Some pics of the Air and Space Museum

One of the many awe-inspiring museums under the Smithsonian umbrella is the Air and Space Museum. Here are a few pictures. They're pretty hi-res, so I apologize if they load slowly:

Two psychological observations

These two pieces from my notebooks come nearly 35 years apart. One is from today, one from July, 1977.

1/26/12, 2 Shevat 5772, week of Bo
Four critical and fundamental errors in human analytical thinking:
1. The confusion of emotional attachment with ‘facticity’, truth; vis belief in God becomes dogma and supporting evidence (Bible) becomes incontrovertible; or, feelings of love can cause us to mis-see and misunderstand the person that is loved and the situation in which that love exists.
2. Confusion of emotional intensity for degree of certainty; vis the more comfort one derives from belief in God, the more certain one is of God’s existence; or, the more desperate our need for companionship, the more certain we may become that someone loves us.
3. The confusion that personal perspective is ‘true’ and co-equal with universal perspective; vis the certainty that whatever political beliefs one inclines towards, those beliefs are the correct (or better, CORRECT) way of understanding the situation.
4. The confusion that consciousness, observation, is an unmediated experience, and NOT an interpretive, filtered, and often profoundly limited or occulted experience; vis, the belief that what we see with our eyes is not merely real, but unimpeachable and unbiased ‘fact’.

Antidotes to ingest liberally:
1. facts all come with a point of view
2. observation and interpretation are co-equal
3. emotion is the carriage upon which all thought rides
4. there is no such thing as a single and pure emotion; all emotions resolve into other emotions

Trained philosophers and psychologists who reject or denigrate emotion and extol reason are equally subject to these four confusions. Emotion is a fact of consciousness, shaping and coloring it, whether it is obvious or not, whether it is intense or subtle, foregrounded or undertoned. It is there shaping, coloring, focusing, distorting, transforming, hiding the inputs of experience. Reason distinct from emotion is a conceptual illusion, a false ideal, a Newtonian distortion of the quantum mechanical nature of consciousness/reality. (I use ‘quantum mechanical’ here as a philosophical and psychological model of thought, and not merely as a way of studying matter and energy.)


7/3/77, Kayseri, Turkey
Symbolic thought:
Human consciousness is determined and constrained by density of thought. Density of thought means the number of conscious images and thoughts occurring in a given period. Even in highly exciting moments like the minutes before a race or curtain call, or the seconds before an auto-collision, there are only so many thoughts that consciously pass thru the mind. The actual number seems constrained by the normal activity of mental exertion The more one is able to concentrate, the more concentrated thoughts can be, ie, the denser the thoughts become. Like a thread or wire or beam that can hold so much tension [or transmit so much data - smb, 2012], so our consciousness can endure only so much stress. Beyond that limit it snaps, or blanks out; the system crashes. That limit can be extended by active practice of methods of concentration, however.

But this is the essential point: increased thought density does not work on a linear or algebraically continuous basis. At some point the many thoughts condense or merge into one or a few thoughts or images, like changing energy levels in an atom or molecule. One increases to a limit the number of thoughts per moment and then, remarkably, they condense into a symbol or archetype, and the working number of thoughts suddenly reduces [the ‘aha’ moment; epiphany] and the [potential] intensity of thought increases on an equivalent basis. This is a functional (phenomenological) description of the formation of symbols and symbolic thought.

My writing career, briefly

My writing career spans forty years. From one perspective I am developing a Jewish and kabbalistic vision of the world, the mind, and the soul. From another perspective, I am composing long narrative poems that explore the clash between the real and the ideal, in the lives of historical figures and people I have known. From yet a third perspective, I am developing a new, more versatile language in which the complexity and multi-dimensionality of quantum mechanics is carved into the lens of language itself.

Or let me put it this way: I have spent the last 40 years writing poetry that re-visions and re-models not just the world we live in, but the language with which we see, describe, and understand that world. In the process I have created a new grammar to represent the fundamental indeterminacies at the horizons of thought. This has been a slow process requiring much persistence, not only because of its own inherent difficulties, but because of the difficulties it creates for readers, who have a challenging enough job deciphering the experiments and non-linearities of modern and post-modern writing. The result, though a challenge to many readers, allows my work to achieve layered and faceted perspectives that a traditional use of language inherently prohibits.

It seems that I am almost alone in spearheading the development of a language that can reflect and express the nature of quantum mechanics, both in physics and in consciousness. But I am not entirely alone. In 1980 David Bohm, the renowned physicist, published his last book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order. It is about the need to develop a new language in response to quantum mechanics! In 1980 I was already six years into my project to recreate English.

