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?