Self, Soul, and God

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Mystics always seem to, alone in solitude, find themselves. . . and find God, at the same time.

The neuroscientist, Michael Graziano, thinks that Self, Soul, and God are all related manifestations of the human neurologic system of mental social perception.  NOT, mind you, mental social thinking, rather mental social perception.  He emphasizes perception – the experience of our senses – what we automatically and unconsciously consider to be real.  Perceptions, he says, are believed.   And what is fundamental about God, Self, and Soul, is that they are believed.

He explains, however,  that our perceptions are actually constructed models in the brain, that create our experience in predetermined ways.  We don’t experience them in this way,  though, we experience them as objective aspects of the real world.   Our minds fool us this way . . . very, very convincingly.  Our minds are virtual-reality devices.

Evolution has created these constructed models of perception, in our brains, not to be ‘true’ as we think of objective reality as being ‘true’, but for the purpose of promoting our evolutionary interests and goals – survival and reproduction.  They are constructed in various ways, for various kinds of perception, with or without cognitive, or motor elements, and with or without conscious elements, as natural selection has found to be best.  Most importantly, Graziano emphasizes, we are NOT built to be conscious that they are constructs,  Rather, we are built to believe – to feel – that they mirror objective reality.  We don’t ‘think‘ them, we ‘know‘ them.

“The perceptual machinery in the brain automatically constructs models about the mental states and intentions that underlie events.  We are built to do it.  We do it all the time.  We can’t help it.  It is our heritage as social animals.”

Our social perceptions – perceptions about what other living beings, (particularly other human beings), are thinking, feeling, wanting, and planning to do, are no different than our other perceptions of the world. Our evolutionary needs require intense social perception, as other living beings are key elements of the problems and opportunities of our lives. We conjecture about the awareness and intentions and perceptions of other beings.  We model their world of perceptions and what they are thinking and feeling so as to understand  and cope with their actions.

“We live immersed in self-created models of minds crowding around us.”

Further, we apply social perception, both consciously and unconsciously,  to ourselves.  We perceive ourselves – our thoughts, our feelings, and intentions – using the same system we use to perceive others.

And, very importantly,  we have as much objectivity . . . and lack of objectivity . . . about ourselves as we do of others.  Our self awareness is as limited as our objectivity of others is limited.  And because it is a perception, our self awareness feels as real as our other perceptions, which, unconsciously, feel objectively real. . . in us and outside of us.

And, if that is not enough:

“Somehow, we are aware of ourselves being aware, and we are aware of others being aware of their self awareness, and we feel like this awareness is disembodied”  – outside of our physical being. 

Disembodied, our self awareness becomes . . . our Soul, and the intentions and awareness in nature becomes . . . God.

Our social perception modeling apparatus is always on, operating, all the time.  It has a built-in bias of agency and intention.  We see, wherever we look, inside ourselves and outside of ourselves, agency and intention, all the time, the presence of Self, and Soul, and God.

“What is God but the perception of intentionality on a global  scale?

                           God, Soul, Mind, Brain        Michael S. A. Graziano, 2010.

 

The Music of the Universe

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“How do such simple things as atomic nuclei, or even more elementary particles like neutrons or muons, ‘know’ their half life?  . . .  These objects are like hair trigger bombs in an storm environment.  Space itself, seething with quantum fluctuations, supplies passing gusts, and every so often one is strong enough to to trigger an explosion.  In this picture, nuclei are basically simple and passive.  It is space, empty space! that is complex and active. 

Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek tells us about beta decay.  It is radioactivity of certain atoms, which have spontaneous release of beta particles – electrons and neutrinos.  This release is predictable . . .  in time, but only with probability . . . in space.  We can know how many atoms will decay in a unit of time, but not precisely which ones will decay, or where they will decay.   This is all caused by the ongoing, spontaneous energy fluctuations of vacuum space –  the Void, that energize the release of particles from atoms.  And these energy fluctuations, of empty space, are the actual powerhouse of those mysterious fields, quantum fields, the most basic known elements of fundamental physical reality.  They are the invisible, ghost power of the Universe.  Predictable, when, probabilistic, where.

