Materialist Philosophy Does Not Contradict Itself

Recently a philosophical acquaintance argued that materialists blatantly contradict themselves when they take a materialist view of reality and yet affirm that free, independent action is possible.

The argument which he presented relied on three premises:

1) Materialism affirms that reality in nothing but matter-in-motion.
2) Materialism implies affirmation of determinism, the metaphysical idea that all physical reality is causally determined.
3) Free, independent action requires action free of determinism.

To draw the conclusion:

4) Hence, when materialists affirm that human freedom is possible they contradict themselves. (They affirm that all reality is determined and affirm that some reality (human free action) is not determined.)

The argument fails because it relies on very questionable, if not downright false, premises with regard to (1) 'materialism,' (2) 'determinism,' and (3) 'free action.'

MATERIALISM: Defining "materialism" as the view that the only reality is matter-in-motion is not at all consistent with the materialist philosophy held by scientific materialists. Scientific materialism is the philosophy that works to explain all reality in terms of natural, physical processes. By contrast, the idea that materialism is the metaphysics which claims nothing exists but matter-in-motion is the philosophy of the ancient Greek atomists such as Democritus and Epicurus.

One plausible version of modern materialism is one the philosophy that holds everything real to be ultimately explained from a physical base. For example, the living entities of biology and the thinking entities of psychology, sociology, and culture are entities that can be explained as arising from a physical base. Calling such phenomena mere matter-in-motion amounts to a caricature of that level of reality. On the other hand, the materialist claim that ultimately each of these has a physical base is a viable form of realism and far removed from the simplistic notion that only matter-in-motion is real.

It would be a gross distortion to claim that the sub-atomic reality studied by quantum physics and the atomic reality studied by atomic and nuclear physics is a study of matter-in-motion, as the sub-atomic particle-waves and the atoms are the basis for matter. It would be a gross distortion to say that electro-magnetic band, which includes visible light, radio waves, ultra-violet waves and other forms of energy, is just matter-in-motion. No knowledgeable scientific materialist would ever claim that such physical realities as electrical and magnetic energy are nothing but matter-in-motion.

To claim that the realities of living organisms, of beings with a complex central nervous system, and of persons with culture (language, science, art, mathematics) are nothing but matter-in-motion is to commit a gross reductionism, one which scientific realists (materialists) do not commit. To say that all living organism have a physical-chemical basis is not to say that the reality of living organisms is nothing but the sub-atomic particles, the atoms, and molecules which make up that living organism. Likewise to say that all beings with a complex central nervous system and those with complex, large brains have a physical-chemical basis is not to say that the reality of such beings reduces to a set of sub-atomic particles, atoms, and molecules which make up those beings. In short, the complexity of existence at the biological and psychological levels is not reducible to mere matter-in-motion.

DETERMINISM: The claim that all materialists must accept the truth of determinism is a false claim.

Universal determinism is a metaphysical philosophy that is not held by many scientific materialists. There is no compelling reason for holding that all physical reality is held together by a universal net of causal determinism. This view of a universal determinism is an old metaphysical philosophy that modern scientific thinkers have mostly abandoned because a number of factors that question that universal determinism; e.g., the indeterminism of quantum physics, the randomness that is found in physical and social reality, the chaotic aspects of much of physical reality and the complexity the characterizes much of physical reality, making claims of causal determinism to be claims of academic philosophy at best.

The fact that many of the sciences utilize a from of causal explanation, i.e., explain phenomena in terms of the conditions and processes that caused the phenomenon in question, does not imply that those sciences entail a metaphysics of universal determinism. When we consider human reality (action, behavior) at the cultural-sociological-historical level, claims of universal determinism governing human behavior are not at all tenable, since the ability to predict human behavior is very limited at best.

FREEDOM (sometimes called "free will"): The statement that a materialist philosophy implies the impossibility of free, independent action by human beings is a false statement.

The belief that materialism negates the possibility of free, purposive, and autonomous human behavior is a belief that rests on a particular, philosophical notion of 'freedom,' one which identifies free action with free will, and sees freedom and free will as being independent of all conditioning factors. Accordingly, if human behavior can be causally explained as arising from neurological factors, psychological conditioning, and such, it is held that such behavior is not free behavior. Only action that would take place in absolute independence of any determining factor would be considered free action or action indicative of free will.

There are good reasons for rejecting that notion of 'freedom,' which turns out to be a concept of metaphysical freedom held by many traditional philosophers, but one which has nothing to do with our ordinary, effective concept of freedom. A rough statement of our ordinary, effective notion of freedom is that one acts freely when one acts in accordance with one's desires and self-interest. In other words, one is not coerced or compelled to act by some determining force, external or internal. A modern materialist does not have any trouble accounting for the fact that humans make 'free' choices and rational decisions which are not just the outcome of factors beyond their control.

Even if one accepts some version of metaphysical determinism (and there are many reasons for rejecting such), many philosophers have developed views of human 'freedom' which are compatible with determinism. In other words, it does not follow that if one accepts determinism, the implication is one that denies human free, 'independent' action.

Dr. Juan Bernal PhD is a retired mainframe programmer with degrees in philosophy and Spanish literature.

Juan is the a managing blogger & author at PhilosophyLounge.com which covers various topics from western philosophy, religion, and history. PhilosophyLounge.com is a place were people can interact, debate, and contribute to the topics that interest them pertaining to philosophy.

Take some time and visit the blog for more exciting articles.

View the original article here

What Shall I Think About Today? Cognitive Surplus, Spend It Wisely

As a society gets more and more efficient, it's citizens have more time to relax, enjoy recreation, and also to think. Not everyone enjoys thinking, sometimes they like to vegetate and just watch the TV, or listen to music. That's fine too, and each individual in a free society is allowed to spend their extra time however they wish, doing whatever pleases them. That's a good thing, and it is nice to live in such an abundant society and civilization.

Now then, let's say you are an individual who likes to think, and maybe you are no Plato, Aristotle, or Socrates, but you like to exercise your mental muscle now and again. Often, we are engaged in thoughts that our leaders suggest we think about, the types of things they'd like us thinking on, for instance, starving Africans, future space colonies, green alternative energy, or perhaps some political venue that will help serve the powers that be. Still, I would submit to you that you should think about those things, which most interests you, and use your cognitive surplus for those endeavors.

Obviously, with 7 billion people on the planet we don't need everyone thinking about exactly the same things all of the time. It might be good for nationalism, or national unity, or it might be good for the global community to get everyone on the same page. Nevertheless, a society does best when its thoughts are diverse, when individuality sets in, without the overshadowing thought police. This is how we will win the future, and this is how we will propel innovation, taking our society to the next step. Meanwhile, we should be careful not to succumb to societal norms, political correctness, or merely decide to think like everyone else so we fit in.

Having extra brain power, and more time to think is an extremely valuable tool for a society which wishes to press on into the future. There is no telling what new inventions, innovations, and new concepts the human mind might come up with. There are unlimited numbers of combination's which can be applied, and unlimited areas of thoughts from academia, science, industry, humanity, philosophy, education, energy, resources, transportation, communication, computers, technology, art, politics, and business to be merged.

Why not use your cognitive surplus to do something good for mankind, to push the boundaries of thought, and take this game to a higher level. That is if you are able, and you must remember your brain works better when you use it, and the more you use it the better it works. Please consider all this and think on it.

Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes writing 24,300 articles will be difficult because all the letters on his keyboard are now worn off now..

View the original article here

Want to Know the Biggest Secret of All - There Aren't Any

Humans are curious by nature, actually all up-right walking primates tend to be curious, and that shouldn't surprise anyone. Nor should it surprise anyone to learn that any good book publisher that publishes nonfiction books will tell you that the word "secret" in the title of the book will help it sell more copies. There is something that is alluring to the fact that there is a secret, something we don't know about, that makes us all too curious to go and find out. Religions use this tactic to recruit individuals to their flock, and marketers use it to sell products and services.

Still, it's used so often, and there are so few secrets in the information age that the chances of you learning a real secret are slim to none. That is to say, sure you might learn something that you don't know, but it's hardly a secret. And there are many more information outlets to discover the exact same information, usually for free. It's even more so than it ever has been in the past because all of mankind's information and knowledge is now online on the Internet. With billions of people connected to this massive communication system the concept of keeping secrets will someday be a thing of the past.

What I am trying to say is the biggest secret of all; is that there really are no secrets, that is to say no important secrets. Yes there is undiscovered information, and there are some things that humans don't yet know about physics, but I guarantee you someday in the future our artificially intelligent supercomputers, along with our scientists will discover all that information as well. I'm sure you've heard the phrase; Unlocking the Secrets of the Universe. There are no secrets in physics - there are only challenges in the observational abilities, and the limits to the devices that we presently have to do the viewing.

There are no secrets to our world, no one is purposely trying to hide anything of any huge magnitude, just silly little things, that don't amount to a hill of beans anyway. Luckily humans are a curious bunch, and they were to seek out information they do not know. However, with over 7 billion people on the planet now - the chances of anyone secret escaping all of mankind in the past, present, and off into the future is highly unlikely.

Therefore you should always realize that the biggest secret of all is; there aren't any real secrets anymore. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it. If you have any comments, concerns, and/or philosophical questions please shoot me an e-mail.

Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes writing 24,222 articles by July 22, 2011 at 2:22 PM is going to be difficult because all the letters on his keyboard are now worn off now..

