The life cycle of a cell is simply amazing. It does work to construct constraints on the release of energy, which does work to construct more constraints on the release of energy, which does work to construct even more constraints on the release of energy, and other kinds of work as well. It builds structure. Cells don’t just carry information. They actually build things until something astonishing happens: a cell completes a closed nexus of work tasks, and builds a copy of itself. Although he didn’t know about cells, Kant spoke about this 230 years ago when he said that an organized being possesses a self-organizing propagating whole that is able to make more of itself. But although cells can do this, that fact is nowhere in our physics. It’s not in our notion of matter, it’s not in our notion of energy, it’s not in our notion of information, and it’s not in our notion of entropy. It’s something else. It has to do with organization, propagation of organization, work, and constraint construction. All of this has to be incorporated into some new theory of organization.

…

We don’t know what Darwinian pre adaptations are going to be, which supplies an arrow of time. The same thing is true in the economy; we can’t say ahead of time what technological innovations are going to happen. Nobody was thinking of the Web 300 years ago. The Romans were using things to lob heavy rocks, but they certainly didn’t have the idea of cruise missiles. So I don’t think we can do it for the biosphere either, or for the econosphere.

…

I can begin to imagine making models of how the universe gets more complex, but at the same time I’m hamstrung by the fact that I don’t see how you can see ahead of time what the variables will be.

…

The same question applies to the economy. How can human beings assemble this increasing diversity and complexity of ways of making a living? Why does it work in the common law? Why does the common law stay a living body of law? There must be some very general conditions about co-evolutionary assembly. Notice that nobody is in charge of the evolution of the common law, the evolution of the biosphere, or the evolution of the econosphere. Somehow, systems get themselves to a position where they can carry out coevolutionary assembly. That question isn’t even on the books, but it’s a profound question; it’s not obvious that it should work at all. So I’m stuck.

From “The Adjacent Possible“, Stuart Kauffman

This is a really uncomfortable show to watch.   Asks some amazing questions AND unemotionally explores some answers/approaches.

What got me really thinking was listening to the Drs. and researchers who work on this stuff everyday.   It’s shocking to many of us who don’t deal with this stuff everyday, but for these researchers, its clinical.

Absolutely fascinating research over hundreds of years.   Some really kooky stuff.

There’s a part where this Dr. “MacDougal” attempted to measure the weight of the soul in the 1800s.   WHAT??!?

There’s an amazing part involving the air force testing the effects of G on pilots’ brains.

Definitely a much watch, if you can handle it.  It’s not for everyone.

That strategy can never work.  All things that lead to the above goals are computationally irreducible systems.

The most efficient strategy, and here comes the bad news… is to jump in, do stuff* and see what happens.

*stuff =  take to the streets, code something, write that book, run the marathon, quit that job, join the peace corps, send the letter, have the talk, etc.

Never let me watch others make the world go round.

Never let me watch others dance the night away.

Never let me see the band play on without me.

Never let me… wait for others to suck it all in.

This is all there is.

Russell’s (Son) position:

This is it.  My 28,105 days are all that I have.  People might remember some version of the things I said or did, others might have photos and videos of some slice of my life and some might carry my genes but I, capital I, will cease to exist when I die.

Based on that, best to live life to the fullest.  That doesn’t mean become adrenaline junkie or find Buddha.  To me it means just do and stop to smell the roses.   Work hard, play hard… be at peace as much as is reasonable. Experience as much as possible.

I like what my grandfather said, “All you leave behind is how people remember you.”  [In the response below, Mom corrects this... perhaps I remembered the quote the way I wanted to... hmmmm]

Donna’s (Mother) response:

So glad to see my father’s words recalled here. I remember them a bit differently, “When it’s all said and done, it’s only the people who will matter.” But that’s really an aside to the question here for me, since I think he was trying to tell me to live for the people and not the stuff after he had spent so many years working so hard to provide me with a good and comfortable life. He wasn’t commenting on his belief in God (which was also one of his deep values) but rather trying to guide me.

Is this life all we have? Is this it? I do not believe this physical life is it.

In fact, the last time I heard anyone say that “this is it” was when my brother and I stood at direct odds over the impending death of our dad — the man quoted by both mother and son herein.

