Language

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Mishegas from a misanthropic, moribund, misbegotten former Michigander

It’s very early on Tuesday morning, and I’m already at the office.  I’m not going to be writing any fiction today, unless you count any pretense I make at coherence here in this blog post.

I had a very bad sleep last night, despite taking some diphenhydramine*.  I felt relatively optimistic at the beginning of the week (yesterday), with thoughts of reading some science and/or mathematics and/or other books when there was occasional downtime.  But then, of course, people arrived at the office and started talking and making other noise, and then the “music” was started, and I could not concentrate.

And, back at the house, the air conditioning and fan were, perforce, churning, since it’s quite hot and humid around here.  That’s better than the office noise, because at least it’s steady and sort of “white noise”, but it’s still physically irritating in the small, confined space of my room, especially accompanying, as it does, my now-bilateral tinnitus.

“‘Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,’ spake then the apostate angel, ‘this the site, that we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom for that eternal light?'”

Nah, I’ll pass.

I’m trying to be optimistic, or at least to be upbeat.  I’m trying very hard to act as if I’m doing better–playing guitar, writing fiction–in hopes that it will become real.  “Dream that what is dreamed will be.”  I know that I can physically endure, if necessary…but for what purpose, to what end?  It’s just a cycle from dreary to noisy to lonely to turbulent to idiotic to angry to absurd back to dreary and so on, all set against a landscape of chronic pain and self-loathing, accompanied by a constant, high-pitched whine (and no, I don’t mean the fact that I’m whining about it, though I am).

I know, I know:  “Shut up, no one wants to hear about it, everyone has their own issues, just suck it up and walk it off and lather, rinse, repeat.  Everyone suffers, everyone has problems, everybody hurts, yada yada yada.”  This is supposed to, what…make a person want to stick around in the world?  Or is it a somewhat subtle way of encouraging someone just to get gone already, to leave the world to the vapid troglodytes?

I’m so tired.  I don’t have anything to which to look forward.  The only advantage of weekends, even, is that I don’t have to deal with the foolishness and the overhead noise in the office…but then I don’t really do anything on the weekends, either.  I can’t even seem to read, now.  My brain is frazzled and fried and other words beginning with “f”.

Hmm…let’s see…

Fudge’s face froze, feeling forsaken from fair freedom’s fiefdom, foundering forlornly, foully fettered, finding few facts, fearing fundamental farragoes, fleeting facets fabricated from Facebook**.

Oh, for fuck’s fake***!  I need to stop.  Is it any wonder I don’t have people with whom to hang out?  Is it any wonder that eventually even people who love me find it better to do so from a distance?  I, at least, don’t find it surprising.  I don’t even like my own company, honestly, and I’m often driven to punish myself in various ways when I get too wound up…that way, at least, I don’t go off on other people.

I don’t have any idea what I’m trying to accomplish here today, other than perhaps to convey the message, “Look, I wrote a blog post today, even though I didn’t write any fiction!”  Also, I suppose, to try to let people know that I’m slowly, and perhaps subtly, crashing.  It’s a bit (I imagine) like trying to stay above the surface of a vast body of a very viscous liquid that nevertheless has a specific gravity much lower than water.  One cannot float on it, anymore than one could float on the surface of gasoline, but the process of sinking is a slow one (because of the viscosity), so one can “swim” or “tread liquid” to stay on the surface, but it requires constant effort, and the stickiness makes it harder, and there’s no land in sight.

Oh, well.  Life doesn’t promise anyone a rose garden.  Even if one gets a rose garden, there are always thorns (or, technically, according to botanists, “prickles”, but “Every rose has its prickle” doesn’t work as well as a lyric).

A hemlock garden would be better.  If the umbels are tall and fair, one might even encounter Tinúviel dancing among them to a pipe unseen.  And I hear the plant can be used to make an interesting tea, though no man (or plucked chicken) tends to drink it more than once.

All right, all right, that’s enough nonsense.  Sorry.  Have a good day.

*I originally wrote that as “diphenhydrazine”, which is a peculiar typo to make–would that be rocket fuel with a benzyl ring attached at each end of every molecule?

**Sorry.  The ending of the previous comment made me want to see if I could write an entire long sentence in which every word begins with “f” and that nevertheless at least makes some form of sense, grammatically if in no other way.

***Use this last “f” as an archaically written “s”, such as one can sometimes see in old English documents, e.g., “feveral”.

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And simple truth miscall’d simplicity, And captive blog attending captain ill

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and so it’s time for a more fully fledged blog post for the week, in the manner in which I used to write them when I was writing fiction the rest of the week (and playing some guitar in the time between writing and starting work most days).

I’ve been rather sick almost every day since last week’s post, except for Friday.  I don’t think it’s a virus of any kind, though that may be incorrect.  It’s mainly upper GI, and it’s taken a lot of the wind out of my sails.

I haven’t played guitar at all since last Friday.  I’ve also only written new fiction on a few of the days—Friday, Monday, and Wednesday, I think—since the last major post.  Still, on the days I wrote, I got a surprisingly good amount of work done, I guess.  It seems as though Extra Body is taking longer than it really ought to take, but once it’s done, I’m going to try to pare it down more than I have previous works, since my stuff tends to grow so rapidly.

I’ve been trying to get into doing more studying and “stuff” to correct the fact that I didn’t realize my plans to go into Physics when I started university.  I had good reasons for this non-realization, of course, the main one being the temporary cognitive impairment brought about by heart-lung bypass when I had open heart surgery when I was eighteen.

I’m pretty sure I’ve written about that before, but I didn’t know about it then, and I didn’t learn about it until I did the review paper I wrote for my fourth-year research project in medical school.  I just felt discouraged and stupid, though I consoled myself by studying some truly wonderful works of literature as an English major, including once taking two Shakespeare courses at the same time.  That was great!

It’s always nice to learn about things, all other things being equal.  I don’t think there are pieces of true information about the world that it is better not to know.  Our response to learning some intimidating truth about the greater cosmos may not be good, but the fault then lies not with the stars but with ourselves.  If you truly can’t handle the truth, then the problem is with you, not with the truth.

Of course, knowing what is true is generally not simple, except about simple things, and often not even about those.  This is the heart of epistemology, the philosophical branch that deals with how we know what we know when we know it, so to speak.  The subject may seem dry at times, especially when it gets weighed down by jargon that serves mainly just to keep lay people from chiming in on things—at least as far as I can see—but it is important and interesting at its root.

Not but what there can’t be good reasons for creating and using specific and precise and unique terms, such as to make sure that one knows exactly what is meant and doesn’t fall into the trap of linguistic fuzziness which often leads to misunderstanding and miscommunication.  That’s part of the reason most serious Physics involves mathematical formalism; one wants to deal with things precisely and algorithmically in ways that one can make testable and rigorous predictions.

