A small glittering thing

While I'm on a quote-kick, might as well toss out another existential fav:

So we reach into the raging chaos, and we pluck some small glittering thing, and we cling to it, and tell ourselves that it has meaning, and that the world is good, and we are not evil, and we will all go home in the end.

- Anne Rice, The Tale of the Body Thief

Endless becoming

I can't recall what book I jotted this from, but I found it in some notes I was throwing out:

Later in his philosophical development the idea of freedom became Sarte's main theme. Man, beginning in the loathsome emptiness of his existence, creates his essence -- his self, his being -- through his choices that he freely makes. Hence his being is never fixed. He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death he would never end. Nor would his philosophy. "Existentialists," wrote Irish philosopher Arland Ussher, "have a notable
difficulty in finishing their books: of necessity, for their philosophy --
staying close to the movement of life -- can have no finality."

Prepare for the Long Now

A Christian was posting to a message board I frequent about the End Times, about how all the woes of the world indicate that society is going downhill fast and look to the skies the end is nigh. I don't know about all of that, but I prefer to remain optimistic (disclaimer: I'm not a religious person).

My friend: I see your "End Times" and raise you one "Clock of the Long Now".

The Clock of the Long Now is a proposed mechanical clock designed to keep time for 10,000 years, to get people thinking about the future, the l-o-n-g future, the long now. It's a problem-solving think-project with time as the enemy -- how do you make a clock that runs 10,000 years? how do you protect it from the environment, wars, etc.? The more one thinks about these questions, the more they imagine civilization lasting for millenia to come. It's a "counterpoint to today's 'faster/cheaper' mind set and [serves to] promote 'slower/better' thinking." From one of the founders of the project:

When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 2000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.

- Computer scientist Daniel Hillis

Learn more

The apple just is

A reader commented on my post about Sarte's novel La Nausée, and since I had forgotten about the post I figured I'd do a follow up. The original post was about my discovery that Sarte wrote the book -- a book that had a huge influence in promoting existentialism -- after a bad mescaline trip. I wondered if the book would have had a more uplifting tone had his reportedly one-time drug experience been a good one.

Wow, that is incredible insight. Indeed people who are famous have wrote incredible works through what society calls illegitimate means. La Nausee is probably a "bad trip", however, most people don't want to think of that angle. That life is pointless is a dark way to look at life but there is comfort in that fact as well.

First, thanks for recognizing my brilliance : ) Seriously, though, it is interesting. Both camps, the mystics and the existentialists, say pretty similar things, that dissolving buffers will present a direct encounter with existence. I've heard this explained (forget where) as the difficulty in describing "appleness". You can never really convey the is-ness of an apple because in doing so you automatically remove yourself from the direct experience of the apple. You can say the apple is red, or the apple is juicy, or the apple is sweet, but those are all signifiers. You fill the description with symbols meant to represent the apple, but of course that's not the apple itself. The symbols are at least one step back from the apple.

Mystics and existentialists alike figure that if you can get past these obstacles you encounter pure and true reality. After this agreement, they then part ways. The mystic walks away with a sense of nondual connectedness and meaning, and the existentialist walks away seeing no connections beyond those created outside of the pure awareness.

In Sarte's book the lack of connections was viewed with anxiety and -- hence the title -- nausea. I didn't realize before then that this negative view of existence was prompted by a bad drug trip -- something that by all accounts (never taken mescaline myself) gets the adrenaline flowing, causing anxiety. That's the exact experience portrayed in the novel, that when presented with pure existence, the protagonist felt anxious and partly horrified.

This is not to say existentialism is all bad, or negative by itself sans-Sarte. It is primarily concerned with finding individual meaning, not jettisoning meaning altogether. It's just a more depressing view than the mystics' who hold that everything is interconnected. Ahem, a mystic would look at all the interconnected events that led up to Sarte taking mescaline in 1935, and all the events thereafter, including the growth of existentialism itself, and the fine-lines between good experiences and bad ones, and call the complete story inspired. Then again, the existentialist would view those apparent connections as an inspired choice.

Basically, for a bad drug trip to have been one of the sparks of the movement is surprising because many report pleasurable mescaline trips. It could have gone either direction. In a way it makes you wonder if true existentialism isn't somehow betrayed by Sarte's book. Strictly speaking, "good" and "bad" are themselves signifiers removed from any direct experience. Adjectives are never direct. Peyote may be good or bad. The apple just is.

