Education (?)

I am reliving nightmares from many past years--the ones where you are back in a classroom and forgot all about the test or the homework or your locker combination. Sheer terror until you wake up and remember it all ended long ago. Except this time I have plugged my brain in like the people in The Matrix; I am taking two online courses on chemical dependency. No human contact, only disembodied words on the screen. It's interesting though that one can tell a few things about the personalities of instructors and fellow students almost right away by reading their discussion postings. One instructor is a hardcore authoritarian--who else would structure an essay question on an exam so that "only CORRECT answers to essay questions will receive points." I am realizing at least one thing about myself--that part of both my long-past successes AND dropping out of academia was based on my extreme dislike of being told to learn things in a certain way. If I were back in college for real I would instantly drop a class where the essays had a "correct" answer; now I guess I will persevere and see what happens.

Anyway, all that is boring unless you are me. I will be taking a break from this blog for a few weeks while I get my time re-arranged to accomodate the study schedule that I have promised myself not to rail at. My early morning writing and thinking time will be taken over by the mental organization of the instructors of these classes and I will do better by not thinking too creatively for a while. But . . .gotta do it if I'm gonna do it! I'll post things occasionally if my brain just can't stand the pressure inside, otherwise, see you later in the summer!

Evo Revo

Several days ago the cops shot a guy around the corner from where Daughter Em lives in Portland. They immediately blocked off the whole street and wouldn’t let her go home. She had to spend the night at a friend’s and next day wasn’t even allowed on the block until later in the day. Who the hell do they think they are, making people sleep on couches and not letting them go home? The arrogance of just blockading an entire neighborhood as if everyone there were guilty astounds me. It’s not like there was a big shootout and people were in danger. They were probably planting a gun on the guy they shot and didn’t want the neighbors to see. They didn’t need to bother, the guy the pigs shot at his wedding in New York didn’t have a gun planted on him and the cops were still acquitted. Actually turns out that the cop who killed this guy in Portland had also killed a woman in the same neighborhood a few years back and was acquitted for that. We used to call these guys pigs in the 70’s, for good reason.



Not much has changed (Seattle 1999):




Reagan came along and all of a sudden it got fashionable to be a Yuppie establishment type and such people don’t criticize the cops. And then after 9/11… I don’t even want to talk about that. Just because there were some uniformed heroes there doesn’t make ALL uniforms into heroes and does NOT automatically command my respect. So I’m a traitor, right?

A couple of years ago our less-than-esteemed Vice Emperor Dick (Evil Eye) Cheney came through Billings on an Imperial Progress to his favorite fishing spot on the Bighorn River. This happens every year or so and they always take his motorcade down from the airport on Zimmerman Trail just up the block from us. (They need to avoid the legions of terrorists waiting on the main airport road who have it in for Dick. It’s a good thing they don’t know about me.) So, on this particular day, our long-suffering UPS man was heading to our house to pick up a load of mugs to send all over the world to our lovely customers when a (woman) cop flagged him down, shouted something he couldn’t hear, and walked away. He looked around, saw that Cheney’s armored limousine was still 3 or 4 blocks away, so decided she must have meant for him to move his truck (so the terrorists couldn’t hide behind it). Instead she must have meant for him to stay put (obviously there was a lot of room for bombs in a big UPS van), because as soon as he put his truck in gear she flew into a rage, began screaming at him and wrote him a huge ticket, the basic violation being that he had “ignored her direct orders.” Now a moving violation is a serious deal in UPS land; a driver with more than one will be fired. Poor UPS Steve had to take a whole day off work to appear in court, pay a fine, explain the whole thing to his boss (who luckily was not a flag lapel-pin wearer). When he told me about it three days later he was still shaking, and he is a very gentle guy, not quick to anger. And who asked you to fish here anyway Mr. VeePee? You and your Dark Minions go away and leave our poor UPS driver alone! Fish in Wyoming where you belong!!!

(Ahem, excuse me, lost it for a minute there. . .)

In the New World we are going to make, there will be police, yes. But they will all have to take 4 years of social work and counseling classes and there will be only one guy with a gun for every 100 negotiators instead of the reverse. They will have to spend a certain number of hours a month in counseling practice sessions instead of the same hours on the shooting range. And it will not be a de facto capital crime for a mentally ill guy to threaten a cop. And any cop who loses his temper because someone disrespects him or her would be summarily fired. Any cop who needed to get his rocks off chasing someone who ignored (or didn’t hear) his command to stop would be fired. Any cop that pulled out his gun because a 12-year old in the ghetto was running from him (something I saw in front of my house in East Palo Alto once) would be FIRED!!

