Climate Change Superheroes and Microagression Saviors

Congratulations to humanity for successfully publicly acknowledging that global industrial-scale carbon emission poses risks to the future of humanity. Good job, folks. Our species’ most privileged representatives boarded countless jet planes and flew to Paris to congregate, blame, shame, and finally admit that we are burning fossil fuels more rapidly than atmospheric carbon is being absorbed. Then they patted themselves on their backs, flew home, and trumpeted their success. Presumably these leaders are riding bicycles to work this week, right?

Unfortunately, none of this matters. Not even a little bit. It is irrelevant because no matter how much our wealthy countries are willing to inflict economic damage upon themselves in limiting emissions, they will still be reducing the wrong variable in the equation of anthropogenic climate change. What variable is more important than per capita carbon emission? Try the number of people emitting. The population of humanity has more than tripled in the last hundred years. In the next hundred years it almost certainly won’t triple again, but it will grow.

You think carbon emissions are bad for humanity? Wait until there are regional freshwater shortages, global fishery depletions, deforestation, pollution, famine, and war. War bred from ignorance, desperation, and envy. Genocide, chemical and biological warfare, ethnic cleansing, and resource hoarding are in our future. All because we, for some reason, aren’t willing to even acknowledge population overgrowth. Nobody is talking about it. Why not? What is wrong with you people? It is THE problem of our time.

You spoiled brats at universities across the U.S., whining about microagressions, pissing and moaning about white privilege, demanding African studies be incorporated into the curriculum, more sensitivity workshops, blah blah blah. You’re all clueless. You want to talk about privilege? You’re manufacturing victimhood because you can’t find any and you want to be victims so bad you can almost taste the social sympathy. Well here’s a cause for you, on the house: Black lives matter? Does that include the black lives on other continents? The black lives in Africa are dying in greater numbers at earlier ages than any other ethnic group and when the population reaches its breaking point I suspect they will suffer the most. From climate change and resource scarcity and God-knows-what-else.

But I know, it’s hard to talk about birthrates. Good luck reforming the American higher education system. You’re saving the world.

A blog post long enough to guarantee that nobody who cares about gun control will read it to the end.

I’m not sure why I’m writing this. I’m certain that almost nobody will read it, and also that anyone who does will not be influenced by it. The personal firearms debate in this country has left the realm of conversation- it has devolved into deafening attacks and absurd statements and accusations, each side trying to drown out the other in a cacophony of hatred and rage. I wish I could reset the conversation, but that’s just a dream. So I’ll write my thoughts here, a whisper of hope drowned in a sea of vitriol, anger, and logical fallacies, all worn thin by repetition, yet still amplified and projected at such an extreme volume that either side can only hear their own bullhorns. Whatever comes of this disagreement, at least I will know that I spoke my piece and that even if nobody hears it there are still voices of reason adrift in the sea of willful ignorance.

Guns are neither sacred nor evil. They are tools, and they are tools of violence. Violence is neither sacred nor evil. Nuclear energy is neither sacred nor evil. If I tackle a stranger to prevent them being struck by a vehicle, I have probably used violence to a positive end. If I tackle a running man after witnessing him snatch a purse, I may have used violence to a positive end. When the United States nuked the Japanese civilians in the closing days of WWII, they arguably used violence to a positive end. That nuclear weapons have not been used since is a testament to the human capacity for restraint, and to the lasting impression those two nuclear attacks made.

I would not advocate that we keep guns in the American populace at literally any cost. But I do firmly believe that the empowerment that comes out of having the capacity for violence is a valuable part of democracy. So let’s not give that up in pursuit of some fallacious line of reasoning. Allow me to explain:

"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," said Mao Zedong. I don’t think he was wrong about that. The anti-gun argument I’ve heard regarding the assertion that gun ownership is necessary to protect our civil liberties from oppressive government goes something like this: "If the government wanted to take over, then your hunting rifles and pistols wouldn’t do any good against tanks and helicopters and warplanes. Also they have nuclear weapons." First of all, this is incorrect. I fought against poorly equipped and untrained militias in an occupation in Iraq. We had the most advanced ground vehicles, unchallenged aerial superiority, and the greatest firepower in human history at our disposal. We were among the most highly-trained regular soldiers in the history of modern warfare. If our mission had been annihilation of the populace, we would have faced no real difficulty other than our conscience. Our mission was control and pacification, and all our gadgets and firepower and aircraft didn’t give us much advantage against the guerilla warfare of the militia. This is not a new dynamic, either. Look at every guerilla war ever. Furthermore, the soldiers who would presumably be executing the orders of this hostile government would in reality likely refuse, or stage an outright coup. And no power-mad dictator wishes to reign over a desolate smoking crater, so this argument is flawed. It’s actually just kinda stupid. QED.

Moving on. I believe there is a huge psychological component to this disagreement. It seems that the subset of Americans who favor a ban on gun ownership do not, in fact, own any. This subset is not personally familiar with firearms, and therefore they conceptualize them as something scary and dangerous. People who are comfortable with owning and using a firearm are in favor of owning firearms. This may seem a little bit obvious, but there is an important kernel here. The unarmed populace are fearful for their safety and clamoring for the government to protect them from the threat of gun violence, a threat which they erroneously attribute to the armed populace. The armed populace are fearful of gun violence, but they correctly attribute it to the criminal element and correctly reason that they will achieve a better outcome by being prepared to defend themselves than they will by relying on legislation and police alone. By way of analogy, I don’t own an enormous diesel pickup truck with poor fuel economy, and I think that the folks who use these merely as commuter vehicles are wasteful and polluting and unconcerned about their environmental impact. In material terms, the world would be better off if these vehicles were restricted to hauling and towing, should we give up our freedom to drive these vehicles? I won’t get into it here as any comprehensive discussion would have to go pretty deep, but I do want to briefly point out that there are myriad social side-effects of relying too heavily on government to manage our exposure to risk, and in my opinion these are mostly negative side-effects.

There is a troubling tie-in here for police militarization. (Note: I have been lamenting said militarization since 2010, long before the recent media craze, and I will probably still be decrying it long after the media moves on to the next craze.) As the various and sundry municipal, state, and federal authorities become increasingly enamored with sending tactical teams* unannounced into private residences to serve low-level drug warrants and the like, frequently resulting in lethal exchanges between criminals and officers (and sometimes between innocents and officers: raiding the correct house in the middle of the night has proven to be a real challenge for these "elite" units) I can only imagine that less gun ownership will embolden them. Perhaps fewer officers and suspects and innocents will be shot outright, but would that outcome be preferable if it comes at the price of greatly eroded civil rights? By the way, if the DEA and their ilk were emboldened by such a situation to batter down more doors serving "no-knock" warrants, the actual dangerous criminals are still going to shoot back at them.

