Purpose

Can we say "everything" has a purpose, or a goal? This notion raises shouts of high heresy amongst the scientific party-liners. But I keep thinking, and have thought for years: every multi-part population that crawls the earth has some purpose, no matter how dull or uninspiring. The ants' nest is an organism that somehow maintains its integrity and multiplies and defends itself against others.

And for all living living systems, in Claude Bernard's perception, "the architecture of physiological function is directed towards the maintenance of the internal environment." Learned scientists rammed that mantra into my mind over sixty years ago. By the internal environment, they meant that in mammals, blood temperature, acidity, various and complex bundles of measurable factors were kept within quite strict bounds throughout the organism's lifetime.And, mutatis mutantis, this type of activity appears in all life from trees to beetles.

Around 1929, when I was one year old, Walter Cannon gave Bernard's criterion of internal stability the name "homeostasis" and generalized the idea to all systems, even engineering devices such as thermostats, and automatic pilots for ships and airplanes.

Every living thing seeks constancy within itself. Even though there are a only very few measurable properties that have to remain steady, life must cease when temperature rises beyond bounds or blood sugar crashes.

Could it be correct to extend this seemingly magical quality to all things, apparently living or not? Does the seemingly inert scree on a mountainside have a "wish" to remain as it is. Is there any tendency for a set of causally unconnected objects (I'll call it a mere nexus of oddments) to act in one mode, as if intentionally?

I wonder if a some notion of a final purpose enlivens even the most disorganized events to evolve, in time, towards a unity of feeling; or at best a harmony of action.

RIPs

THE DAY AFTER Michael Jackson's death, I wrote on my Facebook page:

When Michael Jackson was born I was thirty years old. I barely noticed his existence until the very hour of his death. For me, his entire life's work amounted to a tiny crepitation in the far, far distance. Pity the poor struggler who fights to win attention from the remotest edges of being. RIP.

The disappearance of Jackson came as the greatest shock only to members of the "Boomer" generation. To people like me, who were born before 1929, Jackson and his associated popular art means little or nothing.

During the week of Jackson's death, two other pop icons died: Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon. I had known of them since the 1970s and they had become, in a small, TV-ish way, part of my life. Their passing saddens me.

But I am used to death. I have lost many parts of myself, physically and mentally, to Time. Very soon I too shall cross the river. Everything perishes. Even protons decay after a very long wait. What is to become of us, no one can know.

Nothing repeats, except perishing itself. Boomers and their publicists must get used to it.

Rights to Land

Here's a comment on land-owner's rights which takes in, not only current argumetns, but also negates quarrels over land titles which have endured for centuries. It appears in Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution blog:

No one really has any claim to any land beyond what force will allow. Basically, if you can hold on to a piece of land by military means, it's yours. This may piss off a lot of people, but it's the reality. Don't like it? Bring a bigger army.
Then the other side brings an even bigger one. Eventually (and theoretically), the winner is "whoever the UN backs", since that's going to be the biggest army there is right now. It basically becomes an "armed forces arms race".
These things are not stated directly by politicians or the media, and there's this twisted sense of "indigenous ownership". It's all just land, and we're all just people.

People spread out a long time ago. How long does it take for a people to have a "real" claim to a land? 100 years? 500? 1000? What if that "people" was a bunch of different former nationalities? Haplogroups? Languages? It could go on forever, and these things just aren't a useful basis for land claims or policy. It's just plain divorced from reality.
No one owns anything. You keep land because: a) no one can kick you out or b) no one cares that you're there. There's no inherent right. No group is "truly" indigenous. All we've got is "who lived there last" and maybe "who we think lived there longest". Neither of those things imbue people or land with any sort of magical pixie dust that says they belong together. That's just the unspoken reality of it.

Finally, it makes the often laughable assumption that some "group" is really a pure representation of something, not taking into account historical migration (into the areas thought to belong to that "group"), interbreeding, and genetic drifting. How would you even determine who *really* gets some sort of claim? Do a test for haplogroup/type on every person that says something is theirs?