My father was languishing on life support systems having had a very bad outcome from his surgery for pancreatic cancer. He lapsed into a coma shortly after the surgery and showed few — if any — signs that he could or would come out of the coma.

As the hours and days wore on, my brother was determined. If there was one sliver of a chance that our dad would come out of his coma, my brother wanted the life support to continue. I argued that my dad never wanted to be kept alive on life support systems when his quality of life was not likely to be outcome. I wanted his wishes honored. I wanted the machines turned off.

My brother was livid and terrified. He said things like, “Don’t get the flu around Donna, she’ll blow your brains out,” and, “I don’t know about you, but I believe this life is all we get so we have to keep him alive if there is any chance at all for life.”

I was angry, hurt but determined. I answered him, “No, I do not believe this is it. But it really doesn’t matter what you or I believe, what matters is what he (our dad) believes, and he believed in something more. He did not fear death but living a life that was without meaning.”

A day or two later when my brother could be sufficiently convinced that there was no hope for life for my dad and after my dad had then suffered mini-strokes and lots of end-of-life traumas, we finally turned off the machines.

We stood at his beside. A shell of a body that had not shown any tangible signs of life for eight days — my dad was finally to die. In the midst of those sad moments, he turned his head, opened his eyes and fixed them on mine. I reassured him that everything would be all right, just as he had reassured me so many times when I was a little girl. I told him I loved him (as we all did). And he died. The sun was visable for a few moments before the cloud covered filled in the gray skies, and it was over.

My dad was my main teacher in areas of the greater themes of my life, my value system and my overall beliefs, but he was by no means my only teacher.

It is my experience is that the deeper threads of life hold more than I can comprehend or explain without my faith. The wind, a crashing wave on the Pacific shore, a grandchild’s voice, a phrase well-written… or a the love of my father who gave up so much of what he desired to share the fruits of his work with me and to better my life.

I have so much faith in something outside of self.

The story asks the big question: does life have any meaning?

The book does the only thing you can do with that question… contextualize it, swirl it around, test it.  Ultimately it remains non-answered with a tilt towards “just when you think life does have meaning something happens to make you question it.”

This is book is loaded.

* All humans carry mystical bagage (fate!, rights!, free will!, God’s way!, rain god!)
* Western society romances the truth for children (where there’s a will, there’s a way!)
* Humans do what the environment shapes them to do (social circles, castes, roles in life, culture, family)
* Changing course requires changing the environment (circle of friends, physical change…)
* Beauty is…really hard to define
* Being lonely sucks but false relationships might suck worse
* Intelligence is not an end in itself, it is a biological tool to help us survive

About that last bullet point this passage from page 165-167 haunts me.  And, yes, it’s personal.

“Fascination with intelligence is in itself fascinating, but I don’t think it’s a value in itself. There are tons of intelligent people out there and there are a lot of retards, too.  I’m going to say something really banal but intelligence, in itself, is neither valuable nor interesting.  Very intelligent people have devoted their lives to the question of the sex of angels, for example.  But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself.  They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangley: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed… It is not a sacred gift, it is a primate’s only weapon.”

Ouch.  This is what I mean about this book non-answering the big questions.  The author drives a stake through intelligence as a good to possess and recasts it as the simple tool it is. AND… here we are reading a philosophical book with poetic characters that wax about the meaning of life and profound thoughts!

So… is it just a biological weapon? and if so, how is this book a wielding of that weapon?

This is a trickier question than it might seem regardless of your take on the matter.

And on that note… I’m going to a giant book festival now to wield my weapon and probably keep this pathological search for meaning going for another day. and maybe that’s just it.  if I stopped looking for or ceased creating meaning, how would I survive?

“If the dog had not stopped to take a shit, he would have caught the rabbit!”

But he did stop… or X, Y, or Z and he didn’t catch the rabbit… or make sales numbers, the team, the appointment, etc.

Cons:

Counterfactuals are a form of prediction without parameters because the conditional statement is illusionary. There is no way to prove or disprove the counterfactual so the provider takes on a psychic persona of knowing what didn’t happen.

We see it all the time… John Madden says knowingly, “That missed extra point will come back to haunt the Packers in the forth quarter.” The fact that between the missed point and the last two minutes of the forth quarter there were 51 offensive plays, 2 interceptions, 2 bad calls, two fumbles and one player (no one knows which one) has a concussion doesn’t come into Madden’s NFL game perspective. He like so many other fans says what he says because they collectively have seen a game lost by one point in this way. Making the declarative if erroneous counterfactual statement pointing to one and only one play is fun but it is also preposterous.