 

So this boils down to a very different question than gun ownership. The real question is this: would you give up your right to own firearms, and also your protection from unreasonable search and seizure and due legal process in the hopes of making guns moderately more difficult to obtain by the individuals who are at-risk for mental illness related mass shootings? Because even the most liberal-minded person must accept that guns will be available to criminals in this country regardless of any conceivable restrictive legislation.  I would also point out that thoroughly-planned mass shootings do not require easy accessibility to guns in order to be perpetrated.  Crimes of passion, yes.  Don't commit the fallacy of correlation as causation here; yes, legally owned guns have been used in many mass shootings.  This does not mean that these same shootings would not have taken place had gun ownership been outlawed.  America has a robust illicit substances network, and firearms are only slightly more difficult to transport than drugs, and they're also durable goods (unlike drugs, which are typically consumed by the end purchaser).  And let's please not push these mass murderers to take up bomb-building instead of shooting.  This would not be a positive outcome.  I can probably out-shoot most psychopaths, and we can all flee or hide from a rampage, but there's not much we can do if they bomb the building we're in.

I’m not asking you to take my word for any of this. Can we please just have a civil conversation about it though? We have a choice: either continue shouting past one another and preserving the status quo, or else cooperating to find a solution that makes sense. Frankly, the anti-gun crowd have proved themselves largely ignorant on function and capabilities of firearm hardware, so the legislative "successes" that they claim have restricted firearms in ways that are bizarre, arbitrary, and superstitious. We gun experts have a better knowledge of which guns, ammunition, magazines, and accessories represent a greater capacity for risk to society. Ask us these questions; most of us love talking about guns.

* These teams are largely composed of men who, if we’re being honest, enjoy their job, their public image, and the power and thrill of small unit tactical operations. Believe me, I know the type. I used to be that type, only I opted to perpetrate violence against the enemies of our country, not against her citizens. As long as we’re being real, I’ll bet money that the vast majority of these officers have a deep affinity for firearms, and don’t view them as a necessary evil. Of course you’re unlikely to get them to say that on the record.

Touch of Gold

I had a new type of dream experience this past Sunday morning. It will be difficult to describe (as are most dream concepts), so in the interest of clarity I will describe it chronologically, or as I experienced it. Here is the narrative of my recollection:

SETTING: An unremarkable diner. Slightly greasy, but acceptable. I’ve just finished a meal with my school-age daughter and we are on our way out the door.

We head out the door, but my daughter (we’ll refer to her as Alice, an homage to Carroll) asks a busboy for a quarter. He is caught off-guard, and fishes a coin out of his pocket to give to her. I pull some change out of my own pocket to reimburse the busboy, and a dime slips through my fingers and clatters on the dirty floor. The busboy deftly picks a quarter out of the change in my palm and Alice and I walk out into the car park. Approaching my car, I notice that the front wheels consist of a pair of wheel trucks on struts- each side has a truck with a pair of wheels, not unlike aircraft landing gear. The driver’s side truck seems badly out of alignment. Next I notice someone is snooping around my car.

I confront the snoop, he is a middle-aged man in a cheap but honest-looking suit. He apologizes, and by way of excuse explains that he is looking for a lost young woman. He fills me in on the sparse details surrounding the woman’s disappearance, and I come to a startling realization: I’ve been in this man’s position before. The whole scenario was an elaborate setup, a kind of suspended-reality game, a mystery novel performed in the flesh. I confirm this when I ask the man, "did Tommy Lee Jones ask you to look for this woman?" The man answers in the affirmative. Of course he did. Mr. Jones also asked me, years ago, to help solve the mystery of the missing woman. Something else comes back to me- the villain. The villain in this fiction is none other than Carl Weathers.

I help the snoop to look around the parking lot for a few minutes, remembering how much I enjoyed investigating the mystery when I went through it. Next thing I remember I’m driving at high speed down a dirt runway in the dark. There is a pyrotechnic display in the distance, and an ATV dragging a mattress passes me on the right side. The ATV operator is dressed up like a rodeo clown, and there is a young woman gagged and bound to the mattress.

This is all that I remember from the dream itself, but the experience doesn’t end here. When I awoke, I was certain that my dream "memory" was something more than mere ad hoc fabrication by my subconscious. In the first few moments of wakefulness, I thought of the memory as something which actually occurred in my past. Shortly afterward, of course, I realized that this was unlikely; I’ve never met Tommy Lee Jones nor Carl Weathers, and neither have I solved any missing persons mysteries. My next thought was that it must have been a movie I’d seen. I started thinking about that possibility, and the title "Touch of Gold" came to mind. I searched Google and came up dry. It turned out to be a fabrication after all.

This experience was very different from any other dream experience I’ve had, and makes me even more curious about the workings of my mind. It’s worth noting that the mystery in my dream bears conceptual similarity to "The Magus" by John Fowles and the movie "The Game" starring Michael Douglas. Then on Monday night (after the dream) I saw the movie "Ex Machina" for the first time, which is also thematically similar to these stories. Here’s to the ever changing, ever bizarre world of dreams and the subconscious!

I am a mere mortal, so I cannot resist the urge to chime in on the phenomenon of The Donald

I came across an article this morning about how Donald Trump is not as great a businessman as he would have us believe.  The gist of it is this: Mr. Trump inherited a bunch of money from his father, and if he had merely stuck it in some imaginary stock market investment instead of working for the past four decades, he would have some billions of dollars today, which may or may not be more than his current worth.  So this is basically an indictment to the effect of "Donald Trump has been outperformed by the average businessman".  Unless, of course, his true net worth is greater than the $3 billion the author posits as the value of the imaginary 1970's investment.

Now, let me start my response by clearly and humbly stating that I am out of my depth when it comes to high finance and complex investment strategies.  I'm decent with numbers and I am pretty good at thinking carefully and analyzing arguments, however, so that is what I'll be doing here.  I will gracefully submit to the judgment of any financial experts if they wish to weigh in, but until then I can only point out what I see as the weaknesses of Mr. Date's (sorry I don't know how to make an accent mark over the 'e') case against Donald Trump.  Here we go.

First of all, and probably most troubling, we have the fallacy that because we can look at the performance of the stock market over the past 40 years, then anyone with money in their pocket in 1970 should have known that investing in a specific set of stocks would yield a fat payday in 2015.  This is just piss-poor reasoning.  Plenty of people did invest back then and the nature of the stock market caused some of them to do worse than others.  Of course it's easy to look back at the performance of the S&P 500 and say, "golly, I should've invested in that 45 years ago".  Problem is, a person looking to invest in 1970 would have had to choose an investment strategy, and the author's imagined mutual fund of S&P 500 stocks is just one of many.  The author unwittingly points this out by his comparison of Trump to Warren Buffett.  Warren Buffett has had a wildly successful career, and outperformed pretty much everyone.  This is confirmation bias, however, because in 1970 nobody knew how well Mr. Buffett was going to do.  So the author has arbitrarily picked out two ways in which Donald Trump could have made more money without working, using the benefit of hindsight.  Trump also could have done much worse.  If he had picked the wrong investments, he could well have been ruined.  Such is the nature of investing.