Physicists will sometimes say that they can’t really convey some aspect of physics using ordinary language, that you have to use the math(s), but that can’t be true in any simplistic sense, or no one would ever be able to learn it in the first place.  Even the mathematics has to be taught via language, after all.  It’s just more cumbersome to try to work through the plain—or not so plain—language to get the precise and accurate concepts across.

And, of course, sometimes the person tasked with presenting an idea to someone else doesn’t really understand it in a way that would allow them to convey it in ordinary language.  This is not necessarily an insult to that person.  Richard Feynman apparently used to hold the opinion that if you truly understand some subject in Physics, you should be able to produce a freshman-level lecture about it that doesn’t require prior knowledge, but he admitted freely when he couldn’t do so, and was known to say that this indicated that we—or at least he—just didn’t understand the subject well enough yet.

I don’t know how I got to this point in this blog post, or indeed what point I’m trying to make, if there is any point to anything at all (I suppose a lot of that would depend on one’s point of view).  I think I got into it by saying that I was trying to catch up on Physics, so I can deal with it at a full level, because there are things I want to understand and be able to contemplate rigorously.

I particularly want to try to get all the way into General Relativity (also Quantum Field Theory), and the mathematics of that is stuff that I never learned specifically, and it is intricate—matrices and tensors and non-Euclidean geometry and similar stuff.  It’s all tremendously interesting, of course, but it requires effort, which requires time and energy.

And once other people have come into the office and the “music” has started, it’s very hard for me to maintain the required focus and the energy even in my down time, though I have many textbooks and pre-textbook level works available right there at my desk.  I’ve started, and I’m making progress, but it is very slow because of the drains on my energy and attention.

If anyone out there wants to sponsor my search for knowledge, so I wouldn’t have to do anything but study and write, I’d welcome the patronage.

But I’m not good at self-promotion, nor at asking for help in any serious way.  I tend to take the general attitude that I deserve neither health nor comfort in life, and I certainly don’t expect any of it.  I’m not my own biggest fan, probably not by a long shot.  In fact, it’s probably accurate to say that I am my own greatest enemy.

Unfortunately, I’m probably the only person who could reliably thwart me.  I’m sure I’m not unique in this.  Probably very few people have literal enemies out there in the world, but plenty of people—maybe nearly everyone—has an enemy or enemies within.  This is one of the things that happens to beings without one single, solitary terminal goal or drive or utility function, but rather with numerous ones, the strengths of which vary with time and with internal and external events.

I’ve said before that I see the motivations and drives of the mind as a vector sum in very much higher-dimensional phase space, but with input vectors that vary in response to outcomes of the immediately preceding sum perhaps even more than they do with inputs from the environment.  I don’t think there will ever be a strong way fully to describe the system algorithmically, though perhaps it may be modeled adequately and even reproduced.  This is the nature of “Elessar’s First Conjecture”:  No mind can ever be complex enough to understand itself fully and in detail*.

A combination of minds may understand it though—conceivably.  Biologists have mapped the entire nervous system of C elegans, a worm with a precisely defined nervous system with an exact number of neurons, and of course, progress is constantly being made on more advanced things.  But even individual neurons are not perfectly understood, even in worms, and the interactions between those nerves and the other cells of the body is a complex Rube Goldberg machine thrown together from pieces that were just laying around in the shed.

Complexity theory is still a very young science.

And the public at large spends its energy doing things like making and then countering “deep fakes” and arguing partisan politics with all the fervor that no doubt the ancient Egyptians and Greeks and Romans and the ancient Chinese and Japanese and Celts and Huns and Iroquois and Inca and Aztecs and Mayans and everyone else in ancient, vanished, or changed, civilizations did.  They all surely imagined that their daily politics were supremely important, that the world, the very universe, pivoted on the specifics of their little, petty disagreements and plans and paranoias**.

And so often so many of them, especially the young “revolutionaries”, whose frontal lobes were far from fully developed, were willing to spill the blood of others (and were occasionally even willing to sacrifice themselves) in pursuit of their utopian*** imaginings.  This is true from the French Revolution to the Bolsheviks to the Maoists and the Killing Fields, and before them all the way back to the Puritans of Salem, and the Inquisition, and the Athenians who executed Socrates, and the killers of Pythagoras****, and the millions of perpetrators of no-longer-known atrocities in no-longer-known cultures and civilizations.

And then, of course, we have the current gaggle of fashionably ideological, privileged youth, who decry the very things that brought them all that they take for granted, and who will follow in the blood-soaked footsteps of those I mentioned above—l’dor v’dor, ad suf kul hadoroth, a-mayn.

In the meantime, I’ll try to keep writing my stories, and try to keep learning things, and if I’m able to develop an adequate (by my standards) understanding of General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory, it’s just remotely possible that I might even make legitimate contributions to the field(s).  But more likely I’ll self-destruct, literally, well before any of that happens.

I’ve probably gone on too long already, as has this blog post.  I thank you for your patience with my meanderings.  Please try to have a good day, and I hope those of you who celebrate it are having a good Passover.

TTFN

*This implies that Laplace’s Demon could not be within the universe about which it knows the position and momentum of every particle and the strength of every force.  It needs to be instantiated elsewhere.

**Should that be “paranoiae”?  It feels like that ought to be the formal way of putting it, but Word thinks it’s misspelled.

***Not to be confused with “eutopian”.  Utopia means “no place”, whereas Eutopia would mean “good place” or “pleasant place” or “well place”.

****He was caught despite a head start, so I’ve heard, because he refused to cross a bean field, believing that beans were evil.  He was a weird guy.  It’s apparently from his followers that the term “irrational”—which originally just meant a number that cannot be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers—developed its connotation as “crazy” or “insane”.  They didn’t like the fact that irrational numbers even existed.  Too bad for them; there are vastly more irrational numbers than rational ones…an uncountable infinity versus a “countable” infinity.  It’s not even close.

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Monday morning report for 4-22-2024

I’m writing a quick blog post this morning before I write any fiction, just to pass the time while I ride into the office.  I had a fairly bad stomach bug this weekend, I don’t really feel up to riding the train, and I didn’t bring my laptop computer back to the house with me on Friday.  I also did not work on Saturday, which is good, since I was busy throwing up.  Now I’m kind sore from all that, but the worst seems over, so I’m going to the office.

I mean to do my fiction writing on the laptop computer at the office this morning, mainly for tradition’s sake.  Though the smartphone writing has been pretty successful so far, I still want to write on the computer mostly.

