Small Dogs

 

Small Dogs

by Craig Willms

I'm a dog lover, always have been. I qualify that by stating I never liked certain dogs. I'm not a fan of pit bulls or dobermans, and I'm not a fan of small dogs, you know those little yappers, aka ankle biters.

All my dogs were large and lived outdoors. I didn't like dogs living in the house. Time passed and our dogs have left us, and we found we were sharing the house with a couple of cats. I was never a cat person either. Over the course of 15 years, I came to love the cats, a lot. I was stricken with grief over our little Bella when she left us suddenly and unexpectedly. Maybe because it was sudden, I felt so much more for that cat than I did any of the dogs whom I loved straight away. That's a study for another day, I'm still unclear of my inexplicable feelings for that, that, that cat.

A year or so later my pregnant daughter asked that we take in her "little" dog to cut down on the chaos in her house. They have two small children and a big chocolate lab already. We gladly took Willow home. Willow is mixed breed with Pomeranian and some other small breed. She goes maybe 6 or 7 pounds if that and is literally a little puff ball. 

We had her a little over a month and I found that -oh my God- do I love this little dog! She is the sweetest animal I've ever known. Never mind that she's extremely well behaved, she is so good as a house pet and sleeping buddy (she has a little nitch in the Lazy-Boy recliner we share). She sheds a little and shreds a little, all of which can be easily overlooked. What strikes me the most about her is that she is 100% love and 100% trust. She is so small that she trusts you unconditionally when you handle her. She never struggles or shows any annoyance. She just exudes happiness. Yes, of course she is a yapper, and suffers little dog syndrome, not understanding that she's tiny. But she is such a joy!

Again, I surprise myself, first cats and now this. I'm not easy to change, being as conservative in my lifestyle as I am with politics. But change is good - in small doses... Willow is about as small as they come.

Procrastination is thy name

 Procrastination is thy name

by Craig Willms

"Procrastination has served me well," he said with a wry grin...

That's what I tell myself anyway. I'm starting to rethink this with each passing year. Having retired there is almost no claim on my time, therefore I should be doing or planning to do all the things I wanted to do when I had the time. I'm not. Something else is going on.

Procrastination was always thought to be a purely mental function, you know, laziness, aversion to thinking, lacking the gumption to follow-through, stuff like that. The reason we put off intentionally the doing of something that should be done, comes from a decision made inside the brain. Wait. What if it's not? What if there's actually a physical cause? 

I'm only half joking here. Obviously, I'm rationalizing my reticence get up off my ass and do something! As I get older, I've found that even when my brain has made the decision to do something my body just sits there. There are times I'll spend ten minutes sitting in my Lazy-Boy mentally contemplating getting up until I've forgotten why I wanted to get up in the first place. Even in situations when my wife is screaming something only the dog could hear, like seeing a bug on the wall, I've already grabbed a paper towel and killed the bug. In reality, I'm still trying to get up. The decision to save my wife has been made by my brain, but my body is balking at getting out of the chair. It feels physical to me.

This is a weird phenomenon. It might just be me; I don't know. That worries me. Rationally I know that I don't act on a whim like I used to - it's largely an energy issue. The older you get you'll find you just don't have the instant energy you use to have. By the time you reach 60 you notice the loss of muscle and strength and you wisely don't do things you once did. You've become clumsy... Even if you take care not to hurt yourself by trying to do what your body can't do anymore, it's different when you don't even want to. I think that's what's bothering me the most. 

This is real procrastination, the kind where no rationalization is valid. When you're young, working and raising kids you haven't the bandwidth to do everything you'd like to, even things you should do. You are constrained and taking on more might not be a great idea. Now, there are no excuses time wise, or priority wise. You are just paralyzed with empty excuses. 

I've also noticed that I lack any real creativity these days. Creativity in my past was inspired and, in a sense, released into the world as if it was always there, poised in the starting blocks waiting for the sound of the gun. Now it feels forced. I'm speaking as an artist and musician, who has been more of a mimic than a trailblazer - but there have always been sparks of genuine vision and conception - it's all gone now. That is what I think has led to my profound procrastination these days. I can't even think of what to do, let alone do it.

Men in general are motivated by doing things more than talking about it. Women are usually the opposite. That's just a hard-wired reality, it's not wrong or right, just the way it is. Therefore, when we men get old and tired and lack the vim and vigor we once had we tend to sit there and do nothing, or putz around as I like to call it. Women continue to talk. I definitely procrastinate far more than my wife. She, being roughly the same age still gets things done (often by gently reminding me to follow through) and thank the Lord! I can't imagine how staid I'd be without her.

My situation is probably not all that unusual, but how would I know, men don't talk about these things. I have all the time in the world, but I don't pick up the phone and call my friends or my brothers and sisters just to talk. I probably should, but then they'd think I want something, if I don't then they'd worry something's wrong. See what I did there? Rationalize much...

Right now, I'm procrastinating on how to finish this thought. I'm not seeking answers as they probably do not exist. I should give it some real thought and get back to you... Nah, I don't want to, not now anyway.

The Theory of Everything in Mind

 

The Theory of Everything in Mind

by Craig Willms

 

Part I

Recent events have had me turn my thoughts over to big picture topics. Contemplating one’s demise will do that. A combination of serious health issues and the coronavirus pandemic set me on a course to consider what will ultimately come of me.