View the original article here

Robert Oppenheimer and Andrei Sakarov

Two Nuclear Scientists, Robert Oppenheimer and Andrei Sakarov, played leading roles in the development of nuclear bombs (A-Bomb for R.O. and the H-Bomb for A. S.) for their respective governments, and then experienced similar reversals in their views of the wisdom and morality of the nuclear weapons programs in their respective nations.

Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project which developed and built the first Atomic bomb in the mid 1940s, later became a voice of moderation and opposed development of the even more powerful thermonuclear bomb (H-Bomb). He felt that US superiority in stockpiling A-Bombs was sufficient for national defense, but he was opposed by strong voices in and out of government who favored the H-Bomb project; he was eventually discredited, lost his security clearance, and had no further influence on US nuclear arms policy. The US government took the advice of Edward Teller, one of Oppenheimer's scientific colleagues, and proceeded to develop the H-Bomb. Meanwhile (in the 1950s) Oppenheimer's loyalty to the United States was questioned and he was generally discredited as a leading scientist and adviser to the government. His contributions both for defense and as a spokesman for moderation were not given due recognition until much later (1990s) during the time of the Clinton administration.

The leading scientist in the Soviet development of the thermonuclear bomb was Andrei Sakarov, known as the "father of the H-Bomb" in the Soviet Union. After successful above-ground testing of the most powerful nuclear device ever exploded, he also had second thoughts. He criticized the whole arms program of the Soviet Union, argued strongly for bilateral nuclear treaties with the United States, criticized Soviet policies, and the Soviet authorities. In 1975 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but the leaders of the USSR were not pleased. Eventually he was arrested and sentenced to "internal exile." But with the later developments and moderation in the Soviet Union, Sakarov was recognized for his work on behalf of Human Rights. I believe that the American Humanist Association named him "Humanist of Year" in 1980.

It is ironic to note that in each case we have two leading scientists, whose moral, social conscience got them in trouble with the authorities in their respective countries. Each came out as a spokesman for moderation and opposed his respective nation's mad dash into the nuclear arms race. Both paid the price that is often exacted on anyone who raises moral questions about his country's weapons programs and anyone who opposes the military policies of their governments, especially when officials claim that national security hangs in the balance.

Dr. Juan Bernal PhD is a retired mainframe programmer with degrees in philosophy and Spanish literature.

Juan is the a managing blogger & author at PhilosophyLounge.com which covers various topics from western philosophy, religion, and history. PhilosophyLounge.com is a place were people can interact, debate, and contribute to the topics that interest them pertaining to philosophy.

Take some time and visit the blog for more exciting articles.

View the original article here

Be Curious About Creativity

Have you ever wondered why humanity is so questioning? What an amazingly curious mind the artist and inventor Leonardo Da Vinci had to make the discoveries that kept his name in the spotlight 500 years after his death. The world would not have the technology to reach others over the internet without curious, creative people sharing knowledge.

We all do need a little support, and sometimes an escape from everyday life, to find the inner artist in this busy world. Getting more conscious about who we are personally takes a little self examination and lot of ongoing assessment. The secret, I feel, is to return to our childhood memories to find what inspired and fulfilled us them.'Curiouser and Curiouser' was what Alice exclaimed in her journey to Wonderland. We may all have something to learn from falling down a well into another way of looking at the world.

I recently had a very interesting group of curious artists gather in my art studio at Tallegalla for a workshop. That curiosity was a largest part of this weekend was very evident. Most had questions that related to their purpose in creating and their ongoing search for answers. Learning how others have researched and discovered can answer the many questions we all have about life...and art is after all life.

My own curiosity has lead to a rather largish library that I continue to add to at such a rate I need three minds to absorb what I want to read. Not only is self education essential, we need to find our tribe and curiosity will lead us to our creative destiny. However remaining motivated can be a hard call at times as creative people can be like boats tossed about in storms of life. There are several versions of a saying attributed to Babatunde Olatunj and I particularly like this version "The clock is running. Make the most of today as time waits for no man. Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery and today is a gift. That is why it is called the present."

It is the mystery of life I find so interesting but it is today that is always going to be the best time to be educating the mind which is powerful and responsive to the best efforts to motivate and enrich us. Every day we can read something new, experiment, explore and best of all research what gives us passion. I found this alone to be the most inspiring of all the tools of creativity.

Lyne Marshall is an Australian artist and author of two books on art philosophy, Gleaner or Gladiator: The struggle to Create and Invisible Realities: Finding the Hidden Dimensions in Art. Lyne's blog on creativity is on http://www.lynemarshall.com.au/ and her art and books can be viewed on http://www.artclique.com.au/. All writing Copyright Lyne Marshall 2011

View the original article here

Platonic-Fullerene Chemistry and Nanopolymer Technology

The science of Platonic Fullerene Chemistry has been reunited the cultures of science and art to re-establish the ancient Platonic Science for Ethical Ends. This means that the concept of Aristotle's ethical science to guide ennobling government can now re-emerge throughout the world. The objective of that ancient science remains exactly the same as it once was. It is science, designed to avoid human extinction. The existence of two separate chemistries, one about the physical material reality and the other about the functioning of Dr Candace Pert's Molecule of Emotion, forms the structure of this human survival science. Both chemistries entangle with each other to describe universal reality. This provides the basis of the ancient Greek political concept of allowing the people to choose between what Buckminster Fuller's called Utopia or Oblivion.

The global slide toward oblivion today is much as it once was in ancient Athens, when the Tyrants plunged the city into impossible debt, threatening such chaotic violence that Solon was appointed to sort out the economic differences in a peaceful manner. He abolished personal debt and interest on loans, as well as making property ownership more accessible to the people. Within ten years Athens became extremely prosperous. His wisdom, on behalf of the people, made contributions toward more democratic concepts in the face of complex greed manipulations by unethical power brokers.

After ten years of growing prosperity the Tyrants again seized control and Athenian power began its path to decline by foreign aggression. Today the same situation has returned to Greece and other nations caught up in the current global economic nightmare, now threatening to destroy the civilisation of the United States of America. It can be considered that stakeholders in global economic rationalism might be able to conceive, to their benefit, a modification of their present economic legal responsiblies, by upgrading them to meet the new medical chemistry guidelines.

During the 20th Century it was common knowledge that our entropic chemistry, governed by the second law of thermodynamics, had correctly stated that it is impossible to construct a perpetual motion machine. However, such concepts can now be reasoned about logically with an understanding about the functioning of the integration of both the new and the old chemistries. Past economic rationalism, however, invented concepts that sought perpetual economic growth for the benefit of human civilisation. TIME Magazine's Century of Science's greatest scientist for 1907 was Maria Montessori, who realised this was in error, referring to the entropic second law as the Greed Energy Law that would only bring about economic collapses and continual warfare.

Working with the Jesuit Priest, Tielhard de Chardin, Montessori postulated the existence of an electromagnetic key to open the 'Golden Gates' to the future. This electromagnetic key was Immanuel Kant's God-like Ethic for perpetual peace on earth, the subject of Hans Christian Oersted's Doctorate in 1799 titled,The Architectonicks of Natural Metaphysics. Oersted envisaged a new electromagnetic biological technology, which, in modern terms, is the quantum biology of the new Platonic Fullerene Chemistry. This makes Faraday's concept of the electric motor a child's toy by comparison. We now know from nanopolymer research, that such an electromagnetic life-science ethic is associated with the functioning of the centriole within the human cell, giving glimpses of a truly supra technology beyond our previous ability to imagine.

It is not necessary to use such technical terminology to demonstrate to the people that modern science and economics has been constructed upon false assumptions that dismissed human feelings as part of its composition. Leonardo da Vinci was not the man of the Renaissance the public has been led to believe. His optics key in his Theory of Knowledge, claiming that the eye was the source of all cognition, was erroneously supported by Rene Descartes and Sir Francis Bacon, pivotal figures of the mechanical era. At the moment of conception the eye does not even exist to guide any evolutionary development at all. Leonardo was unable to envision the liquid crystal optics of the eye of the cell. When the fertilising sperm, driven by a male nano-scale electromagnetic motor, penetrates the liquid crystal optical construction membrane of the female ovum, Dr Carl Callerman's universal purpose is brought into living focus as a balanced Yin-Yang electromagnetic centriole. The optics of the cellular membrane, not the optics of the human eye, holds the key to all knowledge. The centriole is the carrier of universal life-science purpose.

Scientists such as Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff are researching about what can be considered to be crucial properties of the centriole that are associated with the cerebral functioning of micro-tubule polymers. Without a doubt, nano-polymer research is now becoming crucial research for humanity's future. However, Buckminster Fuller's warning about making the choice between Utopia or Oblivion is of paramount importance to the people of the world. Fears about entropic nano-bot technology appear to be well founded. Plato warned about the destructive evil of unformed matter within the physical atom that could emerge from the actions of engineers who knew nothing about spiritual optical engineering principles belonging to the science for ethical ends. Today, the nuclear radiation threat spreading into Japan pales into insignificance to the threat posed by current entropic nanotechnology.

