so influences causation.

Still wondering about light.

I’m trying to learn more about light, and will post here a few thoughts and things I need to learn.

• The double slit experiment was performed using one slit, having the photon emit through it at one of two possible points in time. This is weird to nth power. The photon is not only occupying a volume of space, it is occupying a volume of time. The 1st photon is interfering with a 2nd photon that crosses through the slit at a separate point in time! An alternate interpretation is that a single photon is emitted from either points in time at once, and that time itself does not collapse into a discreet moment until the photon gives up its energy. Either way you look at it, time itself has a wave like property – it fills a volume of space, and is only measured in discreet time/space locations during interactions.
• A photon not only occupies a volume of space equal to its wave-front, but moves through space exhibiting the characteristics of of a wave – it has crests and troughs of (?positive and negative potential).
• Individual photons are completely polarized. Their polarization state can be elliptical, circular, or linear.
• Parabolic reflectors can be made of a grid mesh of wire. Photons with a frequency wider than the mesh will be either reflected or absorbed.
• Light can be either reflected, refracted, or absorbed. These correspond to mirrors, prisms, and antennas or faraday cages or black objects.
• Light reacts with a surface and reflects depending on the angle of the approach to the surface, the wavelength, and the properties of the surface. There will be a % of light that can be expected to bounce, a percent expected to be absorbed, and a percent expected to be refracted and travel through. I’m suspecting here that the percentages should be able to be calculated based on the size of the “holes” in the material, analogous to the size of the holes in a grid mesh of a parabolic antena reflector, compared to the wavelength of the light.
• All objects behave as light, in that they have a frequency, depending on their speed. So a fast moving human being could theoretically pass through a very tight diffraction grating.
• One big hole in my understanding is what is required to make an object opaque (either absorbing or reflecting, but not refracting). I’m assuming that a two dimentional plane requires a boundary of mesh of atoms that are opaque to the wavelength that has holes between the atoms that are smaller than the wavelength – like a wire mesh antenna reflector. If so then the photon interacts with the full plane bounded by its wavefront all at once, in order to “decide” that it has no probability to pass. Consider the edges of a wire mesh designed to reflect/absorb all radio wavelengths greater than 1 centimeter. Light of a 1 centimeter wavefront width that hits 50 percent of the area of the edge will either be absorbed, or pass behind the grid. The photon must have knowlegde of the potential reactions throughtout its full wave-front all at once to know if the surface is fully opaque. The single photon calculates the probability of its interacting with the edge of wire mesh – 50% probability to pass, 50% to be absorbed. It can not make that calculation without “interaction” with its full wave front at once. The wave front that interacts and is either refracted, bounced, or absorbed, makes that decision based on the full surface of what the wavefront encounters. And the “surface” of the wave front would be defined by the width of its frequency plus an as yet undetermined width of nearby points in time.

The double slit experiment is further proof that the wave-front interacts with full surface – if the photon travels through two pinholes instead of one, it will interfere with itself.

Update: I just woke from some nightmarish dreams. I think they were sparked by the deeply disturbing nature of light. In one image i was in a confined to a small room, listening to an unknown voice that was outside the door. I was told by this unknown force that a test of trust was required. I then learned of a bag covering my head, which some helpful assistants in my room removed. Upon it being removed I saw a dark shrivelled mumy shaped demon, clawing threateningly towards my face. That freaked me out enough to wake up, and wonder why the anxiety. Some force outside my room was demanding that I trust something, something uncertain and possibly not knowable, and until I do, I may see it manifest as a demon.

The anxieties are provoked by the cognitive dissonance invoked by the facts that 1) photons (and by extention electrons and atoms and molecules when they act in quantum ways) exist in a wave front all at once, performing probabilistic calculations while interacting with mater through refractions and bounces throughout this volume of space/time, and then quantizing locally, and 2) that photons perform probabilistic caluclations – their actions are random and unknowable yet scattered through mathematically defined through probabilities and 3) that photons wavefronts entangle with themselves and each other across limitless distances and even through some volume of time. That information is truly spooky. A demon clawing at my face indeed, until I can trust the underlying and unknowable source forever only outside my ability to perceive.

