The Amateur’s Guide To Life

As a follow up to my last post about Robert Burton and how do we know anything. What this is taking into account is that we all have the same basic ‘knowing’ abilities, the standard human kit, but of course, this isn’t true. Right off the bat I think of people who have synesthesia. Their ability to process information and understand it in different ways is very different so in effect, they may ‘know’ things we don’t. In other words, they see patterns we don’t.

The other follow up idea I had was how he uses the example, “Try to visualize the big bang – a single infinitely dense point that suddenly explodes.” to show “…how reason cannot be separated from bodily sensations. Any notion of space – no matter how abstract – must be filtered through our bodily perceptions of space.” At first I though, “exactly, he’s right, we’ll never be able to really think about those type of concepts in the right way.” But later after mulling it over, I realized that perhaps the fault lies in the description, not the interpretation of the description. There are an infinite amount of ways to describe something, just because science says ‘a single infinitely dense point’ doesn’t mean that is the only way to describe it. And by describe it, I mean conjure up the feeling in someone of what the concept is.

Perhaps this is why ’science’ falls so flat for so many people. Because they expect everyone to see the world as a right brain nerd would. But we don’t, in fact I would argue, we’re built in the complete opposite, NOT to see the world that way. So we’re constantly trying to learn a language that we’re not naturally good at speaking. We speak in stories, we feel in stories, we grasp concepts in stories. Maybe the right way to describe the beginning of the Universe never mentions any of those things, maybe it is a song, or a painting or a strange dance in the Outback.
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One person who seems to ‘get this’ is Steven Strogatz who is writing a new column in the NY Times about math. The first post titled, “From Fish To Infinity” gets right into all the juicy stuff that makes math so intriguing.

Viewed in this light, numbers start to seem a bit mysterious. They apparently exist in some sort of Platonic realm, a level above reality. In that respect they are more like other lofty concepts (e.g., truth and justice), and less like the ordinary objects of daily life. Upon further reflection, their philosophical status becomes even murkier. Where exactly do numbers come from? Did humanity invent them? Or discover them?

A further subtlety is that numbers (and all mathematical ideas, for that matter) have lives of their own. We can’t control them. Even though they exist in our minds, once we decide what we mean by them we have no say in how they behave. They obey certain laws and have certain properties, personalities, and ways of combining with one another, and there’s nothing we can do about it except watch and try to understand. In that sense they are eerily reminiscent of atoms and stars, the things of this world, which are likewise subject to laws beyond our control … except that those things exist outside our heads.

Hopefully the rest of his posts will be as interesting.

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In other news, this morning I had a minor transcendental moment when I was trying to explain to my son what the watch on my wrist was. He had never shown interest before, and for some reason he grabbed my hand, pointed at the watch and said, “what’s that?” Try explaining what a watch is to a two year old. At that moment it really hit me, his mind was this virgin territory, this unfettered sponge, it had never known what a ‘watch’ was. I told him him it was so I could tell what ‘time’ it was, which was far more exciting to me then him. I could see the neurons in his head making new connections though, the software was writing onto the disk drive. Something new was being etched onto the plate.

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Speaking of which, next on my list is this NPR story about why time moves faster for older people then younger people. Already I’m not excited about their conclusions.

That’s because when it’s the “first”, there are so many things to remember. The list of encoded memories is so dense, reading them back gives you a feeling that they must have taken forever. But that’s an illusion. “It’s a construction of the brain,” says Eagleman. “The more memory you have of something, you think, ‘Wow, that really took a long time!’

“Of course, you can see this in everyday life,” says Eagleman, “when you drive to your new workplace for the first time and it seems to take a really long time to get there. But when you drive back and forth to your work every day after that, it takes no time at all, because you’re not really writing it down anymore. There’s nothing novel about it.”

What? You could see a hundred new things on your way to work every time you go. That being said, I think the theory is that the feeling that my son gets when he firsts discovers a watch is that much more intense then when I see a new dog on my way to work. Therefore, life moves slow for him as he soaks this all in, while my dog discovery takes two nanoseconds to register.

Really? Is that really why? To be honest, time doesn’t seem to have changed speed for me that much. If anything, with kids, it has slowed to a crawl.

I just posted the podcast for Monday nights radio show, you can find it on the archive page here.

There really is no actual preparation for the show, or put another way, I spend two weeks preparing for the show by stacking my brain up with all sorts of random information and then try and remember some of it right before we go on the air.