The British Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, has predicted that uncontrolled nanotechnology research is one of the inevitable human extinction outcomes that is likely to occur this century. In order to comprehend the solution to that dire threat of oblivion, we need to understand the basic relationship between the old familiar chemistry and the new one that is now emerging alongside it. We must free ourselves completely from being governed by an entropic dictatorship that denies that the science of life is linked to the infinite ethical fractal logic of the new chemistry. It is no longer acceptable to considerit heresy that Sir Isaac Newton's conviction, written in his Heresy Papers, that the world-view of a material universe must be completed with a more natural, profound philosophy, a philosophy based upon the same physics principles that upheld the original Platonic Science for Ethical Ends. Newton's infinite world-view can only be upheld by the same fractal logic that was basic to this lost science, and which is also fundamental to Platonic Fullerene Chemistry.

Buckminster Fuller's warning about a science governed by entropic logic was echoed by others such as the Molecular Biologist, Sir C P Snow, the Nobel Laureate in Medicine, Szent-Georgy, and the Max Plank Astrophysicist, Peter Kafka. All of these people warned that the mind-set of Homo Entropicus was following a path to total chaos. This is indeed an entrenched scientific culture, Einstein wrote that the second law of thermodynamics was the Premier Law of All of Science. Einstein's colleague, Sir Arthur Eddington called it the Supreme Metaphysical Law of the Entire Universe. Charles Darwin used it as the basis of his Theory of Evolution, actually citing Thomas Malthus' economic theories, which, in the 18th Century, had become synonymous with the second law of thermodynamics. For Western Moral Jurisprudence Law to attempt to continue to enforce an entropic global economic rationalism upon the global population can be considered to be a recipe for World War III.

In Volume 12 of the collected papers of Bertrand Russell, written in 1902, mention is made of Platonic metaphysics, but Russell lost belief in those ideas, although that particular work is considered to warrant further serious study. His, A Free Man's Worship, published in 1903, was a dedication to Albert Einstein's concept, that all life must be destroyed by the dictates of the second law of thermodynamics, the universal entropy law, and this became Russell's most popular reprinted essay. He wrote that "...the whole temple of man's achievement must be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins..." and "... only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built." In the light of the new Platonic Fullerene Chemistry, this horrific world-view that has been governing Western science for so many centuries, is no longer acceptable.

We know that various ancient Eastern philosophies were able to associate fractal geometrical logic with human emotional feeling. For example, the ancient Indra Diamond Net Necklace fractal demonstrates emotional concepts that are relevant to Dr Candace Pert's Molecule of Emotion discovered in1972. It is ignorant and offensive to consider such ancient philosophical ideas to have been ancient acts of pagan, barbaric behaviour, as was believed by St Augustine during the 5th Century, following the murder of the mathematician, Hypatia, in 415, who was the custodian of the Great Library of Alexandria.

During the 5th Century, over a thousand years of fractal logic life-science research were burned and dismissed from the mind-set of Western culture, influencing the Western world for another fifteen hundred years. The great genius, Albert Einstein, may have caused Bertrand Russell's inspiration that we must accept a living hell on earth, but Einstein's real greatness was that his protege, David Bohm, and Bohm's colleague, Karl Pribram, managed to break the entropic barrier to give the world a glimpse of the workings of an infinite fractal holographic universe. Einstein can be considered to have been instrumental in making that possible.

The front cover of New Scientist, dated the 26th of June 2010, heralded the Rise of the Quantum Machines. The relevant feature article carried the heading that "The new breed of quantum machines promise to patch a gaping hole into every experiment ever made". The quantum researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Nobel Laureate, Anthony Leggett, considered that although quantum theory is our most successful physics theory to date, it may not continue to describe the physical world perfectly, because there are too many issues that approximate reality.

The quantum theory mentioned in the article emphasises the physical world. The new Platonic Fullerene Chemistry, however, is about quantum biology and its interweaving with the world of quantum mechanics. This permits new models of reality to come into existence that challenge the validity of our understanding of the second law of thermodynamics. One of physics' most famous thought experiments is that of Shrodinger's cat, which can be dead and alive at the same time, an argument designed to demonstrate that quantum theory can be considered to flawed. Many scientists argue otherwise, referring to the property of a single Fullerene carbon-70 molecule being able to go through two separate slits at the same time within Young's double slit experiment. Ideas about parallel universes appear to emerge from such thinking, which although interesting, do not seem to be addressing the serious consequences of maintaining an entropic mind-set.

Due to the serious issue of Fuller's choice between Utopia or Oblivion underlying this article, it has been deemed warranted to make an attempt to present some reasoned argument that might draw public attention to its perceived peril at the hands of the second law. The properties of the Fullerene Carbon-70 is of great interest to the Science-Art Research Centre of Australia, which is closely associated with the development of the New Measurement of Humanity Project at the University of Florence. The Centre has adopted the Mark Robinson model of space-time, which provides a suggested solution to Young's famous double slit experimental paradox and it is therefore considered prudent to mention this as being representative of the new models of space-time that are now emerging in defiance of the second law of thermodynamics

Robinson's model was among such models noted in the text of a quantum biological paper by Huping Hu and Maoxin Wu, titled On Dark Chemistry- What's dark Matter and How Mind Influences Brain Through Proactive Spin. The paper was about how primordial sub atomic spin influences consciousness in defiance of the second law of thermodynamics and was published in NeuroQuantology, Volume 5, issue2, June 2007.

In accord with Plato's dictum that all is geometry, Robinson postulated that a fundamental concept of space-time describes a simple premise. Information within energy creates a unique geometrical structure of time, space and matter, reminiscent of Sir Isaac Newton's 'very subtle spirit' mentioned in his Fundamental Principles of Natural Philosophy. In Robinson's model, a constant acceleration of light upgrades a holographic pattern of space-time reality, compatible to Newton's association of light carrying information related to gravity. Space-time comprises of three phase states, past, present and future as a singular geometric event. Each phase's location is uniquely defined within the time line. This suggests a coherent geometry through space-time, replacing the concept of randomness and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

Nonlocality, the ability of information exchange beyond space-time, is essential to Robinson's model. Each phase of a moment of time communicates within its being, to constantly upgrade its local environmental space-time structure of the universe. Within Young's double slit experiment, this process might play a role to explain paradoxical events. We know from the EPR paradox that information can be in two places at once and we might now associate this with the workings of some intelligent purpose rather that submit to Bertrand Russell's world-view of uncertainty and chaos. Order from chaos can be considered associated with sub-atomic movement evolving through space-time, compatible with both the physics principles upholding the Platonic Science for Ethical Ends and Sir Isaac Newton's complete description of the universe.

Professor Paolo Manzelli and Professor Massimo Pregnolato were awarded the Georgio Napolitano Medal in 2010 on behalf of the Republic of Italy, for their quantum biological development of Platonic Fullerene Chemistry, as part of their New Measurement of Humanity Project, the New Renaissance. Their Age of Quantum Entanglement in science and art allows for an understanding of how the process of chaos simultaneously enacts an auto catalytic event that produces a new ethical, or healthy, order in nature, described as the "Principle of Fertile Evolution".

http://www.science-art.com.au/

Professor Robert Pope is the Director of the Science-Art Research Centre of Australia, Uki, NSW, Australia. The Center's objective is to initiate a second Renaissance in science and art, so that the current science will be balanced by a more creative and feminine science. More information is available at the Science-Art Centre website: http://www.science-art.com.au/books.html

Professor Robert Pope is a recipient of the 2009 Gold Medal Laureate for Philosophy of Science, Telesio Galilei Academy of Science, London. He is an Ambassador for the Florentine New Measurement of Humanity Project, University of Florence, is listed in Marquis Who's Who of the World as an Artist-philosopher, and has received a Decree of Recognition from the American Council of the United Nations University Millennium Project, Australasian Node.

As a professional artist, he has held numerous university artist-in-residencies, including Adelaide University, University of Sydney, and the Dorothy Knox Fellowship for Distinguished Persons. His artwork has been featured of the front covers of the art encyclopedia, Artists and Galleries of Australia, Scientific Australian and the Australian Foreign Affairs Record. His artwork can be viewed on the Science-Art Centre's website.

View the original article here

Golden Touch

Once upon a time there was a rich man named Midas. He had many palaces, many acres of land, a lot of money and many gold bars. Still he was not satisfied with them. He wanted more and more gold. He had a daughter, who was very beautiful. He loved her very much.

One night a fairy wanted to teach him a lesson and appeared before him. The fairy said, "Oh Midas! I want to give a boon to you. You may ask for anything. It'll be granted."

Midas was very happy. He thanked the fairy and said," kindly give me the power by which anything touched by me changes into gold." The fairy smiled and gave him the power. Then the fairy disappeared.

Midas was very happy. He touched all the articles in his palace. Everything changed into gold. "I will be the richest man in the world. Oh, fairy! Thank you very much," said Midas. Then he went to bed.

Next morning he woke up. He wanted to have a bath. When he touched water, it turned into gold. He was shocked. He could not have a bath.

Then he came to the dining table. The servants served delicious dishes before him. When he touched them to eat, everything changed into gold. He could not eat.

At that time, his daughter came there to have her break-fast. When he touched her fondly, she too became a golden statue.

"Oh, God! What is this?" he cried. "I don't like this power of changing everything into gold. I want my daughter back. "

No one answered his prayer. He wept bitterly.

"Oh! I don't like to be the richest man in the world. I am ready to give away all my wealth. Give me back my daughter," Midas cried.

In the evening the fairy appeared before Midas and asked, "Midas! Are you happy now?"

"Oh, fairy! Kindly take away your boon. I don't like to be a rich man. I am ready to be a poor man if my daughter is given back to me," Midas requested.

