Thirty Miles…

Thirty miles is approximately nine-thousand bicycle pedal revolutions…on my Bacchetta Giro short-wheel-base recumbent bicycle.

Thirty miles equals two hours of time…and space.  The fourth dimension of time and space becomes ever real within the context of a thirty-mile ride.  I traverse the same course, over and over and over again, three, four or sometimes five times per week.  The rides is in some ways always the same, but always different as well.  Stretches of some miles seem to roll along in an instant.  The same stretches, on a different day, seem to roll ever so slowly.  Time and space intertwine, become one.  Miles melt into spaces of thoughts and imaginings, visions of an ever-changing suburban environment and a few river basins of many birds—herons, egrets, ducks, vultures, hawks.  Cormorants perch upon the telephone wires that stretch across the span of the Coyote Creek, from autumn to spring, then they fly north to some other place.

Thirty miles is a course to the wide expanse of the Pacific Ocean, eight miles from our home, and then circling back inland to Cypress Village…via eight cities.  I ride to Seal Beach and stop for a minute or two at the pier to gaze out at the ocean, listen to the sound of seagulls, and watch a few fellow early morning risers—walkers, fellow cyclists, workers and business people, dog-walkers and surfers–who also have come to meld with the sea, the smell of sea air, the freeing sense of being one with this wide watery blue expanse at this southern California coastline.

Thirty miles is approximately eighteen-hundred calories burned…more or less, depending upon the speed and torque applied, as well.  I commissioned my body to lose fifty pounds of mass, beginning early this year, and easy it was to do with frequent and consistent thirty-mile burns each week…at least for forty pounds.  The final ten pounds seem reluctant to be shed.  Too much torque and the pounds stay, albeit as muscle mass rather than fat, but I would like to see them go.  This means more spinning and less torqueing.  This means when I feel the competitive urge to chase a young rider or two who pass me by on the riverbed trail at twenty-plus miles per hour… that I must let them go, lower my gear, increase my spin, and chase the pounds away instead.

Thirty miles is not a license to eat more food.  More calories burned?  Yes.  It would be easy to convince myself that I need more calories, for it is true, so I do eat more food, with a very aware consciousness of the calories they contain.  Yet, in counting calories I am very much aware that I was accustomed to eating too much food before this year, too many breads and starches, too much wine, and too little complex carbohydrates and good, high protein foods.  Granola with soy milk in the morning, but only half a cup.  A bowl of soup, a Tofurkey Italian sausage in the afternoon.  A salad and more soy protein in the evening.  A snack of a handful of nuts and raisins.  No second plates.  Lots and lots of water.

Thirty miles is a transcendence of body and mind.  Neurotransmitters—dopamine, endorphines and enkephalins—are released into the synapses of bilions of neuronal connections within my brain.  Meanwhile my blood pressure is changing, respiration is altered, blood circulation is increasing as the muscles, tendons, nerves and brain rise in ability and function to meet the demands of a thirty-mile bicycling venture.  I am transformed by thirty miles.  Energized, yet more relaxed and calm, all at once…as I glide into our village at the end of my ride.

Thirty miles is a meditation, a spiritual renewal, a rite of passage.  Each of the approximately nine-thousand pedal strokes is a thought, a memory, a contemplation, an experience.  Where does one stroke end and the other begin?  A continuum of being, of space and time, body and mind, bicycle and rider, sensate being and environment, past present and future all here and now, it is a singular sensation.

The Bacchetta Giro beckons.  It is 6:10 a.m.  Time to ride.

Amen.

MH

Confessions of an Ubuntu Monk: The Ritual of Installation: Thursday, March 17th, 2011

UBUNTU: A South African word meaning “I am because of who we all are.”

There are many various rites of passage, of transcendence, by which an individual may pass from one virtual realm of being into another. Is “virtual” synonymous with “ spiritual”? Not always, but in a large sense…yes. There are many times within a person’s life in which he or she may feel entranced, locked, within a realm of being, and bound to it, as if it simply “ must be” and there is no other way.

Such is the nature of being human, one of the many great paradoxes of being human. We can imagine and dream, yet oftentimes we are compelled to stay within a frame of reference, to maintain a sort of equalibrium, and lock ourselves into habitual ways of being. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. It is not. Many of our daily habits and rituals, our systemic status quos, are structures for sustainance and order in our lives. Yet, sometimes, elements of these reliant systems take on negative connotations, preventing us from being more than we can, be, perhaps preventing us from realizing our hopes and dreams, or to just see things from a new and different perspective. Our daily structures and regularities, if they sustain us into the next day, stave off any fears of the new and untried, even if they are painful structures or regularities. It is what we are accustomed to, it is what we are used to. Nothing is neither wholly good nor wholly bad, and we balance the assets and debits of the structures of our lives perpetually, without giving much of them up, without standing back from the whole of our lives to pause, to reflect, to examine new alternative possibilities for being, for experiencing this amazing human life.

Even when we stay within the sameness of our day-to-day lives, we find novelties, experiences which alter our comfort zone and give us pause to reflect, to wonder, and to make a small change in our ways of thinking, of being, and behaving. The religious structures of human life which sustain so many billions of people for their daily lives provide a sense of being, a sense of belonging, a sense of meaning and order, even when tragedy and peril befall us.

In our virtual lives we step into the realm of expressions through a computer screen, which seems to magically express billions of yes/no, on/off electronic switches into mega-logrythms of software codes, elevated into programmable text, which is then designed and formed into programs and operating systems. These magical formulas are then implanted into the memory banks of microchips onto silicone circuit boards, “A million angels dancing on the head of a pin,” as the late Joseph Campbell once described the awe of a central processing unit, the main brain of a computer motherboard. In this day and age, there are literally hundreds of millions of data bits, orderly processing data through a computer’s central processing unit, often with dual, triple or quad cores of being. How all of these formulas can then be translated into text, images, sound and video is astonishing, yet the collective minds of many human beings have found the means to do so through thousands of years of scientifici and technological progress, kept alive and evolving through the work of millions of scientists, technologists, developers and programmers.

Let me digress for a couple of paragraphs into an extremely brief history of computers and software before coming back to the very humanness of our virtual rituals and behaviors, as we use them each day.

