A Christmas of Chaos and Ideas

So,
Lazarus slept in for Christmas morning, not getting up until about 10AM. Probably the last time that will happen for a while! Generally, I think he did really about as well as could've been expected. He quite liked going through his stocking and getting his present from Santa (a set of Doctor Who action figures). The opening of christmas presents proper, however, soon overwhelmed him. The chaos of that many excited people in one room is quite a bit to take for a guy who usually only sees his mom and dad in any given day. He still enjoyed things, but we had to periodically escape to the quiet upstairs and take a break. Still a couple of presents left to open for him. He just got beyond it after a while.

The sharing of ideas seemed to be a theme, perhaps mostly instigated by Sunshine and I who asked for bunches of technical books for christmas. We gave David a copy of SES which was well timed, as he asked me just last night were he should start with Wilber. Jeremy, prompted by our conversation last week gave me a copy of Mere Christianity which should prove interesting. It certainly seems as if a conversation of sorts may be starting.

Post intersubjective fireworks

It's late, about 20 minutes after midnight. Sunshine is awake because she's feeling ill. Dinner isn't going down so well with her or something. Meanwhile, I'm still up for a somewhat different reason, but in a way perhaps I too am trying to digest a spicy meal. (The process seems more pleasant for me. At least I'm not certain I want to know what the intellectual equivalent of hurling is.)

I had a very interesting discussion with my brother in law Jeremy about religion this evening. He is on a spiritual journey into deep Christian territory and it sounds as if he's been having some success. So we had a discussion about reality and scripture and (at least implicitly) about some integral ideas as well. All in all, it was quite a stimulating discussion, which I think left both participants with some new ideas to ponder. I'm not really sure that I can detail what those are. I could try, but I don't know that I've digested it fully. It certainly feels like I'm still digesting. My brain is sparking all over the place. I've been having some sparks already from my reading of the latest Wilber book, but the setting is certainly having an effect as well.

I do think I have a bit of a shadow regarding religion, and Christian religion in particular. I probably need to look into that. I've been keeping it mostly in check though, focusing past my xenophobia and attempting some embracing. Certainly have lots of opportunity this fortnight. Definitely in alien territory now. Not only am I surrounded by several seriously christian folks, but I'm hanging out in that oh-so-red state of Wyoming, which coming from liberal progressive London seems a bit like the far side of the moon. Living in the UK has definitely given me a new perspective on the US and Americanism.

Anyway, it will be interesting, and I think I am slowly evolving out of my fear of being different enough to engage with the alien and perhaps expand my rolodex of perspective. Certainly this is a pretty decent opportunity to do so as the in-laws are not only Christian (at least some of them) but are also intellectuals, which certainly does aid the conversation.

Meanwhile I'm becoming ever more curious about this Integral Life Practice thingy that Sunshine has gotten us. It will be interesting to discover if it is substance or pure product. It seems a hard thing to bottle, but maybe they've got some useful stuff in. (I love that particular bit of UK slang grammar.) I suspect I am going to end up sampling some of the on-line discussion and wander over to I-I sometime and see what's what.

Spark Spark Spark...

I do think that I should probably investigate Christian mythology a bit. Disturbing as it is, it is a dominant force in my culture and I probably need to understand that better. It might also be integral to addressing any shadow issues I have in there. Besides, it gives me a path to interesting conversations with the in-laws. All quadrant after all.

I don't think that I'm likely to find it a path to spiritual development. I suspect that I'm more likely to find mesh with something a little less literal and a little less deity centric. My gut feeling is to look at Zen or some such, but I don't know all that much directly about it. Most of my Buddhist knowledge is filtered through Sunshine or Ken Wilber. I haven't made much of a search along that horizontal path yet, though I'm beginning to get the first inkling that maybe I should.

Well... perhaps it is time to see if I can get the machine that goes ping out of my head and get some sleep before I wake Lazarus.

Longslit Spectrum of Consciousness

Ken Wilber's Integral Spirituality is turning out to be quite an interesting read. There is a big gap between this book and his previous ones (about five years or so) and that gap really shows. This new stuff has definitely stepped up a notch. It's a bit of a slow read, but is turning out to be quite an exciting and thought provoking one.

He's also made a fairly radical change to his spectrum model. Previously, his upper left evolved much along the lines of his original spectrum of consciousness model, and basically grafted meditative involution onto the top of the procession of waves from developmental psychology and the like. Thus one evolved up to the integrated 'centaur' and then started evolving into the transpersonal 'psychic', 'subtle', 'nondual', etc.

Now he's literally tipped this over on its side. Instead of grafting involution onto the top of developmental evolution, he's made them effectively orthogonal. Instead of a one-dimensional spectrum, we now have a two-dimensional lattice with evolutionary developmental structures as one dimension, and meditative state development as the other. Now he can explain how you can have highly developed 'spiritual' practice which is still stuck in a low level evolutionary state. No wonder I find spiritual text difficult to get into. Much of it is written from a lower evolutionary state. The Bible may be a glorious source of rich involutionary inspiration, but it is grounded in a 2000 year old worldspace and morality which seems barbaric, cruel, and totally incompatible with a modern global society.

It also helps to clarify to myself where I am in this AQAL setting, and why I was seemingly on the doorstep of the transpersonal but didn't seem to be aware of it at all. No wonder I've been looking for Buddhism for Gearheads. Perhaps this I-I "Integral Life Practice" kit that Sunshine is getting for Christmas will be something of that ilk. (Assuming that it isn't now too out of date with respect to this multi-dimensionality). Still, I guess the advantage of being at 'tier 2' is that I can reach down and pick out some of the wisdom from below. I can try and reinterpret Zen into a teal/turquoise worldspace, even if it's more work.

MY VISION IS IMPAIRED! I CANNOT SEE! (but perhaps a spark of enlightenment?)