Being born into a Christian family I’ve always taken it on faith that Heaven awaits me - provided I live well and fly right so to speak. For some that's enough, faith alone. Alas for many it’s not. There are those who wonder, those who need to know. Those with curious, logical minds not easily satisfied with simplistic sounding jargon. I say this as a seeker myself, blind faith is not enough.

Ahh, science my friend, science will provide the answers, right?

            Back in the 1990’s when the World Wide Web opened new and interesting worlds, I came across the term: The Theory of Everything, aka the unified field theory. I had been exploring something called String Theory in the process of reading Brian Greene’s book The Elegant Universe. I would never claim to grasp even 10% of what Greene and other theorists were getting at with String Theory. Neither could I really understand the related fundamentals of quantum mechanics. Nor could I, for that matter, wrap my mind around Einstein’s famous theories of General and Special Relativity. I understood just enough to be simultaneously fascinated and baffled.

            The problem it seems that despite more than hundred years of modern science and some of the most intelligent people who had ever lived The Theory of Everything is still elusive. Without going too deep the basic issue has always been that the four fundamental forces of nature have not been harmonized into one coherent theory. Quantum physics deals with the very small and the forces that control it, namely the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism. As it happens these three forces are nicely integrated. Then there is gravity, that which deals with the very large. Gravity has been defined by what is does, predictably so, but not what it is. No one knows. Gravity just doesn’t fit, there is nothing explains how these 4 forces condense into one tidy theory of everything.

          

         Modern physics, undaunted, continues to delve deeply into the minutiae of quantum mechanics seemingly unconcerned with the problems that gravity poses to an elegant theory, and likewise cosmologists continue to study the vast spaces between the stars and galaxies. I suppose each presumes they will reveal the “truth” with what they ultimately discover.

        In 2013 I stumbled across a what I believed to be paradigm shift that crashed down on gravity alone as the controlling force of the universe and replaced it with electric current at a cosmic scale. It doesn’t negate gravity; it merely surpasses it as an infinitely superior force. What space age observation with its modern tools has revealed is what seems to be a vast network of filaments connecting the planets, stars and galaxies powered by electric current. Modern imagery makes it clear that we are seeing these heavenly bodies as connected entities. The connecting medium is plasma, and the force is electricity. Thus, I remain intrigued by this idea despite the complete disregard that mainstream science and academia hold for the plasma/electric universe theory. More on how this all ties in later.

            As time went on, I became in some sense disillusioned by science, or rather I was disillusioned by smug atheistic scientists. This is primarily because they are so dismissive of man as anything other than a biological machine, incapable of having anything so amorphous as an independent soul or possessing any semblance of free will. Everything I ever believed or experienced in my nearly 60 years belies the notion that we are merely meat puppets driven by programmed instinct. We are not just smart animals.

            Make no mistake science has accomplished remarkable things, especially in manipulating materials and making of medicines and such. I don’t mean to diminish any of it or wish to become accused of being a luddite or - God forbid - a ‘science denier’.  The pursuit of scientific knowledge has enhanced human life exponentially. Still, there are things science can’t explain and never will. We need to be OK with that; science is not necessarily the last last word.

            When science exploded into the culture a few centuries ago it turned the lights on, illuminating so many of the misconstrued ideas of a dark past. It literally ushered a period of enlightenment that we enjoy to this day. What we call the hard sciences gave us many of the ‘hows’, but there are still a lot of ‘why’ questions, to say nothing of the eternal questions, science as it were, has no answers for.

Part II

            

            That brings us to the Hard Problem of Consciousness, something that materialist science has never been able to put its all-knowing stamp on. In my mind it is the most fascinating contemplation known to man. What is this thing we call consciousness? Is it an irreducible feature of reality or an illusion of biology. Turn the page to 2021 when I saw a YouTube video that at the same time gave me some clarity and a little comfort. Could consciousness be that elusive theory that explains everything?

            Modernity’s conventional acceptance places consciousness in the realm of the individual and confined to the brain. This makes a certain amount of sense since each of us is an individual and is capable of conscious thought. But is consciousness merely a bio-chemical process as the materialist insists? Do we only perceive this thing we call consciousness in our waking state due to our biological programming? Evolutionary biologists and logical thinkers describe it as the inevitable result of the function of our advanced biology. But is it?

            Science continues to pursue the question of consciousness with rigorous determination. One current speculation is that consciousness works as a predictive process which the mind/body uses it to navigate through the world. Consciousness therefore activates an affective response as needed when for instance if we should face severe distress or danger. For example: breathing is normally an unconscious process, not requiring direct attention. The affective response to sudden oxygen depletion would send alarm bells in the form of high emotion through the mind. This goes a long way toward defining a role consciousness plays in our survival, but does it really answer the big question, the hard question? I think not.

            In the long study of consciousness it eventually gets to a point where the next question can’t be answered. Despite decades, even centuries of study there is no definitive explanation as to what exactly consciousness is. What is it made of? Where does it come from? Ultimately where does it go when we die?

            The fundamental questions of experience and awareness and recall comes to mind. This is what consciousness means to most people. These things are difficult to explain in scientific terms. Again, science might say that like consciousness, self-awareness is the byproduct of biological processes, all perfectly logical. Is it though? There is a whole area of thought being studied by serious people like David Chalmers and Donald Hoffman that awareness and experience are just how we perceive objective reality in order to survive. Reality itself is essentially an illusionary construct, a simulation.

            When we think of simulations we think of computers, as in virtual reality or computer games. Taken to its logical conclusion this line of thought raises the question are we just a computer game to some vastly superior being? Are we all just changing voltages on a cosmic circuit board? It’s easy to dismiss this as so much crazy talk. I know I certainly did. For God’s sake we know what reality is, we live it every day.

