A Theory of the Divine

I have a theory of the divine. It's not especially cheerful, though it does manage to deal with the problem of suffering in the world. What if there were some presence that basically fed off emotion?

Is my theory of the divine that there is some kind of emotion-sucking parasite floating out there?

Let's just say that if there is a food chain, we're not at the top of it. My theory is that we are the link between the material world that was created, and the vast abstraction that created it. Our job is simply to live, and to experience emotion, which presumably gets transmitted to or absorbed by whoever or whatever set the whole business of the Universe up and running. This view is not too incompatible with the Western notion of why mankind has free will, and the purpose of worship.

If we didn't have free will, the Creator would just be talking to himself through meat puppets - nothing new, no surprises, just the omniscient talking to itself throughout eternity. Worship is then seen as a particularly effective means of communication.

In other words, we are here with more or less free will in an environment where not everything is determined before-hand (I could give a whole lecture on the quantum physics reasons why God must NOT know when and where every leaf falls because the glue that holds the physical world together is uncertainty) because God was lonely and needed someone to talk to.

From the point of view of emotion, all of creation is therefore a kind of continuously running experiment in gathering sense-impressions. One could argue that since the experiment doesn't have a particular morality (it's just a mechanism to collect sense-impressions from the physical world), this idea explains the problem of good and evil. In some sense, it doesn't matter.

In case you think this assertion sounds harsh, consider this: from about 200 to 65 million years ago, there was abundant animal life, of a kind not seen since on this Earth, and what did this life do? It ate other life. In some cases, the life that was being eaten was plant life, which appears to be in no position to complain, but in very many cases, one dinosaur would eat another. Those animals had nervous systems and brains enough to exhibit behaviors. This means that these animals probably felt pain, and quite possibly, also felt something akin to fear. The point here is, in that long ago time before people, or even mammals, there was a complete eco-system of plants and animals, most of which we would now regard as quite alien. Did any of those animals achieve self-awareness, and wonder about Creation, or did they just react with autonomous but unconscious learned behavior, while feeling something we might call emotion - happiness, fear, and so forth?

What's missing from the primordial picture? Self-awareness, probably, and what we might call personality, although pet lovers will probably be quick to declare that even the family cat, with a brain the size of a walnut, has an individual, recognizable personality, and can certainly experience both happiness and fear. Since people are obviously both different yet similar in many ways to the family cat, there is at least the suspicion that what we call personality, the basis for belief in the human soul, may have been a kind of evolutionary accident or by-product.

There is a further question. Are the little bits of personality merged back with the greater consciouness upon death, or merely extinguished, having completed their task of transmitting sense-impressions? Alan Watts and similar Buddhist thinkers would probably say that we live in the Universe, so we must in some sense be part of the Divine, but that the notion of individual personality is not so important. Dr Watts' argument was that we come from nothing, from billions of years of not having existed, and that doesn't seem to bother anybody. If we then go to nothing, why is that any different? Why be afraid of nothing?

From Wilhelm Reich's orgone boxes of dubious efficacy to the statistically testable Random Event Generators at Princeton which appear to be sensitive to emotional world events, there is at least a hint that we are all connected in some as yet scientifically unknown way. The big question is, are we part of the cosmic presence that created things, or just a bit of the machinery that accidentally became aware of its own existence?

TV Shows We Wish We Could See

One of the kids just bought a TV, so I had some suggestions for her on what to watch. The following are the programs that the Family Channel should be showing:

Who's Driving This Bus? - A reality show about family conflict, interspersed with long periods of travel to the relatives' and reviews of mediocre southern-style food as served at strip malls in the Northeast. The truly interesting premise behind this program is that all the conflict is over issues on which the participants already agree.

She's Not My Cousin! - A game show that tries to answer the question, "Is my father's mother's cousin once removed actually related to me?" In tonight's episode, contestants try to find out if they are related to Vladimir Lenin, through a connection on the maternal grandparent's side. Recently discovered photographs show my great-grandfather around 1910 looking very similar to the soon to be Soviet leader, with the familiar goatee and cap, plus both he and Lenin were at least partially Jewish, around the same height, and lived in the same general area in Europe. And, they both kept changing their names! There is even evidence that suggests that Lenin may have stopped in at the family bakery in Riga during his flight to Switzerland. Bagels or bolshevism? You be the judge.

What's Daddy Going to Eat? - a game show in which untrained men with no culinary competence are left to fend for themselves, for periods of up to three days, while their wives take a break, visiting children and other acknowledged relatives. There is a complex scoring system, where credits earned by nuking frozen hot dogs are wiped out by a run to the local Chinese take-out place, with double penalty points assessed for having Chinese for both lunch and dinner. Style points are added or subtracted, depending on whether or not food is consumed at the table, in the living room, or standing over the kitchen sink. Double style points if utensils are used, triple points if the utensils are washed between uses and not left in the sink awaiting the next course. Bonus points can be earned by baking a cake, but only if that is not the main meal of the day.