Here's a new experience: blogging in bed with the sleeping baby. We're in Casper Wyoming, having arrived late last night after a long set of flights from London, and a long car ride up from Denver on icy roads. Wow. I'd forgotten how cold it gets here. I mean, I remember it intellectually, but he body forgets that feeling. It's cold here!

Anyway, in general the trip went pretty well considering. Laz slept for a lot of the trip, and didn't really seem to mind plane travel much at all. He was much less pleased with the car seat because Sunshine couldn't let him out of his seat and feed him without stopping the car.

This was of course a pretty large source of stress for her too. It really cuts her when he cries, especially if she feels like she could be doing something about it. This can also then strike the nerve in that deep wound of hers and trigger her lockdown reflex. That in turn, triggers her guilt spiral, and in general, it turns into a pretty ugly scene. She is making progress though, and at least now I feel like we are getting some understanding of what's going on and developing some methods for coping, at least with parts of it. I don't know about this deep wound. That anger/lockdown reflex seems pretty low-level and I think we may need to look elsewhere for very specific kind of help for that. Meanwhile, we can work on defusing some of the other interrelated issues ourselves.

Laz broke the eyestalk off the dalek this morning. (Actually, I'm not sure where that piece ended up... I need to find it before it causes more trouble). Anyway, now he has a fine example of that classic genre of children's toys, the slightly broken toy. (Actually he's got a few others, but this is a true classic. I guess I used to have a slew of legless R2D2 figures when I was a kid.) Actually I guess technically it was my toy, but Laz loves it so it's his too now. Besides, it much more fun to be played with (and to watch toys being played with). I'm not really much of a 'keep it in the box' sorta guy.

Laz has really taken pretty well to traveling. He seemed to enjoy his stay at the hotel in Amsterdam, and he has really taken to Kathy (Sunshine's mom). Usually, he has a bit of stranger fear around new people. It took him a while to warm up to Loren (my brother) and David (Sunshine's brother) when they visited, and Jeremy (Sunshine's other brother) is still a bit scary. But Laz is all over Kathy, climbing and laughing and even playing a bit of the chase game. Maybe he senses enough of Sunshine in her, or maybe she's just got "it" (whatever that is), but he has no stranger thing at all with her. (I can't imagine it is a memory from her visit when he was a week old, but maybe the internet chatting helped.) Who knows.

He's napping quite peacefully now, and I'm keeping watch so Sunshine can get some downtime with family. (She desperately needs the downtime too!) While we were putting him to sleep, I was again reminded of my technique for encouraging his sleep. It was one of my intuitive parenting discoveries from quite early on. Basically, while holding or touching him, I close my eyes and breathe slowly and deeply, trying to put myself as close to sleep as possible. (Indeed, the closer I am to nodding off the better.) Then its sort of a matter of just projecting that zone of calm at him. I know this sounds rather new-age goofy. It actually feels rather Buddhist to me, particularly this notion of generating 'sleep energy' (if you will) and embracing or channelling it to him. I suppose, objectively, that it is probably that he is picking up on a million non-verbal body language cues from me. Seeing as he isn't fully emotionally differentiated from Sunshine and I, and because he's still got that infant instinct to imitate, that he ends up adopting my calm to some extent.

Now what strikes me as really interesting this time, is that in Wilber's integral philosophy, both views are valid and useful. The hard-nosed objective view would be the processes as viewed from the 'right hand' (probably lower right?) viewpoint, and the goofy Buddhist version is the view from the 'left hand' inside. But the point is that both views are correct, and this may be the first time I actually 'get' where he's going with the post metaphysics, and how to relate 'science' and 'religion'. I might intellectually understand the objective view, but the Buddhist version is just as useful here in practice, and might even be more so for certain practices.

When I discovered this practice, it wasn't through the external objective view. I don't think about sending out non-verbal cues. I really do tend to focus on sending my 'loving sleep energy' at him. Similarly, when I'm trying to calm myself, I don't tend to think about flooding my brain with Serotonin or whatever the appropriate brain chemical is. I focus on finding center, mindful breathing, etc. But here's the really exciting bit. I don't have to abandon my 'hard-nosed' scientific training. I don't have to abandon my objectivity. In fact, I'm better off with both.

This is very interesting indeed, because it effectively dismisses one the biggest issues I've had with 'religion', which is that it seems to require me to turn of by brain. Faith without evidence is the goal. Indeed evidence may only hurt you. This often seems to me to be the voice of religion, at least much of I've met that calls itself religion. And I have serious moral objections to that sort of dogmatic approach. What's so attractive about Wilber's approach is that it is one of injunction and response. Effectively it is something like a spiritual scientific method. Integral spiritual training should sound like 'try this: it works!'. And indeed, I've tried something and it does seem effective.

What's more, the objective understanding I have of it doesn't reduce its efficacy! This has been one of my stumbling blocks in the past, probably a leftover of flatland philosophy. If spirituality is all in the mind, then what is the point? If Buddhist lovingkindness doesn't exist in the 'real' world, then how does it help? I seemed to have a hang up on reality. But of course, 'cyberspace' doesn't really exist either, but it is an eminently useful thing in it's own realm. Lovingkindness probably does have external correlates, and they may be quite complicated, but internally, in the human mind, they manifest in a fairly intuitive way.

And here's the truly shocking bit: the external 'real' world may NOT be the primary motive causation! There are indeed correlations between internal and external worldspaces. I have tended, in the past, to assume that the external factors were the causal reality, and the internal factors were mere side effects. But the truth is, that I don't really have much of a basis for that bias. It is a well known scientific trap to equate correlation with causation. Perhaps the flow of causality flows both ways. And if so, then that opens the door to a great many possibilities.

Waiting for the Sirens' Call

So, a late night at work, followed, apparently, by a slow train ride home. They just reported "severe delays" into Acton Town, my halfway point. So, since the carriage is relatively empty, I'll blog a bit on the laptop.