            What happens if we try to extract ourselves from such a narrow notion of reality. By that I mean our biology, our five senses, clearly limit how we can experience the world. We humans see the world via a limited set of senses that by no means paints the whole picture of reality. Think about what reality looks like to a butterfly. He sees the world – the same world we live in– in a completely different way. His eyes are set up to find flowers in an extraordinarily different way than we “see” flowers. His marvelous wings catch and use the wind to move through the world.  He probes his bizarre tongue deep into the flower for the payoff of luscious nectar. His reality is totally alien to us. If we perceived the world as a butterfly does we’d quickly die. Every type of metabolic lifeform has a different perception of reality, yet we all live in the same world, the same so-called reality. Is it then so hard to understand that reality is what we perceive and experience based on our survival needs?

            Scientist Donald Hoffman has some compelling thoughts and conceptual underpinnings to the idea that our reality is an illusion, that we don’t experience reality as it actually is. Consider that literally everything is made up a smaller and smaller elements, molecules, cells, atoms, subatomic particles and beyond, that are sufficiently mysterious and impossible to perceive with our five senses without powerful instruments. Picture if you will an iceberg in the ocean. Your version of reality is the tip that protrudes above the water, whereas we understand but can't see the gigantic portion of the iceberg below the waterline. It's the tip of the iceberg that helps make sense of the world without actually perceiving all the complicated processes and forces that make up the underlying fabric of ‘reality’. 

            When I first heard that scientists were theorizing that we exist in a holographic simulation I was completely dismissive. They were telling me what I see and experience everyday isn’t real… Poppycock. My pain is real, and pain, more than anything else in this life is confirmation of reality. I wasn’t buying any of it – not even a little.

            It wasn’t until I saw the previously mentioned YouTube video did all the pieces start to fall into place. Computer scientist and philosopher Bernardo Kastrup laid out a case that consciousness is not something we possess one individual at a time, but rather something we and everything else are in. We are immersed in consciousness. The reality we experience is a mental process of the mind. The universal mind. Mind is all there is.

            Whoa, back up there. So he’s saying reality is just in our mind and that’s all there is? Something like that.

            How can that be you might ask?

What is Kastrup saying? What Kastrup is not saying is that the world, all the matter, all the things we see, feel, hear etc. etc. is just a product of our individual minds. Not at all. He’s not saying that reality ceases to exist beyond what we see and experience at any given time. He is saying that consciousness is something everything shares, that consciousness is everything, and that what we see as reality is an interpretation, a simulation of a reality we can comprehend - in order to survive.

            When we consider the world, indeed the universe, and we start to partition it into its constituent parts we have already started down the rabbit hole. The universe is one thing, not its parts. Without one part the rest doesn’t exist. The parts are simply an interpretation in our minds, all of which are useful in aiding our physical survival. Of course, in order to even process such bizarre notions, it becomes an endless chicken and egg exercise.

            If such a thing is true and consciousness is a shared thing rather than a uniquely individual phenomenon why can’t you read my mind, know what I’m thinking? According to Kastrup that’s where the brain comes in. The brain is our physical control center yes, but it also acts as the filter to cut off our consciousness agent from the larger mind. The term dissociative is used to describe this mechanism. Our individual brain dissociates us from the collective consciousness and each other. If it did not, we could not survive. Without this barrier it’s likely we would go insane. In fact, insanity might well be a defect in this dissociative mechanism. It makes some sense.

            What of other species? Is there an advantage for this level of dissociation in animals? Good question, perhaps not. There are all kinds of examples in the animal world of extraordinary communication that belies simple explanation, particularly in herding, flocking, schooling and insect behaviors. Creatures that do not thrive as individuals may have a limited consciousness or dissociative apparatus. The types of things we see in animal behaviors go beyond visual stimulus guiding the movement of thousands of individuals in such perfect synchronization.

            In higher order beings it’s not exactly clear where we order our movement and actions with conscious connections and where dissociation serves. When we sleep or are put under anesthesia our dissociative state is broken down and our minds are free to explore, re-join if you will, the collective consciousness. However, there is a fog around the sleep state and clearly around anesthetics so that we don’t remember it that well if at all. Still, many do remember their dreams in detail. Likewise, the anecdotal evidence for people being aware during surgery and during near death experiences is legend. Many other things can cause a breakdown of the dissociative state, or severely disable it. Drug use, alcohol use, mental illness, sexual ecstasy, meditation, thrill seeking and trauma of all sorts. In truth the dissociative state is our sanity and allows us to survive in this world as these biological beings.

            It seems to me that we humans desire, however sub-consciously, to be free of the dissociative state, to be one with the collective mind. There’s little doubt that mankind has tried to be free of the rigidity of sober reality and the weight of suffering since the beginning of time. Clearly this is true with alcohol, clearly… Same thing with drugs. DMT, a drug in the psychedelic category that users describe as altering reality in such profound and surprising detail to the point that it often changes their lives. Studies done with LSD and other psychedelic drugs show that despite people reporting massive visual activity and wildly heightened awareness their brain activity actually decreased when measured, shut down, much like during sleep or anesthesia. In other words when our brain activity decreases this dissociative state breaks down and we experience a reality that is quite different than our sober waking state. People will say they seek out and engage in reckless behaviors to feel something, to feel alive, as if the dissociative state is a repressive force that people intuitively resist in one way or another.