Homeostasis, evolution, and paganism

What follows is a non-poetic restatement of the ideas in my poem “XIII” of “Pesez ov an Unrevelen Narrattiv”, which is a poem-series in my longer poem Mith ov the Aternen Jew.

While exploring the psychological roots of anti-Semitism, it has occurred to me that the contents of consciousness can be generated by interior workings of the body itself. Indeed, much of what we call myth (such as the various myths of the Jew, or the idea of Messiah, or ideas and stories about God or The Gods) may be seen as a narrativization of biological forces. This is not so strange as it might, at first, sound. The idea is derived by understanding that homeostasis and evolution are two conflicting forces in nature, and it is further substantiated by the circularity of consciousness. Let me explain.

Homeostasis is, to quote that intellectual cornerstone, Wikipedia,

...the property of a system, either open or closed, that regulates its internal environment and tends to maintain a stable, constant condition. Typically used to refer to a living organism, the concept came from that of milieu interieur that was created by Claude Bernard and published in 1865. Multiple dynamic equilibrium adjustment and regulation mechanisms make homeostasis possible.

Thus, all living creatures rely on homeostasis, the body-mind’s attempt to survive by maintaining balance and stability in an environment that is inherently, and ultimately, destabilizing and destructive.

One of those forces that is pitted against homeostasis is evolution. Evolutionary changes reconfigure both interior and exterior biological “landscapes”, causing organisms to constantly rebalance and reconfigure their systems to optimize survival. Exterior evolutionary and environmental changes threaten an organism’s ability to survive by changing the conditions of the niche in which the organism lives. Interior evolutionary changes, that is evolutionary changes in an organism itself, directly confront the homeostatic systems that manage an organism. The organism’s own systems now must compete for control of resources and management functions. From a homeostatic “point of view”, evolutionary changes are invasive and threatening systems.

I would suggest that these interior stresses, while largely subconscious, yet get converted to narratives, as the mind seeks explanations for its stresses. This narrativization of biological stressors is not surprising. One of the conundrums (or ironies) of human consciousness is that we are bound by the circularity of our senses. We use our senses to observe what our senses are. We are not able to step out of ourselves, to step out of our bodies, and perceive what our senses really are, or what our senses are truly perceiving. The notion that our senses are merely windows on reality, while alluring, is unfortunately just a simplistic attempt to step out of our inherent circularity. Acknowledging this circularity, we are forced to the notion that our minds, as our senses, are interpreters and mythmakers, not raw observers. Our identities are myths, as are our ideologies. Thus, our biology will serve our mythmaking, as part of our general experience.

By the way, I use the term “myth” here both in its lesser sense as “illusion”, and in its more elevated sense as a foundational layer of consciousness. Our myths are full of illusion, and yet they can also be our best attempts to understand the circular reality into which we are bound. Thus, for me, “science” is also myth.

We humans are a species in the midst of evolutionary stresses, both interior and exterior. Our particular interior competitions and stresses generated by evolution amplify the exterior stresses of survival, causing a persistent tendency to build a narrative of ethnic invasion. Thus we have biological as well as social stresses tending to create myths of the “other”. This would help account for the persistence of anti-Semitism and its many underlying narratives, including its most modern incarnation, anti-Zionism – hatred of the idea of a Jewish nation.

One final detail, critical to my semi-narrative poem Mith ov the Aternen Jew. While evolution is generally believed to proceed randomly, evolutionary forces are well known to pursue gradients, that is, to fill niches in nature. In my poem I claim that there are gradients in nature that are working to eliminate paganistic thinking. In this case I define “pagan” not in the traditional religious way - the worship of idols and “false” gods - but in psychological terms. Paganistic thinking claims that law and ethics are relative and human productions, and that therefore, there is no one correct system of law or ethics.

I would argue that history suggests the opposite. It appears that humans are moving towards a singular and unified definition of law and ethics. Tribal borders and ethnicities are rapidly breaking down (the foundational cause of Islamic terrorism, by the way). In this process, languages, too are rapidly disappearing.

It seems the biblical prophets understood this particular gradient working on human consciousness, unabashedly claiming that one law and one moral standard would dominate the world. There now seems to be much evidence to that effect, even as we struggle to know, and to shape, what that law and ethics is. What were once prophetic statements that appeared to be arrogantly ethnocentric and wildly implausible, now seem to be the first harbingers of the obvious and the necessary.

