tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87336301846194690502024-03-07T23:30:15.424-06:00Analogic Perception<p>"All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy."
<p>Henry David Thoreau'Johnny'http://www.blogger.com/profile/09061698853073810021noreply@blogger.comBlogger14125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733630184619469050.post-27700694817016189862008-07-23T20:56:00.000-05:002008-07-23T20:57:15.583-05:00Testtest'Johnny'http://www.blogger.com/profile/09061698853073810021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733630184619469050.post-65692880550761787172008-06-13T11:16:00.005-05:002008-06-13T12:04:43.074-05:00Excerpt from "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues"<blockquote>"A lot of life boils down to the question of whether a person is going to be able to realize his fantasies, or else end up surviving only through compromises he can't face up to. The way I figure it, Heaven and Hell are right here on Earth. Heaven is living in your hopes and Hell is living your fears. It's up to each individual which one he chooses." Jelly paused "I told that to the Chink once and he said, "Every fear is part hope and every hope is part fear--quit dividing things up and taking sides".<br /></blockquote><br /><br />Bonanza Jellybean'Johnny'http://www.blogger.com/profile/09061698853073810021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733630184619469050.post-52042437015542528432008-05-01T15:16:00.003-05:002008-05-01T15:31:27.636-05:00Complex Hive builders or Free Entities?One of my favorite folks on these here internet tubes, Thoreau, who writes over at <a href="http://www.highclearing.com/">Unqualified Offerings</a>, linked to an <a href="http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=PRLTAO000100000013138702000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes">abstract</a> and an <a href="http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13759-city-road-networks-grow-like-biological-systems.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=news7_head_dn13759">article</a> about the discovery of the similarity between leaf veins and city road systems.<br /><br />I found these especially interesting because I have long wondered whether cities are hives, or something more. Now, don't get me wrong, I love urban living like nobodies business. I truly believe that the modern urban environment actually represents a difference on an evolutionary, or at least the beginning of one for human beings. I can't find the link, but there was a discovery of an ancient city, I believe in Pakistan, nearly 9,000 years old, that suggested that they were advanced enough to have dental sciences. I have long suspected that human cities, human hives, are quantitatively more advanced than smaller groups of humans based on the "coming together", a sort of gestalt system.<br /><br />Items like this research revealing the similarity between biological systems, like leaf veins, and road systems, indicate to me, the possibility, however distastefull to some, that we are evolved ants. Or something like it, and much more tied to the biology that gave birth to us than might be comfortable to admit.<br /><br />Well, perhaps I'm seeing something that isn't there, but check them out for yourself.'Johnny'http://www.blogger.com/profile/09061698853073810021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733630184619469050.post-59357255112253310672008-04-30T20:11:00.003-05:002008-06-13T12:02:43.673-05:00Peach BlossomsBliss and sorrow, love and hate, light and shadow, hot and cold, joy and anger, self and other.<br /><br />The enjoyment of poetic beauty may well lead to hell.<br /><br />But look what we find strewn all along our Path:<br /><br />Peach Blossoms and peach flowers!<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikkyu_Sojun">Ikkyu Sojun</a> translated by John Stevens in "<a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/73-9781893996656-0">Wild Ways: Zen Poems of Ikkyu</a>"'Johnny'http://www.blogger.com/profile/09061698853073810021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733630184619469050.post-90785561532753992242008-04-30T20:08:00.004-05:002008-06-13T12:04:14.967-05:00A bit of Emerson: HistoryThere is no great and no small<br />To the Soul that maketh all:<br />And where it cometh, all things are<br />And it cometh everywhere.<br /><br />I am owner of the sphere,<br />Of the seven stars and the solar year,<br />Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain,<br />Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain.<br /><br /><br />The world exists for the education of each man. There is no age or state of society or mode of action in history to which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life. Every thing tends in a wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should see that he can live all history in his own person. He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography and all the government of the world; he must transfer the point of view from which history is commonly read, from Rome and Athens and London, to himself, and not deny his conviction that he is the court, and if England or Egypt have any thing to say to him he will try the case; if not, let them for ever be silent. He must attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike. The instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the signal narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign? London and Paris and New York must go the same way. "What is history," said Napoleon, "but a fable agreed upon?" This life of ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War, Colonization, Church, Court and Commerce, as with so many flowers and wild ornaments grave and gay. I will not make more account of them. I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain and the Islands,--the genius and creative principle of each and of all eras, in my own mind.'Johnny'http://www.blogger.com/profile/09061698853073810021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733630184619469050.post-39673514562725006692008-01-31T23:59:00.001-06:002008-06-13T12:03:26.143-05:00"The $1.4 Trillion Question" by James Fallows<blockquote> Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus—$1.4 trillion and counting, going up by about $1 billion per day—that the Chinese government has mostly parked in U.S. Treasury notes. In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China. Like so many imbalances in economics, this one can’t go on indefinitely, and therefore won’t. But the way it ends—suddenly versus gradually, for predictable reasons versus during a panic—will make an enormous difference to the U.S. and Chinese economies over the next few years, to say nothing of bystanders in Europe and elsewhere.