Infinite potential of a finite mind

Sidestepping shadow-plays
boxed in bonus-sized portions
for garden-varietal religions,
I've had these scuzzy intimations
great big (voids) lie behind
most altruistic inclinations
and the biggest news is,
we're still expanding
with-in-exhaustible potentials
to be eternally filled greater.

Now I'll admit to being
hampered in my cognitive
capacity for meaningful
pattern recognition
by my debilitating
predisposition toward
concentrated forms of myopia,
ergo, I can't shape
a formless mess into anything
but incoherent flimflam.

I've tried alleviating this
condition with meditative
concoctions and palliatives
of sensory deprivation,
yet I fear I'll need
a silicon-chip-enhanced head
before I can glimpse
the cosmic legerdemain spinning
its paradoxes of endless
surfaces but no top.

If I finally do, I'll smile big
as a great-white gull winning
his first demonstration hand at
the three-card monte of not-to-be
reconciled contradictions.

---

This poem is written for Big Tent Poetry's Week 2 Prompt, and was inspired by the March 7 episode of Philosophy Talk on Infinity. The suggestion was to only use three to six words overheard, but I think I ended up using as many as a dozen here. I'm a philosophy nerd.

Briefly back to the philosophical

Interrupting my in-progress poem Two Souls, I want to make a more-than-mental note of a couple ideas brought to my recent attention. Each hearkens me back to the series of posts I began a few months ago (and unfortunately dropped due to distractions) regarding the necessity for a new 21st Century Ethos.

I'll try to incorporate both into the continuation of that discussion, which I hope to pick up again very soon.

First, there's a very interesting article in June's Wired Magazine, which features a discussion of the New New Economy. The article is called "The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online." Its title is sure to provoke a negative response from Americans who for sixty years have been taught to recoil at the mere mention of the "S" word. Getting beyond that first reaction, it's very much worth reading for its examination of the new forms of social media and how they are creating a greater tendency toward and preference for collaboration and collective action.

The next idea that caught my fancy is the concept of Biocentrism that a friend referenced in a Tweet last week. Below is a passage pulled from Wikipedia that lays out the main points, but I encourage you to read the full article on Biocentrism:

According to Robert Lanza biocentrism has seven principles.

1. What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. An "external" reality, if it existed, would by definition have to exist in space. But this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.

2. Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.

3. The behavior of subatomic particles, indeed all particles and objects, is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.

4. Without consciousness, "matter" dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.

5. The structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. The "universe" is simply the complete spatio-temporal logic of the self.

6. Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.

7. Space, like time, is not an object or a thing. Space is another form of our animal understanding and does not have an independent reality. We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.

Questioning people's motives

This is the second in my series of "thinking out loud" posts loosely grouped under the banner of Toward a 21st Century Ethos. The ideas are laid down here with broad brush strokes, and the devil will most certainly be hidden in the details.

Never one to take small bites when chewing on a subject, today I try to tackle the question of what motivates people and the need to build a social economy not centered around profit and greed. To discuss economics might seem off-topic, but I would argue that how a society functions at its most fundamental level and the behavior it encourages cannot be compartmentalized from the ethics we preach in church or at home.

In our capitalistic society, no ideal is enshrined as highly or protected as thoroughly as the right to private property and profit. Our legal system was constructed to preserve it. Our myths and metaphors revolve around it.

Our cultural icons are rugged individuals who thrive on self-reliance to achieve great material success. They disdain weakness and collective action. Yes there are many exceptions, but the general storyline still runs through most of our pop-culture mythology. These are ideas that arose from and suited the needs of industrial capitalism.

Some may try to argue that as a "Christian" nation, our ethics are actually informed by the New Testament. And on an individual level that may be true, but it's not the behavior that is expected or rewarded by the prevailing social order. In fact, I would argue, that the lessons taught by Christ are often in direct opposition to those encouraged by our society.