Bill Gates, once a very young man in the early nineteen-eighties, bought a patent from IBM for a “Disk Operating System”, or IBM DOS. IBM DOS had been the main operating system for the IBM Personal Computer or, PC. The first PC was built around a 64ghz central processing unit, had only 64 kilobytes of RAM memory, compared to several gigabytes in present-day computers. There was no hard drive in that first computer. Only a dual “floppy disk” system that would hold two portable floppy disks of 360 kilobytes each. Compare this with today’s new computers, that have a “terabyte” or more of storage space on modern hard drives. At the same time that Bill Gates bought the seed to his Microsoft fortunes, IBM also relinquished its patent on the hardware systems of the first personal computer. Thus, the explosive computer industry was born as tens of thousands of companies, developres, programmers and inventors begin to devise their own computer systems, “IBM clones” as the first few generations of personal computers, following IBM, were known. The size of processing and memory chips would jump a generation by months, not years. So quickly would the abilities and uses of computers and computer chips advance over the next few decades. Now, we have operating systems developed for smart phones held in the palms of our hands, each of which can hundreds, if not thousands, of more operations than the first IBM PC. We now have laptops, netbooks, tablets, smart phones, and many of our home systems are integrating computers with multi-media and Internet access into a massive singular system with unlimited capabilities for business, home use, entertainment, education and many other operations.

To explain sizes of computer memory: BYTE: Abbreviation for binary term, a unit of storage capable of holding a single character . On almost all modern computers , a byte is equal to 8 bits . Large amounts of memory are indicated in terms of kilobytes (1,024 bytes ), megabytes (1,048,576 bytes), and gigabytes (1,073,741,824 bytes). A terabyte is a thousand gigabytes. – from www.WEBOPEDIA.com So, a character would be a letter or number expression, composed of eight bits of memory.

These are now very real and intricate threads of the fabric of being human. We humans network together through Internet-based social networks and email. We perform many of our communication tasks, thought-processing tasks, business and personal tasks, through the operating systems and software of our computers. Indeed, these are now very human elements of our lives, and we perform ritual acts each day with them, as part of the structure of our lives. Much of what we do with our computers is formulated into our thinking by the very structure of the operating system itself. This operating system, like many other elements of daily human life, is learned enough for each of us to use for our needs, yet within the limited structure of the operating system format, and the programs that can be run on it. Ninety-nine percent of computers, more or less, come with Bill Gates’ Microsoft Windows operating system installed. Most of us who have been using computers for the past twenty or thirty years have become so accustomed to this Microsoft system, and invested so many years into using it, learning the upgrades and revisions, that we don’t even question whether or not there is another operating system available…other than Apple Computer’s Mac OS which exists only in an Apple computer.

Like most of the other elements of the daily lives of many of us, much of how our computers work is taken for granted. Most of us never consider that there might be other computer operating systems available to us, that might be easier for us to use, cost a fraction of what Microsoft and affiliated software makers charge for their programs, or cost nothing at all, and perform better, more securely, faster, to do what we would like our computers to do. To venture outside of the routines of our lives, to experience the novel and new, is to add to the richness of being, and even to enhance the routines of the familiar by stepping back from them as if we were viewing them for the first time.

To be continued…

 

 

 

 

 

Liberal or Conservative: By What Label Would You Wish to Be Known?

For once, I have very little to add to the thrust of this message. I enclose excerpts and links to Roget’s Thesaurus page for the complete force of this essay.

LIBERAL OR CONSERVATIVE, WITH WHICH DEFINITIONS WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE AFFILIATED?

DIRECTLY FROM ROGET’S THESAURUS PAGES:

http://thesaurus.com/browse/liberal

Main Entry: liberal
Part of Speech: adjective
Definition: progressive
Synonyms: advanced, avant-garde, broad, broad-minded,catholic, enlightened, flexible, free, general,high-minded, humanistic, humanitarian,indulgent, intelligent, interested, latitudinarian,left, lenient, libertarian, loose, magnanimous,permissive, radical, rational, reasonable,receiving, receptive, reformist, tolerant,unbiased, unbigoted, unconventional,understanding, unorthodox, unprejudiced
Antonyms: conservative, narrow, narrow-minded
Main Entry: liberal
Part of Speech: adjective
Definition: giving, generous
Synonyms: altruistic, beneficent, benevolent, bighearted,bounteous, bountiful, casual, charitable,eleemosynary, exuberant, free, free-and-easy,handsome, kind, lavish, loose, munificent,openhanded, openhearted, philanthropic,princely, prodigal, profuse, soft-touch, unselfish,unsparing, unstinging
Antonyms: economical, greedy, mean, thrifty, ungenerous

http://thesaurus.com/browse/conservative

Main Entry: conservative
Part of Speech: adjective
Definition: cautious, moderate, tending to preserve thestatus quo
Synonyms: Tory, bourgeois, constant, controlled,conventional, die-hard, fearful, firm, fogyish,fuddy-duddy, guarded, hard hat, hidebound,holding to, illiberal, in a rut, inflexible, middle-of-the-road, not extreme, obstinate, old guard,old line, orthodox, quiet, reactionary, redneck,right, right of center, right-wing, sober, stable,steady, timid, traditional, traditionalistic,unchangeable, unchanging, uncreative, undaring,unimaginative, unprogressive, white bread
Antonyms: exaggerated, incautious, left-wing, liberal,progressive, radical

Main Entry: conservative
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: person who is cautious, moderate; an opponentof change
Synonyms: Tory, bitter-ender, classicist, conserver,conventionalist, diehard, hard hat, middle-of-the-roader, moderate, moderatist, obstructionist,old guard, old liner, preserver, reactionary,redneck, right, right-winger, rightist, silk-stocking, standpat, stick-in-the-mud,traditionalist, unprogressive
Antonyms: left-winger, liberal, progressive, radical

UNDERSTANDING OUR UNIVERSE…FROM THE REALM OF THE VERY, VERY SMALL…THE MICROSPHERE OF QUANTUM PHYSICS

UNDERSTANDING OUR UNIVERSE…FROM THE REALM OF THE VERY, VERY SMALL…THE MICROSPHERE OF QUANTUM PHYSICS

Did you know that subatomic particles appear to be in two places at once? Did you know that photons of light behave sometimes as waves, and sometimes as particles? Did you know that such behaviors are also dependent upon the observer? Odd questions and issues that arise in the realm of the very, very small microsphere of quantum mechanics, where the laws and theories of the larger macrosphere of planets don’t seem to apply in the same way.