<br /><br />Any economist will say that Americans have been living better than they should—which is by definition the case when a nation’s total consumption is greater than its total production, as America’s now is. Economists will also point out that, despite the glitter of China’s big cities and the rise of its billionaire class, China’s people have been living far worse than they could. That’s what it means when a nation consumes only half of what it produces, as China does.<br /><br />Neither government likes to draw attention to this arrangement, because it has been so convenient on both sides. For China, it has helped the regime guide development in the way it would like—and keep the domestic economy’s growth rate from crossing the thin line that separates “unbelievably fast” from “uncontrollably inflationary.” For America, it has meant cheaper iPods, lower interest rates, reduced mortgage payments, a lighter tax burden. But because of political tensions in both countries, and because of the huge and growing size of the imbalance, the arrangement now shows signs of cracking apart. </blockquote><br /><br /><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200801/fallows-chinese-dollars">Link</a> to the <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200801/fallows-chinese-dollars">article</a> in <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/">The Atlantic</a>'Johnny'http://www.blogger.com/profile/09061698853073810021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733630184619469050.post-81392405676290569012008-01-24T22:46:00.002-06:002008-06-13T12:05:29.359-05:00Divine MadnessNow, however, the human species wishes to add deeper significance to their endeavors. Realizing that true fulfillment escapes them, they have begun once more to search within themselves for a kind of satisfaction they have not found so far in their conquest of the external world. They know that they can find biological happiness by achieving adaptation to their physical and social environment, but they realize that this form of happiness is as limited in scope as the contentment of the cow. The best-adapted populations certainly experienced physical contentment, but their lives were probably deficient in other ways since they have produced chiefly what Toynbee called "arrested civilizations." Modern Humans are not yet resigned enough to be completely satisfied with purely creature contentment. They still hope that they can discover a philosophy of life that will be as creative and emotionally rewarding as that of classical Greece or of Western Europe in the thirteenth century.<br /><br />Our greatest blessing, says Socrates in Plato's dialogue Phaedrus, comes to us by way of madness—mania. In this arresting statement, Plato does not mean mania as a disease, but rather as a state during which man experiences a kind of self-revelation occurring through the emergence of a powerful spirit from the depth of their beings. Poetical words, tones, and gestures, and even prophecy are the expressions of enthusiasm—the god within. Apparently certain drugs can help in generating this inspired state. But Plato traced inspiration to the primeval forces that Greek mythology symbolized in the form of deities, especially Dionysos.<br /><br /><br />The Microbiologist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_Dubos">René Dubos's</a> from “A God Within".<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Dubos"></a>'Johnny'http://www.blogger.com/profile/09061698853073810021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733630184619469050.post-47491552663143326172008-01-22T08:21:00.000-06:002008-01-22T08:36:27.012-06:00To be against happiness is to embrace ecstasyFrom an <a href="http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=t5wqrs9hpxt70zjz3bv348pqg1hcxz0r">essay</a> adapted from Eric G. Wilson's book "Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy"<br /><br /><blockquote>A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that almost 85 percent of Americans believe that they are very happy or at least pretty happy. The psychological world is now abuzz with a new field, positive psychology, devoted to finding ways to enhance happiness through pleasure, engagement, and meaning. Psychologists practicing this brand of therapy are leaders in a novel science, the science of happiness. Mainstream publishers are learning from the self-help industry and printing thousands of books on how to be happy. Doctors offer a wide array of drugs that might eradicate depression forever. It seems truly an age of almost perfect contentment, a brave new world of persistent good fortune, joy without trouble, felicity with no penalty.<br /><br />Why are most Americans so utterly willing to have an essential part of their hearts sliced away and discarded like so much waste? What are we to make of this American obsession with happiness, an obsession that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation? What drives this rage for complacency, this desperate contentment?<br /><br />Surely all this happiness can't be for real. <br /><br />~~~~<br /><br />Suffering the gloom, inevitable as breath, we must further accept this fact that the world hates: We are forever incomplete, fragments of some ungraspable whole. Our unfinished natures — we are never pure actualities but always vague potentials — make life a constant struggle, a bout with the persistent unknown. But this extension into the abyss is also our salvation. To be only a fragment is always to strive for something beyond ourselves, something transcendent. That striving is always an act of freedom, of choosing one road instead of another. Though this labor is arduous — it requires constant attention to our mysterious and shifting interiors — it is also ecstatic, an almost infinite sounding of the exquisite riddles of Being.