Astrology

A friend of mine once long ago gave me the nickname of "Mood" because of my impossible mood swings from friendly to hostile over some tiny nothing of a turn of phrase, something said I didn't agree with, whatever. The memory of this nickname returns to me regularly and I make a show of living it down... with a notable lack of success. I go forth with the idea that I will attempt to leave my isolate existence and associate with the human race, but one never quite knows what the heart will have in store for one when one arrives. (I call the heart the "chest" in this guise, a place of poisonous and circular turmoil, as opposed to the "heart" which would always have some idea of reaching toward the good, if doubtful on the means at times). I blame astrology for these moods. (Actually, I do nothing of the sort. They seem mine entire, to the point of laming all progress. It would be better if I did, I might be able to walk with somewhat more ease in that case). Some couple of days ago I had one of these attacks. I went out to Starbucks feeling perfectly sane on the way there, sat down, and found myself surrounded by a toxic, squishy, sticky region. People all round about were throwing off tiny, most microscopic gestures intended to get me to pay attention to them. I would simply not yield to any such underhandedness. A clear boundary would be marked, they would stay on their side, I would stay on mine, and, maybe, after a due interval had passed, and they had done sufficient penance, I would suffer them to exist. I had not an attack of this sort of mood for at least a few weeks. It was a complete surprise, and enough to remind me of my nickname.

Now, when I got home I had a look at my transiting planets, and found something, (there being so many indications and so many things that might mean this or that in Astrology one almost always will find something). That day we had Mercury conjunct natal Neptune and Saturn square natal Saturn - good enough for a heap of unpleasantness by some lights. Nothing unusual about finding some indications. When I feel my chest is burning and I simply must do something, whether a good or bad idea makes no difference, I have a look and find that Mars is square to something or other, like as not. I have no idea what to make of this. Do I have some unconscious calculation going to set my mood appropriately? I don't check these things all that often, but the indications are only of my inner moods, never of events, and so infinitely maleable.

I began to investigate Astrology some years ago. I had determined that I was utterly at a dead end and wanted some insight that would give me some guidance to whatever blind spot was holding me back. Some years earlier I had made a passing acquaintance with Astrology, and been amazed to find that the planets in the signs seemed almost like a map of my personality. I found this quite amazing at the time. I was much of the opinion that, if one found something that seemed to work, or gave insight, the correct approach was to lay out its internal logic and consequences, and not attempt to argue until you understood its inner workings. And so, at a time when I had more time than sense and no direction to steer at all, I began a fairly thorough study. I found more impediments and obstructions in my personality, many more than in my first brush with Astrology, but I only seemed to see things which I had discovered by painful trial on my own. I had ground along some painful track - and look, there it was in the chart as well. Was there insight in this, or was it only interpreted in - I still really cannot say.

The End is Nigh

Capitalism requires growth. It simply cannot exist in a steady state, and thereby it approaches its end. This arises from two causes: the first being the necessities of paying interest, and the second the inherent severity of zero sum games. Companies must return profits to their investors which are comparable to what would be earned from savings. This would be compound interest, which is an exponential. So a company's profits must be on an exponential curve, or investors will flee it for some more profitable investment. These sales will most often involve at least some increase in materials, so the consumption of environmental goods will be pushed towards an exponential curve. Any exponential curve which involves consuming matter rather than mathematics, does not go on very long, and the result of its end is rather drastic. Now, it might be argued that greater efficiencies will enable us to produce more with less, and so avoid any sort of inconvenience and unpleasantness. Indeed cars get better mileage, strand board replaces plywood for homes, (of course the trees really have all been cut down, making plywood too expensive for homes). The market finds some more efficient substitute. Yet the consumption of material is on some sort of increasing curve regardless, and the Earth is finite and fixed. At some point in the not too distant future, these curves will inevitably intersect.

The second requirement of growth for the survival of Capitalism is due to the severity of zero sum games. Growth softens this severity, it actually makes The Future. You do not need to grab whatever you can right now, you can put it off till The Future, when there will be more than enough for everyone. The Future will always have more of everything so nothing is lost by saving, or spending time on a futile job - The Future will inevitably produce much more of everything, so everyone can eventually be happy, even if they aren't right now. Without Growth The Future becomes a wil'o the wisp, a complete fantasm. Without Growth, if anyone is to have more, the food will have to be taken from someone else's mouth. Any gain is someone else's loss. (In fact, I wonder if some of the poison of present American politics is not due to stagnant incomes of the middle class gradually filtering into people's emotional response, bypassing reason. They are now fighting for the scraps and are in the emotional state one might expect). Without The Future the emotional underpinnings which make Capitalism possible disintegrate.

We might perhaps even save ourselves by using all the knowledge we have acquired by tracking every single purchase that every single person has made for their entire lives. We could perhaps use this incredible amount of information to see what will actually produced happiness, but instead we will use it for Marketing, and so hasten our own downfall.

