My So-Called Penis

Really?

The L.A Times reports: Surfer killed in shark attack died ‘doing something he loved’

He loved being eaten by sharks?

The religious experience

My latest read is a double biography of the fathers of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. (It’s titled, rather creatively, “Freud & Jung.”) Currently, I’m in the Freud section. Freud was known to be an atheist and rather dismissive of religion (hence my warm feelings for him.) Freud even wrote an entire book dismissing religion called “The Future of an Illusion.” When he sent a copy to religious friend, the friend reproached him for not understanding the true source of contentment found in religion. Freud reported…

This, he [the religious friend] says, consists in a particular feeling, which he himself is never without, which he finds confirmed by many others, in which he may suppose is present in millions of people. It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded — as it were, ‘oceanic’.

Of course, keen eyed readers of this blog have seen this feeling described before. In one blog post I described the book “My Stroke of Insight” in which…

…the author describes feelings of spiritual transcendence after suffering a serious left brain stroke. She describes feeling liquid, connected to the universe, and at some points incapable of delineating where her physical self ends and the rest of her environment begins.

The specificity of terms is interesting here. Freud’s friend described feeling “oceanic”, while this book’s author describes feeling “liquid.”

I also once mentioned a Los Angeles Times article on the use of LSD to treat various ailments. The article reported…

Delany said her “trip” awakened a deep and reassuring sense of “knowing.” She came to see the universe and everything in it as interconnected. As the music in her headphones reached a crescendo, she held her breath and realized it would OK — no, really easy — not to breathe anymore. She sensed there was nothing more she needed to know and therefore nothing she needed to fear about dying.

Can this sensation be explained in neurological terms? Again, quoting my post on “My Stroke of Insight”…

Today, I find myself scanning through an old New Yorker article, “God on the Brain.” (September 17, 2001.) The piece discusses the brain scans of Tibetan Buddhists and Franciscan nuns taken “before and at the peak of their transcendent feelings.” It notes…

Beforehand, the scan’s computer portrays the brain’s activity as a palette of fierce reds in rich yellows. During meditation or prayer, however, a marked color change was noted in a small region of the left side of the cerebrum called the parietal superior parietal lobe, which is just behind the crown of the skull. The flaming reds have turned into deep azure, signaling a substantial decline in activity.

Clowes’ revenge

Reason magazine has an interesting article on the comics of Dan Clowes, one of my all-time favorite comic creators. Clowes did the hilarious “Eightball” comic in the 90s and various related products. The article focuses on Clowes battles against the elitist world of high-art and his realization that comics could be a meaningful product.

In early 1990s issues of his comic book Eightball, Daniel Clowes regularly savaged the pretensions and hypocrisies of high art. In his estimation, art school was a scam where washed-up hacks dispensed expensive affirmation to lazy and inept strivers. Art critics were boobs and blowhards. Galleries and museums rewarded hype, novelty, and speculation over craftsmanship and authentic expression. The world of high art, Clowes suggested in multiple stories, was silly, shallow, venal, and blind to actual talent.
…
It was as if he realized that the world of commercial art—and especially the world of comic books, where the end product was a cheap commodity that was far more resistant to the sort of variations in price that made assigning value in the high art so capricious—was the best domain for the serious pursuit of art.

Alas, the high art world failed to completely appreciate the radical nature of Clowes’s approach—then and now. But compare his cultural impact to, say, Haring’s or Scharf’s. The latter ostensibly made art more accessible by bringing it to the streets, the subways, and the Mudd Club. But they still mostly trafficked in one-offs certified by cultural elites and underwritten by well-heeled collectors.

Clowes, in contrast, wasn’t interested in making art more accessible. He was interested in making that which was already highly accessible—the comic book—more artful. Not out of any utopian sentiments—Clowes has always come off as a cultural snob of the highest order—but rather just because he really, really believed in the artistic possibilities of the comic book.

Hear, hear! And death to art snobs. When the revolution comes they will be dragged from their houses as they shit and piss themselves in fear and then tortured to death. Yay!

Poor, Poor, Pitiful Jackson

Anyone with any taste is aware of Warren Zevon’s tune “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me.” What I just found out is that it’s theorized that Zevon was taking a swipe at his friend Jackson Brown in the song. (The song features a protagonist who seems to have no problem getting the ladies yet feels sorry for himself.) If so, this makes the line “I met a girl at the Rainbow Bar, she asked me if I’d beat her” even more compelling as Jackson was famously accused of beating up Darly Hannah (though serious questions exist about these charges.)

Anyway, here’s Brown’s version of the tune.

More robot music!