Of course, the smartphone is a computer as well, but its keyboard isn’t nearly as well-designed for human-type hands to use‒thus all the software add-ons like auto-correct that are necessary to make it tolerable for most people to use.  As for me, I don’t like the auto-fill options, especially in word processing, though suggestions are sometimes useful when one is typing a long word.  Still, the fact that these systems seem to learn from the great masses of illiterati using them doesn’t reassure me.  The fact that the system keeps wanting to add an apostrophe when I’m writing the possessive form of “it” shows that it’s not getting its grammar suggestions from any formal guidelines, and so it’s actually miseducating people who are unaware of the apostrophe convention in this circumstance.

Most people probably don’t pay much attention, of course, so I suppose that’s not a very big worry.

I have a bit of a headache from all my queasiness and such this weekend‒at least, I suspect that’s the source‒so I’m not going to make this much longer.  I will come back before I post it and add a summary of the writing I’ve done today on my fiction.  I hope you all have a good day and a good week, and for those who celebrate it, have a good Passover (it starts tonight).

***

Well, even though I’m not feeling well, and had to lie down for a bit in the middle, I wrote 1952 words on Extra Body this morning.  But now I’m quite discouraged, because my coworker with whom I share responsibilities is not going to be in today, since his back is acting up.  I can’t fail to sympathize‒my back has been acting up for just over 20 years, so I know how bad it can get.  But it’s discouraging, since I really still don’t feel well, and was thinking of ducking out early, today.

I guess there will be no rest for the wicked, of which I am surely one.  At least I got some decent writing done.

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There’s a divinity that shapes our blogs, rough-hew them how we will

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and as I promised‒or threatened, depending on your point of view‒here I am, writing my weekly blog post as before, back when I was regularly writing and publishing my fiction.

I’m not sure what topic(s) I should cover here, today.  I rarely seem able to plan these posts in advance, and when I do plan them, I don’t think they often come out very well.  That’s from my point of view, of course; maybe other people have found my planned posts excellent and wish I would write them more often, but if so, they haven’t given any clear feedback.  So, I don’t really know what will happen from now until the end of this blog post.

Of course, if the universe is deterministic, then whether I or anyone else knows it or not, what I will write is already a certain thing, as is the fact that I don’t know it‒indeed one could legitimately claim that it “already” exists in a sense, particularly if one is invoking the picture of Special and General Relativity and the “block” spacetime concept.

However, the Copenhagen interpretation (if that’s the correct term) of quantum mechanics states that wave-function collapse is truly “random”, and so the future is not determined, at least at the smallest level.  But if the wave function truly collapses, then that would be the only fundamentally irreversible temporal process known in physics so far, and that seems suspicious to me.

I’ve been reading the original EPR paper and thinking about this subject at least a little bit lately.

Of course, in a way, the Everettian “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics would say that the future really is determined, but that at every instance of decoherence, the wavefunction becomes subdivided into waves that no longer interact with each other directly.  People interpret this as if new universes were coming into existence each time, and that’s a decent way to conceptualize it, but to me it seems misleading.

To my mind, it’s just waves that are traveling along in “parallel” and not influencing each other.  But that’s not really any different from the sounds of two separate conversations happening in a crowded room‒maybe one involves a group of people discussing a recent sporting event and another gaggle is talking about some new show on Netflix.  Maybe the conversations are even in different languages.  The sound waves propagate from each conversation independently, and though there may be places where troughs and crests pass and add or subtract for an instant, locally, they are very much different processes.  But there is no mystical invocation of “new universes” such as what troubles some people about Everettian quantum mechanics because of a misunderstanding of Occam’s Razor.  There are just separate, “parallel” things happening within the same overall universe.

That’s not a perfect analogy, of course.  The “waves” of the quantum mechanics are more complex* than sound waves, and are more fundamental, and once they decohere, it seems they are far less likely to interact with their other “branches” than are even sound waves of parallel conversations in different languages.  But even those are more separable than we think.

We have an exquisitely evolved capacity to parse the information out of human conversation, decoding the waves without thought, and so we don’t think very often about how astonishing that process is.  If aliens who communicated only by light flashes were trying to interpret such a set of conversations, they would have a daunting task, indeed.

Just think about how hard it has been even to decode the communications of dolphins and whales‒highly intelligent and social creatures that clearly communicate with each other.  And these are our fellow mammals from the same planet, who also use sound for communication!  We vastly underestimate the complexity of what we’re doing when we understand conversation and other noises, because our auditory processing systems do it without our conscious intervention, and they have been honed over hundreds of millions of years by the brutal and pitiless sieve** of natural selection.

Likewise, we thoroughly underestimate the complexity involved in catching a pop-up fly ball, or a thrown football, or the process of walking, or of throwing a ball, or of finding a specific item on a cluttered desk.  It shouldn’t surprise us that even if the future “division” of the universal wave function seems random, it can be utterly deterministic, and in that sense each branch “already” exists.  But each “branch” that no longer interacts with others after an instance of decoherence will “feel” to given humans*** as if it were the one and only “universe” and that all others have collapsed out of existence somehow, when they’re really just there but not interacting anymore with the person in question.

Maybe I’m wrong, of course.  I mean, I’ve been right before, but not often enough to make it my default presumption.

Anyway, there you have it, the stuff about which I was “destined” to write, though I had no specific plans.  That’s fair enough.  “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans,” as the saying goes.

Speaking of plans, though, I plan to write tomorrow and Saturday**** on my fiction (probably just on Extra Body).  I may take my laptop with me to do it; the experiment with my smartphone seems to be working okay (see my reports from Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday), but it doesn’t feel quite as “natural” to me, still.  Who knows, though?

Only Laplace’s Demon® (Quantum Version™) knows.  But of course, that entity would feel, if anything, less “free” than those of us who know not yet what is to be and know not fully what has been.  For an entity that can see every detail of the past and the future laid out deterministically and in full detail is utterly incapable of taking any action on such knowledge‒for its own actions are as determined as all others, and it “knows” this.  Indeed, it cannot but know it.

Ignorance is not bliss, but it does at least give you room to improve, and that can be ego syntonic.

Have a good week, if such is your destiny.

TTFN

*Ha ha, that’s a little physics joke there, when you think of how quantum wave functions involve complex numbers.

**Mixed metaphor alert!  How would a sieve hone anything?  Oh, well, I’m not going to change it; it works too well to communicate my meaning.

***And the very process of “feeling like something” is extraordinarily complex, and we only really understand the bare rudiments of how this happens.  This relative ignorance engenders the propagation of nonsensical, conceptually vacuous ideas like panpsychism and the like, and the pseudo-mystery of the “hard problem” of consciousness.  Well, it is a hard problem in a sense, but not the way philosophers of consciousness seem to express it, as far as I can see.

