Tyrant Lizard King

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600 million years ago, in the Burgess Shale fossils of Canada, one can see dramatic changes happening in evolution.  Life is exploding in form and diversity.  Nature is experimenting wildly, with body shapes, body parts, eyes, and heads, fossils that look like Pixar animation.  We aren’t sure why, but at that time, animals started eating other animals . . .alive.  The dance of predator and prey, it seems, was creating an evolutionary storm. 

It is one thing for life to learn to survive in the elements, to be able to find and digest food, reproduce and survive the weather.  It is another to survive the attacks of other living beings, to outsmart other beings that are trying to outsmart you.  A spiral of deceit and evasion and ferocity develops.  Both predator and prey push each other to get bigger, and quicker, and meaner, and smarter . . . fast.  

Forward 350 million years, as the great single-continent land mass, PANGEA, is splitting apart,  causing a hell-fire holocaust of volcanic eruption called the Permian Extinction, predator and prey evolution culminates in the age of the dinosaurs.

“as the world was going to hell, dinosaurs were thriving, somehow taking advantage of the chaos around them”  The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs,  Steve Brusatte.

Prey became bigger and more herd-like, utilizing defense in numbers and size, and more and more armored with horns and plates of skin. The Sauropods, like Argentinosauris – the largest animal ever on land on Earth –  were four London buses long and five stories tall.

Predators became more and more cunning and vicious killing machines.   Initially it was the crocodile, Archosauros, that ruled the killer world. Then came the Allosauros, the “butcher of the Jurassic”.  Finally came the  most ferocious hunter and killer of our planet’s history. . . Tyrannosaurus Rex.  

Movie maker Steven Spielberg, did not have to exaggerate the evil, monstrous nature of Tyrannosaurus Rex.

T. Rex appears, almost exclusively in North America, 85 million years ago.  He was 35-40 feet long, could weigh up to 7 tons, had teeth the size of bananas, 58 of them, the head the size of a car, and massive, bone crushing jaws capable of 3000 pounds of pressure, the strongest bite of any known animal on earth. His skull was built like an airplane fuselage, to withstand the forces of his bite.  All his action was in his head.  He didn’t chew. . .he ripped and crushed.  He bit deeply and. . . pulled.    

T. Rex hunted in packs. He had exceptional low frequency hearing.  Like a seismometer, he would know, from far away, where you were.  His camera eyes were the size of grapefruits.  He had satanic horns for eyelashes.   He was covered in scales and feathers like some freakish Mardi Gras nightmare.

 T. Rex was the largest predator that has ever lived on land in the 4.5 billion years of life’s history on Earth.  This meat lusting monster travelled in packs!  He had bird’s lungs, and could breath in his bones.  He could run 25 miles per hour.  He was as smart as a chimpanzee. . the animal today that is thought to most closely rival human intelligence!  He had very good smell.  His only ‘weakness’ – he couldn’t turn well.  

Empathy was not much in the T Rex brain.  Young T. Rex may have wanted to get away from Momma T. Rex as soon as possible.

To this day, there is no fossil evidence of T. Rex eggs. . . .

Triceratops seems to have eventually been his main prey, a 40 ton gargantuan – the size of 5 elephants – with very thick scale and a giant, goring central unicorn horn. He was hard to bite without getting pierced.  

 T. Rex was just so good that his success was likely spelling his own doom, as he would eventually kill himself out of food.  Before that, only God, it seems, could stop this Devil on Earth, and it seems God actually did. 

Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops were present on the Day of the  Chicxulub asteroid impact 65 million years ago, the great inferno that brought to an end the Age of Dinosaurs, and T. Rex, and the spiraling horror show of predator and prey.    

Birds are the only surviving dinosaurs today.

Nature it seems, for a long time was better at making killers than cooperators.  Only small, nocturnal, rodent mammals, running under foot, at night, could co-exist in the Tyrannosaurus heyday, too small to bother with for T. Rex.  Only after the asteroid impact could gentler predators, and greater cooperation. . .the age of mammals. . . flourish.  

Eventually came Humans, as good at cooperation as T. Rex was at killing. They may be next to put themselves out of business. . .  if God doesn’t.   

