Benblog

Calculated regrets

One of the terms used by enviros, possibly still, is the idea of no regrets policies and technologies.

I think that position is an extreme one.

There is no way to calculate the range of possibilities based on present knowledge.

But we can make educated guesses about what some of the potential risks to new approaches are, and build in mechanisms, economic and otherwise, that at least make an attempt to accomodate future risk.

I think this is one of the most fundamental issues with the idea of the invisible hand in the economy. Number one, the metrics are almost primitive by comparison to the enormous complexity the global market represents. Number two, we cannot expect entities that are unable to meaningfully calculate the costs of certain actions on certain invididuals, including their own human cohorts, to measure the future costs of financial decisions made today.

Corporations are held accountable today to standards that have everything to do with profit but nothing to do with real cost.

In fact, their ability to impact the government and regulatory functions of society through the money and power they wield has made them the defacto standard bearers of a newly and narrowly defined truth, one that has little, if any bearing, on the actual impact on humans.

Unless and until we come up with new mechanisms for permitting the operation of free enterprise in such a way that general goals of transparency are more fully met, humans will be working for a corporate state, rather than using corporate structures to serve human needs.

New Physics of Telekinesis

I just realized that one of the pieces of the puzzle may be simply understanding the energy profile of an item and moving it in time and space. Again, not so much the movement of mass, but the shifting of energy.

Mutability and Survival of Species

What seems a self evident contention, that environmental factors impact mutation impact adaptation impact evolution, is another example of why the whole intelligent design debate is fundamentally irrelevant. Believe in a first mover, but believe that the first mover had the wisdom to design a self-regulating system.

This also makes me think about the way businesses and organizations must think to survive - under assault, we have to try different things, make mistakes, figure out what sticks, rather than thinking that we will somehow magically survive doing the same thing we've always done.

The Physics of Telekinesis

I don't have a way of testing this yet, but I think we can't do telekinesis with our understanding limited to Newtonian Physics. The reason telekinesis works is because the forces at work are probalistic rather than mechanistic.

It's amazing to think how much of our formulation of our physics relies on the machinery of the universe we actually perceive, and then have the math to discuss and debate amongst ourselves. In pre, and even post Copernicun astronomy, we had the idea of the universe operating like a clock, a machine wound up by God and set in motion.

Having that mechanistic notion, tied up in our cosmology and mythology, limited the human mind's ability to conceive of something beyond.

One of the lasting aspects of western scientific method is that while other ancient civilizations may have had mathematics and astronomy (and I'm thinking of druidic and shamanistic traditions, like the Celts and the Mayans), our tradition, coming out of the best of Greek and Roman and Egyptian and Arabic and Chinese systems, allows us to validate and propogate information fairly quickly, especially if we have the mathematics to explain the proof.

But sometimes we are limited by the mathematics themselves not being able to recognize what they can not yet account for within their own schema.

Hence, telekinetics within Newtonian Physics involves F=MA.

Einstein gets a little closer with E=MC squared, in bringing us into a relativistic framework.

But we ultimately, in all things, in all systems, function within a realm of probability, with energy and time and space all resulting out of an aggregate chaos, of which we, as participant observers, shape within our micro-sphere, truly influencing in aggregate a universe shaped by intention.

Telekininesis in the context of probability is as easy as choosing one of the probabilities of an event, no one of which is any more or less possible in the infinity of events than the other, within a specific context governed by some of the real limits of Newtonian physics (gravity, as a construct, is realized enough that it becomes much more difficult to remove gravity as a possibility).

For example, the idea of Darth Vader physically choking someone requires much more potential energy (image the force required simply to choke a man, and then imagine moving that force through a medium that has no conductivity - you would have to disperse a huge amount of energy to make that happen, like Tessla's attempts later in life to generate electricity that could be transferred over air, huge towers firing bolts at one another) than the idea of simply enactualizing that person existing in a moment of space when there is no air there, or throw a man through the air, not by moving the body, but intentionalizing a time when the wall is where the man is now, making the intersection by manipulating quanta rather than moving mass.

I sometimes think that my role in life may be to be a cartographer of the mind, a modern explorer of the unknown, venturing forth in discovery, and in the hopes of constructing a deeper mathematics of existence. I feel that path would require such a high level of understanding of the existings science that I am better delighting in the faith of these exploits, perhaps helping inspire someone else, further away in history, to explore the metaphysics.

Those who claim the mystical needs no math, but faith, are themselves limited the capacity of their own discernment.

I wonder what it would have been like to have been in a Tibetan monastery in the early days. And then I know that I know.

In my own mind is already a library of the mind, accessible simply by accessing it.

Writing the wisdom down is part of the focus of the journey, making breadcrumbs for those who come after you.

