Just Be Claws

I caused my coffee to brew.

I got the beans out, ground them, put filter in pot.

I filled up the water, poured just the right amount.

I plugged machine into wall, turning it on.

I watched clear become my desire of dark, rich brown.

I caused the coffee to brew.

I did not grow the coffee.

I did not make the grinder, filter, or pot.

I did not make or lay pipes allowing water to flow.

I neither designed nor built the machine.

I was only a link in a long set of chains.

I did not cause the coffee to brew.

Normally we think of cause and effect as simple. Something is done that makes something else happen. A useful way to live in the day-by-day. Cause and effects usefulness betrays the more complex, the more subtle, the more beautiful of what the reality is.

Kitty Lust

Causes require connections. I open the tuna can, the cats come. The can and cats must be setup a special way in order for cause and effect to work. Each cat must be within ear shot of the opener or they do not know of the potential tuna. If the basement door is closed the feline returning from the litter box may be unable to reach the can in the kitchen. Most of the time, we do not think about the special setup that allows causes and effects.

Causes do not always have the same effects. My cats Pan and Dora run to the kitchen when I open a can. Do I cause Pan-Dora to run? The creatures smell food and follow their desire for tuna. The fact that I'm the one opening the can means nothing to Dora or Pan. If I allow them to gorge themselves on the tuna and wait a few minutes to open another can, they do not often come running again, rather lick their paws and ignore can, tuna, and me.

Dreams of my cats

Different things can cause the same effect. Sometimes, when I'm cooking dinner, I'll open a can of peas or carrots or maybe tomatoes. You can hear the cats come bounding from where ever they lay, claws on wooden stairs launching themselves with abandon to their hoped for treat. Most of the time the can opener is not opening something they want. But just on the off chance it might be, they come anyway.

Effects follow causes. I have never once seen the Pan/Dora run to the kitchen expecting tuna while I am in another room. Maybe, when away from home, if I left a web-cam in the kitchen, I could detect such behavior; but I'm pretty sure it would be a waste of time. It seems safe to say that without the cause of the can opening, the kitchen running does not occur.

Cats think they are in charge

Some effects have many causes. We have a little plastic mouse with a red beaming laser light for a nose. If I push the button between the mouses ears the laser light lands on wall and floor much to amusements of my pets. Pan especially likes it when the light leads her from room to room.  She runs with all her might chasing the red darting prey. Getting Dora to run to the kitchen where the cans are opened is no mean feat. I can get Pan to do it a half dozen times before she tires and just watches the light move about. The opening of cans are not required for the cat to run to the kitchen with desire.

Correlation is not causation. Sometimes I make tuna fish sandwiches and put them in plastic bags. When I take these bags out of the fridge and open them to eat, a cat in range will come to investigate the smell. This led me to understand that it was not really the can that drove the cat, it was the tuna. The can is merely a correlation. The furry creatures had connected the sound of the can opening with the oily satisfaction of eating fish. The idea that because you relate one thing to another does not mean that one thing is the cause of another.

This seemingly little distinction, that correlation is not causation, leads us to a totally different sense of justice when cause and effect are applied to the law. Our sense of justice is closely tied to our innate ideas of cause. If you break the law you will be punished. The words 'you break' point to the cause and 'punishment' is the effect.

We have law for reasons of causation

Consider the heroin addict who craves his drug like my cat craves tuna. His body drives him to acquire the drug. His desire overpowers his morality and he becomes able to make the mental leap that theft is a viable way to obtain the chemicals his body screams for. In this sense the addict has been driven to change his morality, his sense of justice by chemical demand.

We make assumptions about cause and correlations always with insufficient information. Can we say the addict is responsible, that he is the cause of the theft? Do we say the drug is the cause of the theft? Perhaps it was his mother who took drugs while he was in her womb that setup this chain of events? Or maybe the pusher who convinced him as a young boy that heroin was fun? Perhaps all are culpable, perhaps none.

Dora will often jump on the counter to look for tuna after I leave the kitchen. She knows that tuna was there and if I don't see or hear her jump onto the counter, there may be an unexpected treat. Dora also knows that if I find her there, or become aware, I will chase her down with a squirt bottle until fur is wet. Dora does not like wet fur. Not at all. When Dora wants the tuna, her desire often overpowers her sense of consequences. Sometimes I'm not around and she gets what she wants. Dora knows that the effect does not always follow the cause.

Human nature looks for the simple cause and the simple effect. Its useful, but not often accurate to assume the easy and direct relationship of cause and effect. So next time you judge remember to be 'just', 'be claws' it is the right thing to do.