My second objection is even simpler.  Mr. Date did not specifically detail how he arrived at his figures (perhaps there is an online S&P 500 calculator where you input year and initial investment and it tells you how well you would have done), but I am assuming that his number includes a reinvestment of 100% of any dividends from these stocks.  Now here's the important bit: I am going to go out on a limb and assume that Donald Trump has spent some money on "non-assets" (for lack of a better term) in the past 40 years.  He can list real estate and private jets and such as assets counting toward his net worth, but he has probably also bought a few suits, a few groceries, and maybe some non-durable toys.  Therefore, over the years as he made money doing whatever it was he was doing, Mr. Trump also probably spent a lot of it on items which he cannot count toward his net worth.  So if I am correct that the author has not, in his hypothetical model, allowed for Mr. Trump to extract and spend vast sums of money from his portfolio, then the comparison is invalid.  There are additional problems as well, such as owning a house/apartment (an investment which also provides physical shelter) as opposed to paying rent and putting money in the stock market (an investment which does not provide physical shelter), but I think I've sufficiently demonstrated the problem here.

My final objection is that it is a bit problematic to oversimplify the economy by suggesting that every business owner whose company performs less well than the S&P 500 ought to just give up and become a stock market speculator.  We have a lot of speculators already, and probably not enough "real" companies which build stuff, manufacture stuff, employ people, etc.  So Donald Trump has had his companies go through bankruptcy several times.  That's certainly not the most admirable business record, but it is a legal process which exists for good reason.  Compared to the investment bankers who poisoned the well selling toxic mortgage-backed securities and devastated the entire global economy out of pure, unmitigated, selfish greed and outright contempt for the rules and regulations, I'm not so concerned about Donald Trump's business record.

A transient human treasure

Oliver Sacks died yesterday, Sunday August 30, 2015. He was 82. I hope he was ready for death, or at least as ready as any living creature can be. I suspect he was, and if there is any enduring consciousness after death, I suspect that Dr. Sacks is busily investigating it right now, trying to figure out how it works, who and what he is, and whether or not any of it is actually real.  Who knows, maybe he's having tea with Lewis Carroll and Martin Gardner right now.

I first became aware of Oliver Sacks through my all-time favorite podcast Radiolab. Dr. Sacks was a regular guest on the show, and several of my favorite Radiolab segments feature the good doctor. I’ve not yet read any of his books, though I intend to read at least a few of them. The man was warm, curious, thoughtful, kind, funny, sharp, and a bit tragic. I expect I am not alone in expressing that I would have liked to know the man personally. I am certain that he will be missed.

The Emergence of Patterns

I’m currently reading Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. I’ve only just covered a few chapters so far, and I’m sure there are plenty more undiscovered treasures in the pages ahead, but I’m already thrilled with what the author has shared. Read it yourself, but for now I’ll tell you that it deals with formal systems, self-reference, language and meta-language, strange loops, and amusing conversations between Achilles and a tortoise, a la Lewis Carroll. One of the themes is understanding whether any system can exist and be defined only within the system itself. In other words, whether a system can be created whose explicit definition does not rely on any information outside of the system being defined… I’m doing a terrible job at explaining this, so if you’re curious go pick up the book.

So I studied a bit of philosophy at university, and I’m very much still a novice, but one thing that I frequently considered was my recognition that although a study of philosophy yields poor career prospects, it confers some very real (albeit vague and intangible) benefits to the student. This is a point that has been made by many philosophers through history, and there are a number of well-known, succinct quotations which underscore this point. This is little consolation to practically-minded parents of college-bound teens who express an interest in a philosophy degree, however. Today I experienced something which tied together Hofstadter’s ideas in GEB and the notion that philosophy has very real value to humanity.

I am a fan of the webcomic xkcd. I have seen most of Mr. Munroe’s comics (some many times) by regularly following the comic for about 4 years, and frequently clicking the "random" button. xkcd # 903 came up today, and it features a piece of trivia: Starting from any Wikipedia article, if you click on the first link not in parenthesis or italics, you will eventually end up at the entry for Philosophy. I tried it starting from a random page, and it worked! It was fascinating watching the subjects of the links moving gradually from a very specific topic to increasingly broad subjects, and ultimately to philosophy. This gives me the impression that all of our knowledge as human beings can be carefully ordered and correlated, and the most intuitive or efficient way of doing so starts with a robust foundation in philosophy. It is the bedrock on which we build increasingly ambitious cathedrals of knowledge.

This idea relates to GEB in terms of the systems and meta-systems I mentioned. It seems to me that philosophy is the meta-language we use to understand the most basic concepts of human existence, such as the nature of knowledge, reality, ethics, etc. It’s interesting that Wikipedia has been designed (presumably coincidentally) in a parallel fashion to this idea of hierarchies of knowledge. I wonder what meta-language describes philosophy? Perhaps there is no ultimate meta-language, but the hierarchy tends toward infinity.

 

I'll mention this in the trivia section, along with the Wikipedia Game!

National Service: you're doing it wrong.

I just read this morning about the Pentagon considering whether transgender people ought to be allowed to serve openly in the military.  The following is my opinion.  To save you hate-filled, closed-minded, belligerent types some reading (God forbid!), here's the short version:

I don't know and even if I did it wouldn't matter.

Now that we have that out of the way and the nasty folks have left us in peace, we can get down to business.  First, in the interest of disclosure, I don't really understand what transgender means.  I have this compulsion to understand things, how they work, what makes them tick, etc.  I believe transgender means that a person who was born with the body of gender A feels like they are actually gender B?  That doesn't really make sense to me personally, but I'll just count myself fortunate that I don't feel conflicted about my gender.  I'm certainly not making the case that other people don't feel that way.  I only know what it's like to be one person and therefore won't conjecture what it's like to be a different person.

Instead I will talk about something which I do know a bit about: National Service.  When I was an adolescent the military appealed to me largely because of propaganda and the straight-faced proclamations by adults everywhere that members of the military are Heroes.  It seemed all too easy- get paid to be a dangerous good guy, fight bad guys, and receive universal respect for the rest of your life all in exchange for a little risk of death and dismemberment.  So I signed up.  I had the test scores to do any job in the military, but I was interested in only one thing.  Army Infantry.  This was 2004, when Saddam was still on the loose, we were still "liberating" the Iraqis from his tyranny, and the Weapons of Mass Destruction were still presumed present in Iraq.  Upon my graduation from the Infantry Training Brigade in Fort Benning, GA I received the first 3 awards that any soldier enlisting in the Army at that time received.  These were the Army Service Ribbon (granted to everyone upon graduation from Basic Training), the Global War on Terrorism medal (granted to everyone during the war on terror), and the National Defense Service Medal (granted to everyone serving during a time of conflict).

