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10/31/21

Richard Halliburton Lived Several Lives in One


 This art-deco image of a pilot, scarf flying over a vintage biplane, evokes for me an entire era, and one man helps capture that era.  A while back I found a book in a used book store.  It was about Richard Halliburton, written by his father, Wesley.  I bought it and set it aside for reading on some day when I had both free time and the inclination.  When I did read it I was hooked.  I learned Richard Halliburton was a travel-adventure writer and wrote many books.  I bought them all and read them all.  I could go on but that would not compare to the life I read about.  Instead, I provide a summary from my book.

Richard Halliburton was a misfit, a rebel, in an America coming of age in the world. In the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most famous persons in America, even more than Amelia Earhart, and today he is forgotten. He knew many people who would not fit in the handy boxes society offered them. Paul Mooney sailed across the Pacific with him in a Chinese junk. Moye Stephens flew as a stunt pilot in Howard Hughes' silent movies. Elly Beinhorn was Germany's Amelia Earhart. Pancho Barnes founded the Happy Bottom Riding Club. Halliburton met history makers like Lenin's widow and the man who shot the Czar. He chatted with Herbert Hoover, was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

He was a maverick and couldn't see himself fitting into the America of his youth, although he was very much its product with his can-do attitude and things-will-get better belief.  For all that, he was a round peg with nothing but square holes awaiting him as he reached adulthood. He could not see things the way most people saw them. His parents wanted him to play by the rules, to live an even tenor, and he scorned the rules, especially the phrase "even tenor."  He said no to their even tenor and in doing so he turned his back on an America that held those values.  Despite having little respect for rules, he became wildly successful because his life was wildly improbable as a travel-adventure writer.  Because he dared, he became an icon of his era, more famous in his day than Amelia Earhart, with farmers' wives in Topeka, factory workers in Detroit, and newspaper boys in Cleveland buying his books.  

Available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble or other book stores. Click




8/27/21

Pain & Pleasure: The Lobster Reconsidered & David Foster Wallace

Lobster Reconsidered David Foster Wallace
A few years back I read about George, a 140 year-old lobster that did not wind up on somebody's dinner plate. Instead, he was returned to the ocean at Kennebunkport, Maine. Lobster age is calculated by weight and this one weighed 20 pounds. George would have provided a dinner at over $100 in a good restaurant. Because of his age, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals asked the restaurant, City Crab and Seafood, that the lobster be returned to the ocean. After holding George in a tank for ten days, restaurant management released him to the animal-humane organization.

Then I read about this more recently:  Fish "sensors flare when . . . a hook rips through their scales and into their flesh. In the lab, when trout lips are injected with acid, the fish do not merely respond at the site. They rock their entire bodies back and forth, hyperventilating, rubbing their mouths against their tanks’ sides or gravel bottoms. These behaviors cease when the fish are given morphine. Such actions call the ethics of the research itself into question. But the experiences of lab fish are nothing compared with those endured by the trillions of aquatic animals that humans yank, unceremoniously, out of oceans and rivers and lakes every year. Some fish are still alive, hours later, when they’re shoveled into the sickly lit, refrigerated intake tubes of the global seafood supply chain."

Those items item led me to some thoughts about pleasure and pain.

8/9/21

Mercedes de Acosta Met Ramana Maharshi: Here Lies The Heart

Descended from the legendary Dukes of Alba, daughter in a wealthy Cuban family, Mercedes de Acosta was born in 1893 in New York, raised near Fifth Avenue, and had a beautiful sister Rita de Acosta who was
a model for artists John Singer Sargent and Giovanni Boldini. Married to painter Abram Poole, Mercedes was socialite, poet, playwright, Hollywood set and costume designer as well as script writer. She knew many of the greats of her day: Bessie Marbury, Rodin, Edith Wharton, Stravinsky, Sarah Bernhardt, Elenora Duse, Picasso, Cecil Beaton, Elsa Maxwell, and Krishnamurti. Near the end of her life, she met and befriended Andy Warhol, and introduced him to many of the people who would count in his career.

Consuelo (Hatmaker) Sides, whose husband had been the World War I French flying ace Charles Nungesser, accompanied Mercedes on her passage to India. After arriving, de Acosta met former President Woodrow Wilson's daughter, Margaret, a devotee at Sri Aurobindo's ashram.

In 1960, she published an autobiography, Here Lies The Heart, dedicated to Maharshi, in which she wrote, To Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi, the only completely egoless, world-detached, and pure being I have ever known. She spent three days with him and remembered them as the most significant of her life.

4/5/21

The Revolt of Pancho Barnes



Born to immense wealth, Pancho had an arranged marriage to a minister. Newspapers proclaimed the marriage of a socialite to a pastor. Tired of the marriage, she couldn't get a divorce so each Sunday morning she climbed into her biplane and dove down over the steeple, buzzing his church during his sermons, drowning out the service. While a school girl she led her horse into her dorm. Called on the carpet, she "sweetly" explained to the headmistress she thought the animal was lonely. In the depth of the Great Depression she spent the last of her money to help fellow aviators but, broke, became a capable business woman, building The Happy Bottom Riding Club and Rancho Oro Verde Dude Ranch in the Mojave Desert and was a surrogate mother to test pilot Chuck Yeager. Years later, using her usual colorful language she told off the commanding officer of Edwards Air Force Base and he got back by trying to bulldoze her Happy Bottom Riding Club.

Pancho Barnes is included in Don't Die in Bed: The Brief, Intense Life of Richard Halliburton.
She grew up on South Garfield Avenue in San Marino, California in a three-story thirty-five room mansion with eighteen foot ceilings, wood-paneled walls with hand-carved moldings ,and a massive crystal chandelier hanging from one ceiling.  A harpsichord chime summoned the family to dinner.
Silver spigots serviced upstairs baths of marble.  Water lilies decorated a large patio pool.  Guests ambled to tennis courts for a few sets or to the stables, where they rode a mile course.  In Laguna Beach stood another fine mansion on the cliffs above Emerald Bay.  Next it she had a landing strip for her airplane.