Kill Them. Kill Them All.

Zombies.
Zombies want brains.
Zombies want my brain.
Zombies want my baby's brain.
Kill them.
Kill them all.
After all, they are just zombies.

Read the signs! They are here!

Pretend, for a moment, that the fictional but funly imagined Zombie Apocalypse has come. You have your shotgun. You know how to double-tap. Your chainsaw is well oiled and you've got plenty of gas. You're a fast draw and a faster runner and these are slow zombies.  Not the zombies from 28 Days Later, or The Dawn of the Dead.  These are zombies who shuffle along, whose fastest movement is slower than a Sunday stroll.

Our imagined zombies are just about totally independent from physical needs or wants of any sort. They do not eat for energy.  They eat just because it is what they do.

 Our zombies feel no pain. They have less mind than a slug, but more mind than a tree. They can open doors by accident, but ladders stop them cold.  Zombies are mostly not there at all, otherwise they wouldn't be zombies!

Zombie's Existentially

A good read.

Zombies are infectious. Their bite can make you become a zombie too, if they do not eat your brains first. According to “The Zombie Survival Guide” zombies became zombies because of a virus called solanum. Typically zombies are given an origin resulting from a virus or biological organism, disease, or some other source of physical damage. 

Zombies do not choose to be zombies, it just happens to them. Like cancer or the measles, there is no intent, there is no choice in getting the zombie sickness. You might want to say that “they could have tried harder to avoid it”. Try telling that to your eight year old boy picking his nose in the corner. Or your eighty-eight year old grandma drooling in her mid-day nap for that matter.

Many of us will just kill the zombies. The basic logic goes something like this; “They can infect me.  We will protect ourselves.  Zombies must die.” The desire for self defense is strong in we humans, especially when it comes to those we identify with as family.

After a little consideration you may well notice that when we take this view, we tend to say the word 'kill' rather than 'murder'. I kill the chicken for my diner, I do not murder it. Yet to the chicken and the zombie, our intent in murder or killing doesn't matter. It should matter to us.  Very much!

Animals slaughtered by necessity.

If we consider the zombies as humans with a terminal disease, then the word 'kill' gets a little bit harder to justify. If the zombie was your nice uncle Ralph, or the sweet old man next door who sometimes shovels your sidewalk when it snows, it would feel like 'murder'.  Even if you try to think you are doing them a favor. Have you ever heard of someone putting a clause in their will that says “If I become a zombie, please kill me.”? 

The threat that zombies pose is from instinct and not intent. How can we judge a zombie's character when they are obviously, and literally, dumber than door knobs? This reduction of the zombies brain to something less than human may give hope to the would-be-zombie killer to find some moral justification in their pursuit to eliminate zombies violently. To whit we must then ask; "Do zombies have a soul?"

Soul Brothers and Sisters?

Spirits in the world.

If you believe in dualism, that humans have an immortal soul, a separate from the body piece of the universe that makes up your mind or spirit, then you must ask "Does the soul still inhabit the body of a zombie?"

Consider for a moment a person in a vegetative state like a coma. Do they still have a soul? If you can answer 'yes' to the presence of a soul, then morality well may push you to save the zombies soul, to care for it, to make it at peace. We, as the superior mind, have a responsibility to care for those less fortunate; for shouldn't a person and even a society be judged for how it cares for the least of its souls?  Run like hell from the zombies. Build a barricade to hide behind, quarantine all the zombies in a pit, but do not under any circumstances kill them, for it is murder plain and simple.

Destroying barrels was fun!

On the other hand, the dualist who thinks the zombie's soul has already left their body can chain-saw away at will. Since zombies are just inanimate matter like a brick, the word 'kill' does not even apply. Zombies are already dead. In fact, it is good and proper to take pleasure killing zombies.
I would recommend whistling while you work at your de-zombification.  Singing an old chain gang song like “De Camptown Races” would be a wonderful way to spend an afternoon with friends while slicing and slashing and double-tapping; doing your duty for your fellow man.

Empirically Void?

The inventor of utilitarianism
looks a bit like a zombie.

What though, if you believe the there is no soul, but rather that the mind is emergent from the body? Your monist philosophy would dictate a different kind of assessment on the morality of whacking and hacking at the zombie critters. Thoughts on morality here fall into two camps; consequence and categorical.