Even though these decorations were universal (not awarded to me based on my own merit) I felt immense pride in wearing them for the first time.  Maybe not as much pride as I felt for my sky-blue Infantry shoulder cord and blue-backed crossed rifles, but pride nonetheless.  I felt this pride, not because of who I was or what I'd done, but rather because they were given to me as recognition of my participation in something which (I believed) was noble, good, selfless, and worthy.  This is a unique feeling, and if you've never experienced it, you may be wise to refrain from assuming that you can imagine what it feels like.

So how does this tie in to the subject of transgender servicepeople?  The ongoing conversations about homosexuality in the military and women in combat roles have revolved mainly around two points: civil rights and competence.  The prevailing argument has gone something like this:

"I have the right to be free from discrimination based on (sexual orientation/gender), and I can do the job as well as anyone else.  So let me in."

I could talk about these two issues at length, but that would derail me from making a point that I feel is more important.  The reason that national service has been venerated in our society, the reason that I felt proud of those silly bits of colored fabric on my chest, is because it has always been associated with the willing sacrifices, made by citizen soldiers, of their own personal interests in favor of the best interests of something else.  Those courageous few who have had the occasion and the fortitude to sacrifice their lives that their comrades-in-arms might live have often been honored with our most esteemed decorations, for the spirit of their sacrifice is the spirit of service.

In civilian America, where we have grown fat, litigious, thin-skinned, and entitled, a very different spirit presides.  This is the spirit of self-veneration.  Many of us have come to believe that we are so precious and the world is so filled with threats to our self-evident value that we have a Moral Obligation to fight against these threats.  This spirit gives rise to proclamations of "I".  "I am a Homosexual, and I will not be quiet!".  "I am a Woman and I deserve the right to fight the enemies of my country in ground combat!".  Now, I don't disagree with these proclamations on their own merits.  They are perfectly reasonable assertions in the society of the "I".  I merely submit that they are irrelevant in the spirit of National Service.

National service (in the military specifically) asks that we provide the finest soldiers we are able, as they will have to compete in the most violent possible contests with the finest soldiers of other nations, often with the very highest stakes.  And national service expects those soldiers to do what is best for a squad, or a company, or an army, or a nation rather than for the self.  In fact, in the spirit of national service the interests of the self are often relegated to the very bottom of the hierarchy of interests served.  It is this quality that builds the unassailable fortress of esprit de corps, the unbreakable bond of brothers-in-arms, and the willingness to march forward toward death and destruction which is so foreign to the spirit of the "I".

The personnel needs of the military are constantly in flux, as they mirror the real and perceived threats present in the world.  In peacetime or a "small war" the military may turn away a would-be recruit for insufficient civilian education (as one example), while in a crisis they may levy conscription without regard for educational attainment.  Frankly, if you are blind, have missing limbs, oppressive illnesses, or an irreconcilable psychological profile, the military probably doesn't have any use for you.  You may still be a wonderful, beautiful creature, and hopefully you may achieve actualization in the world ruled by the "I", but you would not be competitive enough in the contest of War.  If you are inhabited by the spirit of service, then you accept this and hold no ill will.

It is my opinion that the recent conversations about homosexuality, women, and transgender people in the military have all been driven by the spirit of "I".  The proponents of reform all seek to break the military to their vision of the future, their code of morality, and their desire to enfranchise a new group of "I's".  Whether or not this is best for the military has been subordinated to whether or not this is best for the people whom the military has historically had no use for.  If the Pentagon was shown demonstrable proof that transgender people make the finest shock infantry on the planet, then I suspect the Pentagon would actively recruit transgender people for its ground combat forces.  Likewise, if (and this is a hypothetical, not an assertion) the Pentagon believes that an all-male infantry unit is more capable than a mixed-gender unit, or an all-female unit, then we ought to leave that decision to them.

It is my opinion that if we continue to subordinate national service to the spirit of "I", then our military will be weakened.  I think we ought to try to avoid this.  Not at any cost, but certainly at the cost of some hurt feelings and temper tantrums.  Consider, in closing, the apex predator of the society of "I".  S/he is a highly paid corporate executive, constantly evaluating her/his own wealth and how best to increase it.  S/he will abandon any post at the drop of a hat and cross the street to work for a competitor if s/he judges that to be in her/his best interests.  Is this a model we wish to impose on our military leaders?

I am at peace with our differences.

I want to talk about reality tunnels. I’ll start with an example which collapses one spatial dimension in order to make the visualization simpler. Imagine a tunnel bored into a mountain. It may twist and turn, rise and descend, and the cross section may be wider or narrower at different points. But it is, by its nature, a contiguous void through a medium, in this case earth and rock. If we were to slice this tunnel into an infinitude of cross sections along the z-axis, we would have a set of two-dimensional shapes in the coordinate plane. Specifically, if our tunnel was perfectly cylindrical with a radius of 1 meter, our cross-sectional shapes would be unit circles. Practically, however, the walls of our tunnel would be rough and irregular and so our cross-sections will also be irregular.

Let’s place our point of view inside the tunnel, and define it such that on our 2-D coordinate plane sections our POV is at the origin. Therefore the shape on each section may be irregular, but it will necessarily enclose a region of the plane containing the origin (otherwise we would be outside the tunnel, embedded in the mountain). Now as we move back and forth on the z-axis we are viewing discrete portions of the tunnel. But if we stipulate that we are only capable of moving forward along the z-axis, and at a constant rate, then we have an analogy for the temporal dimension. So we start at the mouth of the tunnel and are drawn forward along the arrow of time, seeing each section of the tunnel for the first and last time as we go deeper and deeper.

One flaw with this model is that if we have defined the z-axis as the dimension of time, then our POV is incapable of perception in the direction of the arrow of time. We can’t see the future or the past, in other words. You could argue that we can perceive the past (backward along the arrow of time, or the negative z-axis) by remembering, but if you’ve read my other posts than you know I don’t consider memory to be reliable. So in this model at any given moment our perception is limited to a two-dimensional surface around us (eerily it has the dimensions of length and depth from our POV, not the length and breadth that we typically imagine when we think of a 2-D surface). I admit that this is hard to visualize, but set that aside, we’ll flesh it out shortly.

Now to turn this regular tunnel into a reality tunnel, two things are necessary. The first is that we replace the medium (the mountain) with the entire universe. Every location, every atom, every person and experience which exists is now the medium for our tunnel. The boring of our reality tunnel is accomplished by our experience of reality as we move along the direction of the arrow of time. Our perceptions and thoughts and emotions make up the drill bit, and the walls of the tunnel are the portions of reality which are revealed to us. So in one sense, a reality tunnel is like a super-detailed timeline of your life.

The second thing which is necessary is to boot our model from three dimensions out into the full four (x, y, and z spatial axes and the arrow of time). At any given instant we are experiencing reality in three dimensions, not two. I can’t quite visualize a 4-D tunnel, but the visualization is not necessary for conceptual understanding. Now is when things get a little wacky. Our perception of reality is informed and interpreted according to our experiences and preconceptions, so at every moment our reality is at least partially defined by our past reality. This is clearly a candidate for one of Douglas R. Hofstadter’s "strange loops".