Research and studies in quantum physics have accelerated with the advent of large particle accelerators here in the United States—the Firmalab accelerator, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermilab, and the newest and largest particle accelerator, the Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider. Particle accelerators are comprised of a circle of electromagnets, miles in circumference. The aim is to take two subatomic particles and send them in opposite directions so that they eventually collide at a great speed. This collision creates an explosion resulting in many more, and smaller, subatomic particles. By studying this process through these controlled collisions, scientists can actually observe quantum behaviors of these particles. Quantum behaviors of subatomic particles in the microsphere don’t follow the usual laws of physics that we can observe and major for larger complexes of atoms and objects in the macrosphere. It seems that as many as ten, and possibly eleven, and maybe even more dimensions are necessary to calculate the behaviors of these subatomic particles.

The current collider research is focused on finding the Higgs Boson, a subatomic particle that theoretically exists between the asymmetries of matter and anti-matter http://www.uslhc.us/LHC_Science/Questions_for_the_Universe/Antimatter. It is possible that this process will result in mini black holes. All matter and even gravity in the surrounding region are pulled into the vortex of a black hole. Many large black holes have been observed in adjacent galaxies. The black holes that might develop in the collision that would produce a Higgs boson are extremely small. Some groups of people are seeking to stop this research, fearing that the emergence of these mini black holes would result in the universe being sucked into one of their vortexes. What these people do not realize is that the controlled collisions of these particle accelerators are tiny, tiny instances of such collisions that are occurring all of the time. Our planet is constantly bombarded by neutrinos and other tiny quantum particles, and has been for billions of years. We are still here, without the universe being sucked into the vortex of any mini black hole that might have occurred. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_black_hole.

Actually finding a Higgs boson may not be the end of the universe, but will be a confirmation of the calculations that explain the odd behaviors of particles at the quantum level. The prediction is made from these calculations, thus the probability is high that it will be found. There is also the possiblity that it will not, which would shed a critical light on the current directions of some quantum theories and predictions. Stay tuned. The large Hadron collider in Cern, Swtizerland, isn’t even running at capacity yet.

Developing Branches of Life and Meaning

A soft spring rain fell gently on the trees, cascading through the leaves to the bright green belts of grass below. Then yesterday became today, leaving only a hint of clouds and a weather forecast for sun and warming, and the freshness of the post-rain air. Spring has been extraordinarily bountiful and beautiful this year.

Our village in Cypress is a suburban Eden, with lush green belts wrapping around the development of town homes and patio homes, generously dotted with trees, flowers and shrubs of many varieties. I know we travel to far away places in order to experience the diversities of people, culture, geography and foods, and to be with friends in their home lands. Sometimes, though, when I walk through our village, I wonder why we spend money and energy to travel anywhere else at all, to leave our paradise village, our wonderful home, and what my wife has created and nurtured for over a couple of decades to be our own wonderful small meditation garden, bedecked with fountains, wind chimes and bird feeders.

No, I have no regrets about traveling.  To the contrary, I dearly cherish the people and experiences that have so enriched our lives, but I think it is time to be home, and to invite our cherished friends to this wonderful place.  We have climbed the tropical forests of Kauai, above the Napali coast, the ancient pyramids of Oaxa and the Yucatan in Mexico, we have swam in the coral reefs off the coast of Bora Bora, and traveled among the alpine forests of Switzerland, Germany and Austria.  We have walked the ancient streets of Rome, hiked along Don Quixote’s windmills in La Mancha, Spain.   And now my longing is for home, here in Cypress Village, and to do some work, some writing, and perhaps to give back, to share, some of what I have learned in my fifty-seven years of life thus far.

When I gaze upon the trees in front of our home, I am reminded of their long and ancient histories, millennia before even their seeds, woven through centuries of poetry, myth and prose. I wonder how much we may be relinquishing in our modern technological age, where the focus of nature is blurred by the attention to virtual places and spaces, where the academics of our age is abandoning the liberal arts of literature, poetry, mythology and the great stories of old that link us to the past, and let us know the continuities of human existence, how we have developed and evolved.

We can learn about the science of trees, their natural technologies, but it is poetry and stories that attaches to our souls, deeply within our minds, in ways quite different from research and study.  Reading is an art of patience and reflection, of quiet concentration and focus upon words, and the release of the imagination to embrace the stories and verses of authors and  poets.

The ability to sustain a concentration long enough to read a book is being replaced my the short attention spans of multi-tasking electronic media, where people communicate, work and entertain themselves through screens, keyboards, keypads and touch screens of various sizes, shapes and abilities. Many people now text, email, work through apps and Internet, often without actually being with another human being outside of virtual relationships and spaces, save for a few minutes of their days. The only non-virtual experience with people may be on a freeway, still separated from each other by their cars, as millions commute alone to and from their work places. Funny, how crowded the freeways are with so many rolling metal boxes, each containing only a single human being, none able to touch each other, nor to communicate with each other except for a momentary glance as they pass each other.

I am not writing. I am typing. However, I am typing with full words and sentences. I wonder how much longer language will sustain the fullness of of words and meanings in this age where short-hand phrases and acronyms are creating an abbreviated and shallow means of virtual communication. Many people are communicating with bits and pieces of words, so I wonder if they retain only bits and pieces of meanings, as a result. LOL (This means “laugh out loud” in texting shorthand). On Facebook, the very popular social networking venue, which I used for a brief few times, each member has a profile and a wall, with various privacy settings to allow various elements of one’s profile to be seen by all, by some, or none. I noticed that when I posted a comment on another “friend”’s wall that I would get more responses about my style of writing, and the many words I used to write with, than I would about my comments.

