The Ground of Being and Models.

I, and almost everybody else, believe that there is an actual reality. There is an existing thing that has a number of qualities.

I, and almost everybody else, believe that we are human beings with physical structures that perceive things about what is around us and think about that world.

I, and almost everybody else, believe that the physical structures that enable us to sense and think about our surroundings are not infinitely powerful. They have limitations in what we can sense, and what sense we can make of those senses.

As a result what human beings have is a limited experience of reality and a limited ability to think of reality. What human beings do, what we must do to make sense of things and what are bodies have evolved to do, is make models of the world around us. We have a series of models for different situations, and without them we cannot function.

We have many models for people, the most obvious and ubiquitous model we have for people is that they are essentially us in different bodies. When we want to predict or understand the actions of others we try to imagine ourselves in that position. Built upon this model are essentially stereotypes, alterations to the standard model based on the categorization of people. For example, we can alter what we predict will be the reaction to watching the Lawrence Welk show according to whether the viewer is a sixteen year old girl or a seventy year old man without any other information at all.

We have models about the Universe around us. There are scientific models that apply to specific regions of experience, but break down at the edges of those regions. There are mythical models for the Universe, involving meaning, intention, fabulous beings and so on. Underlying these models are more basic components, the concepts upon which models are built. But these concepts are models, a god, an atom, a tree are all conceptual models upon which to build other models.

What led me to these thoughts are the relatively recent discovery that Dark Matter and Dark Energy make up 99% of the energy and mass in the Universe. These are the mass and energy of vacuums. These forms of mass and energy pretty much only interact with gravity, and I think a good way to think of gravity is simply as the shape of space+time. What we are dealing with here is the Ground of Being upon which all the manifestations of form and matter are placed. This is the Tao. It is the deep ocean upon which what we experience as "real stuff" are merely the ripples.

This last metaphor, ripples upon the water, was emphasized to me by seeing The Face of Evil wag his sopping wet tail over a smooth piece of water. A perfect arc of droplets landed one after the other on the surface of the water. Each was unruffled, a perfect circle until it met the expanding circle of another droplet.

I though of the water as the Ground of Being, reality. The surface of the water was our consciousness of this Ground of Being. Each droplet was a model we have for experiencing, defining, and explaining reality. Within each expanding circle is a model for understanding reality. While the circle is small it is perfect. Newton's Laws perfectly describe the motion of the planets in the skies. The Thunder God's fury at our sins perfectly explains to a small tribe why the rules should be obeyed and why there is thunder and lightning. For those living in a liberal enclave those who would vote for Mike Huckerbee are ignorant rednecks.

When the circles expand enough they touch each other, and then the circles become troubled and complicated. The models of Free Will, Original Sin, Neurology, Newtonian Physics, Justice all wash over each other and complicate things, as it is quite possible to believe in free will, original sin, that neurologists are good at finding out about the brain, that Newton's Laws work and that criminals should be punished all at the same time. However, these models are incompatible with each other. Neurology and Newtonian physics suggest that while people make decisions, they can only make one decision. If people can only make one decision how can they be held responsible for crimes? Original sin means we have to be forgiven, but if time works in both directions it makes as much sense to say that our lives cause original sin through redemption or the lack thereof as it does to say original sin means we must be forgiven.

This doesn't cause much trouble if you retain understanding that all of your understandings are just models, systematic concepts which attempt to describe portions of our experiences. Newtonian Physics can't explain the actions of quarks, but that doesn't bother scientists too much because they just use the appropriate theory in the appropriate place. The possible absence of free will doesn't bother judges and lawyers too much, the most effective model for a criminal justice system is free will. However, many people, perhaps most people, mistake their models for reality. Someone may have a political model, such that those with differing opinions are stupid, hateful and ignorant and this may be held as reality beyond the ability of other influences to change.

This confusion between models and reality is at the heart of Eastern religion/philosophy. Time and time again Eastern religion talks about the illusion of our ideas, of the calming of our mental models and an appreciation of how things are as they are, without concepts. This is usually considered to be a "higher" level of understanding. The truth is that it is impossible to be entirely free of models and concepts. The idea of Enlightenment is of a unity of consciousness of everything, a feeling of light and compassion, of peace. These are all concepts that make up a model of the Universe. It still isn't the Universe, just a different model.