As one simple illustration, consider a man who has become paranoid of his government. Suppose as a young man he was subject to experiences which instilled in him a fear and mistrust of powerful people and organizations. As he aged, he carried with him suspicion and presumptions of the abusiveness and corruption of government. The more he feared injustice, the more he looked for it, and the more he found it, which reinforced his presumptions. Another strange loop? The point here is that this man’s reality truly is populated by experiences of government misbehavior. So you may call him paranoid, because in your reality tunnel there have been few experiences which lead you to mistrust the government, but if you shared his reality tunnel you may well share his views. So even though there is (presumably) only one object reality which you both inhabit, its vastness and variety coupled with our meager perceptual abilities mean that we may experience wildly different realities without either of us necessarily being wrong.

I find this concept reassuring when I witness human behavior which seems incomprehensible to me, or when I wonder why I am so different from the people around me. Each of us has a reality tunnel which is infinitely complex and therefore infinitely unique. We may share similar formative experiences (i.e. sections of our tunnels may be superficially similar) such as a near-death experience, an abusive parent, the untimely death of a loved one, etc. But here’s what I find truly beautiful:

Our reality tunnels exist in actual 4-D space-time. That means, if one was to chart their own tunnel from start to present, it would track all over the Earth (or for a very select few as far as the Moon) as our location in space is inextricable from our reality. So even though our reality tunnels are infinitely more unique to us than even our fingerprints, our tunnels are constantly intersecting slightly with those of the people around us. If you and I are complete strangers eating a meal on opposite sides of a restaurant at the same time, there is a very slight overlap of reality. If we have the same waitress, I imagine her reality tunnel oscillates between ours, occasionally overlapping with both of ours, like some acid-trip Venn diagram. Now suppose we’re both strangers in a movie theater, completely engrossed in a nearly identical experience for two hours. No, make that fifty strangers sharing an experience. If it is a good movie and we’re absorbed in it, then our strange loops are suppressed and our tunnels are likely as similar as they could ever possibly be.

The thought of all of humanity constantly boring reality tunnels through space-time, and the interplay between tunnels, the coming together and falling away… we must make beautiful patterns. Commuters who take the same route to and from work at the same times every day provide repeating structural patterns while our sort of random, spur-of-the-moment impulses inject the random variability into the system. An artistic depiction that always comes to mind when I think about how these tunnels should "look" is the supernatural vector that emerges from Donnie Darko’s chest and leads him around his house in the movie (Donnie Darko, of course).

Quail, Qualia, and Quasars

Quail are fascinating birds. The quail in my neck-of-the-woods are Gambel's Quail. They are among the most garish of birds, excepting the peacock and possibly flamingo, with their ostentatious crest, their black face, red scalp, and painted breast and speckled wings. They are truly a beautiful, wonderful creation. Although adept at flight, they prefer to stay on the ground, even evading their terrestrial predators on foot, rather than taking to the wing. Quail parents can be seen with their fledglings crossing open spaces in a single file with one parent at the head of the column and the other bringing up the rear. I’ve no idea if they are monogamous, but mating pairs do appear to cooperate until their offspring are self-sufficient. Furthermore, they are exceedingly flavorful game birds. The breast meat is very dark, compared with livestock poultry, and we all know that darker meat is more succulent and flavorful.

Qualia is a plural word which is difficult to define- in fact, a quale is fundamentally impossible to express between individuals, so this should not be surprising. These are experiences that we have, but they are kind of raw experiences; purely subjective and essential. It deals with how a color looks, what a sound is like, what a food tastes like. We may assume that these are similar, identical, or wildly different between individuals. That makes me feel a little bit lonelier, truth be told. But it is a fascinating concept. It got me thinking about all the various qualia that humans may experience, and that made me want to list some of the qualia that stand out to me as being especially beautiful, terrible, primal, or otherwise noteworthy. Here is a sampling:

The warm sun on bare skin.

Wind blowing through long hair.

The weight of your relaxed body, pulled toward Earth, and pulling back.

Making passing eye contact with a stranger.

Exchanging smiles with a stranger.

Bare toes curling in warm sand.

The first taste of a cold beer on a hot day.

Reaching my hand under a cool pillow on a lazy morning.

Watching a baby utterly content in a mother’s arms.

The fury of a howling storm in the night.

The brush of a lover’s soft lips against my neck.

A dog reclining at my feet to nap.

A panhandler approaching me in a parking lot.

The acoustics of an instrument vibrating through a room.

The euphoria at the end of a hard workout.

The knot in my stomach when I talk to a pretty girl.

The sight of my own crimson blood, pumping out of a wound.

Realizing there is a spider in the shower with me.

A cat jumps onto my lap.

A shooting pain, and the subsequent realization that a scorpion has stung me.

Walking out on a stage to speak before strangers.

Finding out my lover has no use for me.

The realization that my body is deteriorating.

Plunging into a very cold lake.

This list could go on and on and on. What are some of your favorite qualia?

Quasars are some of the most powerful, impressive, energetic, and destructive engines in the universe. I am grossly simplifying here, as I am not an astronomer, but quasars are essentially supermassive black holes which are in the process of devouring their parent galaxy. They exist in terms of scales which are utterly foreign to those of us who are not mathematicians or astronomers. Our Sun is massive, approximately 332,946 times the mass of Earth. It will throw off incomprehensible amounts of energy for a total lifespan of perhaps eight billion years. The brightest known quasars consume the equivalent of one thousand suns per year, or according to Wikipedia, 600 Earths per minute. So next time you sit down and watch your 30 minute sitcom, reflect that somewhere a quasar has just obliterated nearly twenty thousand Earth masses in the same period. And we are aware of about 200,000 quasars in the known universe. And this may be a tiny fraction of the entire universe. I don’t know about you, but my perspective is definitely altered when I consider such things.

On the relationship between memory and reality

I continue to be intrigued by the concept of memory, and the phenomena of my several very brief experiences of greater memory loss. I suppose my ex-wife would also put in that I suffer from perpetual lesser memory loss, but I am not in a position to confirm or deny this. I am trepidatious about self-experimentation along these lines, because I certainly don’t want to do irreparable damage to my mind. This reluctance to risk my knowledge of self does not stem entirely from fear, but also the paradox that if I succeeded in absolving myself of all memory then my experiment would be fruitless, as I would have no memory of intentionally having done so. But as I pondered this point in the shower this morning, I stumbled upon a much more interesting idea. It’s a bit difficult to follow, so bear with me here.

