Are We (You) Alone?

     Fair warning that this post is a bit longer than most, and briefly --but only briefly-- starts with math.  Consider it one of those year-end overloads, the sort already blitzing your emails with recaps and best-of lists.  But if you want just the short version of this post, then jump to the 2 videos of our universe, both of which were mentioned in earlier posts but perhaps never clicked (on the links).  They're worth watching, if only to put things into perspective as you wind down after this holiday scramble.  What is our place in this universe, and why are we so caring and yet so hurtful, to ourselves, to others, and to the planet?  It's not like we can keep running away.  As Mark Twain was quoted, "there are two important days in your life: the day you were born and the day you find our why?"  So before you start to scroll down and think that this may be a bit wordy (it is), think about what you're doing, where you're going, what you feel is so important, and perhaps like me, why you feel that you still have all the time in the world.  A single breath, as I wrote in the last post.  That's what we really have.  Breath by breath.  And consider you having that last breath and your thoughts at that moment.  Did you do good?  Did you have regrets. as in loads of them?  Will you be missed?  The arrival of a new year means that another year has ended, and we can choose to look at it that way; but as in life, we can also view the coming year as a chance to perhaps change a few of our ways, or to continue to look to our past.  A way forward or a stubborn curmudgeon-like attitude of "I'm not changing."  After all, math is math and there are certain things that are simply the laws of nature and shouldn't be questioned...aren't there?  Uh, no.  And with that, class, let us begin.

      One + One = One?  If the concept of that equation puzzles you, mathematician Eugenia Cheng asks you to imagine blending two separate colors of paint.  The result is just one paint in a new color.  Math is like that she wrote in her book, Unequal.  But don't run off quite yet.  Math also asks you to have differing views.  Picture the simple equation 2+3 = 3+2.  Logical, right?  Except that ■■ + ●●● doesn't look the same as ●●● + ■■...unless, you walk around to the back of those objects and then they DO look alike.  As she added (no pun intended): If you understand the change of view that has happened, then you can get a better understanding of the sense in which the two things in question are the same; and this is true in life as well.  We could do with more skill at seeing things from other people's points of view.  That's not usually thought of as something to do with math, but I think it really is, because of how carefully math deals with different views of the same concept...sometimes we might get so used to the different views counting as 'the same' that we forget that the shift in viewpoint is happening, such as if we are so sure that 2x3 and 3x2 give the same answer that we forget how they're different (picture 2 packs of 3 cookies vs. 3 packs of 2 cookies).

      Although she ventured into math fields beyond my limited understanding, I couldn't help but think that through math, she had encapsulated our view of life in today's world...racial profiling, climate change, rare earth minerals, armed conflicts.  Each can be so limiting and so individual that it is far easier to simply categorize them as 'the same.'  What do you hear when words such as libs or paleo conservatives, broligarchs or libertarians, dems or alt-rights are used.  Do you find yourself automatically shifting to one side or another by such "invisible rulers?"  Book clubs or curated playlists, avocado toast or craft ramen, "must see" videos or "insta" posts, the algorithms speed ahead of you as a guide, only to have you later realize that you're not being guided but being forcibly pulled.  Recommendation algorithms were the secret recipes behind services like Spotify and Netflix, the formulas that made them addictive, wrote a piece in The New York Review (it also noted that the word "algorithm" comes from the Latinization of a ninth-century Persian mathematician).  Continued author Cheng: Too often in daily life we get into arguments with each other just because we haven't been clear about the definitions we're using.  Usually it then turns out that we're all using different definitions.  Making those definitions clear is essential in math, but it's important in daily life too if we want to avoid misunderstandings; being unclear about definitions is a way to manipulate people in bad faith...Some people just say 'woke' to mean 'being aware of other people's struggles and the way in which they have suffered through no fault of their own, and believing that we should help people who have suffered in that way'; those who are against it are often not at all clear what they mean by it, as evidenced by some painful videos of politicians railing against wokeness but then going completely tongue-tied when the interviewer asks them what 'woke' means.  I believe we would all have much more sensible discussions about all these things if we began by declaring what we mean when we use these words...[an] algorithm is limiting because while it might result in someone being able to solve problems that look almost exactly the same, it is more likely that they will not be able to apply their understanding to situations that look a bit less the same.  Popular Mechanics echoed this thought in a piece on the growing arms race in space when it wrote: Fostering an environment where space agencies and militaries communicate more openly about their intention with their spacecraft and space technologies could lead to less escalatory rhetoric, fewer mistakes, and a reduced risk of hostilities.