"Midas! Wealth is not everything. Don't be greedy. I wanted to teach you a lesson. Your daughter will come back and you will lead a normal life," said the fairy and disappeared.

The extraordinary power of Midas vanished. His daughter came to life. Midas was very happy and led a contented life. Then he came to the dining table. The servants served delicious dishes before him. When he touched them to eat, everything changed into gold. He could not eat.

View the original article here

You Cannot Automate Everything with Computers to Run Human Society and Still Maintain Freedom

As the coordinator for a think tank which happens to operate online, I often find people who are computer savvy, and have skills in the IT sector. They definitely come up with very intriguing ideas to streamline our civilization using software and computers to help improve the efficiency. However, there is a problem with all this, and that is that the folks writing the software, and creating the hardware, perhaps do not have the proper experience in a given industry, or understand the ramifications or law of unintended consequences when proposing ways to fix the economy, government, healthcare system, transportation, or anything else.

Perhaps you've been frustrated when you were forced to fill out a form online or on a computer. You weren't allowed to go to the next question until filled out something in the previous box. Unfortunately what you had to fill out in the box was unacceptable, there were no good choices, or you couldn't answer the question because it wasn't applicable. It's times like that that you realize that the computer systems were set up for a certain type of scenario, rather than someone who has a special case, special need, or a different situation.

One thing I've learned is if you try to develop a system for the most unintelligent person, and make it simple enough for everyone to use, you inevitably run into problems if there are complications. It happens anytime you make a rule, regulation, or law and making rules is pretty much that's what writing software is about. You see, you cannot automate everything with computers to run human civilization and society. And if you try you will inadvertently take away freedom. In other words someone won't be allowed to do something merely because there was a box to fill out, or a form, and therefore they can't.

That's unfortunate because we have laws in our country which are supposed to be set up that; "if it doesn't say you can't, then you automatically can," and in a way by making few rules, we derive freedom while living under the rule of law. Now then, the software programmers and the hardware that runs these computers will not be able to think of everything on their own, until we create true artificially intelligent to run the system and make future changes on its own.

Meanwhile humans who are fallible, and in this case may not understand all the future situations because things change, but also because they have no experience in that particular industry, area of endeavor, or social program, are causing a loss of freedom with each new rule they create to run the new system.

We must be very careful what we automate things not to cut people out of the pattern, or take away the freedoms that we all love. We do this far too often when someone doesn't consider all the potential eventualities in advance, and they come up with some law, rule, or software program which alienates an entire group of people. Or, sometimes just an individual, someone like you. I hope I've made my point.

Lance Winslow is the Founder of the Online Think Tank, a diverse group of achievers, experts, innovators, entrepreneurs, thinkers, futurists, academics, dreamers, leaders, and general all around brilliant minds. Lance Winslow hopes you've enjoyed today's discussion and topic. http://www.worldthinktank.net/ - Have an important subject to discuss, contact Lance Winslow.

View the original article here

Is Fashion Art?

A couple of instant coffee granules miss the cup as they often do first thing in the morning. With slow sleepy swipes, I mop them up while I wait for the kettle to boil. If I've managed to convey the right number of coffee granules from the coffee jar to my mug, and added precisely the right amount of sugar, milk and hot water, then it will be a good cup of coffee. But if I don't get ratio exactly right, it's yuck, which goes to show that there's an art to making a decent cup of java. Or is there? An art to making coffee, I mean.

The question of what constitutes "Art" with a capital T has been around for a long time. People pretty much agree that making a good cup of coffee is not an art but there is still a lot of dissent about certain modes of expression like writing, movie making and fashion. There is the idea that fashion cannot be an art because it evolved from sewing and tailoring which is a craft even though tailoring has been referred to as "architecture" and the draping of fabric across the body as being "sculptural". Many designers make references to art and artistic theories and concepts in their work yet are nevertheless relegated to the ranks of the frivolous where haute couture is viewed as the fetish of the financially well-to-do. And once haute couture and runway collections have been watered down for consumption by the general public then they are seen as nothing more than financial commodities and functional apparel in the marketplace.

Another reason why fashion is not considered to be art is because, as with film making, a number of people performing different functions take part in the creation of a garment, such as the designer, fabric producer, pattern cutter and seamstress to name but a few. Because designers often don't work alone to produce a garment, they don't fit with the traditional view of the artist as a solitary genius and are therefore not considered artists even though their vision of what the garment will look like is their own.

In short, there is no clear-cut answer as to whether fashion is Art or not because there are so many ways to interpret and use an individual garment. It can be seen as protection from the elements, an expression of belonging to a particular socio-cultural group, as a personal form of expression when it is worn, or in its purest sense, as the embodiment of the vision of its creator, the designer. Because fashion is so fluid and open to interpretation, it fits in with the theories of many disciplines and forms of expression, of which Art is only one.

For more information about fashion visit the website http://www.fashionink.co.za/

View the original article here

Physics Vs Metaphysics And Mankind's Romance With Immortality

Physics defines the science of matter and energy and interactions between the two, popularly seen as a study of quantum theory, transmission of discrete energy units, and quantum mechanics, the structure and behavior of atoms and molecules.

Metaphysics represents the branch of philosophy concerned with reality's nature, including the relationship between mind and matter, fact and value, the corporeal and incorporeal, or the first principles of a particular discipline, a priori speculation.

As a tool of science, physics reflects a long romance between eminent thinkers and the theory of everything; as thinkers court an unseen but tantalizing essence surrounding the body of translucent matter. Even at this late date, recognized science fails in its quest to establish the Ultimate Particle. Likewise, in Metaphysics, academe and would-be scholars wrestle with yet another unseen and tantalizing essence, the particle of mankind able to attain immortality. But can such particle, as popularly defined, be an enabler succeeding desire. Here again, desire fails the mentality to properly access the emotion of self-preservation into an eternal abode.

* Firstly: eternity is misapprehended; biblically it means 'until the set time.'
* Secondly: the vehicle of choice selected for attainment is chanced with little more consideration than the roll of a dice.
* Thirdly: the true identity of principles and principals is totally ignored.
* Fourthly: the existence of specific time frames, or dispensations, or limits via the Ten Ages as mileposts are unwittingly overlooked. You cannot find the way without specific signposts.

So many errors occur in Bible interpretation and denominational one-upmanship as to make the entire 3000 choices to appear ridiculous. Does this author make wild accusations? Consider the strict limits to biblical salvation in Ezekiel 14:14 (speaking of faithfulness as a requirement in 'last days'): "Though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousness,... they shall deliver neither sons nor daughters, but they only shall be delivered.... Even if you were eligible for judgment: What would be your chances? If we properly consider the restriction of principals and obsoleteness of application, proponents will suffer little chance of realizing morphosis into immortality.

Underground, in Berne, Switzerland, pulses a tremendous cyclotron; at a cost of billions, the construction can generate millions of electron volts (eV) (one photon can contain 13.6 eV). The scientists goal is to isolate the Ultimate Particle, physics' lifelong ambition. Just for kicks, this author will attempt to beat them to the punch: the Ultimate Particle projected at 4.4 x 10/33 lp/amu.

Resolution to the metaphysics of monotheism presents even a greater puzzle to exegetes trying to unravel ultimate understanding, limitedness, and restrictions in the biblical code. But such knowledge is available for enquiring and receptive minds, those eagerly and endlessly searching for the bottom line. Careful thought preceded the controversial conclusions now available.

As mankind contemplates the physical sciences, he also ponders the imponderable, how to save a piece of himself into immortal transcendency. What part of the ashes to ashes and dust to dust residue can we expect to assume coherency in the imponderable attainment. Was such ever a valid proposition? Where did we get this idea? Did we twist an ideograph to suit our own desperate desire? Indeed, advanced studies are available to settle the atheism/theism debate and answer the age-old question about immortality and an alternate destiny to nihility.

Ben Winter, particles physicist, Bible scholar, and author of "THE GREAT DECEPTION: Symbols And Numbers Clarified," reveals there 'is' something new under the sun -- that is, for modern Bible students. He addresses a correctness of language and true intent of the major Bible topics: solves Bible mysteries, defines Gog and Magog, reveals Daniel He-goat's surprising identity, and dares to number the all important Ten Ages. Sign up for FREE book critiques at http://www.winterbriar.com/ and view more articles in blog format at http://blog.thegreatdeception.net/.

View the original article here

Forcing Logic is Irrelevant - But Humans Do it Anyway!

It seems rather illogical to force logic to prove something, for if someone starts out with erroneous assumptions and builds upon false premise how can they ever guarantee they've arrived at the best possible decision, or correct answer? The reality is they can't, but humans do this all the time. Most often this occurs when someone is trying to prove themselves correct, and so they set out to do just that, and they build their logic tree, or put forth axioms, rules, and statements, that they assume to be correct.

But just because someone assumes that an axiom, rule, or statement is correct doesn't mean it fits in all circumstances, and trying to force logic in this way is irrelevant, not only to the process itself, but to the inconsistency of logical time efficiency. After all, why waste time using false assumptions to try to solve a problem that is relevant? You wouldn't do that, because if you really want to solve the problem, using logic that is, you must do so using factual or correct rules, statements, or axioms.

Now then, that does not mean that you cannot create a situation or an imaginary space, and try to solve an imaginary solution within that imaginary space. However if you are borrowing rules and statements from outside that imaginary space to solve the problem within it, which you will most likely have to do unless you reinvent all the axioms each time, then you have already broken a rule of logic in some regards.