This week it actually worked to some extent and I felt like, thanks to Robert A. Burton, I may have had an epiphany. Maybe. Burton wrote a book called ‘On Being Certain – Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not‘ which is in my ‘top ten books that must be read’ list. Because any philosophical inquiry into the meaning of life must begin one place, “how do I know anything anyway?” We take for granted that knowing is this wonderful ‘feeling’ in our head that tells us that, ‘yes, this is right’. Burton is the only person I’ve found so far who has captured this subject in a way that a dude like me can understand.

Here is the first quote where he demonstrates how we biologically want to ‘know’ the answer to something which has no answer:

A classic example is the optical illusion of the silhouette of two opposing faces that can also be seen as a vase. Stare at the picture and the vase will alternate with the facial profiles. You cannot will yourself to continuously see either the faces r the vase. This unstable alternating relationship of foreground to background is the result of a perpetual tug-of-war between equally weighted aspects of visual perception. The question that we ask ourselves – which is it, two faces in silhouette or a vase? – has no answer even if it feels as though it might. The question has no real meaning; it is nothing more than an attempt by the hidden layer to resolve competing aspects of perception. It might be said that the problem of deciding between faces and a vase doesn’t exist outside of the mind of the viewer. It isn’t a “real world” issue. Consider this foreground-background-tug-of-war as a model of a biologically generated paradox that cannot be resolved.

What is happening here is that we are being fooled by our own systems. We are able to think of situations that don’t exist, of paradoxes that don’t have resolution and our mind strains to come up with some answer. Therefore, when we ask ‘big questions’ like ‘what is the meaning of life’, we may be heading in the wrong direction and even though we strain our brain cells to come up with an answer, there is none, it only feels like there should be.
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To take this idea further, Burton says this:

Try to visualize the big bang – a single infinitely dense point that suddenly explodes. To see this object in our mind’s eye, we place this dot against some contrasting background. Most people, when questioned, will offer that they see a dim darkness against which the initial singularity is framed. This problem of borders isn’t confined to spatial considerations; time is equally impossible to visualize as either always existing or suddenly beginning. We see a beginning in contrast to what was present just before the beginning. The cruel irony is that a mind’s eye’s representation of no surrounding space or time occupies some space and suggests a prior time. Te relieve the question shared by science and religion – what, if anything, was present before the beginning?

…This is an example of how reason cannot be separated from bodily sensations. Any notion of space – no matter how abstract – must be filtered through our bodily perceptions of space. In our mind’s eye, emptiness occupies space.

This is where the Eastern approach makes so much more sense. Instead of struggling with these mechanisms in the mind, let go of them. If you can release the endless ‘trying to figure it out’ and just ‘be in the moment’, you’ve saved yourself a lot of work. A scientist might counter that with, the real challenge is to figure out what the ‘answerable’ questions are first, and then try and find those answers. I prefer the letting go option myself.

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As a follow up, I just found this video by Robert Burton as a part of the ‘Google Talks’. I look forward to listening to it.

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Along those lines, we had our regular caller dial in and tell us about his experience with Jacob Needleman’s talk on Sunday. Here is Needleman’s book, “What Is God?” and I here is the a link to Michael Krasny’s interview with him yesterday which I heard is worth a listen.

Wrapped up our first show of the new year last night. Grayson made it in despite having a shattered left hand, that’s dedication to the truth. I will post the podcast in the archives later today.

Two quotes to think about today. The first is a reference to the Einstein/Bohr debates we were talking about last night. This is from an article which is no longer online:

Einstein entered the twentieth century firmly convinced that there was a platonic realm where his mathematical insights lived and breathed. Our physical theories, he argued, are models of that world. When we measure something, we are in fact measuring some thing.

“Not so,” said Bohr, the greatest of Danes. When we measure something we are forcing an undetermined, undefined world to assume some experimental value. We are not “measuring” the world, we are creating it.

The second is from an excellent article in The Atlantic called ‘The Secret to Success’ which talks about how scientists are rethinking the role of genetics in the nature vs. nurture debate. It says there are two kinds of children, ‘dandelions’ who are the rugged survivors that will survive any type of upbringing and the ‘orchids’ who will wilt under a stressful upbringing but will bloom if in a good environment. The quote that fascinates me is this one:

Suomi learned his trade as a student and protégé of, and then a direct successor to, Harry Harlow, one of the 20th century’s most influential and problematic behavioral scientists. When Harlow started his work, in the 1930s, the study of childhood development was dominated by a ruthlessly mechanistic behavioralism. The movement’s leading figure in the United States, John Watson, considered mother love “a dangerous instrument.” He urged parents to leave crying babies alone; to never hold them to give pleasure or comfort; and to kiss them only occasionally, on the forehead. Mothers were important less for their affection than as conditioners of behavior.