That's not the topic though, it's just a relatively pointless bit of background. The topic is more what I was musing on while walking to the tube station... touched off, in part, by the New Order song playing on my iPod. New Order often gets a bit of stick from music critics for their "adolescent" lyrics. Sometimes though even the simple can strike a nerve. I've always had a thing for "Regret" from their Republic© album, and in this case it's the title song from their latest album that lends the title to this entry which hits a little close to home.

The reason, however, will probably be left as subtext to whatever reader might eventually read this. I suspect that there are few enough of those anyway. Some might be able to put together a plausible hypothesis for the relevance, some might even jump to the wrong conclusion. In any event, I have not (at least yet) progressed to the point where I am blogging my innermost self to cyberspace. Does anyone actually? Certainly some people seem to get surprisingly intimate with the internet. Even so, something must always get left out. It's inevitable. Still, is such a universal intimacy even desirable? Is it an ideal to strive for, or just a very bad idea?

Why do we hide things from our fellows? Is it for defense? Perhaps. Certainly others can use your innermost thoughts in a way that might be hurtful to you. But is that just because we are insecure in ourselves? If we are really comfortable with our own selves, can our secrets still hurt us? Our current society is built around the principle that everyone is hiding something, so as a practical point, being completely honest is probably a potential detriment. But if this weren't the case, is that all that should hold us back? Assuming I'm not going to run for political office, then it's reasonably unlikely that anyone other than family or friends are ever going to read this. Surely I shouldn't want to hide things from them?

Or should I? Is intimacy always a gift? Is it always appreciated, or would some prefer not to know too much. Intimacy is, after all, not merely a sharing of "good stuff." What if a loved one discovers something ugly, that while 'true' is also hurtful. Is it always a good idea to strive for intimacy? I'm not sure that I know.

I am not a natural in this respect. It is not my instinctual nature to open up and share myself. At least some of that is self esteem, or the lack thereof. Some is probably socialization. For whatever reasons, I tend to play things pretty close to my chest.

Still, I have at least one extremely intimate relationship, and we work really quite hard to keep it that way. Still, this intimacy comes with a price, and the toll can sometimes be brutally high. Even with two people as modest, empathic and well meshed as Sunshine and I, the truth can be incredibly painful at times. It doesn't deter me from chasing that ideal in this one case, but it does give me great pause when considering revealing personal issues. Intimate secrets seem to me to be dangerous things and potentially heavy burdens that shouldn't be settled on those around you without serious consideration. I still don't know if it should be that way, but there it is.

Still, perhaps something is being lost. This self censorship certainly narrows experience. Perhaps great TBNNI lyrics were lost to embarrassment. Perhaps I had a brilliant thesis about a New Order song which has been left on the slag heap of other choices. I have been told that there are people, perhaps even potential readers, who would like to know me better. Perhaps they do. Perhaps they will. Perhaps even this blog will provide some of that knowing. If so, I wish them godspeed and hope that they do not regret the knowledge. I might, after all dear reader, be secretly evil.

TIMMY!

So, not only have the residents produced at least 2 major works this year, and a bunch of archival stuff as well, but they've started releasing a regular series of short videos on YouTube starring Timmy from Bad Day on the Midway. It's a bit like Jim's Journal and Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy, except of course from that disturbed Residents worldview. Give it a look:

Link to YouTube

Three Body Problem

Thich Naht Hahn's Anger is a fine book, as far as it goes. It does just fine at proscribing a technique for dealing with two-body toxic relationships, (feuding couples, warring nations, angry parents, etc). What it doesn't address, however, is the much nastier three body problem. What do you do when there is a third person involved? When there is not 1 bidirectional communication but three? Just to make it more complicated, lets make the three people span an enormous range in development both as wholes and even internally. Things get complicated. It's all well and good not to require mindfulness in your 2-body partner, but how do you balance the compassionate listener with the compassionate warrior in the 3-body case?

Wilber's Basic Moral Intuition: act to preserve the greatest depth for the greatest span. Yeah, fair enough, but what do you do in the real world when you are faced with incomplete knowledge. You know, that tricky little complication that gives political science, game theory and economics majors things to write theses about. What do you do when you need to balance the simultaneous needs of loved ones when hampered by incomplete knowledge about all three participants and when your own skills are, at best, untrained.

The answer, inevitably, seems to be that you make it up as you go. You can try and think as broad as you wish, but inevitably, it will boil down to flying by the seat of your pants in a fog without a map. And even previous experience is only so much help, because as Newton pointed out hundreds of years ago, the three body problem is unstable. Even the closed orbits are balanced on a knife edge and the slightest misstep sends things crashing into chaos.

People get hurt. And therein lies the tragedy. That's what leaves you sitting in the dark, listening to sorrow, and haunted by the ghostly echos of footsteps you might have taken.

The Conscience of the King

The Hamlet reference is deliberate and specific here. Reading more of Wilber's latest. I think I now have some understanding of what his Integral Methodological Pluralism is, and in particular what those zones are. The idea seems to be that holons tetra-exist in all 4 quadrants, and can also be examined from the 4 quadrants, and hence 8 zones, each describing a perspective. 4 internal perspectives of holons thinking about themselves in a given quadrant, and 4 external perspectives of considering other holons through a given quadrant.

Things get a little more interesting when he starts talking about Integral Post-Metaphysics. He first makes the point that these perspectives are active. They are injunctions, methodologies, not passive. You do something in each of these zones and that doing results in some sort of response, a sort a generalized datum. The perspectives are injunctions which bring forth experiences. Now here's the daring bit. He's proposing that reality is made up of these perspectives:

This Integral Post-Metaphysics replaces perceptions with perspectives, and thus re-defines the manifest realm as the realm of perspectives, not things, nor events, nor structures, nor processes, nor systems, nor vasanas, nor archetypes, nor dharmas, because all of those are perspectives before they are anything else, and cannot be adopted or even stated without first assuming a perspective.