Never discuss religion or politics at the dinner table

You've probably heard the expression (title), but this is a blog so here goes:

Some intrepid guy was asking about people's views on atheism in a local forum website I visit now and then. This is a small-town America type community, and probably mirrors the national averages on religious population -- probably something like 80-90 percent Christian. Anyway, he's a self-styled atheist and was wondering what people in the local community's feelings were about that, like would they hold it against him or whatever. I replied something along the lines of being able to relate.

I have trouble just telling people I'm agnostic, which only means that I believe some things are unknowable, like whether there is a God or the nature of God or whether there's any meaning to life at all. It's really not all that bad, though, as far as how people treat you. In my experience, it's not like people hold it against you or anything. It's just harder to find common ground in deep conversations, especially with people firm in their convictions.

René Descartes famously stated Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). It sounds a bit narcissistic, but really all he was saying is that the only thing he could be certain of is his own existential nature, that because his mind is working he must be existent. Well, that's all good, but as a true agnostic I'm not even certain of that. For all I know I could be a character in someone else's play.

Agnosticism is pure unknowing and coming to grips with the limitation of knowledge. It's not doubt (skepticism) or disbelief (atheism). It's simply not knowing shit. It's being incapable of knowing shit to any authentic degree of certainty. It's coming to grips with those parameters, and then trying to make the best out of life. It's hard because you're left without a rulebook established by social and religious systems, and you pretty much have to evaluate each truth statement and value judgement on your own -- knowing full well that you'll never actually know if you're right or wrong.

Explaining that to people of faith, people who seem to be certain of how things work, is always a little awkward. On one hand you're mentally debunking what they're saying while they're saying it (because for you it's always "yeah, but"), and on the other hand you are deeply envious of their certainty. You know it's faith and not knowledge, and you know that they might even know that and be comfortable with it. If they don't, you're certainly not going to tell them because you don't want to be an asshole.

So, yeah, I can relate to the atheist though I'm not a disbeliever. Poor guy. For me it's just not knowing. For the atheist it's not buying it at all. Imagine having a conversation with someone you think is completely full of crap.

In search of a spiritual consensus

I've been editing some fringe science articles on Wikipedia lately and it's been an interesting experience. Fringe sciences get a bit of a hard time on Wikipedia. I would say it's an appropriate hard time because as a mainstream encyclopedia, Wikipedia gives more weight to prevailing scientific models. Often fringe science hypotheses are contradictory to accepted models. The sliding scale goes something like this: mainstream science, fringe science, pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is a term introduced by philosopher Karl Popper to describe ideas that appear to be scientific, but actually aren't. They often use scientific jargon, but aren't backed by science. Think diet pill commercials.

In any case, this post isn't about science. It's about spirituality. I'm only mentioning the above because I want to steal the terms and replace the word science in them with spirituality. I want to explain the difference between mainstream spirituality, fringe spirituality, and pseudospirituality. Also, just as the prevailing scientific model is based on a consensus in the scientific community, I wanted to show that there may be a prevailing spiritual model, based on a consensus of the spiritual community.

Let's look at the terms I've introduced. To do that, we need a working definition of spirituality. Broadly speaking, spirituality is concerned with one's ultimate nature, typically marked by a connection to something greater than oneself. Note that this is very different from religiosity which also includes specific practices. Spirituality is a broader term and could include religion, but religion doesn't necessarily include spirituality. Religious fanatics showing complete disconnect (9/11) is not an example of spirituality.

In fact, it brings us to our first term: pseudospirituality. Pseudospirituality is something that poses as spirituality but actually isn't. It may use spiritual jargon, claim to have spiritual goals, or incorporate spiritual practices. It is not spirituality, however, if its defining characteristic is a profound disconnect. The example of religious fanatics above is an example of this, but also cults which disconnect from the world or serve some non-spiritual agenda, religious intolerance of other religions or lifestyles, religious notions of dominion over anything else, anything that severely disconnects for supposedly spiritual reasons. Some of these examples are actually properly labeled as religious, but they're not spiritual.

The next term is fringe spirituality. These are actual spiritual models, but I would characterize them as immature ones. By immature I don't mean "look I made a doody in my pants", or immature on a timeline (some of these philosophies go back thousands of years), but rather they don't comprehensively or universally answer the questions spirituality sets out to answer. These are reductive spiritual models that define spirituality in terms of a small set of universal truths and leave everything else up to subjective interpretation. Existentialism, for example, is a spiritual model that reduces everything to the universal truth that we do obviously exist, everything else is largely subjective. Atheism is a spiritual model as well. It starts with the assumption that there is no God, and often that there is no afterlife, and asks how do we remain connected to each other in spite of this? Each of these models are mature unto themselves, but immature in forming something resembling what they have over in science, a comprehensive model that answers most basic questions that someone might ask.