The consequence, or sometimes called utilitarian, view is that questions about morality should be looked at in terms of what would be the greatest good. How do we help the most people? The consequence moralist would ask the question “If I terminate the zombies existence will it benefit more people?” Since clearly one zombie can infect many non-zombies, the zombie has got to go. With haste! The sum of the people saved must be greater than the sum of the people hurt. As long as I am saving non-zombie lives, its good and proper to grind zombie flesh.

If however, you think the golden rule should apply, then you would be taking the categorical idea and ask the question “If I became a zombie would I want someone to kill me?” Your answer to this question becomes the moral basis for whacking or running, double-tapping or containing. If you found yourself with a group of survivors, using logic and reason you would try to figure out together what is the group's view was. You would consider together what should be done if any of you became zombies. This would allow you to have the basis of law and order, probably on democratic terms about which zombies should be taken out.

Ummm.... Ooohhhmmm?

Lastly, a view from eastern philosophy.  The Buddhist tradition would absolutely forbid killing zombies.  This thought stream holds that killing is always a wrong thing to do.  The Buddha is said to have avoided killing any living creature, mosquito, ox, or human.  It is written in the Dhammapada "Everyone fears punishment; everyone fears death, just as you do. Therefore do not kill or cause to kill."

Would Buddha have survived the zombie invasion?  We may never know, but I rather doubt it, unless an impregnable fortress could be built to protect all non-zombie life.

Just Kill'em!

I do not know about what you would do, but I can speak for myself.

If come the zombie apocalypse and it is between a zombie or me, I would with great effort and little forethought be sure to separate its brain from its body.

 I'll shake them and break them nary pause to ask “is it right" or "is it wrong” or even “is there a better way”because...

Dad' gum' it! Im'a protect me and mine! Honey, wars the double-barrel? Git me dat der hatchet!  

And Kill Them!  Kill Them All!

Judging Leadership

Ronald Reagan's early leadership style.

My local coffee clutch has one member who was a US Marine. He was away from the barracks the morning of October 23, 1983 when the bomb went off killing 241 American servicemen. It is clear to me that this event is burned hard into his mind because of he has talked about it with us several times, his loss of friends and face. His words used to describe our national response are "we cut and run". He may still well desire revenge and could use the word 'hate' when speaking of Ronald Reagan.

In my family, by marriage, is a young girl of intense faith. She exclaimed to me over this past holiday how proud she was to have been alive, although she was very young, when Ronald Reagan was our leader. Her view is that his voiced principles should be his measure and not his actions; his idealism is to be cherished; but he should not be held responsible for events during his office. She is inspired to service by his example. She desires purity. She could use the word 'love' when speaking of Ronald Reagan.

Even his enemies thought Robert E. Lee a good leader.

Lincoln, in his time, was so hated that a huge chunk of  my country split off and attempted to leave it, while others rallied around him in an attempt to establish a new principled order of the future. What then do we make of Napoleon or Alexander the Great? Great leaders who succeeded wildly at the beginning and failed miserably at the end? Can we say "they are good leaders"? Other examples of lightning rods and divisive leadership can be commonly found.

It would seem that subjective views are difficult to untangle from objective ones when we view leaders. A common view among historians is that only with time and distance can we gain useful perspective. This may be self-serving to historians I fear.

I wonder what criteria then should we use to evaluate a leader's performance? How can we not cherry pick, each from their own preconceptions?

A look to scholarship will define 'leadership' as the ability to get participants in a group to focus their attention and actions on the issues that the leader considers significant. Leaders accomplish this by three means: organization, communication, and decisions. Such abstract methods can lead to measurement of leadership effectiveness. Many large organizations like corporations and non-profit institution use abstract tests in an attempt to quantify someone's ability to lead.

The Organizer

Most leaders are highly restricted in the organization they lead. Leaders of large organizations, like corporate executive officers (CEO), often do not have the ability to structure the organization they lead in the manner they desire. Existing infrastructure, boards of directors, and market demand are the true masters determining success or failure in meeting the competing needs placed on large organizations. Leaders at best can push and shove on the existing infrastructure to lead.

The Communicator

Leaders who promise they can bring us the 'shining city on the hill', who push us to have a 'new deal', or promise a 'great society' are practicing good leadership communication skills. Projecting a future vision that we, as followers, can emotionally identify with and act upon is when we are led.  Communications for a leader is about projecting an idea from the top of a hierarchy or the center of a broad cast.  They convince us of to move our diverse viewpoints toward a common, shared view.  We expect then that good leaders will communicate in a way that provides unity more than division.