As far as I’m aware, neurologists still don’t "really" understand how animal memory works. I certainly don’t. Consider these three analogues: computer memory, written language, and artwork. A computer’s Random Access Memory is, at least in my simplistic understanding, an architecture in which various bits may be recorded in different configurations. Such as 001100 010010 011110 100001 101101 110011. Therefore, we may encode any information about the past in this physical "memory" which is nothing more than a complicated arrangement of matter which we interpret according to certain protocols and consider to be reliable. A book (or scroll, or manuscript, etc) is essentially the same. We use a protocol to arrange patterns of ink on a medium which can then be revisited and reinterpreted later on, and we consider it to be reliable. Note: by reliable, I mean that we take for granted that the information accessed at a later time is unchanged/identical to the information encoded at an earlier time. We assume that our books, once completed, don’t gain or lose information as a function of time. Let’s consider artwork. A portrait or a sculpture which are meant to realistically represent an actual person to posterity are nothing more than matter arranged in a very specific manner. A painting or drawing of a person is a bit abstract, as it uses patterns of color on a two-dimensional medium to represent a three-dimensional object. A sculpture on the other hand is very straightforward- it is an effort at filling a space with an arrangement of matter in the exact same volume (or a larger/smaller scale of the volume) as the subject. These three examples demonstrate that we encode all of our information in arrangements of physical matter in varying degrees of complexity. I submit that it is likely that our animal memory works in a similar fashion. At some level, physical arrangement of neural matter comprises our ability to remember, and indeed our memories.

This hypothesis makes our notions of the world, society, and ourselves all the more unstable. If memory fails us on an individual level, our social constructs will be resilient enough to "fill in the gaps", so to speak. You may forget your name, your past, your family, etc. but there is a good chance that today (in the United States anyway) you could be identified by the authorities, introduced to your family members, and even a large portion of your past could be returned to you through the recitation of others’ memories of you, and personal artifacts such as email archives, text messages, love letters, etc. But this raises two fascinating questions.

First, what happens if everyone forgets? If we lost our manually recorded information and our neural information simultaneously as a species, then what would this mean? I’m not talking about the obvious consequences (violence, anarchy, chaos, "state of nature") but rather the more nuanced ones. Our ancient religions would cease to exist, nationalities, borders, property, histories, all would blink out of existence. Everything would be suddenly available. This is interesting because of the implications of how it would change the way we see the world, and the relationship between memory and reality. If nobody remembers something, does that change the essence of the event? Is it as "real" as something remembered?

Let’s conduct a thought experiment. I’ll repurpose one of Arthur C. Clarke’s plot devices here. Suppose an adult man uses a suspended animation device to wait for the distant future to arrive, and suppose he intends to spread misinformation and false propaganda in the future. To this end, he loads his sleeping pod with false and fictitious histories. But suppose his device malfunctions and he oversleeps, awakening in a wasteland. Eons have passed, and all trace of humanity is gone, save the man and his sleeping pod. Imagine he falls and injures his head, and loses all of his memories. He no longer has a name, no family, no nationality. In this state, is any of the man’s past "real"? All of humanity’s achievements and failures are forgotten, and no evidence exists for any of it. Humanity has passed on, and left no legacy.

Now suppose our man discovers his cargo of lies and proceeds to thoroughly "educate" himself, believing that the histories are honest ones. Now in his mind exists a framework of the past which is entirely false and yet he believes it to be accurate. Neither the actual history nor the false have left any evidence of their veracity on the face of Earth. So the only difference between the two is that one, which happened, will never be known again, and the other, which never happened, will be remembered and pondered for a time, and may even serve to influence the actions of the man and thereby influence his present reality. So the true history doesn’t even exist, except in a very obscure sense in which it exists in your and my mind, as outside observers of the universe. But if we are true to the thought experiment, we must consider that we don’t exist, so there is no mind to assign the value of "false" to the man’s history books.  And what does it mean to say that something happened?  If no evidence of the event in question exists and no person can attest to it, then I'm not sure we can make the claim that it is a part of reality.

For example, I could imagine a story which is extremely likely to have occurred, but which I have no evidence of and which unquestionably originated in my creative mind.  Let's try: once upon a time, long before humans were recording history, there was a great storm which raged, unabated, for several weeks and culminated in a great volcanic eruption.  Once the ash had settled, the storm broke and tranquility returned to the region.  This story is essentially meaningless, but most people would be more surprised to learn that it hadn't transpired at some place, at some time, than that it had.  Of course we have no means to investigate whether it occurred.

Anyway, I’ll stop before this gets any more absurd. I believe this topic falls under the umbrella of ontology, possibly epistemology. Both of which are subtopics of metaphysics, which is probably my favorite human discipline.

--EDIT  2015.07.10--
I was visiting a friend recently, and we spent a few boozy nights reminiscing the days of our youth and all of the adventures we had.  We each reminded the other of events and people which had been forgotten in the intervening years.  At one point I was regaling him with a story from my time in the Fertile Crescent and (I'd had several beers) I mixed up a couple of names.  As I was thinking about it that night in bed, about all the bizarre and surreal experiences I've had and the many which I have tried to not think about over the years.  It occurred to me that even though I probably remembered the gist of the story accurately, I had misremembered someone's name, and would have gone on blindly had my friend not pointed it out.  Isn't it possible, even likely, that I have misremembered other details from the story?  Was I there at all?  Did it happen to me?  How could I possibly know?

On this same visit I went to a botanical garden with my friend and his family and, as we were walking through the rattlesnake exhibit, I made an offhand remark to his wife about rattlesnakes and our deeply-rooted evolutionary fear of them.  She asked me how close I had ever been to a rattlesnake.  I thought about it for a moment, and came up blank.  Surely, growing up in the Sonoran Desert, I had had a close call once or twice.  Nothing.  My next thought was that I remember my dad having killed a few that I know of.  I was stunned.  I told her I didn't know, maybe five feet or so, and that I had never had occasion to kill one.  I felt rather sheepish, but that's life.  I feel sheepish a few times a week, probably.

Several days later, I remembered a chapter from my adolescence.  A good friend in high school had taken me along a few times when he went with his little brother out to Wickenburg to capture rattlesnakes.  These two had literally dozens if not scores of captive snakes in their house, many of which were venomous.  We (by which I mean they) had captured numerous sidewinders and diamondbacks on our expeditions and transported them back to their house.  Unless, of course, that is illegal in which case it never happened.  I don't specifically recall ever handling the captive vipers, but I would bet that I at least touched them.  I was that kind of stupid back then.

So my point is, in a moment of inquisition, I had failed to access this memory which should have been a prominent one as it was fun, dangerous, exciting, and possibly illegal.  This begs the question, what else have I forgotten?  What else have I misremembered?

I just fixed everything...

You'll find a new feature on the Exchange, located down the Rabbit Hole to the right.  It contains the first few items in my ongoing efforts to fix the universe.  Today I just laid out some suggestions for fixing the way in which we fill the office of the most powerful human in the Solar System.  If you have any suggestions for fixing or improving something, please submit it.  If you think I got something wrong, please let me know.
Thanks!

An open letter to God

Dear God,

WHAT THE FUCK?