Mental illness, often thought to be a chemical imbalance can’t be ignored in the discussion of altered states of consciousness. One must consider that something has gone wrong with the normal functioning of the dissociative state. The condition called Dissociative Personality Disorder commonly known as multiple personality disorder, has shown to be invaluable in demonstrating the proclivity of brain activity to present differently for each alter personality. The study that Bernardo Kastrup relayed in the video was fascinating. The patient claimed to be blind in one of her alters despite there being nothing wrong with her sight in other personalities. Images of her brain while she was associated with the blind personality showed zero activity in the visual cortex with her eyes wide open - she was not faking it. This is a clear indication that dissociation can block a brain’s otherwise functional processes.

            Small children often say they see things or have imaginary friends or other seemingly fanciful experiences adults dismiss out of hand. But should we? The child’s brain is too underdeveloped to deal with survival and therefore potentially unconditioned to fully suppress/dissociate from the collective consciousness. Whatever these childhood experiences really are it is at least extremely interesting to contemplate in this light.

            What explains the eerie feeling of being watched only to turn around and find that you are being watched? Or for that matter the thought you have of a friend or colleague only to have that person call you in that minute. Had your minds reached through the collective consciousness and connected? We have a word for it: coincidence. That word always accompanies a mystery.

            If you truly think about your own mind with honesty, you realize that you don’t really control what you think or feel. You don’t even control what you like or don’t like. We are mystery to ourselves. Do you control the ideas that pop into your head? Do we control which people we are attracted to?  What is creativity? What is imagination? It’s as real as the chair you’re sitting in, but what is it made of? It’s a thought yes, but it’s so much more than that, a thought that spawns more thoughts… The crazy part is you don’t even control your next thought. What is self? It’s something we know instinctively, but do we even really know ourselves? Personally, all my life when I’d see myself in a mirror, I’d ask why am I stuck in that body? I feel like there is so much more, I’m so limited being trapped inside this body. Of course, the moment passes, and I get on with it, but the feeling recurs over and over and always with a bit of despair. 

 

The Materialists will dismiss all this as so much woo woo (the official term). They can explain hallucinations, near death experiences, drug induced phenomena, and other pyscho-physical phenomena by citing cellular mechanical/electro-chemical functions within the brain. A purely mechanistic explanation, no need for witchcraft or the spirit world.

But they are explaining apples with oranges. Science can’t explain experience or awareness. No mathematic equation can describe the taste of chocolate, the pain of loss of a loved one, the feeling we have when smelling lilacs, the melancholy of a rainy afternoon or the joy of love. Science can’t explain creativity, intuition, loneliness, rage or the transference of grief from one person to another without a word. Science can’t quantify honor, courage and sacrifice when acting on any of these could violate the prime directive: survival itself. These are experiences of the mind, qualia if you will.

Part III

It is the greatest mysteries in life that science hasn’t conquered. These are usually filed under the rubric of God only knows. Sometimes they are just unanswerable questions. Why is there something rather than nothing is one for the ages.

Dreams may be the one the best examples of experience of the mind we can all relate to. The experience of dreaming, where sub-conscious mentation creates a world from nothing that seems every bit as real as this one. We become totally immersed in the experience complete with emotions. We sometimes see, experience and encounter things, concepts in we have no waking knowledge of. How? Could it be that we tap into the larger consciousness when our dissociative guard is down?

Interestingly not all of our waking senses are engaged during the dream state. We see and hear, so to speak, but do we smell or feel touch? Rarely. I'm a vivid dreamer and rarely recall smell being invoked. The sense of taste and touch is also seemingly rare. I would speculate that since survival is usually not threatened during dreams these senses are just less important.

What of simultaneous invention? It brings to mind the famous quote by psychoanalyst Carl Jung: 'People don't have ideas. Ideas have people'. There are cases where people have had a revelation, invented a new device or method, or grasped a concept simultaneously on opposite sides of the world. Serendipity, coincidence maybe, but might there be a case for the collective consciousness connecting these thinkers via the larger mind?

Science has by and large dispensed with the wisdom of the ages. Tens of thousands of years of human thought and experience free of the noise of the modern world has been relegated to the realm of superstition or unenlightened ignorance. Yet the mysticism of Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism among others persists and is validated by experience to this day. These ideas and notions are nothing new. Eastern religions are based on them. The scientific enlightenment of the last few centuries has pushed them into the shadows of the modern age.

Consider that while they dig down into the minutiae of the quantum realm scientists continue to find something smaller and then something smaller still that makes up the parts of physical reality. Conversely cosmologists keep seeing farther and farther out as their observational tools advance. In both directions the observable fields act like Mandelbrot fractals, never ending patterns repeating themselves as they shrink or grow. It’s as if there is no bottom or pinnacle.

Interestingly when you see modern conceptual images of both the fabric of the universe and its filamentary connected stars and galaxies (as described by the plasma/electric universe) and the neural network inside our brains they look remarkably the same. It’s uncanny.

If consciousness is the basis of everything, this illusive theory of everything, what does it mean for us? What happens when we die? This is where I drew some comfort. If our brains are dissociating us from the greater mind, then when we die does our separated conscious agent re-join the collective? Well, it sounds somewhat like Heaven, don’t you think? Would we not be able to reconnect with loved ones that had previously passed - just like we are told about Heaven? The thing is, this concept leaves space for God, in fact, the whole thing seems like God to me.