Yet, our lived world is one of predictability in both space and time, one of self-organization, arising out of , and floating in, it seems, this sea of random quantum field energy fluctuations.   How can randomness form the ordered and predictable world?

Chvykov, et.al., in the journal Science, say that it is because of Rattling.  Rattling is when the random responses of the ‘many body’ systems of matter, to the pounding of quantum field energy fluctuations, inevitably yields perturbations of synchronization, and this synchronization then brings forth order, in both time and space.  In any infinite set of random collisions of movement, there will randomly – and inevitably – be collisions that repeat themselves, identically, in time and space, and these collisions, again, inevitably, foster further repeating and further establishment of the created patterns.  As Isaac Newton stated in his third law – for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.  And so, inevitably, the beat of synchronicity arises in the system, much like mechanical clocks, on a shelf, eventually all tick and tock in unison.

And so, despite a basis of random, unpredictable, fundamental actors and actions – the energy fluctuations of quantum fields – order inevitably and always arises.  Randomness only exists theoretically.  It is a useful abstraction. but real . . . it is not.

From nothing comes a beat, and from the beat,  order.  Not unlike how melody arises from iterations of rhythm.  John Lennon – of the Beat-les – once said:  “Its got to have a beat.”

Reality is the ‘music of the spheres’.  The world is a musical instrument.

Electromagnetic God

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The heretic pharaoh, King Akhenaten, of ancient Egypt, in 1350 B.C., realized that the true God, the all powerful creator of the Universe, was not the Sun, itself, but the sun’s rays.  He wasn’t far off, the sun’s rays are electromagnetism.  Our known world is electromagnetism.

We experience the gravitation field, we manipulate the quantum field, we ponder about a field of consciousness, but we live in the electromagnetic field.  Electromagnetism is light, it is energy, it is charge, it is magnetism, it is electricity.  And electromagnetism is chemistry – the dynamically ordered and structured flow of electrons between atoms.   And as life is ordered . . . structured . . . dynamic . . . self-organizing . . . self-reproducing . . . and sub-critically stable . .  chemical complexity, life, too, is electromagnetism.

Electromagnetism is how our nerves conduct signals by firing across electric charge gradients, across axon membranes. Our brains, our hearts, our muscles, our thoughts, our emotions, our vision – all fire electromagnetically.  Seizures and cardiac sudden death are discharges of electromagnetism.  Our moods and state of consciousness flow with electromagnetic, EEG brain waves.

Electromagnetism is a wave, a wave that wave’s itself, like an undulating rope, electric charge swinging magnetism and magnetism swinging electric charge.  It can travel in a vacuum.  It binds protons with electrons into atoms, creating the matter, the very stuff of our existence.  It streams as packets of energy – photons – creating information, communication and computers.  What it actually is, that is waving, we don’t know.

The shimmering of gold itself is electromagnetism, the shared electrons of the atoms of its metallic structure are all traveling between its atoms,  at the shimmering speed of light.

Electromagnetism is the one and only invariant reality of our universe, the one non-relative entity of unchanging dimension to all observers.  Nothing can travel faster than electromagnetism, and it has no mass, and does not exist at rest.  Because of this invariant fact of its finite velocity, and its stable dimension, we have a world of knowable space, time and causality.

We can actually see a tiny photon – a subatomic entity – with our naked eyes, testament to its central role to our being.

“People can perceive flashes of light as feeble as a single photon“.  Nature Communications 7, 12172, 2016

It was all photons. . . in the beginning.

“The early universe contained both matter and anti-matter and these two forms of matter annihilated each other into photons when they were brought together.  There was slightly more matter than antimatter in the early universe; without this asymmetry, the universe would be pure energy-no stars, no planets, and certainly no life.” 

The world was without form, and God said let there be light.

We are fish in a vast, electromagnetic sea.

 

Ancestor Hominin

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Fossilized footprints of Neanderthal were recently found in the sandstone of an ancient beach in northern France, adults with children going one way, adults only going back the other way.

Starting forty thousand years ago, Neanderthal gradually disappeared, the last of them living in caves in the north and eastern sides of the rock of Gilbraltar.

