The Bridge to Nowhere and Nowhen

I had occasion to write a friend concerning the Tarot and my uses thereof. Suddenly it clicked that this might be the more useful venue for my essay.

I like Sylvia's line from ST:TOS "Catspaw": "You like to think of yourselves as complex creatures, but you're flawed." but then I give it a twist. Emotions..., seem to date back to reptiles; it's not clear that their predecessor amphibians felt aggression (however, I don't know of any carnivorous frogs, that could have something to do with it...), but it's very clear for reptilian predators. And mammals definitely display the tender side, motherly love and so forth. My cats love me. Much of that is our mutual touching; they'll nuzzle me for affection, and I'll _pet_ them because I love them.

What I'm focusing on is that emotions predate humanity; they've been around for a very, very long time, have been, if you will, thoroughly "debugged" by evolution. They're the "truest" things that I know of in my mental landscape. I _trust_ my emotions. If I spot my beloved in an apparently compromising position, I may become depressed, angry, jealous, or another emotion or mix of them. I may have misinterpreted the situation, perhaps made an erroneous assessment. But I _can_ trust what I feel.

Let's contrast that. Calculus dates back about three hundred and thirty years. When I was in college it was easy, indeed the foundation for much more. But now, I can only see the action, remember the images, but not have a prayer of "turning the crank" on a problem. So how much do I "trust" my own calculus? And there's a similar but not so well dated argument for the much larger skill of logic itself (more than a thousand years back, but more than ten thousand? a hundred thousand? certainly it doesn't go back a million years). These are for the most part products of the conscious mind, relatively recent inventions. They're hard to grasp, hard to retain, and untrustworthy even in the most skilled of hands. It's easy to imagine another checking your logic, but just try to remember the last time a friend offered to "check" your emotions.

I see emotions as manifestations perhaps agents from the subconscious, the "ground state" that underlies each and every mind; they're totally trustworthy. Then that's overlaid by a superstructure of intellect, shaky logic with a shaky ego as captain. The rats have taken over the holds, the crew is mutinying below decks, the captain's taken to the bottle, but at least s/he still holds the wheel of the ship of state. :)

 I see the Tarot as bridge from subconscious to conscious. You start with a question, then you lay out the cards in a spread. The choice of spread, and the specific meanings to each position and each card, they're all arbitrary but chosen in advance to give a framework. And the _meaning_ is in the eye of the beholder.

Almost all of music is written to fit one or another template. J.S. Bach's music may be compared to mathematics, was written to a very strict template. Few want to listen to a kid hitting the piano with a hammer.

Free Will .AND. Predestination

I've been thinking since mid-2012, a BLOG hiatus if you will, just not posting about it. I hate to just say something when I don't have anything _interesting_. But this particular musing I'm posting today, I've had before; perhaps it's time to air it, to see if the posting spurs new points of view.

This will not be your usual, tired posting about a subject that goes back at least centuries (John Calvin), perhaps millenia (Saint Augustine?). This is a different slant, spurred into recollection by listening to Beethovan's 4th Symphony on WKAR this morning.

When Beethovan wrote the 4th, he was free to start it on any pitch, duration, chord, whatever, that he wanted. By the time he got to the end, he had almost no freedom at all; an arbitrary note would have been discordant. Similarly, when the author starts a fictional story, it's a "blank sheet of paper". S/he can start anywhere, and go anywhere else. The author's task is to tell a pack of lies, and make the reader like it; suspension of disbelief is accepted, but not internal contradictions. But as the story progresses, the degrees of freedom for the narrative narrow; there are more and more things to not contradict. By the end, there's very little literary (or musical) freedom left.

Life is like that, too. When I was young, my options seemed unlimited. As I made decisions (or didn't...), as I committed myself to a path, to my "life trajectory", other options were lost in the past. Now that I'm old, I seem to have very few ones left. Soon, there will be only one. I'm not there yet, but I can see this all too clearly.

