I have to take my hat off to Wired Magazine. I don’t have a subscription yet, but in doing internet research on a variety of topics, I’m often led to articles in Wired. If it’s about science or technology and its going to make a mark on the way we live, those Wired folk seem to be on it. Anyway, here’s a link to an article on “The Big Unanswered Questions”. Quite interesting. (No, I wasn’t paid to put this up. Just thought I’d give them a plug for making some good content available for free on the net.)

Another interesting magazine article: in the May Atlantic, there’s an article about homosexuality in Saudi Arabia. Actually, what I just said is not fully accurate. In fact, the article tells you about the many heterosexuals doing the homosexual thing in the desert kingdom. It sounds like what went on in the ancient Greco-Roman world, back in the time of the Bible; other than Mohammad and petrochemicals, things probably haven’t changed much in Arabia since then. So, if you want to know what St. Paul was ranting about with regard to same-sex perversions, read that article. More evidence that the anti-gay Bible thumpers are just plain wrong.

The Wisdom of the East: Here in the USA and also in Europe, it’s been rather fashionable over the past 10 to 20 years for “enlightened spiritual seekers” like myself to explore the ways of the East. I’m thinking here about Zen, Taoism, Nikkei Buddhism and Soka Gakkai, maybe a few other movements. The question is, if we think those easterners are so wise about the soul, do we agree with their wisdom about the body? And yes, I’m alluding here to sex. Just how does the far East feel about sex? Does their (alleged) cosmic wisdom translate into a body appreciation and a sexual openness that will appeal to sex-fixated westerners?

I saw a little article on the NPR web site about a worldwide study of people over 40 years old, comparing attitudes about sex between various nations(in the comparative sense, NOT the literal sense — for those of you with dirty minds!). The bottom line is that the USA seems to give high regard to sex, whereas Japan and China like it the least. And by quite a wide margin! There were three main questions in the survey. The first question was about the physical pleasure derived from sex. In the USA, 73% of men and 65% of women gave positive responses. In China, the comparative numbers were 25% and 24%; and worse yet was Japan, coming in at 18% and 10%, respectively.

So OK, the far East doesn’t get much of a shiver out of it. But maybe they still find it emotionally satisfying. But no, alas. Regarding the emotional pleasure of sexuality, 77% of men in the USA gave it a thumbs up, and 68% of women did the same. In China, the male and female numbers were 36% and 33%. Once again, Japan was even less impressed: only 24% of men and 16% of women had positive attitudes about the emotional side of sex.

The third question regarded the overall important to life of sex. And the pattern is quite predictable, although somewhat lower in the USA than you might think. In the US, 37% of men and 28% of women said that sex was either extremely important or very important. In China, the numbers were 29% and 18%. And of course, those sexually cynical Japanese had to go even lower, 28% and 12%. As a footnote, Israelis seems to have the most positive attitudes toward sex; their male / female numbers are 64% and 53%, respectively. Brazilian men hit 75%, but their women are comparative prudes at 46%.

This survey focused on people 40 and above, and those folk are not the ones knocking out the babies, for the most part. To get a sense of whether younger Japanese and Chinese enjoy their sex, I took a look at comparative birth rates per 1000. In the USA, the rate is 14.14%. Japan clearly comes in lower, at 9.37%. China isn’t far behind the USA, at 13.25%. However, the Chinese birth rate probably reflects the whole country better than the survey does. I would suspect that a sex satisfaction survey in China focused disproportionately on the cities and wealthier regions, not on the farms way out in the hinterlands. In those regions, they still need to knock out kids as farm hands and to compensate for shorter life spans. To get a better sense of what goes on in urbanized China, we can look to the stats for Hong Kong and Macau: 7.3% and 8.5%, respectively.

So yea, it does appear that when far Easterners live in a socio-economic environment similar to what Americans are used to, sex isn’t quite the big deal that it is in “the States”. And I can’t help but wonder if that might be a good thing. I myself get tired of all the childish sexual innuendoes in American entertainment, all the sexual enticements in commercial advertisements, and the strong assumption here that if a man and woman are left alone, they’re gonna do it. Perhaps the prudish social assumptions of the 1950’s were unrealistic. But the pendulum shot too far the other way during the American cultural revolution of the late 60’s, fueled by a demographic bulge of horny teens and 20-somethings (i.e., the Baby Boom). Since then, America has gotten older, but the culture and entertainment makers seem to think that we’re still in the summer of love (or the boy’s locker room). What a yucky thought: graying baby-boom people stuck in a cotton candy paradise, thinking that they’re still sexy, thinking that sex is (still) what life is all about.