This is an example of what happens when science, which scientists proudly claim is ‘counter-intuitive’, gets it horribly wrong. Now I would suppose that ‘hard’ scientists would consider ’soft’ scientists to be in a different league, but still, the reminder is chilling.

On another note, if you didn’t listen to the end of the show, do yourself a favor and listen to this clip from Woody Allen’s Manhattan. That will cheer you up.

The ground is slowly starting to feel somewhat steady again. I’m back after a brief hiatus of trying to figure out how to survive in a world filled with two children.

TAGTL had a great show last night, a good friend, Teacher Steve, sat in with me and we talked about why it’s so hard for normal people understand just what the hell is going on. As we we’re driving to the studio, I was having my now familiar wrestle with trying to articulate what the show is all about. Having tried to read the book ‘Why E=mc2′, it became clear to me. Normal guys like me just don’t have the chops to understand advanced physics. There, I said it. Not that it isn’t obvious. And physicists apparently think they are closing in on the secrets of the universe, so this presents a real problem. There is a knowledge gap, even a, I dare say, paradigm gap. These guys and gals are able to think about the world in ways most people can’t. So my goal is to bridge that gap (without resorting to the ‘Idiot’s Guide To Life’).

On the housekeeping side of things, I am very proud to say that I put the last three shows up in the archives for you’re iPod listening pleasure. I’ve got one more show to go and then I’ll have every show of 2009 archived. Next up, creating the podcast RSS feed. Almost there.

Had a great show last night. That’s two in a row and I need to post them both to the archives and get my podcast feed up and running. On the list.

In the meantime, I read an insightful interview with Cormac McCarthy in the WSJ this morning. I like the way he thinks.

WSJ: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?

CM: I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Couldn’t agree more.

WSJ: Is the God that you grew up with in church every Sunday the same God that the man in “The Road” questions and curses?

CM: It may be. I have a great sympathy for the spiritual view of life, and I think that it’s meaningful. But am I a spiritual person? I would like to be. Not that I am thinking about some afterlife that I want to go to, but just in terms of being a better person. I have friends at the Institute. They’re just really bright guys who do really difficult work solving difficult problems, who say, “It’s really more important to be good than it is to be smart.” And I agree it is more important to be good than it is to be smart. That is all I can offer you.

I’m not exactly sure what the contrast between ‘good’ and ’smart’ is, but I think I get the overall message.

So much good stuff, so little time. Another hit list of things that are good for your brain.

I just bought this book about sex and death which I am very excited about. And who couldn’t be excited about a book explaining why we should care that E=MC2? The author was interviewed on the radio recently and he is a smart dude.

This trailer is about cop who makes predictions that are scary. But then you later learn that the cop also has a pending sexual harassment suit against him. Should this make what he says any less scary? I don’t know. It’s all scary. The director also made “American Movie” which is a great film. So that says something.

Still working my way through a book about infinity (The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless). I’m always in search of what is the ‘real question’ we should really be asking ourselves. This week, it’s whether infinity in either format, space or time, exists. Because if it does, then everything exists, has existed or will existed. Infinity is that powerful. Bigger the big. Higher then high.

And what would the week be without a Richard Dawkins interview? I’m tired of dancing around with Richard, but this was a particularly interesting interview and there was one quote in there so tantalizing that I had to include it here.

HH: So when you consider before the big bang, what does Richard Dawkins think was there?
RD: I don’t consider the question, because I recognize that it’s an intuitively appealing question. I recognize that I, along with everybody else, wants to ask that question. Then I talk to physicists who say you can no more ask what came before the big bang than you can ask what’s north of the North Pole.

What does that mean, ‘what’s north of the north pole’? That’s so utterly frustrating. I can’t tell you the answer because the stew tastes like a moon. Seriously folks, you’re going to have to do better than that. I know the physics are extremely complicated, but how about you try and break it down into something other then a zen koan?

And lastly, this story about the Hadron Collider being shut down by a stray baguette only lends credence to the theory that particles from the future are ensuring that this very expensive device never smashes anything together.

