A Sine Wave Approaching Pi

The week prior to the northern autumnal equinox is a charmed time of the year in my life. On a certain day this week both of my children were born, and three years before the first of those birthdays I saw fit to write this. It starts out fairly harmlessly about the weather and moving, then kind of rambles off from there.

I like the sound of thunder. I like the polished crunchiness of the sound. The sharpness of the initial shock is buffed and smoothed by atmospheric turbulence between you and the initiating bolt, so that several miles away thunder has a gentleness completely out of tune with the violence of the event that spawned it. It’s a nice sound, reassuring and lively in its rumbling rambling, and I’ll miss it in Seattle.

I’m moving to Seattle soon. When I arrive there, it’ll be my home, indefinitely. I’m happy about this. I like Seattle, too. Its quirks and charms outweigh its inconveniences and disappointments. Seattle weather isn’t loud like southern weather, though, and thunder is as much a rarity around Puget Sound as snow. I’ll just have to soak up the sound of thunder while I’m in Texas and Arizona. Like sunshine in winter and highways free of traffic, it’ll be in short supply in the north.

I think I’m trying to figure out decisions, and this sentence is more revealing than I’d like it to be. I feel more like an archeologist, poking around for artifacts produced long ago, than a philosopher or scientist, clevering my way to virgin truths. Why do my opinions feel like musty old things built by people of another time and place? I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to be writing, I just feel like I’m supposed to say something.

What I’m really trying to figure out is what I’m supposed to be doing with my life right now. I feel like there are some paths that are more correct than others, and I’m not entirely sure which ones are more correct and how to choose between them. Worse than that, I’m not even convinced I know how to go about determining what rightness and wrongness are when applied to the practical decisions in my life. My decision-making machinery is running rough, and I can’t remember what frequency it’s supposed to be running at anyway.

The reason this is all bothering me so much, part of the reason at least, is because I have so much time to incubate these notions. When I’m working 80 hours a week in school, or 40 at work and spending most of my remaining time networking and commuting, and coming to know a new community, there simply isn’t time to ponder if my plans and actions are in good alignment with the best proper path for me. Now, with no classes and office time muddling up my schedule, there’s plenty of time to wonder what I’m supposed to do.

Maybe this whole process is just nonsense. I’ll be moving to a city I like soon, doing a job I enjoy and find meaningful, and I’ll be near women and men whose company I enjoy. Why not just roll with it and see what happens? Adapt as needed as circumstances arise. It’s easy and a little tempting to just sit back and allow things to happen, but still part of me seems to reject that notion. No, it says, we’re supposed to do something bigger.

So evidently I believe there’s a such thing as bigger and better things to do, and I also believe that I should do them. Preference formulation. Once preferences are formed, a rational actor is supposed to make decisions in such a way as to maximize the output according to stated preferences based on currently available information, with updates to actions as new data arrive. To some extent that makes sense. I don’t want to be the one forming the preferences, though. I want my preferences to be discovered. I want them to line up with truths of the universe. I don’t want them to be playthings I conjure into existence for my own amusement. To be honest, I don’t find such things particularly amusing.

So if I’m not deciding my preferences, who or what is? I believe in objective morality. I believe in objective morality because I believe that there are some actions that lead to people being happy, being more fulfilled, having joy instead of sorrow in their hearts. Actions that lead those directions, for the most people, are good. Those that lead us astray are bad. So does that make me a utilitarian?

I can’t be a utilitarian because I believe that there are such things as horrible means, and I don’t believe that even the noblest ends justify them. Involuntary human sacrifice for organs probably could increase the total number of life-years lived, but I consider that a horrible means to a noble end. That’s an extreme example, but the reality seems to be that you can’t reduce moral decisions to arithmetic on where the greater good lies. On a practical level, decisions that seem abhorrent through some other schema come out as good. This needs to be addressed.

Kantian ethics are also problematic. The idea that there are certain things you just don’t do to people is intuitive, but also leads to independently-deselected decisions. Stealing, killing, and lying all seem intuitively to be wrong things to do, yet it’s not difficult to imagine practical, low-energy ethics situations where they must be done. What other options are there for determining ethics more faithfully to our intuition?

The Christian virtue ethics solution appears to be this: Make decisions that correspond to the types of decisions that typify virtues. That is, do things that faithful, chaste, charitable, loving, hopeful, kind, humble, patient, temperate, and diligent people do. This requires a model of what these virtues are, and their failure modes, and Catholic Christianity provides one through the Catechism. There are three key difficulties encountered here:

·         The Catholic picture of virtue failure modes seems to conflict with my intuition on several points of human behavior.

·         Accepting the Catholic ethics scheme implies historical and cosmological implications that I wouldn’t ordinarily do.

·         There are other potential competing schemes. I have not evaluated them to as great a degree as the Catholic scheme, and probably will not have sufficient leisure time in my life to do so.

It makes sense to be driven by Catholic ideas of sin and virtue if you believe that the teachings of the Catholic Church are correct. Making your morality Catholic implies becoming Catholic. This is okay, but a clear image of what this entails needs to be evaluated.

At RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) this week, several people said something along the lines of “I’ve always known that at the end of my life I would stand before God and be judged.” I have no reason to suspect that they were trying to mislead me, and such belief is common enough in this part of the country that there’s no reason not to trust their self-evaluations. Still, it’s a foreign kind of confidence to me. The idea of being absolutely certain of not just an afterlife, but an afterlife that so closely resembles the mainstream media’s tropes on Christian teleology, is an oddly pungent kind of confidence to me.