So is there a mainstream spirituality, something that isn't just subjective and has the consensus of the spiritual community as a whole? It's hard to say. The nature of spirituality is that it's hard to confirm. A spiritual idea is largely opinion and it's hard to pin down any real facts. Nevertheless, comparative religion researchers and philosophers have noticed some cross-culture overlaps between the various religious traditions. If, they argue, you jettison the specific mythologies (Moses parting the Red Sea, Buddha beneath the tree) and examine the actual spiritual values, an almost universal blueprint does seem to emerge. Aldous Huxley described this blueprint as The Perennial Philosophy (a term coined by Leibniz) because it shows up time and again regardless of the age or culture examined.

According to Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy is:

the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being; the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the perennial philosophy may be found among the traditional lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions (The Perennial Philosophy, p. vii).

Confirmation may be a stretch, but if various cultures arrived at the same spiritual conclusions, based on their own observations, independently of one another, that certainly sounds like consensus.

Sense and soul in couple's therapy, Part II

I happened upon a somewhat recent article and wanted to post about it as a sort of follow up to my earlier one about meditation and science. Apparently in 2004, the Dalai Lama invited several neuroscientists to his home in Dharamsala, India, to examine brain scans of Tibetan Buddhist monks who engage in meditation on a regular basis. What scientists have found is that meditation actually does alter the structure of the brain. They call this effect neuroplasticity.

The term refers to the brain's recently discovered ability to change its structure and function, in particular by expanding or strengthening circuits that are used and by shrinking or weakening those that are rarely engaged. In its short history, the science of neuroplasticity has mostly documented brain changes that reflect physical experience and input from the outside world. In pianists who play many arpeggios, for instance, brain regions that control the index finger and middle finger become fused, apparently because when one finger hits a key in one of these fast-tempo movements, the other does so almost simultaneously, fooling the brain into thinking the two fingers are one. As a result of the fused brain regions, the pianist can no longer move those fingers independently of one another.

Weird. The external influence on the brain's structure led the scientists to explore whether or not purely internal, mental signals could likewise effect the structure. To do this, they gathered a group of novice meditators and compared the brain activity to that of the Buddhist monks who had spent more than 10,000 hours in meditation.

In a striking difference between novices and monks, the latter showed a dramatic increase in high-frequency brain activity called gamma waves during compassion meditation. Thought to be the signature of neuronal activity that knits together far-flung brain circuits, gamma waves underlie higher mental activity such as consciousness. The novice meditators "showed a slight increase in gamma activity, but most monks showed extremely large increases of a sort that has never been reported before in the neuroscience literature," says Prof. Davidson, suggesting that mental training can bring the brain to a greater level of consciousness.

On one hand this is awesome because science is now confirming meditative effects on the brain. On the other hand this is kind of lame because science is only confirming meditative effects on the brain. The really interesting effects of meditation don't happen in the brain; they happen in one's life. Meditation is truly transformative on a person's outlook regardless of physical effects. The difference is a matter of translative versus transformative. So they've translated spiritual awareness to physical brain activities? That's great. It's actually pretty awesome. But really, stop looking at the brain scans and go and meditate already. Experience the transformative side. That's so much more exciting.

Check it out: Meditation Alters Structure, Functioning

How to distinguish humans from machines

Allow me to borrow from the now immortal Vonnegut, as he explains in the novel Breakfast of Champions (1973) the motivation behind abstract expressionism. He's talking about a painting by the fictional artist Rabo Karabekian, entitled The Temptation of Saint Anthony. The painting was twenty feet wide and sixteen feet high. It was simple: a field of "Hawaiian Avocado" with a single vertical stripe of dayglo orange reflecting tape.



As the story goes, the painting was sold to an arts center for a whopping price tag of $50,000. The towns people were outraged. They were pissed that the chairman of the center paid so much for such a simple piece of art.

Karabekian was in a cocktail lounge and made some remark that a waitress found offensive. She replied: "Well, we don't think much of your painting. I've seen better pictures done by a five-year-old."

And here is Karabekian's brilliant response, from the book:

------------

"I have read the editorial against my painting in your wonderful newspaper. I have read every word of the hate mail you have been thoughtful enough to send to New York."

This embarrassed people some.

"The painting did not exist until I made it," Karabekian went on. "Now that it does exist, nothing would make me happier than to have it reproduced again and again, and vastly improved upon, by all the five-year-olds in town. I would love for your children to find pleasantly and playfully what it took me many angry years to find.