We are not sure why.

The Neanderthal made fire, made and used tools, and lived in nomadic groups. They were mostly ambush hunters, striking from woodland cover, with hand-held spears. They did not have  projectile weapons.  They may have had burials, and likely decorated themselves.  They may have had rudimentary art.

Their disappearance coincided with the arrival of modern humans, who came into Europe from Africa and the Middle East and hunted much the same food as the Neanderthal – elk, horses, reindeer, aurochs, bison, and the woolly mammoth. The Neanderthal were bigger and stronger than modern humans. We have no evidence of war.

“We should see evidence of the direct killing of neanderthals by modern humans – and we don’t.. 

We have always assumed that we modern humans were smarter.  We maintained larger groups.  The white sclera of our eyes empowered our social and verbal communication.  We had projectile weapons, and could better hunt in the open – courser predators . . . We could hunt in packs.  We hunted for furs as well as for food, used bone needles for sewing, and made better clothes.  Our shelters, and burial ceremonies were more elaborate.  We clearly made art.  And we harnessed the skills that reside in the genes of other species, for our own advantage.  We domesticated wolves, and our dogs were immensely helpful in hunting, able to run down prey, hold them at bay for the kill, and help defend against scavenger predators.

Perhaps we simply out hunted Neanderthal.

But maybe not.

Something else happened just as modern humans arrived – the Campanian Ignibrite Eruption, the largest volcano eruption in Europe of the past 200,000 years.  This happened in the Gulf of Pozzuoli, just west of the modern city of Naples, Italy, and just east of Mount Vesuvius.

Before the time of Pangea – the great universal continent formed when all tectonic land masses came together –  there was a great sea that encircled the globe, the Tethys Sea.  This sea became the Mediterranean Sea as the African tectonic Plate migrated north and collided with the Eurasian Plate to complete the super continent.   This collision created the the cliffs of the northern mediterranean shore, the volcanoes of western Italy. . . and the Campanian eruption.

The eruption sent volcanic ash 7000 km, in all directions,  covering all of Italy and  eastern Europe.  A volcanic winter followed, with cold temperatures over all of Europe, causing loss of game and the woodlands, changing the game of survival.

Modern Humans were able to get to Southeast Asia and Australia 50-70,000 years ago.  Cline Findlayson suggests that maybe Neanderthal were able to keep them out of Europe . . .until the Campanian Eruption.

More than the modern human mind, it may have been the modern human body, the more gracile, more energy efficient body from Africa, better at walking and running over longer distances, that favored survival for modern humans in the cold and open steppe terrain that Europe became.

“I maintain that humans are the most invasive species that has ever lived.”  The Invaders,  Pat Shipman.

Neanderthal do live on, their genes living on in the genes of modern humans.  They are our. . . ancestors.

Philosophers have tried to understand the nature of human nature for thousands of years.  Hominin ancestors like Neanderthal can tell us.

Neanderthal lasted for 400,000 years. . . . Will we?

Natural Born

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They were originally Siberian nomads. Some 8 thousand years ago, they  crossed the Bering Strait into North America. The Nemeruh – “the people” – came to live a primitive hunting and gathering life in eastern Wyoming .  They had no pottery, no farming, no priests.  They were Stone Age hunters.

In the early 1600’s, Spaniards from Mexico brought Arabian-bred desert horses to the Americas. . . Mustangs.  Some of them got away.  Within a few decades there were . . .millions. . . wild, roaming the plains and canyons of western North America, all the way into Canada.

In those times, on the Great Plains, buffalo herds as large as 4 million strong grazed the rolling fields of grass, in groups as large as 50 miles long and 25 miles wide.

The Nemeruh became highly skilled horsemen.  Horses greatly empowered hunting, but also war, territorial war between the native peoples.  The Nemeruh relentlessly fought their way south, displacing the Apache’s, the Ute’s and others, and conquered the greatest buffalo country of all, the Llano Estanto – the lands of northern Texas and Oklahoma.

They became known as the Comanches, so named by the Ute’s as “those who are always against us”.

“A Comanche brave who captured a live Ute would torture him to death without question.  A Comanche captured by a Ute would expect to receive exactly the same treatment.