I’m not sure quite what I believe about life, death, and life after death. I’m mostly confused, I suppose. We know from empiricism that consciousness is tightly coupled with the brain. Mind states seem to correlate with drugs, level of sleep, and blood flow patterns observable in the brain. For life after death to be a sensible concept, there needs to be a way for the soul to exist apart from the brain, since brain inactivity and later decomposition is the very definition of death. Everyone dies, but nobody knows about consciousness thereafter.

Is it possible to imagine souls (Or minds if the language bothers you. It doesn’t bother me in particular.) can exist apart from brains? Certainly, in the same sense that it’s possible to imagine living brains existing without souls embedded in them.  I don’t believe such mindless brains exist, but I can imagine them. The main reason I don’t believe they exist is because I find the idea of inconsistent brains unsettling and unsatisfactory. There’s no way to test for a difference between a human and a zombie, and I know that I’m a human. Why bother considering that anyone who looks like a human is a zombie, then? If zombies exist, the world also seems diminished somehow. I enjoy spending time with friends and loved ones so much not because I derive some sort of positive emotional quantity from them, but because I yearn for closeness to other human souls. Dopamine vs.  serotonin is a relevant difference here. A world where some of the people I love don’t really exist, but are really organic simulacrums of humanity is horrifying, and I avoid believing such a thing is the case in part because of my horror.

Just as I’d prefer to believe that brains can’t exist without minds, I’d like to believe that minds can exist without brains. Is that a double standard?  Is it a silly idea, regardless? The whole question is made so much more difficult because I don’t understand, even slightly, how consciousness relates to the brain. I understand that they’re correlated; I’ve even tugged on some of the cables that run that correlation and watched what happened. It was interesting, to say the very least. The idea that the rich inner world of perception and emotion and knowing can be completely described by the outer world of neural networks and pharmacokinetics and information theory sounds nothing short of major league absurdity.

The best method I’ve heard for understanding consciousness as emergent from the brain is Scott’s analogy between particle interactions and communication. Everything in the universe interacts with everything else through the fundamental forces. Take two hydrogen atoms. They’re simple and familiar. They each have gravity, and there’s a cloud of electromagnetic activity around each nucleus. If they’re moving fast enough, the nuclear forces may be relevant, too. Atom A extends a gravitational influence to Atom B, and B returns A’s favor. As they approach, the electrostatic fields emitted by the protons and electrons apply attractive and repulsive forces to each other. It’s like they’re talking to each other, except this explanation goes a step further. They are talking to each other, the narrative goes, at the most basic level of communication.

There’s not a lot going on in the particle interactions dictated by the four sisters of gravity, electromagnetism, and strong and weak nuclear force, but nuance builds up quickly as the particles collect into more interesting things. Let’s talk about what’s going on in a human brain. There are about 100 billion neurons in the average brain, and each of them connects to about 7,000 synapses. At each synapse, there are large neurotransmitter molecules crossing the synaptic cleft, passing signals from one neuron to another. When those neurotransmitter molecules are uptaken by a neuron, ions interact with other ions, resulting in neurotransmitters being released in a new synapse. Sometimes the process starts when energy in the form of light, sound, pressure, heat transfer, dislocation, or chemical presence interacts with neurons clustered in sensory organs. Sometimes the process is interrupted for a very long time, and then proceeds anew, as in the case of memories. All of this is particles interacting with particles, cells talking to cells, a person communicating with the world around her.

Communion is communication, the theory goes, at ever-increasing levels of complexity. To exist as a conscious thing, as a soul, then, according to this line of thought is to be talking to a world of energy, physics, molecules, and chemistry around you. Talking to a human, verbally, tactilely, or intuitively, is different in scale from interatomic forces, but not in kind. It’s a nifty idea. I have a hard time countering it, but I find something incomplete about this theory.

When I listen to music, I know something of the physical reality of what’s going on. Some time ago, in a place I’ve never been, the musicians and producers digitally encoded the information needed to compose a song into media that my computer can read. I bought their album, uploaded the information to my computer, and commanded my computer to read it back to me. Encoded electrical power, rectified from the AC power generated by falling water in the Columbia River or a fissile nuclear pile in Wintersburg, Arizona, vibrates solenoid magnets crafted from Chinese neodymium in such a way as to produce a faithful apparition of the song Purity Ring composed in Montreal a year ago. Tiny hairs in my cochleae encode this acoustic energy into electrochemical information that is then processed by my brain into the sound of music that I enjoy. It’s in that last step, the “processing” in my brain, a garden of half-formed ideas, where the whole notion of mind-brain identity seems to collapse.

Whatever the signature in energy and blood flow in my brain when I hear music, the experience is a world ineffable in such terms. The concept of qualia, so roundly despised by mainstream contemporary philosophers, seems to be the only real description of what’s going on. Philosophers of mind have relentlessly attacked the concept of qualia on the grounds that it’s not fruitful. You can’t reduce qualia into components. The whole idea is that they’re irreducible, after all. Why then, accept a concept that you can’t learn from by breaking it down further? I suppose the answer is because it seems right and I can’t think of a better idea. Perhaps this is also an opportunity to point out that we as a culture are fetishizing reductionism to an unhealthy extent in this entire discussion.

Think of what the experience of music is. It’s sensation, raw and alive and meandering through emotion and perception and memory all the while. Music interacts with the mind like surf breaking on a beach, washing the soul with the misty sensation of a world beyond tingling with the inner vibrancy of sense itself. You can tell what I’m doing here. I’m egregiously mixing metaphors and the clarity of my writing has drained away. But what else can I do? I’m trying to talk about what it’s like to be alive. To be sensitive and in touch with the world, but utterly apart from it, because while you sense the world around you in a vivid and profound way, the world has only the vaguest dull notion of your existence. It’s so vague, awareness seems like the wrong description. My point is that there’s a whole new world that exists within each conscious mind. They’re all in touch with the outer world that I believe exists, but none of them are the same as that world, and they can’t be described purely in the language of the outer world. There’s a barrier here, and I don’t see a viable route to cross it.