****I think I will be working Saturday, but I’m not certain, because of the highly atypical thing that happened last Saturday, with the office being closed.  This coming Saturday will be my son’s 24th birthday, and I will now literally have missed half of his life more or less completely.  That’s his preference, not mine, though it started as a consequence of my own misadventures‒our personal wavefunction decoherence if you will.  Still, when enough people repeatedly decide they don’t really like having you around or interacting with you too much, you have to think there must be some powerful causes for the consistency, especially when you don’t even really want to be around yourself.  So, I am profoundly sad about the state of things, and I miss my children terribly, but I have to conclude provisionally that they’re making a reasonable decision.  At least I “talk” to my daughter from time to time, and that’s not a small consolation.

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With malice toward Aptos, with charity toward Calibri

Well, it’s Saturday, and I’m writing this post on my laptop computer—for the first time in quite a while, I think.  That’s where I’ve been writing Extra Body, and I figure I might as well write both things on the computer and bring it with me to the house and back to the office.

That’s what I did, which I guess is obvious.

I did in fact write some on Extra Body yesterday.  As is often the case, it felt a little clunky as I was getting started, but after a short while it flowed pretty easily, and I ended up writing about a page and a half; so the story is over 3,000 words long already.  I’m trying to keep from going off on tangents and getting into too much detail, and the less-ambitious target of only a page a day may be helping me do that.  We’ll see how well it turns out.

Sorry about that pause there, just now (perhaps you didn’t notice it, since it happened on my end, but didn’t necessarily happen on yours).  I was trying to look to see if I could remember how to change the default font in MS Word back to Calibri.

I don’t know whose nephew designed the “Aptos” font that Microsoft has made their new default font, but I hate it, and I wish ill luck, disease, and financial ruin upon the individual most responsible for its adoption as the new default*.  It has no advantages over Calibri that I can see, but it adds little, irritating curlicues and the like that are just unpleasant to my eye.

There’s also, as far as I can see, no reason to have changed it!  The switch to Calibri from, for instance, Times New Roman was probably justifiable because getting rid of serifs could make a raw document look slightly less cluttered while one is writing.  And, I guess, if one were printing a draft, it might use a little less ink.  Calibri isn’t as aesthetically pleasing as Times New Roman, but it’s clean and easy to read.

I don’t understand the point of this new, not-even-cosmetic change.

By all means, update the program regularly for improved functionality; no program is going to be perfect, and as people use it, they will discover little bugs and quirks, and these can be fixed, and new tools can be added.  But the little twiddles like this font change are much like the cosmetic changes to Google Chrome, which has rounded off all the virtual “buttons” on the screens, and the boxes, and all that related stuff.

Are there really people complaining that the buttons and the boxes and so on that adorn their computer screens are too boxy, that their corners look too sharp and angular?

If there are such people, can we please try to do our best to prevent them from reproducing?  It’s one thing to “baby-proof” a house by putting foam pads on the sharp corners of one’s furniture while a toddler is learning to walk.  But it would be weird to leave them on all through your offspring’s childhood, until they got old enough to head off to college or whatever.

That’s a bit what it feels as though Google is doing with their updates on the shapes of virtual buttons, only in this case it’s even stupider, because no one can bang his or her head on the corner of a button that’s merely a graphic design.

But at least the default font in Google Docs is still the same as it was before:  Arial.  It’s not exactly identical to Calibri, but it may as well be.  It’s a stripped-down, no-serifs, no-frills font where each of the letters is readily distinguishable from the others.

It’s easy enough, I suppose, to alter the font later on, as one is writing, and that can be useful.  If one is making a sign to hang in the office, for instance, it can be useful to vary fonts and font sizes and so on, to try to get the attention of the reader.  Also, when editing my works of fiction, I change the font on each run-through, so the work really, literally, looks different to me than it did while I was typing it.  I don’t know if this actually gives me a fresh outlook on it when I’m editing, but it feels as if it does.

And, of course, when my fiction ready to publish, it’s always going to be in Times New Roman or some other traditional, classic, serif-laden font, because why would you cheapen a work of fiction written for grown-ups with kindergarten-style type?  For working on drafts, the no-frills fonts are good.  But I hate changes that take place for no good reason.

Oh, well.  Whataya gonna do?  I’ve changed the font of this work in progress to Calibri, but that won’t have any Impact (get it?) on you readers, because the WordPress format I have uses one standard font for the main body of the post.

Life really is fundamentally and inherently unsatisfactory, isn’t it?  The Buddhists are right, at least about that.  You can see why the goal of Buddhism, upon recognizing this, would be to escape from the cycle of karma and rebirth.  Of course, reincarnation is a bizarre concept, especially since there’s not supposed to be any actual, subjective connection from one life to the next.  If one’s previous life’s memories and character are all erased and one starts anew, in what sense has that person been reincarnated?  It’s just a new person, almost as if there were no such thing as reincarnation.

Well, I’m not going to digress into that.  I hope you all have a pretty good Saturday and a pretty good remainder of the weekend thereafter.  Heck, I hope you have a great one.  Why not?  My hopes are even more useless to you than they are to me.  It’s like “sending” thoughts and prayers to victims of a tragedy; it does literally no good whatsoever for the people involved.  You’d be better off trying to do a rain dance for people suffering from a drought, because at least you would get some exercise.

That’s enough for this week.  If you’re unlucky enough—and if I’m even more unlucky—I’ll still be around and writing on Monday, and I’ll give you the latest updates on my new story-writing and on the twisted and crampy processes of my thoughts.  In the meantime, please do try to have a nice day, for your own sake, if you can.

*Note that, as I pointed out in my discussion on thoughts and prayers and the like, I’m aware that this will have no actual effect on the person in question.  If my malice had the power to cause harm just by its existence, there would be many, many, specific people who would be suffering this very day, and probably every day.  You may say, “Well, there really are many people suffering every day,” but believe me, you have no idea.  My natural, inherent ill-will is worthy of legend, and it’s just as well for the world and humanity that I direct as much or more of it at myself than at everyone else put together and that I inherently have very strong impulse control for such things.

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Top o’ the work week to ye!

I was going to title this post “top o’ the week to ye”, but I realize that many people consider the week proper to begin on Sunday; standard calendars in places such as the US and Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth and so on look at it that way.  In Japan, on the other hand, I’m led to understand that the week officially starts on Monday, since that’s the day work starts, and Saturday and Sunday (Doyōbi and Nichiyōbi) are the weekend.

Though Japan has individually named weekdays referring to esoteric things much as we do in the West, the Japanese months‒at least their current, standard names‒are basically just numbered (though I understand there are older, more traditional names).  It seems pretty sensible just to number the months‒and the days, for that matter‒rather than give them names.