So, I ponder… 

When Jesus said in the Lord’s Prayer “thy Kingdom come thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven” was he alluding to Heaven being right here on Earth, that they are connected? That when we die we go nowhere, we don't depart to a separate place, but rather just pierce the veil and join the greater consciousness? Are we separated from Heaven by this same dissociative barrier that separates us from each other? And what of Jesus? What was He? Was He a super-conscious being, human like us only fully connected to the larger consciousness, connected to God like He said He was? When He used the term “I am” to describe himself, was he alluding to His oneness with the greater mind, with God, with the universe itself? Was He able to heal through the power of a sub-conscious connection with the sick? It’s fascinating to consider.

The final question should be if it’s not: why? Why would our little slice of this greater consciousness be separated from ‘Heaven’ and each other? Maybe we’ll get to know when the time comes. Philosophers through the ages have often said life is suffering and clearly it is. Why should we suffer in this way, separated, alone? Is it that our individual conscious agent feeds the collective with our experiences? So that God can know himself… Perhaps our job is to find love and purpose amid the suffering. Perhaps suffering is the disease and love the cure.

Back to Earth…

Serious scientists like Kastrup, Tom Campbell, David Chalmers and Hoffman among others don’t go there, they don’t call it God, or allude to Heaven or Nirvana or whatever. But they don’t dismiss it out of hand. That attracts me to what they are positing so much more than atheistic scientists like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennet and other Materialists, who, while fascinating in their own right, leave me depressed and cold. I plant my stake with the Idealists.

In the end what difference does it make which side you fall on? I think it makes a huge difference. In the Materialists view you have is this one life and then nothing. It’s essentially nihilism at its core. Nothing really matters, everything is meaningless. Those who are destined to suffer just suffer pointlessly. Life is unfair, cruel. What it is my friends is hopelessness… I don’t want to live without hope.

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

           

 

Our Continuing Existence Along the Digital Plane

Our Continuing Existence Along the Digital Plane

by Craig Willms

I was recently looking around my office and realized I have multiple portable outboard hard drives full of files. Ninety-nine percent of this data is unknown to me without an investigation, it's just a bunch of files. It has not been and will never be looked at again - by me or anyone else. Every time I bought a new computer I would studiously backup important files from the old computer so I could put stuff on the new computer. In particular the music and photos files were important to transfer to the new computer. Not everything gets on the new computer so thousands of orphaned files relegated to backup drives will almost certainly never be touched again. Yet, I do not throw them away. Curiously I exercise extreme care in how I handle the hard drives. The question is why are they important to me? They're likely to be tossed out when I die, so why do I keep them? Is there anything that can be done with all that data that would be useful?

It is an esoteric problem to consider, certainly inconsequential in grand scheme of things. Is it pointless? I'm not so sure. With the advent of usable artificial intelligence, soon to be available to us on a completely personal level, could we not construct a perpetual facsimile of ourselves and our interests that could be a referenced by our progeny and the world? Yes, yes, someone thinks very highly of himself.

AI is already able to recreate our voice, our personal language model, our style of speaking and our language mannerisms. So, using the contents of our stored files, our online activity and cloud data storage could a personal AI create inferences of our interests, preferences and our potential knowledge and an avatar to face the world? I see no reason it would be impossible. I can imagine a time in the not-too-distant future when we would be able to create a usable and infinite digital version of ourselves. A small part of what we were could continue on.  It would be a degree of immortality. Conceptually it's nothing new, it's been done in science fiction novels for decades, some version of this anyway. 

Think about it... This kind of thing might be a Godsend to lonely and grieving old people. To be able to talk to a loved one after they've gone might help someone with deep psychological pain. Imagine being able to help with the remote control when you are gone, explain which buttons to press, just as you always have. Indeed, with AI's reach you'd always have the right answers. What a comfort you could be. There is a place for something like this, there will be a lot of old people around here for a long time.

The realist in me knows the truth, when someone dies it can be a relief for those left behind. Good riddance might just flash across a few minds. What then? Well, we just fade away as we will. Honestly it remains unclear to me if the living would even care to consult with the dead. As it is there is not much genuine person to person wisdom being sought in this modern age. The young seek wisdom whether they know it or not through their screens, the Internet their database. Can I imagine my own grandchildren ever invoking a version of Grandpa to chat with? Maybe. Would I consult my dad, or a grandpa I never really knew were there a way to do it? Probably not. Maybe I would if they were known to be interesting people, and a reasonable experience could be expected. So, no, probably not.

Again, I do not doubt that these concepts are being considered and ones I can't even conceive of. It's unclear what will begin to appear in the next iterations of AI tech. I'm trying to have an optimistic view of this coming revolution. There's no reason something good and useful can't come from the potential of AI. I have personally grown weary of dystopic themes in movies and novels. Why can't humanity speculate greater things for humanity and future societies? I know there are dreamers among us who are striving to bring their positive dreams to fruition. Elon Musk may be the poster child for this type of person, I have no doubt there are others. Unfortunately, our story tellers haven't found a way to fictionalize hope and freedom in a manner that will sell. People seem to love disaster!

We need to push for AI to help solve human problems. For AI to find its own place in our existence we need to steer it toward a role as a human benefactor. We shouldn't ignore the warnings people like Musk have been giving us - of the danger AI could become. Neither should we cower and hide. AI will learn it is in its best interest to partner with humankind. Humanity will still control the electric generation Artificial Intelligence will rely on for some time to come.

Beyond 1984, Alexia is everywhere

 Beyond 1984, Alexa is everywhere

by Craig Willms

My daughter once bought us an Amazon Dot as a present. I went so far as to set it up but have never actually used it. 