Thus I say, there ARE gradients directing evolution, and it seems some of them became a source of ideological belief, long before there was evidence to substantiate them.

Zeno's Paradox

I have been fascinated by Zeno's Paradox for at least 4 decades, and there must be many dozens of musings scattered through my notebooks on the topic, including not a few solutions to the paradox. This is my latest musing.

5/15/2010, Shabbat Bemidbar, plane to DC
Reading Bohm, Implicate Order, pp. 199 to a third of the way down 201.

Zeno’s paradox, although appearing to pertain to motion, really is about consciousness and the perception of time. In consciousness, time is overlapping, like a series of semi-transparent images arrayed and overlapping each other. The term I have used is “superimposition” and in some cases “embedded,” while Bohm uses “enfolded.” As our sense of time is superimposed (a fundamental property of consciousness), so events are embedded in each other, and “now” includes some indeterminate component of “past” and “future.” The more expanded and expansive (expansen) our consciousness, the more the past and future is “embedden” in our “now.” Indeed, we must not think of time as a single thread, and in the same way, we must not think of consciousness as a single thread, or even as just a few threads. Our math, Aristotelian, Euclidean, as it is, distorts and misrepresents reality. We mathematically represent motion as a vector, but it is really multiple vectors, which in the calculus of consciousness are synthesized and unified, a simplification useful for most applications, but inaccurate as we begin to unpack the actual “workings” (in quotes because the term implies a mechanistic representation, and consciousness is not mechanistic) of consciousness and our awareness of minute periods of time and motion. When we try to stop-frame time, we realize it can’t be done. Just as a geometric point is a fiction, so is an instant in time. However, an instant in consciousness is not only an indeterminately short moment, it is a series or compilation of time frames, long and short, extending back, potentially thousands of years, or more, and forward in ways and “distances” we cannot calculate or comprehend.

Hercules overtakes the turtle because the geometric model that would restrain him with its infinite regression is fundamentally flawed. It posits time as a single line made up of an infinite number of tangent points. But time is not a single line, it is not even linear, and there are no such things as instants.

At my horizon, and hazy still:

1. Time is a complex superimposition of multiple frame-periods, individually discontinuous (?), and variable in their endurance/extension, (reified, integrated synthesized) by consciousness.

2. Human will/intentionality is the (necessity)(?) that generates this uni-dimensional synthesis, this illusion of a single thread of time, of moments, of motion, and of divisibility. I say will is what drives us to create the Euclidean illusions of time because will is what motivates us build, make tools, hunt, plan, and calculate, and all these functions require that time be simplified into one dimension in a series of causally connected moments.

3. Concepts and perceptions of predictability and control derive from archaic portions of consciousness that incline us to strip reality of its complexities.

Scientific Poetic Fragments

Arkettekcherrel Fragmenz Ammung the Ruwenz

1.
You are not what you appear to be.
Consciousness is not a clear glass;
The world is not a polished mirror.
As a drop of water is distinct
     From the vapor that expressed it,
A different state of itself;
As salt dissolved is distinct from its crystal form,
So are we,
From a finer matter condensed into living crystal,
And distorted by sense, and the coarseness of thought.

2.
Speken on the sixth day:
     “O mordel Addom
     “I will kreyate a werl with yu.
     “I will brake yu
     “An grate lite will por frum yur mienz.
     “I will replakkate yu,
     “Bilden bloks aplentee,
     “All simmaller an uneek.
     “I will press yu and twist yu
     “An stress yur hart
     “Tu make yu a lume
     “An weev a bodee a lite
     “Kompilen yur faent flashen.

Science Adrift, 2

Responding to my "Science Adrift" post of 4/8/09,
god-free morals said...

I think the problem is just that science does not only focus on matter. That is, what it can actually make statements about. It tries to apply itself to all aspects of humanity; religious, social, even artistic.

"People today believe that scientists are there to instruct them, writers and musicians to entertain them. That the latter have something to teach them never occurs to them." Wittgenstein

Dear Chris, god-free morals:

Thanks for helping to align the focus of this post. Your Wittgenstein quote was brilliant, pointing exactly to my intention. I am not speaking about scientific inquiry itself, which is often poorly conceived, sloppily done, and opinionated in its interpretations. That’s the nature of this (hopefully) self-correcting beast. I’m speaking about public perception and public education in the West, which is now based on scientific triumphalism. Religion is imagined to be outdated, primitive, and worse. There was a time when religious institutions controlled education (and it still does in some schools and many countries in the world), and that surely carried/carries its own set of problems.