 

Science Priest

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Isaac Newton got the concepts right, perhaps better than anyone else in history.    Mass is quantity of matter.  Momentum is quantity of motion. Force is change in motion. Change of motion is acceleration.  Mass is resistance to force.  Force equals mass times acceleration.

F=ma

This equation “is the basis of our mechanical, civil, hydraulic, acoustic, and other types of engineering; it used to understand surface tension, the flow of fluids in pipes, capillary action, the drift of continents, the propagation of sound in air and in steel, the stability of structures like the Sears Tower or one of the most wonderful of all bridges, the Bronx-Whiteston Bridge    Leon Lederman

Alone on his aunt’s farm, to escape the plague after graduating from college, he developed the laws of motion for both the planets in space and falling bodies on earth.  To explain his laws, he developed a whole new system of mathematics, the calculus, which gives dynamic change to geometry.  He is still the greatest scientist of all time.

He seemed to know that his mind was different.

“Common people did not know how to abstract their thoughts from their senses.  Speaking always of relative quantities or measures, they are thus unable to discern the true, real world that lay beyond their perceptual cloaks.”

He was certain that his ideas were correct.

He was not much interested in convincing others. He avoided argument – the ‘legal sphere’.  Why waste one’s precious time?  He kept his discoveries to himself for almost 20 years, until Edmond Halley,  of Halley’s comet, pressured him to publish.

Born into the puritan tradition, an orphan raised by priests, he was a devout believer in God, and an exacting student of the Bible.

He was a ‘natural philosopher’ and that included theology.  Getting the concepts right meant getting God right too.  Be clear about God so as to be clear about Nature.  God is both immanent – in all things, and transcendent – above all things.   Absolute Space is the universal presence of God.  Absolute Time is the omniscient consciousness of God.  The Laws of Nature are Transcendent, like their creator.  Gravity, like God, is a omnipresent, a universal power, active everywhere.

“The principles I consider, not as occult qualities supposed to result from the specific Forms of things, but as general laws of Nature, by which the things themselves are formed; their truth appearing to us by Phenomena, though their causes be not yet discovered.”

As We are in God’s image, our reason is God’s gift to us to discover the laws of nature.  And as God is unitary, so is truth.  Truth must be consistent and agree with observation.  Science, for Isaac Newton, was a religious calling, Our human reason can be trusted.

His great treatise,  Philosophiae Principia Naturalis Mathematica – the greatest book of science ever written – for him, was written in the tradition of Moses of the Bible.

And yet he remained humble, mindful of what he didn’t know.

“Thus far I have explained the phenomena of the heavens and our sea by the force of gravity, but I have not yet assigned a cause to gravity. . . I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reasons for these properties of gravity, and I do not ‘feign’ hypothesis.”

Isaac Newton gave the same intensity that he gave to natural philosophy, to the study of Christian history.  Any polytheism is blasphemy,  and always leads to corruption. . .  in all things, in theology. . . and in natural philosophy.

His studies convinced him that the notion of the Trinity was wrong –  a giant conspiracy starting at the Council of Nicosia, with the falsely added 1 John 5:7, and 1 Timothy 3:16 verses to the King James Bible.  In his time, in England, denial of the Trinity was a capital crime.  He kept these views to himself.

Sir Isaac Newton didn’t like music, poetry, or literature.  He never married, and had no known personal companion.  He was buried in Westminster Abbey . . . ‘like a king’.

Alien

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A fish won’t stare at you, but an octopus will.  They watch you, with their human-like camera eyes, as much as you watch them. They are the smartest animal that has stayed in the sea, the only invertebrate – animals with no backbone – with a large brain.   Though as primitive as shell fish, they have as many neurons as a dog.

Octopus are hunters and predators, but with no physical defense.  Unlike their ancestors, they did not retain their shells.  They can ink the water to escape, and do instantaneous camouflage, and a few are poisonous, but mostly they are mobile, and smart. . . brains over braun.  Two thirds of their brain cells are in their eight arms.  They can squeeze thru an opening as small as one of their eyes.