Viva la revolución.

Evo devo

Are we evolving? To fail to change is to die, as any dinosaur can tell you. Any genetic changes in our bodies would probably be too slow for us to detect until we have been keeping records for another ½ million years or so. Our body still wants to walk miles in the sun tracking antelopes and eating large amounts of grains and raw vegetables for every precious bite of meat. Our mind no longer wants to do this, it wants to have pizza delivered. So our minds must be changing faster than our bodies. If we are evolving culturally--which I hope is the case because if we aren’t, we’re doomed—where are we going? Are there such things as mutations in cultural values which would endow the possessors to out-survive the holders-on of the old culture? Maybe that is what we are seeing now with some people perceiving the failure of our suburban church-going lawn-mowing mall-shopping culture and rejecting it in favor of alternative agriculture, alternative energy, alternative medicine. Interesting that the label “alternative”, connoting a choice, is stuck onto things that are really the only rational option in the minds of the culturally mutated. There really is no choice, humans must evolve. But the fear of change, so Republican, so High Church, rules many people and they huddle within their comfortable subcultures. Humans are hard-wired to believe in something; it is unfortunate that with many the wiring is of the old school, lead soldered type that makes re-programming almost impossible. They will cling to their beliefs until they die because for the conservative, preserving those beliefs is all that counts.

Personally I get bored doing the same thing more than three times in the same way—memorizing catechisms about what I should believe doesn’t sit well with me, it is not in the least satisfying to mindlessly repeat mantras. I cannot understand why so many people feel comfort in treading and re-treading the same worn paths as if their tired group and their old beliefs were the be-all and the end-all. People talk about the comforting nature of rituals and I just cannot understand. To me a ritual is interesting only once, the first time, in an anthropological sense, and to participate more than that makes me feel silly. Each to their own, I guess. So have I mutated away from the Dominant Culture? If so, will my biological evolution play along with my adventurous drift away from the well-trodden path? Hard to say—as E. O. Wilson, wearing his sociobiologist hat, said: “Biological evolution keeps cultural evolution on a short leash.” Meaning that you get too crazy and you won’t have kids. Or your kids will grow up so prickly neurotic that they won’t breed. So the Ted Kaczinski’s die out, thankfully, but maybe so do the poets the outsiders, and the weird dreamers, the Jim Morrisons. The backslapping guys on the golf course and the sherry-tea ladies at the art center will all have scads of grandchildren and there goes the Earth. Alea lacta est.

Harping on various things (is this what blogs are supposed to be?)

I hear people all around asking “Do you believe in evolution?’ Such an American question; we make everything into a religion. Evolutionary theory is a strong theoretical framework to understanding all life on this planet and possibly others. This is not something that needs to be believed in or not—without it we just would not be even to first base in the fields of biology, ecology, biochemistry, medicine, many more.

Driving past the local hospital yesterday I noticed the sign on their new psych ward—they don’t call them “psych wards” anymore, they are now Behavioral Health Clinics. I suppose I can understand why they don’t want to label the patients, in or out, to whom they provide services, but the connotations to me are scary, implying that their goal is just to help people create external behaviors that fit the mold regardless of those peoples’ internal thoughts and feelings—true behaviorism; control the reinforcement and they will push the right levers.

My year now has only 364 days since I have deleted Mothers Day. It does not exist for me any more. So I spent much of that blank day digging in the garden that formerly was my mother’s. Did a lot of weeding and some early planting. Interestingly enough the only activity that almost completely stops me from thinking is gardening. Pottery, car mechanics, hiking, any other supposedly non-intellectual endeavor just sets my brain cells off and running--I can’t wait to finish the current book or get to the keyboard. But digging shuts them down. When I dig I don’t blog (and the world is probably grateful).