Sometimes they involve category errors which is logical mumbo jumbo for a change in assumptions similar to metaphors and similes. This can happen when there is some type of anthroporification assigned to the game, or when playing it seems to be unnecessary as when Terrell Owens says that
“losing this game was never an option” as if to defy by some Zeus entitlement or some magic of ‘willing’ a win to happen. While that makes sense in street vernacular it is not ‘common sense” and it does a real disservice to the beauty of what is going on for real and in the lesser constraints of what is going on in a dynamic game (soccer) or even a collective discrete game like American Football.

Counterfactuals are very mechanical in the Newtonian sense of ‘cause and effect’ and maintain the common sense and common illogic of single causality for things that happen. This gives them their simplicity and also their poor logical construction.

They generate a lot of tangentials that take focus away from lines of development. People start studying the ‘mind’ to figure out about behavior even thought the mind can’t be measured or falsified as existing without a courtyard of assumptions, presumptions and other postulates. All the while behavior is occurring without sufficient understanding to allow us to understand how to pick up an egg.

Then again, their use has consequences whether we recognize it or not…

1. Help maintain superstitions and myths and urban legends
2. Keeps individuals and the media from having to be accountable for whatever they say

Pros:

Of course this too is ironical in that the subsequent variability leads to some interesting investigations of relationships as well as sink holes of vernacular pop science that dilutes the resources of trying to figure out what the heck is going on “out there.”

Counterfactuals are also the basis of a lot of interesting “leap frog” research in that the concept of counterfactuals generates some non-linear questions about relationships between objects and events with other objects and events. This is best seen in the cases of “Freakanomics” by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt as well as what is presented in the 2007 book “Black Swan” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to mention but two prime examples where counterfactuals work as a literary hook.

Knowing about them will provide a way of using them as needed and not making the mistakes we all make from their misuse.  Besides, did any of us really need to know that that pop-logic had a name before reading this slice of verbage?

Tonight was no exception.  It goes something like this – in an out-of-body kinda way…

Weeks of anticipation funnel to an inevitable point.    Then, in a “pop” like clearing your ears from a redeye flight, it‘s here.  You walk in, bold front and quivering ass not aware that you’re not breathing.  At that exact moment, or the one before it, or the one before that one, you know this is the time and this is the place… you just aren’t sure for ‘what’.   

A couple times before when your comfort zone was this small you didn’t know whether to wither, laugh, cry or throw up?  ‘This is good’ you muse.  You’ve taken steps to put yourself here physically that escalated from some intellectually ripe overture where you assessment that this could be an “interesting” gig.   Now, you’re off the access road and you’re finally here and they‘re waiting.   You are generating some pretty raw emotions being ‘in the moment’; experiences that are frightening and exhilarating but devoid of references. There is nothing around you you can hold on to that will anchor some familiarity with this unfamiliarity.  Yah, you’ve been center stage before, done your lines with confidence and rocked ‘em.   No script for this one though… 

You’d done all the preparation, the really hard stuff, the stuff that seemed hard until you were standing there with rock star level names cooking this new visual brew without a recipe.  “How’d they do that?”  Mouths moved but sound came and went like a dolphin fin in the surf. 

Then, while you weren’t looking, it happened.  Suddenly, a conversation where the language had only three or six foreign words in it slaps you.  They are talking to you.  Even though it makes no sense how it made sense, you go with it.  This epic was morphing before you and blurring the shadowed hallways behind you.   Now, it was natural to be there…

Stuff like that ever happen to you?  I hope you know ‘about’ what I’m trying to explain.   If not, I hope you will.  I think you know that when it happens to you, you’ll be different.  And that’s always hard to explain.  You’ll try; maybe more than once.  You’ll be silent for a long time sifting and shifting through meta context that your head blows over your tongue only to be unrecognizable coming out of your mouth.  No, the cliché doesn’t work… “…you’d have to be there!”  No, because that would change it; your personal epic spike.  Your soul mate, your mom and your hero’s can’t be there.   You’re not sure you’ll ever be able to explain what they missed.  Another kind of loneliness. 

Damn, this Red Bull can is cold…