<br /><br />To be against happiness is to embrace ecstasy. Incompleteness is a call to life. Fragmentation is freedom. The exhilaration of never knowing anything fully is that you can perpetually imagine sublimities beyond reason. On the margins of the known is the agile edge of existence. This is the rapture, burning slow, of finishing a book that can never be completed, a flawed and conflicted text, vexed as twilight.</blockquote><br /><br />Via <a href="http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/01/department-of-w.html">Marginal Revolution</a>'Johnny'http://www.blogger.com/profile/09061698853073810021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733630184619469050.post-54887858497902670012008-01-16T09:43:00.000-06:002008-01-16T12:02:40.640-06:00Theism/Atheism?"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."<br /><br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein">Albert Einstein</a> from "The World as I see it"<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">~~~~~<br /></div><br /><br />We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.<br /><br />American <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence">Declaration of Independence</a><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">~~~~~<br /></div><br /><br />“Why bother with the never ending, genuinely hopeless search for truth when a truth can be had so readily, all at once, in the form of an ideology or doctrine? Suddenly it is all so simple. Think of all the difficult questions which are answered in advance!”<br /><br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaclav_Havel">Vaclav Havel</a>, 1985 <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">~~~~~<br /></div><br /><br /><br />"[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards,"<br /><br />Huckabee (<a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/09061698853073810021">lrjjr note:</a> Mike Huckabee candidate for the republican presidential nominee) often refers to the need to amend the constitution on these grounds, but he has never so specifically called for the Constitution to be brought within "God's standards," which are themselves debated amongst religious scholars.<br /><br />From <a href="http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/01/15/579265.aspx">MSNBC</a>'Johnny'http://www.blogger.com/profile/09061698853073810021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733630184619469050.post-86204917362712992462008-01-14T22:23:00.000-06:002008-01-14T23:04:15.132-06:00Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs?By <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/dennis_overbye/index.html?inline=nyt-per">DENNIS OVERBYE</a><br /><br />Jan. 15, 2008 New York Times<br /><br />It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.<br /><br />If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.<br /><br />This bizarre picture is the outcome of a recent series of calculations that take some of the bedrock theories and discoveries of modern cosmology to the limit. Nobody in the field believes that this is the way things really work, however. And so there in the last couple of years there has been a growing stream of debate and dueling papers, replete with references to such esoteric subjects as reincarnation, multiple universes and even the death of spacetime, as cosmologists try to square the predictions of their cherished theories with their convictions that we and the universe are real. The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/science/15brain.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print">Link to the rest of the article</a>'Johnny'http://www.blogger.com/profile/09061698853073810021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733630184619469050.post-46752662534994669232008-01-08T17:56:00.000-06:002008-01-08T18:06:37.938-06:00The Physical World as a Virtual Reality<div style="text-align: center;"><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Brian Whitworth<br />Massey University, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand</span></div><br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;">Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine<br /></div><div style="text-align: right;">Sir Arthur Eddington<br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Abstract</span><br /><br />This paper explores the idea that the universe is a virtual reality created by information processing, and relates this strange idea to the findings of modern physics about the physical world. The virtual reality concept is familiar to us from online worlds, but our world as a virtual reality is usually a subject for science fiction rather than science. Yet logically the world could be an information simulation running on a multi-dimensional space-time screen. Indeed, if the essence of the universe is information, matter, charge, energy and movement could be aspects of information, and the many conservation laws could be a single law of information conservation. If the universe were a virtual reality, its creation at the big bang would no longer be paradoxical,as every virtual system must be booted up. It is suggested that whether the world is an objective reality or a virtual reality is a matter for science to resolve. Modern information science can suggest how core physical properties like space, time, light, matter and movement could derive from information processing. Such an approach could reconcile relativity and quantum theories, with the former being how information processing creates space-time, and the latter how it creates energy and matter.