The Tautological Method

The aspect of Mammonistic Christian teachings around science that is most alarming is that there is no accountability, no methodology other than that which the practitioners say it is. The belief system itself is problematic and spotty, but to attempt to apply it consistently to help us achieve greater knowledge is impossible. If I knew the word better, I would call it nihilistic, in the way it dumbs down our ability to listen to God by focusing our area of conversation to increasingly smaller circles, spiralling inward. All in the name of God.

Things are going to get a lot worse in this country before they get better, if the Mammanites don't' blow us all to bits.

Getting over the Ghost

Tracy freaked out when we walked into room 602 at the Savoy. The air was dead. The room hadn't been used for some time, and the water stains on the ceiling, the peeling wall paper, did nothing to remove the spook.

She thought when she walked in the bathroom that she was going to see a dead body in the tub.

I did my best to move some of the energy in the room, spritzing the air with my chi, which helped a little.

We changed rooms in the morning. And that night, I checked online for information on the Savoy.

The place has a history of hauntings.

I don't think ghosts are malevolent as much as they are like cold spots in a pond, residual energy, sometimes with enough stored routines that it can still attempt communication.

I think I may ask to stay in room 505 next time, the room where Betsy Ward died in her bathtub, and is said to still bathe.

Even the thought gives me the willies.

Most times, when I have had the experience of unknown energy surrounding me, after a short time, I feel safe in its midst, even curious, just like finding a cold spot in a pond.

Finding that level of cold, especially on a hot summer day, is a treasure. Being able to inhabit the space of entity long departed corporally must give that entity some repose from it's own longing, since most warm blooded corporeal creatures shun the iciness of its grasp.

Mind maps

Now that I've discovered my inability to do relatively simple story problems on paper any more, let alone in my head, I've rediscovered the idea of math as math - that it provides a framework, a taxonomy for the world much more useful than visuals or words alone. Specifically, completing another game of Conquest, which is really about mathematics and some strategy, but mostly math, and logical guessing, which, as I discovered from watching the computer at work, hoping I could interact with the logic playfully, see if it might enjoy batting planets back and forth, is mostly designed around educated guesses about which planets are weak. It would launch ships as soon as it saw that I had moved mine, making the game almost ridiculously and unplayably simple in most scenarios for me now - shift ships away from planet to draw an attack, with enough reinforcements nearby to resupply the planet, with another attack launched towards the launching planet. I'm sure it's not really sophisticated programming, but you'd think it would be less predictably about math than that - that there would be some equation factoring in risk to a more sophisticated degree. As the turns wore on, I was trying to establish a pattern for the futile attack it would launch once every 118 turns, then 160, then 180, and then not in over 300 turns. But I realized that I would be more likely to be able to estimate the pattern if I graphed it, but couldn't begin to do the math around determining those numbers by entering various factors. I feel I have neglected an old friend, in losing the ability to think like that, give some predictability to some aspects of the universe, as mysterious as their inner workings will always be, and then the inner workings inside those, all somehow part of some external working, including the prying into the innter workings, and the inner workings inside that.

Makes me even more amazed to think of creationists and intelligent design theorists - that somehow, everything we understand about atoms and half-life and the periodic table of the elements must somehow be false as well. It would be very interesting to present all of the developments on this planet that are related to the very basic science which supports evolution, or even the idea that we've been around for more than several thousand years, and tell them that anyone who believes in creationism cannot use those items, for in their world, they do not exist. I guess, essentially, that much of the entire body of knowledge leading up to modern chemistry and biology would also have to come into question.

It just makes me shudder. The inanity of it all.

And to hear preachers preach about the social Gospel and the spiritual Gospel as being equally important, or one being more important than the other, each spinning out of that mystery some concrete set of ordained values, properly prioritized and ordered, to which we should adhere.

The Bible may be a key to deeper appreciation of how divine will attempts to manifest itself in this world, and how humans throughout the ages have grappled with those questions. But it is not a license to stupidity.

It makes me think of people who follow Hubbards teachings, or what a community of Heinlein followers might end up messing up of his works, were they to grapple over centuries with the tenets therein. It's like playing telephone with people who are dead communicating their experience of God in a context and in a language that no one speaks anymore, at least not the way it would have been understood back then. All of which, as is the case with the Bible, was written down hundreds, perhaps thousands in some cases, after the alleged events took place. It makes my heart wail and my brain spin when I think how obvious the message, the mystery even, and how we still mess it up. It would be like someone writing a note saying, Plant tomatoes today, that someone comes upon later, and focuses on what the writing was like, or argues about whether or not tomatoes should be spelled with or without an e, or whether or not it meant to eat Plant tomatoes before sundown, and on which day the proclamation was made. The example is slightly exagerrated, but I do not have the energy to make the thought more clear.