Watch Your Step

Well just as it seemed we couldn’t do much collectively, we’ve had a moment. Last week, thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope, a startling observation was announced. 

The Event Horizon Telescope is notable achievement itself - a consortium of 80 telescopes around the world peer collectively at a remote object, acting as a single Earth-sized telescope. Then a consortium of over 300 scientists analyzes the data. It allows resolution of objects equivalent to spotting a ping pong ball on the moon. Pretty amazing and no small effort to be sure. I mean, go team.

Well 3 years ago it detected a black hole in galaxy Messier 87, which is not even in the top 200 closest galaxies to us. Following 2 years of analysis, a black hole referred to as Sagittarius A* (or Sgr A*), was detected in the center of our galaxy the Milky Way.

OK so Sgr A* is over a thousand times smaller than the one in Messier 87, but it’s our black hole, the closest black hole. What’s it doing out there? Only sucking in all types of gas and matter into its relatively small size, similar to “sucking an elephant through a straw.” In other words, that would be a really giant sucking sound if only there was sound in space. Thank goodness it is smaller than the one in Messier 87.

In his article from The Washington Post, Joel Achenbach clarifies “Earthlings should understand that it poses no threat to our world and is essentially just a part of the galactic furniture.” Whew. I feel better already.

Sgr A* is more massive than 4 million suns; it “bends space and time and forms a glowing ring of light with eternal darkness at its core (emphasis added).” And to think I was concerned about our pending collision with the Andromeda Galaxy. They better watch out! We’ve got a black hole bitch!

As long as it doesn’t get us first. You gotta watch not to stub your toe on the furniture.

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Me:You:Us:Them

Me: Conscious memories seem to have started some time around year 4 or 5. Perhaps it is before that where a priori comes from. But really, the camera starts rolling 24/7 at that point. Creating a relentlessly inescapable first person perspective. I have led a pretty fortunate life. Done some pretty cool stuff, and unfortunately some uncool stuff. All of which resides in the past. In memories. Well at this point, memories of memories. At night, they return. Stirred and shaken. Jumbled and recombined.

I lie awake in an attempt to disengage the Monkey Mind. I try focusing on the untruth that is duality and I stand at the edge of the abyss, peering in, waiting for the colors. They come in whorls and patterns that can’t be focused on. Always moving and changing. But I can’t focus too much. For it is only softly, softly does one catchee monkey.

I tell myself “I am made of sand on a raining beach.” I listen past the roar of misadventure’s tinnitus, and I hear the forest symphony. An amazingly random and infinite loop of crickets, insects, spring peepers. I am told it is a “sonic hallucination.” It’s always running in the background. But could it be just another jumbled childhood memory - recreated from summers past, sleeping on a screened porch cot or lying in bed with the windows open? It is like the colors, beautiful and uncontrollable. This is the platform I am on, as I try to let the train run through the station.

You: I see you. You are individual. Simply put, Not Me. One easy way I can tell, You don’t look like Me. That’s OK. I am not frightened.

I try not to judge You or label You despite what seems to be the natural tendency of the Monkey Mind. Even if successful I feel a primal need to assess whether You are friend or foe. I understand your camera has also been rolling too, but since I haven’t seen the whole movie, it is difficult for Me to fully appreciate your perspective. 

I suspect You think quite similarly to Me, functionally at least. For clues, I can only observe your actions and attempt to communicate. However as George Bernard Shaw once said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

Your conclusions are not always the same as mine. Also OK. You have accomplished things I never could. You occasionally amaze and inspire Me. And sometimes the opposite is true. From your perspective, You are “Me.” Only different. Me and You. Both extras in each other’s major motion picture. I wonder: What does your abyss look like at night? Do You look? Do You hear forest symphonies?

Us: I have never been much of a Joiner. But occasionally, I have something in common with You. We agree on something, and probably not everything, at least temporarily. That allows Me and You to become Us. As a tribe we are greater than the sum our individual selves. Man cannot play baseball alone, for example. During Us, we tend to ignore the differences that would otherwise divide Us. Otherwise we cease to be.

Them: For some reason if You are not a member of Us, You must be Them. As a group you may look like Us, but clearly there is some important difference. Unless of course you abstain from whatever the difference is, in an attempt to be neither Us nor Them. But by doing so, You just get bundled together with the abstained non-joiners, and also become Them. Just a different Them. 

Back in the day, being Them was OK. Even with our differences, there seemed to be a basic understanding, more fundamental than Us and Them, or Me and You, called Civility. Respect for others. Apparently though, Civility disenfranchised a large quantity of the population. This group has tired of quietly living with their dissatisfaction and feels the need to forcibly make a course correction. Never has it been easier for Me to not be with Them.

Several years ago, in the sea of jumbled memories, I had a dream. In it, all of humanity suddenly knew and understood each other. Kind of like The Borg in the rebooted Star Trek (which was otherwise lame except providing that analogy. And they were kind of creepy.) There was a beautiful harmony among the species. There was no Them, only Us. We acted in our collective best interest; we all knew what that was. Everyone contributed what they could, and if for some reason a person couldn’t, that was OK because we knew everyone was doing their level best. We took care of each other. 

These days, it seems humanity is unable to even agree on what is best for itself, much less act together to improve our collective well being. And to make matters worse, it’s as if all the loudmouth, bullying idiots from childhood are taking over the asylum. Truth should not be subjective. Superman’s American Way is not the same Great America they are trying to recreate. And don’t get me started about justice.

No wonder I’m trying to get back to sleep - at least I can dream there.