The Nemeruh, and all the Plains peoples, lived ”immersed in the elemental world” of the “endless, trackless, and mostly waterless expanse of undulating grass” – the “oceanic” plains that were filled with natural fires, sudden storms, blizzards, venomous snakes, and ravenous predator beasts.

Their life was “ceaseless toil, hunger, constant war, and early death”, but also PURE MAGIC, with “spirits everywhere, in rocks, trees, and in animals” and nights filled with dancing and singing.  The raw liver of a freshly killed buffalo was a delicacy, as was the curdled milk form the stomach of a still nursing bison calf.  They never ate the buffalo heart.  They lived intensely alive.

”virtually all the Indian tribes waged war against their neighbors and practiced deeply sickening torture. Prisoners who weren’t tomahawked on the spot could expect to be disemboweled and tied to a tree with their own intestines, roasted to death over a slow fire, or simply hacked to pieces and fed alive to the dogs.”

Once, they captured and adopted Daniel Boone’s grand daughter. but after a raid against them by settlers, they tied her high in a tree, alive, and shot her full of  arrows.

The Comanches . . . ‘stopped cold’  . . . the northern advance of the Spaniards and the western advance of the Americans. . .  for 150 years.  They were the very last holdout of native people against the tide of settlers in North America.  Only the deliberate slaughter of the buffalo could bring them to submission.

”The strength of their attachment to each other, and the demonstration they gave of the same, even to the dividing of the last morsel with each other upon the point of starvation, might put any professed Christians to blush!  But they were just the reverse of all this to all the world outside.”

Denouement

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November 22, 1963

In the morning, LBJ tried to talk JFK into having Ralph Yarborough, his political adversary, in the Presidential car on the motorcade, rather than John Connolly,  his political ally.  JFK said no.  Jackie heard their heated exchange.

Later in the morning, Richard Nixon boarded a plane, in Dallas, to fly home.  As he embarked, he told reporters of rumors that JFK would remove LBJ from the upcoming re-election ticket.

In Washington, D.C., Dan Reynolds, who sold a life insurance policy to LBJ, began testifying to Congress about LBJ’s demands for kickback payments – purchasing advertisements on LBJ’s radio station and a stereo set for Lady Bird.

Carlos Marcello, New Orleans mafia boss, was in district court in New Orleans, fighting deportation by Attorney General RFK for falsifying his passport.

At 12:35 PM, shots rang out in Dealey Plaza.

As Mr. Reynolds was about to present incriminating documents, it was announced that JFK had been killed.  “I guess you won’t need these.  Giving testimony involving the Vice President is one thing, but when it involves the President, that is something else.”

While the Judge in the Marcello trial was instructing the jury, he was interrupted by news of JFK’s death.  The verdict later that day was NOT GUILTY.

In Cuba, a French journalist, Jean Daniels, sat with Fidel Castro in a seaside villa at Varadero, Cuba.  Some weeks prior,  JFK learned of Daniel’s planned visit to see Castro, and asked Daniels to give Castro a message: “If you want peace, you must break with Moscow”.  Daniels was to made to wait to see Castro . . .for 3 weeks.  Then, on 11/21/63, they finally met.  They talked until 4AM.  Castro invited him to lunch the next day.  During lunch, Castro received a call, and was told of JFK’s murder.  “This is very bad news”.  His fear was that he would be blamed.

In Paris, Rolando Cubela, a Cuban physician and leader in Fidel’s government, and a neighbor of Castro in Varadero, met with a CIA representative.  He had secretly met with the CIA, before, stating that he wanted to defect.  In Brazil, in September 1963, he had met with Desmond Fitzgerald of the CIA, who asked him to assassinate Castro.  Rubella had conditions.  He wanted a high powered rifle, and he wanted personal orders, directly from RFK.  Many in the CIA suspected ‘a set up’. Fitzgerald gave RFK’s go-ahead anyway.

As Cubela was given a poison pen to use on Castro, news of JFK’s assassination arrived.  He didn’t take the pen.