Despite the fact that Jesus repeatedly assailed greed as a motivating force (see Matthew 19:23-24, as just one example), many Christians seem to wall-off their religious beliefs as separate from their economic ones. This is usually rationalized with Christ's own words "render unto Caesar." The meaning of those words is ambiguous, but many take it as an implicit endorsement of maintaining a split personality in our secular and spiritual lives. It may be that he was renouncing participation in the economy at any level, but I'm not here to argue his intention.

I'm also not here to argue against the separation of Church and State, which I completely agree is a vital component of our democracy. What I am here to do is argue for better aligning our social behavior with our ethical beliefs, and there are plenty of common moral principles that span the plethora of our different spiritual traditions.

Here are just a few that I think most of us can agree on: ensuring an equality of opportunity for all to contribute; serving the greater good; rewarding honesty and accountability. Our current system fails at those things in most instances. Naomi Klein, who I saw speak just last night and who is the author of The Shock Doctine, does a better job of documenting specific examples of that than I ever could.

What I would like to do in this essay is provoke people to begin to question whether the social system built up around profit and private property still suits us in a day and age when advances in technology are rendering their pursuit not only obsolete but damaging to our further growth.

There is no argument that as a social system, capitalism served some very well. I firmly believe, however, the beneficiaries of its largesse are a rapidly shrinking minority. I'm also convinced that the corrosive influence of profit-seeking as the prime motivator in our society is undermining the integrity of all our essential institutions: medicine, education, government, and beyond.

There is also a very dark cynicism to the ethos of capitalism. It feeds a myth that human beings are essentially lazy and corrupt, and that they can only be motivated by the promise of fulfilling their most selfish material desires. My experience, and I'm guessing yours too, is that most people are on the whole good-hearted and giving. They are motivated by a desire to contribute to their communities and better the situation of their families. They want a purpose in life, and to belong to something greater than themselves.

What could arise in place of a profit-based economy? I think the glimpse of an answer was provided in Pekka Himanen's book The Hacker's Ethic. It describes a culture where people are motivated by respect and recognition among their peers. These hackers (the term did not originally hold its current pejorative sense) collaborated on open source projects, not to win great riches, but to establish their reputations. Because of the collective work of so many talented indivduals, they also created much stronger products than their proprietary competitors.

How much more successfully could a society function that did not limit how its members could contribute their talents, and that did not impose false rationing of resources in order to preserve an opportunity for the few to profit at the expense of the many? It's a matter of giving up our allegiance to old and outdated ideologies, and of looking at the world with the fresh eyes of a newborn. We do have the ability to make radical changes in the way we live, but we still lack the political will.

The trends of automation, digital communications, and open-source software and hardware (check out this interesting Wired article) are pushing the cost of manufactured goods further and further down. They're reducing the possibility of profit through any but the most artificial of means. This may seem like a scary proposition, but it's also a tremendous opportunity. It offers us a chance to remake ourselves and our society. But first we need to acknowledge the moment for real change that stands so clearly before us.

When stark outlines get fuzzy

This is the first in the series of philosophical essays I promised under the very broad and probably too self-important sounding banner of Toward a 21st Century Ethos. Because I don't want to write chapter-length posts, I'm skimming the surface on most of this. I hope what's under-treated will be fodder for the comments.

I admittedly chose to start with the topic that has only recently begun to shape itself in my mind. The outlines of my argument may appear vague and shifting, but that fits well with the subject I'm trying to tackle here.

The human mind seems to have an obsessive compulsion to neatly order the universe. We place the objects around us into tidy classifications, perhaps in order to convince ourselves we've mastered the world we live in. We especially like to stick these everyday things, and even each other, into numbered boxes. The problem is that sometimes the objects don't fit very easily, and we have to shave off a layer or two of truth in order to get them to squeeze into their assigned compartments.

Take as examples some very simple categories that are widely accepted, even though improved science and more accurate measuring devices have proved their inaccuracy. From childhood we learn there are nine planets; five senses; twenty-four hours in a day; and 365 days in a year.