Robo-Baroque (electronic classical music) by Wil Forbis

Sight unseen

You may have heard the anecdote that when European ships first appeared on the horizon of the New World, the natives could not see them. The argument is that these ships were so unlike anything they had ever seen, so uncategorizable by their brains, that they were rendered invisible. (I’ve heard similar accounts of Western ships appearing on African shores.) You probably thought, “what fools they must’ve been to not be able to see something. They were thoroughly deserving of their centuries of subjugation.”

I was just emptying the dishwasher. I finished, then looked in and noticed that I had not removed a butter tray. The butter tray seldom gets washed and as a result is usually not part of a dishwashing session. In this sense, when placed in the dishwasher, it become something of a foreign object. Was my brain responding to the sight of the dishwasher tray in the same way the brains of native Americans responded to those ships?

Here’s another example that everyone can relate to. I was missing a book. I went into my bedroom to look for it, but even before I entered the room, I was thinking “there’s no way it could be here.” It wasn’t. I searched the rest of the house, then gave the bedroom a second try. There was the book in plain sight, on my desk. Because I had no expectation of finding it there, it had become invisible. Or, it’s possible that the house is haunted by a poltergeist who jokingly removed the book from my view, then returned it to my desk. It seems quite likely that when the next houseguest appears, the poltergeist will use its supernatural abilities to increase the pressure on that person’s head, causing their head to explode and bits of their brain to fly out across the dinner table.

Destroy all humans!

Ray Kurzweil, in a recent issue of Discover magazine, argues that machines will become conscious by the year 2029. Such claims are always a bit suspect since there doesn’t seem to be much consensus on what consciousness really means. Kurzweil takes a pass at defining the term.

My own view is that consciousness is an emergent property of a complex physical system. In this view, a dog is also conscious but somewhat less so than human. An ant has some level of consciousness, but much less than that of a dog. The ant colony, on the other hand, could be considered to have a higher level of consciousness than the individual ant; it is certainly more intelligent.
By this reckoning, a sufficiently complex machine can also be conscious. A computer that successfully emulates the complexity of the human brain would also have the same emergent consciousness as a human.

We understand that there are machines now that “sense” light, sound, even smells (in the sense of sensing floating chemicals.) But we don’t believe that those machines have the interior sense of seeing, hearing or smelling that we do. Kurzweil seems to be saying that machines will get so complex that they will develop those interior senses, along with the ability to think and feel. It seems like a reasonable enough claim.

Now, a classic science-fiction narrative is the idea that machines become hyper intelligent and declare war on the human race or some such. (This is “The Terminator” storyline.) In the philosophical “Straw Dogs” book that I’m reading, this scenario is contemplated.

Humans are no more masters of machines that they are of fire or the wheel. The forms of artificial life and intelligence they are constructing today will lose human control just as naturally occurring forms of life have done. They may even replace the creators.

Natural life forms have no built-in evolutionary advantage over organisms that began their life as artefacts. Adrian Woolfson writes: ‘ it is by no means certain that living things constructed from natural biological materials would be able to outcompete their synthetic and ahistorically designed machine-based rivals’. Digital evolution — natural selection among virtual organisms in cyberspace — may already be at work…. But the new virtual environment is no more controllable than the natural world. According to Mark Ward, ‘once a system is handed over to the living, breathing software there is no turning back’.

The author of “Straw Dogs” then goes on to theorize that humans, struggling to survive in a world dominated by machines, might turn to bioengineering their selves (genetic engineering etc.) to better compete with machines. In the course of this, all trace of humanity as we know it would be destroyed.

Happy Sunday!

Bacteria, our friend

Keen eyed readers are doubtless aware of my fixation on the question of why there are so many fat people in America. Why so many VW sized hippos waddling through our supermarket aisles and fast food establishments? I was just at a barbecue ribs joint and was stunned at the obese monstrosities shoveling food into their gullets.

The October 22 New Yorker has an interesting article on bacteria. It turns out our war on bacteria may be a factor in our growing obesity problem. Bacteria, as you probably know, are tiny lifeforms living in areas like our stomach, mouth, ears and other fun places. They cause various diseases. About 70 years ago, antibiotics, which kill bacteria, were developed. You probably got many shots of antibiotics as a child and throughout your life. One bacteria that might have been attacked by your antibiotic shots lives in the stomach and is called H. pylori. The article says…

There is… convincing evidence that destroying H. pylori could alter metabolism in ways that increase the risk of obesity.

Why would this happen? It’s complex and you have read this article for full details, but basically H. pylori has a strong relationship with two stomach hormones which effectively tell us when we feel full or hungry. If you eradicate this bacteria, you throw these hormones are out of whack, and consequently, you keep eating long past when you should stop. To quote the article…

“A generation of kids are growing up without H. Pylori regulating their levels of ghrelin [one of the hormones],” Blaser told me. These results suggest that the message to stop eating never makes it to the brain. If those hormones aren’t controlled, it becomes far more difficult to control one’s weight.