Perhaps it’s time to throw some far-Eastern cold water on to that notion. Perhaps Zen and the Tao are part of an overall presumption that sees sexuality for what it really is: a very mixed blessing, something that can be very good in certain settings, and yet can very bad in others; something that can deliver you to the gates of heaven, but also to the shackles of boredom; something that can heal, but which all too often hurts; something that can be truth, but is more often a delusion. As with all things, wisdom is the key to breaking the paradox. But here in America, wisdom is at a low ebb right now.

I was updating the consciousness section of my website over the weekend, and I got to thinking about how we actually experience death most every day. Death in the sense of no consciousness, not in the sense of no living body. But hey, if you had a living body and no consciousness, then what good would it do you? The point is, every night when we sleep, we’re completely gone for a few hours (the other slumbering hours are spent dreaming, which is a form of consciousness). And if we need to go under anesthesia for a medical procedure, same deal. For a few hours, we just aren’t.

But we come back from these mini-deaths when our body awakens and the neuron structures critical to consciousness start firing again. Every night when we go to sleep, we trust that our memory structures will properly restore us intact, with the same personality and the same personal history and the same personal qualities, by the time that morning light shines (or even before, during our dreaming phases). Pretty amazing when you think about it. We give in to a death-like state, with the hope that a physical structure (i.e., that comprising our bodies and brains) is ready and waiting to re-activate our conscious lives in a few hours.

This also makes me think about the Star Trek Transporter scenario. What if, while you were in “dead sleep”, your body was destroyed, but replaced by an exact copy, all charged up and ready to go, but in a completely different place? Or even worse – what if your original body was intact, but there was also a copy? Would you split into two? Two human beings with exactly the same memories and experiences up to a certain point in time (i.e., the date of the copy)?

Right now, this is not a problem. There is no practical way of gaining all the information needed from your existing body, then using it as a blueprint to build a “new you”. Information has a cost, and the cost right now is way too high; it’s beyond what our science can do. But that doesn’t mean that it’s completely impossible, that it will never be possible.

If anyone could intelligently imagine an afterlife granted by a divine, omnipresent power, this would need to be the scenario or principle by which it would take place. That power would need be able to gather all of the information necessary to build an exact copy of the processes and states in your brain at the time of death (or even before, as the actual brain may have experienced severe decay before death, as with Alzheimer’s Disease). “The power” would then need to use that information to establish a working copy of your brain processes in some energy and information exchange medium. Voila, you would be – resurrected.

OK, it’s a long shot. But given that it’s Easter Sunday, well . . . . . I’ll leave it at that for now.

I was listening to a CD lecture about the Old Testament the other day, and the topic was the food and purity laws, in Leviticus and other books. Ugh, booh, thumbs down. That’s how most modern folk feel about ancient purity codes. But to be charitable, we say that perhaps they had a good reason at the time. E.g., don’t eat pigs because they cause trichinosis when not cooked right, or shellfish gets infected by poisonous bacteria very quickly.

But the lecturer made a good counterpoint, by referring to an article written by anthropologist Mary Douglas. Dr. Douglas points out that these ancient codes and rituals cannot be explained as having some practical purpose at the time (even if they incidentally did). No, what was really going on was an ancient culture’s way of dealing with an unpredictable world, dealing with the fact that we don’t fully understand the world. Nothing gets people more upset than strangeness (recall that great song by Jim Morrison and the Doors: “people are strange, when you’re a stranger, faces look ugly when you’re alone”). One way that ancient people dealt with strangeness was to come up with strict laws with strict rules and categories. This is right, anything else is wrong. If it’s not expected, it’s not good, if it doesn’t fit into the way we understand the world, stay away from it. Pigs have cloven hoofs but don’t chew cud, so they’re strange. Shellfish are water creatures without fins. Strange stuff. So don’t mess with it.

[This also explains the Biblical injunctions against homosexuality. It wasn’t what the majority would do, sexually. We now know that about 1 in 25 people have the urge for their own gender. Four percent is definitely a minority. Since ancient people couldn’t understand it, they called it strange and banned it. As though it were in fact bannable.]

In modern times, we have science and know a lot more about stuff. We have much more detailed ways of classifying and understanding things. So we don’t need to adopt such “overspecifications” against things such as shellfish, which might in fact be OK for us (given modern refrigeration). Hopefully, homosexuality is coming out of the social fear zone, and into the “we understand it, nothing to fear” region. But, Dr. Douglas pointed out that we modern folk here in the USA and Western Europe still have some hang-ups about things being in the right place. One example she cited was dirt. Suburban people go out of their way to keep dirt and insects out of their houses. They say this is unhealthy. But actually, most dirt and most insects won’t hurt you (but yes, roaches can spread disease; they remain unwelcome).