Signal and Noise

In the interlude between when I threw in the towel on grad school and when I began working full-time at Boeing I had time to slow down and spend time on things I'd previously ignored. One of these things was reading and watching the books and movies people had recommended to me over the years. Musing on Watchmen and other bits of philosophy of mind, this was the result:

While he’s being psychologically evaluated near the center of Watchmen’s story arc, Rorschach has this to say about patterns and meaning:

“Existence is random. It has no pattern save what we imagine after looking at it for too long.”

The quote is effective at establishing Rorschach as the avatar of existentialism in Watchmen and an absurdist hero in his own mind, but is ineffective at being an accurate observation about perception and reality. The subtlest of glances yields patterns and signals across all our senses. We see flickers of light in the dark and imagine things going bump in the night. We listen to chatter in a noisy hallway and are convinced we hear someone shouting our name in a break in the noise.

The data being taken in through our senses are so noisy and corrupted that the only way to ever piece together a coherent picture of the outside world is by building a parallel world of pattern and causation, quickly, in the conscious mind. Stare at one place too long, or repeat a word too often, and weirdness and meaninglessness ensue. We best understand patterns in short, sharp glances; they seem to decay rapidly with age.

Of course, what Rorschach was getting at was a claim that there isn’t really an underlying pattern in the interactions we observe in the universe around us. Such pattern and meaning is either there or it isn’t. Our intuitions have no bearing on its existence. But the idea that more observation leads to more delusions is wrongheaded. Data break the fever of delusion, and while they pose a challenge for interpretation, that job is a real and not an imagined one. We’re embedded in a pattern that’s real. The unknown questions are how intricate and knowable the pattern is. So far, the smart money’s always been on assuming intricacy over knowability.

A Fragment on Gender and Knowability

At the time I wrote this I was unfamiliar with Pablo Neruda's line "I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees." Had I known it, I probably would've worked this in somewhere in the below. In which I muse on gender and epistemology, inspired by Norman Mailer's book on missing the point of the Apollo program, Of a Fire on the Moon:

Men say that women are unknowable because they want the world to work that way. They want women to have an aura of otherworldliness around them; they want the actions and sensations and desires of women to be a mystery. When men complain about not understanding women it’s either out of habit or an expression of this wish that femininity be a magical property of humanity always just beyond understanding.

Were the opposite to be true, were the distinction between manhood and womanhood to be nothing more than semantics and tradition, a certain vibrancy would be missing from the world. Men need to be able to empathize with women, to be able to communicate with them, and understand their world, but want to maintain a playful aloofness between the sexes. The sights and smells and touches of femaleness need to seem a little alien to keep the pleasant male perception of otherness alive. We like it that way. Don’t change, we tell the girls.

This quote by Norman Mailer is bullshit, for example:

“…Aquarius had long built his philosophical world on the firm conviction that nothing was finally knowable (an exact recompense to having spent his formative years and young manhood in searching for the true nature of women)…”

Maybe he’s just being cheeky, but the pretentiousness of his writing suggests otherwise. How in the world can the nature of womanhood be the greatest mystery to man? You want unknowable mystery? Look at religion. Quantum physics. Cosmology. Dark matter. Metaphysics. Morality. Consciousness. The sex of humanity opposite your own shouldn’t be anywhere near so baffling. I don’t believe that it is. This all implies willful self-deceit to me.

What, then, is a healthy way to look at masculinity and femininity as they relate to humanity? I think the wonder and sense of mystery reflect something real, but so does the empathy. I’m attracted to women because I see something exotic and skew and different from me, but also somewhere I can call home. To embrace the feminine and come to know her, for me, is like an avatar of growing up. As I set aside childish things for the greater world of adulthood, so do I wish to know woman. Maybe it’s the other way around. I just know that I crave intimacy with the feminine shade of humanity, and to call her home.

Discursive Thoughts in an Emergency

In the late summer of 2012 I decided not to return to complete my MS course of study in grad school. In part I was motivated by running out of funding, but I had been unhappy there from the start. It was a good change. Still, it was a traumatic decision to make. I wish things had turned out differently. Here's part of my thinking leading up to the decision:

I don’t think there’s any money for grad school. You thought there would be money and there isn’t. Boeing wants to hire you. They’ll be flexible and move the date up if you ask.

You need to stop being so damned anxious. Please stop this now. Relax. You’re anxious and you’re sad and you’re nervous and you’re angry. You don’t want to feel aphasia, and you don’t right now, which is good.

Fellowships take time to apply for. You need to register, fill out the applications, submit them, and wait on selection. The tuition bill will be due in a matter of weeks, there’s no time for this. Had you known to apply earlier, you would’ve. You were told not to .

You could jump ship again and go to a new prof like Dr. K. That sounds awful. Who knows what you’d be doing? You know nothing about what the new prof will be like to work for. There’s no guarantee they’ll fund you, anyway.

Working at Boeing early means you’ll start around January. You become eligible for grad school funding from Boeing in time for fall quarter. You’re not quite halfway to a non-thesis masters. You don’t want to throw good time after bad. Maybe it’s time to write off 2011 as a terrible year.

You like working at Boeing. That’s true. It’s fulfilling, interesting work with a good set of co-workers. You like Seattle, too. Remember that you’re working on a finite schedule. Time runs out certainly by 2089 but possibly as soon as 2013. You are solely responsible for doing the right thing between now and then, whenever “then” is.

