Science

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Never seem to find the time…

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m writing this post on my smartphone, because I couldn’t be arsed to bring my laptop back from work with me last night.  Perhaps this entry will therefore be more concise than usual, but I wouldn’t lay heavy money on it.  It’s more likely than winning the $1.9 billion Powerball Con Game, but that’s not saying much.  Getting struck by lightning during a shark attack is probably more likely than that.

There’s a full lunar eclipse in progress as I write this, and the umbra has about halfway covered the moon.  I took a snap with my smartphone as I left the house and then more when I got here to the train platform.  I’ll share some of them below.  They are not of very good quality‒and the first one is just streaks of light, because apparently I was too excited to keep my phone still while taking the picture‒but then again, in the days before smartphones, I wouldn’t have been able to take such a picture at all.

The last time I recall watching a lunar eclipse with any degree of attention was back when I was in either junior high or high school, and I had a very cheap telescope on our back deck (This was quite a bit later than the reminiscence I described yesterday).  I have to say, the one happening now is quite a bit more impressive than the one I remember.  The shadowed portion of the moon is almost completely black, and the encroaching edge of the Earth’s shadow is quite, quite different than the usual arc of the moon’s own phases.  It’s fascinating.

I forgot again to work on editing my audio recording of thoughts about time yesterday.  I feel like I want to make some excuse, and there are surely reasons, or at least causes, but it doesn’t really matter what they are.  So, now I’m going to try to rehash those verbal thoughts to give you all either a preview or‒more likely‒a replacement for the posting of those spoken words.

I was triggered to talk about time when watching a science video in which someone pointed out, as people often do, that we are able to travel rather freely in any of the three dimensions of space, but that our direction in time seems entirely one dimensional, and we don’t seem able to choose our direction or speed through it.  But this is a slightly misleading characterization of the situation, I thought, and that thought is not entirely original nor unique to me, but this is my way of thinking about it.

It’s true that, if we were in deep space, especially in one of the gargantuan intergalactic voids (where light from all the surrounding galaxies would be too faint to be visible), there would literally be nothing to differentiate up from down, left from right, forward from backward, or indeed, any of these axes of motion from the others.  But that’s not the situation in which we find ourselves.  We are on the surface of a planet, in the presence of a rather strong gravity “well”, and that changes very much the way we experience the three dimensions of space.

Ignoring the facts of terrain, and thinking back to before we had modern technology, it’s clear that, while we are basically free to move forward and back and left and right‒and indeed, we can swap those axes out arbitrarily‒we are not free to move up and down at will.

Even birds and insects and bats cannot freely move through the up-down dimension, not in the way they can move along the curved plane of the surface of the Earth.  It requires great effort for them to change their height, and they are limited by that effort and by the density of the air through which they swim.  Because we are near a source of strong gravity, there is a clear directionality to one of the dimensions of space, and the only reason we don’t keep falling down is that there’s a planet in the way, but if it weren’t there would be nothing pulling us in one direction.

In a somewhat analogous sense, the only reason there seems to be a directionality to time is that we are near (in time) the presence of a region of very low entropy:  The Big Bang.  Since that time, about 13.8 billion years ago, entropy has been steadily increasing, as is its tendency, for fairly simple, mathematical reasons that make the 2nd law of thermodynamics among the most unassailable of all principles of physics.

All the processes that cause us to experience a directionality to time are driven by the tendency for entropy to increase, and that includes the clumping of matter under gravity, the growth of biological organisms, the accumulation of memory, and the development of technology.  Increasing entropy‒on the largest scales‒is all that allows temporary decreases of entropy locally.  Put poetically, it is only the inevitability of death that allows life to exist at all.

But of course, in the future, as entropy increases, life and local order will be no more possible than they would be in intergalactic space.  Once entropy increases enough‒and the vast majority of the existence of our universe will be in such a state, just as most of space is not near the surface of a planet‒there will be no way even to know which direction of time would have corresponded to what we now think of as past and future, because the laws of physics are locally time-reversible.  Time in that epoch would be no more uni-directional than space is in the vastness of an intergalactic void.

What’s more, it’s clear based on special and general relativity that time is not purely one dimensional.  Time and space bleed into each other depending on relative motion and local spacetime curvature.  That which can curve is not, strictly speaking, entirely one-dimensional in a Euclidean sense.

All this makes me wonder if, perhaps, the Big Bang era is not strictly a “plane” orthogonal to the time dimension, but might in fact be the surface of a sphere…or, well, some manner of hypersphere in space time, the surface of which is all at one “moment” just as the surface of a planet is all‒more or less‒the same distance from its center.

If so, then the Big Bang need not have happened merely in one direction in time.  Others have toyed with ideas like this*, with the thought that there might be a sort of mirror image universe to ours, extending the other direction in time from us, its future analogous to our past.  I’ve even occasionally wondered if the (very slight) relative abundance of matter over antimatter in our direction of time would be mirrored by a relative abundance of antimatter in that universe**.

But on further thought, I’m led to wonder if there need be merely two mirror universes, delineated by the Big Bang, heading in opposite directions.  Perhaps there is a continuum of such directions, just as there is a continuum of “up” directions from the surface of the Earth.  Perhaps our expanding universe has more in common with the expanding size of a sphere around the Earth’s center, which gets larger and larger as one moves away from it, and the Big Bang is not so much a beginning of time or the universe as it is a local area of low entropy in time, allowing the existence of phenomena‒including life‒near its surface that experience a difference locally between past and future only because they exist in an entropy gradient.

Perhaps, far out in the “future” of the universe, there might exist other local entropy minima, in any direction in time from us‒directly ahead or even at right angles in time to us, or any combination thereof.  Of course, “reaching” them would be harder than traveling out into intergalactic space, given that they would probably exist across unguessable gulfs of timeless “time”***.

How would we even measure or pass through time in a region in which entropy was near-maximal and time was without any inherent direction?  Perhaps if it were possible to accelerate continuously to near enough the speed of light that one’s personal time slowed ever more and more, one could survive to arrive at a place where entropy would begin to decrease.  But what would that even be like?  Would one enter such a realm as if a traveler from its future, moving‒to any local residents‒backward through time?

I could go on and on about these ideas, and maybe I’ll explore them more in future (ha) posts, but for now, I’ve taken enough time (ha ha).  This was certainly not a concise blog post, but I hope it was at least intriguing.  I’d be interested to hear your own thoughts on such matters.

In closing, I’ll just ask the following thoroughly fanciful question that just popped into my head:  What would happen to a werewolf during a lunar eclipse?

*For instance, The Janus Point by Julian Barbour, deals with some similar concepts.  I haven’t finished reading the book, but I thought of the ideas I’m discussing before I’d encountered it, and my ideas are somewhat different, though far less expert than his.

**Though they would surely switch the terms, calling our antimatter their matter.

***And reaching the portion of our universe that heads in the opposite direction in time would seem to require exceeding the speed of light, which appears to be impossible‒though perhaps wormholes might lead to such places, if they in fact exist.

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If “November” is the 11th month, then is the “second” day number 4?

It’s 4:35 on Wednesday morning, November 2nd, 2022, and it’s already 80 degrees (Fahrenheit) at the Hollywood train station and very muggy.  I’m dripping with sweat just from walking as far as the bench to wait for the earliest morning train*.  It’s ridiculous.  For this reason and others, I wish I had never moved to Florida.  In my opinion, it’s overall a “nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there”.  Or as many locals say: “Come on vacation, leave on probation”.  It really is a shame, because there is a tremendous amount of natural beauty here, but much of even that has been ruined by invasive species, the main one being Homo sapiens.

