May 2004

 

Mind

 

I spent some time today at a beautiful place up in the hills west of Eugene, overlooking forest and Fern Ridge reservoir. But there is poison oak all over the place.

 

I’ll believe anything, about now, if it’s interesting.

If it’s boring I won’t believe it.

 

My mind is like a dog: I have to give it something to chew on or it’s going to chew on me.

 

Sleep is a subtle thing. I have to slow down for it.

 

I’m in drifting mode, in which I do not follow directions, especially my own. Drifting is my way of escaping through the looking glass. Most of the time I can’t do it, because I’m governed by all the things I think I should be doing. I can always think of one more thing to do. I can think of things for you to do.

 

Do you remember when getting in a car and going somewhere far away was romantic?

 

At what age do children develop long-term memory, the ability to remember events?

 

We hurt ourselves when we try for too much control over other people.

 

Crazy people, I’ve found, are sane a large part of the time. And sane people….

 

We get caught inside feedback loops, where we can’t do what we want to do because….

 

Even in the old days it was normal to wonder, now and then, if you were real. At least it was normal for zen masters and college sophomores. – David Brin, Kiln People

 

I would rather think we live on the edge of reality. The chaordic zone.

 

I think if I enjoyed things more I’d be greedy too.

 

 

Books

 

Read a personals ad today from a woman, unfortunately not in my age group (old), who wants a man who reads books, “and not books from Safeway either.” Truth is, sometimes I do read books from Safeway, when I’m desperate, when I haven’t got anything good to read – “good” meaning entertaining – and the library is closed, when I feel a depression coming on.

 

No biscuits and the coffee had a slight hint of fairy liquid. – Christian Thompson, That Which Doesn’t Kill You

 

“Fairy liquid?” I had to look that up in Google: “England’s favorite dish washing detergent.”  British crime novel. I didn’t realize. Now I’ll have to spend time in a foreign culture.

 

Why should things carry on the same way from one moment to the next? It seems there is something about life that causes a person to expect this when he ought not to. – James Whorton Jr., Approximately Heaven

 

I liked Approximately Heaven a lot. Ordinary small town southern people going through the absurdities of life, where you never know exactly what is going on but you keep trying to make it right. Funny, with little bits of off-the-wall wisdom. Made me feel more sane.

 

“Sometimes when you’re at a moment of crisis, the best thing you can do is become absent.”

“So you deal with it later on.”

“No. My point is, sometimes you skip the crisis, and when you come back, the problem’s gone.”

 

Don is the kind of guy who, if he has a problem, is inclined to wait for it to go away. His wife Mary is not. They’re working-class people short on money. He’s a college dropout electrician who does remodeling, mostly bathrooms. He says it’s not complicated to remodel a bathroom, although there is a wrong way to do it.

Mary is smarter than Don, as he freely admits, admires her for it, a college graduate librarian. They live in a fixer-upper house which Don is taking too long to fix up, so they’re living in a mess, and Mary is tired of it, tired of Don’s slow-moving, impulsive, child-like ways.

Don is goodhearted, sincerely loves Mary, but just can’t be bothered to do a lot. Presently unemployed, he likes to drink beer and shot the shit with his buddies, having fairly pointless conversations which mostly consist of kidding each other.

Don is without ambition. He lives in an accidental, “shit happens” world. Mary is more purposeful.

Don knows he screws up sometimes, like having a couple of beers before going to work for a customer who doesn’t like alcohol and losing the customer, but oh well, he’ll find more work. If it’s not in his nature to think ahead, it’s also not in his nature to worry much. He would be reasonably content if Mary weren’t unhappy with him.

Don has never been in trouble with the law. If he were to get busted it would probably be for drinking and driving, because any time is a good time for a beer. If you don’t drink and drive, how are you supposed to get anywhere?

When Mary decides to leave Don he escapes the problem by going on a trip with his friend Dove. After some rambling, Don slides sideways into change. When good fortune finally comes his way, it seems more like a series of accidents than anything he made happen.