Working in reverse, the precise measurement of a day (one earth rotation) is actually 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.2 seconds. That's not an amount that can be captured very easily on the face of a clock, however. This error in our neat 24-hour rendering of a day of course ripples through the measurement of our year, and we tack a leap day onto our calendars (not exactly) every four years to even things out.

The number of planets that wheel their way around our Sun might actually be eight, as some have demoted Pluto to asteroid status. Or it could be as many as eleven, if you insist on including the maybe-asteroid and its brethren in the Kuiper belt (see the Wikipedia summary of the controversy).

As far as our senses, without even raising the possibility of ESP, some scientists believe we should include proprioception (a combination of self-orientation and location) as a sixth. There are also those who are actively working to hack the ways we receive stimulus from the world, so one day we could, for example, see with our taste buds (see Wired Magazine article Mixed Feelings).

Beyond such accounting tricks for worldly things, we also like to label and define each other. We group people and stereotype them, and kid ourselves that we can "know" them based on such superficial characteristics as occupation, gender and ethnicity. If I remember my Jean Paul Sartre correctly, and I probably don't, part of it arises from a frustration over not being able to ever fully understand what's in the mind of the other. Unable to accept that reality, we distort it and reduce the other person to a parody of themselves.

The human mind is, obviously a very complex thing. Not only are individual personalities much messier than any categories we can hope to try to group them into, they can also contain traits that we normally view as contradictory. The idea that two opposites can co-exist in a single entity is a particularly challenging one for most of us.

It's much easier to come to terms with an unsubtle universe of clear divisions; constructing a worldview based on black-white, either-or, right-wrong, and us-them paradigms. The more nuanced conception that multiple, sometimes contradictory traits can exist in one person seems to threaten our too-secure sense of who we are, and how we fit into the world.

This may seem a bit of a leap, but what if we take the concept even further and extend it beyond the physical realm to that of ideas. The literal and the metaphorical, for example, are always treated as contradictory, but what if Genesis and evolution weren't viewed as mutually exclusive truths? It's a subject I tried to delve into in one of my very early posts here: The Serpent, the Tree of Knowledge and Evolution? What if hidden within the poetic imagery of the forbidden fruit is a seed of truth about how our consciousness actually evolved?

Can Science and religion on some level be reconciled? What about the teachings of the various religions we view as contending for a single truth? What I'd like to suggest is that these "opposing" truths haven't been reconciled not because they can't be, but because it requires us to extend ourselves beyond our usual comfort zones. It means putting aside the petty desire to prove one "side" superior to another, and instead do the hard labor necessary to win a fuller understanding of reality. It means putting our common humanity above serving any narrow ideology.

It might seem like I'm making an argument for a relativistic truth, but that's not quite accurate. What I am trying to say is that we, the world and the universe are so immensely complex that our limited mental capacities aren't able to wrap themselves around the entirety of it all. Individually, in fact, we may only be able to grasp a small piece of that complexity.

Uniting those billions of pieces collected by each of our receptive minds, however, gets us much closer to a comprehensive view. As technology allows us to link up more easily and gather these fragments into a whole, that becomes a very real possibility. That's a discussion for a future post.

Eye on the future

My friend JD left a very thoughtful comment in response to the post on my recent feeling of disequilibrium. He rightly challenged me on something that I should have never done: portray a personal opinion provoked by individual circumstance as a universal truth.

Contrary to what my statements may have implied, I am not opposed to spirituality. It's a trait that I believe lies at the core of who we are. I do have serious objections to organized religion, which I feel uses our innate inclination toward spirituality to control rather than free us. Most major religions were created under much different social circumstances than we have now. They have, in my opinion, become so intertwined with the status quo that they can't help but oppose any movement toward legitimate social change.

Of course religions aren't the only entities standing in the way of our progress. Corrupt governments, greedy corporations, and unaccountable financial institutions have also proven quite capable of making out very well while keeping us running in place. We're facing a worldwide economic meltdown, while these various mis-leaders play Nero and fiddle on amid the destruction.