"I now give you my word of honor," he went on, "that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal -- the 'I am' to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us -- in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

"I have just heard from this cocktail waitress here, this vertical band of light, a story about her husband and an idiot who was about to be executed at Shepherdstown. Very well -- let a five-year-old paint a sacred interpretation of that encounter. Let a five-year-old strip away the idiocy, the bars, the waiting electric chair, the uniform of the guard, the gun of the guard, the bones and the meat of the guard. What is that perfect picture which any five-year-old can paint? Two unwavering bands of light."

------------
-Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast Of Champions

20 x 16 foot canvas with avocado paint and a strip of dayglo orange tape: $50,000
Illustrating the awareness in individuals that distinguish them from machines: Priceless

For those who hated the Sopranos finale

[Updated to remove some inaccuracies. Instead, read this. It just blows your mind. The last episode was a carefully executed example of how to use symbolism brilliantly. Tony didn't just get wacked; he practically got a Catholic funeral.]

Le nausée ou la bonheur?

One of the most depressing books I've read is La Nausée by Jean-Paul Sarte (1938). It's not the ideas in the book that depress me. It's the tone. As the story unfolds, the protagonist Antoine Roquentin begins to feel a "sweetish sickness" emanating from mundane objects — a crumpled piece of paper, a rock on the beach, a man's tie — and this nauseous feeling begins to overshadow everything he once enjoyed. Over time, he begins to realize that he has somehow pierced the veil and is seeing objects in their pure being. They no longer have qualities such as color or shape. Instead, all descriptors are separated from the thing itself, and he is confronted with pure existence.

Roquentin is immediately repulsed. He feels contempt for what he has discovered; he feels a pure disgust towards existence.

Sounds uplifiting, doesn't it?

Like I said, it's not the idea that depresses me. The idea is the central idea of Existentialism, which isn't so bad or depressing in itself. In fact, La Nausée is one of the canonical works of Existentialism and helped to foster it's growth. No, it's completely the tone. When reading, you identify with Antoine Roquentin. You begin to feel the nausea yourself. You begin to feel a repulsion towards existence wondering why something instead of nothing? You see, purely existential objects are devoid of the connections that cause meaning. In fact, existentialists feel that in human existence there is no purpose, indeed nothing, at its core. Finding a way to counter this nothingness, find meaning by embracing existence, is the fundamental theme of Existentialism.

The odd thing is that mystics also concern themselves with dissolving descriptors to get at pure existence. That is, mystics maintain that pure being is neither bad nor good, it just is. It's literally a nondual awareness beyond anything that can be described.

That's what prompted this post, riding on earlier posts talking about the work of Ken Wilber, arguably a mystic. Upon encountering pure being, existentialists walk away repulsed, horrified, and disgusted. Mystics walk away engaged. Why such polemic reactions to the same pureness? Well, my own feeling is that mystics build up to pure awareness, and that there is positive meaning in that process, where existentialists reduce to pure awareness, jettisoning anything that could be considered postive. And then...

There's something I didn't know before today. Years ago when I read that depressing book I didn't realize why it suggested pure existential awareness is something to recoil from. Don't get me wrong, it could be. It could be horrifying. What I'm arguing, though, is that there are at least two ways to react when encountering it. Apparently Sarte's was a bad trip.

Thomas Riedlinger, a contributing author to Charles Grob's book Hallucinogens, writes:

"Although awareness of the use of hallucinogens by prominent individuals in society is generally restricted to the period of the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, these compounds were available earlier in the twentieth century. Jean-Paul Sartre, renowned French philosopher and a founder of Existentialism, had a single mescaline experience in 1935. He encountered a nightmarish vision, which clung to him for months after and became the inspiration for his acclaimed novel Nausea."

Nice. One of the most influential philosophical movements of the twentieth century and it was inspired at least in part by a bad mescaline trip. It makes you wonder what Sarte's tone would have been had it been a good trip. La Bonheur?

The Good, the True, and the Beautiful

Self critiquing, I don't think I accurately represented what Ken Wilber is up to in my post from yesterday. Wilber isn't trying to validate spiritual claims through science or engage in an apologetics of religion. It's much more sophisticated than that. According to Wilber, there's several types of truth claims, of which science is only one. These validity claims run a more comprehensive and inclusive spectrum, and narrow or "hard" science can be improved upon by including these other forms of knowledge.

Rather than muck it up again, here's how he puts it:

Science — empirical science — deals with objects, with "its," with empirical patterns. Morals and ethics concern "we" and our intersubjective world of mutual understanding and justness. Art and aesthetics concern the beauty in the eye of the beholder, the "I."

And yes, this is essentially Plato's the Good (morals, the "we"), the True (in the sense of propositional truth, objective truths or "its"), and the Beautiful (the aesthetic dimensions as perceived by each "I").