So, I was sweeping my kitchen floor this morning, and I pondered the fact that the linoleum is old and is permanently dirty. Most people (including my brother) don’t like this. But hey, so long as there aren’t any mice or black widow spiders around, it’s fine by me. Some dirt, some dust, some leaves, some beetles or grey spiders – what’s the problem?

Well, the ancient closed-mindedness missed a lot of things. The old purity laws didn’t allow the mixing of fabrics, like wool and linen. Today, just about everything we wear is a mix of fabrics. It’s a “best of both worlds” thing to us. But still, I will admit, there are still times and places where categories may be good, and category confusion may be bad. Cops do need to be tough and hard when dealing with bad guys. It’s good for our progeny that women assume nurturing roles with children (although men admittedly also need to help out in that regard). It’s good to teach the 95% of kids who are heterosexual that homosexuality is not evil, but not good to imply that they’re free to experiment with it. Doctors do need to be authoritative (much as I hate that some times), and teachers do need to take the attitude that they know more than their students. Categories still play a role in the functioning of society.

Footnote: I once tried to teach an economic class as a one-day substitute for my boss, who was an adjunct college professor. I totally bombed out. I thought I knew the materials, but when the kids started asking questions, I completely lost my balance and was reduced to a blithering idiot. My boss must have gotten complaints from the kids, as he never had me do that again; and just as well, I figured.

The main sin of the ancient Biblical Jews was closed-mindedness. Leviticus assumes that the community leaders know how the world should be broken down, and thus have enough authority to condemn various things (including all homosexuals; women didn’t do so well either, if they went “outside the box” in their behavior). Perhaps today we go too far the other way at times. As various thinkers have said, it’s all in finding the right balance; i.e., Aristotle’s Golden Mean.

It’s springtime once again, and it seems like a good time to think about sex. Of course, you young folk out there might say “don’t think about it, just do it!” Yes, however . . . . you’ll be old some day, and you may then come to realize just how much of a delusion sex can be, once you can finally free your mind from the grip of your hormones. As Sophocles said, when age takes the passions away from you, “it is like escaping from the bondage of a raging madman.” But let me be fair about it; if sex leads to true love – and that does occasionally happen – well, then perhaps the charade is worth it. But just as it’s the sun’s rays being reflected, and not the moon itself that lights up the night, the promise of sex is ultimately love. The reality of sex without love is just as barren as the lunar craters.

Anyway, we children of the 1960s turned sex into both a playground and an imagined biological necessity, thanks to the technology and social currents of the times – e.g., birth control, abortion rights and the substitution of psychology for religion. We converted sex into a birthright and a marketing tool. Whooppeeee.

Until perhaps the mid-70s, some old-tyme religion people still lectured that sex was something to be careful with, something that can bring forth the worst of life’s moments as well as the best. But before long, the “free love” ethos had won the day. Not even the most fire-breathing of religious preachers would dare warn their congregations any more about the pitfalls of indiscriminate sexuality. You wouldn’t have a congregation for very long if you did.

The ancient Greeks saw past the thrill (which, as Lord Chesterfield famously noted, is fleeting), in their better moments anyway. They celebrated sex as the source of our species’ renewal, and yet feared it as a source of destruction and death. For example, Sophocles’ fellow tragedian Euripides told a story of Medea and Jason (of Argonauts fame). Medea fell in love with Jason and helped him through his various adventures and battles. Her clairvoyance and herbal potions got him out of some tight situations. And yet, wouldn’t ya know it, Jason decided that trusty old Medea just wasn’t too exciting anymore, and took up with some bimbo (i.e., King Creon’s daughter; ah yes, power and wealth are definitely aphrodisiacs). Well, Medea was still holding the torch for Jason and got into a fit about it. How to avenge such betrayal? She decided to kill their sons. That’ll fix Jason.

The free love people might have responded as follows: “oh come on, that was just an old Greek tale; once we get over our hangups, sex is just as harmless as a teddy bear”. Yea, well – we’re living in a “post-hungup” world, and yet the dark side of sexuality keeps on coming thru (aside from the monkey-wrench that nature threw at “free love”, i.e. AIDS). There’s still way too much rape and domestic violence, mostly perpetrated by men. But even women sometimes show forth their Medea-like qualities. Recently, a jilted woman threatened to kill her rival – which wouldn’t have made the news, but for the setting in which it took place. That setting was the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — the bastion of science, rationality and military discipline. Yes, I’m talking about Lisa Nowak, the Space Shuttle veteran who drove 900 miles with a diaper, a knife, a BB gun and some pepper spray, to take on her rival (Air Force Captain Colleen Shipman). When you see the astronauts on TV, floating around up in the heavens, all middle-American and laughing at clean jokes and talking their techie lingo with cool precision, you say wow, this is truly the victory of rationality. These folk are absolutely in control. NASA has obviously picked the coolest of the coolest. Roger that.