No one really has any claim to any land beyond what force will allow. Basically, if you can hold on to a piece of land by military means, it's yours. This may piss off a lot of people, but it's the reality. Don't like it? Bring a bigger army. Then the other side brings an even bigger one. Eventually (and theoretically), the winner is "whoever the UN backs", since that's going to be the biggest army there is right now. It's basically becomes an "armed forces arms race". These things are not stated directly by politicians or the media, and there's this twisted sense of "indigenous ownership". It's all just land, and we're all just people. People spread out a long time ago. How long does it take for a people to have a "real" claim to a land? 100 years? 500? 1000? What if that "people" was a bunch of different former nationalities? Haplogroups? Languages? It could go on forever, and these things just aren't a useful basis for land claims or policy. It's just plain divorced from reality. No one owns anything. You keep land because: a) no one can kick you out or b) no one cares that you're there. There's no inherent right. No group is "truly" indigenous. All we've got is "who lived there last" and maybe "who we think lived there longest". Neither of those things imbue people or land with any sort of magical pixie dust that says they belong together. That's just the unspoken reality of it. Finally, it makes the often laughable assumption that some "group" is really a pure representation of something, not taking into account historical migration (into the areas thought to belong to that "group"), interbreeding, and genetic drifting. How would you even determine who *really* gets some sort of claim? Do a test for haplogroup/type on every person that says something is theirs?

Posted by: AyeCarumba at Jun 22, 2009 9:23:45 PM

Global Warming: James Lovelock's unorthodox approach

Still in mid-reading of Lovelock's latest: The vanishing face of Gaia. Lovelock treats the biosphere as a complex system, so intricate as to be virtually a living organism.

Multifarious geochemical factors interact within the earth's biosphere, but not inevitably so, Lovelock considers. The mood of the sun, the biases of mankind, the life-drives of all organisms compete and cooperate to move a variety of variable equilibria around, in seafch of -- shall we say -- comfort? Of safistaction, or beauty?

I wonder where we are in this search? Can it end?

When I have read more, i will report more. Until then, I am also reading Scared to Death, which is a more physicalist and bureaucratic rendering of the same far-reaching problem.

Daniel Hannen, the Telegraph and direct democracy

Looks to me like a recipe for complete disaster. Hannen has now lost my confidence after having won it for his brilliant excoriation of shabby Gordon Brown. He sums up his recipe for democracy reform in his Telegraph blog.

"Open primaries; the right of recall; a democratic upper chamber; citizen legislators; ending the patronage powers enjoyed by the Prime Minister under Crown Prerogative and making appointments through open parliamentary hearings; self-financing local councils; popular initiative; referendums."

What a mish-mash. "Your People, Sir, is a Great Beast."

Democracy and duckhouses

This email I received from a relative in UK notes some of the pettier forms of corruption among politicians:

We are having quite a lot of fun with MPs' expenses. The one that has captured the public's imagination is the purchase by a Tory MP of a rather fancy floating duck house for £1,500 at the taxpayer's expense.

They are very pretty, and if not so expensive I would like one on our roof for the two ceramic chinese ducks I bought recently from Oxfam...

Also amusing is the fact that the Chancellor of the Exchequer charged us £1500 in accountancy fees to do his annual tax return

These news items point to a long-standing problem with representative democracy. Should we pay our representatives? If we force them to make politics their sole trade then they no longer represent "us."
I can't see any easy way out of this.

Arithmetical Uproar

How can I praise the outrage Gödel brought?
Mathematics torn to baseless shreds;
Scholars tumbled from their tenured beds.
Professors, parsing propositions, sought
To mute conjecture, lest the farce they taught
Should pry them from their sherried Chairs. Threads
Of logic tore apart, and donnish dreads
Of fallacy convulsed the overwrought.

Yet, Gödel's thunder hides a healing theme
Within his proof that reason is inchoate.
He bears a bright reward that Hilbert's dream
Had failed to count—and all the wranglers know it:
Soul-devouring though the numbers seem,
Whole—and holy—worlds require the poet.