The show didn’t actually happen this week due to some complications here at home base. Everything is ok now. My apologies to those who tuned in and got nothing but canned music. It’s a shame though, because I have a great interview with James Nestor, the author of ‘How To Get High (without drugs)‘ who recently attended a conference about Near Death Experiences and is writing a book on Out Of Body Experiences. To say I’m jealous is an understatement. He’s a very smart guy and I really think he’s on to something.
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Speaking of being on to something, this article about the Hadron Collider in The New York Times is just too much.

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

That is some heavy thinking right there, and this isn’t coming from amateurs, these are world class physicists breaking this stuff out.

Some of the comments from the Boing Boing post on the story were very interesting. One person noted that this idea is very similar to the plot of the book, ‘Einstein’s Bridge‘. God bless science fiction.

Another comment linked to this blog post in Discovery Magazine which takes some of the fun out of the ‘those wacky scientists’ edge in the NY Times piece and does a nice job of explaining the logic behind the paper.

The sad but not unexpected part of this whole story is the army of folks with no sense of fun whatsoever who fill the comments with the predictable, “this isn’t science, get back to reality Toto.” Seriously folks, its ok to draw outside the lines every now and then.

On a related note, I think trotting out the “you can’t kill your grandfather” paradox is slightly absurd when seriously discussing time travel. If one is going to have a serious talk about abstract ideas like this, then why not follow through all the way. There is no time. There is no traveling. There is only a ‘limited subjective experience’ moving through an ‘infinite amount of probable possibilities’. Trying to mix one world view (time moves in one direction and we are all material creatures that live and die as prescribed by that timeline) onto another one (we could move faster then the speed of light, thus travel though time) just doesn’t work. If you can move faster then the speed of light, then all sorts of things are going to change. To say the least, your perception of the nature of reality.
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I shall return.

Admittedly, I am slow to update the blog section of this site as of late. The problem certainly isn’t that there is nothing to talk about, it’s that there is too much to talk about, I keep waiting for the right moment to let it all spill out. To business then.
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I finally posted the mp3 version of my last show with Emmanuel Vaughn-Lee. It was a great show and he is a very interesting guy. Check out the Global Oneness Project’s web site to watch all the interviews he talked about during the program.
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Another milestone this week was that I finished reading James Nestor’s book, ‘Get High (Without Drugs)‘. In a nutshell, man has been trying to figure out ways to manipulate his consciousness since, man realized he had consciousness. In this book, Nestor catalogs numerous methods of how to do this without ever having to touch a drop of acid. Some are basic, like Eastern breathing techniques, some are visual puzzles that make you slightly sick and others are exotic methods he doesn’t recommend (but that make for good stories, like, say, ingesting Giraffe bone marrow). My only complaint with the book was that after all of this experimenting by him and his friends in his ‘HighLab’, he doesn’t go into how it changed (or didn’t change) his overall philosophy of life. Hopefully I can track James down and fill out this missing detail.
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I always assumed the web site Reddit was a poor man’s Digg, which I guess in a sense it is. The same general concept applies, users submit links, an army of users then comment on them In the encounters I’ve had with Reddit though, the discussions are generally more thoughtful (generally being the operative word). So much so that people often link to them. Which brought me to Reddit in the first place. They have a section called, ‘Does Anybody Else’ and the first one that grabbed my attention was ‘DAE, while a passenger in a car, imagine a little guy running alongside the vehicle dodging obstacles/slashing things with a sword?‘. I did constantly as on only child sitting in the back of a car staring out the window. I pictured Evil Knievel jumping over everything.

The crown jewel though was, ‘DAE have moments where they realize “Holy shit, I’m a living, breathing thing. I have a body, I am alive”?‘ This is the question that powers the engine that drives this whole project I’m working on here. This is the essence of being alive in my mind. The thread was split between the obvious, ‘only when I’m high’ jokes and people who actually had something to say. My favorite being:

I like looking at my hand sometimes (no I’m not high then) and just moving it around and imagine the tendons inside pulling CSI/House MD style.

I’m not sure if he’s serious, but I do spend a lot of time staring at my hand thinking, “why is it that I’m something called an ‘I’ staring at this thing in front of me, which I seemingly control, as is ‘my hand’.” It’s like the less articulate but much easier to grasp version of Douglass Hofstader’s idea of a ’strange loop’. The feeling I get when staring at my hand is like a feedback loop looping back in on itself (insert drug reference here). Anyway, I found it reassuring that I was not alone on this one.
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In the humor department, there is this classic send up of ‘Occam’s Razor’ and religion. Well played sir.
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Boing Boing did it, so I had to look. And I’m glad I did. Two videos which involve animals and are stunning for their own unique reasons. This is the one with the dolphin and this one with the one with the elephant. I haven’t seen it all, but I’m one step closer.