Do You Ever Clean Up Around Here? - another game show, in which the wife from "What's Daddy Going to Eat" returns home, and tries to figure out if anything has been vacuumed, swept, washed, wiped down,or otherwise cleaned in her absence. Double points if laundry has been done, triple for bathrooms. The highlight of this game show is the search for the secret schmutz, left in an otherwise high-traffic area but sure to be ignored. At the end of the program,the wife returns home, and reveals to the studio audience the location of this cache of crud. The audience then votes on the probability that the husband even saw anything out of the ordinary,much less cleaned it up.

Supermarket Slalom - where wives try to track down their husbands and their shopping carts in a confusing maze of aisles and week-end special offers. The object of the game is for the wives to get everything on their weekly shopping list and place them in the cart, while their husbands maneuver the carts at random, placing extraneous items in the cart while removing others. The husband wins if any three of the non-essential items that he added equal either the monetary or caloric value of all other food items combined, or if he successfully eludes his wife, and makes it to the check-out counter while she is still carrying six or more items.

You Bought What? - Similar to "The Price Is Right", but in reverse. The female contestant is given a dollar figure, and asked to choose which of three items her spouse actually bought. The main categories are Specialty Food That is Bad for Us, High Tech Gizmos We Don't Need, and Abstruse Reading Material We Could Have Gotten at The Library.

Political Orientation

You are a Social Liberal (70% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (13% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist Link: The Politics Test

Seven Haiku on Bunionectomy

Inspired by some quality time with the family where we learned more about their medical problems than we ever wanted to know...

I have been quite ill
Was it very serious?
Bunionectomy...

Toes bothering you?
Try a bunionectomy
Take some off the top

Bunionectomy?
A way to get perfect feet
From imperfect toes

Bunionectomy?
But it was such a nice toe
Now somewhat smaller

Bunionectomy?
A callous remark indeed
Why not the whole foot?

Can't accept defeat?
Try a bunionectomy
Win at one remove

Bunionectomy?
Is it all about feet, then?
Babe the Blue Ox knows

A Parent's Birthday Wish Haiku

A book of haiku?
What could be a better gift?
A visit maybe...

A Post-Modern Haiku

Jacques Derrida dead
Master of deconstruction
Now deconstructed

Three Haiku on the Possible Solution of Riemann's Hypothesis

Is this number prime?
How about the neighborhood?
Maybe now we know

What is the answer?
Zeta, and I don't mean Jones
Straight line everywhere

Ecommerce gone bust?
Blame the mathematicians
Prime problem is solved

A Different kind of Fish Story

News Item

Glowing Fish to Be First Genetically Changed Pet
Fri 21 November, 2003 21:49

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A little tropical fish that glows fluorescent red will be the first genetically engineered pet, a Texas-based company said on Friday.

The zebra fish were originally developed to detect environmental toxins, but Alan Blake and colleagues at Yorktown Technologies, L.P. licensed them to sell as pets.

"These fish were bred to help fight environmental pollution," Blake said in a telephone interview. "They were bred to fluoresce in the presence of toxins."
---

And how long do you think it will be before we have fish (and other animals) with commercial messages or logos emblazoned on their sides?

Other applications come to mind, some applied to people. If fish can be made to fluoresce in the presence of toxins, then perhaps other organisms, including people, can be made to have specific physiological responses to specific chemical inputs, including the presence of various drugs or hormones. Imagine a world where you take a truth cocktail, and some physiological effect ensues that is linked to hormones released with deceptive responses.

How about innoculating the young before they enter school, so that fundamental behavioral drives are writ large to assist class management? Those TV commercials with people having "Poor anger management", or "Confused", or "Clueless" stamped on their foreheads may be closer to reality than we think. Didn't the arch-villian in "Snowcrash" have "Poor Impulse Control" tattooed on his forehead?

Alfred Bester's "Demolished Man", covers some of this ground, where a society keeps order by constant telepathic surveillance of the citizenry, and no thoughts are truly private. We may not have telepaths, but between Mr Ashcroft and Admiral Poindexter, we are likely to have predictive databases that are the next best (or worst) thing. A chemical/biological cue to point out the possibly guilty is merely a refinement. The idea of self-identifying guilt is quite old. Think of the last scene in Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter".

Or consider the marriage of biology and electronics, where different patterns snap on and off in response to some electronic signal. I can see it now, "My life as a billboard".

One popular feel-good mantra is "being comfortable in your own skin". With these recent technical advances, achieving that comfort may be a very elusive goal. In the future, it could be that no-one will be comfortable in their own skin. Instead of being comfortable, the challenge will be to keep the package from revealing the contents. Instead of wearing your heart on your sleeve, you might have a kind of human emoticon glowing on your forehead.

Seven Haiku for Number One

Little Hilary
Birthday girl with a mission:
She is number one

Chronological?
Mere birth order doesn't count
At least in her mind

Do numbers matter?
In this context, no, you see
They're all number one

Keep the record straight
Numbers sort by age only
Not by affection

Each is number one
Even numbers two and three
Year-round, ev'ry day

All our kids are great
Though each very different
Did you want clone kids?