You’re nervous because you’re seriously contemplating doing something that flies in the face of everything you planned to do. And why not? Losing funding was a black swan event; it merits an extreme response. You’re mad that you weren’t a better judge of circumstances. Consider this an opportunity to refine your circumstance and character judgment systems. It’s a painful learning experience, the second-most effective way to learn, after knowing already.

Do you look down on people who haven’t been relentless about pursuing education? Really think about this. The answer is “no.” You still like them, you still admire them, their choices maybe just confuse you. Why are you such a harsher judge on yourself, then? This needs to stop. Now.

The PhD mania needs to stop. Your exposure to PhD-level research so far indicates that it is, without exception, a dull misuse of time. You should consider yourself fortunate for identifying this now. Why do you want to be called “Dr. Atkinson?” You have no requirement for vanity.

Moving to Seattle should be no more daunting than moving to College Station was. It’ll be a pain, but you’ll do it, and you’ll be happy to be there. This cannot be a deterrent to Boeing.

When you don’t talk to people, your mind becomes an emotional echo chamber. There is sufficient self-skepticism in you that you need to recharge in confidence from other people on a regular basis. Use built-in holds to guarantee this; you tend not to interact enough without prompting. Surround yourself with people who reinforce you in a positive way. This is not difficult, just make sure it happens.

You should be able to finish your degree in about 1.5 years. Conservatively, let’s say 2015. That’s not really so bad. Failure to complete more degrees due to family is a nonissue, since you want family more than you want degrees anyway. Also that’s not how things work. False dichotomies and such.

I’m beginning to think that my whole decision-making mechanism is broken. It’s literally not doing anything right now. I keep thinking about this issue; isn’t a decision just supposed to fall out? This isn’t happening because this isn’t a deterministic process. You need to just decide, it can’t be broken down any further. Don’t you feel a tug?

The answer, of course, is “yes.” The tug is north by northwest, toward Boeing, toward Seattle, toward Capitol Hill. Everything, almost everything, that way feels like light and sweetness and awe, and it’s all fog and drudgery and anxiety to the east, toward Texas. I feel so alive in Seattle, and so pathetic in College Station. The immediate truth is that I’d rather wake up tomorrow and go to work at Boeing than wake up in College Station and do another day of grad school.

A Single Guy Reflects on Raising Children

First, the thing, which I felt compelled to write in July of 2012:

I want to have a daughter. I want to make love to a pretty woman, my wife, and I want to hold her close while our girl grows inside her. I want to look at the sonographs and press my hand on her belly while our daughter quickens in her. I’ll be terribly envious of her the whole time, of how close she gets to be to the new girl, but I’ll be too happy to care.

When she gives birth, when she’s born, I’ll see my wife and me blended, unified into a complex clip who’s not quite either of us. She’ll be a screaming, needy bundle of newness at first, in awe of everything, and I’ll fall in love immediately.

When summer comes, I want to take her to the islands, to the mountains, to the deserts. I want to show her white blood cells in a clear blue sky and nights so dark the Milky Way swirls from east to west as the satellites wander west to east. I want to take her flying and let her feel wings in her fingertips, and take her hiking till her feet march all the way up the great volcanic summits. When the rains come back, we’ll hunker down and I’ll teach her about the people and places and the ways the universe works. We’ll talk endlessly about the world around us and the worlds far away, and figure out a little more of who we are.

I want to watch her grow up, that beautiful way girls do. I want to talk to her about calculus and conjugation while her mind blossoms into the fullness of adulthood and she dips her toes into grown-up-ness for the first time. I want to see her alter, and become that form that’s the baseline of physical beauty. The book of me, and the book of my wife, will be woven together a billion times in her skin and in her blood, and I want to look at this beautiful creature and know that it’s a part of me that looks back.

That, among other things, is what I want.

Now to comment:

There are a few things going on here that seem worthy of some discussion. This was several years before I would be married and have children. Evidently this was something on my mind even back then. The fixation on having a daughter, as opposed to a child in general, says something about me. Is this a product of the male gaze going haywire, or is this some kind of pseudo-feminism, wanting to do my part so to speak to put at least one woman on equal footing with the start I got to life? Probably a little of both.

Frankly I find this embarrassing, mostly because the execution is sloppy and none of these thoughts are really complete. It's a nice idea muddled by fixation on the wrong things. I would also prefer to stick to feminism unambiguously. Hopefully I'm doing a better job of that now.

Also this is clearly a love letter to the Pacific northwest, at least in part. That's still something I haven't gotten out of my system.

Obsession Tuned to Abstraction

There is a period in my writing when I obsessively fixated on philosophy of mind, the origin of ethics, and the Catholic Church. I'm not the first person to do this, but it is unusual. It's also not particularly fashionable in this day and age, but, here you go. Here's something from July of 2012:

Writing well is better. Iterate to do this. Maybe.

Implicitly, I think we assume that our desires are more real than the world around us. That is, we have higher confidence that we want what we want and know what that is than we have confidence that there’s a cogent world that we really understand around us.

I don’t think this is warranted.

There’s no reason to assign such high confidence to our wants and cravings. We see the world go by in our senses; it’s real; it’s happening. This moment, this, is happening. I know that. But my mind is a hodgepodge of stitched-together elements and aspects, and I don’t think I can really trust myself to know what I want, especially when there’s so much I don’t know.

It’s truly remarkable how much my writing and my ponderings on this reveal about me. There are all these heuristics and algorithms and well-worn paths of thought, emotion, and mood that seem hidden until I just get things still enough that I can hear my own mind and remember what other minds are like.

I assume much less of my knowledge than most people do. When I hear someone talking, even if I have no idea if what they’re saying will be of any value to me or be important, I almost always listen in, since I’m convinced they might show me something I don’t know that I’d really like to see.