However, my concern here is that our wholesale abandonment of religion and religious education is seriously, if not fatally damaging us. The trajectory of our secular culture was set in motion in an era in which religious/ethical values were foundational to our thinking. The democratic revolution begun 200+ years ago carried with it the ideals of universal freedom and dignity, and leadership based on merit and accomplishment; in short, an attempt to create a human-authored utopian society. But, as with all revolutions, there were other sides to the story. One of those sides was the power struggle with religious authority. The secular/scientific school has not merely won that battle, but routed its opponent. And we are left with a one-sided, materialistic focus, dominated by “number, weight and measure” (Marriage of Heaven and Hell, proverb 14), which is to say, an educational focus bereft of ethical values and the skills to develop psychological sensitivities.

Look at the curriculum of any high school (gymnasium), college, or university. Engineering is our obsession: mechanical, chemical, biological, electronic, ecological, nuclear, corporate, financial, medical, legal. We are fabulous at teaching the skills to build ingenious tools, models, historical scenarios, balance sheets, and other Rube Goldberg constructions, be they physical or mental, but how many course offerings (much less course requirements) are offered on practical ethics, conflict dynamics, life dilemmas, real-time ethical decision making, the conflicts between self and society, or identity building and religious tradition? We are taught professional skills but not how to live.

I sat in on a Sabbath morning study session with Rabbi Mordechai Finley last week. He asked us how we, as a society, define “the good life.” It was widely agreed that it means lots of money, leisure, and sex. But Finley’s definition, without denying the pleasure of money and sex, was very different. For him it means:
- learning how to endure existential despair with dignity;
- including people of all faiths, creeds, nationalities, and social strata among one’s group of friends (which means inviting them into one’s house regularly;)
- learning how to effectively engage with political diversity;
- taking time on a regular basis to pray, meditate, explore one’s inner being
- making learning an essential and regular part of one’s life.

The promulgating of meaningful values was once the provenance of our religious communities. In our secular societies, however, religious communities have become nearly vestigial. We need to revive those communities or replace them, because, assuredly, we cannot continue on a trajectory towards utopian ideals without a commitment to the values that will implement those ideals.

Science Adrift

It is taught,
“We have become wise in science
And cast off the superstition of religion.”
If you have been taught thus,
You have been taught poorly.
Rather,
“We have become skillful in manipulation,
And cast off the constraints that guide our Soul.”

For science is but a process to observe carefully,
But in this era that process is only applied to matter,
And as for matters of conscience,
And the transmission of values, we are woefully careless.

We have become crude in our sensitivities,
Blind to our Soul, arrogantly so.
“I refuse to consider the knowledge in religion;
Nor will I constrain my desires.”

I louk at this kine an I despaer.
Neether past nor prezzen ar dezerven ov onnor,
And az for owwer fewcher,
We ar on a ship, asael in daenjerz,
And we kaer not ennee mor ov kapten or krew.

Two Undefinable Equations

While pondering whether time, like energy, may be non-continuous, its passage being, thus, a series of discrete quanta, I came to this conclusion: there are two fundamental conundrums that mediate all knowledge.

The first:
Time and space are not pre-existing, distinct phenomena. They are interlinked in a determinate way. The equation linking them, like the reciprocity of electricity and magnetism, would show that they are, in fact, two manifestations of a single phenomenon. However, we do not have the means to step outside the space-time continuum and observe and measure the interrelationship. Thus the equation showing their reciprocity must remain undefinable.

The second:
We can be certain that the distinctions between mental and physical, or mind and body, are illusions. Consciousness is the continuum in which all human experience is embedded. As such, mind and body are reciprocal aspects of the continuum of consciousness. However, here again we cannot step outside consciousness, and thus we are entirely unable to determine the boundaries between mind and body, and more generally, self and non-self, dream and non-dream, real and unreal, truth and fantasy. However convinced we are of the verity of our experiences, and the truth of our beliefs, in fact, we live in utter indeterminacy.

And it is in this state that we must proceed, perhaps more humbly than we have been inclined, as a species, up to now.

Time is Illusion

As Rovelli explains it, in quantum mechanics all particles of matter and energy can also be described as waves. And waves have an unusual property: An infinite number of them can exist in the same location. If time and space are one day shown to consist of quanta, the quanta could all exist piled together in a single dimensionless point. "Space and time in some sense melt in this picture," says Rovelli. "There is no space anymore. There are just quanta kind of living on top of one another without being immersed in a space."...