One thing it seems that I was mistaken about in my understanding of the location of the wave-front of a photon; a photon wave-front is not defined by the width of its frequency. Sometimes the direction of a photon is “unknown”, and so it does not have a single direction until it quantises by giving up its quanta of energy. This is one reason why the double slit experiment works; the light source is non-coherent, meaning it is not a laser, and even one photon does not have a single defined direction. The light leaving the source leaves in a scatter of different directions. The better way to visualise this is that the photon leaves as a wave with a spherically expanding wave front.

The Ashfar experiment gives the clearest visualation about what a photon is and does.

If you imagine a photon with a spherically expanding wavefront, whose wave front expands to 10 light years across, you can see that when the wave has been interacting through refractions and reflections throughout its volume, and then collapses only once its energy is absorbed in interaction with an electron. As soon as the electron on one end of the sphere soaks up the energy, 10 light years away the wave front also collapses.

Photons can entangle, and in the same way affect each other 10 light years away. Unfortunately we can not extrace information from the entanglement, due to some limitation about how once a quantum property interacts with an electron, non-local information collapses into local information. (or something like that that I can’t yet visualize).

Update: When you squint at a lightbulb and see lines of light and shadow through your lashes, remember that the shadows in the diffraction patterns were created by photons reacting with that space on your retina. Interference of waves means that the cancelled flat waves exert influence in that space.

Update: This net-cafe computer has only 10 bytes of ram, so it has to make virtual ram from hard drive space, which takes a lot of read-write time.  The computer is slower than my brain.  Twiddling of fingers, tightening of sphincter, general unease and impatience.  Forgetting my point.

Oh ya.  You don’t need 180 plus I.Q. and a decade of training in maths to question the implications of double slit experiments.  A little focus and a little imagination will push out a new generation of conclusions.  Some of those must die, some will reproduce.  Focus, and imagination.  I’m working with limited hardware here, and my software is not designed for the problem.  You don’t need Photoshop 8.0 on a Pentium 4 to work with images – a 386 and Paint.exe can work.

My conclusions were that the “ether” restricts the speed light because “discreet” points in space have an internet connection between them with limited bandwidth.  They can communicate non-localised “information” through unlimited distance because they contain more than 4 dimensions: each point holds a heart that has a wireless connection to all other ponts.  This dimesion can’t communicate ones and zeros faster than light though – only that a big non-local-wave has decided to crash and burn into an electron.  Ones and zeros are Big information that rely on electrons to quantize.  Up and down, in and out – electrons react with photons in measurable ways; yes, I love all girls, but I’m either fucking or not fucking – the all pervasive and indeterminate love of the photon can only orgasm into one electron, and that is what we use for “information”.  Electrons are the pussies of space, making photons commit, spewing out baby photons.  Without electrons there is no discreet shape to space.  Space is not continuous, it is made of bubbles that touch each other, and that include wireless connections between each other.  The thinking behind this would take some effort to document, but seem to follow from rational step by step logic to me.  Interference patterns infer that space interacts with photons, and that photons exert positive and negative wave-like influence upon vacuum.  Therefore vacuum can hold charge.  The charge is localised.  The speed at which the charge travels is fixed, depending upon the quality of the photon (frequency of wave).  A wave front will collapse all at once (or at least within a finite volume of time that is smaller than can be communicated through the speed of light), transmitting the requirement to collapse at faster than light speed.  Ok, so each point in space limits speed, yet can transmit information faster than light – therefore we need at least one extra dimention, hidden inside the “points” of space.

These aren’t big leaps of insight.  The current maths that try to solve the questions posed by the double slit experiments involve extra dimensions being present at scales below the Max Plank smallest measurable scales.  This is infered by our measurements, but I’m neither smart enough nor educated enough to attempt to understand those maths.  What I can see is that “points” in space interconnect, that 3d is a surface that rests on deeper dimensions, like the top of our curved oceans rest on depths, and that causality in time is not step by step enough to make us at ease.

Update: This, from a comment on newscientist.com: …there is one view of quantum mechanics which has no anomalies: that there is no real particle, only a wave packet. The particle is only an expression to signify the point at which a wave packet interacts with our apparatus. One wave packet can interact only once, giving the impression of one particle.

Light is weird.