 

 

Science

 

In March, for example, European scientists announced that one of their planetary probes had detected methane in the atmosphere of Mars – a possible sign that alien microbes live beneath the planet's surface. – Register-Guard

 

On Nova tonight a program about the earth’s magnetic field. They said it’s decreasing and may be reduced to nothing sometime in the next millennium, exposing us to more radiation from the sun. This may be part of a larger cycle where the earth’s magnetic field reverses about every 200,000 years or so. We’re about due.

After that another program on memory. They’ve reversed Alzheimer’s in rats by administering some kind of vaccine that helps clear out whatever it is that clutters and then deadens the brain. The vaccine was given to the rats first by injection into the brain and then by nose drops. They tried vaccine injection with humans but stopped after one patient died of brain inflammation. They’re going to try nose drops on humans.

They’ve also tried injecting cells which produce a growth factor into the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. Too soon to tell if it helps but one woman said she felt less confused.

 

… evolutionary change is seen as the result of life’s inherent tendency to create novelty…. All larger organisms, including ourselves, are living testimonies to the fact that destructive practices do not work in the long run. In the end the aggressors always destroy themselves, making way for others who know how to cooperate and get along. Life is much less a competitive struggle for survival than a triumph of cooperation and creativity. – Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life, 1996

 

Animal cells, he says, were invaded by bacteria that learned to work with their hosts, becoming permanent parts of the cell machinery. Symbiosis, different organisms working together, became one of the main mechanisms of evolution.

 

Recently I read that the main cancer causing agent in our environment is oxygen.

 

Close to two-thirds of people diagnosed with cancer now live at least five years. That’s up from a five-year survival rate of 58.8 percent in the late 1980s and early 1990s. – Wall Street Journal via the newsletter of the Oregon chapter of The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society

 

I’ve lived almost eight years since diagnosis with a form of leukemia, a cancer of the white blood cells. Two treatments with chemotherapy. First remission a little over three years. Present remission three years and two months. However, I have one of the most treatable cancers. Treatable but not curable, so far. Will probably always come back.

 

The air dances that honeybees do, to tell the other bees where the flowers are, are partly instinctive and partly learned. Each hive has its own versions.

…

… chimpanzees are able not only to learn many standard signs of a sign language, but to create new expressions by combining various signs. – Capra

 

Someone told me a long time ago that there are local dialects of bird songs.

 

 

Movies

 

Something’s Gotta Give: Pleasant. Nice to see a love story with a man in his 60s and a woman in her 50s, Diane Keaton, still beautiful. But Jack Nicholson, although he fits the part perfectly, has played himself, the smirking ladies man, at least one too many times. He’s not believable.

Funny, the women talk about his good qualities, but I didn’t see them. I wondered why Keaton’s character fell in love with him. He understands that she’s “formidable.” Is that enough? Maybe I missed it.

 

 

TV

 

Article on the Internet said The Guardian got cancelled because ratings were too low among the 18-49 demographic prized by advertisers. No room for adult drama in TV land.

The Guardian was about real people who kept falling off the edge. A reminder that life is always just an approximation.

Culturally, I wish the U.S. were less democratic. Maybe for that you need cable. Niche programming.

 

 

Bleep

 

Tonight I went to see What the Bleep Do We Know?, a sort of scientific/mystic documentary about ideas, wrapped around a little bit of story about a woman who has gotten stuck in mental feedback loops. Ideas from quantum physics and biology, and the philosophical implications.

At the subatomic level, matter is mostly space and very little matter. Even what seems solid, nucleus and electrons, are really only probabilities. Bleep says that at the subatomic level existence is not constant. Things blink in and out of existence. Perhaps into an alternate universe and back. I didn’t understand how they know this.

I know some aspects of quantum theory – e.g., that light behaves as both a particle and an energy wave – can be experimentally demonstrated. Quantum theory dates from a century ago, yet we’re still trying to work it into our everyday view of the world.

On the biological level, Bleep says, perception takes place in the brain and may not represent physical reality. When Columbus’s ships approached the new world islands, the natives were not able to see them until they were very close, because they had no mental concept to match the ships. So what are we not seeing, because we have no concept for it?

Also, our brains can process only a small part of the stimuli we receive. (And since civilization produces sensory bombardment, perhaps we process less of the total than “primitive” people. Or maybe different categories of stimuli?)