Born In 1901, Florence Leontine Lowe was supposed to have grown into a debutante whose coming-out would be into the best Southern California society. But Pancho was born to rebel while her mother wanted a young lady who conformed to social expectations. Pancho loved animals and wanted to be a veterinarian but her mother thought that too common. Pancho took after her grandfather and father, both of whom doted on her.

Her grandfather was Thaddeus S.C. Lowe, photographed from below by Matthew Brady as Lowe floated in a balloon at a Civil War battle. He spied on Confederate troop movements while Union soldiers held ropes to keep the balloon from drifting over Johnny Reb’s ranks.

Abraham Lincoln appointed Lowe Chief Aeronaut of the Balloon Corps and Pancho claimed this made him founder of the US Air Force because he was de facto pioneer of American military aviation. In his balloon he became a favorite target of Rebel sharpshooters but fate favored him to grow old and become rich.

Around 1918, Florence attended the Bishop School in La Jolla, her fourth school in eight years. She roomed with Ursula Greenshaw (Mandel), who wrote an autobiography, I Live My Life, saying that life with “Florence was “never DULL!” “One night when I entered our room, I stumbled against a body. I switched on the light and there lay Florence on the floor in a pool of blood. Pinned to her chest with a dagger was a note saying that she had decided to end it all. I soon discovered the blood was red ink and the dagger wound faked.”

Florence was called on the carpet at the principal’s office one day because she led her horse, Dobbins, inside her building and up the stairs. The principal demanded to know the reason for the outrage. “She feigned innocent surprise and soon was expressing deep sympathy for the horse.” She sweetly said, “He must have been so lonesome that he even came upstairs to look for me.”

Florence continued to rebel but for a while, at least, her mother had the upper hand and decided that an arranged marriage would cool her daughter’s spirit. In 1921, Pancho wed Episcopalian Reverend C. Rankin Barnes of Pasadena and ten years older. The newspapers announced that a society aviatrix married a Pasadena reverend.

Three nights after the marriage, they finally slept together and begot a son. After that night they slept apart. William Emmert was born nine months later and grew up close to his mother, dying in 1981 when his WWII fighter, a P-51 Mustang, crashed.

Theirs was not a match made in heaven.

In her unpublished autobiography Pancho wrote, “I had married a clergyman and that was to be my life.” She tried to make it work. “I taught Sunday school. I had a class of boys about nine years old. I bribed them with jackknives to learn the catechism.” But Pancho after all was Pancho, not Florence. She wrote that “More and more I spent time with my horses.” She wanted a divorce but he did not want the scandal.

She tried provoking him into it. After she learned to fly, on Sundays she swooped her biplane low over her husband’s church and buzzed it, drowning out the choir and his sermon. He still refused. But no proper minister could remain married to a woman who publicly said “Flying is like being a sex maniac in a whore house,” one of Pancho’s celebrated quips. Years later, in 1941, he did grant a divorce.

Florence became Pancho in an adventure wholly typical of her. When friends decided to hire on as seamen on a banana boat, Pancho, the only woman, decided to join them. She cut her hair short, donned baggy pants, and signed on a tramp freighter as an ordinary seaman, Jacob Crane. There she met Roger Chute. She cussed and played poker with the crew but Chute, a Stanford-educated fisheries expert, saw through her disguise. They became alarmed when at sea. The captain hoisted the Panamanian flag—they discovered the ship ran guns to Mexican revolutionaries. At San Blas, she and Chute jumped ship before it became caught between revolutionary forces and sunk.

Deep in Mexico riding horses, Chute on a white steed, she said he reminded her of Don Quixote. He said she looked like Pancho, Don Quixote’s squire. No, she said, you mean Sancho Panza, but she liked the name and kept it because there was nothing dignified about it and because it gave the raspberry to her mother’s proper lady.

The Depression was not good to Pancho. With only a Hollywood apartment left, in 1935 she sold it and bought eighty acres in the Mojave Desert. Almost out of money and flying her Lockheed Vega, one day she looked down on the land below and saw a lush, green alfalfa field and thought it would be a good place to raise her son Billy. March Army Air Base was there and next it was Muroc Field.

She bought a struggling alfalfa ranch and transformed it, having also bought out a dairy called Adair. She sold milk and eggs to the base. She grew alfalfa, had a dairy herd of cows and goats, farmed pigs, raised chickens, grew corn. She had a sweet deal with her garbage business, feeding her hogs on trash the base paid her to haul away and then selling pork back to it. She was an able businesswoman and with profits from her ranch she bought more land.

Near her ranch she built the Happy Bottom Riding Club, because General Jimmy Doolittle once told her he had a happy bottom. It was also known as Rancho Oro Verde Fly Inn Dude Ranch, where she eventually built a dance hall with glamorous hostesses, a gambling casino, a swimming pool, horse stables, and a championship rodeo stadium.

Fellow aviator Moye Stephens recalled that among aviators she commanded respect as an able pilot, and she flew as a test pilot for Lockheed. She, in turn, respected other pilots and gravitated to them.

Pilots went to Pancho’s where she could talk airplanes with them. She was queen of her bar, and the fly boys came to have fun and kid with her. She said she hosted the fastest and bravest men on earth. Pancho did not charge military test pilots for their drinks but triple-charged the civilian test pilots because of their fat salaries.

A 1948 Time magazine article described her place: “Pancho’s Fly-Inn (or the Happy Bottom Riding Club)” has its own airport, lighted at night, “so that guests, friends and airborne wayfarers can fly in at all hours. . . . Chuck Yeager has roared low over the ranch in every sort of airplane, including the fastest jets. When he buzzes the place in a jet plane, the slap from the zipping wing jounces the bar.” The Time cover shows Yeager in his test pilot’s helmet as the man who broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1.