I’ve been thinking about LCD Soundsystem’s “I Can Change” a lot today, mostly after 3-ish. I’m not really sure why. Something just speaks to me in the bouncy tuney melodies there. “Love in your eyes, love in your ey-es.” So lovely. I’m quite sure I know what he’s talking about.

From day to day my perception of the world changes tremendously. I know the world doesn’t really change; it's an artifact of where my mind meets reality. Not real. But everything’s so beautiful and wonderful and alive on a good day, just like the housewife said. It’s like all the hang-ups and bugs in the system that keep us from purring along the way we’re intended to just wash away, and all that’s left is a flowing, shimmering river of rightness. Why shouldn’t the world be right? It’s happening. It’s really happening, and if it’s broken then what in the world does it mean to be well?

We can imagine a more convenient, a better, world than the one we live in. One with all the good parts and the beauty but where nobody fights or coerces each other, and where the crust never knocks cities down when it moves under our feet. We don’t live there, and it seems a shame. But isn’t the world still lovely as it is? I hear the idea that that notion is an illusion, and I understand it well enough. I can see where it comes from, but it just bounces off my inner loop of understanding and falls at my feet. That there is an inherent goodness in the world – I believe it. The world is good. I believe that.

I want to be Catholic. I know that because I can feel it in the way my emotional responses to the people around me are flavored. Learning that LeahLibresco is converting fills me with a joy and excitement that are only partly because of the novelty and surprise of her conversion. It shouldn’t have happened, but inwardly it felt so wonderful that it did. What a delight, Leah, to see you jump. Seeing a Christian in my life lose faith leaves me with nothing but a vague melancholy. “Oh, so you’re leaving, too. Bummer.” I don’t fully understand why I desire this so strongly.

There are reasons why I want to do this, right? I believe so. The rational, conscious reasons have to do with insight and morality and finding a system of ethics that’s consistent and doesn’t crash all the damn time. The picture of a universe where the relationship between people, truth, and beauty, is a fully-coupled and fully-interacting system is something I wouldn’t have thought of on my own and seems to be a better picture of reality than one without this understanding.

I think I just don’t trust myself. I should work on that.

Optimization is Difficult, Discernment More So

Sitting on a boat in Clear Lake the morning of my now-sister-in-law's wedding, somehow I felt compelled to write this mixed metaphor about optimization and the pursuit of truth:

The canonical analog for truth-finding is that it’s like multi-variable optimization. You seek the highest point by heading uphill and search until there’s nowhere higher to climb. I think this analogy is flawed. It’s flawed because we know which way is up, at least, if we’re to have any hope that we can be successful, we have to assume that. It should be easy, then, to compare the levels of different local maxima to determine which is the global max. Yet it’s not. The problem seems to be that we don’t know which way the truth axis should be oriented, so we attach to different maxima which seem more right with our personal orientation. So how do you determine which orientation is correct? I’m not quite sure. Some truths seem to jump out and assert themselves loudly and clearly, while others are highly counterintuitive and may seem downright wrong at first. It would be good to have a way to self-determine the difference between counterintuitive good ideas and bad ideas without resorting to just doing what other people say. Listening to others is okay, just do it thoughtfully. Must investigate further.

The Desire to Sleep and Find Meaning While Awake

Here's something I wrote shortly after starting my internship in the Boeing structures lab:

I can’t sleep. I’m not really sure why. I was exhausted this morning. More than almost anything I just wanted to turn off the monitor, lie down somewhere soft, and close my eyes, and now that that’s what I’m supposed to do my body seems to want nothing to do with it. I can’t stand this feeling, like I’m an unwitting pilot in a vehicle sliding on ice. My mind, and my body, I mean. Shouldn’t they just agree? The tension is such a pain when they don’t.

I’m worried that my body simply won’t adjust to this new sleep schedule. The second letter in “schedule” I wrote just now came out as a “k” at first, not the “c” that it should’ve been from the start. I don’t think I used to make those kinds of mistakes, and it’s worrying me that I’m making them more often now. Maybe I’m getting better at recognizing and remembering my mistakes, but the idea that I’m screwing up simple things more often because I’m not getting enough sleep seems more plausible for some reason.

Tonight I’ve had the strangest sense of freedom. Recently it hit home that I had it completely backwards on a key life decision. I used to think that going to graduate school, reaching the highest academic level I could reach, was a good decision. I was wrong, deeply, vastly wrong, on this count.

Now that I realize that, the future is wide open in a disconcerting way. The variables are all still there, but the equations are invalid and have to be thrown out. The system is underconstrained, and it’s hard for me to make heads or tails of what’s right anymore. My future is like a blindingly bright light, and I can’t get my eyes to focus on what’s out there in the glare.

I have this gnawing feeling that I’m supposed to do something important. But what, exactly? Cancer exists, no one’s ever set foot on Mars, social security is a Ponzi scheme, and humans are cranking Earth's thermostat up in an uncontrolled fashion. I believe these are all problems, and I’d like to see them rectified. My time is limited and I have strengths and flaws and preferences that no one else has. This means that I need to get serious about priorities and putting my time to good use on a plan that makes sense. The current plan isn’t necessarily bad, it just needs to be evaluated in a fresh light.

Now I can barely keep my eyes open. Maybe I just needed to get some authentic expression across today, when I spend so much of the day donning and doffing the personas I’ve developed to get by in this new northern world. Be authentic. Be nice. Be expressive. Be honest inside and outside. Like Alice, I give myself good advice. Hopefully some day I’ll take it.

Illuminating the Cobwebs

A valid argument could be made that this blog is kinda just me being this guy.