Every cell in our bodies has receptors that react to chemical stimuli produced by emotions. We get used to these emotions, even negative ones, and our brains rewire to reflect that, so we get trapped in these patterns of creating situations that produce the chemical emotions we’re wired for. We can interrupt these cycles and rewire the brain. If we’re used to being a victim we need to get out of that pattern.

Okay, that doesn’t take into account our physical/social reality, but still it’s worth considering. A therapist question is, “And how did you set that up?”

It is possible for some period to get outside the self, according to some of the people in this movie. We have, they say, all done it. These are the times when you are so wrapped up in something that you’re not aware of time, not aware of yourself. This is what some of them believe is an awareness of God. God as some hyperstate beyond the self.

The main point of the movie seemed to be that we don’t know what reality is, and we don’t know what the self is. The observer. Which you cannot locate anywhere in the brain. Which is a property of the whole body – each cell “knows” something. Which may not exist.

Second thoughts: Okay, at the subatomic level matter is mostly space; matter is also a form of energy; its existence and position is a matter of probability and seems to depend on the observer; matter can be in more than one place at the same time. So says quantum physics for about the last 100 years. But at our physical scale, matter is indeed solid, in one place at a time, does not depend on an observer for its reality, etc. So tell me again why quantum physics has important philosophical implications for how we see our everyday world?

 

 

Love

 

A woman friend explained it to me: men don’t talk.

 

Two-thirds of divorces after age 40 are initiated by wives, debunking the myth of an older man divorcing his wife for a younger woman, a new survey shows. – Register-Guard

 

In the real world people don’t make other people happy, unless there’s an awful lot at stake if they don’t.

 

Keep doing what you're doing, guys, treating love like a game of poker, where the only sure way to lose is to show your cards. – Farai Chideya, "Personal Voices: The End of an Era," AlterNet

 

I used to think men and women were magnets, and we couldn’t help attracting each other. We’re still magnets, but somehow our polarities got reversed.

 

Is marriage romantic?

Maybe after 20 years or so it just looks different.

 

 

Dreams

 

“I’m supposed to drive someone else’s antique car. Headlights are flames that have to be lit. I’m relieved that there is no crank on the front for a starter. Car is built like a very small house with a window instead of a windshield. I’m wondering if I can drive this.”

Life often seems undrivable, and it’s hard to see where we’re going.

 

So often in dreams I’m lost in a fog, trying to figure things out. Just an exaggeration of my waking life.

 

In my dream last night I was traveling north in someone’s car to Seattle where my older sister (dead) lived. Her house was full of her clan. I looked at her son and ex-husband and thought, but they’re dead. Small children there. I wondered if they were ghosts of her children when they were small, then thought they might be real and asked her whose children they were, but never got a straight answer. No idea what I was doing there, except in waking life I always go back to family when I’m stressed, because that’s where I feel safest.

 

 

Complexity

 

I’m taking a class, taught by Alder Fuller, and reading a book, The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra, on complexity, the science of complex systems.

Fuller says one reason he teaches the class is so he’ll have someone to discuss these ideas with. He teaches privately, outside the university system, in a rented industrial space in west Eugene. No tests, grades, papers to write.

He says complexity is the science of the 21^st century, a set of ideas whose time has come, but colleges are not teaching it. They’re still stuck in the “modern science” of the last 300 years, where you try to understand things by studying their components. E.g., cell biology.

 

Life exists as systems “far from equilibrium.”

Complexity theory says that humans, actually all complex systems, are “chaordic” – they live on the “knife edge of chaos,” the borderline between chaos and order. Which gives us flexibility, ability to change and evolve.

Complexity theory says that complex systems are constantly changing, matter and energy passing through us, but still maintaining our pattern of organization – in human terms, our identity – form and boundaries.

Life, in complexity theory, is a persistent pattern, like a whirlpool in a river.

Complex systems – technically systems described by equations with three or more variables – are self-organizing, self-making. We continually recreate ourselves, maintaining the pattern.

Not all complex systems are living – consider the whirlpool – but all living systems are complex.