Pancho married again. And again. Three months after divorcing the Reverend she married Robert Nichols, Jr. It lasted a few weeks. He was in his twenties, about the same age as her son, Billy; she was approaching 40. After that marriage, she waited a bit longer and in 1945, she wed Don Jose Shalita, a handsome performance dancer. He left after four months. In 1953, she married her ranch foreman, Mac McKendry, thirty-two to her fifty-one. Her good friend Air Force base General Al Boyd flew cross-country in a B-47 for the wedding. He gave the bride away in the ceremony. Bell X-1 test pilot Chuck Yeager was her best man. Indian Chief Lucky blessed the union. Six hundred fifty people attended for a fifty-eight second wedding. Age slowed her down. It took fourteen years for her to divorce McKendry.

Al Boyd, the previous commander, had been an old school aviator, and had even given Pancho away in her wedding to McKendry but in the 1950s the new Edwards Air Force Base commander took an immediate dislike to  Pancho and she was not about to change.  With her what you saw was what you got.

Brigadier General J. Stanley Holtoner felt she and her place were unfit moral examples for his young airmen and called her a madam, her Happy Bottom Riding Club a cat house, and he placed it off limits.  This hurt.  The pilots and air crews had been her boys.  She had taken them under her wing, cared for them.  The general also decided to expand the Base to make room for a new runway, which conveniently meant condemning Pancho’s land by right of eminent domain.  The General low-balled an offer for her 380 acres.

No, said Pancho.  Her land had not figured in any previous Edwards expansion plans.  Besides, with her businesses the real estate was worth far more than the offer.  “They picked the wrong gal to push around!," she said.

She was David against Goliath, and Goliath had an unending supply of lawyers on its payrolls.  Years could pass under judicial review and during those years a David could go bankrupt while Goliath played golf on Sundays and had well-paid lawyers.  That may have discouraged and defeated others but not her.  She was joined at the hip to the Air Force for, as she would argue in court, her grandfather founded the United States Air Force.  She went to a law library to study books and legal briefs.  There, she met Shirley Hufstedler, an attorney who was impressed by Pancho’s generous spirit and real grit.  Shirley, her husband, and a friend, both also attorneys, took on the case.

Her case became a cause célèbre with the press following Pancho’s every comment.  Everybody favored underdog Pancho.  The news spread around the world as “The War of the Mojave.”  The courtroom was packed with people who came to attend the trial, spectators, reporters, military personnel.  When both sides had rested their arguments, the jury retired to deliberate, and the courtroom atmosphere was tense as people waited for the jury, and waited, and still waited.  After several hours, the jury returned with their verdict.
They filed back into the courtroom, and everybody stood for them.  Honorable US District Court Judge Gilbert Jertberg asked them, “ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you finally reached a unanimous decision?” “Yes we have your honor,” came the chairman’s reply. 

They found against the United States Air Force and The United States government.  They found for Florence Leontine "Pancho" Barnes.  Cheers filled the courtroom.  Judge Jertberg stated that Pancho was a courageous, forthright individual.  In her compassion and concern for her military customers she had shown herself a friend of the Air Force.  He awarded her a settlement of $414,500, much more than the $185,000 offered by the Air Force.

Today, little remains of The Happy Bottom Riding Club.

While Pancho was away shopping a fire mysteriously started, destroying it.  Just before the end of the trial, on November 13, 1953,  it burned down.  The fire marshal believed it a case of arson, but could not locate a proximate cause. The general had told Pancho that if she didn’t sell he could have her ranch “napalm bombed off the desert.”

After the hullabaloo faded the Air Force took over her land for a runway.  The Happy Bottom ruins are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

She died in 1975, age 74.  Scheduled to be keynote speaker at the annual Barnstormer’s Reunion of the Antelope Valley Aero Museum, she could not be reached when a friend called her.  Pancho’s son, Bill, stopped by her little rock house in Boron, California to investigate and found her dead.  The coroner concluded that she had died several days earlier of a heart attack.  She had requested that her body be cremated, the ashes strewn from an airplane over the 380 acres of her Happy Bottom ranch.

To this day Edwards Air Force Base celebrates an annual Pancho Barnes Day.

She said “We had more fun in a week than most of the weenies in the world have in a lifetime.”  Perhaps most notable, she should be remembered for this:  “If you have a choice, choose happy.”  She took a very large bite out of life.

Leader of the B-25 raid on Tokyo, General Jimmy Doolittle learned that Pancho had died and thus would not appear as keynote speaker for the Barnstormers Reunion.  He prepared a testimonial to her life.  So many there, so many of her friends, from Hollywood to aviation.  Susan Oliver, Richard Arlen, Chuck Yeager, Buzz Aldrin.  General Doolittle said this:

“Good Evening. Ladies and gentlemen, we have recently lost a true friend.  In this day and age, real friends you can depend on in a pinch are rare indeed.  Florence Lowe Barnes left us late last month.  She was an expert pilot and a good organizer.  She had a fine mind, and was intensely loyal.  When the going was rough, you knew that she would always offer a willing hand.  There was no extent to which she would not go to help a friend who was in need . . . In a few words, she put great store by courage, honor and integrity.  She despised dishonesty and cowardice.  She was straight forward and couldn't abide dissimulation, abhorred sham.  She was outspoken, and she said exactly what she thought and believed.  You know, I can just see her up there at this very minute.  In her inimitable way, with a wry smile, she is probably remarking to some old and dear friend who preceded her, 'I wondered what the little old bald-headed bastard was going to say.'

God love her.  And may I now propose a toast: Ladies and gentlemen, to Pancho Barnes.  Pancho Barnes!”

The Air Force has never built its runway on Pancho’s land.  The dairy barn below is among the ruins that remain.