It’s on hot and muggy early November mornings such as this that I truly miss being in Michigan, where I grew up.  Say what you will about the Detroit area, at least there are fewer humans there now than there were in the past.  It can be somewhat depressing to see that, but boy, in Autumn all the trees along the side streets in my hometown looked spectacular, and you could walk from your door to the street without sweating.

If the Detroit area is too sad for you‒or too flat‒then you could go to upstate New York, where I went to university.  That was amazing in the Fall.  Walking back to the dorm down Libe Slope after class at this time of year was like seeing a fifty mile wide fireworks display happening in slow motion, spread out over many weeks.  Of course Winter was quite cold, bitter, and snowy there, but if you were adventurous, you could take a tray from the dining hall and “tray” down Libe Slope.  I never did that, myself; there was a road right at the bottom of the hill, and though it was not busy, it was hard not to think about careening uncontrollably into some passing salt truck.

Actually, they really did an amazing job keeping the roads clear in Ithaca in the winter.  They had to keep them clear.  There were many slopes in town that could have served as ski jumps if you’d put an upcurve at the bottom, so these had to be cleared pretty much as fast as the snow could fall.

Of course, while I have my complaints about Florida, I did come here of my own free will**, and have had many good times and good life events here, the most outstanding of which was the birth of my daughter.  I can’t ever complain about that.

My son was born in New York (not Ithaca) but we left before he was old enough really to remember it.  Both of my children are Florida kids, effectively.  I wonder how they would feel if someday they moved up North and experienced Autumn there for the first time, beginning to end.  Would they be as wowed by its beauty as I always have been, or would they feel a homesickness for the heat of the Sunshine State as the weather cooled and the days shortened?

Of course, the days don’t literally shorten, just daylight hours.  There are subtle variations and even occasional tiny diminutions of the day, as happened recently, but overall, the rotation rate of the Earth is going very steadily and gradually to slow, barring other inputs, so days will become longer.  If nothing else, since the planet’s mass is not perfectly symmetrical, as it turns it must radiate some miniscule amount of energy away in the form of gravitational waves, and the Moon/Earth orbital pairing will radiate some, too.

When I say “miniscule”, I’m guilty of severe (and ironic) understatement.  The sun will surely long since have gone through red giant and on to white dwarf status before there would be any appreciable loss of rotational energy from gravitational waves alone.  I can’t give you the numbers‒if anyone out there can, please share‒but it’s tiny, it’s wee, it’s verging on infinitesimal.

Speaking of small things and their opposites, yesterday’s post ended up being unusually long and exceptionally dreary***, so I’ll bring this one to a close now.  Thank you for your patience, thank you for reading, and if you have any comments about reactions to autumn, or to major changes of local climate due to moves throughout life, I would be interested to know about them.  No pressure.

*Yes, I came for the 4:45 am train, but only because there wasn’t an earlier one.  I couldn’t sleep.

**So to speak.  I’m provisionally convinced that there is no such thing as free will.  I could be wrong, of course, but it doesn’t really matter all that much.  As I like to say, I either have free will or I don’t, but it’s not like I have any choice in the matter.

***But nonetheless true.  I can’t pretend that it was an exaggeration nor that really, my mental health is just fine.  It is not.  It’s horrible.

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Can we do better than recycling?

Well, I forgot to bring my little laptop back to the house with me yesterday, so I’m writing this blog post on Google Docs via Google Drive on my phone.  It’s very handy, obviously, but it’s not as good a word processor as MS Word, though it has its own relative advantages.  Also, it’s just easier to write using a full, true keyboard than with the simulated keyboard on a smartphone.

It’s not a good sign that I’ve forgotten my laptop.  It’s been years since I forgot it prior to recent weeks, but now I’ve forgotten it twice within about a month.  I am mentally quite foggy, it seems.  You all can probably tell that already, but it’s harder to recognize one’s own deterioration from within, since that with which one does the recognizing is that which is deteriorating.

How troublesome.

Despite not being at my best, I did have a somewhat interesting idea, yesterday‒not for the first time, though it’s become a bit more coherent with each iteration, as such thoughts seem to tend to do.  I was bringing some boxes out to the big dumpster that is reserved solely for cardboard, when it occurred to me‒again, not for the first time‒that we should not be recycling cardboard or paper.  Neither should we be sending it to landfills.  In landfills, of course, paper decays and decomposes, thereby releasing methane and carbon dioxide, so that’s not good.  But the process of recycling is wasteful and inefficient, producing pollution and releasing “greenhouse gases” gasses in its own right.

New paper and cardboard is made from trees grown on tree farms, or such is my understanding.  In other words, old growth forests don’t get cut down to make paper*, but rather, new trees are planted and grown, capturing CO2 from the atmosphere as they grow, though that process is slow and rather inefficient.  But paper and other such things can probably be made from other, faster-growing and even more robust alternatives.

One frequently hears of hemp being touted as a fast-growing source of cellulose and the like, and though I suspect that some of its touted miraculous attributes may be exaggerated, this one seems fairly straightforward.  It’s a rapidly growing plant, the fiber of which has been known to be useful for centuries.  It shouldn’t be too hard to use it for paper and cardboard, and in the meantime, fast-ish growing trees can continue to be planted and take some of the CO2 from the air.

Okay, so, if we don’t recycle it, what do we do with the paper and the cardboard?  We do what some carbon capture technologies are already doing with the carbon they remove from the air: we bury it deep in the earth, preferably in a way that prevents it from decomposing and releasing its carbon back into the atmosphere.  There are ways to do this, in principle, that should be rather cheap.  I would imagine that vacuum packing before deep burying might do the trick.

The ideal place to dispose of it‒indeed it would be a good way of disposing of much of our carbonaceous wastes, including our own bodies, when we die‒would be near a deep ocean subduction zone, where it would eventually be carried back into the mantle of the Earth to remain sequestered and redistributed for millions of years.  Of course, one would probably have to do such deep ocean “burials” on large scales to avoid it being a net detriment, carbon-wise.

Cremation certainly doesn’t make sense when it comes to atmospheric carbon, though it may be better for space considerations. It’s probably worse than burial for the overall environment.  But humans are superstitious about their bodies and the bodies of their relatives and whatnot, so convincing them to do something sensible with them might be a serious uphill battle.

Even plastic should probably not be recycled, except where that can be done in a way that produces something more cheaply and efficiently and in a less atmospherically costly way than making new plastic for particular uses, without subsidizing the process.  Better to do the deep burial thing with that as well.  Plastic can be an excellent carbon sink, and instead of recycling it, we can put more effort into producing neo-plastics from plants rather than petroleum, again removing carbon from the atmosphere.

It’s interesting how feel-good ideas of the past (and the present) can sometimes turn out to be more detrimental than beneficial.  But that’s why one must always assess and reassess every situation as it goes along, testing all knowledge against the unforgiving surface of reality, and not being afraid to rethink things.  At the very least, it can be fun.

I used to think it would be a great idea to breed and/or engineer bacteria or fungi that can digest plastics, but now I realize that this would release a vast quantity of new carbon dioxide and methane and the like into the atmosphere.  Better to have algae that trap carbon and then are converted into plastics, or fuel, or something similar.  At least for now.