I suggested to JD, half-seriously, that it might be interesting to have a dialogue to find common ground between my penchant for chaos theory and his belief that there is an organizing force in the universe. Going even further, I'd actually like to begin that conversation with a series of posts on the question: How do we arrive at an ethos for the 21st century? I'd also love to broaden it out to as many of you as would like to participate.

People around the web have been discussing the Law of Attraction for some time now. It's usually done within the context of attracting a mate or making money. I like the concept, but not the customary application. What if, however, we used the same method (listing out the characteristics we're attracted to) to conjure the future we want for our society?

I've long been an advocate of the idea that we get the future we imagine, and I hope this series of posts will be a small first step toward conjuring the future I want for the world. The ideas I'm going to discuss are in no way original. They are the synthesis of years of reading and conversing, and I'll borrow heavily from sources to which my memory can't manage the proper credit. If you know of a book or website that goes into much more details on these subjects, please do leave a comment.

This is of course very ambitious of me, and I'm not delusional enough to believe that I have a monopoly on the truth. It would help greatly if people fill in the gaps where needed, especially those with expertise in the areas discussed. In an ideal world, I hope there's even occasion for all of us to meet up face-to-face and have a more robust conversation. I know that things will only change with a groundswell of activity at the grass-roots, and the first step toward that could be finding a way for people from around the world to get together and talk about what we need.

Here's a short list of posts that came directly to mind, which I'll try to tackle over the next few weeks:

• Seeking to resolve not exploit contradictions
• A respect-based economy: removing the corrupting influence of the profit-motive
• Divesting ourselves of unnecessary things
  
• Openness, transparency and collaboration
  
• Grass-roots, direct democracy
• A non-anthropocentric universe
• One mind: piecing together the mosaic

These are meant to be wide-ranging philosophical essays, as you can tell. I'm sure that the posts will take the form of me thinking out loud, and I expect to be challenged often when I stray too far from other people's experience.

Before I dive into it, I might just take a stab at the "law of attraction" game on a much more personal level and try to solicit your help in identifying my ideal new occupation. Oh, and there will still be the weekly poems and drawings to keep us amused and distracted.

Grasping at universal connections while hanging onto my ego

Waves of conflicting ideas and sensations have been crashing around my head lately as it's been drenched by a wide-ranging cascade of stimuli:

• Watching Brian Swimme explain the implications of our expanding universe via favorite blog Goodness Graciousness
• Deciphering what it means to be "American" from the latest update to the citizenship exam (see For would-be citizens, a new test is in the offing from MSNBC)
• Reconciling those precepts with the latest torturous news on what's been carried out by our alleged representatives (see Congress Seeks Justice Dept. Documents on Interrogation from the New York Times)
• Keeping up to date on the Myanmar military dictatorship's attempts to suppress a protest movement lead by Buddhist monks hoping to resurrect Burma's aborted attempt at democracy (see Myanmar Hunts for 4 Monk Protest Leaders from AP)
• Reading the details of namesake Francis of Assisi's renunciation of material wealth and his recognition of the sacredness of God's creation
• Noting the concept of "Cosmic Forgetfulness" (see Wired magazine's Jargon Watch)

In order to impose meaning on this stream of possibly random inputs, my utterly confused consciousness has unsurprisingly distilled these droplets of social, political and philosophical thought down to a bridging metaphor informed by a misty recollection of an old film's final frames.

I haven't seen it since I was a kid, but the poetic ending of the 1957 science fiction classic The Incredible Shrinking Man found a lasting home in the recesses of my imagination. The synopsis of the story sounds more appropriate to comic-book-hero myth making than existential musing, but profundity can often be found in the seemingly mundane. Filmed at the height of the Cold War, it offers an interesting glimpse into the American psyche of that era, but it also delves into a more generalized human contradiction: the apparently conflicting desires for individual freedom and social belonging.