3/11/21

Don't Forget This: The Triumphal Parade of Ancient Rome



In ancient Rome, a general, many to become emperors, presided over The Triumph (Triumphus), a victory parade through the streets of the city with throngs watching him pass by.  In a chariot he lead the parade, and heard the ovations of the masses. He wore a purple tunic, for purple was a rare dye only the nobility and powerful could afford.  Behind him walked all his army, his men and women captives, soon to become slaves, followed by his other spoils of war.  A slave held his golden crown, but the main role of the slave was to occasionally whisper in his ear,

Memento mori, memento mori.

Translated it means, Remember, you will die.

I dedicate this story to all politicians of power and high station.

2/24/21

Meditation, The Narrator, and Self-Therapy


The years have piled up on me and through them I have at times been happy, have been sad, have suffered, have been calm.  Over the years and as a lesson hard-won, looking at mind with its ups and downs, I find one thing stands out.  If mind identifies with a narrator, somebody who tells his or her story, then dukkha, suffering, is greater.  The narrator is a voice, a series of thoughts, or images, that seems to have continuity, but in fact it comes and goes.  I also found that a narrator impartially takes credit for bad feelings as well as good ones when in fact either kind of feeling doesn't depend on a narrator.  They just happen. They arise and fall away, just as the narrator arises and falls away.  There is no continuous stream.  The continuity is ego's necessary fiction.  Yes, in life we have a story-line.  We were born at a certain place. Went to school somewhere. Married.  Etc.

But all that is in what we call the past.  The narrator needs the past (and the future) to maintain itself.  We have only now as our thoughts and feelings arise and pass away.  We can add something to them or just watch them happen. The narrator thinks they're you but in a moment they disappear as it does also.

We can't get rid of the narrator but we can see through it.  Seeing through it helps relieve us from suffering. ( I distinguish suffering (mental) from pain (physical).)  

We can see through it by noting when we feel good.  The feeling doesn't need a narrator to increase it.  It's just there, sometimes with a narrator. When we feel bad, the feeling doesn't need a narrator.  Indeed, when a narrator is added the bad feeling worsens.  ("Nobody understands me."  "It's all hopeless."  "This is the story of my life."  These are just examples.  Each of us can choose our own favorite story line.)

I don't know much about Taoism but a phrase resonates.  The Tao that can be seen is not the true Tao.  What you are is what mind cannot grasp.  Maybe you want to save that for later in your investigations, though.  I'll just ask you to think about this: Are you your brain? If so, where does the "me" thought come from?  Can you find it?  Are you in your body?  Etc.  The point here is that whatever you can identify is itself another object, physical or mental.  Are you an object? Or are you that which sees objects? Similarly you see objects in space but not space itself.

A few people grasp all that without ever meditating.  I am not one of them.  It took many years of meditation for me.  So that's my advice.  In the beginning five minutes of meditation daily can help.  Over time the five can be extended to ten, the ten to twenty, etc.  Whenever it is neglected the mind wants to take over, get itself back in control with thoughts such as "I have no time for this," or "This is a waste of time," or "It just isn't my cup of tea," etc. Notice that the ego is involved in each denial.  Meditation, as it deepens, reveals the folly of clinging to egoic assertions.

6/23/20

Buddha & Absolutes: Hindu Thought & The View from Nowhere



I found an interesting article at the Skeptic site, called The View from Nowhere or Somewhere?  Maja Caron reviews a novel by Rebecca Goldstein, 36 Arguments for The Existence of God. ( I read her book Plato at The Googleplex, and it is a tour de force.)  In the review Caron brings up Thomas Nagel's classic work, The View from Nowhere, discussing Nagel in terms of the views of Cass Seltzer, Goldstein's protagonist.

Somewhere in her very interesting and good article Caron says this: 

"If the universe is both personal and universal, as both Seltzer and Nagel suggest, and it’s not possible for an individual to wrap his/her logical thinking process around the notion, one should neither assign mystical significance to this nothing, nor should it seek to empirically dissect it as a 'thing in itself'."

I have this to say about that.  Of course. The central tenet of many of the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita, and Buddhism is that the universe is both personal and universal.  But. The difference between Hindu teachings and Buddhism--as I understand them--is that India goes metaphysical with Brahman while Buddhism does not go there with anatta, or no-self.  India took the next step. Buddha, a son of India, did not delve into metaphysics.

Both Hinduism and Buddhism argue that the universal/personal cannot be understood by mind.  But Advaita--to use an example teaching--took a leap of faith while Buddhism--in its non-dogmatic teachings--says you are that, you are both personal and universal, but it's only part of your experience and to be realized empirically.*  What lies "beyond" your experience cannot be known by the human mind and there is no point in taking a leap of faith because any statement of faith is only an assumption. *(Realized in human experience that is not claimed as metaphysical revelation and as stated in The Heart Sutra: "Form is emptiness; emptiness form.")

Buddhist teachings go on to say that the so-called awakening experience, because it is not metaphysical and only a non-conventional possibility of experience, should not be exceptioned as beatitude. It should not be regarded as special because it is only another experience.  It is liberating but not magical, not other-worldly religious, and certainly not revelation from God.  Buddhism is agnostic about any absolute.  "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him; if you meet a ghost kill the ghost," goes an old Zen koan. (Attributed to  Zen Master Linji, founder of the Rinzai sect.)  In short, don't follow mind in its old tricks about absolute/not-absolute.  The ultimate trickster is mind and its musings that keep ego involved in trying to find a "groundless ground."

Yeats said it well: "Like a long-legged fly upon the water his mind moves on silence."  With its attendant experiences the silence is as far as we can go.

1/12/20

What Is Time? Julian Barbour's Answer



Tell me what time is. You cannot. The future does not exist, nor does the past. Nor the present. You cannot live in the present. Snap your fingers and it is gone. By the time you say "now" it is already past.  You cannot apprehend any part of time you talk about. All you have are words to explain something that eludes you and the words only confuse you all the more.