Because solving one problem, assuming that even happens, will always lead to new, unforeseeable problems and questions that must be addressed.  But each new question faced and each new problem solved makes the knowledge and capacity of civilization greater.  There is no upper limit on how much can be known‒or if there is, it’s so far beyond what we do know that we cannot even contemplate it sensibly.  There is, however, a definite lower limit of knowledge (not counting “anti-knowledge” or stupidity, which is another point of exploration entirely), and that is zero‒a return to a state with no life, no mind, no information.

Some of us find that state enticing for ourselves, but when I’m feeling unusually generous, I think it would be a shame for civilization to come to naught.  There’s nothing in the laws of nature preventing it from happening, though, anymore than there’s anything preventing a reckless teenage driver from being killed in a car accident, no matter how immortal he feels.  It’s never too early to try to learn discipline and responsibility, to become more self aware and aware of the universe…but it can be too late.

Anyway, that’s enough for the day.  I hope I didn’t bore you.  Have a good day.

*More often, it seems, this is done to create new farmland, which is a separate issue.

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Musing on the transience of stray ideas and on the difficulty in preventing…things

Well, it’s Saturday morning once again, and since I’m working today, I’m writing a blog post today.  Aren’t you lucky?  I suppose it does help to while away the idle hours, if and when they happen, to have a blog post to read, and mine are longer than many.

I briefly had a few thoughts, as I was getting showered and dressed this morning, about what topic to address in my post today.  However, not one of them persisted in my mind, and I’ve lost the threads completely.  Likewise, I didn’t write them down or otherwise take notes, so I don’t remember what I’d thought possibly to write.

I guess that means that none of them was truly gripping and important enough for me to hold onto, which probably means they wouldn’t have been that engaging to read, though that guess could be wrong, at least in principle.

It’s a bit like a phenomenon that happens with some regularity on my Saturday mornings.

On my way to the train, I pass a club of some sort on the southeast corner of a relatively major intersection along my path.  Though it is mainly deserted during the week, on Saturday mornings it is almost always packed with cars, to the extent that people have to park in the otherwise empty lot that serves a convenience store across the way.  One often sees people, all alone or in twos, crossing the street and heading for this club.  This is at about five in the morning, which implies the club is open pretty much all night; it’s hard to imagine that it opens at three or four.

As I pass the place, I often think to myself that it is remarkably popular, and I tell myself that I should look into it.  In this age of Google Maps and the like, it should be quite easy to find the spot on the map app and see the name of the business.  From there I could easily find out more about it, assuming that it has an online presence of some kind, which I am guessing that it does.  Most popular places do.

And yet, as it turns out, this is the longest I’ve ever kept a thought about the place in my mind after passing it.  I’ve not yet looked it up in any way, despite having passed it almost daily for years now.  I don’t even recall its name; I don’t know that I’ve ever actually read what it is, though there is a sign.  It’s not a strip joint of any kind.  The sign is painted, not internally lit or molded from neon-filled tubes.  It’s clearly some form of “social club”, and it seems rather wholesome, but I don’t get the impression that it’s part of or affiliated with any religious organization, though I could easily be mistaken about this.

It just doesn’t stick in my mind, and though I do occasionally regret this upon passing it once again, it’s not a very deep regret.  Obviously, if I were truly curious, I could find out more.  Believe me, I consume oodles of written and video (and sometimes audio) material about various scientific curiosities, carefully curating the information to get it from reliable sources rather than purveyors of woo and pseudo-science*.  I’m capable of pursuing my special interests with great fervor.  So it must not be that important.  But the fact that such thoughts and ideas so frequently spring into the mind only to—on most occasions—simply dissolve into nothingness like a light frost in a warm morning sun shows something interesting about the way ideas and thoughts come into a mind.

On an unrelated note, I’m now sitting on the train in a seat analogous to the one by the poster of which I shared a picture recently (the one about the suicide help line, which I still haven’t called again, though I surely qualify for its services).  The poster here, which I’ll show below, is for “Aware and Care Palm Beach County”, which is about preventing mass violence.  Indeed, as you can see, it reads, “Mass violence can be prevented…it starts with you!”

poster on violence prevention

I applaud the sentiment of preventing mass violence**, pretty much however one can define it, but I’m not sure that the statement is correct.  It’s certainly not been demonstrated, either logically or in practice to be completely preventable.  If someone is dysfunctional enough to want to commit violent acts against large numbers of strangers, and is even willing to give their own life to do so, it’s hard to see it being absolutely preventable.  I think what the sign-makers really mean to convey is that mass violence can be reduced, or that some mass violence can be prevented.

But the sign also includes the words “Learn how to…report suspicious behavior”, and that makes me nervous.  It seems to imply a bit of a Big Brother mentality, a KGB, Stasi, CCP, DHS, Gestapo kind of attitude of seeking out and removing “undesirables”.  I don’t think that’s its intent, but such things often, or perhaps always, have “good” intentions at their roots.  Rarely does a dangerous but popular movement get started by openly encouraging people to act to cause chaos, death, pain, and destruction on huge scales.

But a state has tremendous power, and it can—and does—commit greater violence and destruction against its own citizens on many occasions and in many ways than any lone madman, however well-armed.  And this happens so diffusely, its effects so broad, that most of the time, most people don’t even notice it, let alone think about it.  It’s a bit like death and injury rates from car accidents—they are huge in number, scope, and overall scale, but they are hardly even noticed, for they happen episodically, their effects spread out over time and space, so only very few people notice the carnage and devastation they entail.

It is probably the case that most committers of mass violence share certain characteristics of personality, psychopathology, and behavior.  This is barely the beginning of working out a predictive model for locating such people.  It’s like the breast cancer screening test problem as so often used to explain Bayesian reasoning relating to probability and statistics.  Veritasium did a good video on this, and Derek is also an excellent educator about difficult concepts, so I’m linking that video.  You could do worse than to subscribe to his channel.

The important thing is not solely that most—or even all—mass violence committers have a certain set of characteristics, but also how many of the possibly billions of people who have those characteristics will ever go on to commit any kind of mass violence.  I suspect you’d find it to be a tiny percentage indeed.  You may have some of those characteristics yourself.  How confident are you in the state’s ability to tell the difference between those who will commit violence and those who will not?  What if they think that you are such a person?

That being said, of course, I do think, if you see someone who has access to many and/or powerful weapons and they are acting in ways that make you think they are considering committing some atrocity, it’s reasonable for you to tell someone about it.  You’ll probably be wrong, of course, given the statistics of the matter, but you might at least call someone’s attention to a person who could use some psychological help.

But it’s worth it always to keep in mind that those in “authority” are just flesh, blood, bone, and (in principle) brain like you are, and on average they are no more intelligent nor aware nor ethical***.  Don’t give those people more power than that with which you’d trust the average football fan…and less than you’d give a referee.

*Though I enjoyed such material when I was very young—from stories of UFOs and so-called paranormal phenomena, to “cryptozoology” stories about such things as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster—as I got older, I was able to see the difference between the type and quality of evidence behind such claims and the information which explained, for instance, how and why biology operates, what makes cars and ships and planes function, what the nature is of gravity and electromagnetism, the history of the universe as well as we can discern it, and so on.  These are not only much more satisfying because they are about subjects that are actually real (as witnessed in part by the immensely powerful technologies such information can produce) but also because they have internal and mutual logical consistency.  It’s hard to see how a universe that is not mutually consistent could even hold together.  For a good primer on the important difference of such fields of curiosity, I can unreservedly recommend Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World.  Get it and read it if you haven’t already.  His writing is clear and conversational, and he conveys complex ideas in ways that are both wondrous and easy to understand.  It’s not for nothing that Stephen Jay Gould called Sagan “the best advocate for science in the millennium”.