Then again, while there is a certain logic to the number of months‒related both to the length of the year and to the moon’s orbital period, both of which are objective, external facts‒the number of days in a week is pretty much arbitrary.

It seems the sort of thing that, around the time of the Revolution, the French might have wanted to make decimal, with, say, three ten-day periods (decadi?  decamaines?) per month and 36.5 of those a year.  I mean, multiples of ten were justifiably popular with them.  For instance, they defined the units of distance so that a meter was one ten-millionth the distance from the pole to the equator at the arc passing through Greenwich, England.

Thus, there were 10,000 kilometers on that arc, making the Earth’s circumference a relatively easy to remember 40,000 kilometers (with variations depending on which great circle you’re measuring).  Then they defined their measures of volume accordingly (a liter as one cubic decimeter, for instance), and then their standard of mass based upon those volumes of water, which is surely the most “standard” substance for living creatures on the surface of the Earth.

Of course, now the meter is “officially” defined in terms of the speed of light, which is, as far as we can tell, absolutely constant in all reference frames.  So, a meter is defined as the distance light travels in 1 / 299,792,458 seconds exactly.

The second, by the way, is defined as the time taken by 9,192,631,770 cycles of the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition in the electrons of Cesium-133, again exactly.

Of course, given General and Special Relativity, how long that takes can vary depending on one’s reference frame relative to other reference frames‒this is why the GPS system has to compensate both for velocity-based time slowing in the satellites relative to the Earth and gravity-based time slowing on the surface of the Earth relative to the satellites.  Ponder that when you use your GPS; it would not work at all without those constant corrections due to Einstein.

The specific numbers used to define the meter and the second are fairly arbitrary, but they are consistent, and so are useful.  They definitely make more sense than the choice of starting the week on “Sunday” in the part of the world formerly known as “Christendom”.

Think about it*.  Sunday is considered the Sabbath day in most Christian and formerly Christian cultures, certainly those influenced by the former British Empire.  But the Sabbath is supposed to be observed in remembrance of the seventh day of Creation, when God rested.

Leave aside the strange notion of an infinite being either reckoning days based on the cycles of one planet around one of hundreds of billions of stars in each of possibly trillions of galaxies.  We can accept that as a non-literal measure of time, since God is supposed to be outside of space and time, anyway**.  But why would an infinite being of infinite power need to rest?

Anyway, the original Sabbath, as observed in Judaism and a few of the sects**** of Christianity, is Saturday, the official end of the week according to that arbitrary choice.  Even the Spanish word for Saturday, for instance‒sábado‒is related to the word “Sabbath” or “Shabbat”, and Spain is traditionally a very Christian place.  I don’t know what’s behind the disjunction between the Sabbath and the end of the week occurred in the realm of “Christendom” when even some of the most Christian languages maintain the vestiges of a recognition that the sabbath day ought to be at the end of the week, according to their own “holy” book.

Oh, well.  It’s all arbitrary or at least stochastic.

Don’t get me wrong‒I like 7 for the number of days in a week.  It’s a prime number, for one thing.  It’s also the number of “non-fixed” celestial bodies known in antiquity because they were visible to the naked eye (the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), which is probably why we have seven days.  Many of the days of the week in western languages retain traces of having been named for those bodies.

Also, 7 times 52 is 364, which means 7 divides into the days of a year with only one and a quarter days’ remainder, so the same date will fall one day “earlier” on each subsequent year (two days earlier after a “leap year” but not after the turn of three out of every four centuries, because of the adjustments made in the Gregorian calendar).  At least they don’t skip quasi-haphazardly through the days of the week every year.  Such would be the case in a decimal “week”*****, unless one made the 5 (or 6) remainder days of the year entirely separate, not ordinary days at all.

This is, apparently, how the Hobbit calendar works in Tolkien’s world, though they put their extra days in “mid-summer”, around the summer solstice rather than around the winter solstice.

Well, this has been much ado about not much of anything but random trivia about time and measure and the days of the week.  I suppose that’s appropriate for what is the beginning of at least the work week for most of us, depending on how you reckon it.

Try to have a good day, everyone, in any case.

*There must be higher love.

**So says Francis Collins, anyway, and he ought to know***.

***Well…no, he oughtn’t know.  No one ought to know, or has any way to know, or any justifiable claim to know such things.  It’s all conjecture and speculation, unsupported by any evidence that would stand up in even a kangaroo court, and what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.  But never mind; it can be fun to think about it.

****Christians often seem much more comfortable dealing with sects than dealing with sex.  Ba-dump-bump.

*****Although…on non-leap years, the dates would cycle between two “opposite” days of the “decamaine”, then would ratchet over to the next pair on leap years, so that might be fun.

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Salutations on a Friday

I don’t have much to say, today‒or much to write, I guess, if you want to be precise.  Honestly, I don’t think I have much to say in the literal sense, either, but it’s harder to tell since I don’t tend to talk to anyone at all before nine or so in the morning.  Often, I would prefer not to say anything even then, but people will insist on saying things to me, like “Good morning,” and so on.

I guess I don’t really mind the “Hi” and “Good morning” type greetings*, though it is often irritating that one is expected to return them in some ritual fashion, for no particular purpose that I can discern‒other than, I suppose, that of primate hierarchical, dominance, and coalitional signaling between members of the same flange of naked house apes.  I doubt most people think much about it.  Still, a “Hi” is okay.  I can return it with a word and a nod, though often my voice is apparently too quiet for other people to hear when I reply.  I also will often give a Vulcan salute, which is good because it is silent and distinctive.

I gave one of those to a young man on the train who had asked me which stop was next because he needed to get off at a particular one.  I gave him useful information, he got off at his desired stop, and as he left, he thanked me.  I said a somewhat befuddled “you’re welcome” and without thinking did a low-key Vulcan salute.  I’m not sure he noticed it.

It can be amusing to greet or say goodbye to people using the American Sign language “love” gesture, with the index and pinky fingers and thumbs out but the middle two fingers down, as if you were Spider-Man shooting webs straight up into the air.  It’s not that I particularly like telling people that I “love” them‒generally, I don’t (love them or want to tell them), and I think the whole “I love you, man” kind of thing is very much overused, and bastardizes and cheapens the word and the very concept of love.

On the other hand, if you fold your thumb in, the “love” sign turns into the heavy metal sign of the devil (supposedly), so for people toward whom you have the least affection, it can be a good way to slag them off without them even realizing you’re doing it.  I know, it’s petty and rather unsatisfying, but it’s not as though you can act on your real impulses.  If you set them on fire with a homemade flame-thrower or beat them to death with a baseball bat, you’re liable to get arrested, even‒and this is the galling point‒if everyone else in the office agrees that the person is annoying.