With that in mind, I'll avoid apologizing for not posting more. It's not as though the world is suffering from a lack of my speech anyway.

What is this blog for, then? I'll get to that in a moment.

At one point in my life I wrote a lot. Not a lot by professional writer standards, but I wrote a lot of very introspective things that were sometimes philosophical, sometimes engineer-like. I liked doing it, and it helped me get a sense of what I actually think. Sometimes I felt compelled to stay up past my bedtime (like tonight, oddly enough), and jotted things down til my mind felt fuzzy and happy that I'd gotten something out into the world of language. I've filled a red wide-ruled notebook that I got for free after helping with a promotional video for my alma mater with this stuff. I also write things in my laptop when I want to bypass the graphite-on-paper step.

So what's the point of all that? If I'm wondering what the point of blogging is, and I'm wondering what the point of jotting my thoughts down is, maybe I might as well let the two of them synch up. I'm not particularly shy about most of the things I write about (very little is politics, which seems to be what I'm most shy to talk about), so I might as well make them public. Without false humility I will say that I don't know if this will make anyone's life better, but I communicate with people a lot less than I used to, before I moved to California and had kids, so maybe putting my thought journal out there will be a good way to get things moving.

What I propose to do is copy a bit a time from this long-running journal here under the "Illuminating the cobwebs" tab. To start, here's something I wrote in March of 2012:

It’s like there are these two worlds. Two domains. There’s the world of sensing, of awareness and introspection, and then there’s the domain of math and method, and cause and effect. There’s a barrier between them, between the world outside and the world inside, like a flat sheet of glass. You’re looking straight into it, so you can’t see the interface. But it’s not glass at all. It’s water, and when something moves over the surface of that water, it shimmers, and the way the ripples catch the light is breathtaking. It knocks you down, makes your mouth gasp and your mind reel, and all you can do to keep up is think beauty, beauty, beauty. Think isn’t even the right word. Your mind flows and runs until all that you are is all that’s in touch with this magnificence that’s being.

The only proper response is laughter. It’s a humble laugh, a wild-running expression of the euphoria it is to be this moment. The universe reads to us a picture of light and sound and motion, and we read back a wildfire image of emotion and gratitude. What else could there be? What else could we do?

The world of atoms and the world of wonder aren’t adversaries. They harmonize. When the line between them shakes and twinkles you see how they weave together like never before. Joy becomes light, colored light, colored light that moves, lupines flapping on a March morning breeze. Causation becomes trend, function, interaction, emergence of knowledge. To know. We want to know. We want to know by the language we speak, by the book, by theory, but we also yearn to know by taking this world to heart, by sensing, by seeing our innermost selves in it.

How do our inner worlds come to know this outer world? It’s a mystery, a necessary one, to the linguist. But to the explorer it just is. There’s a frontier, and knowing it piece by piece and bit by bit is a magical thing of joy. You who have seen the touch of this magic, in a beautiful song, in a religious awakening, a lover’s touch, or a psychedelic journey, will never walk the Earth the same way. For you will know the ecstasy it is to be, and will long to be the euphoria of life again.

In case you're wondering, the pictures in this series will be non-sequiturs; just pretty stuff I've taken here and there.

A Moment of Crown and Shadow

There are mountains on the Moon. The lunar surface once roiled and wriggled, driven by nuclear fire from below. That fire died long ago, and for billions of years the mountains have stood steady over the sterile gray mare. Some of these mountains are on the 90^th meridians east and west. They stand at the border, one foot in land always facing the Earth, one foot facing toward the endless space beyond.

There are mountains on Earth. The furnace at the heart of the planet, fueled by the sputtering of helium and antimatter off uranium, thorium, and potassium, still glows red like an animal’s blood where it leaks through the skin. The mountains here are still in motion, thrusted up by the trembling plates that compose Earth’s crust, worn down by blowing sand and flowing water. Some of these mountains are in the Snake River watershed. They funnel the water that falls here, east of the Cascades, toward Hells Canyon and the surging Columbia River that snakes through the desert to the northwest.

Space, even as short a space as between Earth and the Moon, is an effective quarantine. The mountains astride the limb of the Moon and the mountains of eastern Oregon are indifferent to each other. In plain view of one another they are separated by an invisible and insurmountable abyss.

At the time the Moon formed it didn’t look or move as it does today. The Moon was closer and orbited faster, and Earth spun with more febrile vigor just after the cataclysm that cleaved moon from planet. The Moon’s gravity tugs harder on the point beneath it than on the point opposite Earth’s core. This tide pulls Earth into a lopsided ellipse, one lobe spun slightly forward of the Moon’s position. This applies a torque, trading spinning energy of the Earth for potential energy, altitude, of the Moon. At the present day this long balance has placed the Moon in an elliptical orbit whose average distance results in an angular size about the same as the Sun’s in the sky when viewed from Earth’s surface. When the Moon is in the lower arc of its orbit it appears just slightly larger in the sky than the Sun. When the plane of the Moon’s orbit around Earth just happens to line up with the plane of Earth’s orbit around the Sun, and the Moon is near perigee, its shadow sweeps across the face of the Earth. This is a total solar eclipse.

As long as I can remember being aware of the concept I’ve wanted to see a total solar eclipse. I suppose a part of me just wants to do everything, or at least everything pleasant. Total solar eclipses are rare. Seeing one in spite of their rarity might give one a sense of accomplishment. They are beautiful, full of unusual phenomena not seen anywhere else in human life. At any rate, I wanted to see one.

In the fractal branches of my family tree I have an aunt and uncle who grew weary of California. They were driving on a highway full of solitude 50 miles east of Baker City and arrived where they chose to place their lives. Conveniently and unexpectedly, the site would be directly in the path of the Moon’s shadow at 10:25 AM on Monday, August 21^st, 2017.