So that's my haiku
Birthday and everyday
You're all number one

Technological Thanatopsis

News item:

'Lost in Space' Actor Harris Dies
Mon Nov 4, 9:44 PM ET

By ANTHONY BREZNICAN, AP Entertainment Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Jonathan Harris, the flamboyantly fussy actor who portrayed the dastardly, cowardly antagonist Dr. Zachary Smith on the 1960's sci-fi show "Lost in Space," has died. He was 87.

And so another bit of pop culture passes from the scene, assuming a kind of iconic immortality on some cable channel. Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs thought that after death, they would ascend to heaven as a god, and be seen as a star. These days, the more modern view is that you become a star first, and then die in syndication.

In another ten years or so, very many of the shows in syndication will have casts made up almost entirely of dead people. Keeps costs down, I suppose. Why do you think that RCA re-issues a new Toscanini set every 10 years or so? Think about it, though. For the first time in history, we have the world-view of previous generations being passed down directly (in color, even) to generations with very different demographics and cultural outlook. Some big discordancy there. Fred MacMurray may have gone to that big Disneyland in the sky, but his early 60's earnestly square outlook is still being beamed out to millions every day as the picture of normal California family life (if that's not an oxymoron.)

The 21st Century is being continuously inundated with scenes from life in the mid-20th Century, a vicarious form of time travel. People are now able to escape to eras of their choosing, if only for a little while, and if only in the imagination.

But what if the good old days could be brought back to life, in some directly experienced way?

There are already speech synthesis techniques that work by concatenating tiny pieces of utterances from a human speaker to form new utterances. Given enough voice samples, you could have the voices of famous people saying things that the people themselves never said in real life. More than that, you could have the voices of famous people speaking lines in new productions, long after the original people are gone from the scene.

Now the real fun begins. Who owns the rights to the voice, appearance, and mannerisms of people who are no longer alive?

Here is a semi-facetious suggestion. Doctors, lawyers, and other professional people already incorporate themselves. Everybody should do this, using incorporated status to file copyright notices on their voice, appearance, and mannerisms for use by future generations. I can see a new kind of investment vehicle, where instead of leaving your loved ones an insurance policy, based on the statistics of a lottery cushioned by the demographics of growing population, you can leave them - you! Or at least the distinct, IP-protected bits that make you, you, in standards-friendly digital form, ready for licensing and evergreen revenue production.

Note that Microsoft already owns an encyclopedia (Encarta) and a multimedia archive (Corbis)? What happens to shared cultural experience when it is no longer shared, but licensed out?

My guess is that as the real world becomes more entangled with the virtual world, personas will be as important as persons, and that the future of the future lies in customizable re-creations of the past.

Two Haiku on DMCA

Bitstream is secret
Do not even try to look
Else visit Club Fed

Bitstream comes with curse.
Crack it, incur the awesome
Wrath of Valenti.

One More Haiku on Program Structure

Unlike consultant
good script writer is never
ever go-to guy.

(with thanks to Bob Perlman)

Seven Haiku to While Away the Time

Can you loop the loop?
Not just aerobatic tricks
Software does it too

For loops are easy
No extra variables
The loop does it all

While loops are tricky
Am I repeating myself?
While loops are tricky

While condition met
Loop iteration goes on
Without end, maybe

Time to exit yet?
Bump the loop counter or else
Never-ending loop

Dyjkstra had it right
Use of goto is harmful
Use of while is, too

What is to be learned?
Keep track of your indices
Or memory full

The Future Isn't What It Used To Be

Long ago and far away, but stunning in retrospect to consider what might have been.

I can recall a sales guy in 1976 saying "I can sell a mini for $25K or a micro for $2.5K. How many of these things do you think we can sell? With 30,000 machines in the field, we already have the second largest installed base in the world."

Intel has since shown us that:

• More than 30,000 CPUs can be sold, before breakfast, even.
• Architecture is not a strong predictor of success
• What almost all computer companies do efficiently is packaging, not fundamental design

Seven Haiku for a Departed Tooth

Tooth number thirty
Lost its filling, always hurt
Tooth and pain gone now

Bad tooth. What to do?
Root canal? I don't think so.
Extraction action

An "abridged" comment
Brush your teeth every day
Or gap in the back

Dentist was perplexed
Endodontist helps too late
Nothing left to save

Root canals are easy
Says young dentist to patient
Now both know better

Dentists need practice
Experience teaches them
But why me, O Lord?

Oral surgeon knows
Dentist's failure his success
"Mind the gap" he says

Information Utopia

There was a speech at RAND a while ago on the development of the Internet. The main points were that information utopia and a new era of personal freedom were almost here, because of the free flow of data along the many distributed networks of the Internet which are accessible to most everybody.

I disagree with this cheery assessment because I think there is a kind of funnel or information diode effect going on. Users logging onto a site are visible, searchable, and ultimately knowable, by both corporations and governments, for purposes ranging from the benign to the annoying to the truly frightening. The organizations doing the observing are not themselves so observable - all the visitor sees is what's on the Web site, while the Web site can get quite a bit of data on the visitor, more if spyware is used. The relative anonymity of organizations and their databases ensures that the information diode flows mainly from people to organizations, not the other way around.