This is all hypothetical, of course.

Anyway, I will be working tomorrow, so I suspect that I’ll be writing another blog post in the morning.  Yippee.  I don’t know why, but I have not yet been able to break that habit.

I am tempted just to sleep in the office tonight rather than go back to the house.  It’s a bit pointless, all the going back and forth.  There’s no one and nothing waiting at the house for me.  Even the neighborhood cats are coming around less often; someone else must be putting out better food than I do.

This is probably just as well.  I only started feeding the cats because my housemate used to do it, and he said he was going to come pick up the really skittish one.  He has not yet done so, and it’s been a few years now‒I don’t recall how long‒and I’ve been spending money on cat food that I could…I don’t know, that I could use as washrags to wipe the bathroom sink, something like that?  Nothing that I spend money on is really beneficial, other than books, perhaps, but I have oodles of those, and I still haven’t read much of Quantum Field Theory, As Simply as Possible, or Spacetime and Geometry, or Classical Electrodynamics or any of those books that I keep meaning to read.

It’s all very boring, but at least I have chronic pain and depression and insomnia to keep things from being too peaceful.  It’s too bad I don’t have drug or alcohol problems‒at least those keep life from being predictable.

I was being tongue-in-cheek with that last sentence.  I don’t want to have drug or alcohol problems, though they are enticing routes to self-destruction.  It was bad enough when I had to take prescription pain meds for so long.  And my favorite alcoholic beverages are the ones I imagine drinking; the real ones are always a disappointment, and they leave me feeling unpleasant.

I mean I feel unpleasant internally in that situation, meaning that I feel uncomfortable physically, that I feel unwell.  I know that I’m always relatively unpleasant to other people.

However, although my mind is not my friend, there are and have always been aspects of it that are the most treasured things about reality for me, and I don’t want to endanger those.  My love of learning and understanding, of reading, of horror and science fiction and fantasy, of music, all those things are treasures, even when my depression makes them inaccessible to me.  I don’t want them to go away permanently, at least not while I’m alive.  I guess that means that, if I were to get cancer, I wouldn’t want a brain tumor.

Of course, that would mean that I would be most likely to get a brain tumor, if the universe dealt in irony, which as far as I can tell it does not.  As far as I can tell, all instances of seeming “karmic” irony are cases of selection bias or recall bias.  We remember the time the guy who refused to fly died in a train derailment, or when the exercise guru died young of a heart attack, not realizing that we remember them precisely because they are unusual and atypical.  They are cases of “man bites dog”, which is news, according to the cliché, while “dog bites man” is not.

Talk to you tomorrow.

*On the other hand, I have great trouble with “How are you doing?” and related greetings.  I almost always freeze up for at least a moment when met with such inquiries.  I don’t know what to say.  Most days I feel that I am not doing well at all, but I don’t necessarily want to say that to others, nor are they likely to want to hear it, and I feel irritated at being put on the spot, especially when people don’t seem really to care much how well or poorly I’m faring.

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There may be no firm fundament but is there a fun firmament?

It’s Tuesday morning, now, and I’m writing this on my laptop computer, mainly to spare my thumbs, but also because I just prefer real typing to the constrictive and error-ridden twiddling of virtual buttons on a very small phone screen.

Speaking of the day, if the Beatles song Lady Madonna is correct, then it’s still Tuesday afternoon, and has been at least since last Tuesday, since “Tuesday afternoon is never-ending”.  Of course, if Tuesday afternoon really is never-ending, then it has been Tuesday afternoon ever since the first Tuesday afternoon.  From a certain point of view, this is trivially the case.  After all, every moment after 12pm on the first Tuesday that ever happened could be considered Tuesday afternoon—or, at least, they could be considered “after Tuesday noon” if you will.

Enough of that particular nonsense.  I only wrote that because there’s nothing sensible about which to write that comes to my mind.  But, of course, in a larger sense, there is nothing “sensible” at all.

There are things that can be sensed, obviously.  I can see, hear, and touch this computer, for instance.  If I wanted, I could probably smell it, though I think its odor is likely quite subdued.  But I mean “sensible” in the more colloquial, bastardized, mutated sense—as in the word “sense” just there—which has to do with something being logical, reasonable, rational, coherent, that sort of thing.  Indeed, it has to do with things having meaning.

Deep down, though, from the telos point of view, there is no true, inherent meaning to much of anything, as far as anyone can see.  Certainly there’s no meaning that anyone has ever demonstrated or asserted convincingly that I have encountered at any point in my life.

Of course, people have beliefs and they have convictions, and humans assign meanings to various things.  All the words I have used in writing this post so far, and all the words I will use henceforth, have “meanings”, but those are invented meanings.  There is nothing in the collection of letters—nor indeed in the shapes of the letters themselves, nor the way we put them down on paper or a screen—that means anything intrinsically.  They were all invented, like justice and morality and the whole lot of such things.

That something is invented doesn’t mean it isn’t real, of course.  Cars are an invention, and only a fool (in the modern world) would deny that cars are real.  But they are not inherent to the universe; they are not in any sense fundamental.

In a related sense, even DNA and the protein structures for which it codes are very much not fundamental; they are quasi-arbitrary.  Of course, one cannot make DNA or RNA or proteins out of substrates for which the chemistry simply will not hold together.  But the genetic code—the set of three-nucleotide-long “letters”, the codons, in the genetic code that each associate with a given amino acid (or a stop signal, or similar) as they are transcribed into proteins—is arbitrary.  There’s nothing inherent in any set of three nucleotides that makes it associate with some particular amino acid.

This sort of thing took me quite a long time to realize as I was growing up and trying to understand biology and chemistry and such.  What, for instance, was the chemical reaction with, say, adrenaline that made things in the body speed up and go into “fight or flight” mode, as it were?  How was it that aspirin chemically interacted with bodies and nervous systems to blunt pain?  How many possible chemical reactions were there, really?  It was mind-boggling that there could be so many reactions, and that they could all produce such disparate effects on various creatures.

When finally I was shown the real nature of such things, it was definitely a scales-dropping-from-eyes moment.  There is nothing inherent in the chemistry of DNA, or of drugs or hormones, that produces their effects.  There is no inherent “soporific” quality to an anesthetic.  You could give a dose of Versed  that would kill a human to some alien with a different biology, and at most its effects would be those of a contaminant.

It’s all just a kind of language—indeed, it’s almost a kind of computer language, and hormones are just messengers*, which are more or less arbitrary, like the ASCII code for representing characters within computer systems.  Likewise, there’s nothing in the word “cat” that has direct connection with the animal to which it refers.  It’s just keyed to that creature in our minds, arbitrarily, as is demonstrated by the fact that, for instance, in Japan the term is “neko” (or, well, it sounds like that—the actual written term is ねこ or 猫).