They are minds that swim.

Their squishy bodies, with no hard parts, are pure tasty, and quick, digestible meat.  They are hunted by all the predators of the sea.  Their life span is short, they die shortly after breeding just once.  Life is risky, they go for broke.

They are ingenious at escape, and always try.  They have been known to open a jar . . . from the inside . . . to get free.  They seem able to recognize particular individual humans.  When they escape, they are uncanny at picking the moment you aren’t watching them.

“When you work with fish, they have no idea they are in a tank, somewhere unnatural.  With octopuses it is totally different.  They know they are inside this special place, and you are outside it. All their behaviors are affected by their awareness of captivity.”  Peter Godfrey-Smith

They have been found to have perceptual constancy –  they understand an object is the same object, from different points of view.  They have comparative memory analysis – they can bring past experiences to bear on present situations and decisions .  They have curiosity.  They will interact with something, even when they know they can’t eat it.  They do step by step action, like other animals with consciousness, they can navigate mazes.

They are not considered to be social, but divers have known then to ‘high five’ each other . . . !

They have three hearts and blue-green blood.

We humans are not just conscious, but also are self-conscious, we have awareness of ourselves along with our awareness of the world, an eerie sense of two-ness that haunts us, and we sense that the octopus has that too.

“Meeting an octopus, is, in many ways, the closest we are likely to get to meeting an intelligent alien.” Peter Godfrey-Smith 

They may BE alien.  Scientists have very recently decided that since their genetics and intelligence are so much a leap from their origins that some of their DNA, literally, may have come from outer space, carried in the spray of meteors from outer space.

“the genome of the Octopus shows a staggering level of complexity, with 33,000 protein-coding genes more than is present in Homo Sapiens. . . the possibility that cryopreserved octopus eggs arrived in icy bolides [in meteors] several hundred million years ago should not be discounted, as that would be a parsimonious cosmic explanation for the Octopus’ sudden emergence on Earth circa 270 million years ago.”   Steele, et. al.  Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, March 2018.

Thinker Speaker

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“All humans of normal intelligence can learn any language, provided they start at a young age.  After the age of five or six, a child can almost never become perfectly fluent in a language, and the ability to learn it can completely disappear soon after that.  After puberty, it is almost impossible to perfect the pronunciation of a second language.” Gene, Peoples, and Languages, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza.

Do we speak because we think, or do we think because we speak?  How does our thinking depend on our language?  Did we become smart because we can talk, or can we talk because we are smart?

To Noam Chomsky, we speak because we think, and we think . . . linguistically . . .not because it helps us speak, but because it helps us think.  Life is about characters and  events, situated in the past, present, and future, and so is our thinking.  We function in social groups, with goals of survival, children, cooperation, and deception.  We live stories, and so we think stories.  Our minds are literary.  We are playwrights, and we are one of our characters.  Language is always and everywhere structured for stories.

For Chomsky, speech came later, an output of thinking, like a printer is to a computer.  Unlike for thinking, there are physical constraints on  speech delivery, so speech is less than thinking.  By speaking our minds with others, we expand our knowledge.  Speaking empowered thinking. Thinking and speaking feedback to enlarge our intelligence and our scope of  collective action.  The rest is history.  We vanquished the bigger and stronger Neanderthal, and everything else.  We have taken over the planet.

Noam Chomsky started linguistics in the 1950’s, when the human mind was considered a blank slate, to be filled up with culture and learning.  He noted, however, how easily and fast children acquire language without specific instruction.  They acquire the skills of language fare faster than it can be taught.  He wrote a ground-breaking work, Syntactic Structures, in 1957, in which he posited an innate language ability with  a ‘language acquisition device’ in the human mind – a universal, innate and hard-wired brain system that unfolds a language ability – in a child, as it is activated, not learned,  by  exposure to speech in the early years of childhood.

This was at last a theory of nature and nurture in human development, not one or the other.  Chomsky’s theory up-ended the blank slate foundational theory of social science, and launched the field of modern brain science.  He is, today, the sixth most cited person in scientific literature . . . of all time . . . just behind William Shakespeare.