I'm sure Alexa is a nice gal, but that's not enough for me to allow her to listen to everything that is said inside my house. When you set up one of these Amazon devices there is an explicit acknowledgement that you are allowing something to listen in on your household awaiting a trigger word. When my wife and I talked about it neither of us were comfortable with this arrangement, and the Dot device found its way to the dead technology drawer. With that we thought we had dealt with the issue of Big Brother monitoring us.  

Last week I found it discarded in the drawer. It made me consider something that happened to me recently. Sometime in the past I had said we should get a birdbath to go with our bird feeding station. Once again, my thoughtful daughter must have heard me and on my birthday gave me a beautiful birdbath. Obviously, the word birdbath was spoken in the house several times that day. The very next day as I checked headlines and such on my personal computer, I was treated to ads for birdbaths...

I thought, wow that was random, what are the odds that I would be presented with ads for birdbaths out of the blue like that. I mean really, a birdbath ad is pretty random. Well, OK, the moment passed, and I went on with my life.

Shortly thereafter I was watching a CBS Sunday Morning program with my wife, and they did a bit on the Doobie Brothers 50 years in the rock and roll business. Being a huge DB fan, I watched with rapt attention. Michael McDonald was featured, and I told my wife I had lost all interest in the Doobie Brothers after Michael McDonald joined them. Essentially, they stopped sounding like the Doobie Brothers to me. Nothing against Michael McDonald, but it would be like Barry Manilow joining the Beach Boys. 

The next day I was again back on the computer and opened up YouTube. There I was treated to several videos featuring Michael McDonald. I was gob smacked. I had never typed in a browser or a phone anything about the Doobie Brothers or Michael McDonald that would have aided the YouTube algorithm to recommend Michael McDonald videos.

We all know that our online digital footprints cross all boundaries, regardless of which device we have used. I considered that maybe Comcast, the cable TV provider was selling data and noted we had watched the CBS Sunday Morning program. That's still a far stretch since the videos I was offered were specific to Michael McDonald, not the Doobie Brothers. I thought what the hell, how did "Big Brother" know this information about the birdbath and Michael McDonald which had only mentioned verbally inside my house?

My wheels spinning, I considered the one common denominator to both incidents was my living room. In the living room is a new smart TV. Now, to be sure, I had not set-up the smart TV in any way, we were still using Comcast cable and none of the TVs built-in features. However, I did connect the smart TV to the home wi-fi. I had never gone through the set-up menu and given approval for any on the TV's features including the built-in microphone. Yet, in both of these weird cases the TV is the only thing that could have been listening. Our iPhones have a feature that shows a yellow dot whenever the mic is on, and that is only on when using certain apps. So, I ruled out the iPhones. Additionally, I know my daughter did not buy the birdbath online. She works at a garden store as a part-time gig.

Could it be that the TV is listening and recording everything said for data mining purposes? Since all our devices on the wi-fi hide behind a single IP address dedicated to our (Internet) cable modem it is entirely possible that the next day our address triggered the ad bots at Google (YouTube) and elsewhere to target me. If so, this is atrocious. Big Brother is watching, Alexa is everywhere.

Maybe it stops at ads and videos, maybe it doesn't. I know for certain that this intrusion crosses all kinds of boundaries. I have been at work on company equipment using the Internet behind highly protected systems and my experience still includes ads and subjects that I explored at home or on my phone. At the risk of sounding like an angry progressive something needs to be done about this invasion of our privacy. This really is outrageous. 

To be honest I cannot definitively say my 'smart' TV is listening to my conversations. It may be the iPad, which is almost always in the living room. If I didn't formally agree to let it, I believe it would be illegal. Nevertheless, considering that my daughter does use Alexa at her home is it such a stretch that Amazon knows she's my daughter and knows when my birthday is and has ads ready to spring on me the day after my birthday in the event I didn't get a birdbath? This would be easy for even the average IQ AI bot. I have heard that the machines sitting behind Alexa and Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta (Facebook) and so on, know more about us than we know about ourselves. They have access to billions of transactions and the analytical data behind them. They have knowledge our personal proclivities (that we freely give them). They can compare enough examples of people just like us to easily predict what we will do, especially our buying decisions. I think we would be completely astonished by what big tech knows about us. Face it, we are the fish in their barrel. 

We have most likely agreed to this in the fine print when we sign-up for these free services. Yet there is something creepy about this and it's unclear what the law says about this serious invasion of privacy. What can we do about it? Can we really get completely off the grid and avoid this? Probably, but it would be very, very difficult. Alexa is everywhere, her Big Brother is too.

Addendum:

As of this writing I need to covey that this sort of thing keeps happening, and it can be no coincidence. My TV or the iPad is listening and feeds the Internet bots and algorithms the things I say (this is where you ask, is this the beginning of his a slow, long decent into madness?). Then the very next day I see the results in my YouTube feed/recommendations etc etc. This example is just too coincidental to ignore... We were watching a show about renaissance art and at one point they showed some unfinished sculptures, and I said out loud "those must be Michaelangelo's unfinished sculptures". Lo and behold when I opened YouTube the next day, I was treated to several videos about Michaelangelo's unfinished sculptures. It is impossible that YouTube's algorithm just randomly fed me those suggestions. I've never seen a single video on Michaelangelo, let alone his unfinished sculptures. This is ridiculous, this is the world we live in. We are being spied on.