Why do you think for some reason that humans have stopped evolving ? Even many respected scientists think so. Sounds like the usual anthrocentrism in different clothes to me. A huge experiment in differential reproduction rates vis-à-vis the “less developed” nations is currently running; we will never know the results because our lifetimes are not long enough for an objective view. At the same time we “developed” nations are experimenting (recklessly) on the overall genetic fitness of our populations when they are bathed from birth in myriad chemicals and drugs and fed foods approaching the lower limit in acceptable nutrition. Yet many say that genetic evolution is no longer important, that it is cultural evolution, the evolution of ideas (memes) that has taken over and will carry on into the future (?) of the human race. Perhaps this is so. It seems to me that both things could be going on and it wouldn’t hurt us to pay attention to what we feed our kids. Actually they is recent startling evidence (startling to those who remember the disgusted dismissal of “Lamarckism” in college biology classes-- Lamarck said that giraffes had long necks because they stretched so hard to get the high leaves) that learned behaviors are transmissible between generations to some extent.. So far this evidence is restricted to the level of bacteria, but if this type of evolution is found to act in other life forms as well, wouldn’t it be interesting? We should know in 2-3 generations—if it works the kids will have square eyes and prehensile thumbs.

Cosmology

Have you ever seen the Hubble Deep Field photographs? Pretty amazing. A lot of scientists feel awkward about gushing in public—when I first ran across these photos it was in a ho-hum sidebar in Natural History Magazine about 10 years ago. Just another day on the Hubble. Then I realized that every dot of light in the photo was a not a star but a GALAXY! Big Wow Factor. Too bad more astronomers aren’t out of the closet like Carl Sagan was. It must be hard keeping your emotions in check when discussing the science behind these photos. There is a cool video you can watch about this:



(thanks Omi)

All cosmologists now agree on the Big Bang Theory. It is so much in line with what religions want to believe that a few years ago the Vatican convened a council of astrophysicists to discuss it. They loved the concept of everything being created in a moment of pure energy but the pope tried to tell the scientists that although it was OK to talk about the Big Bang he really didn’t like talk about a beginning-of-time singularity. It would be questioning God to say that time began with the big bang because if there was no time, how could God have existed? Oh well, they haven’t had a good fight on their hands about cosmology since Galileo. They loved the old Aristotelian system which had the stars on the outermost of a series of glass shells enveloping the Earth—that left plenty of room outside the last shell for heaven. Ancient India really invented the modern theory about 2500 years ago—the Cosmic Egg of the Universe (brahmanda) started from a single point (bindu) and grew, just as we think now. A singularity, the beginning of time, is a bindu and until recently astrophysicists thought that the big bang was the expansion of all matter and energy now called the Universe from such a point. The big discussion 20 years ago was whether or not the expanding universe was going to come to the end of its rope and start collapsing again someday. Now they have included quantum mechanics in the equations and have decided that possibly this is the wrong model—that maybe space is in fact curved like an egg and that the singularity is not a unidimensional point but a place on a curved sphere—the cosmic egg. Modern Buddhists know their astrophysics and have easily merged their beliefs with western science. Karma is defined as the sum of all energies and momentums of all particles throughout their histories and changes from mass to energy and back going right back to the Big Bang. The atoms in your body, your Karma, were of course once in stars and galaxies and supernovas before swirling into the orbit of the sun and becoming you. Buddhism (the philosphy, not the later added-on magic of prayer wheels and idols and such) is a complete cosmology using non-western terms. It fits amazingly well with modern western theories. Where did they get all that? Or do we all, as humans, tend to think along the same lines and maybe even the extraordinarily complicated math that leads to the Big Bang Theory is a sort of subconscious wish-fulfillment. Even the need to know all this can be construed as somewhat compulsive—humans have evolved the strong need to put things into categories, to figure out how things work. We are addicted to information. I think it is fine to work on theories of the universe; it sure is amazing for us little guys to read about and try to get our heads around. But we should all save time once in a while to contemplate Deep Space just for the sheer mind-blowing amazement.


(Here is another link to the site of the guy who made the video explaining more of the science behind the photo: http://www.deepastronomy.com/hubble-deep-field.html)

Old Business

And in elucidation of some of yesterday’s comments, lest, dear reader, you should think I was just shooting from the hip, here are some of my reasons for disparaging the strange bedfellows of Philosophy, Psychology, Medicine, Religion, and Astrology:

1) When science in the 19th century progressed beyond the ability of any one person to understand all of its details as well as the history of human questing for answers called Philosophy, it left the philosophers so far behind that today they delve deeply into amazingly narrow fields like the Philosophy of Sports (!) It seems it is no longer possible to deeply understand both cosmology and the human spirit.

2) Psychology has been aching to be a science since its birth from its parents, Philosophy and Medicine. B. F. Skinner tried hard to make us all into machines and modern psychologists try hard to control their variables and run their statistics, but they are firmly up against the mind-body problem and seem to me to be caught up in just another Glass Bead Game, although for the most part, I feel they are more in touch than your typical philosopher.