Atoms can release some of their energy, in discreet packets of photons. They pay for this release by having the outer shell of electrons drop down into an orbit closer to the nucleus. They can also receive energy first, in the form of electrons or photons, and then re-release the energy as photons – that is how flashlights and lasers work.

Photons are totally weird. Two or more can occupy the same time and space, and when separated, they are so romantically entangled as to still behave as if they were one. Spin one, and the other will spin, no matter how far away it is.

And they tunnel through time. Take the point of view of a photon. As it is emitted, no time occurs at all until it it causes a reaction to another atom, no matter how far away. If you glance up to see a star that is 1 million light years away, that light took 1 million years to travel, however from the point of view of the photon, no time elapsed. If you were able to hitch-hike along on the back of the photon, you would experience no time elapsing from the moment you departed the star, until the moment you arrived on earth.

And photons are not even things. They aren’t shaped like balls, or cubes, or bicycles. They travel through two slits at the same time, yet react with stuff in discreet positions of time and space, as if they were things.

And they don’t respect the idea of speed. If I’m zooming down the highway at 100 miles per hour, and I have a slingshot that can release a marble at 100 miles per hour, if I shoot it ahead of me, the bullet will leave the car at 200 miles per hour, relative to the highway. If I shoot behind me, it will fall straight down, bounce a few times, and sit there quietly minding its business. Not so photons. No matter how fast my car travels, the photon will zoom out from the front of the car at the same speed as it leaves the rear. Photons make a mockery of the idea of relative speed.

If I were to accelerate an atom to near the speed of light, and send it out towards a detector located 4 light years away near the star Betelgeuse, and then after two light years this atom releases two photons – one aimed towards the detector near Betelgeuse, the other towards a detector on earth, both photons will arrive at both detectors at the same time. The photon arriving at Betelgeuse will arrive at nearly the same time as the atom; the time difference coming because the atom is travelling just under the speed of light, as it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an atom to 100% of the speed of light.

If you accelerate matter close to the speed of light, it also starts to tunnel through time – the closer you get to the speed of light, the less time you will experience passing – so if you left earth on a rocket and zoomed about for a distance of 100 light years at 99% the speed of light, when you arrived back on earth it would be about 101 years later, and you would have only experienced about 1 year of travel.

Light totally messes with time and space. This means that time and space are also totally weird. Photons can entangle, and affect each other at any distance, making the distance of space meaningless. Fom their perspective they take no time to travel, yet from the perspective of photon detectors, they travel at a constant speed. They have no discreet location and behave like a wave, yet interact only in discreet packets of energy with discreet location and time.

We can only describe how light behaves, and what it does. We aren’t able to visualize it as a thing. Things require locations – they occupy a specific shape and volume of space. A photon (or packet of energy) occupies a range of space all at once, a range that is as wide as its wavelength, which can be from really small (one plank length of 10 to the minus 35 meters) up to hundreds of thousands or more miles wide, but when it interacts with anything, the photon disappears and gives up its energy to whatever absorbs it, usually by either bumping off an electron from an atom, or raising an electron up to a higher orbit around the nucleus. The photon didn’t bump into the electron, like a billiard ball might bump into a beach ball. It was a wave front that crashed onto a beach full of beach balls, and instantly disappeared after moving one random beach ball.

And different wavelengths of light react with different types of beach balls. Visible light travels through glass, while infrared will be absorbed by it, making the electrons move faster and so heating it up. X rays go through wooden walls, but not lead. Each frequency reacts differently with different types of matter. They also travel relatively faster or slower through space than each other, with a short frequency that occupies less space, like gamma radiation, moving fast, with a long frequency with a wider wave-front, like infrared, moving slower.

If I were an atom of plutonium, I’d be feeling too cranked up, and want to wind down a bit. I’d let off little excess energy by sending out a photon. Ah, now I’m less hot, more relaxed, less energetic. The photon ripples through space/time, travelling in a direction and with a wave-front-width, passing through and past barriers, until one particularly sexy atom catches it’s attention, at which point it disappears in orgasmic union with the atom, imparting its energy as hyped up heat.