Exposed on the open sea to a wandering fog of pesticide, Scott Carey, the movie title's subject, finds his DNA hacked and his comfy middle class world undone. Rapidly losing physical stature and social significance, his mind must make sense of his reduced role as man and human being. Unexpectedly, at the moment all of the trappings of life in 1950s America have fallen away like scales from his eyes, shrunken to the size of an atom and peering into the vastness of the universe to which he has become more particularly linked, Carey reaches the following insightful conclusion:

I was continuing to shrink, to become... what? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future? If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world.

Freed from the outwardly imposed social demands we think inevitably define us as individuals, we're often more easily able to see the more fundamental connections to each other and every other piece of the cosmic puzzle. Janis Joplin intoned the prophetic wisdom "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose," and it's that bottomed out perspective that allows us to recognize Lear-like the folly of old ways.

Standing atop Fortune's ever-spinning wheel should give anyone pause, as the inevitable next direction is always back down toward the bottom. Self-proclaimed the world's only "super power" and its current flavor of empire, the United States is in that unenviable position. The high-walled dams we've erected to protect our privileged status will eventually be worn down by the tidal forces leveling the international economy, and when that day comes our ship of state will fall to meet the world's other boats raised up.

In many ways the fear of that unavoidable decline is painting the national psyche in panicked tones. A retreat to the nationalism of bygone eras was a predictable response, with its attendant passions for war and xenophobia. It's a regressive decision that will ultimately prove both futile and self defeating. Feeling unfairly besieged and at risk, we've renounced the cherished principles that best defined us. Armed, enfortressed and obscured, we've ignored the greater social movement toward openness, connection and transparency.

Holding on to old forms in the face of inescapable change is not a uniquely American failing, however, and in some parts of the world they lag behind even the previous century's standards of human rights. Burma is one such holdout, and all Americans should be able to identify with the struggle of its people to win the most basic democratic freedoms. The wonders of new technology are making it harder for repressive regimes to hide behind the cover of isolationism. Through the Internet the cause of a Buddhist monk in remote southeast Asia can more immediately become known to the entire world.

With science giving us opportunities each day to become more aware of our most basic commonalities, what keeps us trapped in the cozy corners of our well partitioned selves? It's much easier to operate in a universe with well-defined borders and clear-cut divisions, no matter how conceptually artificial, because it's the best way to maintain a sense of purpose and self-importance.

When faced with the overwhelming prospect of being a tiny speck on the infinite spectrum of time and space, it's hard to avoid feelings of awe-filled paralysis. If our lifetimes are just a blink of God's eye in the grand scheme of the universe, why bother? Others can answer that question more eloquently than I, but I choose to look at it from a different angle. If I'm connected to everyone and everything, how can I not make sure that I love, honor and respect all that I come into contact with?

From space dust we came, and into space dust we shall return. It's a sentiment that echoes the mantra of most religious teachings, but with the advances in science it's also a proposition that becomes more marvelous by the light year. It should remind us of the wondrousness of the creation to which we are inextricably connected, while dashing away the pretense of self-importance that lies behind most of our ego-feeding misbehaviors. We are the blessed particles of universe given consciousness to sense and know the marvels of our selves.

Cafe Society: This week's gleanings

Class is always in session at the Ennui Café and this week's lessons were varied and enlightening, as always. Already revved to maximum capacity by the caffeine intake, my fevered brain only retains the information received for later processing. Removed from their surrounding context the incidental connections often get lost, but it's my job to piece together the puzzling continuity.