In addition to the length of written or typed communications among us, and the fading art of concentration to read complete books, there is also a significant change in the way we communicate with each other through social networking. In particular, through Facebook. Facebook is only one of many social networking venues. There is Twitter, My Space, My Face, and Google’s new entry into the social networking realm, Buzz. Now, most social networking venues recognize that each of us has a variety of relationships with many different people in our lives. We have spouses and lovers, mothers and fathers, siblings and cousins, friends and associates, ministers and priests, employees and employers. In the non-virtual world, we develop and sustain these relationships in very different ways from each other. We treat and respect people differently and expect a different kind of treatment and respect in response, according to the nature of each type of relationship. All of this goes out the window on the level playing field of a social network venue.

Most social venues still ask the member if he or she would like to add a “person” to their social networking list, and each venue has its own privacy policies and settings to allow a person to see all of one’s profile, some of one’s profile, or none of it. And, a member may choose to allow the “persons” or “people” on his or her networking list to communicate with each other. The terms “people” and “persons” are generic, and allow the user to designate the nature of his or her relationships with the “people”, or people, he or she wants to network with on line, and what information is shared.

Facebook simply refers to anyone added to a member’s list as a “friend”, therefore all networking members of Facebook are deemed as “friends” whether this “friend” is a lover, a spouse, a mother or father, a sibling or cousin, real friend or associate, employee or employer. This single term will change the nature of the etiquette and relationships we have with each other on line. No differentiation by real relationships, unless one believes that he or she can be a “friend” to anyone. On the social networking venue of Facebook, we are all “friends”. It was for this, and other reasons, that I “de-faced” myself from Facebook. I don’t want to be a “friend” to everyone I know. I like my different roles with different people, which I hope are friendly most of the time.

It could well be I am making much out of nothing. I am, and have been for decades, very much concerned with the clarity of language, and using proper terms to communicate effectively, and to explain those terms, especially when presenting ideas and information about a subject that may be relatively unknown or familiar to my readers. Admittedly, I can use many words where fewer may suffice, sometimes to a fault. It may be that this transformation of language into texting short-hand will develop into a new language of bits, bytes and acronyms that links people together across present languages and cultures. There may be some advantage to equalizing all of us as “friends” on a social networking plane. Social pretenses may evaporate, along with levels of authoritarianism. In short, through social networking, we are all Bozos on this bus. I am all for breaking down the icons of tradition and authority that have been propped up for the sake of manipulating and deceiving people for thousands of years. Still, I reject the absence of etiquette and respect. Can we not have some proprieties that merit the experiences and knowledge of the long-lived and wise among us? I hope we retain such, and it must be reflected in social networking venues, as well, if this is going to remain as one of the key means by which people associate with each other.

So, I gaze again out upon the trees of ancient roots outside of my Cypress Village window, and I think of the ancient meanings of trees in thousands of years of poetry and mythology, the longtime vehicles of human truths—the oak of antiquity, the elm, and the ash, the dogwood and pine. In some ancient writings of cosmic creation, the trees were made before the sun, moon, and stars, a reflection of the deep relationship twixt human and tree, people and forest. We are made of the same stuff. The DNA that exists within tree and human is the same in substance, but different in order of strands on the double-helix of life. Yet, life all the same, weaving branches of leaves and branches of people among each other. The tree giving oxygen to the air for us to breathe, and human emitting carbon dioxide which nurtures the tree. An abundance of surrounding flora and fauna become elements in this relationship, a complexity of relationships of air, water, bacteria, viruses, algae, insects, birds, animals and humans. It is the ever-unfolding and changing nature of life, reflected through the language of poetry and myth, of ancient legends told and retold and retold again, featuring a hero of a thousand faces through a thousand ages.

It is the knowing through the changing stories and words that guides us back to the ancient roots, the common roots of tree and human. If we abandon these roots, we will lose the nurturance of a literary and real history, and the underlying sense of continuity from those days of old to now. We each lose a little bit of our selves when a human culture becomes extinct and, with it, its rich wealth of languages and meanings, words and stories, stretching back into antiquity.

A am a tree, and a tree is me,

and all that is in between us,

Time and space entangle our roots

and we mingle back to the

cosmic beginnings, or some

eternal cycle of things that

bind us as one.

A tree leaves, as we imagine.

A tree reaches up to the light

as we seek to be

alive as we can be.

– May 19th, Michael Hovey

With respect to the ancients, humans and trees,
Amen.
MH

WHY I DEFACED MYSELF FROM FACEBOOK

I defaced myself from Facebook, after my last of three experiments with it.  I am on Google’s Buzz and also on Twitter, which seem to be much less burdened by the complexities of Facebook’s structure, and geared much more to my purposes for a social network venue, which is to publicize my web site and web logs.  As far as I can see, Twitter seems to much more easily connect people by interest or topic, without the multi-layered profiles and multi-layered privacy settings of Facebook.  Also, there are not the myriads of apps and games on either of them that seem to overwhelm the space of one’s wall on Facebook with “friends” of “friends” games popping up all over it.

You can find my essays here at my Cyberian Reflections web log: http://mhpathfinder.wordpress.com

Facebook is good for sharing photos, which can also be done through Buzz, and  Facebook, with many family members involved in it, it is easy to make a general announcement for an event or activity to the family, albeit not a direct communication with people, just a note on a wall.  However, Facebook has had some recent problems, and some of those–through my online data–could contaminate some confidentiality and legal client privilege issues down the road.   As for photos, I can share them via email, and Google’s Picasa makes this process very easy.

As recently as a few days ago, the executives of Facebook were holding an emergency “all-hands-on-board” meeting to discuss some serious problems with their privacy policies, when it was reported in the news that Facebook members’ personal profiles–no matter if set to “only me” or “everyone”–were being sold in lists to third-party marketing firms.   This explains why within days of my recent subscription to Facebook, I was suddenly overwhelmed with text messages on my cell phone and email messages from companies I had never done business with, nor desired to.  The American Civil Liberties Union, of which I am a member, sent me an email about the Facebook profile list marketing issues.