This is where the idea of entropy comes from. That there is a finite amount of atoms and photons, and all that they can do is radiate into each other. After billions of years of atoms orgasming into each other, all the atoms will be at the same temperature – none hotter than the other. Since energy can only be extracted from a difference in temperature, there would be no more possible chemical or energetic reactions. Everything would be at just slightly above absolute zero in temperature, with no more photons being released, and no more chemical reactions. Entropy means that we can move matter and energy around, but doing so mushes up the average temperature, until we have no temperature difference left with which to use to move stuff around. On earth we can get around entropy by bringing in an outside source of energy; the sun. Without that the best we could do is burn matter into heat to keep our houses warm, until we’d have to resort to burning our own houses.

If there were some way to get energy from outside the universe, then it could sustain life forever. Some physicists believe that since space itself is a quantum foam of particles coming into being and falling back into non-being, it may be possible to extract energy from the background potential-of-being that empty space possesses. Vacuum energy is no more preposterous than the big-bang.

Space is weird – it entangles with each other across limitless distances, boils with particles coming out of nothing and going back to it, warps itself into strange shapes that make time slow down, and limits the maximum speed at which objects and information can travel. And weirdest of all is that it allows for us to have subjective experience; a knowingness aspect to our sense perceptions.

What percentage of us have personality disorders?

The mental health statistics vary widely. Near as I can find, a minimum of 10% of people have a personality disorder. This article at nomarriage.com speculates that the mental health community grossly underestimates the figures, and concludes with:

What we have here is a medical community that is afraid to say that a big percentage of American women have very serious mental problems.

Most people occasionally show personality disorder traits, so having cognitive deficits and being nuts is somewhat of a sliding scale, rather than a black and white issue.

Nomarriage.com is great misogynist fun. Misogyny and misandry and misanthropy all hold pertinent and impertinent truths. Misogyny is better understood by including the context of misandry. Both are better understood by a keen inclusion of the wisdoms of misanthropy. My counsel and aim has always been to use the system. If 100% of what nomarriage.com says about women and western feminist women is true, what else is true, and then what? People tend to suck, but it can still be a great ride.

At least, if you aren’t attached to a nutter. The mood over at thingsmygirlfriendandihavearguedabout.com is way too familiar. Nothing worse than someone threatening you with their mood. My mood is fine, thank you, no need for it to be adjusted by any pissyness.

Over at the Tucker Max message board, statistics are ignored, and people talk about how to spot the signs that a guy is fucked up, or signs that a girl is fucked up.

I’ve been thinking of this as I am finally dating someone who isn’t nuts and who enjoys the simple pleasures of making each other happy. We are very happy. How hard was this to find? Like finding lettuce in the canned beans section.

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel has done studies that show that ethics professors are less ethical than average. It turns out that being good at thinking about how to be nice and kind isn’t related to being nice and kind. How kind we are is based on our emotional regulation and empathy. People have a set state of how happy they are, plus people vary in their ability to regulate their mood. So some people are moody and cranky and bothersome about it, and no amount of conversation will resolve their trouble. That’s why mood is the most important factor in a mate.

How human are we on blogs?

Tom Robbins, in his novel Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, talks of six qualities unique to humans, but not possessed by most of us. Comments mine.

1. Humor. Not slapstick, but humor that delights in the shock of unexpected re-cognition. Humor irreverent to its core, able to wink at itself.
2. Curiosity about things that do not relate to your well-being.
3. Imagination. In order to see reality, you need to use your imagination.
4. Eroticism. There are levels of eroticism, from the most physical up to kundalini up to devotional up to non dual tantra. Monkeys masturbate, but a monkey can’t give good head. Mixed with the other 5 uniquely human attributes, the sexual can be fully human.
5. Spirituality. Enriched by and requiring all 5 other human attributes.
6. Rebelliousness. Rebelliousness is radical curiosity, radical humor, radical imagination, radical eroticism, radical aesthetics. The decision to refuse the bargain of accepting social limitations for the payoff of social acceptance. Rebelliousness is not self-interest gone wild. Unless you consider the terrible two’s rebellious. Rebelliousness as a human trait wonders at boundaries and takes a part in their creation. God grant me the wisdom to accept what I can not change, change what I can, and to see the difference. And to choose a choice that makes things gooder.