People vary in their ability to convert thought into speech.  Chomsky, himself, is master thinker/speaker.  No one can speak more clearly, more comprehensively, or more spontaneously,    or enunciate streams of information as they support reasoned conclusions and opinions about very complex ideas, than Noam Chomsky.  He can drive people crazy.

Politics is a different matter.

This great linguist theorist of biological human language is a . . .  radical socialist anarchist. Famous for repudiating behaviorism, the blank slate theory of social science, he strangely applies behaviorist rationality to human political nature.  Seemingly blind to the biology of tribalism and political behavior of non-linguistic human nature,  he forever condemns illogical politics as immoral. . . .

Math and Truth

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“How is it possible that mathematics, a product of human thought that is independent of experience, fits so excellently the objects of physical reality?”  Albert Einstein.

In 1939, at Cambridge University, Ludwig Wittgenstein was lecturing on the Philosophy of Mathematics.  By this time, with messianic certainty, he was adamant that mathematics was just a lot of linguistic convention, a bunch of tautologies based on definitions and word play.  He thought that seeking mathematical proofs, along with the quest to develop a mathematics without inconsistencies, was pointless.  He essentially taught against mathematics.

At the same time, Alan Turing, soon to be one of the great mathematicians of all time, was also at Cambridge, teaching a course in mathematical logic. He was also a student in Wittgenstein’s class.  He had proven certain mathematical truths that would eventually be very important for code breaking during the coming war, and for the future of computer programming. He could not agree that mathematical inconsistency didn’t matter.

“The real harm of a system that contains a contradiction, will not come in unless there is an application, in which case a bridge may fall down or something of the sort.”

Turing and Wittgenstein debated each and every class.  The other students  were bystanders. Wittgenstein would cancel class if Turing wasn’t going to show up.  Turing gradually realized that Wittgenstein considered debate. .  itself. . . as meaningless. He eventually stopped going.

The Vienna circle philosopher, Moritz Schlick, told his friend Albert Einstein of his allegiance to Wittgenstein’s thinking, finding all philosophy ‘superfluous’ and all metaphysical thinking meaningless.  Schlick was the dean of the Vienna school of ‘logical positivists’, philosophers who tried to believe that only observations, verified by experiment, could be considered real or true.  Theory and philosophy can never lead to knowledge.

Einstein, like Turing, could not agree.  He found the philosophers such as Kant and Mach very helpful.  He defended the role of both experiment and theory in scientific advancement.  It was not one or the other.  All living creatures used thinking in some way!  Concepts, as well as observations, theory as well as data, are necessary.

“Physics is an attempt to construct, conceptually, a model of the Real World, as well as its law-governed structure.  You will be surprised by Einstein the metaphysician, but in this sense every 4 and 2 legged animal is, de facto, a metaphysician.”

Turing’s legacy is computers, Einstein’s is space travel.

Computers that have logically inconsistent programming will crash.

Space ships, with inaccurate calculations of fuel and trajectory, traveling millions of miles to encircle and land on asteroids,  will crash.

The SpaceX robot-guided Falcon 9 rockets ride into sun-synchronous orbit, deliver satellites to geo-synchronous orbit, at the speed of a bullet, and then return, decelerating from 120,000 feet per second to zero feet per second, in a matter of minutes, rotating elegantly from head-first to feet-first, and landing, intact, on a platform 60 square yards in size, floating at sea.

Mathematics, a product independent of human experience, is the pilot.

Tc(t)=Kpe(t)+Ki∫t∘e(t)dr +Kde(t)

Time and NOW

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“What then is time?  If no one asks me, I know what it is.  If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”  St. Augustine of Hippo.

Everywhere in archeology, in the pyramids of Giza, the stones of  Stonehenge, the observatory of Chichen Itza, or the temples of Angkor Was, humans have worshiped the heavens. But. . .  not the sun or the moon or the stars themselves.  No, humans have been worshiping their . . . predictability.  Humans express reverence for this mysterious truth of nature . . . the past informs the future.  And for their gift of memory, humans give gratitude to the . . . gods.

Rocks smash or get smashed.  Life can get out of the way.