Join me as I follow the twisted path of collective consciousness, and we'll wend our way toward a mutual understanding that is informed by decades of art, literature, and music. Coffee klatch culture is nothing if not eclectic, and there's a hint of augmented sweetness mixed in with the bitter bean's natural flavor ... so drink deeply from the unconventional cup. Here's a sampling of the topics discussed, with appropriate links in case you'd like to explore them in more depth:

Emile Nolde — I must admit my here-to-fore ignorance of the work of this German expressionist. He is known for his bold use of color and his mystical exploration of the supernatural (his painting "Masks Still Life" appears above). He was listed as a "degenerate" artist by the Nazis and forbidden from painting during the war, but during those years he secretly produced a series of watercolors he called "unpainted pictures." Interestingly, he was a member and supporter of the party early on. He certainly wasn't the only German to get swept up in the wave of nationalism only to become victimized by its hateful and barbaric ideology when the classification of the "other" grew broad enough to include him.

Joan Didion — An American essayist and novelist, Didion is someone I've heard of but never read. Her writing mixes the personal with social commentary, critiquing modern American culture and politics. The coffee talk was of her 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, which chronicles her grieving after the loss of her husband and was adapted into a one-woman play currently on Broadway. It's described as an interesting mix of the very personal story of Didion's mourning and a more clinical analysis of grief in general.

Gustav Mahler — The Austrian Romantic Composer's Songs of a Wayfarer (better translated as Songs of a Travelling Journeyman) was the subject of conversation as it had been performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra the night before. The song cycle, with lyrics by the composer, was allegedly inspired by an ill-fated romance and combines emotionally evocative music with German folk poetry. It mourns the loss of love, but the grief expressed is in an overly dramatic vein and the wished-for death an exaggerated conceit. Mahler himself would suffer a tragedy on par with Didion's in 1907, as his daughter died too soon at the age of five leaving him distraught.

Feting Sartre's coming into Being from Nothingness

On June 21, 1905, French Existentialist Jean Paul Sartre made his appearance on the world's stage. In many ways he was a man after my own heart with a penchant for cafés, politics, philosophy, and literature.

In college, I studied both Sartre's philosophical and literary texts, and his existentialist view of the world has always appealed to me; jiving well with my inclination toward punk music. Existentialism includes a pretty rigid morality that emphasizes free will and judges everyone by their actions and choices. It also tries to explain the sense of alienation and anxiety that is a large part of the modern human condition.

Sartre wrote several plays and novels to help illustrate his philosophical points, including: The Flies, Dirty Hands, and No Exit. The last is probably his most famous, dealing with a twisted love triangle in the after-life where the only hell-like torture proves to be the thoughts and judgements of other people.

The most complete explanation of his philosophy exists in the work Being and Nothingness, and it's in that tome that Sartre lays out the terms of his arguments. In my own limited vocabulary, the basic concept is the impossibility of fully knowing ourselves and others, and the frustration that limitation causes. While we may comfort ourselves with the deception that we can guess the thoughts and motivations of others — often reducing them to simplistic categories that make sense to us — deep down we know that we can never truly grasp the complexity of human consciousness. So it is that we'll always end up tortured by our own doubts.

As proof of that mental complexity, my mind made the leap from Sartre to a favorite little ditty by the Velvet Undeground that also deals with self-knowledge. It's a happy little tune, and much more fun to get through than a long philosophical text.

I'll Be Your Mirror
by Lou Reed

I'll be your mirror
Reflect what you are, in case you don't know
Ill be the wind, the rain and the sun
The light on your door to show that youre home

When you think the night has seen your mind
That inside you're twisted and unkind
Let me stand to show that you are blind
Please put down your hands
'Cause I see you, I do

I find it hard to believe you don't know
The beauty you are
But if you dont let me be your eyes
A hand in your darkness, so you won't be afraid

When you think the night has seen your mind
That inside you're twisted and unkind
Let me stand to show that you are blind
Please put down your hands
'Cause I see you, I do

I'll be your mirror

Happy Birthday Rene Descartes

He was born 411 years ago on March 31, 1596. He stopped thinking on February 11, 1650.

There are a number of unthinking politicians (and their supporters) who seem to disprove his statement "Cogito ergo sum" (I think therefore I am) -- but that's another discussion entirely.

Go to his Answers.com page to get the 411 on his impact on Philosophy and Math, including some good links to much more info.