It is a rare blog that shows all the human attributes. Do we mute our sexuality on geek blogs? Mute our humor on political blogs? Is it that we don’t give voice to all ourselves, publicly, or is the problem with the authors command of their full humanity?

Visualizing, part 3

In my first post about visualizing, I mentioned that as I can’t vizualize well, that the parts of the brain most responsible for visualizing are not directly hooked up to my speech centers, I don’t have a good direct conscious control and integration with visualizing, and clear visions happen for me only in dreams.  This led me to wonder how to sneak around in my brain to get indirect access to the powerful image making parts of me.

But I had missed a clue.  I already get images all the time, through metaphors in my thinking and writing.  I don’t see images clearly, but the sneaky image creator has been speaking to me all along, and is hooked up quite nicely already to my speech centers.

I’m still curious about getting more clear visuals.  I have friends who spend hours each day with Buddhist visualization practices who can dream up vast and detailed scenes at will.

Rites of passage

I hate Brit men. They are always taking the piss. And I have no interest in Premier League Football. Why would anyone care who wins? Most male competition seems squirelly to me.

Here is what I mean by squirelly. At age 22 I was earnest. So I sat in a grove, to meditate. In this grove was a comfortable 3 walled cabin on stilts. A squirrel nested in the eaves. As I sat perfectly still, he would poke his head out, explaining what tentative means. A tentative step, then a dash back.  Each try he’d advance an extra step, until after ten minutes he’d scurry out to expose his full body length on the beam. Then dash back! I never moved.

I never moved.

Squirelly is getting all excited about your own emotions and fears, building up big stories, dashing forth and running back, while nothing at all is going on.

So I hate Brit men. English Premier Football? What the fuck is that? What are you getting all worked up over?

But I have come to see that there is some strange bizarre and sickly twisted humor in how Brits keep hitting each other over the head with insults.  The movie Quest for Fire was set in Britain.  One tribe that was doing well enjoyed chasing any male outsider into the marsh, slinging arrows at him, dragging him into a circle of people who laugh and point, and then watching him have sex with the fat chick.  Brits are supposed to be all about Guvenor This and Lady That, but they are all about taking the piss.

The picture is congealing that personal development requires tests and hardships.

Most traditional cultures have rite of passage ceremonies, for men at least, that are grueling.

There is mounting evidence that these actually help adolescents grow up.

Mirroring self deception

Dale Carnegie said that to win friends and influence people, one should avoid finding fault, and praise. If some critique might be useful, it should be put forth in a way that can be easily listened to, by avoiding blame and surrounding it with real praise.

There are times when I get a strong urge to burst balloons. Some people like to point out the inane and damaging “logic” that fundamentalist Christians and Muslims use. We get this strong urge to burst their balloon. For their own good.

People don’t appreciate attempts at having their bubbles burst. It can feel like an attack. Invasive. Abusive, even.

And it’s much easier to be critical face to face. In print, people tend to follow this principle:

Modern Thinker talks about the difference between “two general theories of truth, called the correspondence theory and the coherence theory.”

The correspondence theory is also called realism and is the theory used by science : it assumes that an object is what it appears to be, that is, an object is made of matter. In this theory, objects are independent of the observer who is looking at them, so they are not mental creations.

The coherence theory assumes that objects are not self-evident – their existence has to be explained. This theory is rather like a jigsaw puzzle ; every bit of explanation has to be mutually compatible with all other bits, so that everything fits together coherently. Any contradiction indicates a defect in the theory. The thinker searches for patterns in ideas over the whole range of his interests. For example, the patterns of power that he detects in forms of religion need to be compatible with patterns of power in other domains, such as social relationships. Hence the coherence theory is the hallmark of system thinking. System thinking is pattern thinking. It is the theory that I espouse.

He then goes on to mention:

The coherence theory presents a major problem to analysis since contradictions are not allowed. In the early years of my psycho-analysis I had managed a few times to construct an apparently coherent psychology that embraced all my current ideas. Then a new psychological fact would present itself to me, one that just could not be fitted into my framework. So my intellectually-neat theory would collapse in ruins, leaving me lethargic, depressed and discouraged for some time afterwards.