Of course, there are things in the universe that, as far as we can tell, are fundamental, such as quantum fields and gravity and spacetime itself.  But even these may yet peel away and be revealed to be arbitrary or semi-arbitrary forms of some other, deeper, underlying unity, as is postulated in string theory, for instance.

The specific forms of the fundamental particles and forces in our universe may—if string theory and eternal inflationary cosmology for instance are correct—be just one possible version of a potential 10500 or more** possible sets of particles and forces determined by the particular Calabi-Yau “shape” and configuration of the curled up extra dimensions of space that string theory hypothesizes.  So, the very fundamental forces of nature, or at least the “constants” thereof, may be arbitrary—historical accidents, as much as are the forms and specifics of the life that currently exists on Earth.

And what’s to say that strings and branes and Calabi-Yau manifolds are fundamental, either?  Perhaps reality has no fundament whatsoever.  Perhaps it is a bottomless pit of meaninglessness, in which only truly fundamental mathematics are consistent throughout…if even they are.

I’m not likely to arrive at a conclusion regarding these matters in a blog post written off-the-cuff in the morning while commuting to the office.  But I guess it all supports a would-be Stoic philosophical ideal, which urges us to let go of things that are outside our control and instead try to focus on those things over which we have some power:  our thoughts and our actions.

Of course, even these are, at some deeper level, not truly or at least not fully ours to control—we cannot affect the past that led to our present state, after all, and the future is born of that present which is born of that past over which we have no control.  But, for practical purposes, the levers that we use to control ourselves are the only levers we have to use.

We might as well keep a grip on them as well as we can, and not worry too much about things that are not in our current reach.  Though we can try to stretch out and limber up, maybe practice some mental yoga, to try to extend that reach over time, I suppose.  But that’s a subject for some other blog post, I guess; this one has already gone on long enough.

*For the most part.  Things like cholesterol and fatty acids and sugars—and certainly water and oxygen—and other fundamental building blocks do have inherent chemical properties that make them useful for the purposes to which bodies put them.  Then again, words can have tendencies that make them more useful for some things than others, too.  “No” and “yes” are short and clear and clearly different sounds, for instance; it makes sense that such words evolved to be such important, fundamentally dichotomous signals.

**That means 10 x 10 x 10 x 10… until you’ve done that multiplication 500 times.  You may know that a “googol” is a mere 10100, and that in itself is already roughly 20 orders of magnitude (100,000,000,000,000,000,000 times!) larger than the number of protons and neutrons estimated to exist in the visible universe.  So 10500 is a number far vaster than could ever be written out within the confines of the universe that we can ever see.  There’s not enough space, let alone enough matter, with which to write it.  It’s a googol times a googol times a googol times a googol times a googol!

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Once again, no semi-Shakespearean title this week

Hello and good morning.

I have no idea about what to write today.  Yesterday’s rather long post took off from an initial notion that’s been with me for a long time*, with some tangents in between and so on.  The footnote about the doubling of bacteria took a bit of extra effort once I got to the office‒not much, though, since I was able quickly to look up** the size of a typical bacterium on Google, and the calculations were just “plug and chug”.

Thankfully, I already knew the dimensions of the other bits of trivia, like the size of the visible universe in light-years and the length of a light-year, though on my first round of calculations I got something very off with the volume of the visible universe.  I think I must’ve squared rather than cubed at some point, because it was much too small, and when I did my editing, I thought “that can’t be right”, and I redid the figuring.  Then, because of the mistake, I checked that result against Google/Wikipedia, and my correction was, at least, correct.

There, that’s a little discussion on “how the sausage gets made” so to speak.

That’s a curious expression, don’t you think?  Apparently, people prefer not to see how actual sausages get made.  I’m not quite sure why that’s the case, though.  Are people under some delusion that sausages are not made from various and sundry animal parts, at least some of which would not look as pretty as a nice steak if you served them “as they were” on a plate in a restaurant?

Sausages are meat.  They are parts of dead animals, ground up and stuffed together into some form of outer “skin”.  When done right, they are delicious.  This is because humans are opportunistic omnivores with a strong penchant for carnivory, and meat is a concentrated source of nutrients, the sort our ancestors‒the ones that survived to pass on their genes, anyway‒liked to eat because it was very beneficial.

That was a weird digression.  I’ll just say that, if you eat meat‒as I do‒and you are afraid to see how sausages are made, I don’t understand how you think.  I’m not suggesting that you ought to make your own sausages; division of labor is a terrifically useful thing, and makes all of civilization more efficient and indeed possible.  But to be in denial about sausages is a bit like being in denial about landfills and sewers, both of which are real and, for now at least, necessary.

I don’t know why I’m going on about this.  No one but my own brain raised the subject.  For all I know, every one of my readers has seen sausage being made (and seen waste treatment facilities and landfills) and has been perfectly fine and sensible about it.  Or, perhaps, they’re all vegans***.  Or perhaps they’re a mixture.

More likely, most of my readers are indeed opportunistic omnivores.  That seems a very sensible way for an animal to be.  I’ve read or heard of science fiction authors (and possibly even scientists) who speculate that most intelligent life forms would be omnivores.  There’s certainly some potential logic and reason there, but I suspect that mostly it’s projection and bias.  Certainly it is big speculation.

There are very good reasons to suspect that most if not all life will be largely carbon-based, due to carbon’s uniquely profligate chemistry and its near-ubiquity in the universe; those are matters of largely unambiguous physics and chemistry.  But as for the rest, our speculations are largely unguided and thus unconstrained, and we should be careful about even preliminary thoughts, let alone conclusions.

Of course, science fiction writers are free to speculate and invent.  That’s the job.  And within their created universes, they are the Gods.  But it’s important to know the difference between fiction and reality.  Reality is a much harsher taskmaster than fiction, and in reality, the wages of “sin” really are often death.

I think my own wages of that type are long overdue, to be honest.  I keep putting in claims, but HR and Payroll are, apparently, very inefficient.

.

Okay, sorry about the little pause, there; maybe you didn’t notice it, since it happened in a different time plane than the one in which you are reading, but it was there, don’t doubt that.  My train seems to be running late, but there has been no announcement about it, and it doesn’t even show up on the Tri-Rail tracker site, though the subsequent two trains do, and are listed as “on time”.  Why should they not be on time?  They’re due a half an hour and an hour from now, respectively.

.

There was another pause, there, just now, as I thought I saw the first glimmer of the headlights of “my” train, but alas, it was not so.  I don’t know what I’m going to do if it’s much later.  Trains get more crowded when they’re late and I hate that.  Maybe I’ll just get an Uber.  Maybe I should just go back to the house.  Possibly I should just lie on the tracks “in protest”.  After all, if the trains are going to be late and/or canceled anyway, I might as well give them a strong reason.