3) Aah, medicine. . .we are all so afraid to die or even suffer temporary diminishment of our pleasures by illness that we invest huge amounts of money and angst into our doctors. Many of them are scientists trying hard to understand us humans in a biological way. They are certainly more open to new theories than the psychos or the philosophes, but tell me, just HOW long is it going to take for them to accept acupuncture as a reputable idea? Medicine rejects things that work if they do not fit its theories, so I feel justified in calling it, to some extent, just another closed box.

4) Religion—always easy to bash. I am talking about organized religion, the systems of coerced belief that were institutionalized by the movers and shakers after Buddha and Christ and Mohammed had conveniently left the scene. Those three were not prisoners of the ideas of others, but their so-called followers are.

5) Finally, astrology—help! Don’t hurt me! I know and respect a lot of people (mostly women) who use this old system of beliefs to navigate through their lives. There are probably truths in the science of astrology (yes, science—it was an state-of-the-art science at one time about 600 years ago) but because the system was formulated well before the concept of experimental or even empirical science came about, it does not attempt to test its propositions. I can easily imagine that there might be a lot of predictive value in astrology, after all a lot of interesting personality differences have been found to be caused by birth order and timing of birth. It is not a whole lot more counterintuitive than a lot of modern psychological theories. So why won’t the astrologers run the experiments? They would have nothing to loose, it wouldn’t shake their believers even if the theories were found lacking.

Nuff said.

All is theory

Most people do not know what a theory is. In the little narrow-minded country school with staff hand-picked by the fundamentalist school board, my daughter’s 7th grade biology teacher used to tell the class in a voice dripping with sarcasm that “Evolution is just a theory. . .” Exactly. A theory is a set of proposed explanations for observed events which is used to predict the occurrence of other events. A theory, by definition cannot be “proved”; it either predicts observed events successfully or it is discarded in favor of a new theory. (Hypotheses are different animals—they can be proved or disproved, mostly because they are by definition extremely narrow in scope). The fundamentalists reject Darwin’s theory because it does not happen to be mentioned in the Bible and because they are too insecure to feel comfortable about being related to bonobos. But the criticism they aim at evolutionary theory, that “there is no proof”, is exactly the point about theories. The Theory of Evolution predicts and explains observed facts of nature better than anything we have come up with yet and much better than the Pope can.

But I didn’t start this to bitch about fundamentalist school boards and ignorant teachers. I think it is interesting how as we grow along our paths, each of us tends to develop theories of the universe to help us explain why things are as they are. We behave exactly as scientists do—from the time we are babies we construct theories to help us navigate the world we find ourselves in, testing them against observations, discarding them as they become outmoded and developing new theories which serve us better to exist skillfully in such a universe. In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking proposes that theories of the universe are asymptotic, that is that there never will be a perfect theory but they can and do approach a limit and each new adjustment to accommodate new observations resulting from better resolution of the observing mechanism will be less and less drastic until to all intents and purposes, a “perfect” theory can be stated. That resonates with me; I believe that thinking humans do this all their lives. The concerns of a teenager are vastly different from those of a senior citizen and their theories differ as well. The extent of the difference controls the extent of their communication (if there is any). Some unfortunate people get too attached to an obsolete theory, either their own or one adopted wholesale from a religion or other archaic system (like astrology) and go on trying to force the events in their lives to conform to a theory with little predictive ability. This is rather like insisting that radio waves travel through the ether or that fire burns because of Phlogisten. I suppose there are some people (in the Vatican?) still combing through news reports in hope of finding mention of someone who fell off the edge of the world. So as not to get astrology buffs upset about being singled out, I should list some other theories I feel are outmoded and do not subject themselves to a test of their predictive value: Academic Philosophy, Psychology, Medicine, all organized religions, Atheism. Some interesting contradictions there? Not to me. I’ll explain them all some time. I am here just commenting on the lack of “accountability” of each of those systems. They tend to exist as closed systems and feel no pressing need to test their own predictive ability. If they do, and fail, they refuse to modify the theory. That refusal, to me, is the sign that a person is stuck, progress along their developmental path is blocked. That is sad—there is so much to be learned in the universe and so many amazing things all affecting one another, all related in yet-unknown ways—why would a person want to try to force it all into a box made in the past by people with less-developed minds and sensitivities?