The final problem I want to address is the concept that if there is no complete, perfect truth that humans can understand that there is therefore no right or wrong answer, or that all cultures, ideas and ways of dealing with the world are equally justified. The thing is that there really is a reality that has qualities that can be determined and measured. That an anemometer cannot measure the color of an apple doesn't mean that you can't say whether the apple is red or green with a high level of certainty. In trying to determine whether a child should receive prayer or medical treatment for meningitis it is possible to make a sensible determination, and it isn't based on how fervently a person holds their belief.

You do not experience reality, and you can never truly experience all that there is in reality. Anyone who tells you differently is wrong. You cannot understand in a complete way any complete and ultimate truth. Everything that you think, feel, or experience is based on models of reality. Models are imperfect, and this means that even if you are equipped with the latest and best models about things, you are still certainly wrong about some things. Our understanding of things improves when we understand how we understand things.

Moments and Memories.

I think the essential structure of life is that of a series of moments. There isn't a set amount of time for a moment, nor much of a structure. What a moment is, for my definition, is something that the mind constructs as a thing, a continual structure. So a tree is a tree because we think of it as a complete entity with boundaries.

A moment can be very short, such as the moment in the Alps of Italy were I went off the side of the ski slope and fell through the air, to what I was certain was my death. I landed in several feet of powder perhaps a second later, but that was the moment in which I understood my reaction to death.

A moment can be much longer such as the afternoon I spent with my wife on the beach at Jalapa in Mexico. We sat on deckchairs on the beach sipping beer and watching the beautiful day go by while doing and thinking very little.

Moments make up a large part of our memories, they are what we think of when we think of memories. However, think how many moments you can remember, is it an hundred? A thousand? It's a tricky question, because for a start that's not how memory works. Memory works by association, rather than being a filing cabinet full of memories. However, the amount of moments we remember is much smaller than the amount of life we have lived. We think of our lives as a continual event, but our memory of moments is sporadic and finite. What fills in the gaps?

The gaps between moments in our memories are filled with mood. If you think back to a particular time in your life there will be a flash of a few moments. Times with particular people and places. But overall will be a mood, an emotional summary of that time. I think this is really the core of what people are, and how they make their decisions. This deep-down emotional review of how we are feeling happens usually below our conscious thoughts, but is really how we feel about a place, a time or a person.

I think many people spend an unfortunately enormous amount of time between moments, wafting along on a rather uniform sea of mood. People think of moments as things in the future, goals to achieve, pre-planned memories of moments. Moments can happen at any time, this morning for me the moment was birds singing loudly in the trees in voices foreign to my childhood, an exotic sound which awoke me to how fascinating it is to be where I am. A moment can happen at any time by simply taking the time to notice whether you are in a moment or not.

A life well lived is a series of shining moments adrift on a sea of joy.

The following poem was read at our wedding by Mary-Alice, and she was kind enough to send us a framed copy of the poem as a wedding present.

Look to this day:

For it is life, the very life of life.

In its brief course

Lie all the verities and realities of your existence.

The bliss of growth,

The glory of action,

The splendour of achievement

Are but experiences of time.

For yesterday is but a dream

And tomorrow is only a vision;

And today well-lived, makes

Yesterday a dream of happiness

And every tomorrow a vision of hope.

Look well therefore to this day;

Such is the salutation to the ever-new dawn!

- Kalidasa

How to Write an Irish Song

Up until I was past thirty years old I had never written a song. My first song, which I unfortunately cannot presently remember, was a Valentine's Day song for my present wife strummed on the cheapest electric guitar in the world and mumbled incoherently. This is actually not true, but is near enough true that the improvement over the original story is worth claiming that it is true. This is the first lesson in how to write an Irish song, it should be written and sung and believed to be absolute truth, regardless of how the pedantic might feel.

The Irish song tradition is without doubt a romantic tradition. The subject matter should be love, or pride of place or country, or tragedy. The lyrics should be written in a poem with rhyme and meter, a poem in the traditions of the great romantic poets of Tennyson, Shelley, Byron and Yeats. All poetic tricks of alliteration, repetition, foreshadowing, metaphor should be used with freedom. An archaic phrasing has great effect.