**This is violence that interacts with the Higgs Field, and so has mass even at “rest”, and cannot ever move through space at the speed of light.  This is as opposed to “massless violence” which always travels through a vacuum at the speed of light.  Massless violence doesn’t experience a “personal” flow of time.

***Certainly the readers of this blog are well above average in intellect, knowledge, and morality, though that doesn’t necessarily reflect on the blog’s writer.

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Don’t touch that line, it’s hot!

It’s Tuesday morning, which should come as no surprise, since yesterday was Monday.  I am on the earliest train right now—I just got on board less than a minute ago, I’d say, and certainly it only just left the station.  I woke up early, as usual, and just didn’t feel like I could sleep anymore.  On the other hand, although I did wake up early, I can at least report that I didn’t keep waking up over and over again before the final time I woke up, so I seem to have had a few hours’ uninterrupted sleep.  That feels like a major boon*.

Today’s date is a little fun, if you’re using the American ordering of the numbers.  It’s 10-11-2022, which of course is a mini pattern, with a ten and an eleven doubling into a twenty and a twenty-two…all on a “Twosday”!  So, again, a bit of fun with numbers, if you like that sort of thing.  Possibly I’m the only one in the world who finds it amusing.  It wouldn’t be the first time.

I regret to say that I wasn’t able to make a video yesterday, or rather, I wasn’t able to complete one.  I started one, but we had one of our various weird situations at the office, with a potentially returning coworker, who was there quite early, and that interfered with my ability to do a video.  I got less than five minutes of talking done before the interruption came.  I did fiddle around with trying out the video recording on my tablet again a few times during the day, just for experimentation, but that was all.  I ended up knocking the tablet stand over while reaching for something else, and thus knocking over the tablet, but it was not harmed in any visibly detectable*** way.

Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to make a video today.

I think I need to update my “gravitar”, or whatever that term was, that generates the accompanying picture that goes with blog posts, because it shows a picture of me from about ten years ago, in which I was trying to look vaguely amused and whimsical.  It’s a perfectly good picture, of course—“perfectly” not being meant in its literal sense, obviously, since I don’t know what a literally perfectly good picture would even be—but I think it makes readers not quite internalize the blog posts and things that I’m sharing as serious.  I think people read my blog posts in which I try to express my distress and depression, and they see that stupid “gravitar” of me smirking ten years ago, and they think, “Oh, he’s not really all that fucked up right now, he’s just exaggerating for dramatic and/or comedic effect.”

I don’t like the guy in those pictures.  But I guess that probably goes without saying.

It’s been a long time since I updated that picture—I don’t recall even how it’s supposed to be done, frankly, but I’m sure I’ll be able to find it somewhere on the WordPress site, which is where I added it originally.  I need to upload something that’s accurate to how I am now.

I finally have returned to the particular train and the particular seat across from that National Suicide Prevention Hotline poster that I wrote about sometime in the past, and this time, I remembered to take a quick snap of it.  That happened between sentences while writing this blog post.  You probably didn’t even notice it; it was such a swift process that there was nary a hitch in my writing!

I’m not being serious, of course.  Well, I did take a picture, I’m serious about that.  But of course, the time stream of me writing this and the time stream of the final blog post are not the same.  The flow of time is different in the two, and the flow of time in the blog post per anyone reading can be entirely different as well.

That’s kind of curious to think about, at least for me.  I might have mentioned before that if our universe were simulated, down to the Planck scale in space and time, each calculation of interactions could, in principle, take billions of years for some simulating advanced civilizations, but then, after the googols of years it would take to calculate enough of them, we on Earth might still only experience the outcome as the passing of a second, for instance.

I don’t know why an advanced civilization would bother with such things.  But it’s a thought experiment, the domain of spherical inclined planes and frictionless cows, so just go with it.

Anyway, I’ll share the picture of the poster, because one thing that bothers me is that they not only split the infinitive (to be), but they underlined the word with which they split it.  I think it would have been more effective, if anything, to write “It’s OK to be not OK”.  Even the more proper “It’s OK not to be OK” would be preferable to me.

ok not ok scaled down

I truly appreciate and admire the sentiments****, but the split infinitive just makes me more depressed than ever.  The uses of this world and the usages of words seems utterly irrational and pointless to me.  There’s just nobody home.

Might as well shut off the lights.

*Not a reference to Major Boone**.

**I don’t know who “Major Boone” might be, but it would be a good name for a character.

***Nothing I could see, anyway, with or without my reading glasses.  I’m sure there were microscopic scratches and dings, the inevitable hallmarks of entropy, such as will accumulate on even the most durable of substances.  Even diamonds surely lose a carbon atom or two whenever one rubs at them.  The surface atoms, after all, cannot be bonded each to four other carbon atoms, unlike the interior atoms; some must be bonded only to three, and perhaps some even only to two.  And the ones that are bonded to four other atoms in their traditional tetrahedral lattice, are obviously not in an unbreakable arrangement, or there would be no way to cut diamonds.  As far as I know, there is no such thing as an unbreakable arrangement.

****And I don’t want to denigrate the hotline, though my personal experience with them was regrettable because the PBSO came and took me away to a shithole, which I’ve talked about before.  I was only there for less than a day, but it was humiliating and associated with nerve damage to my left wrist, and it did not end up helping me feel better in the long run.  None of this was the hotline’s fault, and I recognize that, but it was quite unpleasant, and is one of the reasons I hesitate to use their services.  I think about calling (or texting) them more days than not, but I don’t think I ever will.  I’m not worth their effort, in any case.  There are many far better uses for their resources than something like me.

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Welcome to the October Country

Well, it’s October 1st, the beginning of a new month in 2022, a month initially meant to be the eighth month, based on its name.

I’m at the train station and, it being Saturday, the schedule is different than during the week.  There’s also some question of whether the trains are boarding on the usual side or not.  There’s a displayed “announcement” on the light boards that all trains are boarding on one side at this station until further notice, but it could be something left over from yesterday.  Also, the guard is not aware of anything regarding the change in sides.

Nevertheless, today was a day for ordering the monthly pass on the machines, and the ones on my usual side weren’t even working, so I’m on the other side for the moment, anyway.  I’m going to have to try to be vigilant as the time for my train approaches*.  If I miss one train, the next won’t come for another hour.

It’s hard to be vigilant, though.  I feel absolutely exhausted.  My brain feels like it’s barely running on one cylinder, metaphorically speaking**.  I’m just so very tired.

Thankfully, I can embed below my video, which I did end up posting on my YouTube channel yesterday afternoon, so that can provide some of the content and spare me a little writing today.  I might as well, since what I’ve written so far is about some of the most banal things imaginable.

Just a bit of clarification about the video, in case any is necessary:  Obviously I don’t mean to say there is literally no life in the universe, since that would be a contradiction (If there were literally no life, then I could not be speaking about the fact).

I just have always been irked by people who make the wide-eyed claims that it’s so amazing and quasi-mystical that the constants of nature are so perfectly designed to make life, and that must imply some sacred meaning or purpose to it.  That’s about as idiotic as looking at the location of a speck of dust in the corner of a school gym and saying how amazing it is that all the facts of nature conspired to bring that speck of dust right there at that point…it had to have been part of some greater purpose!  It’s drivel.  Only the case with life is even more unimpressive.