“Brains are predictive devices, and exploit the fact that recurrence is a fundamental property of the world around us.  Experience and memory allow the recall of similar situations and the deployment of previously effective actions.”  Nature, Vol 497, May 30, 2013.

Memory recall can be unconscious, but with consciousness, memories can more powerfully be re-lived.  This may be what consciousness is for.  Consciousness sorts the past, present and future, and with it comes a sense of a continuous, uniform, forward-flowing time.  Isaac Newton declared that this time was an absolute.  For Einstein, time only existed as a part of SpaceTime, not as an independent entity, and only a local one.

“Only ghosts can hear the sounds of an eternally, uniformly occurring tick-tock.  Ask an intelligent man who is not a scholar what time is and you will see that he takes time to be this ghostly tick-tock  There is no audible tick-tock everywhere in the world that could be considered as time.”  Albert Einstein

For Nicholas Humphrey, the sensation of time is a tool of the mind for organizing memory and experience.

“Suppose indeed that human beings travel through life as in a “time ship” that like a spaceship has a prow and a stern and room inside for us to move around“.  A History of the Mind,  2008.

And for artists too:

“Thus, what happens in the thick moment of conscious sensation, Monet seems to be suggesting, is not that we blend past, present, and future but rather that we take a single moment and hold on to it just as it is – so that each moment is experienced as it happens for longer than it happens.  Seeing Red, 2006.

One physicist, Richard A. Muller, suggests that time very much does exist, and moves forward in the ongoing expansion of SpaceTime that has been happening since the Big Bang.

 “Just as space is being generated by the Hubble expansion, so time is being created.  The coninuous and ongoing creation of new time sets both thearrow of time and its pace. Every moment, the universe gets a little bigger, and there is a little more time, and it is this leading edge of time that we refer to as Now.”  Now, The Physics of Time, 2017.

NOW may be what rides the crest of this wave of new SpaceTime continually being created  by our ever expanding Universe, and we, with our conscious awareness, as unique riders on this surf.

Laureate

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There is singing, and then there is singing. Bob Dylan does singing.  Listen to  ‘House of the rising Sun’, on his very first album.

Malcolm Gladwell speaks of innovators, people who are always different.  They wear odd clothes, and in ways that others don’t and wouldn’t.  They start fads, but they don’t follow them.  They never follow anything.  Whatever it is that makes most people want to be like others, and join in with others, they don’t have.  It is a life strategy.  Think about it.  Always being different avoids comparison.  You can win when only you are playing.

“What others think about me, or feel about me, that’s so irrelevant.  Anymore than it is for me, when I go see a movie, say Wuthering Heights or something, and have to wonder what Lawrence Olivier is really like.”

This is Nobel Laureate, Bob Dylan.  He insists on being him, whether you like it or not. With a born focus  on his own, inner experience, with his trained skills of melody and lyric, he expresses what he finds there.  He wants no contrivance, no preconceived, or planned song. And he doesn’t want us to understand him.  He doesn’t think we should try to understand him.

“It’s all in the songs.”  Be open to what a song does for you, not what you are told to think it means, or what you think it is supposed to mean. Rather than think the song. . .feel it.

“If a song moves, you, that’s all that’s important.  I don’t have to know what a song means.  I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs.  And I’m not going to worry about it – what it all means.”

Hey Mr. Tambourine man/ Play a song for me/Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship/My senses have been stripped/My hands can’t feel to grip/My toes too numb to step/wait only for my boot heels to be wandering/I’m ready to go anywhere/ I’m ready for to fade/Into my own parade/Cast your dancing spell my way/I promise to go under it.

“I can write a song in a crowded room.  Inspiration can hit you anywhere.  It’s magic.  It really is beyond me.”

“My songs are personal music, they’re not communal.  I wouldn’t want people singing along with me.  It would sound funny.  I’m not playing campfire meetings.”

My hearts in the highlands with the horses and hounds/Way up in the border country far from the towns/With the twang of the arrow and the snap of the bow/My heart’s in the highlands, can’t see any other way to go

“John Donne, the poet-priest who lived in the time of Shakespeare, wrote these words, ‘the Sestos and Abydos of her breasts.  Not of two lovers, but two loves, the nests’.  I don’t know what it means, either.  But it sounds good.  And you want your songs to sound good.”  Nobel Lecture, 2017.