Because it is illogical to solve a problem using rules borrowed from another sector, industry, human endeavor, or scientific realm. That doesn't mean that humans don't do it, they do it all the time. After all where else can they borrow the rules from, because if they create rules out of thin air, they have to prove that those rules are correct, but to do so they have to use other rules, but where they come from in the beginning?

Who created the first rule? And how we know the person that created the first rule, which all other rules are built upon, knew what they were doing? And who is the prime mover, the individual that set it all in motion? It seems no matter how we answer these questions, or how far back we take it to justify or verify the rules that we use when solving logical problems, at some point we are Forcing Logic, and we merely complicate that when we borrow rules from places we shouldn't.

Even though logicitions know this, they are human, and they will do it anyway. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.

Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes writing 22,700 articles was a lot of work - because all the letters on his keyboard are now worn off..

View the original article here

Bacterial Wisdom As Template for Artificial Free Will

If any genuine "free will" exists, it is at the level of the "I-ness" of a system, the decision making routine, that it comes into play. Before we dive into the technicalities of this issue, let's first try to brainstorm on what can be understood by "free will". Although intuitively we "know" what "free will" is, just as we know what consciousness is,it is extremely hard to define it in words. Let's try to build an ontology "free will" by reciting its features and by drawing the borders of this concept from the notions of what it is not.

I followed a very interesting discussion on the issue of free will and whether it is needed in AI, which I will neither repeat nor summarise here, but a number of striking concepts of which I will use in this essay. I do not claim to have come up with those concepts myself nor do I claim to be an expert on the issue, but I believe that I can add some interesting concepts to the discussion deriving from Ben Jacob's "Bacterial Wisdom", "Global Brains" and "Societies-of-Minds". I will also propose to incorporate an artificial functional mimic of "Free Will" in a Webmind such as the AWWWARENet (Artificial World Wide Web Awareness Resource Engine Net).

A number of concepts stood out above the noise of the aforementioned discussion, which I'll mention here as features (and non-features) of the "free will ontology":

"Choice, override, randomness, unpredictability, (non)determination, chaotic, (non)causality and evolution".

Indeed, for a "Will" or decision-taking routine to be "free", it must be able to override those possible decisions, which are "causality-determined". In Goertzel?s Webmind the discriminating faculty is the AttentionBroker routine). In the AWWWARENet, the AttentionBroker presents its conclusions, what course of action is to be taken as being the most rational, as having the highest probability of success, to the I.I.I (Identity,Initiative and Illusion generating routine). In as far as the system has an "override" function, the system appears to be endowed with a faculty of "choice" to an outside observer of the system.

The need for a random-picking faculty arises, when the AttentionBroker present the I.I.I-routine with more than one equally likely options i.e. options with identical priorities.

The issue becomes more poignant, when due to a scarcity of resources or time imposed resource constraints not all options can be carried out simultaneously or worse are mutually exclusive i.e. some must be sacrificed at the expense of others.

Which one to choose if they have all equally preferable numerical outcomes of a resultant vector of the pros and cons and the only differences are to be found on a qualitative level?

It goes without saying, that the advantage-disadvantage summing includes attributing preferential weighting of long term advantages over short term disadvantages.

A rational/causal decision for the system will try to optimise the chances for survival of the system in the long term; short term repairable damage can then be tolerated as a temporary sacrifice.

When we look at the only observable example we have of "free will", i.e. ourselves, (at least we believe we're endowed with such a faculty - and we need an example of free will, if we ever want to try to simulate or mimic it in an artificial environment), indeed we sometimes override rational reflections, which warrant a safe outcome and take prima facie irrational intuitive decisions based on a "gut-feeling". Often our animal instincts and/or emotions are capable of overriding a potential well-reflected decision based on a summation of the pros and cons. Goertzel sees these as natural impediments to human superintelligence in his book "The Hidden Pattern".

Are such override decisions examples of "genuine free will" or are they merely the result of a summation on a meta-level, e.g. where an outcome of the "Emotome" is weighed against an outcome of the "Cognotome"? If the latter is the case, these decisions certainly do not qualify as "free will"but are the result of yet another algorithm. Nevertheless, programmed with sufficient control over the "advice" deriving from the "Emotome", a superintelligent AI system, which is aware of the routines of the "Emotome" and "Cognotome", the system will still face situations where it has to choose between equally good (or bad) strategies.

In such cases the system could be programmed to pick one at random. But such a random-picking routine cannot really be equated with "genuine free will".

When we say that we intuitively choose the solution which "feels best", perhaps we're subconsciously performing a search through a space of known similar solutions and we pick the one with the highest degree of similarity of the situational parameters in the solution space or the one with the shortest route to a successful outcome. We might be devising a heuristic. An AI system could be programmed in such a manner, but again such an algorithm does not qualify as genuine free will.

In reality our presumed "free will" is much more limited than we might a priori believe. Tricks played by so-called "mentalists" have shown, that subconsciously registered clues from the most recent peripheral perceptions steer us toward decisions, which we believe to be genuine free will based decisions.

By eliminating all descriptions which are not the product of genuine free will, we may come to a description of free will. Let's continue the brainstorming exercise in order to ground a pattern of free will from a number of examples.

Let's start with an extreme example of "choice", which should not be influenced by "peripheral perceptions". In the film "Sophie's choice" there is a scene where Sophie (played by Meryl Streep) is forced to choose one of her children, the other will be killed. Not choosing will result in both children being killed. A parent who loves his children alike and refrains from favouritism might have the following thoughts:

It is better if one of my children survives than none.As these sadistic monsters kill people anyway, there is no good reason to give in to this non-choice as they will very probably kill both children in the end anyway.If I do choose one of them, I may buy some time for one of them generating a chance for escape and survival.If I do choose one of them I commit a sin: It is immoral to make this decision forced upon by blackmail; One should never give in to that, I'd rather safe my ass in the after world.If I do not choose one of them I commit a sin: It is immoral to condemn both death.I should choose the most helpless one/the one with the best survival chances.

Thoughts 1,3 and 6 belong to the realm of Necessity (N) and Energy (E) and aim for the "least damage" result. Thoughts 2,4 and 5 belong to the realm of Morality (M). Is the choice being made again the result of a summation vector of N,E and M? Is one's choice faculty predestined by the idiosyncratic resultant N,E,M vector?

Is "gut feeling" and "feeling like it" a form of aligning your decision as much as possible to your N,E,M vector or is there a way to escape from algorithmic pattern based calculation considerations?

Don't we sometimes make choices, which are non-rational or even counter-intuitive, the motive being recalcitrance? Is a "what the heck, I'll just pick one" not the carrying out of a pure random picking algorithm?

Scientists, artists, musicians and other creative persons sometimes have breakthrough insights, moments of pure bliss, where they simply "see" the solution to a complex problem; where a sudden "inspiration" overrides the paradigmatic pathways and fixed action patterns of the basal ganglia.

Such utterly original ideas coming from moments of bliss, especially when coupled to a choice may approach the most, what we intuitively assume to be "free will".

Another example of apparent free will based choices is when we deliberately and consciously do the opposite: Willingly go against one's morality, by indulging in this or that bad habit, even if our Emotome and Cognotome tell us differently: The often heard expression is then "The flesh is weak". When this relates to e.g. possibilities of extramarital sexual intercourse, for many people the overriding force of our animal instincts should not be underestimated. The animal part of the brain then imposes a kind of artificial Necessity on the decision-taking routine, if the mating signal has been given by an attractive candidate of the opposite sex.

Only a combination of Energy (E) and morality (M) (e.g. I don?t want to hurt my present partner and my children and/or my religion considers this as a sin etc.) may then override such instincts. Again here a summation of both instinctive tendencies and the outcome of the Emotome? Cognotome will then determine the action to be taken. Not so much free will after all?

A third example of apparent free will and choice with an unpredictable outcome can be found in the realm of "Global brains" such as bacterial colonies, beehives and anthills. A priori, as long as resources are sufficient the system thrives by maintaining conservative habits i.e. by maintaining the paradigm.

Those individuals in the Global Brain, who have the role of Ben Jacob's "conformity enforcers" and "inner judges" will assure that the system can thrive as long as the status quo parameters apply. However, once resources become scarce a need will arise to probe different strategies so as to ensure the survival chances of the species. Those individuals in the colony having the role of "diversity generators" are indispensable to probe alternative strategies. These diversity generators must be able to boldly go where no one had gone before; they must be daring and blithely dive into the abyss the unknown.

It is of utmost importance, that these individuals are endowed with a great deal of free will, because they MUST take decisions, which go against common-sense. They must expose themselves to great dangers and have a huge chance of compromising their own survival in sacrifice for the greater good. The diversity generators must almost have a borderline personality: they must take absurd, random intuitive or counter-intuitive decisions. Whereas the vast majority of the diversity generators (I.e. the mutants in an evolutionary system) are not successful, a few of them are and bring the species anew chance for survival; a new way to exploit resources or new resources all-together The selection of the most promising strategy follows the evangelical adage "To he who hath it shall be given, from he who hath not, it shall be taken away". The outcome of sending out in parallel a multiplicity of diversity generating sentinels and pioneers is unpredictable.

The Global Brain system as a whole, if it is successful in the end then appears to have chosen and invented a solution, which for an observer from the outside appears to derive from a blissful insight, a truly intelligent, intuitive utterly original free will decision.