Very interesting. So the experiment itself is the real thing, not our theory explaining the experiment, and not the 'object' itself (which may or may not exist in and of itself, but is forever out of our reach anyway.) It's actually got a bit of a quantum mechanics feel that. The experiment is what creates the reality. The injunction of measurement truly is bringing forth reality, collapsing the cloud of the possible into the data of the actual. Like Hamlet, our reality isn't known until the play is performed and the reaction drawn forth.

Furthermore, he goes on the say that you don't really know what's going on until you've poked at things from lots of different perspectives. This is where he obliterates the NOMA shield that much of mythic religion would like to hide behind. To really have a basis in truth religion has to take what wisdom it can and weave it into the 'reality' from other methodologies. Unfortunately this is going to require things like leaving behind the notion of the Bible as a literal historical document. Seems eminently reasonable to me, but I suspect that it would be a rather bitter pill to swallow for some of my in-laws and untold billions like them. This I gather was where his previous book on the subject The Marriage of Sense and Soul largely failed. I wonder how he hopes to address that in his new book.

Tentacles

So we're getting down to it now! We leave for the states on Saturday evening. Off on a great adventure which hopefully will turn out to be more pleasant than traumatic. We will have to see. Traveling at Christmastime is always a bit of a mess, and this time we have the little one in tow. Plus we're right in the heat of the US job market so I'm going to be sending out oodles of job apps while I'm away as well. Somewhere in there I need to get some work done too.

Meanwhile I'm trying to figure out if there is a way for me to squirm my way back into my G5 while we're away, and I think I may have come up with something. It's a bit of a kludge and involves cron jobs, a bit of python scripting and using my desktop workstation as a waystation. Still, with any luck I'll be able to worm my way in and perhaps even slurp some tasty bits out! I'll have to try it out this evening and see if it works.

I started reading Wilber's latest book Integral Spirituality last night. Oh boy... The 5 year gap sure shows. A whole new level of complexity has descended on the integral thing, probably having much to do with the founding of I-I. This is not going to be a simple read. Plus, I get the feeling it depends somewhat on the as yet unpublished Kosmos, Vol. 2. (Though to be fair he at least put some excepts out). Still, I think this one is probably going to be a bit of work. I am somewhat encouraged by his notion of 'integral post-metaphysics', depending on what that turns out to mean.

Still, I have to get my head around what he means by his "Integral Methodological Pluralism," and why his 4 quadrants now seem to have turned into 8 "zones". We now have an inside and an outside to each quadrant, (in addition to the left='interior', right='exterior' bifurcation of the original 4 quadrants.) So far, his one example is meditative study being upper left 'inside' and Spiral Dynamics being upper left 'outside'. So it seems like he's hidden the subjective inside yet another layer and in the process perhaps eaten a bit of the NOMA idea. ("Here's the point: you can sit on your meditation mat for decades, and you will NEVER see anything resembling the stages of Spiral Dynamics. And you can study Spiral Dynamics till the cows come home, and you will NEVER have a satori.") Although unlike NOMA, he seems to argue that you should do both instead of hiding behind which ever side of the invisible wall you would like to work on and ignoring the other side. I suspect that the eventual payoff will be the nondual realization which will of course illuminate all as the ground of spirit, or some such...

I found his 'Wilber-4' writing a bit mysterious until I managed to plow through SES. And as meandering and sprawling as that book is, it does have the ingredients needed to understand the rest of his contemporary books. Indeed, to really get "Wilber-4" I had to read SES, and let it percolate for a while, and then read A Theory of Everything which then put the bits in context. (Helped quite a bit by the excellent 'color' shorthand of Spiral Dynamics which does simplify the discussion.) SES was the fuel, TOE was the spark. But now he's gone and made things a bit more complicated and we need the new SES lay the ground work. Anyway, a little light reading for Christmas.

Integral Institute and the "Integral Movement" are quite interesting... Maybe even compelling. I just wish I didn't have the 'creepy cult alarm' going off in the back of my head. Is this what Scientology looked like in the 50's? Hmm... there's a thought to keep one behind the sofa.

Meanwhile, one can ponder this image and think Christmasy thoughts.

"There's no mystical energy field controlling my destiny"

Buried in the subtext of Star Wars is a vaguely buddhist philosophy which for better or worse then gets mixed up with a bit of good old wizard-style magic. In the quiet bit in the middle we get a brief exchange between Han Solo and Ben Kenobi which nicely encapsulates the standard interaction between "eastern" mysticism and "western" modernism.

I'm not going to indulge the inner fanboy any further, but just steal the quote which occurred to me as I am reading Anger by Thich Naht Hanh. Buried in this rather meandering and repetitive text is what I believe is some very sensible advice for dealing with anger, (and probably other 'negative' emotions as well.) However the presentation, like many of these sort of books, sometimes indulges in the rhetoric of 'new-age' mysticism (which is really just old-world magic tarted up to pull in post Aquarian punters). There is much that I find compelling in buddhist philosophy, but I wish I could engage with it without having to translate it into the 21st century. What I need is the philosophical opposite of "buddhism for dummies"; Maybe something more like "buddhism for gearheads."

Even Mr. Wilber falls into this quite a lot, and it's one of my biggest stumbling blocks with his integral philosophy as well. Occasionally I get the feeling that he could couch his philosophy in such a world view, but he hasn't. Perhaps this is because he feels he has to write for the public rather than for academics or the like. So still I pine for a discussion of buddhism that doesn't betray its iron-age origins.

Systems of the World

So, I finally finished Richard Dawkins' latest book The God Delusion. In the end it seems to me that it's a bit of a mixed bag. Some parts of the book are very good, some not so good.