***

Get It While It’s Hot

When last we ventured to the Darvaza Gas Crater, it was March 23, 2011. In that post, which I encourage readers to enjoy yet again, I shared its origin story as well as its familiar name as the Door To Hell. In the interest of accuracy, I am providing an update - that it is also known as the Gates to Hell. Not sure if that’s a name change designed to attract more tourists or what.

It’s easy to see the attraction. Nothing like a 226-foot wide crater, 100-feet deep spewing ignited methane and god only knows what else. Pack a lunch.

As it turns out, despite this exceptionally fun and unique attraction, only a couple thousand tourists travel into Turkmenistan each year. Of course, this is a must-see. As Turkmenistan attractions go, it is #2 - right after the Gypjak Mosque and just ahead of the Turkmen Carpet Museum. You can see why I strongly recommend going with the “Skip The Line” country-wide pass.

Apparently Turkmenistan has decided enough is enough, recommending the crater to be filled and the gas somehow extinguished. This will be a neat trick in itself, and one wonders where all that gas is going to go exactly. But the point is - if you were planning on going - you better book now if you want some of that sweet Gates of Hell merch.

And while you’re there, stock up on the Turkmenistan Carpet Museum merch before prices go up and it rises to #2 on the must-see list.

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Building or Burning and Degrading Gracefully

Degrading gracefully. One of a handful of standard responses my Dad would return when asked how he was doing. There was also “No complaints - nobody listens!” To my brother he was known as The Face. I don’t exactly know the story behind that one but it stuck. 

Anyway, getting back to the blog I was disappointed to discover many of my older posts seem to be degrading gracefully as well. Lost graphics, links to witty YouTube videos broken or turned private, etc. although the words seem to be hanging in there. And the older the posts are, it seems the more likely they are dissembling. Almost like the bits and bytes are just…degrading gracefully. But it is a comfort to know that not everything does. 

For example, I still get mail for my Dad. It has chased me through three addresses since he died 13 years ago and he never lived with me. Pleas for donations of some type, usually. I even get emails, and he never owned a computer. Given this, it is surprising that I don’t get calls for his last chance to lock in on that car warranty.

The post below, from 2010 originally, is a product of this discovery. I inadvertently updated it while trying to figure out what happened, and it brought it to the top of the pile. Can’t undo that. And no point in providing snappy graphics I guess, or trying to fix the old posts, because their temporal context will be lost. Oddly enough, this relates to the 2010 post below:

Today I needed to get outside of my head, so I set out for a bit of a longer ride. The destination: the western end of the W&OD trail in Purcellville, about 21 miles one way. The weather complied, and I set off into the climbing hills. Somewhere around Leesburg, there is a decaying barn just off the trail. I recalled this quote (but not the source unfortunately): “You spend all this time building your barn. Then you burn it down. Sometimes the gods burn it down for you. You rebuild it. That's what we do - it restores our sanity.” As Jimi Hendrix also once said, "And so castles made of sand, melt into the sea...eventually." I found myself presented with a choice of burning down the life I built or waiting for the gods to do it for me. I chose to continue building.

***

You Think, Therefore I Am

Consciousness. At what point does it occur? And what is it really? The brain observes, assimilates, reflects, stores, responds and reacts. We can't help it, that's just what the brain does. Recognizes patterns. Sometimes. Evaluates. Considers. Includes both positive and negative reinforcement experiences. Stir it all up and out comes The Mind. 

Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock performing the Vulcan Mind Meld. 

Is there really room for more than one?

Growing up, there was no Internet. We had these things called libraries. You either believed what your parents or teachers told you, or you were forced to go look it up. OK sometimes friends were consulted. But if you really wanted to KNOW something, you looked it up, with the understanding that what was written was factual and objective. Newspapers counted. Even the evening news I guess, although I never paid much attention to it. Except the nightly tally of the soldiers killed in Vietnam. And now? Good god.

The Internet starts off with good intentions. And Google made it easily accessible. You no longer had to go to the library to write that paper. Then it dawned on someone - probably a teacher either recognizing plagiarism or outright BS - that you can't believe everything you read. Like, “Wow, you maybe oughta fact-check some of that crap before you put it in your term paper.” And about then was the dawn of the misinformation age. An endless sea of clickbait catering to every ridiculous set of notions imaginable, which is a story for another time.

Well much has been said of what it is to claim one KNOWS something, and what that even means. Is there really such a thing as a priori? OR is it what got processed prior to sentience? Whatever the subject, it has been stored somewhere within and can now be recalled with concrete certainty as to its integrity. It is now BELIEVED to be true. And this collection of beliefs and experiences congeals and combines with a self-awareness that we casually identify as ourselves. Then along comes the Matrix and Harrari's Homo Deus and one starts to wonder just who you are talking to.

In the Turing Test we are charged with determining whether the respondent is human or machine. If we can't say with any certainty, or how can we KNOW whether the respondent has consciousness? Because we ask them. And for that matter, how do we know whether the hamster is still alive within our neighbors? The wheels are turning. They claim to be conscious. We generally take their word for it. So I KNOW I’m conscious, I’m just not sure I believe you are. I’ll have to think about it. As well as the question about whether you exist.

Which brings me to a relevant passage from Philip Roth's American Pastoral: 

"You fight with your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims?...The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we KNOW [emphasis added] we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget about being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that - well, lucky you."

So therein is the challenge. Recognize that we get people wrong. That’s life. Try and go along for the ride instead. Believe them when they say they are conscious, but be wary. As Ronald Reagan once said “Trust but verify.” Good luck, and until next time, I’ll be thinking of you.

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