Reading Entrails

Really now, we would be better off slaughtering a goat and reading the entrails than listening to these people. Such was my thought a couple of days ago while listening to NPR interview a list of economists. I have had this thought repeatedly since the financial crisis and occasionally before. I found it even more pointed when it occured to me that since a year or so ago economists have been saying that 2007 was the beginning of the recession. This was a boom year for those living through it, and you heard not one word to the contrary from any economists speaking at the time. It's hard to fathom how the recession could have begun so long before the crash without some of their august group noticing, particularly if the field is credited with being any sort of science. Really, we should return to reading entrails for economic prognostication - it would be more accurate.

We live in a time when every economic activity we undertake is tracked and stored in a database. This has been going on at least since the mid 90's, yet I don't think anyone has taken this data and checked the fudamental assumptions of economics. We walk into a store and make endless economic decisions. One can actually see how price is related to demand, or how increases in price cause people to substitute one item for another. Every single granular economic decision that people make has now been documented for a period of several decades, yet we cannot determine we are in a recession till several years later, or that several times the entire world's GDP is pooling in a bunch of obscure derivatives. How can this be? Since this is supposedly a science, it must be brought back into conformity with the data that is now readily available.

IBM's Watson

Well, so much for being employed to answer phones and type indeterminate nothings into some computer - Watson has me covered. Phones always freaked me out anyway - some sort of mojo with spirit voices talking to me - I actually can't make any sense out of why they are so unpleasant to me, but my god they are. At least I have been delivered from them, all thanks to Watson. Once Watson can run on something resembling standard hardware the better part of all cubicle rodents will no longer be needed. So much for my hopes for some sort of simple job that didn't involve mopping floors or stacking boxes.

Watson would be an actual AI if he were hooked up to a neural net of something like a sea slug, (which I remember reading had 200 neurons or so, easily emulated). Plug this in so that he experiences pleasure when he gets an answer right and pain when he gets an answer wrong and off he will go, a real honest to god AI.

I wondered what it would be like inside a mind of this sort, tried to visualize it. Here's what I saw: Everything is in its assigned drawer in there. Think of any fact and it is instantly there, exactly as requested, nothing more, nothing less. There would never be a moment when you half remember something, a moment when you've got a picture forming in your mind, but not clear enough to make out what you were trying to remember. Also, most likely never a picture appearing in your mind that suggests something you hadn't thought of. Metaphors would probably seem nonsensical to this mind. They make sense to us partly because our minds are filled with fragmentary pictures which immediately jump to other fragmentary pictures... while any picture which appeared in this mind would be exactly the image which it had intended to retrieve. It would make none of the arbitrary connections which are built into the very structure of our memories. Buddhists will be happy to know that Watson will still be bound to the wheel of suffering, however. I don't think any sort of self-directed mind can exist without pleasure and pain.

Nobel Prize for Medicine - Reflections

Hearing about this prize brought back several memories from many years ago. I remember a Sunday school class with my mother sometime in the early Seventies. We were going to a church of fairly liberal persuasion, probably Presbyterian. This was something done, "for the children," since my parents at the time, did not believe at all. We were following through a workbook, answering various hypothetical moral questions, one of which was, "Would a test-tube baby be moral?" My mother was of the opinion that they simply could not be. I was arguing the counter. She had the idea that something might be left out, some indeterminate something, which could not really be known in advance - and how could one take that risk? I was arguing that everything was completely known, or could be, in the abundant certainty of youth. My view has apparently won the day entirely, so that even she would not remember arguing to the contrary at the time, but actually, there was considerable doubt over the idea right up to the actual fact.

What sort of thing might be left out, one might wonder? Fairly obviously it would be something spiritual, the soul most likely. Indeed, in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the soul finds the womb it will be reborn in by the smell of the sex act, which it finds particularly attractive, and is drawn to irresistibly. (At least this is my memory, it is years since I have read the text). Saint Augustine also has something to say about the matter, Original Sin is passed along from generation in the semen. So it would appear that in vitro fertilization would create people who had no souls, but were free from Original Sin.

I was unlocking the door to the bike shed at my apartment perhaps two years ago when a thought occurred to me. There are actually only two kinds of locks -- those which require secret knowledge, i.e., combination locks, and mechanical ward locks, for instance a key and tumbler lock. On the computer, however, the only sort of lock one can find is the secret knowledge type, (at least implemented as software). I wondered if it would be possible to conceive of a key lock that was entirely implemented in software? I thought and thought but couldn't come up with anything that didn't involve translating some physical quantity into a number, "secret knowledge," and then employing that in the software. If one captured the "secret knowledge" in some way, one could in principle access the locked data, whether or not one had the locking device. I know my thinking isn't sufficient to prove the matter absolutely impossible, but I began to suspect it was showing me a fundamental philosophical problem, something which simply couldn't be solved.

Epi-genetics Implications

I read a bit in the current issue of Scientific American about inherited epi-genetic changes. This possibility suggested several things to me. These changes, methylation of particular genetic regions to prevent transcription and thus shut off expression of a gene can evidently be transmitted through the process of meiosis. The changes are supposed to be removed in the process of forming germ cells, but more likely, there is a signalling process to control removal or preservation in my opinion. Epigenetic changes can be controlled by signals and events received from the environment, but they potentially control expression of what would be pure genetic traits. This would make it possible for the for the trait to follow and arc of expression, or be turned on or off, and then this state passed on to offspring. Something rather like Lamarkian evolution would be possible.