These three domains are also Sir Karl Popper's rather famous distinction of three worlds — objective (it), subjective (I), and cultural (we). Many people, myself included, consider Jürgen Habermas the world's foremost living philosopher, and these three great domains correspond exactly with Habermas's three validity claims: objective truth, subjective sincerity, and intersubjective justness.

Of enormous historical importance, these three domains showed up in Kant's immensely influential trilogy — The Critique of Pure Reason (objective science), The Critique of Practical Reason (morals), and The Critique of Judgment (aesthetic judgment and art).

Even into the spiritual levels of development, these three domains show up as, to give only one example, the Three Jewels of Buddhism, namely: Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Buddha is the enlightened mind in each and every sentient being, the I that is no-I, the primordial awareness that shines forth from every interior. Buddha is the "I" or the "eye" of Spirit. Sangha is the community of spiritual truth that is realized, the "It" or "isness" or "thusness" or "suchness" of every phenomenon.

- Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit

My mistake is that I characterized Wilber as trying to mash spirituality into the narrow funnel of hard science. That's not the case at all, and I didn't mean it that way. Hard science looks at something like consciousness and sees a bunch of sparks flying around in the brain, reduced to information bits of 1s and 0s. That's a valid claim, but it's only one aspect of what's really going on. We don't actually experience consciousness as 1s and 0s flashing across our mind. We experience something else entirely. Hard science truth is only as complete as it relates to the sensorimotor part of consciousness. What other levels can we explore? Wilber's answer is expand truth seeking to all levels. He doesn't want to mash meditation into science. He wants to expand science to include it. Knowledge, he reasons, isn't just the True. It's the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

Sense and soul in couple's therapy

I'm re-reading two books by Ken Wilber. The first is One Taste, his personal journal kept over the course of a year (1997), and the second is The Marriage of Sense and Soul, which is his attempt to integrate, or at least find common ground between, the often at odds realms of science and religion. I'm not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination, nor am I all that scientific. I am always interested in the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, however, and have more than a passing interest in how we actually come to know or believe in things. I don't think religion corners the market on that, and neither does science since it's always in process. Free thought is what I'm about, but in coming up with a consensual reality there has to be some agreement on what's valid ways of knowing something.

Typically in science a valid idea is one that has been put through the scientific method and arrived unscathed on the other side. It's been tested and confirmed to be true. That's an extremely simplified version of events, however. There's actually a lot of debate in the epistemology of science over what makes up the scientific method and what things can actually be tested. This is a pretty good question if we're setting out to discover the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. How do you test ideas that on the surface seem entirely subjective?

Wilber says it has a lot to do with having an injunction, an idea he borrowed from philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996). An injunction, as Wilber uses it, is some type of action that one can perform to test an idea. As he puts it: If you do this, you get that. I should point out that Ken Wilber is widely considered to be one of the leading philosophers of our age, working on what he describes as an Integral Theory of Everything. In the case of science testing spiritual beliefs, the injunction Wilber suggests is meditation. If you perform meditation or contemplative awareness, you get X. X, he feels can be confirmed by anyone who performs the injunction. In other words, something seemingly subjective becomes objective by comparing the results of the injunction with the experience of peers who have also performed the injunction. This technically satisfies the testability part of the scientific method (the injunction is the observation), and the repeatablity part of the scientific method (the confirmation of peers who have also performed the injunction). He explains it much better than I in The Marriage of Sense and Soul. It's not half as crazy as it sounds.

Hey, maybe it is a bridge between science and religion. If nothing else, it at least hooks sense and soul up for a one night stand, even if it doesn't go so far as marry the two. Sadly, though, it's unlikely to be adopted anytime soon. Those two camps have been at each other's throats since around the Middle Ages. If they were actually a couple, Dr. Phil would have advised them to part company long ago. The other problem is that most practitioners of contemplative awareness generally agree that you need to spend at least twenty years of daily reflection to see any major payoff. Buddhist monks shun the world for years at a time. What scientist is going to go through all of that on a hunch?

Turtles maybe, but also a grain of sand

A holarchical view of the web is also...

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

William Blake - Auguries of Innocence

It's turtles all the way down — and across

I mentioned previously that the creation of the web collapsed the publishing hierarchy into a horizontal model. That's not entirely accurate. If true, that would mean that every website is on an equal footing and that there's no value ranking to websites. That's obviously not true or I'd have Google money.