But the dark side of sexual passion has finally gotten past the gates of NASA. Bottom line: I think that kids still need to be lectured by adults about that dark side, even though doing so instantly crashes the standing of any such adult in the eyes of today’s youth. It would take guts to speak up, because kids seem to be running the world these days. Their likes and dislikes certainly drive our consumer-oriented economy. And I’ll be the first to admit – I’m not gonna stop the next gaggle of 15 year olds I see walking down my street on a warm spring evening to enlighten them with tales of argonauts and astronauts. No one can do it alone. But parents and teachers and clergypeople who aren’t Christian or Islamic nutcases should really try to explain the two-sidedness of sexuality to young folk. Perhaps a few of them might benefit, even if the majority would just get a laugh out of it.

I was swapping thoughts the other day with my correspondent from Illinois (Dr. Mary S.) regarding paranormal psychic powers like clairvoyance, telepathy and precognition. (Let’s not even get into spoon bending and out-of-body experiences right now, OK?). Do they really exist? Well, attempts to scientifically document such abilities have generally failed. Research psychologist Susan Blackmore, who spent a lot of time studying the paranormal, concludes that there probably are no paranormal phenomena.

As a guy with much regard for the scientific approach, I give a lot of credence to Dr. Blackmore. She allegedly started her career with a positive mindset towards ESP and its like, and hoped that she might actually settle the question in a positive fashion. But she eventually concluded that it just wasn’t meant to be.

I myself think that ESP and mindreading and clairvoyance are mostly a matter of people seeking attention or trying to hustle a few bucks. I remember Jeane Dixon, who was popular when I was still a kid; the local paper ran a weekly column with her cryptic predictions. She got lucky about JFK’s assassination, but after that she forecast that Jesus Christ was coming back in the 1980s, somewhere in India or the Middle East. Well, still no sign of that big reunion tour taking place. So, for the most part I don’t take claims of paranormal abilities too seriously.

However . . . . I’m not 100% sure that there’s absolutely nothing to it. As Mary and I concluded, it is possible that some as yet undocumented phenomenon of nature could occur very randomly and sporadically, and thus be impossible to capture by scientific method. We pondered the Flatland scenario (recall Edward Abbot’s classic book) of a 2-dimensional world with living beings having different geometric shapes (circles, squares, triangles, hexagons, etc.). Suppose their flat world occasionally encountered our 3-D world? Well, stuff would appear to them, then disappear, then magically reappear somewhere else. They wouldn’t have the means to document and understand what was happening; it couldn’t be reliably reproduced or observed by them. Thus, the more scientific Flatlanders would conclude that these disappearing and reappearing things weren’t real; they were just someone’s hallucinations.

So what if psychic phenomenon (or some of them, anyway) are actually like that – caused by some unreliable, rare, randomly occurring interaction between our known world, and some physical laws we haven’t yet come to grips with? This is a far-fetched thought. But actually, you can’t completely dismiss it. The reason that I give it any regard is that I‘ve had 3 or 4 “funny feelings” myself over the course of my life. I knew something was going to happen and it turned out to be right. These weren’t very profound predictions on my part. Just simple stuff, like “my cousin and his parents are coming over to visit us right now”. These mostly happened when I was younger. Can’t say I’ve had such a feeling in the last 5 or 6 years.

Well, skeptics would ask me, how often did you have such a feeling and it turned out to be wrong? Yea, good point. I honestly don’t remember having a “funny feeling in the mind” and then being wrong about it. But I probably wouldn’t remember it, unless it were vindicated. We tend to remember the successes, not the failures.

Mary suggested that perhaps a new idea from physics about the universe being “holographic” in nature would support ESP, given that it more-or-less ties everything in the universe together. OK, here’s what I’ve heard about that, mostly from a Scientific American article. Basically, the hologram idea / hypothesis arose from the study of black holes, including Stephen Hawking’s work. It turns out that the entropy (i.e., state of organization versus decay and randomness) of black holes depends more closely on the surface area of the black hole, versus its volume as originally expected. Entropy is tied at the hip to the more formal, scientific definitions of “information”. Information is the opposite of entropy – organization can carry information, while disorganization cannot. E.g., a metal key is organized in such a way that it can open a lock. A pile of rust cannot do that. The key carries information, the disorganized rust does not. When the key rusts, its entropy increases, and its information decreases. Eventually it can no longer open the lock, as its information is gone.