My biggest issue with this is that it leads to a kind of quiescence, an assumption that, if the universe was “designed” just so that life can exist, then life, and particularly intelligent life, must be important, and the universe will somehow arrange things to nurture us and protect us from extinction.  If you think that’s the case, then ask the dinosaurs, or better yet, any of the far greater numbers of life forms that went extinct in the Permian-Triassic “Great Dying”.

Oh, wait, you can’t.  They’re all extinct.

No, the universe is almost completely hostile to life, both in terms of its space and in terms of its time.  We are lucky beyond ordinary imagining, though I tried in the description of the video to give some notion of just how lucky in spatial terms, at least, by noting that life exists in roughly only 1.5 x 10-64 of the universe’s volume.

As far as time goes, well if you’re thinking of humanity alone, based on the time that has elapsed since the “Big Bang”, which may or may not be the literal beginning of our universe, the percentage is tiny enough, and others have demonstrated this handily, as in the “cosmic calendar” that Carl Sagan made famous in Cosmos.  But if you want to count all expected possible future time, well then our existence is some fraction of what could be infinity, which is pretty undefined, but might as well be called zero.  The limit certainly approaches zero as we extend the future further and further.

This is not necessarily a call for people just to give up and say “what the hell”, though you have that option, of course, and it is tempting.  I wanted to note that, if you would like for life to continue, and even to have some lasting, cosmic-scale impact, then you can’t take it for granted.  You need to work at it, and work hard, and work long.  The universe is not trying to kill us (contrary to Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s habitual way of putting it); if it were, we would be dead already.  But the universe is huge, and it does not even have the capacity to care what happens to life, except in the minds of that life itself.

All life is in the situation of a castaway on a desert island—there’s no preexisting infrastructure, there’s no one out there looking out for you or protecting you, or providing your light, your heat, your air-conditioning, your food, your clothes, your shelter, what have you.  If you want any of those things, you’re going to have to make and/or find them for yourself, and you’re going to have to keep doing it, for as long as you actually want them and want to survive.

Without much more ado, here’s the video***.  I forgot to ask when I made the video, but please give a “thumbs up” and subscribe and share if you are at all inclined to do so, for any colorable reason.  And feel free to check out the other stuff on my YouTube channel if it looks interesting to you.  If anyone finds this interesting at all, I’m hoping to make more such videos about topics that interest me, assuming the universe doesn’t eliminate me in the meantime (though it seems likely to do so).  Oh, and please let me know what you think, either in the comments below the video or here.

Thanks.  Here it is:

*Just a slightly later addendum:  They have announced overhead that my train is approaching in 10 minutes, and have confirmed that it is not on its usual side.  So I was right to be proactive.

**Of course, it’s a metaphor.  I don’t honestly think that any of you really believe that my brain is an internal combustion engine of some kind, except in the loosest of possible senses.  Apologies.

***I wore a mask and dark glasses in the video mainly because I don’t like how my face looks—it bears evidence of the many things that have happened to me in the last decade or so.  Maybe no one else can see it but me, but it is what it is.  Anyway, the glasses are awesome, I really like them, and the mask combined with them makes for a good look, I think.  Certainly better than my underlying face, anyway.

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This is an untitled blog post…or IS it?

Okay, well, I’m back on the laptop again, today.  I think I did a decent job of gauging how long my post should be yesterday, despite using my phone to write it.  It did seem to take slightly longer to write the same number of words than it would have with the laptop.  It’s just easier to write faster when you’re using a (nearly) full-scale keyboard and more or less all of your fingers instead of your two thumbs to type.

Still, as I think I’ve noted before, I wrote a goodly part of my science fiction novel, Son of Man using a smartphone that was quite a bit smaller than the one I have now, and I think it turned out pretty well.  At least, the feedback I’ve gotten from the few people I know who have read it and who deigned to comment—one of whom has sadly died—was good.

Not much has changed since yesterday, though.  By which I mean I’m not sure why I’m bothering to keep doing this blog.  I don’t think it’s doing me much good.  As anyone reading regularly can probably tell, my mental health doesn’t seem to be improving at all despite the use of this unidirectional “talk therapy”.

I’m a creature of habit, though, so I’ll continue this until…well, until something stops me, or until I stop doing even this little bit of proactive stuff.  I’m sure that will leave the world no poorer.

The hurricane that’s approaching is not supposed to hit this part of Florida, but to make landfall along the central west coast, but it’s still been sloppy and rainy, and a bit windy, these past few days.  Sunday afternoon was sunny and clear, and I went for a long walk near the end of the day, but since then we’ve had wetness.  At least the modest windiness—which may have at least something peripheral to do with the hurricane—makes it feel less muggy.

It’s almost pleasant, and even has a slight autumnal feel to it.  It reminds me vaguely of the times in the year after school had started and as Halloween approached up north, when the leaves would begin changing—something that, alas, doesn’t really happen in south Florida—and you had to wear a light jacket against the breeze, but it wasn’t yet truly cold.

Of course, no jackets are required here in south Florida, unless you’re going to some high end club or restaurant, or unless you’re wearing one to keep off the rain.  But an umbrella works better against the rain here, in my experience, and it doesn’t leave you so sweaty.  However, if you’re riding a motorcycle, a good rain jacket is useful, and rain pants if you have them.  A good helmet is more than adequate to keep your head dry, and even keeps it warm in what passes for cold weather in south Florida*.

Here I go again, talking about the weather.  It’s rather pathetic, I know, I’m sorry.

I guess I could comment on political or scientific stories if you’d prefer.  I don’t know what happened with the NASA probe thing last night, the experiment to try to shift the orbit of an asteroid.  It’s a trial of concept, basically, to tease out the workings of the process of changing the long-term orbit of an asteroid, in case one ever appears to be headed for Earth.

The laws of motion and Newtonian gravity are more than adequate for us to tell well in advance where an object’s orbit will take it—if we know where the object is and how it’s moving—and what sort of change would make it no longer headed to intersect the Earth, if it were otherwise going to do so.  Given enough lead time, even a tiny nudge can be more than adequate to prevent collisions.

Of course, also given enough lead time, a tiny nudge and the same technology could alter the trajectory of a hitherto harmless asteroid and put it in a trajectory to hit the Earth.

Don’t think I haven’t thought about it.  Regrettably, I don’t have the resources to pull off such a scheme.  However, there are now at least a few people in the world who have their own private space programs, some capable of interplanetary travel.  I wouldn’t put it past Elon Musk to steer a modest asteroid toward Earth to cause just massive enough a catastrophe to support his point pushing for human colonization of other planets, as a sort of object lesson.

Okay, well, I don’t really think he would do that.  He has too much to lose, and it could be quite tricky to steer such an asteroid finely, so that it hit where on Earth you wanted it to hit.  But it might be a good way to unify the human race.  I’ve often thought that we need a real supervillain to bring the world together.  I would volunteer, but I don’t think humanity is worth the effort.  I’m more inclined just to steer a whopping BIG asteroid at Earth and do a planetary reset.

I wouldn’t do this for any ideological reason, and certainly not for any religious reason.  I believe the supernatural cannot exist by (my) definition**.  I just think it would be a good test, of sorts.  If humanity were able to come together to prevent the catastrophe, or to at least survive it and rebuild, they would have demonstrated their continuing worthiness.  And if not, well, then not.

Honestly, given the fact that life is more or less inevitably dominated by fear and pain***, I often veer toward anti-natalism, and even pro-mortalism (look them up).  Of course, given that I have children, and they are the most important two facts about the universe to me, by far, I can hardly be said to be a pure pro-mortalist or anti-natalist.  But then, I never claimed to be.