Most of us take it for granted that such a widely-used social networking venue is good for keeping in touch with family and frineds, and it is.  But, we do so without thinking about how all of the personal information about us that is aired is used, blocked or not.  When one “unsubscribes” from Facebook, the company keeps all of the profile, identity, addresses, phone numbers, interests, backlog of messages and posts, and other data that one puts on their Facebook pages.   Most people would assume that if he or she left Facebook, cancelled their subscription, that their data would be deleted.  Not so.  I discovered on a user forum that the information was being retained and sold to marketing firms.  One does have the option to have their Facebook data completely deleted, but not unless you do an intense search on the help page topics and Facebook user forums to find what that process is.  It is NOT readily available on the Facebook user’s Account settings or options, nor is it readily available on the Facebook help page.  There was not a single HELP topic that addressed deleting one’s page.  I put it in the HELP search window, and came up with a list of deleting one’s data topics.  When I clicked on any of them, NOTHING HAPPENED!  This was curious.  I went to the Facebook User Forum, and found the issue being kicked around by a number of users trying to leave Facebook and ensure that their data was deleted.  Eventually I found a user who posted the particular web page for deleting one’s data.  Even when I clicked to the site and clicked on the “submit” button to delete my Facebook pages, Facebook told me it would not be deleted for fourteen days.  Why?  Who knows?

The social networking venues of Facebook, Buzz, MySpace, Twitter and others are relatively new–only a couple of years old–and as they continue to evolve, ethics and etiquette for them will evolve as well.  I don’t think I want to be considered a “friend,” or “friend of a friend” to all that I network with, and Facebook is unique in using these terms.  Twitter or Buzz just say “people” without all of the ramification of the term “friend.”  Semantics and meanings may not seem so important to many, especially in this age of cell phone texting where acronyms and other linguistic shortcuts are threatening the richness of language.   Also there are issues of TMI, to use an acronym, or “too much information” that people provide, even the most trivial of communications, deemed appropriate or not, on Facebook to their “friends” and “friends of friends” who might also turn out to be their parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, minister or priest, work associates or employers, or…as the web of “friends” of “friends” of “friends” of “friends” deepens…who knows who else?  As Facebook sells off lists of personal profiles to third party marketing companies, it would be best to assume that any and all information posted on Facebook is in the public domain, no matter the privacy settings.

For more on the most recent privacy issues plaguing FACEBOOK users, and prompting an emergency meeting of Facebook execs, read this article:

http://www.aclunc.org/issues/technology/blog/facebook_execs_meeting_today_on_your_privacy.shtml

At any rate, let’s keep in touch…by phone or email.

Amen.
Mike
a.k.a. M. H. Pathfinder

Notes on Douglas Hofstadter’s “I AM A STRANGE LOOP,” and Loops into other Realms

Douglas Hofstadter has been writing books on the strangeness and loopiness of self-referential thinking for about thirty years. His books include the following:

Godel, Escher and Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid

The Mind’s I

Metamagical Themas

I Am A Strange Loop

His latest book is an attempt to simplify the complexities of self-referential thinking. He would argue that each of his books have been attempts to do so, but he would also admit that they ended up being longer essays with more complex explanations and extrapolations of the complexities of self-referential thought than he intended. GEB (Godel, Escher and Bach) is one of my favorite reference books, and a book just to recapture my wonder and curiosity for the universe when reading the media news of of the New American Dark Age and George Bush’s continual march of determined ignorance gets too depressing. So, he offers “I Am A Strange Loop.” I enjoy all of his books. Hofstadter’s “I” is a playful child full of curiosity which never seems to age into complacency about the wonders of loopiness, and the seeming paradoxical nature of human consciousness, or the consciousnesses of other beings as well. When do the thought mechanisms of a machine or living thing reach a point of self-referential thought? Hofstadter lets us know that this is not a phenomenon that is easy to pin down, nor an issue that is concretely black and white, nor absolute.  If we paid attention, we might be amazed at the array of lifeforms in which this strange loopiness arises, and the degree of complexity in creatures that we might not usually consider closely related to us in “intelligence.”

Let me offer this paraphrased review, an appreciative rephrasing and personalization of some of the many fun, exciting and mesmerizing points of Hoftstadter’s book, mingled with an extrapolation or two (or three, or four…) of my own. Thanks Mr. Hofstadter for a metamagical thematic playtime in my mind, for my “I” to ponder and enjoy.

One can obviously understand the consciousness and self-referential thinking and feelings of beings, such as dogs, elephants, dolphins, chimpanzees and humans. What about a mosquito? How about a robot-activated self-driving car? Does the robot-activated self-driving car have a consciousness of “self”? If a human’s self-referential “I-ness” is a soul, does the mosquito have a soul, albeit with much less self-referential abilities, thus a “smaller” soul? Is my dog’s soul smaller because she doesn’t perceive the complexities of symbols and metaphors that I recognize? I certainly lack the olfactory linguistics of Truffle, my dog, so there are complexities of meanings and metaphors that my nose cannot decipher, therefore the nose of my soul is is not as gifted as the nose of the soul of my dog. Is a soul’s nose any less important to a mind’s “I”?

Well, you can see that the questions can be quite fun, puzzling and go into many different directions. What is more, beyond the self-referential loopiness of living, thinking beings, there is a loopiness to the universe itself. An atom is a seemingly stable element of matter, but it is in reality a temporal state of energy, a tension between two opposing forces–the strong and weak force of the atom. It may be that no matter exists at all, and that even stranger things occur within subatomic particles, such as a quark occupying two spaces at the same time or light behaving as both a wave and a particle. And, the mathematical explanations for the behaviors of some subatomic particles require at least eleven dimensions. We live in three dimensions, understand the curving nature of space/time through the fourth, but how much do we know about the other seven dimensions? Or, are there even more? These ideas are not clear and belong to the realm of quantum physics and theoretical designs which are often difficult to clearly demonstrate to satisfy our sensate thinking.