I became aware of this in the summer of 2011. At that time, tentatively, I began steering myself toward this point at this time.

That moment of awareness was once the present. Now it’s a memory. So many other futures became presents, then memories. Some treasured, some mangled, some longing for amnesia, nearly all forgotten, all those moments became pasts. I started grad school. I dropped out of grad school. I moved to Seattle. I vomited sangria on New Year’s Eve. I helped hang weights on aircraft tails to prepare them for flight test. I pressed my lips against Sarah’s. I ate communion wafers like paper and drank wine like sweet fire. My brother shot himself. I wept at his funeral. I caught the garter tumbling through the air at Sarah’s sister’s wedding. I married Sarah. I drank godawful North Korean brandy on New Year’s Eve, but didn’t barf this time. Deep within Sarah my son was conceived. I flew to Long Beach for an interview and was asked three times what I knew about geometric dimensioning and tolerancing. I moved to Los Angeles. My son was born. I stayed up late holding his little whimpering body, hoping Sarah’s program would just let her come home. I watched him grow, and smile, and walk, and speak. Sarah and I embraced, so many times remembered, many more times forgotten. One of those times our daughter was conceived. I watched parts I designed filled with fuel and fire and gas black as coal and hot as a blast furnace. I learned what unilateral renal agenesis was. I boarded an airplane, rented a truck, and drove to Oregon.

Time progressed, that is to say, and I arrived at my destination where the gravity of the Earth would see to the Moon revealing the light of the Sun’s corona. Time, gravity, light. The convergence of the elements Einstein showed were intimately and mysteriously linked in a moment of brilliance before his time on Earth ended. I know not where the time went between 2011 and 2017 but it placed me more or less exactly where I wanted to be.

Two nights before the eclipse the sky was dark and clear. Far from the cities and with the Moon closing in on the Sun there was nothing but the faint leakage of light domestic and stellar to corrupt the view toward space. Mercury shined copper-white low above where the Sun sank beneath the western hills. Later on, after the Earth turned further from the setting Sun, the dark brought out the night sky’s wonders in dazzling fashion.

I laid on the ground beneath the galaxy and my brother asked me what I thought happens when we die. I demurred. He seemed to want an answer, as do we all. That death is the end of everything and the fate of us all, with no reasonable hope of continued existence, seems to me at once the most obvious and horrible fact of life. It is obvious because my mind comes from my body, my body came from other bodies, those bodies came from the organic sludge of the Earth, and all of the above are governed by fixed and indifferent laws that leave no room beyond the madhouse for the resurrection of the soul. Should the soul find reason to exist purely from the machinations of the neurons within my skull, what reason would it have to exist after my skull’s destruction? Absurdity and obscenity. It is horrible because if death conquers the soul it’s a whole universe of existence that’s lost. Such seems apparent to me.

There followed a sort of apologetics for annihilationism and a meditation on consciousness as an illusion. My brother suspected I was not arguing in good faith when I argued that the notion that consciousness is an illusion is a non-sequitur. He had good reason to suspect so. I don’t always talk plainly. I was being unfair to him then, as I am now. My brother is a fiercely intelligent human being and a better debater than I am, but I didn’t understand how he arrived at what he was saying. We were unable to make ourselves understood.

Like ships with no wake, satellites moved silently over the face of the sky. They came from the west, north, and south, sometimes crossing the whole sky, sometimes fading to invisibility halfway as they passed into Earth’s shadow. Meteors shot through the black like flashes of inspiration on a quiet mind. The biggest ones, the size of pebbles rather than sand or dust, left faintly glowing trails of plasma, a neon record where they fell to Earth. When the conversation ebbed the sound of weaning calves longing for their mothers filled the air. There were no concluding statements. We talked, and we looked at space.

Clouds came in the afternoon the following day. They irritated me. I came to Oregon to see an eclipse, not clouds. I missed my connection to join the family on an excursion to the pine forest because I was at mass in Baker City, so I enjoyed the solitude at the house instead. In the evening sunset came.

The clouds were illuminated by sunlight bent around the limb of the Earth. Like a prism, Earth’s atmosphere bends different frequencies of light at different angles. This manifests as a tremendous chromatic aberration across the line where day becomes night. Orange like sherbet, red like blood, shadows like a bruise, all in pastel glow. It is a trick of refraction, air, light, and color perception, and it’s beautiful.

Beauty moved like an animal through the air that evening. In rustling leaves, in starlit clouds, in the feeling of grass beneath my feet, the beauty of it all seemed to jump from place to place, like a mirthful sprite. Why do we find these scenes so appealing? Perhaps there’s some survival value hidden, a pressure that says “You should enjoy this, for the good of you and your offspring.” Whatever the mechanism, this surrender to awe is one of the great pleasures of human life.

Nightfall came, and morning followed, the 21^st day of August, 2017. I woke and headed to my uncle’s house. Through the eclipse glasses the Sun was round. The Moon was on a beeline to cover the disc of the Sun, but from the vantage point of Oregon limb did not yet touch limb.

The house was not exactly where we watched the eclipse. A few miles to the southeast the neighbors on a ridge overlooking the Eagle Valley were throwing an eclipse party. Our caravan trundled over, a working tuck, a rental car, and my rental truck, flanked by two ATVs. We arrived just as the Moon was beginning to nibble a chunk out of the Sun

.