Irish song is attached to the land, the people and the tales of Ireland. When searching for inspiration you should walk in the blustering wind, feel dark, rich earth beneath your feet, sit beside a fire, drink of stout and poiteen, and be surrounded by the rich green of vegetation and never the lurid kelly green of faux Ireland.

As an example of the method I shall use what I consider one of the greatest Irish songs, Raglan Road by Patrick Kavanagh.

An Irish song starts with a time and place, specificity adds authenticity. A time and place produces a framework for the listener to build their image of the scene. In this case, "On Raglan Road of an autumn day," notice the archaic use of "of" (which I may have inserted myself, I think it improves it). This beginning with a time and place is nearly ubiquitous, from "On the fourth of July 1806 and we set sale from the sweet cove of Cork" in the Irish Rover, to "As I was going over the far famed Kerry mountains" of Whiskey in the Jar, to the modern Shane MacGowan's A Pair of Brown Eyes, "One summer evening drunk to Hell I sat there nearly lifeless. An old man in the corner sang where the water lilies grow."

Once a time and place has been established the next step is to paint the foundational image upon which the rest of the song can be built. In this case "That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might someday rue." The image is of long, dark hair. The feeling is of attraction and danger. The line has a very precise meter, and repeated rhymes, one within the line and the other at the end of a rhyming couplet. This sets a pattern for the rest of the poem, and patterns of this sort are vital within Irish music. Irish music is peasant music, it should be immediately accessible without surprises, the opposite of Jazz. In each verse try to return to the imagery of this first image.

At this point we have a time (Autumn), a place (a Dublin street), an image (tangling dark hair), and a feeling (doomed attraction) for the rest of the song. We have a pattern of rhyming couplets with as many rhymes within a half line as possible.

What happens next is that you take this grounding in real time and space and move slowly into the realms of fantasy. In this case Grafton Street is given a deep ravine. In the Irish Rover at a similar point the ship in question starts having seven masts and a million barrels of bones. In The Galway Shawl the fantasy portion starts when the beautiful maiden invites the itinerant minstrel into her home to meet her father. Part of the Irish tradition is a excitement and a fear of fantasy and magic. The little people, the faeries, and so on are beautiful and tempting, living just within a hill or a wood and so within reach of the everyday, but they are unpredictable and dangerous.

The song then comes to a conclusion, in this case the loss of the Angel, with The Irish Rover the sinking of the ship, with The Galway Shawl the minstrel leaves unrequited, in A Pair of Brown Eyes the protagonist stumbles away from the pub towards the loved sounds of long ago.

Now, you may be thinking, he's talked about a poem but nothing to do with the music, how can this be? Well, that's because the music portion is so simple. There are two methods of making Irish songs, one is simply to set the poetry you have written to an ancient Irish tune. In this case Patrick Kavanagh set his poetry to an 18th century air named The Dawning of the Day. Your poem should have a meter to it, when spoken out loud you will be able to tell the rhythm of the music that will go to it, where the beat goes. The alternative method is to simply put the poem into a major key, begin and end with the major chord, put a seventh chord before that final chord and make sure there's a minor chord in there as well. Fiddle with these chords and you'll get something that fits (which will probably already be an Irish tune.

In On Raglan Road the chords are two lines that go in a poetic order of ABBA:

DGDGD
GDBmDA
GDBmDA
DGDGD

There are no key changes, no bridge, no chorus and only two lines simply repeated. The key with the music of Irish music is not to get innovative, to keep it simple, to follow very basic rules. If the basis is good then good musicians can innovate, improvise, enhance and experiment over the top of this structure.

If you get stuck go for a walk in nature, sleep on it and then sometime in the next few days you will discover that you have solved your conundrum without trying.

The most important part is that if you feel a little guilty that you seem to have stolen all the parts of your song from elsewhere and simply slapped them together you are doing it exactly right.

The Illusion of Rational Control

We human beings, particularly those brought up under the cultural influence of the Abrahamic religions (which means pretty much everyone in Europe, the Americas and the Middle East) generally think that the way we do things is by thinking about what we are going to do and them making a decision. This underpins our whole idea of self, of what we think about other people, how we respect some people and hold others in contempt.