I don’t think it’s usually good to try to define oneself by any “ism”.  It’s vanishingly unlikely that any one given, finite ideology will have come up with reliable, complete, and final answers. regarding much of anything about life.  If it had, I suspect that fact would have become evident, if not obvious, by now.

Knowledge and deep understanding is gained incrementally, not revealed by some “authority”; the universe is extremely complex, at least on scales like the surface of the Earth at this stage of cosmic evolution.  We can’t expect any simple, easy-to-solve equation to describe even the eddies and whorls that take place when milk first begins mixing into coffee, and that’s more or less the stage of the universe we’re in right now (on a much bigger scale than a cup of coffee, obviously).

Okay, well, I don’t know how I got around to those subjects, but I guess that’s the sort of thing that can happen with stream-of-consciousness writing.  At least it wasn’t just a complete rehash of what I wrote yesterday.  Hopefully tomorrow will likewise not be a rehash.  Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow may creep on in this petty pace to the last syllable of recorded time (which record will eventually decay as time goes its interminable way), but each morrow will differ in its details, at least until all things are washed out by entropy.  It’ll be a while—on the mortal scale, anyway—before that happens cosmically.

Keep your eyes peeled and your ears pricked up, though.  It is coming.

Cloudy coffee

*To be fair, if you’re riding at 70+ miles per hour, even a low in the low fifties feels pretty darn cold, but that sort of weather won’t be back for months now, and goodness knows if I’ll ever ride again.

**By which I mean to say, even if there were such things as gods and demons and angels and spirits and so on, if they really existed, then they would in fact be part of nature, and would have a “lawful” existence of some type, and would therefore be natural.  Only imaginary things can be “supernatural”.

***I’m sure I’ve gone into this before.  It is essential for any successfully reproducing organism to have strong senses of pain and fear, to avoid danger and to avoid and seek to mitigate damage.  These must be more immediate and powerful—and potentially more enduring—than any sense of pleasure or joy.  All pleasure and joy must, by nature, be fleeting, or else an organism will not be driven to work to survive, to reproduce as often as feasible.  An organism that feels little to no fear or pain, and that experiences lasting and powerful joy from any given stimulus or circumstance, will live a blissful but short life, and will be outcompeted by fearful, aggressive, and pain-prone creatures.  It would not tend to leave many offspring, all other things being equal.

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All talk is small—all facts are trivia

Well, it’s Monday morning again, now the 19th of September in 2022, and I’m again at the train station waiting for the train to bring me to work…though before I’m done with this post, I’m sure I’ll already be on the train.  I write pretty fast, but it’s rare that I finish the first draft of any blog post before the train arrives, unless it’s running quite late.

This is the last Monday of summer in 2022, for whatever that’s worth.  It’s still irritatingly hot here in south Florida, and more importantly, it’s muggy and has rained every day.  Yesterday morning there was an absolute torrent for a bit, then it slacked off for a while before sputtering on and off throughout the rest of the day and night.

Yes, I am writing about the weather.  I don’t know if that’s better or worse than talking to someone about the weather.  I’m not much good at small talk, so maybe writing about the weather is better.  It doesn’t make me feel stressed, at least.  Possibly there are people out there who wish that it did, so I wouldn’t write such things.  But, then again, unlike the case with small talk, there is no social pressure for anyone to have to read what I write, so it’s better, ethically, to write nonsense than to talk trivialities, because there’s no pressure on anyone else to go along with it or to respond in kind.

That is one of the issues with small talk, after all.  When someone starts talking to you about something in which you have no interest, or which you find irritating, there’s this weird social impetus at least to give a cursory listen to what they’re saying.  That’s a puzzling social dynamic, when you think about it.  Why do people feel pressure to interact with someone when that other person is not saying anything of interest?

But of course, people do feel that pressure, and so small talkers can impose themselves upon their…well, let’s call them their “victims” for lack of a better word, knowing that the victims will feel the urge to interact politely, even if they have no interest in the conversation.  The only people who would feel comfortable just ignoring the small talker are those who feel no moral or social obligations, who can just go off and ignore the first person with internal impunity, perhaps sadistically to initiate small talk with someone else, solely for the purpose of tormenting them, knowing that others feel the pressure to go along with it.

In other words, small talk rewards sociopaths.

For this, and for many other reasons, we should abolish it.  Also, it makes people like me feel ridiculously awkward, because for me, conversation is something that generally serves a purpose, one related to the subject of the conversation, so engaging in small talk is rather like watching an old-school television tuned to an empty channel and trying to discern what the meaning behind the static might be.

At least a percent or so of that crackling and hissing and “snow” comes from the cosmic microwave background, the leftover heat from the early universe, last propagated when the current cosmos was about 300,000 years old and it finally got cool enough for electrons and protons to bond into atoms, so photons could finally fly freely through space without hitting a stray charged particle every few instants and being scattered.  That’s an interesting fact, unlike most things to do with small talk.

Although, in a sense, the cosmic microwave background and what it implies or that of which it records the evidence, is not much more significant than the weather is.  In fact, on any given day, it’s probably far less crucial than the weather.  It can be useful to know whether to bring an umbrella with one (I always do, anyway), or whether one should bring a jacket (rarely necessary in south Florida in September), or if there’s a hurricane threatening*.

So, if small talk is a way of spreading seemingly trivial, but potentially consequential, bits of information from one person to another, to try to keep the whole group, or “flange”, in a state of preparedness, I guess that could be a good thing.  That is, it would be a good thing if you think it’s a good thing for groups of humans to be mutually connected and better prepared to protect themselves and each other from the elements.

Most days, there are at least a few moments when I would much prefer for a massive storm to come up and blow them all away.  But don’t be misled into thinking that I’m just a misanthrope.  I don’t think other animals, or plants, or fungi (or microbes) are any finer or more innocent or sweet or lovable than humans.  They aren’t.  Indeed, nature does not select for sweetness except as a means to an end.  A baby is sweet and cute because that fact manipulates the nervous system of adults to protect it and care for it.

All life manipulates and exploits and preys on other life in one way or another.  Even photosynthetic organisms compete with other such organisms for light, trying to out-produce and out-reproduce the organisms around them.  Nature, red in tooth and claw has been said to unnecessarily focus on violence as a description of the world, but in fact, it’s overly narrow.  Nature could be accurately described as red in tooth and claw and leaf and branch and fur and feather and shell and stem, and so on.

Even cooperation strategies are mainly ways of forming gangs to outcompete other gangs.  What’s more, they are all vulnerable to the defection of any member of their group—thus the horror of cancer, as individual cells in a body lose their inhibitions and start to reproduce without check, temporarily succeeding but eventually destroying the organism.

So, though there’s nothing inherently evil or wrong with life, from some moral point of view—since morality doesn’t have any meaning without life in the first place—there’s nothing particularly moral or good about life, either.  Life likes life, as a general tendency, and tends to make excuses for itself, which it would, and fair play to it, but it’s just a highly localized, complex epiphenomenon (or set of epiphenomena) that for all we know exists only on the surface of the Earth.

It may legitimately be true that we cannot rule out life existing elsewhere in the cosmos, and it may seem terribly unlikely that the only life in the universe is on Earth, but it’s very tricky to try to extrapolate probability from one solitary instance of a phenomenon.  It’s a pretty undisputable fact that nearly everything we can see in the universe is not hospitable to life as we know it.