Several times before I’d seen partial eclipses, and once before I’d seen an annular eclipse, when the Moon was near apogee and left a ring of fire as it crossed the Sun. This was a familiar sight. Still, I felt giddy watching the Sun shrink from a Pac-man shape to a smaller and smaller crescent. When we observed an annular eclipse at the rim of the Grand Canyon my dad and I fashioned a pinhole camera from a shoebox. The camera had found its way to Oregon. Through the pinhole camera the tiny illuminated mirror image shrank in the same way it did through the eclipse glasses

Sunlight dimmed in a barely perceptible fashion for the first hour of the eclipse. Main sequence starlight is so overwhelming from 93 million miles away, and the eye and brain so skilled at contextualizing the light it sees, that you can remove 80% of sunlight without much noticeable difference. Then things get noticeable.

My brother remarked “It feels like stepping into the shade.” The sun shined but it refused to burn. With so much radiant heat from the Sun blocked by the rock of the Moon the temperature began to drop in an accelerating fashion. It grew quiet. Without the Sun driving convective motion in the air there was nothing to move a breeze, and the crowd hushed as the Sun became a sliver in the southeast sky. Finally, after it cooled and quieted, the scene darkened.

Five minutes before totality began I remarked that the shadow had made landfall and I turned my camera on to record the scene. It was darker now, the colors more dull, the shadows sharper. With a clear blue sky above us and one-one-hundredth the normal amount of sunlight still blindingly bright the foreground looked a twilight scene. I took one last look at the vanishing bow of Sun through my eclipse glasses and turned my attention to the mountains.

Light vanished, not in a moment, but in a slow fade The mountains of Oregon grew dark as the shadow of the Moon fell upon them. In the west the sky had the deep gray-blue of late twilight. The east was still bright but fading fast. In the final seconds the scene visibly darkened from one moment to the next as the great light that powers the life of the Earth blinked out overhead. Headlights and street lights in the valley below flickered on. There was a series of whoops, yelps, and a toddler squeal, and I turned to see the Sun’s corona glowing around a pitch black disc where the Sun was a moment ago.

Corona. Crown. Tenuous incandescent plasma at a temperature of two million degrees crowning with beauty and glory the star that nourishes the life of our world. It was absolutely still. Somehow I didn’t expect that. I was looking at a structure millions of miles across. Of course it appeared motionless over the course of a minute, but somehow that dynamic spherical cauldron looked more crystal, more fixed and less fluid, than I imagined. It was white, white as pure as the dress Sarah wore that day in December. It had points and tufts like a bobcat’s ears. There it was, plain as the day rendered night.

I zeroed in on the corona because I knew I would only see it for a few minutes in the entire course of my life. Let this white drill down into my memory forever, I thought. Someone said something about the horizon and I glanced away. There were no illuminated peaks around us, even the background was close enough to all be enveloped in shadow. All around, and brightest to the north, the colors of sunset were on display. There was the golden fleece of dawn all around the horizon, framing the mountains and valleys without prejudice.

I fixed my gaze on the Sun for the rest of totality. The second hand wound on. The corona, constantly in motion, shined on like a glowing white diamond. There were flashes on the edges that coalesced into a brilliant ring. These were Bailey’s beads, sunlight shining through the valleys between the peaks on the 90^th lunar meridians, followed by the diamond ring effect. For a moment just a point of overwhelming sunlight shined on the western edge, and the eye and brain interpret this and the corona barely still visible as a ring of light. Then, sunlight, back in all its radiance. From start to finish, totality in Richland was one minute and 15 seconds.

What is the significance of an eclipse? In all honesty I don’t know the answer. The last scientifically important eclipse happened in 1919, when general relativity was tested for the first time by checking whether starlight behind the Sun was moved by the Sun’s gravity. So it was. Eclipses today are a matter of aesthetics, adventure, philosophy, and, as always, simple geometry.

The laws of gravity and geometry, light and relativity are such that the timing of an eclipse can be predicted with great accuracy a thousand years in the future. There are laws of chemical binding energy and genetic information flow, and there is a known structure to my brain. These relationships are more complicated than the relative motion of the Sun, Earth, and Moon, but shouldn’t they in theory be just as knowable? Doesn’t that knowability somehow wound the soul, make you little more than an odd organic robot?

Maybe that’s the true and complete story. If it is, the idea that death conquers all seems unavoidable. I am unable to rigorously dispel this hypothesis. I have chosen, however, to build my life around the hypothesis that this description of the universe given by indifferent physical law is not wrong, but incomplete. There exists an idea that love, the will toward life, the free giving of life, is not merely a thing that exists within other laws, but a fundamental property and structure of the universe. There is no way to show convincingly whether or not this is true, but it pleases my intuition and is in agreement with my experience. Anyway, I’ve bet my life on this hypothesis being true. Maybe, if it’s all true, the eclipse is a foretaste of what’s to come. When darkness comes it will be surrounded with glory, and be quite temporary, and light comes roaring back a moment later. Maybe.

Speaking more plainly, during the eclipse the mountains of the moon and the mountains of Oregon were not indifferent to each other. Across the sea of space they shouted to one another and made their presence known in the shadow sweeping across Earth and sunlight peeking around the Moon Though islands, we are part of the same whole. This is not half-baked hippy nonsense. This is the reality I witnessed in the Eagle Valley.

On a white blanket there were lines and shapes dancing as the Sun re-emerged from behind the Moon. It looked like the bottom of a disturbed pool. This was the light of the Sun, normally incoherent and overwhelming, made calm and uniform by the Moon’s surface like the knife edge in a Schlieren photography setup. That uniform light showed the swirls and eddies in the air we breathed together that morning. The shapes faded fast as the knife edge crept onward to the east. I marveled at this last beautiful sight from this remarkable conjunction, and felt the heat of the Sun on my face once again. I hugged my cousins, my aunt, my uncle, my brother, and my dad, embarked in my truck, and headed home.