     As James Meek wrote in The London Review (this on the defeat of Go Master Lee Sedol by DeepMind's AlphaGo in 2016): We want to play Go.  AlphaGo doesn't.  It learned Go and played it because it was told to.  This deficiency in AI, this lack of wanting, doesn't matter when AI is being used as a human tool.  But when the human promoters of AI, like DeepMind's co-founder Demis Hassabis, speak of the imminent advent of an AI that matches or exceeds human mental capabilities --a stage often called Artificial General Intelligence or AGI-- it becomes impossible to pretend we're still talking about ever more powerful computers that will simply index and analyze data and offer, dispassionate, solutions to intractable human problems.  AGI will have to have some approximation of initiative, imagination and conscience, and the scientists-coders can't set aside the part of the human brain that is inextricably bound up with reason: motivation.

    Ah, the human brain.  We've still so much to uncover about the brain, almost as we take the long way around and work on AI and quantum computing.  Wrote anpther article in Popular Mechanics: The idea that the human brain contains quantum properties isn’t new.  In fact, the British physicist Roger Penrose and the American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff first suggested the controversial concept back in the 90s, with their “orchestrated objective reduction” model of a consciousness.  Since then, many pieces of evidence have at least hinted that, while the brain may not be a full-fledged quantum computer, some quantum properties may in fact help generate consciousness.   Now, a new study from Shanghai University submits yet another piece of evidence to the neurological court—that one particular process of the human brain exhibits behavior akin to quantum entanglement, a phenomenon when two particles (usually photons) become inextricably linked even across vast distances.  This phenomenon confounded even the most brilliant of minds, including Albert Einstein, who called quantum entanglement “spooky action at a distance.”  The study, published this month in the journal Physics Review E, suggests that a fatty material called myelin that surrounding the nerve cell’s axon --the fiber that transmits electrical impulses to other nerves or body tissues-- provides an environment in which the entanglement of photons is possible.  This could potentially explain the rise of cognition, and especially synchronization, which is essential for information processing and rapid response.

     Perhaps a better way to picture the enormity of this problem was another piece by Donald MacKenzie who asked how does one build a system that can both run and "communicate" in real time?  Google's early years had a million cheap machines in about 24 data centers around the world.  As he wondered: What does your program do when, as is inevitable when it is running on tens of thousands of machines, one or more of them crashes?  After all, the search engine has to come up with results in real time, and can't afford to stop and reboot.  Will your engineers and researchers have to spend all their time dealing with such issues, rather than getting on with the data analysis?  Google created a program to make the computers work in parallel, then revealed enough about how the software worked to have Yahoo create its own big data reducer.  But these days, both programs have evolved so far that few people in the tech sector still use them, wrote MacKenzie.  Once you can scale, the author wrote, goals that seemed hopelessly ambitious suddenly appear within your grasp.  If Google’s systems could ingest and index close to the entirety of the world’s webpages and respond to billions of search queries every day, then why not begin to ingest all the world’s literature too (Google Books), or create a detailed, interactive digital map of the world (Google Maps), along with an interactive photo-image of the planet from satellites and aircraft (Google Earth), and panoramic images of its streets, at least in countries that allow Google’s camera-carrying cars (Google Street View)?  While you’re at it, why not offer a free, high-quality email service, and not worry too much about the strain on your servers if more than a billion people sign up for a Gmail account?  Unless you in rural America...

     Now wait.  Did your mind automatically shift to a certain picture of how you view "rural" America?  Farms and mostly a white population?  Poor areas facing tough times, their streets lined with empty store fronts?  Places where people can't wait to escape?  Turns out, as author Cheng had noted earlier, how we define the term 'rural' makes most of those assumptions wrong.  One study highlighted by The Conversation noted that: Roughly 1 in 5 Americans live in rural areas – places the federal government defines based on small populations and low housing density.  Yet many people understand rural America through stereotypes.  Media and political conversations often use words or terms such as “fading,” “white,” “farming,” “traditional” and “politically uniform” to describe rural communities.  In reality, rural communities are far more varied.   As the article noted, just 6% of rural America is agricultural, and 1 in 4 people working there are non-white.  Continued the piece: An important thing to know about rural population change is that the places defined as “rural” change over time.  When a rural town grows enough, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget reclassifies it as “urban.”  In other words, rural America isn’t disappearing – it’s changing and sometimes urbanizing (the piece does point out that rural life does still tend to lead to shorter lifespans, and that 2/3 of "rural" America did shrink in population...but 1/3 of rural areas actually grew larger).