The Decider

Making decisions, being 'the decider' is what executives do. Picking and choosing objects and actions based on the information at hand are how the bricks get placed in the leadership wall. A good leader not only needs to know how to pick from alternatives, but how to pick which information to go get in order to make an informed decision. This ability to find facts, evaluate opinions, and maintain the ability to doubt is more critical than picking which way to go, which action to take.

The ability to lead, and the results may not be the same thing. Leadership appear to be about 'means', while results appears to be about 'ends'. When we look for effective leadership we expect 'winners' who achieve the goals that we already desire. We want 'peace in our time' and 'an end to poverty' and 'a mule and 50 acres for every man'. These desires, goals, end-points are where we wish to go, but are on the face of them are practically unachievable. Yet when choosing leaders, we frequently have these impossible idealistic goals in mind. We want to believe so badly this new person can lead us to our promised land.

Leaders do try their best.

We would like to think we can pick our leaders based on their past performance. The past predicts the future. This may be so some of the time. Purchasing a new good or service is much like selecting a leader. Both involve evaluating opportunities of the future based on performance in the past. When you purchase something, often a practitioner of the legal profession will include language that says something like "your results may vary" or "past performance is not necessarily an indicator of future performance". Such is an individual leader. We can only hope that their experience in the past will work for us in the future.

So next time you pick a leader, whether the boss you will work for in a new job, the captain of your pickup basketball game, or the leader of the free world remember; you may want to be inspired, you may want to achieve, but the measure of the leader is purely intuitive. You will only know the quality of the leader after the fact and even then, you will be only guessing at their and your success.

Free Won't

My hand is poised by the handle of the coffee cup. I desire the coffee. I desire to prove I have the free will to not take the coffee. The competing desires hover in my mind, choice not yet taken.

Instead, my mind wanders to the heat death of the universe and the seeming deterministic end that with or without the coffee dissipates all into incoherence.

That cat only dies or not when observed. What then observes my hand near the handle of the coffee cup? Some Cartesian theater inside my head? Some probability wave collapsing in 100 billion neuron connections cohering into a choice? Have I already decided and am just waiting to observe the decision?

Photo By Roslyn

Whatever the mechanism, the observing appears to allow choice to be made. As a practical matter of existence in a culture with law and morality there is a common assumption of some degree of personal choice effecting actions. To argue against the existence of free will appears to take concepts like "responsibility" and slap them like a bad puppy.

I am left then with the lack of knowledge on the "how free will happens?" question. That region of our explorations where it appears thar' be dragons.

The action I take will have consequences unforeseen, but in the end-of-ends inconsequential. Instead I'll let that last sip of coffee go and brew some more.

Mind What We Are Doing

One way to discover more about our minds, is to change one's chemistry and observe the effects.  Here is a video from 1956 where a "normal" housewife is given LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide) and her behavior is observed.  

This woman had no expectations of the journey she went on ahead of time, so her responses are genuine.  While her experience is fantastic and the response of the "expert" seems dated; it is clear she is living a different kind of reality after her brain chemistry was altered.

Changing the physical brain changes our means of thinking.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a tool which utilizes pulses of radio energy to take a picture of what is happening inside something.  MRI operates similar to Sonar for submarines, but the radio waves, unlike Sonar's sound waves, can penetrate the skin and enable us to see inside a thing.

We can use these radio waves on the soft tissue of our bodies to see pictures of our insides in three dimensions.  Like with a movie, these pictures can be taken quickly over time to result in a record of what happened.  When applied to our brains, this tool can record a movie of our thoughts as they happen.

It has even become possible to see what happens in the brain when we think certain thoughts.  What we see can cause patterns of thought.  Here are six perspectives of a brain while watching a movie trailer. 

The technique permits us to see the web of brain cells as they store and recall memories   Amazingly, the patterns we see are the same for most normal, healthy brains.  We humans, at a biological level, demonstrably think alike.

Some scientists have begun to try to reconstruct what is going on in our brains using the output of the MRI machines.  The research has led to the capability to display an image of what a person is seeing as they see it.  This video shows how the technology can scan the brain and reproduce the images the cells are processing.  These infant abilities of the MRI tool and the viewer attached to it should quickly be expanded as more precise tools are built and better practice comes from using them.

Where will this technology take us?  Noted futurist and theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has given this some thought and in this last video discusses the applications that most probably will come.  

One of his ideas is that we may actually be able to build a "dictionary of thought", models of the organization operation of our brain that we all share in common.  

