I, Robot

My story on Medium, about a Physics of the Unconscious, is staying with me, as I work towards greater awareness myself.  First Person Physics.  Dr. Bob Fuller helped me evolve it, as a meme.

But when we wake into the first person, as a subject, it's not just a matter of like a light going on.  That's all Physics may seek to explain, the light.  The idea of consciousness as something pure and essential, some phenomenon we all agree on, brings a sense of solidarity at least.

The psychologist, on the other hand, awakens to new pathologies, new mental illnesses, both personal and collective.  What Physics seeks to explain our inner darkness, our waking dream?

The inertia of great forces tears at the fabric of what we all took for shared reality.  We're back to fighting like ghost armies, cast inside new fantasy worlds.  And so the world rolls forward, as we seek to improve its course.  We have a stake in the outcome.

Speaking of climate change, the climate has changed.  The machinery of mass death stalks us, our shadow self, our bot self. I, robot.

I admire diplomats trying to wrestle with the beast.

As a younger man, I remember being astounded that war would again erupt in Europe, and take out Yugoslavia.  I somehow imagined the seething cauldron of nation states had congealed its borders before I arrived.  I was just not that conscious of my place and time, in retrospect.

I felt Grunch of Giants, a Bucky Fuller book, was on the money when it talked about worlds in collision (paraphrase), i.e. the inevitability of a new psyche.  We would have to grow into our smaller world.  Growing pains.

Base Housing

I fall into the skeptics camp when it comes to "real AI" as some call it, oxymoronically.  

That doesn't mean I'm unimpressed by what I'll call AI proper.  

On the contrary, what artificial intelligence has accomplished in my lifetime is as much if not more than we should have expected.  Breakthroughs in linear algebra ala University of Toronto lead to a revolution in voice recognition,  recommendation engines, Alpha Go.

Where I look is to institutionalized wealth such as in the military, but also such as in resort hotels. The guests don't own, and yet they share, the facilities. Ditto on a cruise ship. The opulence is a collective experience, as may be the experience of ownership, as a shareholder.  

All of which is to say:  believing in institutional wealth is not "anti capitalist" nor "anti socialist".  This relationship, of self to wealth, is as old as organized religion, with its shared houses of worship and ceremony, feasts.  Hello, Father Divine.

What "institutional" might mean, in the case of housing developments, is a certain amount of uniformity, even conformity.  We saw that in the case of Levittown, Long Island, New York, widely recognized as the first modern American suburb.

Every Apple Mac or Air of a certain era looks like every other.  Models of cell phones look and work the same. Yet when it comes to architecture, we're often encouraged to express our individuality by commissioning a custom home.  We're talking about the rich and privileged here.  But might we be privileged without being rich?

"Rich enough to actually own" is precisely where we don't have to go in the case of "base" and/or "campus" housing i.e. we might accept the privilege, yet without the curse and/or responsibility of private ownership.  We don't need to design the cruise ship.  That's for the cruise ship designers to undertake.

The book Quakernomics tends to idealize the notion of a "company town" (or "corporate campus") but only because that's what Quakers of the period were idealizing. The more prescient could see and almost taste a future in which those operating the facilities would not experience themselves as under the tyranny of some ruling class.

Too good to be true?  A lot of skeptics think so, and believe driverless cars or even "real AI" might be easier to achieve.

After generations of mobile homes of various design, one might imagine the experimental encampments, the hexayurts or whatever, would not be too much of a stretch.  Indeed, we've seen such encampments appear.

But just envisioning these mirages, as it were, does not replace the hard work of self governance or self management.

Easter Sunday 2022

Greetings to the blogosphere.  We used to call it that more, back when we used the word "sphere" about everything, a German language influence no doubt (half kidding:  thinking Sloterdijk).

I'm a working class hero, or lets say "essential worker" this Easter.  I'll be working through Ramadan as well, but with adjusted hours (many in this cohort will be observing).  My clock time schedule today is not too onerous.  I do have visiting family, as this Easter coincides, almost, with Carol turning 93.

Back to the theme of institutional wealth:  there's a lot of momentum from wills past.  Foundations and so on.  In terms of targeted funding, that's where fund accounting comes in, the kind of bookkeeping that makes it easier for donors to trace and audit whether their earmarks were respected.  If the check was sent for a groundwater pump, where's the pump?  With their name on it (figuratively, in the bookkeeping).

Software allows nit-picky micromanagement whereas human intelligence is about when to break some silly rule.  Management is always reshaping the clay of organizational intelligence, a beast in its own right some say.  Church politics is somewhat similar.  Even when practiced by Methodists I would assume.

I woke up to some new Graham Phillips footage from Mariupol, which I watched beginning to end and then forwarded onto Facebook.  Sometimes we mark great tragedies against the wheeling calendar of whatever holy days. During class tonight, I'll be presenting some Naval Observatory program, recast in Python, designed to find Easter on any given year, within a range.

Advancing the Frontiers

We’re very close to Carol’s birthday.  She’ll be 93 on the 21st.  Julie, my sister, her daughter, is coming for a visit.

Before I head out to the airport tomorrow morning, I’m expecting to lurk in on Gerald de Jong’s presentation to FieldStructure Institute.  

Glenn has been having a lot of fun with Don Briddell’s book, as did I, even though neither of us specializes in neutrinos.