Hierarchy isn't an accurate term either. Hierarchy ranks various levels in order of importance with the higher levels having more value than each lower level. That's almost true but not entirely. When looking for information on your very best friend, you know, me, is it better to go to Google and look me up, or is it better to go directly to my site? Exactly. In most cases, Google has a higher value than most other websites, but not always.

The correct term for ranking websites is never actually used to my knowledge. It was coined in 1967 by Arthur Koestler in his book The Ghost in the Machine. Koestler used the word "holon" to describe things that are simultaneously whole, while part of something else (from the Greek: holos, "whole"). He rightly pointed out that each level in a hierarchy is both a part of the larger system, and also a complete and whole thing unto itself. Applied to the web we see that every website is a part of the larger web, but also a complete system of it's own. If anyone's made that connection before, it hasn't seem to have caught on. Nevertheless, it's both correct and obvious when you think about it. Websites are holons.

Holons are organized in a holarchy. I'd say that they were ranked, but it's more an organization. Where hierarchies are strictly a ranking model, the value level isn't always as clear in holarchies. Because each individual holon is a whole system, within a whole system, and containing whole systems within it, it's not completely a top-down architecture. Depending on what you're looking for on the web, one holon might be the top level eventhough it's actually the junior of a larger holon. The holon of my site, for example, is the top level Jeremy site, though it's way down at the bottom rung of the web as a whole.

Thus the publishing hierarchy was collapsed, but not exactly into a horizontal model. Instead, it was collapsed into many, many, maybe infinite, smaller systems of ranking within a huge horizontal pool.

An old Hindu story (that has many variations):

A teacher tells his student that the earth is supported on the back of a tiger. When the student asks what supports the tiger, the teacher says it stands upon an elephant. When asked what supports the elephant, the teacher says it's a giant turtle. When asked what supports the giant turtle, he says: "Stop right there. It's turtles all the way down."

At some point we could have said — no

So the last two posts were leading up to this one so I can talk about a movie I really like: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I know, I know. Ask me what time it is and I go off on a sidebar of how to build a clock. I've been accused of that before and all I can say is sorry. To quote the movie: "Words. Words. They're all we have to go on."

Now the movie is based on the 1967 play by Tom Stoppard but I'm going to recommend the movie version (1990). The reason is because they're almost exactly the same and in the movie you've got Tim Roth and Gary Oldman as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Richard Dreyfuss as The Player. Awesome cast. It's also more likely that you can find the movie at Netflix than you'll find the play at your local theater.

The story is the inverse of Hamlet. It takes the two most underdeveloped characters in literature and breathes life into them, shining the spotlight on their existence while placing the other characters and events of Hamlet in the background. It not only inverts the story, but also disconnects from it; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have their own story where Hamlet himself plays a minor role. Whenever the two stories overlap, the duo remains in character, acting and saying the lines from Hamlet that they are supposed to say. When the two stories break apart, they are left wondering why they said those things, viewing Hamlet's circumstances as completely absurd.

For example, when Claudius summons the two to question Hamlet as to his strange behavior, they understand what they are supposed to do, but fail to understand why, considering the whole thing to be obvious. They debate on how to approach the subject with Hamlet:

Ros: It makes you think.
Guil: Don't think I haven't thought of it.
Ros: And with her husband's brother.
Guil: They were so close.
Ros: She went to him —
Guil: — Too close —
Ros: — for comfort.
Guil: It looks bad.
Ros: It adds up.
Guil: Incest to adultery.
Ros: Would you go so far?
Guil: Never.
Ros: To sum up: your father, whom you love, dies, you are his heir, you come back to find that hardly was the corpse cold before his young brother popped onto his throne and into his sheets, thereby offending both legal and natural practice. Now why exactly are you behaving in this extraordinary manner?
Guil: I can't imagine! (Pause.) But all that is well known, common property. Yet he sent for us. And we did come.

They get what they're supposed to do, and when they're supposed to do it they perform exactly as it is written. They just don't understand why they're doing any of it. They don't exactly, but sort of, realize that they are characters in a story that is predetermined.

Here's part of the blurb from Wikipedia:

The two characters, brought into being within the puzzling universe of the play, by an act of the playwright's creation, and those they encounter, often confuse their names, as they have interchangeable yet periodically unique identities. They are portrayed as two clowns or fools in a world that is beyond their understanding; they cannot identify any reliable feature or the significance in words or events. Their own memories are not reliable or complete and they misunderstand each other as they stumble through philosophical arguments while not realizing the implications to themselves. They often state deep philosophical truths during their nonsensical ramblings, however they depart from these ideas as quickly as they come to them. At times Guildenstern appears to be more enlightened than Rosencrantz; at times both of them appear to be equally confounded by the events occurring around them.