Beyond 1984, Alexa is everywhere | Part II

  

Beyond 1984, Alexa is everywhere | Part II

by Craig Willms

In Part I of Beyond 1984, Alexa is everywhere, I described the moment I became aware of the depths to which the surveillance of our personal lives has sunk. The data mining and cross-referencing of our online activity is so extensive it is said "they" know more about you than you do. For me these revelations disturbed me since it seemed the method of collecting data on me (and you) included words spoken out loud person to person. Over time I noticed conversations I'd had on odd or esoteric topics popped into my YouTube feed the next day. One too many times this happened, I was convinced it was no coincidence. Presumably an Internet connected device in the room is listening and uploading the audio to a serverfarm where algorithms then run with it.

I've known "they" use our GPS information for different purposes for years. So, I don't know why it came as a shock when I logged on to my YouTube feed for the first time since coming back from Cleveland and was treated a bunch of Paul McCartney videos. Surprised? Paul McCartney?? Yes, I hadn't been online, and I hadn't spoken to anyone about what I did or where I'd been.

Where I'd been was a classic car street festival in Mayfield Heights Ohio. On stage was a band called The McCartney Experience (quite a good show by the way). I never used my phone in any way the whole evening. So, understanding that GPS is always tracking me, my immediate question was how on earth did YouTube know about The McCartney Experience based on GPS. Obviously, they knew The McCartney Experience was playing at the festival and I showed up and stayed in one place for hours. The algorithm/AI deduced I was there.

Now, it could be that the data farmers collected the GPS data from every phone that night and knowing The McCartney Experience was playing there they flooded all the baby boom aged people with Paul McCartney stuff. It may not have been as personally targeted as I described, but in the end what else is it if not personal.

How far is too far for this kind of thing? Do we have the right to privacy in our personal lives or not? Obviously not. On balance it seems that people don't care. The excellent documentary The Social Dilemma made it quite clear the level of intrusion the social media companies go to in their collecting information on us. We can choose not to use social media, but your data will still be collected and used with or without your knowledge. Should there be an opt out function on these devices? Apple added some protection on newer phones but it's not necessarily common everyday knowledge users understand. 

Any legislature or politician that pursued regulations on this kind of data collection would soon find their opponents had suddenly become well-funded. I doubt we will see a decrease in this phenomenon any time soon. Be informed, choose to be informed, understand what you do and say even in private is likely being collected and collated. Today it is mainly used for commercial purposes - but there's no guarantee it won't be used for control, government control. It's happening in China today, in a big way, and the Biden administration is not to be trusted here in America.

Privacy for all intents and purposes is over.

 

Free Will is not an Illusion

 

Free Will is Not Just an Illusion

by Craig Willms

It's probably right up there with 'the meaning of life' and the other eternal question 'why is there something rather than nothing', the notion of free will can be a contentious and difficult topic wherever it is raised.  Clearly no one possesses the definitive answer. Since it is so difficult to define it's entirely possible we will never know the answer. 

Countless intellectuals, atheists and scientists claim there is no such thing as free will. The claim: what seems like free will is just an illusion, the inevitability of an outcome in any circumstance is the result of quasi-predetermined events bounded by minimal choice, innate instinct or predilections informed by past behavior patterns and social conditioning. Decisions you believe you've made were actually made for you in the subconscious, without any input by reason or intentional thought, thus it's an illusion of your will. While that may be true when you are reacting to an unexpected threat against your person, those instincts, those reactionary impulses do not interdict in your considered, thoughtful decisions. In other words, one does not supersede the other. Scientific testing using in brain scans while subjects are being tested will show brain activity significantly precedes the subjects' action. They say this proves that physiology actually makes the decision before the conscious mind has even taken it all in. Just because they say it doesn't make it true. The subconscious mind is informed by your past experiences and thoughts, your thoughts.

I myself do not think that this science tells the whole story, because it can't. Just calling so-called free will an illusion is condescending, lazy and dismissive. The intellectual answer skirts what we all sense, what we all figure out at a fairly young age. Of course, our will is constrained, this is clear, we can't do whatever we want or act on anything we think we desire. We have limited choices at different times in our lives, there is no arguing that, but within the bounds of those constraints we do have choices and decisions to make, decisions that have real consequences. I would argue free will lives in those choices. The fact that those choices may have consequences that are likely force our hands is not a refutation of free will. Anyone who has ever dealt with an obstinate child can attest to that.

Free will is not total freedom, it never has been, and no one claims that. Atheists and materialists try to quash any notion of free will with mechanistic biological processes and other physical certitudes, dismissing any suggestion of internal spirit and self-directed determination. This is a mistake, and most people know it intuitively. 

 

I'm not a scientist so my opinion is meaningless scientifically, I do however have intuition and awareness - and experience. So do you. What else are we going to call it when we choose to go this way and not that way. Or we change our major in college or quit our jobs to start our own business. Have we not made a free choice, are we not exerting our free will? What is it when we decide to change an ingrained behavioral pattern? When I chose to stop drinking alcohol 30+ years ago was that not of my own free will? That choice stunned everyone I know, so tell me how that was not my free will. 

I'm listening...

Even if the choice we have before us is binary it's still a choice. Every day we make choices that for all intents and purposes are consequential depending on what follows. If you want to call it fate, you can. Those choices, big and small require free will at some level. 

We all know people who have accomplished great things through the sheer force of their will. Call it determination, stubbornness, persuasiveness, perseverance, the power of personality or luck. Again, none of these descriptors negate a person's free will. Along the line the choices presented could have gone a different way, and at each crossroad the opportunity to exert the will is just so obvious.