Maybe the answer to the Fermi problem is that there is no sign of life outside of Earth because there is no life outside the Earth, and all that one would ever hear, if one were to listen to the cosmos forever, is static.  Not even small talk.  Life on Earth could be the true aberration, an abomination of sorts…except, of course, nature doesn’t do abominations, nature just does whatever it does.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make with all this.  Maybe there is no point.  Maybe that, in fact, is the point.  Maybe I shouldn’t lament or bemoan small talk, because all talk is small talk when you get right down to it, and every fact is trivia, and all of history is just a “poof” of a random sound taking place in a wasteland…a pebble dislodged by the wind and rolling down a sand dune to rest a little lower than it had been, but without any purpose, without any goal, without any inherent or external meaning.

Anyway, what I’m really trying to get at is, the weather sure has been crappy lately, hasn’t it?

*As far as I know, there isn’t.  Not in the Atlantic, at least, not one that’s going to head toward Florida.  But I haven’t checked the hurricane center since Friday or Saturday, when there was just a tropical storm that was never going to hit us here unless something truly weird happened.

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Surprisingly (for me) positive thoughts on a Saturday morning

[Note:  At the bottom of the post, below the footnotes, I’m including a thought that occurred to me between the initial writing and the final editing of this post, but which doesn’t directly relate to the post itself.]

Well, it’s Saturday morning (the 17th of September, a nice prime number), and I’m waiting at the station for the first train of the day, because I woke up before my alarm again and there was no point trying to go back to sleep.  I’m working again today, and I may be working again next Saturday as well, since I don’t know how long the coworker with whom I split Saturdays will be out with his recovery from surgery.

I can’t begrudge him the time off—surgery is no small thing, even if it was “minimally invasive”, to say nothing of the problem that required surgery.  I’ve had major surgery myself, open-heart when I was 18 and back surgery when I was about 35 (hopefully I won’t have another when I’m 53!).  I don’t remember how long my own laminectomy and fusion left me hobbled, because at the time I was already on temporary disability because of the injury, but it wasn’t a minor inconvenience.

That whole process contributed to the eventual catastrophic collapse of the life I had built, partly because I technically have “failed back surgery syndrome”, which means that, despite my back surgery, I still have chronic pain.  I think the term “failed” is a bit uncharitable, though, because my pain was reduced, it just didn’t come close to going away completely.  It’s there every day, and it has been for about 20 years (for those of you doing the math, I had the pain a good three years or so before I had the surgery, and I am currently 52).

Speaking of the collapse of my previous life, and the loss of so many things that were important to me, I sent an email to my son not long ago—I might have mentioned this previously—to the email address he had used the thank me for his last birthday present.  It was basically a long apology for all the things I screwed up with him (and his sister), and a reminder that I love him and always will, and of course that I miss him.  I didn’t know if he even regularly checks that email, so I asked his sister to let him know I had sent it.  He apparently does, and he’s seen it.

I don’t know what he thinks about it, since he hasn’t replied so far.  I don’t know if he ever will.  That’s up to him, which I guess is obvious.  What I mean is, that it wouldn’t be fair or right for me to expect, let alone demand, a reply from him.  I at least know that, if he wants to know what his father has been thinking and doing for the last quite some time, he can always come to this blog and read it.  I don’t know what he would think if he did that, but it is whatever it is.

I’ve always felt—at least, for as long as I’ve seriously thought about such things—that it’s important to remember that children don’t belong to their parents.  Parents belong to their children.  This is so for good, sound, biological reasons, and also for deep moral ones.  A parent can make the decision to have a child—or well, two parents can make that decision.  The child literally has no say in the matter, for the child does not even exist when the decision is made.  They cannot be held morally accountable for anything to do with that decision, and they cannot incur any obligation because of it.  Of course, good parenting and good socialization can mean that a child will be naturally grateful to the parents, and that’s nice when it happens, but it isn’t required.  It cannot, ethically, be required.  It cannot, in good conscience, be demanded.

That reminds me tangentially of the concept creep problem our culture has with the terms, “respect” and with “self-esteem”.  People cannot demand respect.  Respect is in the eye of the beholder.  Courtesy is presumptively expectable, since simple politeness is the lubricant of civilization, but respect can only be freely given if it is to be of any value at all.

Likewise with self-esteem.  It doesn’t make sense to encourage people to have just a general, free-form, positive self-image based on nothing; that leads to narcissism and all the problems it entails.  One should not feel “proud” merely of the fact that one exists.

A student who cannot seem to master math well should not necessarily feel proud of his or her math skills, though if that student has worked hard to learn as much as they can learn, they should feel proud about that!  And that person almost certainly has other strengths and abilities that they can feel good about, and of which they should feel proud.

Hard work is worthy of esteem, and thus of self-esteem.  But I don’t need to esteem my own ability to play basketball, for instance, and I shouldn’t, because I’m terrible at basketball.  On the other hand, I write reasonably well, and I write a lot.  I also have good skills at general mathematics and science, and I am deeply curious about the way the universe works, and have learned a lot about what people know about how it works, and how that knowledge has been gained.  I should feel good about that, at least.  I certainly enjoy it.

“Pride” in general is a tricky concept.  Its legitimacy depends on how one uses it, and what one means by it.  None of us made ourselves, obviously; we operate according to the laws of nature*, and we are shaped by our nature—our genes and other physical factors—and our experience, our background, our society, our upbringing, our education, and so on.  And in a sense, all of these things are also part of “our” nature.

A person may have the tenacity to work hard and improve themselves from an otherwise unpromising-seeming background, but even then, they did not create that tenacity—it was their luck, or their blessing, however you want to characterize it, that they had it.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  Use the assets you have to their best effect.

You can’t use assets you don’t have, after all.  It would be much easier, for instance, for me to get to work in the morning if I could teleport, or even if I could fly.  But I cannot, and there are no reasonable technological solutions to that lack right now, so I just don’t have that ability.  It would be the height of silliness for me to feel proud of myself for my ability to fly, since I cannot.  But I’m glad of my ability to learn and use the public transportation system in south Florida, and I’m grateful that it exists; I admire the people who put it into place, and I esteem the people who keep it running every day.

Maybe gratitude is a better notion and virtue than pride or self-esteem.  I know some religious systems place an emphasis on it, and I think that’s far from a bad thing.  It’s good to be grateful for the inherent and learned abilities that you have, and it makes sense to instantiate that gratitude by using those gifts to the best of your ability.  Otherwise, it’s not very impressive gratitude.

It’s the converse** of the situation in which a person apologizes for something, but keeps up the behavior that led to the apology.  That’s not much of an apology.  I often find myself saying to people, “I don’t need your apology, I want you not to do the thing you’re apologizing for.  If you apologize but keep doing the same thing, the apology is useless, and even insulting.”

Okay, I use words to that effect, adjusted to match the situation.  I hope you get the idea.

These are my thoughts for this Saturday morning, such as they are.  I hope most of you are looking forward to an enjoyable weekend, hopefully with some time spent with family and/or friends.  Be grateful for them, certainly, if you have them around.  No one is guaranteed to have them, and even if there were such a guarantee, with whom would you lodge the complaint if the guarantee were not met?  Feel good about the things you are good at, and feel grateful for the good things you have in the world, and show your esteem and gratitude by doing the best you can with both.

Those are good words, I think, and I’m astonished that I am the one who actually just wrote them.  The trick will be to live up to them!

*And of Nature’s God, if you believe in God, to paraphrase the Declaration of Independence.

**Or maybe the obverse—I’ve never yet been able to get those concepts clearly differentiated in my head.  Neither term may actually be the correct one, come to think of it.