As might be expected, his deconstruction of Intelligent Design is devastatingly convincing, and proceeds essentially along two lines. First, that natural selection provides a mechanism for explaining the massively improbable state of the biosphere as the end result of lots of not so improbable changes and asymmetric selection effects over really long periods of time. (Although he doesn't mention it, a much simpler example of asymmetry creating order can be seen by simply shaking up a can of mixed nuts. The big ones rise to the top and the small ones sort to the bottom because of small random diffusive motions in the presence of an asymmetrically applied force, in this case gravity. You can shake a little nut into a small space under two bigger nuts, but you can't shake a bigger nut in the the smaller space under two little nuts.) He dismisses as simply wrong the notion that there are serious road blocks, such as a wing or an eye or even the axle of the bacterial flagellum, (favorite targets of Intelligent Design) and points to the intermediate building blocks of each. Second, he points out that Intelligent Design only regresses the improbability back to God, who is necessarily much more improbable than the biosphere He is supposed to explain.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of other stuff in this book, and not all of it is terribly good. To begin with, his strongest argument, pro-natural selection and against intelligent design, doesn't show up until nearly 100 pages into the book. What's worse, he spends most of that first 100 pages alienating his supposed target audience by filling it with some fairly sanctimonious (oh the irony) and arrogant ridiculing of religion, and indulgent personal asides (how many times does he have to name check his buddy Douglas Adams and his wife Lalla Ward, or mention all the TV shows he's been on?!?) Then once he's dispensed with Intelligent Design, he freely admits that the main point of his thesis is done, but the book is only half over. He then spends the rest of the book wandering through various side issues and philosophical ideas with progressively less conviction and progressively more speculation. Some of this is interesting, (are the universals of human thought structures, morals etc, in some way byproducts of natural selection), some is not (are gods the same effect as imaginary friends) and some is just poorly thought out all together (his call to ban the indoctrination of children in religious ideas... I understand why he would like to do so, but this is a fundamentally unworkable philosophy in practice.)

As an invitation to the masses of blue-meme religious folk to step up to orange, I suspect that this book is not such a success. As a manifesto for orange-meme folk to combat the increasingly popular Intelligent Design idea, it is much better. As motivational fearmongering against the increasingly dangerous radical blue-memeies in a complacent multi-culti green-meme political environment it is suitably terrifying. As evidence that Dawkins is writing from an intellectually balanced and honest point of view, this book is not so great. Frankly it might give as much ammunition to his critics as it does to his would be supporters.

It has reinforced my discomfort with certain aspects of Ken Wilber's integral philosophy, at least as it pertains to his vision of evolution. Wilber's writings are intriguing and beguiling and to some extent a little slippery. Inevitably, I need to do more reading to see if what he says holds up. In particular, the next step is probably to read some of the people he quotes as supporting his ideas.

When I was a freshman at Caltech, I found philosophy of science a bit of a boring and pointless topic. Among other issues, I was particularly frustrated by philosophers who seem to insist on invoking quantum physics and the like, while clearly not understanding it. Now, a decade and a half later, I seem to be finding philosophy calling like a siren out of the fog. But the fog is still there, and as disturbing and frustrating as ever. The same problems I found as a frosh are still there: the lack of a sensible ground to work from; the reliance on such slippery things as language as a tool (unavoidable of course); the lack of a clear set of rules for even determining what sort of logical operations are allowed (logic is perfectly clear in a mathematical sense, but does not lift cleanly out of the mind into reality.) Worse, it seems that some of this has now broken out on the internet! Cripes! Dueling blogs!

The difference is, that now I also have the suspicion that the subject might be important. The nature of consciousness, "reality" and the like are leaking into policy. The so-called culture wars are getting serious and bodies are beginning to pile up. I mean, (to take just one blatantly obvious example) who would have thought that a George W presidency could have been that bad! But there it is. The neo-cons really thought they had the answer to all the world's problems. Or maybe not. A significant number seem to thing the end is neigh. Maybe they are just trying to help it along a bit. In either case, current US foreign and scientific policy is the end result of soft-headed philosophy gone amok.

(Asynchronous) Diamonds in the Sky with Lucy

Ahhh...

Now that's better. After nearly three months, we finally have an internet connection in our home again! It amazes me how much connectivity has become integrated into our everyday existence. I'm sure it's going to reach saturation at some point, but I'm not at all sure I've seen it yet. It seems to me that I just use the computer for more and more. Right now it's our TV, our Phone, our DVD, our stereo, our reference section, our yellow pages, our home-studio... Not to mention a virtual workstation, a baby teasing device, and a rubbish bridge partner.

In any case it is nice to have it back in the home. Living an hour away from your e-mail is a bit of a pain.

In getting things set up this morning, I found (thank you google) the answer to why our airport suddenly stopped working with our ADSL modem. Apparently the answer is to load up an older version of the firmware. Sigh... I feel like Apple is beginning to let the quality control slip on their software a bit. That at least twice now that I've been bitten by one of their software updates which introduces a bug and then never gets fixed. I wish they'd introduce fewer new features and concentrate a little more on stability. I mean I guess the bar has been set pretty low by the industry leader, but still, we don't have to aspire to Microsoft's standards do we?

Flotsam & Jetsam

So I'll borrow the working title of the first episode of Torchwood. (Eventually called "Everything Changes" upon broadcast)...

Went to Lunar House in Croydon yesterday to get Lazarus' visa status sorted out. £500 for a small yellow piece of paper and some peace of mind. Now we can go back to the states for Christmas and not have to worry about any unpleasant surprises upon our return. We could probably have gotten away with something cheaper, but with the potential downsides being pretty unpleasant, this seemed the most prudent option.

In other news, it appears that our proposal to upgrade the infrared camera on the Liverpool Telescope has been suddenly and unexpectedly triaged and killed. We were on the schedule for the PPRP meeting next week, but apparently there was a late change to the rules and we got killed by a committee which wasn't even originally supposed to have seen the proposal. Ah well... It looks progressively less and less likely that we will be staying in the UK after this summer. As it stands I currently only have an Advanced Fellowship proposal and a lectureship application at Keele still pending. Roll on the US job market... (Which is hitting full steam right now).