So, the “I” of me is not a tangible thing to be pinned down, and when one peers into the brain to see the electrochemical processes and neural firings of axions and synapses the “I” is not to be seen careening through them. A system often takes on a personality that is greater than the sum of its parts, or at least a result of the parts working as a whole. A human body is composed of various organs and entities, enzymes, bacteria and a host of other living things. Some people, befuddled by the directions and behaviors that come from their own thoughts, say things like, “I don’t know what my brain was thinking,” as if their brain was somehow detached and operating independently from the rest of the body and context in which that body exists. How large is the “I” of the mind? What is the mind? Is it only the cerebral cortex that tails down into bundles of nerves that branch out to the limbs and digits of toes and fingers? Does the mind stop at the spine, the nerve endings? Does the mind incorporate the lungs, heart, kidneys, liver, gall bladder, appendix and other organs, the derma and blood? Or is the “I” of the mind these things, as well, or none of them? Is the “I” a metaphysical soul? It may be something beyond what we can physically see or sense, but the mind’s “I” is nonetheless a result of the physiological processes of a human body that reaches that self-referential loopiness to stand outside of itself and look back and say, “Hey! That’s me!”

Well, after reading these few paragraphs, you may be able to understand how Douglas Hofstadter’s attempts to convey the nature of self-referential thinking could easily expand into hundreds of pages. Fortunately, Hofstader draws upon some very playful and creative analogies and self-referential sentence structuring that tweaks the curiosity and child within each of our “I”s. And I’m not talking about your left “I” or your right “I”, but the “I”behind your eyes. In THE MIND’S I he utilizes phrases from Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, full of paradoxical metaphores and strange loopiness.

Douglas Hofstadter also is a contributing writer to Scientific American.

Amen.

MH

The Pathfinder

IF YOU MEET THE BUDDHA ON THE ROAD, KILL HIM

It’s a quote from ninth-century Zen Master, Lin Chi, a warning to rely only upon the self and not to trust external forces as “authority figures” who wish to dictate one’s life or even simply to imply a certain way that one must be, and Lin Chi would warn not even to rely upon his words I just cited, but to reflect upon one’s own self as one’s guide. Alexander Pope wrote, “Know then thyself. Presume not god to scan. The proper study of mankind is Man.” The only guru one can trust to control one’s life is the guru within, the self. Let no external force have absolute power over ME, even this author who is recommending such advice, or even me who is quoting him. This is in extreme contradiction to the religious paths that so many follow, surrendering their lives to the interpretations of holy books, rendered holy by scribes, priests and self-proclaimed religious leaders throughout history. Or, surrendering to supposed gods, figments of shared imaginations that catapult an ideal vision of human behavior up into the fanciful skies and netherlands of heavenly aspirations, unfounded and unproven by one’s own experience or tests of reason and logic.

This is not to imply anarchy or chaos as preferable means of governing human affairs. I suspect, and believe, that if we were to search within our selves, sans the sea of preconceived notions of multimedial messages that have been teeming into our minds since infancy, we would find a very humanistic self that would seek to create a social network of mutual reliance, because it would benefit the self, as well as other selves, toward a peaceful and mutual means of human cohabitation and prosperity. Not to appear as a naive fool here, I understand that a mutually human social consciousness has to be practiced and honed, learned and tested in a child’s life to have meaning. This seems quite paradoxical to the theme of this essay which seeks to diminish the influence of external authorities and gurus, teachers and sages, and to put forward the value of the self as the primary teacher and guide to one’s life directions. Yet, the choice to adopt an external force as a teacher, if even for a temporary time, can be a choice of one’s self, the result of a reflective process through which the mirror of one’s mind yields an image that one sees as needing an external influence.

And, what is a self? Does one’s self end at the perimeter of one’s skin? Or, is the human self even those ideas and things shared with others, outside of one’s body and mind? I have conversations with dead people, many of whom are my favorite authors whose books I have read long after they have expired, and whose words I allow to bounce among the other ideas in my mind, and I will argue points for and against, be awestruck by novel ideas and synergistic alliances between an author’s ideas and my own present experience. These people are dead, yet their human selves have been transmitted into written texts that communicate with us centuries, millennia after the physical person has expired and rotted away. This metaphysical process takes place through the written word, through film, through music, through architecture and visual arts, through dance, and long beyond the life of a person who created any one of them.

Who is the Buddha? Can he even be identified specifically outside the realm of the self, as we each walk down our paths of life, to killl him? If we kill the Buddha, do we kill part of our self? And…of course…what is a self? Is even a hermit, alone in a cave, a solitary self, if he or she is using the products of other minds on which to sleep, with which to prepare food, and with which to sustain other aspects of their “solitary” lives? At the other extreme, are the social constructs of authoritarianism that discourage individual thought and freedom to choose.

The constructs of American legal and governmental systems mimick the authoritarian constructs of institutional religion. Government chambers are oft designed to loft the executives into higher chairs than their organizational subordinates. Court rooms loft judges into higher chairs as if their authority was the supreme over all in the room. The pulpits and lecterns of many a Catholic and Protestant church are raised to lift the priests and ministers to higher positions than their congregations, as if they are supreme mediums between congregations and gods.

These physical constructs of religious and governmental authority combine to create an illusion of executive and priestly authority over the citizens of a nation-state, and thus relax an individual citizen’s sense of personal responsibility and power over his or her own life and directions. Citizens become pliable human clay to be manipulated and molded into uses that suit the executives of governments, religions and corporations without the central concern of a person’s being and well-being, or their ecological context of existence.

This is a supreme folly, but I am no authority either. I merely ask the reader to consider these thoughts, reflect upon them, and wonder how they fit with your own balance or imbalance of external and internal messaging and personal power. I would hope that a very deep reflection on these issues and ideas would be made on the days and hours before one casts a vote for a particular political candidate and/or votes to adopt or reject a specific bill, initiative or resolution.

So Be It.

Amen.

The Pathfinder

BEING HUMAN: The Nature of the Journey

THE NATURE OF THE JOURNEY

The religious journey is the pursuit of truth,

back to our source of being,

the original meaning,

that elusive end to which we never arrive,

yet by which

our paths are so greatly illuminated.