     So where are we in all of this?  If grasping large numbers and volumes can be done (by machines, if not yet perhaps our minds as in us trying to grasp infinity or other dimensions, of which there are supposedly 7 or 8 -- we can only imagine 3), then how "advanced" are we?  .Peeking upwards --and our satellites and telescope arrays have still only captured an area of space the size of a grain of sand held up to the sky-- is there anything else?   If heaven and Earth are apparently ours and ours alone (say a majority of religions), what is all the other stuff out there?  Should we picture the cosmos, as Neil Degrasse Tyson put it, not: ...as a force that cradles and cares for life, but as a cold, lonely, dangerous place that's quick to extinguish life with extreme emptiness and all manner of hazardous objects...The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small, from a universe that began in a space far tinier that the period at the end of this sentence to one that is now many billions of light years across.  The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that we lose our ability to reason, leaving us quick to believe anything we're told.

    As you watch the video below (I had linked the animation by Global Data in an earlier post but in today's world, it's always wise to be leary about clicking on links of any sort), it will give you a brief idea well beyond that of our solar system, so that even our "pale blue dot" becomes smaller than an atom and vanishes into the infinitely small.  And for many people, their own inner world can feel exactly like that, a puzzle as to why they should continue for another day, or if depressed or insecure enough, wonder why others and the world itself should continue.  Shooting innocent people on a beach or at a school, blowing up alleged drug boats but pardoning multiple drug dealers including one who brought 400 tons of cocaine into this country (all while pharmaceutical companies tell you to take their drugs instead since they're "legal"), news outlets on the verge of becoming government run by broadcasting only what their owners allow.  It's difficult to make sense of such "perspectives."  But, and this is a big but, those are but a small part of what our world is.  I tend to see the resilience of the goodness in ordinary people daily as I walk my dog in his "wheels."  Cars stop to block traffic to let me cross a street, couples young and old stop and talk and pet my dog, neighbors say hello or wave as they take their kids to school or step out to check the mail, even our mailman knocks on the door to drop off a parcel and gives my barking dog a treat (he also tells "dad" jokes, his recent one being: Why does a chicken coop have only 2 doors?...because if it had 4 doors it'd be a sedan).  As Jacinda Ardern, the former prime minister of New Zealand told Graham Norton (when asked about the changing political landscape she experienced): I don’t think it is just any one leader who has experienced that shift.  It has shifted, and amongst all of that, I do think we’re at a moment in time.  I think in response to that moment in time, my plea is for people is to not give up on the prospect that politics can be better.  Expect decency in politics, expect kindness in your politics.  I do think we will come back to that.  As the late William Webster once said (the only person to head both the FBI and the CIA, and considered by many to be one of the last to "wrestle the bureau into the realm of the rule of law"), it was up to Americans "to overcome out differences and pursue the common good.  Order protects liberty, and liberty protects order."   

  

                            

     Often it can be frustrating or depressing to watch these ups and downs of our lives and our governments, especially when it seems that we've stepped back into a revised world of McCarthyism.  Sometimes watching things such as the above video can make you wonder what IS the point?  As part of a poem by Campbell McGrath noted (which appeared in The New Yorker): Death doesn’t scare the body because all the body wants is to lie on the couch with a golf tournament on TV but the mind is drip, drip, drip, drip, relentless.  It wants God to be more than a notion, it wants God to be real so it can escape the hairy carcass and rise --eternity seems always to be an ascension-- the mind wants to climb that ladder while the body prefers to bask in a confetti of chatter, the mind wants to study the stars from the roof and imagine an afterlife it understands deep down, in its python coils, to be nothing but a metaphor, a hunger for reassurance, a telescope resolving the night into a zodiac of consolation.  But all of that may simply be a matter of perspective.  As editor Melissa Kirsch of the NY Times noted about this season and this time we're in: The ancient Greeks experienced time in two ways.  Chronos was the clock time that governs our lives, bedtime and estimated departure time, the hour gained or lost.  Kairos referred to a more figurative measure of time -- the right time, the moment of opportunity, the sacred window for action.  In order to recognize kairos, we have to be aware, awake, present.  Madeleine L’Engle wrote: “The child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos.  The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos.”  When I think about the mystical possibilities of kairos, it seems mundane, boring, uncreative to be blue about a lost chronological hour.  In any season, there is kairos.  These moments of possibility, of serendipity, arrive in all seasons, but we have to be awake to seize them.  The stillness of the colder, darker months --that license to hunker-- is a time to slow down and observe.  What windows of luck and chance and coincidence emerge when we’re a little quieter, a little more observant?