Two years later, in Cuba, Cubela was found guilty of espionage and was given a death sentence.  Castro commuted the sentence, and sent him books while he was in prison.  Cubela was released in 1979 and moved to Spain, where lives to this day.

Desmond Fitzgerald died of a heart attack, playing tennis, in 1967, as doubts of the Warren Report were in the news.

In Los Angeles, Aldous Huxley died of laryngeal cancer.

In Oxford, England, twelve minutes later, C. S. Lewis died of kidney failure. He spoke his last words:  “We have no right to happiness”

 

Bottom Up

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Sir John Cowperthwaite was financial secretary of Hong Kong from 1961 – 1971.

“His administration did not collect any economic data during his tenure.”  Jairaj Devadiga

“if I let them compute theses statistics, they’ll want to use them for planning.”

During Cowperthwaite’s administration, Hong Kong grew “ from being only one fourth as rich as the United Kingdom in 1961, to being 40% richer by 1996′.

What should poor countries do?  His advice:  “Abolish their office of natural statistics”.

When management is driven by statistics. it leads to what is called. . . Surrogation.  Metrics get misinterpreted as goals.

Measurement, contrary to all conventional wisdom, leads to mismanagement.  

Case in point:  Soviet Russia

“Fifty years ago, 180,000 whales disappeared from the oceans”.  Charles Homans.

This was due to Soviet fishing. “In one season alone, from 1950 to 1951, Soviet ships killed nearly 13,000 hump back whales.”

But Russia didn’t need whale fishing product.

“The Soviet whalers . . . were motivated by an obligation to satisfy obscure line items in the five year plans that drove the Soviet economy.  In the grand calculus of the country’s planned economy – the dictates of the State Planning Committee of the Council of Ministeries – whaling was considered a satellite of the fishing industry”

Gross fish tonnage was the metric goal.  Harvesting whales was the easiest way to tonnage.

“No matter what, the plan must be met.”

It is common to think of society as a unitary whole with unitary motivations, something which requires central control, top-down, to achieve focused goals, driven by the statistics of outcomes.  “Mussolini made the trains run on time.”

Thomas Friedman:

“. . .when [one party autocracy] is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as china is today, it can also have great advantages.  That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”   

And yet societies in history that have flourished, and have been more adaptive and thus more stable,  have been more biologic – bottom-up, ecological networks of distributed motivations, interests, and initiatives, with freedom of action and opportunity to learn from experience.

Margaret Thatcher:

”. . .  they are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is NO SUCH THING as Society.   There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except thru people and people look to themselves first.”

Milton Friedman:

”Voluntary exchange is a way to get cooperation among individuals without coercion.  The reliance on voluntary exchange, which means on a free market mechanism, is thus central to the liberal creed.”

”Both sides to an economic transaction can benefit from it, if the transaction is voluntary and informed”.

  Matthew Ridley:

“Innovative societies are free societies where people are free to express their wishes, and where creative minds are free to experiment to find ways to supply those requests . . .”

 

 

 

 

 

Zen Spider Man

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General Lee

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General Robert E. Lee married Mary Custis, grand step-daughter of George Washington.  Thru this marriage he acquired slaves.  He freed them by 1862, following the instructions of his father-in-law’s will.

Lee did not find slavery completely without justification.  [it was] “a greater evil to the white man than to the black race. . . blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially and physically.  The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, and I hope will prepare and lead them to better things.”

Loyal to Virginia, he sided with the Confederates.  “How can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?”

He fought for the confederate cause. . . relentlessly. . . and. . . with relish . . .to the very end.

At Mule Shoe,  when all was nearly hopeless, he tried to break out of Grant’s encirclement, to try to hold out in the hills of Tennessee or Georgia.  In these last days of the war, he sacrificed many thousands of his men.  Few of those men  owned slaves.

“. . he rode Traveller hastily toward the fighting.  He encountered terrified soldiers, streaking back in chaotic flight [from counterattacking union forces], “Hold on!” Lee shouted, seeking to stem the rout,  “Your comrades need your services,” The terrified men refused to heed his admonition, “Shame on you men, shame on you!”  Ron Chernow.

He would not negotiate release of captured Negro Union soldiers who had been southern slaves.