Like after the initial atom bomb was dropped or when the Wright brothers first flew, at the start of a new technology is when we humans struggle to determine where the new tool will take us.  Here is short list of some of the questions that we, our children, and our grand-children will be trying to wrestle with:

• What does it mean to be "free" when your mind can be read?  
• Do we have an obligation to monitor our children's minds?  
• Should we scan people in public places?
• Will the scanning of other animals allow us to communicate with them more fully?
• How will the law be enforced using brain scans?
• Can we enhance our ability to learn?
• Are there some thoughts that should be illegal, immoral, or stopped?

I hope to stick around long enough to see these questions debated!

Relative Uncertainty

They lie
Those who know all
They LIE
Why
It matters not
But they lie

Truth is
Subjective rot
Truth IS
Sought
Like a river
Motion, not form

Dreams are
Reality wishing
Dreams ARE
Bought
To keep tame
Those who think

Facts be
Objective id
Facts BE
Exist
Sensory relative
Experienced never

Model Mind

Earth I touch though it be too large to feel all.

Sun I see but dare not look lest lose my sight.

Air I hear and only your voice has my attention.

Water I taste with just dissoluble flavor.

I do not know these elements as they are.

I only know my sense of them,

The world is the other, the outside, my imagined.

Each hair is linked with the nervous system. When energy affects a cell, a chain reaction falls up a column of cell dominoes, connecting in bundles, threading inside a spinal bone shield, terminating at the base of our brains where a switchboard prioritizes and directs signals to banks of memory cells.

This path from skin to mind is our sense of the world. Heat, motion, or electrical energy cause different chemical signals flowing from our finger to our head. The more intense the energy, the stronger the signal, the more intense our experience.

Sense Detectors

Each of our senses has many and diverse detectors. Touch has inputs for pressure, temperature, and damage.

Hearing uses 20,000 hairs bending to vibrations, triggering other pathways to our memory.

Sight has 120,000,000 rods to detecting batches of light photons; along with 6,000,000 cones that detect their vibrations in hues of yellow, red, or blue.

The patterns of light which bounced off the strangers face, the high energy heat from the stove top, the vibrations from your own footsteps are all detected and sent to your pattern holding brain.

These millions upon millions of detectors are always in operation, sending an onslaught of new information which we process and store.

Our detectors lay patterns into the very structure of our brains. Large interconnected groups of cells that form webs act as storage spaces for the signals the body's sensors have received. 


Pattern Forms

Over and over and over again signals are sent to the brain until patterns begin to slowly form. The individual cells in our brain connect and reconnect as signals are reinforced or fade away. The very structure of these cells become a metaphor for the reality our sensors sensed.

We call this pattern forming of senses to the brain “learning”. The brain has about 100,000,000,000 (100 billion) individual memory cells handling these inputs and holding on to patterns of information expressed within them.

Each memory cell is connected with thousands of other memory cells. These connections between cells shift and change as memories form and fade. Some memories cause many connections, others only a few.  Some memories create more connections and we remember while others lose connections and we forget.

Bio Start-up

The entire system from sensor to memory starts to develop at about twenty-five days after conception. The first signals start laying patterns almost immediately and continue under heavy, constant change for many years.

 Initially memory cells join and break connections quickly; gradually slowing until we die. More and more memory cells are produced during our body's entire life, although the majority of them appear when young.

In this whole system of body and brain that forms our sense and memory, we do not experience the world directly. Rather we have detected the energy on the surface of our bodies and translated it into patterns of memory within our brains.  These memory patterns are what we know the world to be.

Model Mind

Thinking that the world we know is only a metaphor or model of the world as it actually is can be a strange thing to understand at first.

We have built a model of the world in our brains that reliably allows us to estimate what is there, to predict what will happen next.

We think we know the earth, the sun, the air, and the water; but we do not. We sense energy and model it into a memory world within us.

Distant Mother

When we see our mother's face, we actually have light vibrations in our eye that are only the reflections from our mother.

When we feel her cuddle us tight, we felt the pressure of her touch, but not actually her cells.

Our ears feel the vibration in the air from her lips, but do not hear her.

Only when we suckle do we take in a part of her into us, but even that part of her we do not sense directly as it quickly becomes a part of us instead.

Sensible Beauty

It is beautiful and strange that the world we know is sensed and imagined, but never known directly. We have, perhaps, a mutual shared model of the world that is outside us. Practically, we must use our internal model of the world as if it were real. Accepting our model as the world allows us to interact with it, act in response to it, and impose our will upon it.

We live in a self-built artificial bubble of reality called mind. A beautiful model of what we believe is.