Cartoon: New Yorker/Brendon Loper

     As the new year approaches, take those steps to find another perspective, to wander around to the back and to see if things may appear different from that angle.  Why not take the time to embrace our smallness and just wonder how so much life could be packed into such a tiny orb somehow floating in  just the right area of space.  And speaking of orbs, I close with an invitation to venture into that "other" perspective, this one being the view from an octopus.  A review of a series of books about these amazing creatures appeared in the NY Review and started with this: Let’s start with some comparative anatomy.  You and I have bones.  An octopus doesn’t.  It has three hearts --two for its gills-- pumping coppery blue blood.  Instead of gills we have lungs, and our lone heart pumps iron-based red blood.  Bony skulls protect our large, unified brains.  An octopus’s brain is distributed throughout its soft, amorphous body: nine brainlike nerve clusters, one at the base of each arm and another in its head.  Yet the word “head,” when applied to an octopus, is a little puzzling.  It’s all too easy to think of everything above the tentacles as its head, where there appears to be plenty of room for a sizable globular brain.  This is a cranial shape we recognize from many sources, like the invading Martians in the 1996 movie Mars Attacks!  Nearly everything about it says “head” to us, even if it also says “alien.”  But it’s not a head.  It’s a mantle.  What looks headlike to us actually encloses --mantles-- nearly all of an octopus’s organs: its digestive, reproductive, and circulatory systems, which have functions roughly similar to ours.  It also contains some distinctly nonhuman parts, like a poison gland, an ink sac, and a funnel for breathing and propulsion...Comparative anatomy is always worth thinking about from both directions, so that we become the compared as well as the comparing.  After all, our sense of being normal relies on our chronic failure to notice how strange as a species humans really are -- as strange from the cephalopod point of view as cephalopods are from ours.

     And what would that "other" perspective look like?  Added the reviewer: So what would a common octopus find peculiar or interesting about humans, besides the astounding fact that we don’t live underwater?  For one thing, we’re incompressible.  Our body shape is basically unalterable, and thanks to our rigid architecture, we can’t squeeze through an aperture narrower than the width of our hips or shoulders. (An octopus can—and will—siphon itself through an opening no bigger than its beak.)  Our physiological tools for grasping --two hands, with opposable thumbs-- are a very big deal among mammals.  But they would be unimpressive to a creature with nearly two thousand suckers capable of tasting, touching, and adhering, arranged in rows on arms with their own brainlike neuron clusters.  And when it comes to camouflage?  An octopus can vanish in plain sight against almost any background, while humans, lacking chromatophores in the skin, are doomed to live forever unhidden.  Moreover, octopuses have the ability to discard an arm that’s been severed by a predator -- and then regrow it.  Us?  Not so much.  And then there’s the matter of movement.  Humans are inherently stiff and angular whether we’re walking, running, or swimming because our limbs are inflexible bone-beamed levers, connected at hinges we call “joints.”  But in the aqueous, low-gravity world of octopuses, motion is fluid and arrhythmic.  The radical strangeness of octopuses is never more startling than when you see one sidling in its benthic manner along an underwater contour.  In motion it looks less like a unified organism than a disorderly swarm of tentacles or a knotted conclave of eels led first by one arm then another as it billows along, just slightly more substantial in appearance than the “chestnut-brown” ink cloud it emits when alarmed.  It’s worth remembering that the intelligence we recognize in an octopus is not the kind we possess, the review concluded.  To overlook or minimize the differences is to miss seeing how strange life really is...There are many ways to express the wholeness of biological life, a wholeness that Amphibious Soul and My Octopus Teacher try to envision.  But I greatly prefer Godfrey-Smith’s version: “I want to defend an orientation that embraces, and stays with, the idea that we, the world’s living agents, are all here together, as parts of a single system.”  All here together, we certainly are, and the best way to glimpse the wonder of that isn’t to take it for granted.  Octopuses are astonishingly beautiful creatures.  To us, they have this added beauty: they help us unsettle ourselves.

     It's soon to be a new year, a chance for a new beginning.  Make it a time to fight both inner and outer demons.  Dementors.  Stand up for what is right, look at things anew, especially yourself.  You can do it.  Do not succumb.  Just listen to yourself.  Break through the noise and enter the even more difficult world of silence.  Of stillness.  But if --IF-- you find yourself struggling, seek help...a friend, a sibling, a dog, a forest, or a professional (call 866/903-3737 or call/text 988).  Changing a perspective is difficult, but walking around to the back for a different view is not...you can always come back.  Maybe a new year resolution could be to view the perspective of another person, someone you may disagree with.  Stay for awhile and chat, even a tiny bit.  Listen.  Maybe that person's viewpoint is not as different as you think.  In fact, you may discover that you both have a few things in common.  And maybe you could then invite that person over to see your perspective.  And maybe with that one little step or gesture, you've helped to change the world.  Your world.  It doesn't take much, and what better time to start anew.  Happy New Year (emphasis on Happy)...

                       

P.S. For a nice start to the New Year, especially if you're feeling a bit more lonely or depressed, take heart...this TED Talk is filled with empathy since the speaker was not only in the same boat, but visited hundreds of experts in the fields of such topics in order to write his book.  You may find his answers not only uplifting, but quite surprising..