“I’m no poet. Poets drown in lakes.”

The Texas School Book Depository

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“The evidence does cast enormous suspicion on Oswald. . . . leaves him looking guilty of something.  The evidence does not, on the other hand, put him behind a gun in the sixth-floor window.”   Anthony Summers

At 11:45 am, Oswald’s co-workers on the sixth floor took the elevator down for lunch and to see the motorcade, leaving Lee without an elevator. His last words to them are: “Guys how about an elevator?  Send one of them back up.”

At 11:45-11:50 am, Book Depository foreman Bill Shelley sees Oswald near a phone on the first floor.

At 11:50 am Charles Givens sees Oswald reading a newspaper in the first floor lunch room.

At 12:00 noon, Bonnie Ray Williams goes up to the sixth floor to eat his lunch, he stays there until 12:15 pm.  He sees no one else while he is there. The remains of his lunch – chicken bones and lunch bag – are found  after the assassination.

Between 12:00 and 12:15 pm, Junior Jarman and Harold Norman walk thru the second floor lunch room, and remember that there was “someone else in there”. During interrogation, in police custody, Oswald remembers two Negro employees walking thru the lunch room while he is there.

At 12:15 m, Arnold Rowland, standing outside across from the School Book Depository,  sees two men in the sixth floor windows, one holding a rifle across his chest.  Rowland points them out to his wife.

At 12:35 pm, on November 22, 1963, President Kennedy is assassinated. His motorcade is five minutes late.

“I asked him what part of the building he was in at the time the President was shot, and he said he was having lunch about that time on the second floor”.

At 12:37 pm, Marion Baker, a motorcycle policeman riding just behind the President’s car, thinks the shots came from the roof of School Book Depository.  He races over and into the front door of the building, less than one and a half minutes after the shots are fired.  He tries to use the elevators, but they are both stopped on the fifth floor. he races up the stairs.  On the second floor, he encounters a man with a coke walking away from him.  He calls him to stop.  Mr. Truly, the building supervisor, catches up just then, he has been racing ahead of Baker to the top floors.  “That’s Lee Harvey Oswald, he works here”.  Oswald is calm, no sweat on his brow,  not short of breath.

At 12:40 pm, right away after watching the motorcade, and the shooting, Victoria Adams rushes down the back stairway of the Texas Book Depository,  “to see what was happening”.  She has been working that day on the fourth floor of the School Book Depository.  She does not see or hear anyone on those stairs, the stairs a sixth floor gunman would have had to use to escape.

Just at the time of the assassination shootings,  Photojournalist James Altgen takes a photograph of the motorcade, with the front door of the School Book Depository, in view, behind the oncoming motorcade.  There is a small man in the doorway, shirt half open, leaning to look out.

Is… that …man . . . Lee Harvey Oswald?

 

 

Anti-Philosophy

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“After all, he seems to have a lot to say about what can’t be said.”  Bertrand Russell.

Ludwig Wittgenstein came from a  very wealthy family of Vienna, in the time before WW I, a family of musicians, professors, and  suicides. He went to the same grammar school as Adolf Hitler.  His sister was painted by Gustav Klimt, and helped Sigmund Freud escape the Nazis.  He fought in WWI, reading Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief, while voluntarily manning the point, the most dangerous position, on the front.  Beethoven was his hero.  He was precocious in math, and obsessed by logic.

He would scrutinize his own thinking to find the hidden assumptions that underlie all thinking and the subtle ways that logic fails to be logical.  He would puzzle over the use of  words in speech – what is subconscious to most of us –  and search for  hidden patterns.  He wanted to know how we know, what we know, what can be known.

“Sometimes my ideas come so quickly that I feel as if my pen is being guided.”

He was perplexed by the riddles of self reference in logic, the great stumbling block in Bertrand Russell’s attempt, in Principia Mathematica, to derive all knowledge from first principles of logic. Is the set of all sets that don’t include themselves, also a set?