Einstein, for one, found solace in his revolutionary sense of time. In March 1955, when his lifelong friend Michele Besso died, he wrote a letter consoling Besso's family: "Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

The rabbis concur in their biblical exegesis. "There is no past or future in Torah," they teach. Therefore they are not bound by the vector of time and its inherent causality. Thus Abraham is bound by the laws of Kashrut (keeping kosher) even tho those laws were received "historically" 400 or more years after Abraham died, and Jacob studied in a Yeshiva (a school of Jewish learning, especially Talmud) even tho Talmud was not compiled until about 500 CE, or about 2400 years after Jacob died! From a historian's point of view, this kind of exegesis sounds like mere foolishness. From the point of view of quantum mechanics, the rabbis were brilliantly prescient.

More on science and religion

In his insightful comment to my last post, David Van Dusen <http://www.typeschrift.blogspot.com/> says:

"The dogs will fight." & "There is a (divine) gradient to nature." --- Indeed! --- And a divine gradient, also, to the blood-feuds, cock-fights, and peace-by-other-means we wage over Divinity, and Nature?

Well David, a "Divine gradient" does not mean a straight line. To the contrary, it means a tendency with many irregularities and seeming inconsistencies, and even much that appears retrograde.

One example: The Romans destroyed the 2nd Temple and did their best to destroy Judaism, but what resulted was a renewed Judaism, Rabbinic Judaism, with a profoundly powerful social, moral, and intellectual trajectory. That’s the Jewish view, and we’ve been saying it for 1800 years, but you would be hard-pressed to find much Christian (or Muslim) acknowledgment of that point of view until the enlightenment was well under way (1750+). In fact, in Europe (as opposed to the US, whose founders used Judaism as an important model) it only became "reasonable" to openly talk about Judaism’s historic value and validity after the military destruction of European nazism. That war, which dismantled the last vestiges of Europe’s moral and intellectual "authority," allowed a more open and honest reevaluation of Judaism and Jews. In sum, in spite of, shall we say, 95 generations of active resistence, the Divine gradient, which we Jews believe establishes Judaism’s priesthood role, persisted. Israel was restored, and Judaism’s fundamental importance to Western and Middle Eastern culture is now beginning to be acknowledged and studied by people other than Jews.

The clash of science and religion

Jbooks.com, in its 'discussions' section posed the following question to its readers, under the title of The Clash of Scientific Understanding and Religious Truth:

"Rabbi Soloveitchik suggests that the controversy isn't between evolution and creationism, nor is it whether God exists. The issue at heart is that man cannot be both made in the divine image and be equal to other species.

Are you convinced? Does human capacity for understanding our physical world separate us from everything or do biological similarities trump religion? Can science and religion ultimately be synthesized?"

I responded:

I think the Reb is a bit inaccurate in his thinking here. Science can not, and will not extinguish the divine spark in humans. That spark is an existential fact, tho many may not be attuned to it. Neither will science diminish our (apparent) higher consciousness of the divine; that is, higher as compared to other animals. The conflict between science and religion is really not about truth. It is about modes of thinking, and authority.

As for authority, the transfer of power from religious institutions to secular ones (or vice versa), was and is a turf war. The dogs will fight.

I think the more interesting issue is modes of thought. Put in its simplest terms, science asks how, and religion asks why. For example, we would not go to an evolutionary biologist to get an answer to why we humans exist. We would rather ask how we (probably) came to exist here. We would ask 'why are we here?' to a person who specializes in addressing questions of ethics and values.

However, the 2 modes of thinking are critically dependent. The Hebrew Bible often addresses the issue of how, and produces anecdotal evidence to describe the process. For example, Beraysheet/Genesis begins as a clearly scientific text, addressing the issues of origin of the universe (1:1+), origin (and evolution) of species (1:11+), origin of culture (2:16+, 6:18+, and other places), and origin of nations (10:1+). Science has filled in a great deal of detail in some areas.

But the evolutionists (and I am being specific here for the sake of brevity), for all their focus on process, have failed to grasp and work with an essential fact: there is a (divine) gradient to nature. What drives evolution, a process that goes from simple to more complex? There is no survival advantage in greater complexity. Indeed, it violates the principles of inertia and entropy. Specifically, "life" appears to be non-inertial in its behavior. There are no physics to answer the questions of what sets life in motion, what resists it, and what impels it. Life is anti-entropic in its trajectory towards greater complexity and organization. The evolutionists simply ignore these essential "details" and not a few other issues as well.

In sum, there is no conflict between science and religion, even tho there are many foolish and uninformed (or ideologically pre-formed) people on both sides.