In 1908 John McTaggart wrote The Unreality of Time, and using his A and B series of time he argued that our perception of time is an illusion. Of the A series, he argues this:

"If time exists it must be explained by the A series, which is how we normally think about time. This is a tensed series, as in past, present, and future. A cup of coffee was hot in the past, is lukewarm in the present, and cold in the future. The United States was created in the past, exists in the present, and will no longer exist in the future. In this series are three distinct instances."

McTaggart juxtaposes a B series against the A series.  This series is relational, or durational. One way to think of it is as events before the now and after the now. A cup of coffee had hot temperature, is colder temperature in the present, and colder after the present. Put in another way to think about it, the United States was founded in the past, exists after its founding, and will no longer exist after its founding. From both perspectives the instances are not distinct, but relational, enduring from one into another. The B series can be likened to space.  The wall is there, and a window elsewhere. They are spatially related. The B series as relational is not inherently separate (distinct) from other time-moments, just as space has no difference in it. As the wall is there, the window elsewhere, so events in the B series can be located as before and after.

Many rich and profound complications arise from thinking about the two series but the central point is that they are contradictory.  One is tensed, the other tenseless. The A series depends on personal experience and perspective.  "I am drinking hot coffee today." The B series does not. The experience and perspective are not there. "I recall drinking hot coffee today."

Because they are contradictory, McTaggart says time is not real.  His legacy is that he left A theorists and B theorists debating which kind of time is true, continuing a discussion traced back to Parmenides (reality is timeless, unchanging) and Heraclitus ("You can't step into the same river twice").

So what is time? If nobody asks, I know.  If they ask and I try to explain, I do not know. (St Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, 354-430.)

In his book, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics, Julian "Barbour asserts that time simply doesn't exist." Barbour starts with the notion that time is just a way of describing change. He means that to measure time you have to have something that moves. How long does it take to get from point A to Point B?

~ "There's only change, not time. Things move around; time may just be a way of noting that. But Barbour goes further. He says there's no such thing as motion either. Instead, Barbour sees a universe filled with static instants -- instants that contain 'records' that fool any conscious beings who happen to find themselves encased in one into believing that things have moved and time has passed."

~"This common-sense view was one of many forever altered by Einstein's theories. We see time this way, he made clear, only because we move so slowly. If you could peddle your bicycle at something almost in the neighborhood of the speed of light, relative to an observer, your watch and your aging process would appear -- to that observer -- to slow. (From your own perspective, time, unfortunately, would still keep chugging along at its usual dispiriting pace, which makes it unlikely that anyone will figure out how to turn this phenomenon into a wrinkle cream.)"

~"Relativity found time a home as one of the four dimensions in something called spacetime. But it hardly settled the question of what time is. And the idea that time slows down in certain circumstances made it easier to imagine that time was just a construct of us observers, not itself a fact of nature."

~"What if, Barbour wonders, we just imagine a kingfisher to be flying? After all, it isn't exactly the same bird at perch A and perch B: Its molecules constantly change; its atoms constantly change. What if our brain has captured a few snapshots of kingfisher-in-flight that it plays -- movie-like -- in such a way that we think we see continuous motion?"

~"What if the instants we inhabit somehow happen to be filled with 'records' -- images of kingfishers with their wings spread, tread marks, 'memories,' fossils -- that manage to delude us into thinking that birds fly, cars lurch, species become extinct; 'records' that manage to delude us into thinking that we are scurrying along some sort of path from the past to the future? Isn't it true that all we know now about the past or the future comes from thoughts or objects we experience now -- in the present?"

~"What if, Barbour then asks, we're always trapped in one moment or another and everything else -- your sense, for example that X number of minutes ago you moved your hand and clicked on FEED -- is a kind of illusion, somehow evoked by the structure of this particular, all-encompassing moment? What if, in other words, our whole sense that things move is an illusion, as -- in another context -- our sense that the earth does not move proved to be an illusion."

~"This is, if it helps any, quite similar to the view of time presented in Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five, which Barbour has not yet read. ('I know,' he says. 'People keep telling me I should look at it.') Vonnegut describes most earthlings as trapped in moments like 'bugs in amber.' Billy Pilgrim, the book's main character, however, repeatedly comes 'unstuck in time': He jumps, in no particular order (though in accordance with the needs of Vonnegut's narrative), from one point in his life to another. Moreover, on the planet Tralfamadore, which Pilgrim visits, 'all time' is visible at once, as we 'might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. It does not change. It simply is.' That Rocky Mountain-like view of all time is remarkably similar to Barbour's Platonia."

The above comments are excerpts from a  review of his book published in the now defunct Feed Magazine on July 14, 2000 by Mitchell Stephens.  I wanted to link you to the review but the link is dead.  More of the review is below. Or click her for a Nature article on why time is an illusion according to classical physics.

12/7/19

Ota Benga: Man in A Zoo Cage



In September 1906 a caged human being was put on display in the Bronx Zoo. A sign on the cage read:

The African Pygmy, "Ota Benga."
Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches.
Weight, 103 pounds. Brought from the
Kasai River, Congo Free State, South Central Africa, by Dr. Samuel P. Verner.

Benga was exhibited in the afternoons during September. Zoo officials clothed him in animal skins for viewers to gawk  In youth his teeth had been filed to sharp points as was the custom of his people.  Many New Yorkers thought they were for eating human flesh and called him a cannibal.  Chimpanzees were put in the cage to suggest a comparison between him and them.  Nearly a quarter million people saw him--fathers holding children high to see over the shoulders of those in front, women standing in front of the cage so a picture could be taken of them with Ota Benga safely behind the background bars. Zoo attendance in September doubled over the previous year. "Bushman Shares a Cage with Bronx Park Apes," read a New York Times headline, which declared that "the human being happened to be a Bushman, one of a race that scientists do not rate high in the human scale."