While walking down to the surf this weekend, I ran into Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee who is the director of the Global Awareness One Project. As we headed down the trail he told me about his last film, “A Thousand Suns” which chronicles how the spread of Christianity has affected the relationship of native cultures and their environment. That’s just the beginning though, at the Global Awareness One web site there are hundreds of incredible interviews he’s recorded with all sorts of amazing people include Dean Radin, Adyashaniti and Choegyal Rinpoche to name a view. To cap it off, Emmanuel is also a sought after jazz bassist. This will be a good show, be sure to tune in.

This evening I was going through my RSS feeds and dove into ‘My Mind On Books‘, a wonderful web site which tracks newly released books about the mind, consciousness and so forth. What immediately caught my eye was a recently released book called, ‘Get High Now (without drugs)‘ by James Nestor.

Get High Now is an illustrated, mind-blowing magic carpet ride of more than 175 ways to alter human perception and consciousness without drugs or alcohol.

Now this is the kind of guy I want to talk to. For those of you not aware, lucid dreaming and astral projection are (slightly on the back burner now) obsessions of mine. I think that they may hold the key to unlocking our minds and radically altering the way all of us think about things.

In a nutshell, there are two ways to explore things, seek external evidence through science, or go deep inside through introspection. I would argue that our natural tendency is to go inside, but these days, with the proliferation of technology and ‘western’ thinking, the general trend is to trust the external. So a great number of people living today have lost touch with being in touch with ourselves. We all have amazing dreams at night, but we choose to ignore them as fantasies of the mind (scientists will tell you it’s only the mind clearing out reservoirs of data). It seems strange that on the one hand, the mind creates fantasies to be ignored but then on the other it’s the instrument we use to understand everything we know about the world around us. There is an amazing unexplored world sitting right between our ears and I plan on tracking down James Nestor to find out what he found out when he took a look inside.

Another person who has explored similar terrain is Jeff Warren who published a wonderful book called ‘The Head Trip: Adventures On The Wheel Of Consciousness‘. I recently found an interview with Jeff on Erik Davis’ radio program called ‘Expanding Mind‘. This is like finding a ten dollar bill in your old jacket pocket. Now I just need an excuse to drive somewhere so I can listen to it.

Thanks to Leonard Koren for being on the show this week. He is a very interesting guy and was a great guest. Here’s to Gourmet Bathing. You can listen to the show now in the archives.

So what next? What caught me eye this week was this story about a guy who was accidentally given massive dose of Ketamine in the hospital and had something akin to a ‘Near Death Experience’.

“He said: ‘I was sucked down into black tunnels where I’ve never been before. People pulling me around by my feet, all black, was hot, scary, saw life flash in front of me. I saw my mother, felt being born and placed in my mother’s arms, life review of all the good and bad . . . then I shot up through the sky surrounded like a shower of white light, went straight through the clouds and saw this figure to the right and he had a white cap on, look at his face and he wouldn’t let me see his face. It was a bright white light. He was an office-tower high, larger than any building I’d ever seen.’”

I always find these stories amazing. Why are they always the same? Is it because we’ve heard the story so many times that when we are put in a state of alternate consciousness, we subconsciously create a similar experience? Maybe, maybe not, but either way it is amazing that we have the potential to go back into our brain/minds and pull out all of this information about ourselves that we rarely see. This requires no supernatural explanation. There is far more to us then we know, and it’s all sitting between our ears.

So how do we get at that stuff? We spend so much time exploring the external world, what about the internal world? Is that only for people in New York and Los Angeles who can afford expensive therapists? Of course not.

Which brings me to a fascinating article in the NY Times magazine this week about Carl Jung’s ‘Red Book’. When Jung was in his late thirties he experienced a ‘life-altering crisis’ which caused him to have ‘troubling visions’ and ‘inner voices’ and ultimately precipitated a ‘confrontation with the unconscious’. All of which he recorded in the red book. This book has been hidden away for years by his relatives who are worried about what it’s release to the public will do to Jung’s reputation.

The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.

This is one way of finding out what is lurkingin our black boxes, we listen to what the hell is happening in there, without the filter, just raw data seeping out. This is what the Jungian’s love to do, uncover that which is hidden from view.

It’s a fascinating article and has absolutely inspired me to get back on the dream journals.