Lee was West Point and studied Napoleon. He was successful on defense, on his home turf – at Bull Run, at Fredericksburg, at Chancellorsville – but not so effective on offense, on unfamiliar ground, outside of Virginia, such as at Antietam or Gettysburg.

Strong on tactics, not so much on strategy.

“While Lee attacked the front porch, Grant would attack the kitchen and bedroom“.  William T. Sherman.

He had Grant’s respect, but not his awe.  “After I crossed the James, the holding of Richmond was a mistake. . if he left Richmond when Sherman invaded Georgia, it would have given us another year of war“.

At Appomattox, Lee dressed. . .  like a victor . . . in his very finest silver grey.

“I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”  Ulysses S. Grant

Following Lincoln, and ‘malice toward none‘, Grant refused Lee’s sword, and sent him freely off .  Only five days later, Lincoln was assassinated.

Lee’s stature in the South has been mythic, both then and. . . to this day.  His equestrian statue in Lee Park, Charlottesville, is . . .26 feet . . .high.  For Robert E. Lee, and for most southerners. . . to this day, something northerners don’t understand. . . to this day . . .is that homeland freedom, not slavery, was the great issue of the Civil War.  As in all eons past, when your land is all you have, you defend it with your life.

The best Union General, General Lee?  ” McClellan, by all odds“. . .!!

 

Stuff of Reality

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What something is, is different from what something is not.   It is fundamental logical truth that when something is something, it can not also, then, be what it is not.

What physicists seem to have found, however, is that the very basic stuff of reality. . . is both what it is and what it is not.  It is both continuous and discontinuous. . . smooth and flowing like a wave, and discrete and moving like a particle.

Physicists today call this wave-particle stuff quantum fields.  Quantum fields are invisible ghosts of potentiality.  Undisturbed, they are undulating waves of continuous possibility.   Disturbed – ‘measured’ –  ‘observed’, they are moving particles and events.

Erwin Schroedinger discovered an equation that describes the state of a given quantum field and how it behaves.

“There is no ‘energy’ in the Schroedinger equation, a central point that means that whatever is ‘waving’ in the Schroedinger wave equation is neither energy or matter.  It is terribly important that no one knows ‘what’ is waving in the Schroedinger wave equation.”   Stuart A. Kauffman.

Slam a quantum field with an intense point of energy.  This is what Particle Accelerators do.  With long tunnels of electromagnetic and superconducting powers, they drive particles to ever higher speeds, and focus them, with extreme precision, to collide into each other – “like aiming a rifle at a mosquito sitting on the moon“.  Leon Lederman  From how the bits of debris scatter, and where they scatter, physicists learn about quantum fields.

There are different kinds of quantum fields, it seems, quantum fields of gravity, of electromagnetism, and of nuclear forces.  They must be unified in some way.  This was something that Albert Einstein was trying to discover in the last thirty years of his life.

Peter Higgs, in Scotland, 37 years ago, figured that a certain other kind of field must also exist, a field that interacts with radiation and energy, and creates mass, and the material world that we can know.  When particle accelerators became powerful enough, in 2012, the Higgs field was found.

“Over the 20th century, we came to picture all forms of matter as accumulations of transient disturbances in ubiquitous fields.  Some of those fields, when cold, create space filling mists – the Higg’s field is one.  Like morning dew, they are spontaneous emanations, thrown off as the fields settle into equilibrium.”  Frank Wilczek.

Quantum fields seem layered, creating a giant jello cake Universe, in which some layers are like whipped cream and allow radiation unhindered to travel at the speed of light, the fastest anything can go, and some layers are like caramel, with resistance to movement causing mass and the gravity that creates the planets and galaxies.

The layers jiggle as events occur. . .  not totally randomly, but with predictable probability . .  and  with mysterious unity.  Where there is a bounce one way, there is somewhere else a bounce the other way.

There must be other layers. . . A field of consciousness. . .maybe?

“I’d expect complex biochemistry to be consistently biased in the direction that leads closer to consciousness, as gravitation biases motion towards massive objects.  I have no evidence for this idea.  It’s just the way biology seems to work.” David Gerlenter

And God said . . .