The boyish-looking Benga sat on a stool in silence.   In the first week Benga seemed resigned to his fate.  The next week he kicked, bit, or hit attendants as they tried to put him in the cage.  By Sunday September 16th, Benga was allowed to roam the park while watched by park rangers. 40,000 people visited the zoo that day.  Hordes followed him.  The rowdies chased him.  They cornered him, poking him in the ribs or tripping him.  Others laughed at his fright. He struck back at them.  But he wouldn't go back to the monkey house.  Three rangers had to force him back.
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Zoo director William Temple Hornaday wrote to the man who brought him, Samuel P. Verner, on Monday September 17th: “I regret to say that Ota Benga has become quite unmanageable.”  Hornady lamented that  “He has been so fully exploited in the newspapers, and so much in the public eye, it is quite inadvisable for us to punish him; for should we do so, we would immediately be accused of cruelty, coercion, etc., etc. I am sure you will appreciate this point.”

Eventually he was released from the zoo.  African-American clergymen had protested the exhibit. One Monday afternoon in September the Reverend James H Gordon, known as “one of the most eloquent Negroes in the country,” led a small group of ministers to see the exhibit.  They got off the train at the zoological gardens and at the primate house, they watched Ota Benga in a cage with Dohang, the orangutan.

James H. Gordon went home to write, "Our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with the apes." Other clergymen backed him.

Ota Benga became caged in the zoo because of a series of events beginning with history and imperialism.  As a member of the Mbuti people he lived in equatorial forests of Congo Free State. Thereby hangs a tale.  (Congo Free State was captured as metaphor in Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness.)  The Congo was by no means free.  It was created by Belgian King Leopold II in order to plunder it, principally for rubber and ivory.  British consul Roger Casement brought home from the  Congo confirmation of mass atrocities under Leopold’s rule. Men had come to Casement with missing hands. Casement said the rampant practice of mutilation “is amply proved by the Kodak.” Photographs showed at least two dozen mutilated victims. Congolese were chained by their necks and forced to work for the "free" State. Leopold created the Force Publique in order to enslave and control the people.  Benga's people were attacked by the Force. Ota returned from a hunting expedition to find his wife and two children murdered.  Later he was captured by slave traders.

In 1904 Samuel Phillips Verner found Ota Benga among the traders and claimed to have bought his release for a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth.  Verner was under contract from The Louisiana Purchase Exposition (St Louis World's Fair) to return with an assortment of natives for the exhibition. W.J. McGee wanted an exhibit to represent "all the world's people . . . from smallest pygmies to the most gigantic . . . from the darkest blacks to the dominant whites."  In this new age of Darwinism he sought them to demonstrate a cultural evolution.  In short, ranging from inferior to superior cultures.

As Verner tells it, Benga agreed to return to America with him and encouraged a group of Batwa tribesmen to accompany them.  They did not trust Verner, a white man, because of atrocities committed by King Leopold's Force Publique. Benga told them Verner had saved his life and that they had developed a bond.  Four Batwa males as well as other Africans accompanied them to St Louis.

At the World Fair, Apache chief Geronimo, on exhibit also, came to admire Benga and gave him an arrowhead.

Verner returned Benga and the other Africans to the Congo, where Benga married a Batwa woman who died of snakebite. Without his Mbuti people, Benga did not feel he belonged with the Batwa and returned with Verner to the states.

While tending other business, Verner negotiated with curator Henry Bumpus for Benga to stay at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Benga was given a linen suit to wear but became homesick for his own culture.  He was inside all the time, when outside he was in a big city.  The museum itself was silent with hard, barren surfaces.  Outside was concrete without birds, breeze, anything to hunt.   He was presented as a savage.  The museum was a prison.  Guards kept him inside and he tried to slip past them in the large crowds at the entrance.  Once he was asked to seat a wealthy donor's wife.  He pretended to misunderstand and threw a chair, barely missing her head.  One can only imagine him thinking, "So here's the savage you want." Verner found him another home.

It was the Bronx Zoo, where this story began.  William Hornaday, zoo director, had Benga help maintain animal habitats.  But people noticed Benga more than they did the animals. Hornaday eventually featured Benga in an exhibition.  We know how that ended.

The African-American clergyman who protested the treatment of Benga re-enters this narrative here.  James H. Gordon put Benga in the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, a church-sponsored orphanage in Brooklyn, which Gordon supervised. At the Orphan Asylum 1906 wore into 1910 and the press was relentless in pestering Benga and Gordon for stories about the pygmy.

Gordon arranged with the McCray family in Lynchburg, Virginia, for Benga to move there.  He bought him American clothes and had Benga's filed teeth capped so that he could better fit in.  Anne Spencer, a poet of the Harlem Renaissance, tutored him in English.  He attended elementary school at the Baptist Seminary in Lynchburg.

At the time Lynchburg was a city of nearly 30,000 people. Benga would have ridden on its electric street cars, at the back of course, and traveled its cobbled streets.  He lived with Mary Hayes Allen and her seven children in a yellow house across the road from the seminary. Allen was widow of the Seminar seminary's former president.

Benga found the forest near the house as something reminiscent of home.  In it he taught neighborhood boys how to make bows from vines, how to hunt wild turkeys and squirrels. He told of his days hunting elephants.

He went to work at a tobacco factory. For a sandwich and root beer he told people his life story.  The sandwich, the root beer, and the life story suggests he might have become settled by then and leads to the question, Was he happy by then? Had he adjusted to a way of life far from the forest, the animals, the people, and the culture he grew up in?

As he grew older he lost interest in teaching neighborhood boys the ways of a hunter.  He wanted to go back to Africa.

He would have gone too, except for the assassination of Arch-Duke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Serbia, which would grind up men as cannon fodder. In !914 World War I began and Germany launched submarine warfare.  Passenger ship were only one more target for torpedoes.