One of the most amazing things about this Big Place where we live, is that it's comprehensible, that we mere humans can come to understand the cosmos. Our gestalt is by no means complete; we're constantly learning, ever expanding our species knowledge. But that we can at all.... And the best tool that I know for this is mathematics. Here are three easy steps:

• Algebra, the use of symbols with rules for manipulation, goes 'way back, is of Arabic origin, multiple fathers, and centuries before the Renaissance. Almost everything in mathematics is expressed with algebra; it's hard to overstate the importance of this "general solution".
• Calculus (roughly, the instantaneous slope of a function, and separately, the area underneath a curve, co-discovered by Newton & Leibnitz) depended upon analytical geometry (the equivalence of algebraic functions and graphical 2-D curves, Descartes); all three were invented during the Seventeenth Century. Suddenly change was comprehensible, and predictable. That last bit is the key I want to maintain here.
• Quantum mechanics is a Twentieth Century invention, but it's a mathematics quite unlike calculus. Its conclusions are useful mainly in The Land of the Very Small, are probabilistic rather than deterministic, and are supremely accurate. However, there's a crucial departure from the "model" presented by calculus, and that's..., the model. Both predict future behavior; however, calculus gives us a mental model, "explains" the universe. Quantum mechanics does no such thing; there's no model, no comprehension, no understanding, just prediction unsurpassed. Indeed, when pitted against Einstein's General Relativity, QM wins (at least this is my interpretation of Bell Theorem experiments). I suspect that we'll be generations getting around this failure-to-model, understanding "what's it all about".

So back to my initial point, that options narrow as the story / symphony / life progresses. I've never even seen this mentioned elsewhere, let alone analyzed. Is there a mathematics for this, perhaps the Mathematics of Converging Trajectories? Well, the best I can say is, "not yet". For the aging process, that's easy, that's entropy. But this..., I don't think so.

Three Hundred Years

Unlike those of the fictional Phil Conners, my years are advancing as fast as you might think (and yes, I still have to floss). At work I'm heading into "distinguished" territory, although I seem to be making about the same number of mistakes (yeah!), but many of those repeat ones (boo!). At home, I feel like I'm marking time, waiting for external triggers, paused (by my own character choices) but not blocked, and I just don't see that I have a lot of time to waste. None of us do....

Today's news brought not only the death of the infamous Roger Ailes (77), but also "Soundgarden" singer Chris Cornell (52); while the group's music does nothing for me (my current infatuation is the group "Ebanos de la Habana" -- Youtube for Laura Calderin's "Alborado y Son" and "Arsis"), dying at that early age, and as a suicide, seems tragedy. I've learned so much since I was a callow fifty-two.

That last brings me to this topic. Some periods of my life were exploration (of self & the world), some were pleasure (the women of my Twenties), some were mistakes repeated (marijuana long ago gave me temporary escape, but also dulled my ambition of those years), but the best were learning (like now). I'll never stop learning, although I may soon stop.

So what if I didn't just stop? I've imagined then wanted the kind of greatly extended lifespan that would allow me to witness events of great import on astronomical timescales, like the Red Giant phase of our own local star, the billion-year-long collision of the Andromeda Galaxy & our own, and the Era of Quantum Degeneracy. I would not be merely human on those time-frames, but would remember when I was.... But what about much shorter spans. What if I could live to be a more reasonable 300?

What I'm thinking about is the wisdom that I've gained so far. What kind of wisdom, perspective, and self-directed goals, would a human aged three hundred have? Never mind what society would have, I'm only focusing on myself. The best I can imagine is something akin to (what little I know of) Buddha, Jesus, and other Teachers both historical and fictional. Strive without ceasing, love one another, those aren't just platitudes, but deliberate choices to building a better world. Even in a post-scarcity time, especially then, lives would still have meaning; humans and their partners could still aim to better themselves and their worlds.

And if I, like so many others, can see a better future, can strive to build it even though I'll never see it, what of you reading this? What are your plans for your three-hundredth birthday? How will you in current time help to make a better world for future humanity? And why aren't you taking action?