Meanwhile, I've been getting *looks* for my choice of Tube reading the last couple of days. Even here in what must be one of the most secular cities in the world, reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion seems to draw disapproving looks. I can't imagine how it must go down in the states. The raving blue meme-ies really do scare the hell out of me sometimes. (Usually just about anytime I think about them...) Oh well, that's enough for the moment. I must now meditate on a teaching philosophy.

XYZZY

Here's something interesting. http://www.inform-fiction.org. It appears to be a bit of software for writing interactive fiction. Anyone remember Zork? Back when I was a kid these were vaguely popular computer games where you wander around inside a story. Infocom was by far the highest profile creators of these games, and they had built a moderately clever interpreter which would let you control the game by simply typing in english.

The clever thing about Inform seems to be that you can use it to write interactive fiction by typing in english. In other words, this thing interprets both directions. The author writes in english, the computer interprets this and builds a model world based on this composition. Then the 'reader' explores this world interactively by writing in english, which is also interpreted by the computer in the context of the model world. I haven't played with it yet, but does look quite interesting, particularly since it seems to be extendable with lots of pre-made widgets. There's even an academic paper about it on the website. If nothing else, its an interesting concept.

The Sun Did Not Shine

It's raining today. It's raining quite steadily in a rather sedate and understated way that often does here in London. It's as if the weather is trying to conform to that ever so proper image of British culture which is the typical American expectation of Britain.

This is the first really rainy day we've had in a while so, perhaps predictably, I had to be out in it running errands this morning. Still the walk over from High Street Kensington to my office was fairly pleasant, albeit wet. The rain made the pavement (that's a sidewalk for my American readers) quite reflective, and the lighting was actually rather lovely. The sky reflecting off the pavement lighting the street from below, and the fall leaves adding some vibrant yellow, gold, and orange colour which contrasted nicely with the rather neutral gray of the reflected sky. All in all, it was a surprisingly pleasing walk, and the mellow sounds of traffic and splashing water mixed well with the earthy music of Neil Young's Everybody Knows This is Nowhere album.

Neil Young typically sounds rather too American (yes, I know he's Canadian), and usually jars a bit with the surroundings here in urban London, but he worked well today. The Cure would have fit too I guess, but they didn't survive the hard-disk crash that wiped out much of our iTunes library, leaving us with mostly just the end of the alphabet to work with at the moment. I doubt whether listening to The Cure would have inspired quite such an appreciative opinion of the weather though. Beautiful, yes, but a bit maudlin.

Play: It's the Real Thing

Now there's a mangled title phrase for you.

So what is this play business all about anyway. What is it about certain activities, objects, and stimuli that we humans find so pleasing? This question occurred to me watching Laz play tonight, and seeing him totally fascinated by a clear plastic box of wood screws, and squeal in delight at the sight of a plastic Coke bottle. Not exactly standard issue baby toys. Makes one wonder what sort of subliminal programming Coke is putting into their logo that stimulates the pleasure center of a ten month old child!

What Lazarus finds really exciting does seem sorta random. We discovered he gets super-exicted when he sees pictures of David Tennant in Doctor Who Magazine. He can't really be bothered with the rest of the magazine though. Pictures of Billie Piper do nothing for him, though he does show a mild interest in Cybermen. (Apparently he found them incredibly funny this spring while watching The Age of Steel with his Mama. Not that he should have been watching TV, but Daddy was in China at the time, and Mama was feeling a bit overwhelmed and needed a break.)

Anyway, I'm sure that what adults find interesting and exciting is probably just as random, it's just not so obviously so. Although, having said that, there are some pretty bizarre adult hobbies too. Trainspotting; what's that about?!

Speaking of Trainspotting, I love that Brits use the word "anorak" as a synonym for "nerd." Apparently an anorak is what Americans would typically call a rain poncho. It is part of the traditional attire of trainspotters who spend lots of time standing in the rain next to train tracks. This is almost as fun as rhyming slang, which is really bizarre and a bit harder to explain. Plus it tends to lose something in the translation.

Ah well... time to move on...

The magic numbers are: 45, 39, 51.

Yuppieitis

Ah sleep... not always the easiest commodity to come by, and unfortunately not always something that you can make flexible. We've been on a slightly later schedule the last couple of days, but Laz went to bed quite early tonight. I actually need to get up early tomorrow to go in for lab, but my own brain isn't willing to slow down enough yet.

I'm not helped by the fact that I'm physically not terribly comfortable either. I seem to have developed a number of random aches and pains, and what is probably a Repetitive Stress Injury (maybe plural) on my right arm. Been bugging me on and off for months now. I've finally decided to see a doctor about it, so I have another early day on Thursday to see our old GP for my 10 min NHS appointment. (Whoo Hoo!) Make it fast but at least it's free.

Of course typing like this probably isn't going to help my arm feel any better.

Frankly carpal tunnel seems like a bit of a pathetic complaint. I mean really! A medical condition from typing too much? Seems rather reminiscent of George Jetson's sore button-pushing finger. Even so, it is rather surprisingly painful.

Enough moaning. It could be worse. I could actually have to make a living at a real job.

Quantity vs Quality

What is it about our culture that seems to make us tend to value quantity of quality?

It seems to me that virtually everyone I know is overcommitted. We all have our fingers in too many pies and as a result, we quite often don't have the time to really do things right. For example, my job is primarily a research position, but there is a teaching component. In my case, I'm one of the demonstrators in the second-year physics lab. Now if I had the time to spare, I would have gone through the entire lab in an ordered and organized way, filling out a lab book as I went along and really doing a nice work-up. However, other fires need to be tended, and so I went through the entire lab in an afternoon, and took some data, but not always high quality. i've worked through the analysis a bit, but my "lab book" is not at all useful as a demonstration of what a good lab book should be.

This is just a single example, but there are many. Consider what is newsworthy about movies, & music. We hear about the number of albums sold, and the TV ratings. The number one movie is determined merely from the weekend box-office takings. Even awards, which should be some measure of quality, are now enumerated. "Winner of 7 Academy Awards".