Sincerely,
me

The Dreamer's Boon

I cannot say with any certainty how it came to be that humans dream. Whether dreams provide some benefit which has caused dreamers to be selected for in the evolutionary process, or whether they are an unintended and neutral side effect of some other physiological system is still an open question for the few scientists who deign to study the phenomenon of dreaming. It is an interesting question, to be sure, but not one whose answer is either necessary or sufficient to bestow value on the experience of dreaming. I speak, of course, merely with the authority of the experiences of a single individual out of an entire species; I have never experienced the dreams of another, nor read a very great number of recounted dreams. That being said, I have no reason to believe that my experiences while dreaming are not representative of the experiences of humanity as a whole, save perhaps that I have invested a small amount of time and energy in studying, contemplating, and practicing dreaming.

Dreams are an opportunity to experience things which are impossible or impractical in the waking reality, and with the cultivation of certain skills, dreams can become a venue for creating, destroying, and delighting in literally anything you can imagine. But even without taking control of your dreams, the "natural" dreams which we experience are fascinating, thrilling, incredibly bizarre, and occasionally even inspiring. All sorts of creative work and innovation have been attributed to inspiration encountered during dreams. It is my opinion that an enjoyable dream is far more desirable than even the best-made movies. Dreams also happen to cost nothing, and as far as the time investment is concerned there is a double payoff. You’re going to be sleeping anyway, so taking full advantage of your dreams does not result in any loss of "refreshing" sleep. It is quite literally found time. Furthermore, the experience of the passage of time in a dream is subject to a certain distortion: a dream seeming to last hours may have occurred in mere minutes according to waking reality. As a result, in my opinion, not taking advantage of these opportunities for recreation and fulfillment is the greatest form of wastefulness. Unless of course you are racing to get to your natural death with the fewest possible enjoyable experiences along the way, in which case you are a social anomaly.

Many Americans spend hours a day watching television programs, which are diluted to some extent by advertising. If one is willing to spend one’s leisure time in this way, then what possible excuse could one find for not putting tremendous value on dreaming? I think the real cause of a lack of avid dreamers is simply the lack of cultural acknowledgement that dreams can be a source of enrichment in our lives. Another contributing factor is the rather baffling and frustrating default of most human brains of completely erasing all memory of a past night’s dreams within moments of awakening. This can be overcome with practice and discipline, but most people probably never even consider this as a possibility. Indeed, many people sincerely believe that most nights they have no dreams at all, but sleep laboratory studies have shown this to be false. These subjects merely forget their dreams immediately upon awakening.

I don’t often attach supernatural or religious meaning to the measurable phenomena of daily life, but I must admit that the more I consider the personal value that is available to every human in the form of their dreams, the more plausible it seems that dreams are a sort of gift to us- you may be mistreated, oppressed, and marginalized during your waking hours, but every person has an opportunity to become a King, a cosmic explorer, a rock star, or a superhero, or whatever else they fancy on a nightly basis. I find this very nearly parallel to the questionable promises made by certain religions whereby the most downtrodden are promised just rewards in the afterlife, so it is not necessary to resist the status quo while alive. The greatest difference is that while this promise is made for the unknowable afterlife, and taken on faith, the rewards of dreaming may be collected as frequently as one may find the conditions necessary for sleep. If this is a gift, what a gift! And if not, what a happy stroke of circumstance.

One of the simplest and most effective feedback mechanisms that we can use to improve our dream control and dream recall is to talk about this phenomenon with other people who are equally excited and motivated to tap into this resource. To this end, I invite you to leave me a comment or a message if this possibility intrigues you, or if you are an accomplished lucid dreamer looking for someone to share ideas or experiences with. Happy dreaming!

EDIT---------------------------------------------------------------

I happened to listen to a podcast yesterday which discussed, in part, the human body's need for ample sleep.  It was a very interesting topic, and it led me to a thought that hadn't occurred to me before.  It follows:

Biologists and psychologists tell us that getting sufficient sleep is critical to functioning at our peak levels of efficiency, yet it is fairly easy to merely get by with insufficient sleep.  It should be obvious that the pressures and demands of society tempt us to reduce the number of hours that we sleep at night in order to free up time for other activities.  Perhaps dreams have evolved with us in order to incentivize us to get enough sleep?  In other words, the enjoyable dreams we experience during sleep can transform our view of sleeping from an impediment to a reward, and thereby increase our prioritization of the act.  This in turn would make us healthier, mentally sharper, and more efficient throughout the day.

Corrollary to Physical Beauty

This posting serves as a corollary to a posting from 2014.  Find it here.

I've often thought, and even occasionally commented, that a remarkably beautiful woman is likely to be utterly vapid and uninteresting.  It seems to me that a person, especially a woman, who can rely on her physical charm and attractiveness will not develop the same depth of personality as a person, especially a woman, who is forced to cope with life’s challenges without the aid of beauty.  Not only does such a person face the obvious impediments to coupling that characterize the frustrated romances of us mere mortals, which has certainly given me a depth of personality to match the depth of my emotional scarring, but such a person also has to deal with life's non-romantic challenges without the near-universal tools of overt and implied sexuality.

Is depth of personality an attribute directly related to attractiveness?  Or can a woman with no psychological baggage whatsoever be as intriguing as an equally physically attractive woman with a more three-dimensional character?  I think my personal preference runs to the more “developed” personalities, although my experience with women is limited, and with attractive women much more so.

This train of thought led me to another interesting consideration.  Are certain major personality traits correlated with physical desirability? For instance, is an exceedingly handsome young man less likely to voluntarily risk physical damage than a young man whose looks have never served his interests?  Male military courage is clearly more prevalent in some men than others, and I’ve no doubt that there are many factors which determine its presence or absence, but I wonder if the physically attractive are somewhat more loathe to risk death and dismemberment than the more homely among us.  Especially considering the prevailing idea that young men behave as though they believe they are invincible, or at least they don't seem to seriously consider the possibility of death.

So I submit that amongst young men who are afflicted with this fearlessness of death, but who are keenly aware of the likelihood of mutilation, the handsome ones have much more to lose in a risky situation (such as combat) than do their less-handsome peers.  Furthermore, a handsome young man who is mutilated probably becomes less attractive to the female gender, but an unattractive young man may actually experience an increase in his sexual appeal from certain scars and injuries (although certainly not from all).  A handsome face which becomes scarred is seen as a tragedy, but a homely face that becomes scarred carries an air of danger, adventure, toughness, etc., all of which may be attractors of certain women.

Any thoughts or experiences to share?

War Story

     In a faraway land where the language was strange and the customs foreign, there was war.  Civil strife, violence, murder and hatred prowled the streets of a once-great city, and the people lived in fear.  When war began its rampage and established its tyranny over the land, it attracted soldiers from far and wide.  You see, soldiers are drawn to war like moths to a flame. 