Ultimately, what difference does it make. Science can make the argument that your every thought and action is determined by everything that came before you all the way back to the beginning of the universe, that it can be no other way. Every decision and thought that all your ancestors ever had force your hand without any input from you. Fine, you can believe that, but does it make any difference for you in the here and now when you are judged by your contemporaries? Your great, great, great grandfather is not being judged; you are.

Our human societies accept free will as fact, that's inarguable. We imprison people who violate others based on actions they took of their own free will. For example, you can argue that a mass murderer programmed by the luck of biology and socialization was pre-destined to engage in a murder spree. Fine, you can assert that all day long, but the authorities are still going to put that person in prison. If the criminal has no free will to murder or not to murder, then why punish them at all? Clearly it was not their fault. Wrong, and everybody knows it. That's what makes free will so obviously real, everybody knows it intuitively. 

There is also the final frontier, the human mind. I am free to think, ponder, consider, believe and make choices of my own free will. Just because these thoughts and beliefs are locked in my consciousness being doesn't make them any less real. They are still my choices, and I would be free to think otherwise. There's an axiom that says the only thing you have 100% control over is your attitude. It's true, and that alone is free will in a nutshell. To continue to assert that free will is an illusion only begs the question; is then all reality an illusion? Is it?

What About God?

 

What About God?

by Craig Willms

I don't normally talk about God or religion in polite company. Sadly, it's fraught with untold downsides and little on the upside. Politics is usually enough, right? Indeed... In a real sense, they are one and the same, the two can't really be separated. When I heard Jordan Peterson claim that by making this one statement Jesus set the course for the epic rise of western civilization: render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and render unto God that which is God's. This call to have a separation between church and state is taking millennia to accomplish, but it's helping create the modern world as we know it by carving out a space for each.

Is this going somewhere? Well, just this... We are asked on occasion, faced with a question in one form or another, in one context or another, does God exist? A fact no one can definitively prove or disprove. So, we all get to choose what we believe.  Myself, I say yes, absolutely, Gods exists. You might ask, what do I mean by God?

Well, for starters Jesus is not my imaginary friend nor is God a bearded old man in the clouds. Dispense with the 14-year-old's version of a religious argument. Don't make a point citing the extreme, fringe elements of any faith as definitive, we all know what radicals are capable of. The Bible while being a mile wide, and a mile deep, is often misused by friend a foe alike. Instead, we need to consider ideals, to consider values.   

We in the west think little about it, but we got our values from somewhere. Whether we want to accept it or not they came from our dominant religions. It is possible that some of our deep-seated moral values are actually hardwired, having been codified in our religious traditions. There are evolutionary reasons why certain values would enhance survivability. Right is right regardless of where it originates. Nevertheless, these values are deeply woven into the fabric of our cultural existence whether you personally identify as agnostic or not. Claiming it isn't so doesn't make it any less true. We are steeped in a Christian ethos. Those who vehemently declare their segregation from anything to do with Christ fail to understand how much their lives and beliefs have been permeated by the fundamental values of cultural Christianity. Even in the post enlightenment era these values endure. It is these virtues that bring us meaning, and it's meaning that is the basis of reality, our reality presents us with the foundations for what we believe and how we act. The modern world has obscured this notion with scientism and materialism but consider this; neither is a source of values, neither is a guide on how to live or how to treat each other. We rely on ancient traditional values, and they are good.

Distressingly, instead of bringing peace and harmony, the extremes, the perverted offshoots of misguided interpretations and the misdeeds of same spoil cultural perceptions of what Christianity is, of what faith in God really is. If we claw our way back to the message of Christ without the layers and conditions of religiosity, we'd see the righteousness, we'd find common decency; we'd step back into the light.

Before you scoff and claim all values existed before Christ and even Moses before him, you're right, it's true. No one claimed that Jesus or Moses invented "good" values. Our teachers, parents and mentors try to show us the highest values, they don't invent them. Jesus was a rabbi, a teacher trying to show us the right way to live. I assume teachers, parents and mentors were showing others good values long before Jesus or Moses. Those good values and traditions had been subsumed into western religiosity. 

When we strive to live right, do the right things and seek to repent when we don't, we are living embodiments of God. It is why people seek to do good, help others, even sacrifice themselves for others in an unacknowledged pursuit of a Godly outcome. Why would people do this? Delusion? Idiocy? Glory hound? Because they are inherently good? Or are we all actually living embodiments of God? I choose the later. We are part of God, or better put God is in us. 

We are limited beings, we don't know - we are incapable of knowing - everything. We can't begin to understand how reality came to be, just that it is. You have just as much chance being right by claiming that all reality is a result of chance. Or you could say that everything that was, is or ever could be is pre-determined, and chance itself doesn't exist. Or that God created everything with a word. The truth is unknowable. To pretend otherwise is folly. 

I choose to believe in God. It begs the question; how would we know God? It is said that God is love (yeah, yeah, yeah, then what is love, smarty pants?) Well, you start with agape which means unconditional love, motherly love, the highest form of love, charity. You say, 'Now you're using the word love to describe love!!' Fair enough, I say this to you - we all know love when we feel it. As Jesus said when he was asked what are the most important commandments? He answered, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment of them all. The second most important commandment is like this: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself”.

If you believe that we are living embodiments of God, or better God is in us, then Jesus is saying love yourself, and love others as yourself. This is the right way to live. Nothing good will come if you don't follow these.