He became anti-philosophical, convinced that philosophical questions were merely linguistic puzzles, and that language, with all of its mixing up of perceptions and conceptions,  hopelessly impaired thought. Truth can only be known by experience, not with thinking, and only shown, with art perhaps, but not with words. Thought and speech are mere ‘social games’ for living a social human life. . . something, sadly, he himself was not much able to do.

“Whereof one can not speak, thereof one must remain silent”.

With his spooky certitude, and mesmerizing stare, he was considered brilliant. For a time, he was thought to have eclipsed all of conventional philosophy.  He was lionized.

John Maynard Keynes:  “I have met God, he arrived on the 4:30 train.”

He lived an eccentric, solitary life, much of his time in a remote cabin in Norway. At one point he gave away all of his enormous wealth, and lived thereafter in near poverty.  He feared going mad, that he might commit suicide. Three brothers did.

He suffered a constant solipsism, an oppressive self consciousness,  haunted by a loss of self connection.  Is my thinking about myself also my self?

He was a disorder of self reference, like the paradoxes of logic that so obsessed him.

Insanity and genius are not the same thing.

“He has penetrated deep into mystical ways of thought and feeling, but I think (though he wouldn’t agree) that what he likes best in mysticism is its power to make him stop thinking.”  Bertrand Russell.

“Peace in thinking is the wished-for aim of those who philosophize.”

He was trying to think himself out of thinking too much. He didn’t succeed.

Coastal Journey

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Our solar system is not a perfect clock. There have been 16 ice ages in the past million years.

“Small variations in the tilt of the Earth on its axis and variations in the planet’s elliptical path around the sun are all that is necessary to plunge the planet in and out of the freezer. ”   Tim Flannery.

Some 120,000 years ago, modern humans migrated out of Africa, and we kept going, first into the middle east, then on to southeast Asia, with a detour down into Australia, then up the eastern Pacific to the Bering Strait,  and finally into North America.  By 15,000 year ago, we reached the tip of South America.

We evolved in Africa, from a hairy, tree climbing, social primate ancestor.  Somehow, over time, we lost most of our hair, gained a lining of body fat, developed upright walking, a descended larynx that enabled speech, special sweat glands for  thermal regulation, and a diving reflex for swimming.  We became like sea mammals,  more suited for water than the forest or savannah.  Dolphins are our close cousins in intelligence and communication, the whale is the only other mammal to have menopause.  Where and when this happened is a mystery. The Afar Triangle of northeast Africa, on the way out of Africa, may have been a vast, flooded wetlands.  We may have had to swim our way out of Africa.

We followed the coastlines, along the beaches and up rivers, as sea gatherers and fishermen.  Food was plentiful, rich in value, and easy to harvest.  The travel and protection were easier.  We love the beach to this day.

Our journey was during a perilous geologic time.  A warming earth was melting ice, rising sea levels, lifting and shifting tectonic plates,  causing earthquakes and volcanoes. Released by the loss of the weight of the great ice sheets as they melted, continental plates heaved up, and the moon pulled stronger on the increasing tidal waters.  The Pacific tectonic plate, being the largest and the thinnest – only 2.5 miles thick –  moved and cracked the most, aggravating the ‘ring of fire’ of volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunami’s that pound all the coasts of the Pacific Ocean.

As modern humans arrived along the South East Asian coast, some 70,000 years ago, the shallow, continental Pacific Sundra shelf  waters were flooding, and a great volcano –  perhaps the greatest ever volcano – Toba – in Indonesia on the island of Sumatra, erupted.  The massive blast of volcanic dust blackened the sky, creating a volcanic winter and  mass extinction.  Human life all the way  back to northern Africa was nearly extinguished.

The surviving humans were pushed inland and north, and eventually into the New World.  Floods, tidal waves, receding waters, and exploding volcanoes filled their prehistoric consciousness.  This has carried on to our day, in the creation stories of the world, told by their descendants.

The myths are not myths, they are history.

In the beginning the world was in water, and there was darkness.  And then light came to the sky, and then the sun appeared and separated the earth from the sky.