The greatest wonder of it all

is that we’ve never left the source to get back to it,

but we have deceived ourselves most artfully

We are religious animals. We have a deeply profound need to belong with “The Other.” It begins at conception when two genetic banks of information mingle (male and female), then develop into a colony of cells that continue to split off into other colonies of various form and function, yet all within the same mass, on the wall of the uterus of a mother. Other processes and time contribute to development, until a time when we are propelled through a narrow channel from the comfort of this small and secure place and out into a world of noise, cold, other beings, and apart from our source of dependence and nurturance. In our nubile state, we are still completely dependent on “The Other,” in this case our mother. We cannot feed nor protect our fragile fleshy bodies from the elements, nor move about in any fruitful way, in order to survive. Our instincts are to whelp for attention until we are attended to. Without “The Other” at this stage in our human development we would surely die. It is almost as if we’ve been taken from the womb prematurely. We were, before our conception, and the mingling of two genetic banks of information, without a sense, without a clue, and never separate from the whole of things. Our consciousness was that of the cosmos, if it has one. We were of a perpetual cosmic process.

What a mad trick, to be endowed with conscious mind that would eventually perceive itself as–not only separate from the whole–but a unique and reflective being unto itself. It is a trick, intentioned or not, for we are truly NOT independent from the whole. We’ve never left the ecosystem that produced us. We’ve merely transformed in shape and function. The paradox of human existence is this, that we are of one indistinguishable flow, though in a transient form of human existence for some duration of time, before expiring. The energy and matter that was an individual “me” is soon dissipated among the ecosystem once more to recombine with other cosmic elements into other forms and functions. Even in our most supreme state of human independence, we are dependent upon the air, water, plants and animals, other people and a desirable climate. We are compelled to belong with each other. Even the hermit in a cave cannot exist without having learned some skills from another or to use some tools and appliances that were manufactured by another.

Beyond our early development, we socialize with a larger group–from our primary care giver to a family, extending to a tribe or clan, to a community of friends and associates, to a city-state of interdependent organizations and structures, to a nation, and now to a world.

It is no wonder then, that early humans, perceived all of the activities of nature as being animated by “The Other” for our development dictated to us that we could not exist without “The Other.” At birth, we had lost our Cosmic identity, we had no sense of being part of the whole of things. The development of reflective thought occured within the context of our mutual dependence with each other. When the earth turned, presenting the illusion that the sun traveled across the sky, day after day after day, it was perceived not only as moving, but as being moved by an anthropomorphized being, a super human, a god.

All immediately intangible events were explained through an anthropomorphic projection of our own childhood experience– perhaps a providing parent, a mentoring friend, an anonymous and/or alien specter ,or a suspicious or harmful enemy. Our minds are full of archetypes of legend and lore. Then, as today, organized religion was married to the State, through which the distribution of goods and services were controlled by an elite and powerful few, controlling the masses through their religious dogmas, implying a work ethic that would benefit the elite and powerful through the toil of the masses, and whipping up a combination of nationalism and religious duty to compel men into cannon fodder to war for the extension of the empire and the extermination of competing states and religions. In some cases, the religion WAS the state, as in the long and bloody reign of many a Catholic pope.

In other cases, the State was all, as in China under the bloody dictatorship of Mao, where a grotesque distortion of communism was misused to slaughter millions in the name of Mao. Communism is an ideology in which a community benefits from the work of each other in an egalitarian government in which all are equal, without a hierarchy of social classes.. In “communist” China, there was no equality. Those who controlled the State controlled the people. There was a ruling class, a lot of propaganda, and a peasant class. Those who demonstrated allegience to the State rose in power within the misnamed Communist Party. It was, in truth, an elitist party. Nothing communal about it. The Cultural Revolution under Mao, which led to the slaughter of millions and the destruction of surrounding societies as in Tibet, ended with Mao’s death. The elitist dictatorial government structure remained. The so-called “Communist” Party is still the party of power, but capitalism has exploded in China, which is now becoming the most lucrative economic power in the world. It is the major manufacturer and exporter of goods in the world.. The Chinese religious legends and lore have been altered to satisfy the State, but many traditional archetypes persist. In other countries, legends and lore of old are infusing with products of a technological entertainment and communications revolution.

Today’s legends and lore are an abstract compilation of marketing ads, films, video games, books, and ancient religious texts. The traditional archetypes have been morphed into manipulative advertising and propaganda by corporations and governments to persuade the common citizens of earth’s lands to buy their products and services, labor in their factories, and act as cannon fodder in their warring disputes over corporate control of energy sources and natural resources. In this sense, the manipulation of the masses has not changed, but the means of delivering propaganda and manipulative ads has become one of the leading industries of the empire. It has become a sophisticated and highly professional field of business and government.

It is my mission to help people fend off the propaganda, the intertwining manipulations of religion and politics, the distorted and persuasive advertising, by learning to be good researchers. My goal is to educate people to dissieminate fact from fiction, to find the truth among the spinning rhetoric of politicians and their corporate news affiliates, to follow the money trails to see who benefits from a war, a bending of environmental law that harms citizens, the exploitation of dwindling fossil fuels, and more.

To this end, I advocate three guiding elements–reason, human compassion, and desire for peace. For tools, I recommend a computer and an Internet access service, your mind, and the ability to suspend your preconceived notions about the way you believe the world of governments, religion and corporations function in the world.

I recommend the Scientific Method which begins any study without assumptions. One begins with observation, which leads to a question. The question is then presented as a hypothesis. The Scientific Method is applied to keep us honest. We seek not to PROVE our hypthesis, but to prove its opposite–the NULL hypothesis. Thus, reason and skepticism guide to consider NOT how our assumptions may be correct, but to analyze the variable elements that can confound what our assumptions are, or may imply.

I understand the faith that so many devote to their religions, vehicles of moral truths transmitted through ritual and tradition, some for millennia. Religion is, more often than not, the central focal point of a culture, of that culture’s families, and therefore of an individual’s sense of belonging. The irrational attachment with which one adheres to these important social belief systems is what we call faith. Faith, without reason, can only lead to group-think, ostracization and/or denouncement of those outside of the faith, and–in the extreme case–war. Within an irrational religious faith lie the seeds of prejudice, intolerance, bigotry, discrimination and persecution of others. An irrational faith carries with it a sense of arrogant self-righteousness that condemns the rich diversity of humanity that exists outside of itself. A healthy faith is based on reason, adapts to the facts of the universe in which it arises, and reconciles its tenets to reality. An unhealthy faith will deny the reality of the natural world, will be intolerant of other cosmic possibilities and those who believe in them, and become a dangerous threat to the family of Man. One need only to read a scholarly book of human history to see the calamity that irrational and bigoted faith has had upon human civilizations.