A largely European war kept an African man from his native equatorial forests

Old men recalled those war years and themselves as boys listening to Benga sing a song he learned at the Theological Seminary, “I believe I’ll go home / Lordy, won’t you help me."

The old men remembered  the late afternoon of 19 March 1916, as they watched Benga gather wood to build a fire in the field. They watched him dance around the fire.  He chanted and moaned. It was about a world he lost, they knew that, but he had done it before.

They went to sleep.  In the still night with cicadas chirping, Ota Benga crept into a shed near the yellow house. Before daybreak they heard a loud shot.  He had hidden a gun there and fired one bullet through his heart.

Ota Benga, 1883-1916

6/11/19

Belief Shapes Behavior, Free Will or Not



Whether You Think Free Will or Determinism, Belief Shapes Behavior

Popular wisdom has it that everybody will do right or wrong based on moral choice, and that moral choice is just―well, just a personal thing. One person can be as moral as another despite any difference in underlying beliefs about the world. Maybe, but Kathleen Vohs' and Jonathan Schooler's experiment gives us pause to think about the questions. What are the implications for society if people come to believe they have no free will? No moral responsibility?

They had some students read passages from Francis Crick's The Astonishing Hypothesis--a very deterministic view of the universe and the human place in it. We are creatures without God and without free will. The students read this: " ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.”

They had other students read inspirational books on how we make our own decisions and forge our own paths in life

They then let each group play a video game in which the groups were allowed to cheat. The students were told to do 20 arithmetic problems and to press the space bar when a question appeared, otherwise the answer would also pop up because of a computer glitch. The students were told that no one would know when the space bar was pushed. Still, the students were asked not to cheat.

So guess who cheated?

The group that read Crick's words.

What are the implications of this? We hold ourselves responsible when we think we choose our actions.
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An interesting commentary on the experiment can be found at Mindful Hack.

5/6/19

Evolution Didn't Design You To Be Happy


Happiness and Evolution

When people are asked what they really want out of life most respond that they want to be happy.  They
may think more money, a better job, improved status, social recognition will make them happy.  Or they may think of all that as superficial and that they want inner happiness.  Whichever, people regard happiness as a good unto itself.

This is what Aristotle said. He held happiness as the central purpose of human life and an end in itself. It has no goal beyond it. To be happy is to arrive.

But happiness by itself does not propagate genes. It has no survival value. In terms of natural selection, we are not programmed to be happy. It's in our DNA.

Psychologist at University of Pennsylvania, Martin Seligman noted the bias in his field toward mental illness in the basic psychiatric reference work Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders from psychosis to schizoaffective disorder. He found no comparable manual for minds that worked well. He set out to correct this view in, among other books, Authentic Happiness and has a web site, complete with surveys, explaining his approach.

Maybe, though, the notion that shit happens is rooted in our natures. Maybe we are more inclined to worry and anxiety because of their survival value. Think about the word happy. It derives from the same root as our modern happens. In Middle English, happ applied to chance, fortune, accident. We have the application in the modern word happenstance. Given the Middle English root, if you are happy you are lucky. If shit does not happen to you, then you are happy. Happiness, then, carries a tragic view of life. Things occur that are out of your control. You may be happy today and struck down by a car tomorrow.

So what about the survival value of worry and anxiety?

"It is the year 100,000 B.C., and two hunter-gatherers are out hunter-gathering. Let’s call them Ig and Og. Ig comes across a new kind of bush, with bright-red berries. He is hungry, as most hunter-gatherers are most of the time, and the berries look pretty, so he pops a handful in his mouth. Og merely puts some berries in his goatskin bag. A little later, they come to a cave. It looks spooky and Og doesn’t want to go in, but Ig pushes on ahead and has a look around. There’s nothing there except a few bones. On the way home, an unfamiliar rustling in the undergrowth puts Og in a panic, and he freezes, but Ig figures that whatever is rustling probably isn’t any bigger and uglier than he is, so he blunders on, and whatever was doing the rustling scuttles off into the undergrowth. The next morning, Og finally tries the berries, and they do indeed taste O.K. He decides to go back and collect some more.

Now, Ig is clearly a lot more fun than Og. But Og is much more likely to pass on his genes to the next generation of hunter-gatherers. The downside to Ig’s fearlessness is the risk of sudden death. One day, the berries will be poisonous, the bear that lives in the cave will be at home, and the rustling will be a snake or a tiger or some other vertebrate whose bite can turn septic." New Yorker


4/21/19

Ben Underwood Clicks His Tongue To See


"To society he's blind," said Ben's mother, "but that doesn't make him handicapped. He just can't see."

She also said, "One thing that I truly get back from Ben being blind is that he truly sees people from within.

When he hears someone say that someone else is ugly, or anything negative towards someone else. He says, 'That's whats wrong with sighted people, you all look at one another and judge what you look like,' I see that statement being so true. "

His eyes removed because of cancer, Ben grew up without sight, but at age five learned to click with his tongue about every half second—to echolocate—to ride his bike, shoot hoops, play video games, and throw pillows at his sisters. Echoes informed Ben as to the position of objects, how big they were, their general shape, and how solid they were. Ben recognized a pole as tall and narrow, a building as tall and very broad. A pillow was soft and not dense.

I am left with mystery. Watching the boy in action left me scratching my head in amazement. Take a look for yourself:



Sadly, just shy of his 17th birthday this amazing and inspiring boy died of another cancer after the one that took his eyes. The obit video can be watched here. Also read another Mind Shadows post on echolocation, bats, dolphins, and Ben Underwood.

By clicking, Ben avoided curbs while riding his bicycle in his Sacramento, California neighborhood. Even though he couldn't see the hoop, he could sink a basketball through the basket. He played video games by distinguishing sounds. He wrote a novel, typing it at 60 words per minute on a standard keyboard. "I can hear that wall behind you over there. I can hear right there--the radio, and the fan," Ben told one reporter.