 

The human genome, any genome, is not a simple genetic code, where a gene controls one trait. It’s a complex network, where genes influence the expression of other genes. The result is an emergent property of the genetic system.

Which is why genetic therapy may have a long ways to go.

 

Instead of being a machine, nature at large turns out to be more like human nature – unpredictable, sensitive to the surrounding world, influenced by small fluctuations. – Capra

 

Complex systems are all networks, in which every part influences every other part. So the properties of the whole system are network properties. They cannot be understood by simply looking at the properties of the parts. A brain doesn’t behave like a neuron. A society doesn’t behave like a collection of individuals. The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

 

All living systems are networks of smaller components, and the web of life as a while is a multilayered structure of living systems nesting within other living systems – networks within networks. – Capra

 

The smallest living complex system is a cell, but cells probably started, billions of years ago, as colonies of cooperating bacteria.

 

Similarly, the universe is a network of networks. So is the human body.

 

An ecosystem is also a complex network, with all the organisms involved influencing each other to produce emergent ecosystem behavior. The earth is believed to be a complex system of living organisms interacting with nonliving materials, producing complex cycles that maintain the Earth as a habitable planet. This planetary system is sometimes called Gaia.

The danger is that man may be derailing some of these planetary cycles, especially the one that maintains Earth’s temperature in a range suitable for human life.

 

The components of an organism exist for the organism’s functioning, but human social systems exist also for their components, the individual human beings. – Capra

 

Capra quotes Maturana and Varela: “The human social system amplifies the individual creativity of its components….” I haven’t found that to be true, at least not for this component.

 

Complexity theory has its own language, invented words, which takes some getting used to. The self-making property of complex systems, for example, is called “autopoiesis.” Words are also used in a specific, technical way. When they talk about “chaos,” they really mean on the edge of chaos, “chaordic.”  Complex systems on the edge of chaos, paradoxically, have a high degree of very complex order. Completely stable systems in equilibrium have little or no order. A human being in equilibrium is dead. Nothing is happening. The matter involved no longer, in the words of our instructor, “does tricks.”

“Order” means the degree of pattern, organization, complexity. Life systems are rich in complexity. Life on Earth has evolved in the direction of constantly increasing complexity.

Constant inputs of matter and energy are required to keep complex systems functioning, to maintain their pattern of organization, their structure. So are constant outputs of waste matter and energy. Complex systems are therefore known as “dissipative” structures.

Complex systems are islands of order, with permeable boundaries, in the midst of disorder. While the background universe may be tending towards disorder – entropy – complex systems tend toward more order.

A complex system is made up of structured matter, but what it is, is process, pattern.

 

Complex systems are stable – they maintain their present pattern – up to a point, but are sensitive to small changes, which can precipitate large changes. They have multiple potential stable states, and are prone to suddenly move from one state to another – like an avalanche. The Earth’s climate, a very complex system, moves in and out of ice ages quickly, in a matter of years rather than decades or centuries. (The temperature change, that is, takes longer for the ice sheets to form or melt.) Scientists fear that runaway global warming could also cause large sudden changes in global climate, to a new stable state we would have trouble living with.

 

Complex systems are self-regulating through internal feedback loops between their components. Feedback can be negative or positive. Negative feedback, like a thermostat, keeps a system in its present state. When it goes one way negative feedback pulls it back the other way. Criticism would be another example. American politics.

Positive feedback is self-amplifying – it pulls the system further in the direction of change, possibly destabilizing it towards chaos until the system, if it can, pops into a new stable state. Positive feedback gives a system the ability to change, adapt, evolve.

Negative feedback preserves system stability but can also make it rigid, so it can’t adapt to changing conditions in its environment. If the Earth’s climate changes drastically we might have to genetically engineer humans so they could adapt (this from a science fiction novel).

 

Behavior is an “emergent property” of a complex living system. It appears as a system reaches a certain level of complexity.

In complex systems, for example an ant nest, very complex behavior can emerge from just a few simple rules. So ants only need a few hardwired instincts to produce a functioning colony. The system is smarter than its components.

Mind is an emergent behavior of the brain system.