Art and the Unexpected

March 13th, 2009

Researchers find that the unexpected is a key to human learning

Phys.Org reports "The human brain's sensitivity to unexpected outcomes plays a fundamental role in the ability to adapt and learn new behaviors, according to a new study by a team of psychologists and neuroscientists from the University of Pennsylvania."

This relates to art and architecture. The Two Blowhards expound the importance of shadows in architecture.

"How much is there to the observation that traditional work combines regularity (balance, rhythm) with chaos (ie., natural patterns and the unexpected)? It's basic, really. Here's a closeup to illustrate how this works:

"You have your grid -- ie., your regularity. But you also have your irregular qualities too: the fingernail-like scrapes, and (quite strikingly here) what's called the "rustication" of the large stone blocks. It's all artfully enhanced, of course. But a good park is similar -- a harmonious conversation between the natural and the artificial."

This observation points directly to the life-enhancing importance of the visual variety that enlivens traditional "Prince Charles" architecture. Traditional buildings offer surprise and delight: sudden news that's the very cause for life.

View with despair the regular lines, flat surfaces and glabrous facades that deform establishment architecture. Carbuncles, every one of them. The most famous contemporary architects are the most vampiric: Mies van de Rohe leads the sorry brigade, followed by Lord Rogers of Riverside and others famed beyond my scorn.

Thinking about thinking

A cloud of life-images infuse me.
All the world is The Thinker.
Pantheisms in various shapes drift through my mind; they resemble one another but they differ in ways I cannot grasp.
I sense that I know where and how The Thinker wishes to flow. I am partly responsible for many of his outcomes, for I myself am part of The Thinker. He would prefer "this." He would detest "that.
" I know simple arithmetic and love and hate. Any Einstein or Shakespeare would know far more. The Thinker aims to know everything, and so he will, after I have ceased.

Gunman shoots 13 dead at US immigrant center

Read the headline:  Gunman shoots 13 dead at US immigrant counselling centre

Government response: “We’ve got to figure out a way to deal with this terrible, terrible violence,” Mr. Biden said.

President Obama, who is in France for a NATO meeting, issued a statement saying he was saddened to learn of the “act of senseless violence.”

Note this: in March IBM fired some 5,000 U.S. workers

Big Blue is shifting work to India, where labor and production costs are significantly lower. And despairing gunmen are shooting innocents at random in the world's most affluent societies. What of the 5,000 Indians who must be delighted to enlist on IBM's payrolls? Soon they too will be replaced by ... whom? 

Here's what's going on:

55 years ago the cybernetic pioneer, Norbert Wiener wrote in The Human Use of Human Beings:

"Let us remember that the automatic machine, whatever we may think about any feelings it may have, or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.

"It is perfectly clear that this will produce an unemployment situation, in comparison with which the present recession [in the 1950s - RL] and even the depression of the thirties  will seem a pleasant joke. This depression will ruin many industries."

Now, in 2009, we have already seen the destruction of many industries. Where have all the telephone operators gone? They've been replaced by voice recognition devices. Where are all the bank tellers? They are cemented into the walls of banks in the form of ATM machines.

"No problem," say our public intellectuals, our economists, our politicians, "let there be new jobs, new industries, new opportunities. We'll fine-tune the interest rates, screw around with taxes, hold international conferences, get our best brains to fix the matter. The magic of the zeitgeist will settle everything."

So much optimism gushes forth as the jobs, the intellectuals and the accountants are all in their turn swallowed up by the clever machines, and replaced by silicon brains that demand no pay packets. This isn't science fiction. It's the firm earth dissolving under our feet. Last to vanish into the cybernetic maw will be the bureaucrats and politicians themselves.

The lights will go out and then we will all starve.   

It's inevitable. It was foreseen in the 1950s, and before. The prophecy has been made again and again, yet no one of influence dares to face it.

"Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor."

That's the problem. And there's no solution at all to be found within the present philosophy of our civilization. Our elites have run out of philosophy.