[As noted above, here is my thought below the footnotes:  Is it ever possible for any kind of mind, whether natural or artificial, instantiated in hardware or software or both, to be complex enough to accurately model its own workings in detail?  As it becomes more complex, modeling its own function will also become more complex.  I suspect that this complexity will increase more quickly than the ability of the increasingly complex mind to parse it.]

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Expression of depression as “indicator lights” for the state of a complex system

It’s Saturday, but I’m not in the park, and it’s definitely not the 4th of July.  It’s actually the 10th of September.  Oh, and this is 2022 AD (or CE).

I don’t think yesterday’s post was very well-received.  It was probably too dreary for most readers.  This is often the case when a relatively healthy person encounters the thoughts of one who suffers from depression.

I remember it being said in medical school that depression is, in a certain sense, contagious.  That’s not meant literally, of course, but it makes the point that, when interacting with someone who is depressed, one tends to feel one’s own mood pulled down.  In fact, it can sometimes be a diagnostic aid; even if the person to whom you’re speaking isn’t openly declaring depression, if you find yourself feeling depressed yourself after speaking with them*, they may be depressed in some clinically significant sense.

So, if people feel down after reading my writing, I apologize.  I don’t mean to bring anyone else into the fold, so to speak, or worsen the mental situation of someone who is already struggling.  There is a very small proportion of people in the world I think could be improved—from a societal standpoint anyway—by being depressed.

But it is true that, when I’ve read popular works about depression, and about the experience of depression, I don’t tend to get a strong sense of what the writers were feeling when depressed.  Most of the time, the works are written well after the particular bout of depression, and it can be hard to recreate the moods and thoughts that the condition engenders when one is not mired in it.  Just as one who is depressed can feel that the depression has always existed and always will, when one is out of depression it can (apparently) be hard to reenter the worldview that it entails.

Some of this is probably defensive.  Who, having successfully gotten past depression, would want to relive the experience?  I’d hazard a guess that the answer is “no one”.

I remember a time when, briefly, my (now-ex) wife went through a period of reactive depression near the end of a pregnancy, and shortly after it.  This is not an uncommon occurrence, though thankfully most women are spared.  Anyway, at the time, she said that she would never get angry with me when I was depressed again, that she understood now how terrible it was and how difficult, and how it’s not simply a matter of attitude or choice to feel it or not.  I’m quite sure that she meant it with all her heart.  Thankfully, her experience was short-lived, it responded to treatment and time rather rapidly, and she returned to her usual, extremely formidable and impressive self.  But she also lost at least some of her sense of empathy for the depression, unfortunately.

That’s okay.  I like her better when she’s healthy and joyful and fierce.

My personality—and probably my undiagnosed ASD, which contributes to the fact that I can’t convey emotion well, and have a hard time seeking or accepting emotional support—and the sheer persistence of the problem make me hard to bear for anyone, for very long, I think.  It makes me hard to bear even for me.  The advent of my chronic pain, and its affect on my ability to work well**, contributed to that difficulty mightily.

But maybe someone someday will find my musings when I’m depressed useful for at least getting into the mindset of someone suffering from depression.  Maybe not.  I think my thoughts are far from typical even for the depressed, though my tone is probably pretty “normal” for someone with longstanding chronic depression.  Maybe my words will be useful for people studying depression in adults with undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder, which I’m almost certain I have, having studied it now for a while since the possibility first revealed itself.

As a bit of a tangent, it’s rather frustrating to me that I recently saw a very good video that discussed the fact that it seems depression was never caused directly by a deficiency of serotonin, a so-called chemical imbalance.  The maker of this video clearly knows it was never this simple, but there is a popular notion that such a thing is the case, and that has always irritated me.  The brain is not some stew made of a big collection of ingredients cooking together in the skull, which doesn’t come out well if a particular ingredient is missing or is present in too-great quantities.

The brain is a huge and unimaginably complex information-processing system, immensely parallel in its structure, with a staggering amount of feedback and crossover between subunits of the system; even each individual neuron of the hundred billion-ish present is more complicated than one can readily grasp.  It has more in common with a vast weather pattern of sorts, influenced by both local and global environmental factors but also internally influenced by other parts of itself, so that some patterns become self-sustaining and destructive, like a hurricane in the mind that feeds and strengthens itself when conditions are right, and which cannot easily just be broken once it has formed.

So, serotonin was never some mere quantity that was deficient, like iron deficiency leading to anemia.  The nerve cells that signal using serotonin manufacture that neurotransmitter themselves.  It’s simply that part of depression is instantiated (in many) in the underactivity or poor responsiveness of certain parts of the brain that signal via serotonin, and increasing the activity in those regions can sometimes decrease the tendency of the system as a whole to get into the self-reinforcing state that depression is.

It’s rather like the notion that we could, for instance, decrease the likelihood of hurricanes by decreasing the amount of moisture in the local atmosphere.  It’s not that hurricanes are simply caused by high humidity, but just that the high humidity contributes to their production, and decreasing it could, in principle, decrease the likelihood of hurricane formation, or at least decrease their strength and thus their destructive effects.

I don’t want to push the metaphor too far, since the brain is obviously different from weather—for one thing, it is far more meticulous, precise, and in some senses (but not all) more complex and constrained.  There are roughly a quadrillion synapses in a typical brain, but it’s not just the number that really makes the difference, anymore than one can just randomly wire up a hundred billion transistors and make a supercomputer.  Weather is a bit more free form, though it involves a great many more atoms interacting than any one brain.  But analogies can point out similarities at different levels of various systems, and more usefully, they can help try to convey something of the sense, if not the specifics, of an idea.

But depression is a dangerous storm of the mind indeed; it’s frequently a terminal illness.  And one cannot simply slap a hurricane and yell “Snap out of it!” and expect it to have any effect at all.  We understand the nature of autism spectrum disorders even more poorly than we understand mood disorders—trust me, I’ve looked for good neuroscientific, neuroanatomical, structural, and functional investigations of the disorders without much satisfaction so far.  The interaction of mood disorders with ASDs is probably just going to make things still more complicated.  Unfortunately, the only computer with the processing power adequate to modeling the processes so far is reality itself, but we can’t just lift up the hood or look at the source code or whatever metaphor you want to use for that.  We have to figure it out as it goes along.

For that reason, it may not be such a bad thing for me to share my thoughts, however dismal they are and however gloomy and dispirited they may make my readers feel, when I’m in the throes of my malfunctions.  Think of them as indicator lights, or pressure gauges, or even a Windows™ Control Panel readout from the system.  At least they might give some insight into what the system is doing at that time, or what state it’s in.  It won’t necessarily allow one to prevent total system crash; some systems just have too many faults and bugs to keep running.  But maybe at least from an eventual mortality and morbidity conference point of view, they might be useful.

It would be nice to be useful.

*Assuming you weren’t already.

**As an aside, when I was in practice, I also found that I had great difficulty charting using Dictaphones or their equivalents.  This is partly because it was not at all how I charted during training, but I suspect it’s more related to my ASD.  I can write extemporaneously quite well, or at least quite handily, as these blog posts demonstrate, but speaking aloud as a matter of keeping records such as “SOAP notes” is very uncomfortable and even feels physically blocked at times.  Between that and my chronic pain, I had more than one occasion of getting far behind on charting, which caused frustration for my colleagues and my spouse alike.  I’m not lazy.  Not by a long shot.  I think it really was mainly an Asperger’s thing, but at the time I just hated myself for being so weak; I was motivated to do it, but just couldn’t seem to carry it off without it feeling like torture.