      

     One of the soldiers was a young man who had come to the war with a desire to fight for the cause of good, to stand against evil, and so to become a hero.  It would not be until much later in his life that he would come to understand that this cause was not good, and that heroes are rarely born of violence.

     The Soldier lived in a fort, an imposing structure made of solid concrete, taller than any nearby buildings, and surrounded with a wall and protected by rooftop fighting positions.  He spent a great deal of time patrolling the old city and a great deal of time standing on guard duty on the roof and at the gate.  What little time remained to him, he spent sleeping.

     When the Soldier was guarding the gate, he would often have a visitor; immediately outside the wall of the fort lived a family with a young daughter who made money for her family by taking the soldiers’ money to the market and returning with bread, cheese and chicken so that they had something to eat during their interminable guard duty.  The little girl spoke only a few words of the soldiers’ language, namely “bread”, “chicken”, and the numbers one and five, which were the respective prices she charged in the soldiers’ currency.

     At first the Soldier didn’t trust the girl to bring him food.  When she approached the gate he would assume his most menacing aspect and shoo her away with a brusque command in her own tongue.  He was worried that any food she brought may be poisoned, or at least unsanitary.  To a lesser degree he worried that she’d carry off his money and never return.  But as the war ground on, and his daily exposure to risk accumulated toward something more and more like certain death, the Soldier decided that some warm, fresh-baked bread would be a nice change of pace from the preserved rations he’d been eating for months, and he felt less and less attached to the money he was being paid to expose himself to the dangers of the old city.  So the next time the girl cautiously approached the gate, the Soldier beckoned her to approach.

     She eagerly jogged toward him until she was only a few paces away, then she slowed her pace, displaying some anxiety at being so close to the exotic-looking soldier.  He was wearing an easy smile for the first time she’d ever seen, but his black sunglasses, heavy-looking armor, and immaculate black rifle still gave him a menacing demeanor.  The Soldier asked for bread, the girl asked for “one”, and the Soldier pulled a piece of money from his wallet and handed it over to her.

     She brought the bread and cheese back a quarter-hour later, and the transaction was complete.  The Soldier enjoyed the first fresh bread he’d had in months, and decided then and there that he’d buy bread from the girl at every opportunity.  The Soldier didn’t guard the gate every day, and the girl didn’t come every time the Soldier was at the gate, but they became familiar in time.  The Soldier, preoccupied with thoughts of home and trying to cope with the stress of war, never thought to ask the girl’s name though she would try to pronounce the name stitched onto his armor every time she saw him.

     The little girl had a pet dog.  The dog was a pitiful thing, small, grey, and dirty.  He looked like an old, discarded mop head.  When the little girl would come to the gate her dog would mount the wall by her house and run back and forth, carefree and oblivious to the human conflict playing out around him.  When the Soldier would point at the dog, the little girl would smile knowingly and just say, “Eshwe,” as one might when saying, “silly dog.”

     The Soldier didn’t know if Eshwe was the dog’s name, or if it just meant “dog”, or something else entirely, but it was one more piece of mutual language that they shared.  Bread, chicken, one, five, and Eshwe.  These made up the entirety of their verbal communication.  These, and the girl’s tortured efforts at reading the Soldier’s name.

     The Soldier’s first brush with death came soon enough.  His enemies launched a salvo of rockets at the fort, and their aim was respectable.  All but two of the rockets hit their mark, and the imposing concrete fort shuddered violently under the assault.  The perimeter wall was reduced to rubble in one spot by a direct hit, the armored vehicle at the entrance was damaged by a near miss, and the building itself was cracked and aflame.

     The soldiers responded grimly, quickly donning their gear and loading their murderous weaponry, heading out into the billowing smoke and dust to repel any further assault on their home.  Some climbed into the choking clouds of toxic smoke to put out the growing inferno which threatened to dispossess them of their meager property and comfort in this strange land. Amidst the chaos and bitter resentment, the Soldier realized that one of the two rockets which had fallen short of the fort had impacted the house of the little girl, just outside the wall of the fort.  The little girl’s home was a ruin of smoke and shattered concrete.

     The Soldier was directed to help move the crippled vehicle back from the gate to the main entry of the building, as the perimeter was now compromised.  In some distant corner of his mind he was lamenting the carnage which he imagined must exist inside the collapsed and broken home of the girl.  He wondered how his assailants would feel if they knew they had just murdered a little girl and the dog she called “Eshwe”, without killing any of the soldiers whom they were targeting.

     That afternoon passed without further incident for the soldiers.  They were thirsty for retribution, but no enemies dared assault them in their stronghold, even in its vulnerable state.  That is not to say that there was no more death in the city that day, but the soldiers of the fort neither inflicted nor suffered any further violence.   After life had returned to something resembling normalcy and all the soldiers were talking about their brush with eternity, one of the men told the Soldier that while standing guard he had witnessed the rocket launch in the distance, seen the projectiles streaking loudly through the stifling afternoon air, and witnessed in a moment of bizarre absurdity the dog Eshwe take off running at full speed away from the impending calamity.  He had been seen in the area since the disaster, alive and well, if a little bit dirtier.

     A week or two later the little girl and her family returned as well, and the Soldier was comforted in the knowledge that the bloodthirsty specter of war had been denied these lives.  It was many years before the Soldier realized to his chagrin that of course the girl and her family had survived.  They were forewarned about the attack, and had made sure to not be home during a prescribed few days.  And of course the family hadn’t warned the soldiers in their concrete fort.  Such is war.  But even so, many years later, surrounded by peace and all the trappings of civilian life the Soldier can’t help but smile to think of Eshwe, running as fast as his legs would carry him, compelled by some invisible force to escape from death itself.

Careful now...

I awoke in the middle of the night last night with another of my occasional crises of personal identity.  In the past, I have awoken with a temporary amnesia affecting all knowledge of myself and the location in which I am sleeping.  These experiences only last several seconds, but they are highly impactful.  Last night’s occurrence was somewhat different.  The information regarding my history and present disposition were readily available to me, only I didn’t feel an ownership of them.  I felt like there was this well-defined set of details that I was supposed to step into, like a harness fixed to a plow.  And the details were mostly negative: problems, challenges, mistakes, etc.  And responsibilities.  I have a daughter whose requirements overshadow every waking moment of my life, and most of the moments of my near future.

This crisis passed in much the same way as the others have; that is to say, it didn’t last too long.  But the lingering questions are as pervasive as ever.  What is identity?  What is self?  It seems like there must be some sort of supernatural element to our nature, a soul if you will, otherwise our entire Human world, social structure, history, everything is all built on a collective memory of the species.  Our past deeds, crimes and accomplishments, jobs, our addresses, our names and family members, they all persist only because we remember them.  And memory itself is not well understood, except of course for the fact that it is unreliable.

So this morning I put on my Harness, made my lunch and my daughter’s lunch, kissed her goodbye, and headed out the door for work.  For what I remember to be my workplace.  As far as I can tell, they recognize me here.