This is an illusion.

Actually what happens is that most of our decisions happen unconsciously. Most of our actions occur without conscious thought. Most of what we think about people is completed before we have started to think about them.

The power of the illusion is so strong that most people you tell this to simply don't believe it. I believe it and yet I don't feel convinced by it, which is an odd feeling to have (I feel the same about free will in that I think the evidence convincingly shows we don't have free will, and I believe the evidence, but it really feels like people have free will).

Today I have had the wonderful opportunity to demonstrate to myself how true this really is. a pipe has a leak in our attic, and so our water is turned off. This hasn't stopped me from needing to use the bathroom, but it does mean that I should not flush the toilet afterwards. I have, however, flushed the toilet more times in this scenario than I have managed not to. When do I notice? At the sound of the water flushing, not at the touch of the handle.

If you are interested in how much of your brain is under rational control it is easy to do an experiment on yourself. There are things that you do everyday in a particular manner that could be done in a different method. You probably button up your clothing starting at the top or bottom, or you probably put on shirts before trousers (or the other way round). Try a week of attempting to remember to do it the other way round. Or, when buying coffee see if you can realize when you decided what you would order.

Edge Question of the Year

One of the more interesting places to go on the internet is a website I have recommended for a couple of years now, edge.org. There are fascinating places to go to discover the latest scientific findings, sciencenews.org being a good one, and other places where you can simply find interesting things to discover and think about but what makes edge.org different is that it is a place to find out what brilliant people, particularly scientists, think outside of the limitations of academic rigor. here you can find out what scientists think about how scientists should behave, how future discoveries might be made, whether they are hopeful or not about the future.

The biggest thing this site does is ask a question each year of luminaries of the intelligentsia. As an aside, the moments I was most impressed with in Obama's State of the Union speech were calls for teachers to be given greater respect and for the winner of the science fair to be considered as important as the winner of a sports match. There have been some fascinating questions previously such as, "What will change everything?" and "What have you changed your mind about?"

This year's questions is,

"WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY'S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?"

How about thinking about that for a little while? Feel free to give your answer in the comments section.

My answer is, I think, a sort of meta-answer to the question. It is simply the scientific concept of when to use reason to determine truth. There are times when it is foolish to attempt to use the scientific method in order to determine truth, such as the tenth of a second before a car crash, or to in picking a spouse, or when listening to music and deciding whether you like or not. There are other times when of course scientific thinking is useful, such as an architect deciding whether his design for a bridge will stay up, or whether a plane will be able to fly.

The problem is that the majority of people do not do anything like a good job of deciding when to use rational, evidence-based thinking to make a decision. Most people make important decisions about measurable events based on social pressures, by what tribe they identify with, and from initial feelings on the matter. In a recent poll in the USA 80% of people think prayer helps healing and that 63% of doctors should pray along with their patients if asked to do so. This is despite scientific double-blind studies that shows no statistically significant result. The majority of people wish their doctors to do something useless at healing them in order to be healed.

In politics in the USA there is a substantial group of people who support small government and no budget deficits. These people almost universally vote Republican, even though over the last several decades Republicans have expanded government and increased deficits more than Democrats.

In personal life why do most people decide to have children? This is actually hard to determine since having children is such a basic assumption of people that the question of why you would have a baby is never asked (why not is asked with much greater frequency). However, I must assume that a big part of the answer is to make people happier, or because one would regret not having a baby. Scientific evidence shows that while you are raising children it makes you somewhat less happy, and afterwards it makes no difference.

In your work would you choose a job paying you ten percent less if it was twice as close to your home? Many would not despite money being a minor effect on your happiness and commuting being shown to be the most miserable daily activity for people.

Socialized medicine costs less money for businesses, helps people miss less days as a result and reduces corporation's human resources bureaucracy. Are business people for or against socialized medicine. Who contributes more to the productivity of businesses, managers or workers? Who gets paid more?

I have seen many people outraged about illegal immigration and the terrible crime it produces. The problem is that illegal immigration if anything reduces crime.

Ask people around you if things are getting better or worse. I bet you get a lot of answers that things are getting worse, despite increased wages, health, freedom, and decreased poverty, hunger, crime.

I think the most useful scientific concept that the general population could use but presently doesn't is simply when to think rationally.