A team from Blaser’s lab then fed antibiotics to mice in dosages that were comparable to those used to treat children with ear infections. The diet of the mice remained unchanged, but, compared with a control group, they gained considerable weight.

This might explain all those hideous, fat kids you see running around. At least fat mice are kind of cute.

Why we’re doomed

You might be familiar with Ray Kurzweil’s theory of “The Singularity” — the idea that mankind’s progress will become faster and faster in such a way that any predictable sense of progress will be lost. One day we’ll cure cancer, the next we’ll be sucking power out of the sun, three minutes later we’ll have evolved to leave our corporal bodies behind and exist as multidimensional Spirit creatures.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what this ever increasing level progress and change could do to people’s careers. If you went back back 100 years and took up a career as a horse shoe maker, you’d have a pretty stable occupation. At some point, you’d see cars coming, but you have 10, 20 years before your service was really made obsolete. In the near future, I don’t think you’ll have that forewarning. You could be a computer programmer and master the object-oriented programming language Z+, and overnight find the language made obsolete. You could be a recording engineer and master the techniques for the current music fad, electro-reggae-rap, only to find the fad disappear within the space of a few months. The massive onslaught and distribution of information and media could lead to people getting bored of said information and media much faster, leaving producers of such information and media out of work.

“Straw Dogs” gets into this.

One of the pioneers of robotics is written: ‘In the next century inexpensive but capable robots will displace human labor so broadly that the average workday would have to plummet to practically zero to keep everyone employed.’

Hans Moravec’s vision of the future may be closer than we think. New technologies are rapidly displacing human labor. The ‘underclass’ of permanently unemployed is partly the result of poor education and misguided economic policies. Yet it is time that increasing numbers are becoming economically redundant. It is no longer unthinkable that within a few generations the majority of the population will have little or no role in the production process.

So, the theory here is that the production of useful “stuff” — be it food, products and (in my view at least) intangibles like music, fiction etc. will be done by robots and computers. Does that mean people do nothing? “Straw Dogs” continues…

An economy whose core tasks are done by machines will value human labor only insofar as it cannot be replaced. Moravec writes: ‘Many trends in industrialized societies lead to a future were humans are supported by machines, as our ancestors were by wildlife.’ That, according to Jeremy Rifkin, does not mean mass unemployment. Rather we are approaching a time when, in Moravec’s words, ‘ almost all humans work to amuse other humans’.

You better start working on getting motherfucking amusing!

The bacteria revolution

The following, quoted from a quote quoted at Andrew Sullivan’s website is relevant to some of my recent thoughts.

People can’t stop themselves from competing for status. It is branded into the side of the brain before you are born. As a primate, status hierarchies are a part of life, …

Now, in my previous post, I was talking about how my life in Los Angeles was in many ways filled with “material” things. A rich social life, girlfriends, culture (whatever that means) as well as, frankly, good food, good booze, some drugs etc. In San Diego, I have very little of that (true, I do have a collection of friends here, and could easily get a girlfriend if I wasn’t so tired of women’s bullshit) partly because I’m basically broke. But also because I’ve come to the conclusion that this drive for “stuff” (which can be actual things, or concepts, like a relationship) is, as the quote above states, branded into the brain. It’s a programmed drive.

So, the question becomes, if I just ignore the programming, does the wanting, the yearning, the needing go away? Obviously, as the above quote implies, on some levels, the answer is no. If you’re starving, merely recognizing hunger as a programmed drive doesn’t do much. But, for more esoteric needs, I find taking a certain long view does help. In LA, I was something of a social striver, trying to climb the social hierarchy. In San Diego, I really couldn’t care less about such things, mainly because I recognize they’re fundamentally meaningless and transient. A lot of the wants people seem to have — for more money, bigger house, a great family — seem also meaningless to me. Not because I’m some brilliant spiritual guru (well, partly that), but because I see that the need really being fulfilled is not the understood need. Nobody really needs a bigger house; people have bigger houses to symbolize their increased social status etc. My suspicion is that if you don’t work and worry yourself to death in the effort to get a big house, you could actually live a pretty comfortable, enjoyable life.

So, on some level, knowledge is power. But it can’t completely do away with the sting of defying these drives built into us. Interestingly, a section I was reading in “Straw Dogs” today talks of these very drives.

The lesson of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science is that we are descendents of a long lineage, only a fraction of which is human. We are far more than the traces that other humans have left in us. Our brains and spinal cords are encrypted with traces of far older worlds.

The point being that the drive for a big house does not come from our caveman or even monkey ancestors. It comes from primitive bacteria who themselves worked shitty accounting jobs and strived to deftly play office politics so that their wife could host fancy cocktail parties for the neighborhood. It’s time to set your inner primitive bacteria free!