So bursting his own bubble, with his own effort, was a real drag. No wonder that people get really pissed off, and might even tell you to “go to hell”, if you seem critical.

But not all criticism gets this response. The theory of shadow issues says that we only get really pissed off if the criticism has some nugget of truth in it. Some nugget that we don’t want to own. Otherwise the criticism seems so off base as to be irrelevent, and we aren’t so touched, emotionally.

Most of us don’t receive criticism well, but sometimes we don’t receive it at all. I’ve been intimate with a few people who seemed completely incapable of introspection. This may be difficult to imagine, but they were incapable of holding a negative opinion about their self – it was too painful and caused too much cognitive dissonance, and so it never happened. If some critical remark hit a bit close to home, it would be fended off. One usual way would be to deflect it with something like “never mind about me, you are even worse”. Ya, my shit stinks. Ok, yes, it does. And when can the topic get back to you? Never. Never is when. And have a little bit of stinky rage for your efforts. Most of us are more normal, and only sometimes react with anger to well meaning public or private criticism – I mention the extreme case just to highlight how extreme we can be. All of us.

Communicating is a two way street, but sometimes you bump up into off ramps and detours and one way lanes, and there is just nothing you can do.

Update: A few days ago I came across a quote by a pscychiatrist regarding the difficulties of giving critisism, especially when denial may be involved. He ended his article by saying that he has discovered that it is a waste of energy to try to battle against the impenetrable defences of religious thinking – religious thinking is stronger and will win.

On a more encouraging note, I saw the movie “The Queen” today. The plot centered around the Royal Family’s unemotional response to Princess Diana’s death, and Tony Blair’s attempts to encourage the queen to be more vocal, and so quell a rising negative sentiment to the Crown. At the end of the movie, Blair is the epitome of tact and diplomacy, and makes a genuine connection with the previously incalcitrant Queen Elizabeth. I marveled at the skill and discipline required. I take too much delight in the thrust and parry of good verbal joust to pay enough attention to effective diplomacy.

It does seem that there are times when even the most skillful and well meant communication will have no effect on tough defences of denial. Anyone who has argued with fundamentalists will soon see this.

I’m also becoming curious as to the biological underpinnings of denial. The personality disorders, such as histrionic, narcissistic, and borderline, all involve some emotional disregulation and denial. Lithium increases the thickness of grey matter in one part of the brain that can use reason to regulate emotional responses. Genetics have influence on peoples tendencies to go allong with what authorities dictate, which also means swallowing conflicting beliefs, which requires more denial than being an individualist does. Nature and nurture both play a part.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, is true often enough to hold meaning. People with fundamentalist parents, or parents who are extra controlling or histrionic, are likely to have a greater propensity to be in denial – of course not knowing it – otherwise it wouldn’t be denial.

Sad as failures to communicate can be, I’ve come away with a few rules of thumb. When one person starts to be abusive with speech and wishes ill will through curses, such as “go to hell”, or “I hate you”, or “you are shameless”, then there is nothing to do but retreat. When a person is so invisible to themself to not even notice the need to hold values of at least trying to be helpful, all hope is lost.

My attempts at being helpful can backfire. I can come across as being hurtful and betraying the element of respect that makes up the bonds of connection. However confused my attempts are, the fact that I try to be helpful makes a fundamental qualitative difference.

There are people who refuse to see the profound difference between retributive hurtful anger and well intentioned folly that causes pain, and will meet out one for the other.

How we think

If you spend some time on web discussion boards, you will soon see that most people don’t alter their ideas. Once they write down their thoughts, those thoughts are statements of who they are, and who they are is to be fostered through aliance and defended from attack.

It is actually painful to have cognitive dissonance. When reality impinges on our internal utopia, our brain hurts.

This is why Buddhists and others emphasize the importance of not being a wuss, to suck it up, and go into fear. Feel the burn. Practice saying ten times fast “I don’t know.”

How familiar are these concepts? Do they apply to you, or just to others?

Party Loyalty, apathy, habit, strong opinion with weak background information, impatient listening, bias, prejudice, superstition, egocentrism (self-centered thinking, self-serving bias), socio-centrism (group bias, the herd instinct, bandwagon effect), peer pressure, conformism, provincialism, distrust of reason, relativistic thinking, scapegoating, rationalization (in the sense psychologists use), wishful thinking, short-term thinking, selective perception / attention, selective memory, overpowering emotions, self-deception, face-saving, fear of change.