What the outside observer does not know from this prima facie observation is that the Global Brain has massively probed a multitude of solutions the vast majority of which have failed. He outcome appears to be free will, but is the result of a competition, a screening struggle for the most promising strategy. Perhaps our brains function in a similar way, such that when we seek a solution to a problem, we subconsciously launch a multitude of strategies in parallel. These strategies compete and only the most promising strategy is promoted to the level of consciousness, by exceeding a certain threshold after having been voted upwards in a Reddit-like system.

Perhaps this is the best way to mimic free will in an AI system: to allow multiple different strategies to evolve in parallel in a simulation and/or "real"environment and have the "intergroup tournament" establish which strategy is the most successful one. The up or down voting during the intergroup tournament screening is then carried out by online individuals and/or aLife agents, which can be considered as Ben Jacob's "resource shifters".

So "apparent free will" may emerge from making a vast amount of wrong, unsuccessful decisions/strategies and keeping the few promising successful ones.

The "making of mistakes" is both inherent and indispensable to this system as it relies on massive parallel probing: The system will learn the most from its mistakes and prune away non-promising strategies. It will not venture in those directions again. Thus by means of this massively parallel probing in simulation environments, the Global Brain builds its own heuristics.

Analogously in our lives there is nothing wrong about making mistakes as long as we learn there from. It is my experience, that making mistakes is more instructive and has a longer lasting impact than courses of action, which I happened to perform correctly, without knowing why. Thus this world, where we can make mistakes (a religious person would use the term "sin") is in fact the best of all possible worlds in the terms of Voltaire's "Candide", as it permits us to evolve consciously.

So for me the answer to the question "What is free will and is it needed for AI" is the following (and I do not claim to have come up with this definition all by myself; I combined some concepts of the aforementioned discussion and added the element of Ben Jacob's thesis thereto):

Free will can be characterised by a decision making process, which overrides rational and/or emotional/instinctive heuristics and which establishes a new heuristic on the basis of the seven step algorithm of Intelligence, whenever the system is under resource restrictions and has to deal with a choice having less than certain knowledge at its disposal. That algorithm means involving the elements of Ben Jacob's "Bacterial Wisdom" in the following manner:

Probing a diversity generating antithesis as a result of a stimulus from the inadequacy of the status quo thesis (e.g. a lack of resources), pattern abstraction, emergence of multiple alternative strategies, intergroup tournaments and distinction probing resulting in either niching or preferably symbiosis.

The most promising strategies ideally result in symbiosis, a unification of features toward which the system will strive. It will try to resonate with its new environment and thereby adapt to it.

As to the necessity for AI casu quo a webmind, it can be said that if the system is put under pressure due to scarcity of resources, it is indispensable it has a way to venture into the unknown to discover new resources.

Yet the system as a whole cannot venture into the unknown by making a big leap; that is simply too risky. A Webmind apparently disposing of free will is therefore ideally a Society-of-Minds, wherein the different individuals have been attributed the roles of conformity enforcers, inner judges, resource shifters and diversity generators, so that the system as a whole can safely sacrifice diversity generators on a massive scale, without compromising the integrity of the whole in order to find new promising strategies, heuristics and/or resources. Among the diversity generators it can be envisaged that there are different groups or ensembles each having a different degree of freedom to explore: there can be a gradual increase from rather conservative combinations of existing strategies that a diversity generator can propose until absurd wild combinations of unrelated strategies. Conservative diversity generators will still look for certain degrees of resemblances between existing strategies and combine parts of these linearly, when more freedom is allowed non-linear combinations can be used and the most free systems can have access to random combinations on the verge of the absurd. The diversity generators themselves are still algorithm bound, but a successful one will be seen by the outside world as having had a great deal of free will.

Evolution of colony based organisms and cell aggregates within an organism works in a similar way: think of the hypermutation process of the immune system.

Similarly we as human beings may fulfil the roles of the different types of individuals of a Society-of-Minds. The universe is probing for new solutions in order to propagate its seven-step intelligence algorithm and it also uses us to achieve that goal. From there to conclude that we live in a simulation is then almost mere semantics.

The seven-step algorithm of intelligence is a twofold dialectic process: The thesis (1), antithesis(2), pattern-abstraction (3) leading to emergence (4). From opposition (antithesis as regards a thesis) comes creativity (pattern abstraction) resulting in redefinition (emergence).

Free will -at least an apparent form thereof- is indispensable in this system to create the diversity generators. Whereas the conformity enforcers and inner judges who maintain the status quo are endowed with fairly little or almost no free will (and thereby maintain a form of inertia of the system), the resource shifters and even more the diversity generators are endowed with a great deal of free will so as to ensure leaps into the unknown. Absurd and unpredictable mutations, which are carried out on a massive scale result in intelligent decisions by pruning away the mistakes via a survival of the fittest protocol.

The free will of the most extreme diversity generators is then in fact a form of counter-intuitive absurdity; a borderline leaping into the abyss of the unknown just-for-the-kick-of-it. The diversity generators must be endowed with a certain amount of "mental insanity"so as to ensure the sanity of the system as a whole, of which they form part.

So it can be concluded that the free will of the orchestrating quasi-conscious faculty in such a webmind, is limited to the generation of submodules e.g. in the form of smaller sized copies of itself endowed with lesser resources, which submodules perform the ungrateful task of probing the unknown, whereas another greater part of the system is controlled and maintained by the conformity enforcers and inner judges in the form of a Life agents. Note that the faculty to generate apparent free will for its submodules does not necessarily entail genuine free will of the higher meta-levels as well: those are still governed by weighing and summation algorithms and choosing the best option, if needed using random picking when results are identical. Due to the selection of the best solution from the submodules the system as a whole displays "apparent free will", but the webmind has no such true faculty.

Antonin Tuynman was born on 22-02-1971 in Amsterdam. He studied Chemistry at the University in Amsterdam (MSc 1995, PhD 1999). Presently he works as a patent examiner at the European Patent Office in the field of clinical diagnostics. He has also passed the papers of the European Qualifying Examination for patent attorneys. Antonin has a developed a strong interest in futurism and the Singularity theory of Kurzweil. In his blog Awwwareness, http://tuynmix.blogspot.com/ Antonin proposes Artificial Intelligence concepts which may lead to the emergence of internet as a conscious entity.

View the original article here

Different Rules, Different Schools - All Are To Be Loved

Perceptions of life experience vary vastly. Interpersonal traps are afoot by underestimating the power, and personally-held truths implicit, of differing traditions, values sets and histories. What's seen at the pointy end are assumptions made according to the wrong rules...

These 'failure to communicate' experiences evolve through a lack of recognition for the myriad schooling of life.

The gospel of God is the tolerance of all these schools - as we're personally concerned. Broad statement but it's true. It's the Christian way, despite what some extremists say.

Proof of the inherent godliness of this construct is the uniqueness of experience. Each one sees what looks like the same thing but through different eyes. If God wanted us all thinking similarly he'd have limited our range for understanding and perception.

Preaching FOR and Never Against

Instead of preaching against one school's ethos, we preach for ours, and we do it in that charismatic fashion called "love," an alluring 'magic' potion that works (in some way) every time. That's why God's inherent Love - it works as truth in and through the fabric of life. Always has done, always will do.

When we tell people their way is wrong - whether by politics, religion, spirituality or philosophy for living - we're really telling them we don't love them. This might seem like an over-simplification. It isn't.

People are easier to hurt than we think. It might be thought that in challenging people's paradigms they're not being attacked - for the issue is tackled, not the person - but the human mind and heart sees difference and therefore it's a threat. There are millions of different manifestations of this. The point is it's negative.

"Division," Not Divisiveness

When Jesus spoke of "division" in Luke 12:51 he meant the Gospel would divide, bringing peace to the ones embracing it, but persecution also for the significant spiritual difference created between even family members. Jesus never meant that believers are to be divisive in their methods, throwing down others' beliefs.

Division is a consequence of the Gospel, not the method for preaching it.

Preaching for the allure of Jesus' gospel in and through tolerance is the objective of the Christian life. Let's understand this doesn't have anything to do with preaching in the vocal sense. It's our manner, disposition, body language and favour to all humankind that sets people most apart as Jesus' kin - not what we say.

Respect for All Rules and Schools

When it's considered that everyone has come to the formation of themselves through deliberate and intentional processes for learning, having done their best to negotiate life, it's hard to not respect them. Just surviving life is a major accomplishment for many.

Of all assumptions to make-"all have engaged in 'good' learning"-the above is safe because it induces no harm. Of all generalisations to make-"all people"-the above is safe. It causes no harm to anyone. It honours their context. We can honour things without agreeing with them, because we're noting the importance of it to them; we choose love (of them) over fear (which is tackling the differences our beliefs can't stomach).

We do not harm ourselves or anyone else when the tolerance of inimitable respect flows through our psyches.

Repentance - An Individual Choice

It is up to individuals to repent of their own. As individuals, we can only make our repentance - as we hear God usher it through our spirit - and force nobody else's.

Until God reveals the truth to people - as they're to hear it - how are we to pass judgment? It's between them and God.

Copyright (c) 2011 S. J. Wickham.