The question that is really posed here is what does happen to our beloved characters when we're not looking, when they're off-stage. Are they aware? Do they know that whatever ambitions they have were already decided and written long ago? Do they conspire against this? Do they plot against the plot? Or do they simply cease to be when the curtain draws?

When does Jack Bauer use the bathroom?

A greater question beyond the literary is whether our plots were written long ago. Is choice just an illusion? Am I a footnote in your story, or you in mine?

Guildenstern: "There must have been a moment, at the very beginning, where we could have said — no. But somehow we missed it."

What I left out in the above is how hilarious the movie is and how clever the dialogue. My favorite scene:

Guil: What a fine persecution — to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened. . . . (Pause.) We've had no practice.
Ros: We could play at questions.
Guil: What good would that do?
Ros: Practice!
Guil: Statement! One-love!
Ros: Cheating!
Guil: How?
Ros: I hadn't started yet!
Guil: Statement. Two-love.
Ros: Are you counting that?
Guil: What?
Ros: Are you counting that?
Guil: Foul! No repetitions. Three-love. First game to —
Ros: I'm not going to play if you're going to be like that.
Guil: Whose serve?
Ros: Hah?
Guil: Foul! No grunts. Love-one.
Ros: Who's go?
Guil: Why?
Ros: Why not?
Guil: What for?
Ros: Foul! No synonyms. One-all.
Guil: What in God's name is going on?
Ros: Foul! No rhetoric! Two-one.
Guil: What does it all add up to?
Ros: Can't you guess?
Guil: Were you addressing me?
Ros: Is there anyone else?
Guil: Who?
Ros: How would I know?
Guil: Why do you ask?
Ros: Are you serious?
Guil: Was that rhetoric?
Ros: No.
Guil: Statement! Two-all. Game point.
Ros: What's the matter with you today?
Guil: When?
Ros: What?
Guil: Are you deaf?
Ros: Am I dead?
Guil: Yes or no?
Ros: Is there a choice?
Guil: Is there a God?
Ros: Foul! No non-sequiters, three-two, one game all.
Guil (seriously): What's your name?
Ros: What's yours?
Guil: I asked you first.
Ros: Statement. One-love.
Guil: What's your name when you're at home?
Ros: What's yours?
Guil: When I'm at home?
Ros: Is it different at home?
Guil: What home?
Ros: Haven't you got one?
Guil: Why do you ask?
Ros: What are you driving at?
Guil (with emphasis): What's your name?!
Ros: Repetition. Two-love. Match point to me.
Guil (siezing him violently): WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
Ros: Rhetoric! Game and match!

Feeding the machine

I have a love-hate relationship with technology.

I once worked in the dishroom of a large cafeteria serving hundreds of the rudest people imaginable. As they left, they would sling their trays in through a window and my job was to [get covered in slop] stack the trays and load them onto the conveyor belt of this large silver cleaning machine. No matter how many trays I stacked and loaded there were always more coming. Stack. Load. Stack. Load. Every day the same thing. Feed the machine. Before long I couldn't tell where the machine left off and I began.

Some devices were built to make our lives easier. They serve us. They're an accessory. This monstrous steam tray cleaner wasn't one of those devices. It was large, clearly in charge, and hungry. I was but a cog in the machine feeding it endlessly. To pass the time I even took to chanting in my head: "Feed the machine. Feed the machine. Feed the machine." I was a module — the human component of a machine designed for the greater goal of clean dishes.

And today?

Today I'm partly a software coder working on Web 2.0 applications. This came about because of an early love of print, old manuscripts, and the power of the written word. I learned a long time ago how to design for and run printing presses, but when the web hit the world I was the first in my little circle of friends take an awestruck gasp. It was amazing how comparatively inexpensive you can put any strange notion you had out there. In the early days, the web was just a digital version of print, a top-down publishing scheme but nonetheless amazing, and truly revolutionary.

Web 2.0 is the natural evolution of that idea. It is the same concept that any crazy idea can be put out there, but now in critical mass. The technology that coders have assembled has reduced the complexity of publishing and collapsed the hierarchy into a horizontal model. That was the idea behind Web 1.0, but it has only just come about in any real sense. Now every crazy idea that is put out there is tagged to other crazy ideas. Links evolved from hyperlinked documents to hyperlinked everything, up to and including people. No crazy idea is a singular phenomena, it is now a part of the collective of a bigger crazy.