Where does the hologram analogy to a black hole come from? Well, a hologram is a special 2-dimensional surface that has certain added information, such that when light is reflected from it to an “interacting system”, say a human being with normal eyesight, the added information gives the impression that the image is actually of a 3D object, not of a flat plane. The hologram’s “extra dimension” information is packed into its flat surface area.

Well, for a black hole, the maximum amount of organization it can have (versus a state of random decay; like rust compared against a metal key), is tied to how much surface area it has. However, the information conveyed through this “organization” relates to all 3 dimensions of the black hole. Thus, 2 dimensions tell you about all 3 dimensions. I don’t totally understand it, but the ultimate idea is that information may be a fundamental characteristic of the universe, as much as space, matter, energy and time are.

It’s thus imaginable that information (as the basic stuff of reality) is painted on a 3-dimentional “surface membrane” (I use the word “membrane” to mean any boundary to a multi-dimensional reality; the membrane boundary of a 2D plane is a set of 1D lines; the boundary of a 3D object is a set of 2D planes; thus, a 4D reality has a 3D “membrane”; etc.). As such, 3 dimensions would then give us the experience of our familiar 4-dimensional spacetime. But, even more exciting: the “holograph equivalence” theorists note that the 4-dimensional reality we know of, plus “information”, may in fact be the stage for a 5 dimensional reality. In such a model, the lower-dimensional world has particles and forces and all kinds of perturbations, whereas the higher-dimensional side of reality is symmetric and undisturbed. Could ESP and such be, in certain instances, just another 4-D information disturbance that a 5-dimension “background reality” can cause or be caused by? Just remember, a lot can be done with an extra dimension . . . .

To go out on a limb even further: a thinker named Ed Fredkin has been saying something similar about the centrality of information, though not from the perspective of black holes. Fredkin says that the Universe, at bottom, is a computer; like a computer, the most important thing is information, i.e. the program that makes a computer run. At bottom, the deepest level of reality is information – for both computers, in an operational sense, and for our universe, in an ontological sense, if Fredkin is right.

I could thus imagine (on a good day) a connection between a “holographic reality” and paranormal mind abilities – since the ultimate question of psychic powers is information conveyance (the spoon benders notwithstanding). But this would be very, very speculative; way out there beyond accepted science. Nonetheless, perhaps there are information conveyance mechanisms other than length, depth, width and time – the barriers of those dimensions could possibly be transcended if the
holograph equivalence hypothesis were pushed to the limit. And from Fredkin’s view, perhaps the usual restriction that signals need to cross length, depth, width and time is not as impermeable as we now think, since these dimensions are arguably just illusions. They are illusions controlled by information; as such, the barrier is one that information could possibly overcome. Perhaps the “core reality of information” is written so as to flow according to what appears to be time / space restrictions, but occasionally “hiccups” and jumps over the normal barriers (maybe thru some random quantum fluctuation that occasionally gets magnified into the macroworld?). This arguably might allow a small part of the future to wind up in your mind at an odd time. But it’s like an intermittent short-circuit in your car’s dashboard. It only happens when you least expect it, never in the repair shop.

This all sounds wonderful, but it would all go better with some psychedelic music from the late 1960s. It’s way out there, on an EXTREMELY thin reed of quasi-understanding. For now, I’ll take my working reality to be the Fab Four – time, depth, length, and width. And as to my cousin and Mary – well, I can just e-mail them, don’t need ESP or clairvoyance to keep in touch.

Before I get back to my usual mental machinations, I need to congratulate my long-time correspondent from Illinois, Mary S., on being awarded a doctorate in patristic studies from the St. Elias School of Orthodox Theology. Mary retired a while back from a 36 year teaching career, at both the high school and college level. Mary has dual masters’ degrees, but she decided to finally go for the PhD. After some years of study and a thesis, she’s now a Doctor. She is also a true eternal student. Young graduate students jokingly refer to themselves as “eternal students” (here’s another one ); ‘like wow, I’ve been in school so long it seems like forever . . . . .’ But after you get past 50 and then 60, it’s no longer a joke. Some of us finally realize that learning and preserving the mind is quite a noble thing. These are the REAL eternal students. And Mary is a prime example. Here’s one of her recent articles on gnostic influences in John’s Gospel. WRITE ON, Mary.

(Ok, sorry for the weak pun from the ’70s; hearty congratulations to Mary, nonetheless.)