Perhaps Ken Wilber is right about the modern world reducing the universe to a flatland of numbers. Are we attracted to quantity simply because we can count, and that gives us some sort of measure? There are metrics of quality, and some even get used on occasion, but we seem to be more and more a people driven by our own lowest common denominators. More often than not the things that get done are the things that aren't risky.

Perhaps therein lies a bit of an answer. Striving for quality requires imagination and innovation. It means taking longer to accomplish less so that the less that is done is done "better". But "better" is necessarily a somewhat subjective judgement, and what if others don't see the quality? You can always justify quantity. 14 is always more than 7, even if its 7 Mona Lisas. (Of course, the 7 Mona Lisas are only valuable if everyone thinks there's only one, and you'd better be sure that nobody discovers the words "This Is a Fake" written in felt-tip pen under the paint.

Little Green Man

He was once a little green ball of clay... GUMBY
But you should see what Gumby can do today... GUMBY
He can walk into any book,
With his pony pal Pokey too.
If you've got a heart, then Gumby's a part of you.

For some reason, the songs that we end up singing to Lazarus have mostly turned out to be the theme songs to old TV shows. The latest addition is Gumby, which bubbled up from my subconscious the other day when a sudden need for a new song came up. Other favorites include The Flintstones, Mr. Ed, and something called Skinamarink. The Doctor Who theme gets sung quite a lot as well.

Occasionally a few other songs will show up, but usually not much less bizarre. For example, Waltzing Matilda, even though I know almost none of the words. Lots of Christmas carols. Bits of songs from The Music Man. Occasionally, Sunshine will dig up an old Beatles tune. Very little in the way of "proper" lullabies. Of course, some of those are rather creepy. Just what is supposed to be soothing about Rock-a-bye Baby? Of course, I'm not sure that humming the baby to sleep to The Imperial March from The Empire Strikes Back is exactly sending the right message either. At least we have for the most part steered clear of ad jingles.

I'm sure it says something about our culture, or at least our upbringing that these are the 'folk melodies' that come easily to mind.

Mr. Brown Can Mu, Can You?

It is a curious thing this drive to create. Why is it that we Humans feel compelled to bring order and structure and meaning into the universe? Why do we rage against entropy? What is the source?

Ken Wilber would probably say that it is the pull of Spirit (capital S) acting on the universe of spirit (small s) pulling creativity into the world. I'm not really sure if that's an answer or just giving a name to something. Of course Ken Wilber would probably also explain that I'm not really evolved enough to understand this force of Spirit (capital S) and so of course it doesn't make any sense to me. I can't see it. He might even be right. Such is the unanswerable nature of such a statement.

Why all the questions? Does it really matter? Perhaps not. But sitting in the dark of our living room with the lights out and staring at the light cast on the walls by the street lamps outside, I was struck by an urge to write something, to be creative in some form, but I didn't really have much inspiration for what to write about. As a result I've yet again returned to the subject of writing as a subject.

Such self-reflexive text seems rather postmodern. Perhaps postmodernism was just a massive case of collective writers block. (Probably not, but it makes a for a briefly amusing idea. Very brief.)

Of course, it is possible to look at this urge in a much less flattering light. Perhaps it's just the blind pathetic panic reaction to an utterly heartless and slowly disintegrating universe that is completely and utterly indifferent to our lives. Perhaps this drive to create (and indeed procreate) is just our way of fighting off the madness of the
Total Perspective Vortex. (Brilliant man Douglas Adams. Marvelous observations buried in absurd humor and Sci-Fi so you don't notice how stinging they really are. Still, there is a rather distinctive flavor of the broken-hearted romantic in his writing.)

That's the second time today my blogging has led me back to Douglas Adams. I was going to comment in my last post that we really were rather like those telepathic aliens described in the Hitchhiker's Guide, but I couldn't remember their names. (Still can't for that matter.) I did a little Googling for it, but while everyone loves the quote that humans need to talk or their brains start working, nobody seemed to be interested in continuing the quote to the follow-up discussion. I could figure it out by digging out the DVD from the TV series that I recorded off of BBC2 last year, but that would require turning on the lights and I don't want to risk waking Laz up.

Anyway, back to philosophy... I seem to be at the crossroads of Existentialism and Zen. Is God dead? or just waiting inside for me to wake up and notice I am He. (It... She... sigh... pronouns.) Unfortunately, the sages seem to agree that the only answers come from deep contemplation of mu or some such, and frankly such contemplation doesn't seem to be compatible with my lifestyle at the moment. Certainly I can't see listing the contemplation of mu on my CV as likely to land me a job. And the family is pretty needy at the moment as well. Plus Torchwood is showing. Who can contemplate mu when John Barrowman is on the tele? (OK, well that last one does seem a little on the trivial side.)

Waiting for Godot to Download

Sigh... I spend far too much of my time waiting for information to move from one location to another, or perhaps getting modified from one format to another. Bigger computers aren't getting things done faster, they're just convincing us to move more and more bits around.

I wonder if anyone has estimated the bandwidth of the Earth. Or the total data storage capacity. Probably.

Do Sneetches Saunter or Hike?

Lazarus loves reading. How he loves to be read to. It has been one of his favorite activities since he was really quite young (somewhere around three months or so I think.) He's quite fond of Dr. Seuss books in particular, and so Sunshine and I have gotten to know quite a few of these books rather well.

Now since we had to move at the end of the summer, there were a couple of months when many of his books were packed away, and during this time, Laz began to get a bit tired of his unpacked books. As a result, we actually ended up buying a new copy of "The Sneetches and Other Stories" even though my Mother had sent him the old version I had as a child. Anyway, as began to unpack the books in the new flat, we uncovered the old book, and I was quite surprised to discover that the text of "The Sneetches" is slightly different between the two versions.

The change is on the second page in the last sentence, which reads "And whenever they met some when they were out walking, they'd saunter right past them without even talking" in the new version. However in my old version, the Star-bellies don't "saunter". Instead, they "...hike on right past...".