Ben was not the only blind person who developed echolocation. Others are Daniel Kish, 40, of Long Beach, California, who leads other blind people on hikes in the wilderness or in mountain biking. "I have mental images that are very rich, very complex,” says Kish. James Holman (1786-1857) used the sound of his tapping cane to travel alone around the world.

See the piece on Graham Young, a man who is blind but somehow can see. Young can sense moving objects but doesn't know how he does it.  In that article V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist, explained Young's ability.

Here is a web site dedicated to Ben Underwood. Here is his mother's account of him in "Ben's Life."
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Bats send sound signals in rapid bursts at high frequencies. Their sonar can bounce off flying mosquitoes, which the bats swoop on with open mouths. Dolphins find their meals in the same manner. Echolocation, uses sound to identify objects and their locations. As with vision, the brain processes energy reflected off an object—only as sound rather than light.

4/9/19

Jaron Lanier Disagrees with Dawkins' Memes and Kurzweil's Singularity


Jaron Lanier Disagrees with Richard Dawkins' Meme Theory and Ray Kurzweil's Singularity

As a goat farmer, Jaron Lanier supported his way through college. While growing up, he lived far from cities and near Mesilla, New Mexico, with his father in tents until they built a house centered around a hippie-esque geodesic dome designed by Jaron. (His father's Ukrainian family fled the pogroms for America. His mother, who survived an Austrian concentration camp, died in a car accident when he was nine.) As assistant to a midwife, he helped deliver a baby. The father gave him a car as a gift. When he was 13 New Mexico State University let him enroll. There he took graduate-level courses.

The phrase virtual reality was coined by Lanier, to his eternal regret. He recalls the early Utopian vision of his fellow youthful hackers and laments how quickly it was corporatised. A prodigy from the start, he helped create Web 2.0,  futurism, digital utopianism, and their ideology, which he now calls “digital Maoism.” He accused giants Facebook and Google of being “spy agencies.”  He believes the "hive mentality" destroys political discourse. It is the wisdom of the crowd, he says, and it cannot evolve upward but lead only downward.  The mentality weakens economic stability. With its alienated processes the hive mentality can destroy our personhood in the sense of social and legal dignity. He sees it all leading to “social catastrophe." He fears a cybernetic house of mirrors that could be manipulated by whoever is "the biggest asshole."

Born in 1960, Jaron Lanier shuns career stovepipes and has taught computer science in various institutions, including Dartmouth, Columbia, and Yale. His books are You Are Not a Gadget (2010), Who Owns the Future (2013), and Dawn of the New Everything (2017). Lanier reacted against an acquaintance of Timothy Leary who once told him to surround himself with gorgeous young people and flatter them. He decided to never fool people and tell the truth, especially when it was unpleasant.  He has never taken drugs.  A polymath, he a philosophy writer, computer scientist, visual artistcomposer of classical music, and  founding father of the field of virtual reality. A pianist, he writes chamber and orchestral music. He is also a visual artist. In 2010, Lanier was nominated in the Time 100 list of most influential people. He is sought out as an important contributor to current discussions on matters such as the philosophy of consciousness and the findings of science. His interests are widely divergent, among them the interface between artificial intelligence and biology as well as quantum physics.

 In "One-Half a Manifesto", Lanier disagrees with Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering, and a well-known futurist who has scored well with accurate predictions. It is said that since the 1990s his 147 predictions turned out 86 percent accurate. He writes of the Singularity and predicted that by 2029 artificial intelligence (AI) "will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence" and  has 2045 for the Singularity, when effective intelligence will be multiplied by "a billion fold by merging with the intelligence we have created."  He finds abhorrent the belief that  virtual worlds can be "on an equal footing" with reality.

Lanier says humans are not to be considered to be biological computers. Humans will not be generally replaced by computers in a few decades, even economically. This is highly unlikely. He says "Simply put, software just won't allow it. Code can't keep up with processing power now, and it never will."

In an interview, he was asked about the Meme Theory of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. In his classic book, The Selfish Gene, Dawkins explains memes thus:

"Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. . . . If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. `. . . memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. . . . When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. . . . 'belief in life after death' is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over."

Here, then, is the question and Lanier's answer:

"Q: Is culture as important as genes in shaping the future of our brains? I'm not talking about Richard Dawkins' idea of memes here, which I dislike anyway.

A: I think the meme idea is wrong for a variety of reasons. First, there's an obvious sense in which ideas are Lamarckian and genes are not. Memes promote the wrong idea about genes. Richard's idea about genes is that there is a continuity of different creatures that come into being and evolution is walking through an infinite library where each space on the shelf is a slightly different creature. It's like Borges' infinite library, which contained every book that could be written. Every organism that could exist is in Richard's library, and there are two problems with this idea, both of which should kill this metaphor. The first problem is the size of the library. Let's suppose Borges' library was actually created and only held books up to 300 pages. Even in that case the library could not fit into our universe. Our civilization could not possibly survive long enough, even with the biggest starship we could build, to hold it. Just to get from one interesting book to the next would require more energy or space than our civilization has available to it. We're lucky enough to be next to one readable book and that's the only one we'll ever see. You could think of his library as the most efficient, definitely mathematical, perfect, conceivable form of procrastination ever invented.

The second problem is the difference between Borges' and Dawkins' infinite libraries. In Borges' library all the books in between the readable books might not be sensible to us but at least they're printable. But in Dawkins' library, all the creatures between viable creatures are not sensible or even viable. They're just possible creatures. You can't take an arbitrary genetic sequence and have a creature come out." (The link for this no longer exists but you can read his opposition to Memes at Edge, The Reality Club, The Value of Memes, A Powerful Paradigm or a Poor Metaphor?