It is for this reason, that I left organized religion so many years ago, that my mind would not be consumed by a singular irrational explanation of our human existence within the Cosmos, that it could explore ideas, philosophies, facts and fictions, untethered by the preconceived notions of dogma, doctrine, or creed.

A single word can be packed with a multitude of preconceived notions. Example? “God”. To some a fatherly, white bearded heavenly creator, who made humankind in his image out of loneliness, and observes and intercedes upon his creation from some heavenly throne. Does one dare ask how, within an eternal realm of existence , this being can separate out a moment in which to suddenly feel lonely? To others, a faceless spirit moving through the Cosmos as a constant creative force. To others, a supernatural entity that can take on a human form by which to redeem the creatures it created that had chosen to exist in ways not tolerable to this entity. To still others, an animating force in each and every form of this physical universe. And, yet to others, a concept projected from a human mind to explain the events of natural phenomena. Thing move. Things happen. Some ONE has to be moving them and making them happen. Lastly, to others (such as myself) a projected irrational fantasy-being of one’s self, to provide comfort and security in the face of fear, anguish and the absence of reasonable explanation. Human belief in gods diminishes according to the level of one’s education, utility of reason, understanding of science, and intellectual development.

http://www.objectivethought.com/atheism/iqstats.html

To be a “truth walker” one is compelled to leave a standing position.

Amen.

MH

Of Avatars and Human Souls

If it is true that gods, angels and spirit worlds exist, if it is true that souls inhabit bodies, then bodies are merely avatars for this virtual world deemed real. And, it would seem, that the spirit world is the real world from which souls are implanted into avatars of this earthly realm at either conception, some point of meiosis or mitosis, or maybe even at birth. There is no way to establish when such in incarnation of a human soul might begin, so one is left to speculate as to some point along the continuum from conception to birth. Or, perhaps there are half-souls incarnated in sperm cells and ova, and that when a sperm and ovum unite, the genes of the two half-souled bodies mingle, share chromosomes, and a whole soul is conceived in the combined elements of the two bodies become a single new body and the two half-souls becoming a single whole soul.

This presents the question: Are there a bunch of half-souls in the real spirit world, or do souls split to be incarnated into sperm and ova and reunite when each half has found its respective other half. This would mean that a certain sperm was meant to find a specific ovum that had its specific soul-half that was missing in the incarnations into sperm and ova. If whole souls are incarnated within human forms then it would have to occur some time after meiosis and mitosis when the human form is whole, and one might suspect that it would occur after the central nervous system is formed, but such suspicions seem to be left to the imagination in attempts to decipher the process of spirits incarnating human bodies from the real spirit world to this virtual earthly existence.

We are offlanders, or outsiders, to the spirit world, peering in through dreams and maybe through communicative attempts through prayer. In Christian terms, this virtual place for incarnated souls is merely a testing ground of faith, and the faithless are condemned to be isolated from the spirit world in a fiery hell of pain and gnashing of teeth, and all of that. The faithful, deemed so by bowing down to the authoritarian ruler of the spirit-god Yahweh, and to his spirit-son, Jesus, may rise up into the sky, and from there to that spirit world and join with Yahweh and Jesus forever. Or, Yahweh may be Jesus to some who believe in the mystery of the trinity, and then they would simply spend eternity in this spirit world with Yahweh, either as himself or as his son, Jesus, or maybe the forms of Yahweh and Jesus are avatars for the earthly avatars and these too are shed in the spirit world. Who knows?

James Cameron created the wonderful fantasy film, AVATAR, in which a young marine becomes the savior, or messiah, of the Na’vi people of the moon world of Pandora. He “ drives” an avatar fashioned from the DNA of his human brother, now dead, and Na’vi DNA. In the story, Jake Sully, the young marine becomes the avatar through a “linking” process, in which it seems that the whole of his conscious mind is transferred to the avatar and his body sleeps when the link is in process. When the avatar sleeps, he returns to his human body, and this may also happen when some one interrupts the link process. Jake Sully has incentive to remain in his avatar body. Jake is a paraplegic due to a war injury to his spine. His avatar body is tall, agile and strong. Gravity is light on Pandora allowing the Na’vi to perform with amazing physical prowess. Jake also becomes a Na’vi, inside and out, and this changes the entire scenario of the corporate sponsor’s plan for Jake to spy on the Na’vi as one of them in order to move them out of their ancestral home under which a valuable natural fuel in the form of a mineral ore exists in massive quantities. Eventually, by story’s end, Jake becomes a Na’vi without the link-up process, but through the spiritual incarnation of his earthly self into his avatar body, through the spirit-mother or goddess that exists within all things of Pandora.

The film might give Christians a sense of how it may be that a soul of the spirit world would become incarnate in a human form. The other alternative is that the soul of a human may never have existed before the conception between a sperm and ovum, in which case the soul would begin at this time of cell meiosis and mitosis, or some time after, but before the actual birth. How does a Christian know whether a human soul existed before its inhabitancy of its human form, or if the soul began when the human form began? How does one’s perspective of the conception of a human soul affect his or her sense of the spirit world and this one? Which is real and which is virtual? Are both worlds real, and if so, why can’t we access the spirit world in a more tangible way? Are these two dimensions—this earthly realm in this tiny obscure spot, spinning around one of billions and billions of stars within one of billions and billions of galaxies in this universe that we can sense, and then this spirit dimension which we cannot sense at all?

As an atheist, I’m outside of the sphere of faith in such worlds and things.  I do have a notion that other dimensions exist about which we know very little.  Indeed, it seems that at least eleven dimensions must exist in order for the behavior of subatomic particles to be mathematically calculated to explain the weakness of gravity, according to quantum physics.

The hunt for new dimesions:

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2714

M-Theory: Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-theory.

We have very few ideas about these dimensiona and how they may affect us beyond our existence in these three familiar dimensions and into the fourth, in which space and time can bend.  So, it seems plausible to disccus the possiblities of what these dimensions may be like and what exists within them.  Is one dimension that which is so often referred to as “heaven”?

Food for thought.  Eat some.

Questions? Comments?