 

We are beginning to recognize the creative unfolding of life in forms over ever-increasing diversity and complexity as an inherent characteristic of all living systems. – Capra

 

 

Politics

 

Society is a network. We are nodes in the network. If many of the nodes are unhealthy the network will be sick. There is a bedrock nastiness to the U.S. that all of us feel. It’s the reason, for example, why we have high divorce rates. When you’re part of a network, what goes around does come around.

 

Deregulation, privatization and the sale of social or state property to transnational corporations are pursued with the slogans of freedom of the market and free trade.

…

Look at the example of Japan. Now there are many homeless. Ten years ago finding a homeless person was like finding a needle in the haystack. Upon arriving in Japan today, the blue tents where people are lodged are noticeable from a distance. There one meets men in dirty suits with dirty white shirts, still retaining their ties. Once they were businesspersons. Today they spend the night in parks or train stations. They are absolutely superfluous. – Maude Barlow, Portland Indymedia

 

Like Bush, Kerry wants to “stay the course,” only it’s the Clinton course he wants to stay.

 

The Nader campaign, which I support, is paradoxical. Media coverage that focuses on Nader’s threat to Kerry keeps much of Nader’s policy views from getting through, but if Nader weren’t a threat they wouldn’t cover him at all.

 

The low [U.S.] voter turnout … is not random among economic groups. Voting has fallen most sharply among those with lower incomes.” – Beth Shulman, The Betrayal of Work, 2003

 

Poor people figure the political deck is stacked against them and give up. Also they’ve got more important things to worry about, like survival.

Shulman says that higher divorce rates, lower marriage rates and domestic violence are all results of poverty. “Intact families living in poverty dissolve at double the rate of families above the poverty level.”

“Family values” depend on income.

Alcoholism, drug addiction and crime also increase as income goes down.

 

A staggering number of American men are involved with crime compared to other industrialized countries. Roughly 3 percent of the male workforce is incarcerated and about 9 percent is under supervision of the criminal justice system. By the mid nineties, one man was incarcerated for every 50 men in the workforce.

…

In 1995, California alone budgeted more for prisons than for higher education. – Shulman

 

Crime is the American form of revolution. It is the only form we’ve mastered, because most of us are incapable of large-scale organization.

 

I’ve read that once we were a nation of joiners, when people had to depend on each other. My niece told me that a small town in Alaska is still like that. If I moved there, she said, they probably wouldn’t care much about my politics. They would want to know if I would volunteer.

 

The liberals just want their Democrats back. Those bad boys.

 

My nephew says he voted against all incumbents in the primary. He figured they weren’t doing him any good.

 

“There is little thought given to the subsidies we give to the middle class and the wealthy.” Per year:

·        $61 billion – tax deductions for home mortgages

·        $140 billion – health insurance tax exemptions and deductions

·        $70-80 billion – pension deductions

Then there’s the $125 billion per year in federal corporate welfare – “tax abatements, price supports, tax shelters and subsidies.” – Shulman

 

If you look at how Bush does it, you can see that leadership is saying the same thing over and over again.

 

All those liberals who are afraid of George Bush don’t understand that when you’re afraid of someone the shoe is on the wrong foot. What you want politically is for people to be afraid of you.

Don’t ever pass up an opportunity to cause trouble.

The Greens don’t seem to care about pissing off the Democrats. What kind of attitude is that?

 

A populist movement needs to focus on the welfare of those farthest from power.

 

The U.S. problem in Iraq is that you can’t occupy a country by high altitude bombing.

 

I read that the median U.S. income for a family with children is $35,000 a year.

 

Oregon’s primary just happened. Eugene switched from a business oriented mayor/city council majority to a liberal one. It will be interesting to see what that changes. Apparently business interests have run Eugene for a long time.

 

When Charlton Heston dies, I hope someone remembers to remove his “cold dead hand” from his gun.

 

We need to look at political issues from the point of view of who gains, loses or is unaffected. If the federal government runs up huge deficits, for example, what parts of the population have their interests served and which do not? If we could tell someone how a particular policy would affect them, we could ask them to vote on a rational basis.

What’s in it for me?