Fear Raising Incompetence.

I have repeatedly talked about fear on this blog. I have talked about wishing to be courageous in my own decisions, about the foolishness of letting our decisions be made through irrational fear. I've mentioned such things as white people crossing the city limits into Detroit locking their car doors, and people not going to Mexico (a country of three quarters of a million miles) because of there being dangerous parts to Mexico.

My latest example is a facebook post that went as follows,

"This woman came into my bar 20 mins ago w/her 6 yr old son, gave him $3 for food & left him here. Told him to walk back down the block & find her when he's done."

This was described repeatedly by different people as abuse, neglect. People suggested calling the cops, that the child should be taken from her, and that the mother should be punched in the face. The"abuse" happened at 2pm on a Saturday at this bar in Ann Arbor, MI, a leafy collegiate idyll. The block that the boy would have to walk is 50 yards with no street crossings to Main Street, made famous by Bob Seger.

Now, I walked to and from my primary school by myself in England, about half a mile each way, past a train station and across the High Street, returning to a house with no parents. I am sure I was doing this at six years old. I can remember when my school was over the masses of school children not entering a line of SUV's but walking home from school. On the weekends I would walk to the local park, Bushy Park, and spend hours playing in the park alone . Apparently, according to a pretty standard group of American people I was abused, neglected and should have been taken away from my mother, who just so happens to have been a teacher.

So, why is leaving a six year old to eat some food by themselves in a restaurant and then walk along a sidewalk viewed as abuse and neglect? The most common worry was that they were left with strangers, who might abduct them. So let's look at this rationally. There are 75 million children in the USA and 115 of them are abducted by non-family members. Each year in the USA a child has a .000153% chance of being abducted by a stranger. You have two hundred times that probability of being killed by lightning this year. Children are in more danger from the sky than from strangers.

Now, this is the situation in general, but what we have is a downtown restaurant on a Saturday afternoon. The waitstaff knows who the mother is. Can you imagine what would be the reaction in any restaurant if a stranger tried to take a child away? Those who wish to abduct children don't wait on busy streets in the afternoon, or in upscale bars, they take them from playgrounds and schools and hospitals. The child was in far, far more danger being put in a safety seat and driven to the area than he ever was in a restaurant or walking down the street. Several times more children a year in safety seats are killed in car accidents than are abducted by strangers.

So, we have a totally ridiculous and irrational fear. Why is it so acceptable? What are the consequences of the prevalence of this irrational fear of strangers? It is acceptable in the same way that spending $100 million per person killed in 9/11 to prevent future terrorism attacks is acceptable but paying $100,000 per person a decade to provide health care to the uninsured is not acceptable. Terrorism is scarier than disease because it is unpredictable, sudden, happens to almost nobody and is intended by others. Abduction is scarier than car accidents because it is unpredictable, sudden, happens to almost nobody and is intended by others.

Yes, if something is the result of the harmful actions of others but never happens it is scarier than an accident that happens often.

What are the consequences of acting as though if you leave your child around strangers bad things will happen? It means that your child will consider strangers dangerous. What is the best thing for a child in danger to do? That's right, find someone to help. Why are people frightened of Muslims, Mexicans, blacks/whites, men? It's because they have been taught that people they don't know are frightening. So one of the consequences of this prevalent attitude is the inculcation of xenophobic fear in our children.

Now, I personally think this was excellent parenting. A child was taught that it is capable of doing things independently, such as paying for food, walking down a street and recognizing his mother. As children get older introducing them to situations where they take care of what they can take care of for themselves gives them the idea that they can do such things. The alternative produces the idea that the child is not capable of what they are actually capable of doing. The result of that is "children" in their twenties, living at home who can't do their own laundry, get themselves a job, fix anything, or cook their own food. What you get are children without the basic education to take care of themselves, who inaccurately think they are special and amazing, and who fear and hate difference.

Ten Minutes Later

Ten minutes later the sounds that conjure
the peat, the smoke and the hay
Wend their way through mistletoed paths
of a mind without decay.
The graft and the heart of mortal men
may not pass this way,
but the summertime sweet of the afternoon
sings a memory of May
A wistful smile 'midst a frantic mile
the terror of today.