<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0801/0801.0337.pdf">Link to paper (.pdf)</a><br /><br />Via <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2008/01/07/our-universe-as-virt.html">Boing Boing</a>'Johnny'http://www.blogger.com/profile/09061698853073810021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733630184619469050.post-16642667977333141202007-10-14T20:59:00.000-05:002007-10-14T21:00:21.413-05:00The beginning of my philosophyI just posted (below) an excerpt from Plato's Republic. This particular passage had a profound effect on me when I was young (my first reading of the republic was probably around 10 years old, something I'll write of another time), it resonated off of not only the religious precepts I had become acquainted with (From Evangelical Christianity though to to Jewish teachings and off to Buddhism) but the scientific ones I was meeting as well. It is the only part of the Republic that really stayed with me. A few years later I would read an update of this in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughter House 5 and an important link between past and present would be completed for me.'Johnny'http://www.blogger.com/profile/09061698853073810021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733630184619469050.post-3869908086329142652007-10-14T20:58:00.000-05:002007-10-21T15:32:44.132-05:00From Plato's RepublicAnd now I will describe in a figure the enlightenment or un-enlightenment of our nature:<br /><br />--imagine human beings living in an underground den which is open towards the light; they have been there from childhood, having their necks and legs chained, and can only see into the den. At a distance there is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners a raised way, and a low wall is built along the way, like the screen over which marionette players show their puppets.<br /><br />Behind the wall appear moving figures, who hold in their hands various works of art, and among them images of men and animals, wood and stone, and some of the passers-by are talking and others silent.<br /><br />'A strange parable,' he said, 'and strange captives.'<br /><br />They are ourselves, I replied; and they see only the shadows of the images which the fire throws on the wall of the den; to these they give names, and if we add an echo which returns from the wall, the voices of the passengers will seem to proceed from the shadows.<br /><br />Suppose now that you suddenly turn them round and make them look with pain and grief to themselves at the real images; will they believe them to be real?<br /><br />Will not their eyes be dazzled, and will they not try to get away from the light to something which they are able to behold without blinking?<br /><br />And suppose further, that they are dragged up a steep and rugged ascent into the presence of the sun himself, will not their sight be darkened with the excess of light?<br /><br />Some time will pass before they get the habit of perceiving at all; and at first they will be able to perceive only shadows and reflections in the water; then they will recognize the moon and the stars, and will at length behold the sun in his own proper place as he is.<br /><br />Last of all they will conclude:--This is he who gives us the year and the seasons, and is the author of all that we see. How will they rejoice in passing from darkness to light!<br /><br />How worthless to them will seem the honors and glories of the den!<br /><br />But now imagine further, that they descend into their old habitations;--in that underground dwelling they will not see as well as their fellows, and will not be able to compete with them in the measurement of the shadows on the wall; there will be many jokes about the man who went on a visit to the sun and lost his eyes, and if they find anybody trying to set free and enlighten one of their number, they will put him to death, if they can catch him.'Johnny'http://www.blogger.com/profile/09061698853073810021noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733630184619469050.post-42189341557382620982007-10-09T15:05:00.001-05:002007-10-09T15:28:14.904-05:00This seems as good a place to start this blog as any other...Actually, it's a great place to start the blog, with new research about the way people perceive facts.<br /><br />Here is an <a href="http://reason.com/news/show/122892.html">article</a> by someone I often disagree with, but still read, Ronald Bailey from <a href="http://reason.com/">Reason</a> Magazine, and here is the research he is talking about from <a href="http://research.yale.edu/culturalcognition/content/view/124/89/">The Cultural Cognition Project at Yale</a>.<br /><br />Good stuff.<br /><br />I remember a section in one of my psych text books about how "words" alter perception. If two groups of people are shown a film of a traffic accident between a red car, and a blue car which hits it and at the end they get asked one of two questions:<br /><br />At what speed were the cars moving when the accident occurred?<br /><br />-and-<br /><br />At what speed was the blue car moving when it smashed into the red car?<br /><br />People asked the second question will usually list a higher speed for the blue car.<br /><br />I recently saw the absurdity of this on a headline in the Chicago Tribune, it read that a "red line" (part of Chicago's "L" train and subway line) train had killed a man.<br /><br />Then the article reported that he had probably jumped in front of it.<br /><br />I'd be willing to place money on the fact that more people remember that the train "killed" someone, rather than someone used a train to commit suicide. I should see if I can find someone to test that, it's an old pet peeve of mine that papers usually report that trains "hit" people, when the truth usually is that people get in front of trains, and once you see a train moving, and see the tracks, you usually see that the train has limited options, but people not on tracks less so.<br /><br />In that vein I need to qualify that even though I may link to a libertarian magazine article (or later a conservative, or a liberal one), I am not a libertarian.<br /><br />I try to be a "free thinker", which is harder than you might "think".'Johnny'http://www.blogger.com/profile/09061698853073810021noreply@blogger.com0