Steve Wickham is a Registered Safety Practitioner (BSc, FSIA, RSP[Australia]) and a qualified, unordained Christian minister (GradDipBib&Min). His blogs are at: http://epitemnein-epitomic.blogspot.com/ and http://tribework.blogspot.com/

View the original article here

Philosophy of Coexistence

Society is the ultimate in human evolution. We live in a cohesive society which provides for all the human needs whether natural or nurtured. Cohesion is the most important factor in coexistence. Philosophy of coexistence is not a matter of debate but one of truth. Few of us really wonder the mechanics of our world and the society we live in. Cohesion and coexistence paved the way for human evolution and eventual domination of the planet. In earlier evolutionary phases of humanity, the acceptance of uniqueness of the individual paved the way for our development and progress. Humans tend to look to the nature for models for inspiration and emulate that is worthy. Usage of tools or body hygiene may have been picked from crows and cats. Use of shelters might have been forced by the nature and its vagaries but selection of domicile would have been influenced by cave dwelling animals. Plumage and cosmetics might be the result of watching the mating rituals of birds though the opposite gender in humans picked up the habit. Whatever the stage that was set and acted upon, humans were adaptable and agreeable to fellow humans. Animal kingdom had its own strict and rigid values that limited the individual development. Humans differed from animals in that basic sense. Animals had to tow the line or become an outcast. Humans accepted singular and distinctive tendencies and assimilated all positive (and some negative) traits into our culture. The basic philosophy of coexistence was established in character.

It is easy to make assumptions and deliberate on the theme. However, 'however' is a constant in human evolution. We progressed from stone-age to rocket science, however the progress had its consequences. We unraveled the secret of DNA and broke through the space barrier. However, we are still fighting maladies like cancer and AIDS. The world has shrunk due to supersonic travel and broadband. However we are yet to accustom ourselves to different beliefs and cultures. Pizza and sushi are ubiquitous, however we are yet to adopt family values or filial duties from the same cultures. Yoga and acupuncture are common practices however we are yet to assimilate collectiveness into our systems. Equality and level playing field is accepted as a fundamental right world over. However, we are yet to abandon caste and class and gender discrimination.

The next in line to the philosophy of coexistence is the medium of exchange. The proverb 'money is the root of all evils' does not stem from greed. Money or currency created isolated pockets of humankind. When the exchange was through barter interaction was unavoidable. Cohesiveness had meaning and only a cohesive society could exist under ideal conditions. When the medium of exchange was invented and put into practice, mankind changed its behavior. It created classes and creeds. Mankind lost its cohesiveness and the philosophy of coexistence took an about turn. It became coexistence between haves and have-nots. The change was inevitable considering the human tendency for change. However, the change became the 'root of all evils'. Discrimination became rampant and humanity was lost or acquired a different meaning. Philosophy of coexistence became that of serfdom and master class. It was not really coexistence but conformity. The world population attuned themselves to distinctive life styles.

The real philosophy of coexistence is the ability to accept different beliefs. Mankind developed the sense of Super Being since time immemorial. The original beliefs were about the unexplainable. Later this was refined to tenets and doctrines. The articulate spread beliefs which were logical and believable in existing circumstances. Arguments and postulations percolated to the commoners through reiterations and repetitions. Charisma and personality played its part in bringing cohesiveness to localized societies. However, this proved to be a detriment to the philosophy of coexistence. Different beliefs found it difficult to accommodate other ways of life. Conflicts occurred among different beliefs. One tried to dominate another and it lead to crusades. Two cultures stand out in this. Sanathan Dharma and Shinto were oriented towards oneness with nature and peaceful coexistence. These dogmas disregarded the human diversity and accepted the universal truth of uniqueness. The philosophy of coexistence is not dependent on give and take but of acceptance.

Author: Gangadharan Variyar
email: gangadharan_venoor@yahoo.co.in

View the original article here

Humans and The Ever Ending Need to Pit Good Versus Evil Now Have A Problem

It has often been noted that to build a team, any type of team; society, religion, group, or committee you need an enemy, whether human or just an adversity to overcome. Human enemies are beatable, we intrinsically know this. Of course, if you can't find an adversity to triumph over such as a great flood, Tornado, Hurricane, Typhoon, Earthquake, Tsunami, Volcano, or other natural disaster, then you'll need a viable opponent you can conquer, something you can call; Evil!

When it comes to human leaders, well they will often choose various groups, such as wealthy people, or folks of other religions, nations, or some such thing as the bad guy "them" or they. And in doing so, many politicians and leaders inherently know that calling a group's leader "an evil person" works well in rallying the troops for the battle cry, or organizing the people in rising up against a common cause.

Yes, some evil doers are much better than others. Hitler was an excellent "evil doer" to go after, so too were other notables in history. Amedinejad, Kim Jong Il, Gaddafi and others are, hmm, well, indeed perhaps decent evil bad guys from an American perspective, but will they suffice for the loss of our most villainous evil enemy? After all, the mental images of Osama bin Laden living in a secret cave running Al Qaeda does make a rather interesting spy novel, with potentially decent movie rights to the script.

Unfortunately, he's been taken out (yes, that's a good thing), but now what? You see, we now need a new "evil bad guy" to hate, in order to hold together our societal fabric and build unity. Silly isn't it? But luckily, there are no end to potential things to call evil, and even Congress has asked to re-assign drug cartels as terrorists. Okay, and maybe they are, and that can work for now, but will it work long-term?

Often, there is something I've noted by those who lead by misdirecting hatred and negative energy to others, and that is; it all eventually comes around full-circle. For instance, Osama bin Laden labeled the West, and the US as evil, and looky what happened. Perhaps, our leaders will stop labeling things evil early and often, and rather concentrate on their own mirrors. And this is not to say that Osama bin Laden wasn't an evil thinker, doer, and man, certainly he was all of that and more, but perhaps it's time to reflect on all this looking at it from outside the box.

Maybe we all ought to learn from his mistakes prior to labeling another or a group of humans such things ourselves. Hey, don't shoot the messenger, it's all just philosophy after all - in mankind's struggle to create and conquer evil, and the on-going thirst to understand good versus evil. Please consider all this.

Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes writing 23,100 articles was a lot of work - because all the letters on his keyboard are now worn off..

View the original article here

Governments Have Always Been Mob Rule

Mob rule is the unfortunate state after which governing institutions have lost power - or Anarchy. After the legitimacy of the former governments has been eradicated by whatever populist or terrorist force, some group or groups then take control by pure force. These groups then disseminate rules of their own to the now-obeying populous, create governing rules within their commanding ranks, and execute plans to maintain or gain control over other competing groups. These groups can be of resistance ideologically, territorial rivals, or purely based on obtaining resources. So it seems that in this process of Anarchy-to-mob rule-to-competing groups, we will have come full circle once again. The state has returned, and after the many years that follow this competition amongst small groups for resources and territory the question then becomes: what is the best way to govern or disseminate resources to those that need them? From there, political science takes shape and more sophisticated groups and systems emerge until they fall into Anarchy once again...

So the point in all of the human nature hoopla mentioned above? - We have never gotten out of Mob Rule and never will...

If the definition of mob rule is the intimidation of the majority or a pure democracy by numbers, than is that not what we have now? As the masses being governed by the few, we have the power at any time to essentially rule as we see fit by any means necessary. And in turn, the legitimate political powers rule necessarily by force in order to keep order and protect all under their laws. Force is the key here. If they rule buy force or coercion as all governments must do in order to maintain their power, how are they any different than the small competing groups that form during a mob rule mentioned earlier?

read more at: http://globefront.com/2011/01/governments-have-always-been-mob-rule/

View the original article here

Phenomenology and the Crisis of Civilization

Because such fingers need to knit
That subtle knot, which makes us man...
John Donne, The Ecstasy

I

With these dozen or so words the sixteenth century British metaphysical poet, preacher, and elegist, John Donne, foreshadowed the core challenge haunting our late post-modern world, while at roughly the same time a French philosopher and mathematician, Rene Descartes, was busy laying its oft-heralded foundations. Today we are heirs to the one and, like our forebear Descartes, skeptical of the other.

Our current, hyper-rational post-industrial culture is indebted to Cartesian doubt, along with its skeptical bifurcation of subject and object, mind and body, self and world. But this foundation itself rests upon prior constructions laid down by Aristotle and before him by the Greek Stoics. And even the categories of these ancients germinated in soils hearkening back yet further in human history, to the earliest divisions of labor and specializations that emerged with the burgeoning of urban life and the pre-reflective creation of institutional hierarchies six millennia ago. These several historical layers have left us with a diminished conception of thinking, dominated by Aristotle's syllogistic, and with a diminished conception of community, the post-modern state.

With the enforced separation of an objective, externalized universe, presumably independent of the knowing and contemplating subject, scientific hypothesis formation was able to provide us with an ever-expanding toolbox allowing us to manipulate and finally control that external environment. Such a set of tools would eventually be applied not only to objective nature, so conceived, and to those wild creatures populating the natural world, but to human beings as well. So our control and manipulation would finally extend to the very "soul of those who were by nature our own equals... our fellow men" (Augustine, de Doctrina Christiana).

It was not until early in the twentieth century, with the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, another French philosopher, that the wrong turn initiated by Descartes was made clearly evident to trained philosophers. An earnest student of phenomenology and psychology, and with an uncanny commitment to the primacy of perception, Merleau-Ponty was able to disclose the fleshy "intertwining" of the sentient subject and the earthly sensuous, in short, the "body-subject (le corps-sujet), and the world-as-lived-by-the-body. It is this philosophical recollection of the inter-animation of body and world that may assist us in understanding the roots of our current crisis today - the crisis of Western civilization.