Thinking clearly is hardly a common-sense ability. We all have had forehead smacking moments where the person we are talking to is dead set stubborn on being a Jehova’s Witness about their ideas.  All talk and justification, faith and emotion growing stronger in the face of opposing evidence. No one is immune. The brain is wired to think emotionally. Cognitive dissonance hurts.

And we don’t have the tools to see our self deceptions. We need to learn them.

A seemingly separate issue is how to remain human while thinking logically. Have you noticed that some techy/geeky blogs are dry as triscuit?  Integrating ideas has stages, and these include integrating mental space with physical and emotional and sexual space.

So don’t expect your Baptist neighbor to stop feeling guilty about masturbating.

It all comes down to integration. Ideas are not our heirloom companions securely organized in our photo-albums.  Ideas aren’t held and felt in the gut. They are connect four pieces; it is how they link up that makes them work.

There are at least 4 broadly recognized stages of organising ideas:  These are not styles of thinking, they are levels of ability.

The four stages of thinking which have been proposed include: the dualistic stage; the multiplistic stage; the relativistic stage; and the constructed knowledge stage.
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The model upon which these stages are based has been proposed by a number of researchers, including Perry (1970); Magolda (1992); and Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger & Tarule (1986).

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According to the model, a dualistic thinker views knowledge as a collection of facts, presented by an expert and authority (the professor). In this stage, the role of the student is to receive the ‘truth’ from these experts and to learn these facts. New concepts and requests for their own ideas or interpretations of issues and information tends to confuse students at this level.

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A student at the multiplistic thinking stage is able to allow that knowledge is diverse and that not all domains are comprised of facts or ultimate truths. In some areas, such as the social sciences or humanities, for example, there is much that is yet unknown, and experts may not always agree on what is true. Students tend to base their approach to learning in this stage on finding out what the individual professor expects of them, in order to provide answers which fit with the professor’s views, primarily with the goal of achieving good grades.

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Relativistic thinking, the third stage of development, is where students begin to understand that the validity of ideas is often dependent on the context and that their own ideas can be equally as valid and important as those of others. An instructor or professor in this stage is viewed more as a supporting individual or a model, as opposed to an expert or authority figure.

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In the final stage of development, the student reaches what is called the constructed knowledge stage, where integration of different ideas with one’s own takes place, evolving from a synthesis of existing knowledge as well as one’s own experience and ideas. In this stage, then, the student is viewed as autonomous, is able to work independently, and is open to other answers; the instructor or professor is now viewed as a colleague or a mentor.

Big problems in communication arise when a person talking from one level, or stage, talks to a person coming from a different stage. Rational scientists have nothing of interest to say to fundamentalist true believers. The true believer is mentally incapable of organising ideas at the rational level – the rational ideas are effectively meaningless to them.

But it doesn’t end at rationality. Rational people also have a level of cognition just out of reach. And when they hear information organized in this out of reach way, it seems irrelevent. A person may be literate enough to follow a cook book recipe, but unable to grasp the metaphor and irony in a piece of prose poetry.  Some define several levels of organisation more refined even than the constructed knowledge/systemic thinking stage.

The human capacity for self-deception is boundless.  We have to be on guard against ourselves, constantly seeking out internal inconsistencies.  We have them.  The trick is to deliberately seek out those mental places that makes us squeamish.  Uncomfortable truths are the most interesting.

We can’t know what we don’t know. And we don’t know how the next cognitive organization level works. When you were 3 you thought that if you dropped your Teddy on its head, poor Teddy would suffer. Explanations from your older brother had no effect. Consider that life might always be like this.  No matter how smart and learned we are, we sometimes are not capable of knowing just how out of it we are.  Jehova’s Witnesses-R-Us.  Sometimes we have to be insulted, several times, before considering looking at things a new way.

Knowledge and how to organise it isn’t democratic; there will always be better explanations than we have.  A spirit of adventure and appreciation for the unknown, alongside a willingness to be an idiot, are pre-requisites for learning.