Frankly, I prefer the 'new' version, but it seems like a strange thing that there was a change at all. Is this wording that was changed for a British audience? (I kind of doubt it, since many other Americanisms have been left intact in the other UK versions of Dr. Seuss stories.) Perhaps someone decided that children won't know the word "saunter," and at some point it was changed. I don't know. Perhaps I will do a bit of internet searching and see if I can discover when and why this was changed. There must be some obsessive Dr. Seuss fansite somewhere, right?

Back on the Ecto

Well, having played with the blogger applet on dashboard (sorry, they're called Widgets aren't they... ), I've decided that it's not terribly useful. Frankly, it seems to have less capability than just posting via e-mail, so what's the point. As far as I can tell, it can't edit or even see already started posts, and it can't do any sort of formatting. Just text. Yes it's simple, but so is my e-mail client, and that will at least check the spelling.

So, it looks like it will be back to ecto, the blogging client I was using before. Assuming of course that I manage to actually continue to blog. Perhaps I'll let the trial period run out before I purchase a license and see if I use it enough.

Woah... weird little bobble there... the tool bar disappeared... It came back though... Strange.

Hmm... I use too many ellipses in my writing. That can't be good style. Probably a sign of laziness: I can't be bothered to finish my thoughts.

Is that a correct use of a colon? My grasp of grammatical sentence structure in anything but it's most basic form is just pathetic. I really must sort that out one day. Correct understanding of the proper use of semi-colons would be even better. Not that anyone seems to use them much in text. Probably because the rules are a bit squishy. Still, I think that I tend to think and speak in semi-colons a lot. I really should look into that some time.

I also need to cut down on my use of parentheses. (The above paragraph started as a parenthetical aside.) I tend to over use them. Professor Boyk at Caltech commented on this my senior year. He said he'd heard it was often associated with people who do a lot of computer programming. I can see that. It feels a bit like trying to nest the parenthetical idea like a nested code structure. (Those two sentences really wanted to join together, but I don't know the rules regarding the colon/semi-colon glue! Something to do with phrases that can stand alone or those that can't!)

I'd make a terrible newspaper journalist. My natural prose style is completely antithetical to the short choppy sentences that newspapers prefer. I seem to like my sentences long, with lots of ideas and little twisty bits hanging off. Not Joe Friday "just the Facts, Ma'am" style structures. (Jeez... should that whole phrase from "Joe" to "style" be hyphenated? I think maybe technically yes, though it would look immensely silly.)

Good grief this is a rather self-referential bit of text. (Must not overuse exclamation points!) Perhaps I should cut it off now and go home. It's a long way to Harrow and the Piccadilly Line is probably about to transition from a train into a long tube of human flesh wandering through tunnels, occasionally exchanging a few elementary people particles ("Per-sons" to borrow a joke from David Goodstein). Yikes, overly complicated with parenthetical asides and mixed metaphors! (And gratuitous punctuation!) I should quit before I dig too deep a hole.

Testing Testing

Cough Cough...  Lot of dust around here.  Amazing how fast dust collects in cyberspace.

So I see I haven't posted since January.  Well, I guess I shouldn't really be surprised.  It was rather ambitious of me to start when I did.  Moving along...

So here I am testing the Blogger widget in "Dashboard".  I'm not sure I really see the point in dashboard.  It seems like it's a reinvention of the old Desktop Accessories idea, which pretty much fell by the wayside in OS X.  Only now they've moved it into some sort of weird half-lit pseudo desktop which appears over the real desktop.  I haven't tried to see how much they interact with one another.  Who knows, maybe I will warm to it.  I do like the Tube service widget.  

Posting from a new laptop.  Well, technically it's a hand-me-down, bought for Monica a few months before her grant ran out, but it's been sitting around collecting dust for several months.  So when Sunshine's laptop went belly up earlier in the week, I ended up with this one, which is fine.  It's really much more powerful than I really need.

Hmm... This blog editor doesn't scroll, it just expands the window.  I guess that's one way of encouraging a short post, if you can't see past the bottom of the screen.  

Perhaps I should see if this actually publishes correctly.

Enjoy the Silence

So, now that I've crossed over to the other side, I finally understand why it is that parents, especially new ones, can't seem to talk about anything but their children. It's not that they've become obsessive personalities overnight. Nope, they're just brainwashed. Literally.

Think about it. The parents of a newborn are subjected to a variety of stimuli that rather closely resemble some interrogation techniques. First there is the chronic sleep depravation, and what sleep does come arrives in little bits, regardless of circadian rhythms. Plus, they probably aren't getting out much, so add a dollop of Seasonal Affective Disorder as well. Then they are expected to perform a variety of (occasionally complex) unfamiliar tasks, with little or no warning or instruction. They are spurred on by a desire to avoid The Voice, a devastating siren evolved over millennia to instantly shred the human nervous system (and no-doubt genetically tuned to resonate particularly with the parents). It's a sort of "anti-tribble" effect. Just for fun, the voice also goes off randomly every once in a while as well. All this is accompanied by periodic exposure to a variety of noxious fluids, and a hormonal assault on Mom to rival the mother of all PMS.

It's not parental obsession, it's Stockholm Syndrome. Their addled little brains just literally can't think of anything else.

Reconnection

Ah well... This is a bit different.

It's been rather a long time since my last entry. During the run up to Christmas I was running full tilt trying to finish up my data reduction pipeline software for the SupIRCam instrument on the Liverpool Telescope. I didn't quite succeed. Oh well, best laid plans and all that.

I pretty much dropped everything for a week or so around Christmas, which was nice. Enjoyed a bit of time off. Lots of good telly on including the triumphant return of Doctor Who in The Christmas Invasion. Then we got well and truely distracted by the completion of another project: Sunshine gave birth to our son Lazarus Alexander Gerardy. I'm sure there will be more to come on this subject, but for now I'll just leave with this lovely pic.