II

We "first-worlders" tend to believe that our sciences and our technologies represent the best human ingenuity has to offer, that they demonstrate our unquestionable historical advancement and justify our global supremacy. We feel that we have overcome the more primitive and undeveloped aspects of the origins of our species, which, not in the least, is demonstrated through our increasing mastery over nature. In his Introduction to Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger challenges this very assumption of the modern temperament.

The fundamental error that underlies [modern sciences, natural and human] is the opinion that the inception...is primitive and backward, clumsy and weak. The opposite is true. The inception is what is most uncanny and mightiest. What follows is not a development but flattening down as mere widening out... a perversion of what is great, into greatness and extension purely in the sense of number and mass. The uncanniest is what it is because it harbors such an inception in which, from over-abundance, everything breaks out at once into what is overwhelming.... (165)

Here Heidegger overturns, as he frequently does, the commonly accepted view of things. This world of ours, the product of modern science, rather than representing a development is really a regression - a truncation, abbreviation, and reduction of the original richness and fullness of existence to mere numerical coefficients, mere extensions in space-time. The world has become emptied out by modern consciousness, reduced in simplest terms to a set of mathematical equations or legalistic syllogisms.

In all his later work, Heidegger was possessed with this state of affairs and with the curious relationship obtaining between thinking, being, and truth. He came to see that the original nature of human dwelling, of our being-in-the-world, was covered over by the not-so-artful constructs of modern consciousness, and that the truth of being lay hidden in our collective forgetfulness. In fact, he came to rely increasingly upon the concept of truth as unconcealment or disclosedness, seeking to articulate the original intertwining of thinking and dwelling - a condition of openness that he termed Gelassenheit. He recovered the concept of truth from its ancient roots in Greek myth, deriving rather circuitously from the word lethe, the river of forgetfulness, one of the five rivers of the underworld in Greek mythology. The term lethe in classical Greek literally meant "oblivion," "forgetfulness," or "concealment." The word for "truth" on the other hand, from whence Heidegger rescues our own concept, is aletheia (a???I®????), meaning un-forgetfulness, un-concealment, or disclosedness. The event of truth would be exposing that which had been essentially concealed or hidden and letting it again shine-forth.

It is this condition of forgetfulness that Heidegger wants so desperately to reverse in his final writings; he wants to let-shine-forth what was forgotten and covered-over at the origins of modern thought even prior to Aristotle. It is for this reason that he looks to Greek mythology and to the pre-Socratics to help excavate the ground of this forgetting, and begin to uncover the rich origins of human dwelling, and our primal openness (Gelassenheit) to the mystery of Dasein or Being-there.

III

But it was with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's work that the locus of human dwelling was finally rediscovered philosophically, recovered from the oblivion of Western rationalism, scientism and metaphysics. It was his relentless focus on le corps sujet (the body-subject) that broke open that mysterious chiasm, the foundational "intertwining" of my body with the world-as-lived (my flesh, the flesh of the world), affording the very possibility of sentient experience - of touching and being touched, of seeing and being seen, of hearing and being heard, of smelling and being smelled, of tasting and being tasted (The Visible and the Invisible).

More important yet was his analysis of the problematic of unidirectional time, helping to break the spell of historical consciousness that had been cast like a pall over humanity for nearly six millennia. No longer were we to be chained to the treadmill of clock time's forward march. As he wrote in The Phenomenology of Perception:

We say that time passes or flows by. We speak of the course of time. The water that I see rolling by was made ready a few days ago in the mountains, with the melting glacier... If time is similar to a river, it flows from the past towards the present and the future. The present is the consequence of the past, and the future of the present. But this often repeated metaphor is in reality extremely confused. For, looking at the things themselves, the melting snows and what results from this are not successive events, or rather the very notion of event has no place in the objective world... if I consider the world itself, there is simply one indivisible and changeless being in it... The objective world is too much a plenum for there to be time. (411-412)

"...Too much a plenum for there to be time?" More than a challenging metaphor, this statement appears to be an indictment of Enlightenment hypothesizing and post-Enlightenment reasoning. Perhaps a not so indirect allusion to Descartes and Newton (De Gravitatione), Merleau-Ponty's words here suggest a fundamental overturning of our now commonsense view, while recollecting the pre-reflective nature of human dwelling within the fullness (plenus) of the lived-body-world, what he later calls "the thickness of the pre-objective present, in which we find our bodily being, our social being, and the pre-existence of the world." (421, italics mine)

Merleau-Ponty seemed aware that there is something hidden or forgotten underlying our mundane experience of this reconstituted and modified environment; something linking us to the earth we inhabit and enlivening our presence here - something more primal than the hypotheticals of space and time generated by our scientists and our specialists.

IV

Heidegger understood that the emergence of scientific hypotheses concerning pure extension and temporal duration, and so our commonsense conceptions of space and time, represented abstractions, transformations and perversions of a more primal and overwhelming experience of Being - perhaps what the Pacific Islanders referred to as "mana." For the Islanders, there was apparently no such thing as empty space or simple, objective material extension, as was the documented case among many other pre-urban tribes and hunter-gatherer societies; their world was filled with living, animate, sentient and powerful subjectivities lurking everywhere and residing almost anywhere - in the wind, the water, the stone, or the bush. (We first-worlders called it, condescendingly, animism.) So too, there is good reason to suggest that indigenous tribes had no genuine concept of pure linear duration either, no time, as we have come to know it, flowing from past to future (see Dorothy D. Lee, Freedom and Culture). The natural cyclicality of life breathed around, through, and within them: the rising and setting of the sun, the lunar cycle, seasonal changes, the repetition of ritual archetypal behavior. In Heidegger's terms what happened with the emergence of thought from these auspicious and pregnant beginnings was a "flattening out" of an originally uncanny and overwhelming primal moment.

To this day there are some excellent studies that correctly point to the spread of agriculture and the birth of cities as the principal focus of our changed material relations with the world. Yet even these analyses typically make the underlying and pre-thematic assumption that the perceptions and consciousness of our preliterate, pre-civilized predecessors were roughly identical to our own; that we perceive the same world and experience our place therein as did our "primitive" forebears. But to infer that primal humans reasoned and conceptualized as we do today would be an unsustainable inference (see Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances). Indeed, the opposite assumption is more likely the case; that they reflected quite differently on the plenum and on themselves than we do, and that this was in large measure a result of how differently they perceived and felt themselves within the world. There is certainly nothing in the anthropological, paleontological, or ethnographic record that would contradict such an assumption. In fact, there may be much, both in mythology and ethnography, to recommend it (see Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History, Daniel Everett, Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes).

Specifically, our conceptions of pure extension and duration, of mere materiality and unidirectional time, themselves conceptually linked to a reification and radicalization of an objective and internalized sense of self - removed from the world and observing it from afar - locked us into a specific place in history and to our own unique histories; this is a large part of that difference, and this is largely responsible not only for the emergence of civilization, but for the evolving crisis we now face. It is to this primeval transformation of consciousness that we must look for the inchoate but emergent beginnings of our crisis, even at the misty origins of Western civilization.

V

There appears now to be a fork in the road we are traveling; but since, as we have suggested, the present is all we really have, there is not much sense in talking about having passed the point of no return. So, while the culture itself may appear to be locked in a self-inflicted death spiral, each of us still has a choice. Let's briefly consider the options.

On the one hand, we could simply do nothing at all and allow calendrical time, the relentless march of civilized history, to define us and continue its course unabated. In other words, we can maintain our commitment to this ancient trajectory that was set in motion as far back as Sumer, codified later by Aristotle, and more fully articulated in the Enlightenment and beyond; or we can personally choose to minimize or even terminate our participation in the unfolding spectacle, and find a more compelling way of being-in-the-world.

This brings us to the second option - recollection. We can each personally make an effort to recollect that genetic memory trace, recalling from within the hiddenness and forgetfulness of our own isolated egos the "subtle knot" that grounds our primal intertwining with the world-as-lived-by-the-body. In this way we might experience again that feral openness which first made the earthly sensuous and our own sentience possible.

The bigger challenge is for the collective, and the footprint we have made as a civilization. There have been global reverberations from this change of perception and consciousness that were set in motion so many millennia ago. There has been ecological, social, psychological, and economic fallout. How do we find a footpath back from those hypotheses, both social and natural scientific, that have led us to this point and continue to bind us collectively to this spectacle? It seems to me that Merleau-Ponty's reflections, while necessary for understanding the specific gravity of our situated presence, may not be sufficient for overcoming our current dilemma and slowing down or reversing its momentum or its negative effects. But, perhaps with some effort we can yet find something that will at least reduce this cold tyranny of reason and its brainchildren - the syllogism and the modern state.

State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters... State, where the slow suicide of all - is called 'life.' (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The New Idol)

After a ten-year career in academia, Dr. Krolick spent the next twenty years in the executive ranks of several of America's largest international firms. Sandy has spent many years traveling around the world, including parts of Asia, Africa, Western and Eastern Europe. Retiring from business at fifty, he recently returned to the USA with his wife Anna, after teaching for several years in the central Siberian Steppe, at the foot of the Altai mountains in Barnaul, Russia. His latest book, The Recovery of Ecstasy: Notebooks from Siberia, is available at http://www.amazon.com/Recovery-Ecstasy-Notebooks-Siberia/dp/1439227365/?tag=widgetsamazon-20 or visit him @ http://www.kulturcritic.com/.

View the original article here