That's the love. In all this madness, we are building something completely new. It's something the world has never seen before in any period of history. Unless the Library at Alexandria had some system I'm not aware of for user-generated content that automatically linked the content to everything else related, including the librarians themselves, we have stumbled upon something that is the envy of philosophers, mystics, and Kings alike — no matter what the age. This machine is being constructed by everyone, not just the programmers. You, I, my seventy-something-year-old grandmother, we're building the largest human endeavor ever constructed.

In the Wired article "We Are the Web", Kevin Kelly writes:

And who will write the software that makes this contraption useful and productive? We will. In fact, we're already doing it, each of us, every day. When we post and then tag pictures on the community photo album Flickr, we are teaching the Machine to give names to images. The thickening links between caption and picture form a neural net that can learn. Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a Web page as a way of teaching the Machine what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea. Wikipedia encourages its citizen authors to link each fact in an article to a reference citation. Over time, a Wikipedia article becomes totally underlined in blue as ideas are cross-referenced. That massive cross-referencing is how brains think and remember. It is how neural nets answer questions. It is how our global skin of neurons will adapt autonomously and acquire a higher level of knowledge.

It doesn't even matter if people read this crap we post. We are programming the machine itself. It's learning from it's fathers and mothers, ourselves. We are here. We are giving birth to this machine. It's exciting times because when they look back, for good or ill, it all starts right now.

That's the love. It's also what scares the hell out of me.

Maybe it's a narcissistic/nostalgic yearning to remain at the top of the food chain, or a struggle to hold fast to the distinction of a boundary between man and machine. Maybe it's that I fancy myself an artist as well as a programmer and as such I'm duty bound to promote the human condition. Or maybe it's just flashback nightmares of loading trays into the Big Silver Machine. Whatever it is, I cringe at the thought of this massive machine that is more than any of us, ourselves. As father to it, the same as any of you, I wonder if I'm not one of those deadbeat dads that marvel at the birthing but want to skip town on eighteen years committed serving the creation.

One thing is clear. We can rage against the machine all we want. At some point, however, we have to step out of denial and realize the machine is now us. Whatever line there was is blurred.

Life as vortices in the Ohio River

The Ohio River has bested the Hercules, a once mighty barge with a crane that could lift sunken vessels.

Sapped of its strength, the Hercules rests at the bottom of the river,
only its crane and two steel beams jutting above water near the shoreline.

Next to it, a towboat lies partially submerged, its pilothouse listing
like a drunken sailor. And next to that, the rusting hull of an old Navy
minesweeper breaks the river's surface like the belly of a dead whale.

Cincinnati Enquirer, 1998

"Vortices" - Jeremy Parnell

The story of the Bermuda Triangle of the Ohio River began in 1992 when a barge sank near the Kentucky shoreline outside Maysville, Kentucky. A subsequent salvage operation in 1994 tried to raise the barge with two Navy minesweepers. The minesweepers were the next victim as they too became stuck in the mud. Next came a towboat trying to free the minesweepers. Damage to its engines quickly rendered it crippled.

Finally came the salvage barge named "The Hercules" and its towering crane. The triangle made short work of it as well. While hoisting the original barge, the crane aboard the Hercules broke as the barge reached the surface, and down it sank again. Then the Hercules itself sank, coming to rest on top of the barge it was supposed to save. Eventually the minesweepers and the towboat sank as well. The entire salvage operation was caught in what an Army Corps of Engineers spokesperson would later call "'The Bermuda Triangle of the Ohio River".

Today, you can still see remnants of the wreckage peaking out of the Ohio River. Some local residents have called it a junkyard and feel that it blights the shoreline. I completely disagree. It's actually quite a remarkable addition to Maysville, especially when coupled with the story behind the wreckage.

I understand why some people may want it removed. It's old and rusty and doesn't look like it belongs there — your typical junkyard. That's all true. But I believe that if you look at it in a certain way, it really is beautiful. Even without dressing up the photo, it looks like a forgotton grave marker, a symbol of finality, especially with the city behind it that may represent life and the continuation of things. The story itself is a story of the power of the Ohio River. We build dams to control the height of it. We build bridges over it. We build walls to change the shape of it. But sometimes the river just doesn't want to let things go.

It's Life as a River. The metaphor goes way back, but I first read it in Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. It fits. You know countless little things are going on in the city in the distance, but the river brings it to a final point in these strange vortices.

Life is a process until death. You never actually see the same river twice. The water you saw a moment ago has already moved on. Likewise, life is continually unfolding. The product of life, like the river, is that at some point it will draw you in to a final resting place. There's nothing you can do to avoid it, and all of mankind's inventions (engines and cranes, science and medicine) do little to prevent it. Sometimes the end is just a little spot off to the side of the Ohio River where you're watching life go on in the distance.