***

I have left the train station and am now en route to the office in an Uber.  The train showed no signs of arriving, and there was neither an announcement overhead nor any info online.  The Tri-Rail system used to be much better run.  It seems to be going to the dogs, lately.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  To paraphrase Adele, I wish nothing but the best for you all.

TTFN

*Another, unrelated one is, how did Princess Leia know to call Han Solo “Flyboy” when she said “Into the garbage chute, Flyboy!” in the original Star Wars movie?  She had not been told he was a pilot.  Was this an early hint of her natural ability with the Force?  Or was it, rather, just George Lucas accidentally giving her a line based on a fact he knew, but that her character would not?

**Google Docs tried to prompt me to split the infinitive and write “to quickly look up” rather than “quickly to look up”, which is what I wrote.  I hate such anti-grammatical suggestion-making!

***It might interest you to know, in loose relation to the present topic, that members of the dominant intelligent species in the star system Vega are obligate carnivores.  So, ironically, real Vegans only eat meat****.

****Of course, that’s all just a bit of sci-fi that I composed.  But wouldn’t it be hilarious if it were so?  I remember the first time I ever saw or heard someone use the term “vegan”.  It was in Bloom County, said by Steve Dallas, after he got his brain flipped by aliens, making his personality the opposite of what it previously had been.  I was already astronomically literate enough to know about Vega, and I wondered what the hell the character (and other, real people) meant when he/they wrote that they were “vegans”.  At first, I thought it might have something to do with astrology; the people involved seemed to fit that mold a lot of the time.

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Don’t be afraid of “scare quotes”; they are–as am I–here to “help”

It’s Friday at last, the last day of a work week that has lasted at least 12 days already (subjectively speaking).  I am not working tomorrow, so there will be no blog post made again until Monday, barring‒as must always be the case‒the unforeseen.

I will try to remember to send myself the audio files for my last two audio blogs‒or perhaps it was three‒to turn into “videos” over the weekend.  I haven’t downloaded clipchamp or whatever it is to my home computer, but it should be no more difficult to do there than it was at work.  Of course, I may not do that, so don’t make any plans that depend upon my doing it‒goodness knows what such plans might be.

I’m not sure if anyone really likes those “video” versions of my audio blogs or is just as happy with the plain audio.  I’ve noted before that storage on YouTube is functionally limitless (as opposed to WordPress) but if I’m loading them here first, anyway, that’s a moot point at best.

You may have noticed that I tend to put quotation marks around the word “video” when I refer to the above, because though technically they are indeed video files, the visual portion is just a static image.  I’m a big fan of so-called scare quotes.  I think we should use them far more often than we do.  People often arrogate terms to themselves, or use epithets against others, as a means of manipulation, as if invoking some sequence of letters or sounds causes a thing actually to be the case, and I think it’s important to point out when one is unconvinced that the term is being used properly or accurately.

Perhaps the most prominent and pointed such ill-use might be regarding “progressives” and “conservatives”.  Both groups inherited the terms from people who came before, and who perhaps more accurately embodied the general meanings of the words, but they are now simply camouflage uniforms, at least in many cases.  You can call yourself a “freedom fighter” if you want, but using that term doesn’t mean you’re not a terrorist or that you’re actually interested in any legitimate form of freedom.

Of course, real conservatives and progressives being at hostile odds with one another doesn’t make much sense if one is considering the usual meanings of the terms rather than claiming them as team names in some tribal contest of primate dominance.  It makes sense to conserve those things in a society that are effective, that have been tested by time and found to be useful, but it’s just as reasonable that everyone should want to make actual progress whenever possible, to improve life and prosperity for everyone as much as is feasible.

The real, useful discussion would be about which things are working well and should be conserved, and which things require improvement and how to go about it.  There will be substantial disagreement on such questions, of course, and part of the discussion must always be how to decide what best to keep as it is and what is the most fruitful area in which to improve things

People of good will‒who do not think in terms of “us” versus “them” but in terms of usefulness and effectiveness and trying to get the best outcome for as big an “us” as possible‒can work in ways that will be beneficial by whatever measures one might want to use, keeping in mind always that all conclusions are in principle provisional and all processes and people are fallible, but that all problems are in principal soluble.

I’m not sure humans are clever enough primates to achieve such matters for long.  They seem to devolve so readily into conflicting tribes.  I guess this makes sense given the ancestral environment, with groups of only on the order of perhaps about 150 people living together.  But there’s no good excuse for not recognizing that tribal modes cannot function ideally in a setting in which 8 billion people are interacting in a massive and incredibly productive and complex economy and polity.  At higher levels of complexity, newer “rules” are going to tend to be required.

Humans aren’t necessarily all that good at adjusting to such things, though.  I often think that it will require a new and ongoing external threat, such as a supervillain or an alien invasion, to bring humanity together in total.  I’ve often been tempted to volunteer myself for the position, since humanity really can be contemptible and infuriating to me.

It’s not that humans are worse than the other life forms on Earth; I don’t think they are.  Life in general is frequently vicious and cruel and wretched, with all living things riding the knife edge of death and extinction much, perhaps most, of the time.  Nature’s equilibria are not achieved by some beautiful, fairy tale cooperation and self-restraint between forest creatures or what have you.  Equilibria are maintained by disease and death, by starvation and predation.  Agent Smith was just wrong, dead wrong, in his assessment of life’s tendency to form such natural equilibria.  He was too generous in his assessment of non-human forms of life.

Humans, however, are more competent than other animals.  They are also the only ones even capable of seriously planning ahead to strike a flexible and ever-changing balance between conservatism and progress.  It’s that they so often fail even to try to rise above their lizard-monkey minds that is so infuriating, and they themselves are among the worst of their victims.

Sometimes I think just wiping them all out would be a kindness‒not to the rest of the living world, which is certainly no more admirable or worthy of kindness than humans, but to humans themselves.  After all, if a function in time is always negative, then integrating the area “under” the curve will always yield a negative, and a permanent regression to zero would be a gain.  Maybe the universe, or at least the Earth, would be kinder in aggregate if it were sterile.

It’s food for thought, at least, and it is tempting.  What do you all think?  I’m not asking what you feel.  I hate feelings*.  But when you are as close to dispassionate and disinterested as you can make yourself, what do you think?  Does the human race (and by reflection, life itself) require an enemy to bring out its best?  If so, does it not then “deserve” that enemy?  And if it cannot defeat that enemy, does it not “deserve” to be destroyed?

I suspect that might be the case.

*Ha ha, that’s a little joke.