I wrote up a long essay about ESP and psychic phenomenon for today’s posting. I thought it was pretty interesting. But as I was walking from my car this afternoon, I noticed some rabbit tracks in the snow. And I decided that Mother Nature in her simplicity can be just as interesting as my theories about her. So, for now, here’s a pic of the rabbit tracks. The ESP essay is on tap for later this week.

There’s a pretty good article to be read in the latest Atlantic Monthly. It’s about who the winners and losers will be as global warming makes its presence increasingly felt over the next few generations. You’d think that the fossil fuel energy companies (the big oil and coal companies) wouldn’t do so well, since their main product is causing the problem. Besides, by 2040 or so, some analysts think that world oil production will level off and even start going down, no matter what the market demands. But guess what? Global warming will probably open up new coal and oil fields in areas now covered by snow and ice, including Siberia, Greenland, and Antarctica (and will make undersea oil in the Arctic Sea accessible). So, the supply of oil and coal might actually increase, and drive the production cost of these fuels down, for a few decades anyway.

Will the world (and especially the industrialized nations) have the discipline to use this “last hurrah” for fossil fuels wisely (and at greater expense), applying carbon sequestering technologies and maintaining economic supports for alternative energy sources? (Those should include, for better and for worse, improved nuclear power; but only as a part of a bigger mixture including wind, solar, hydro, local generation, improved efficiency, conservation, etc.) Or, as I suspect, will Russia, India, the US, Europe and China throw caution to the wind and go for one last blast of polluting prosperity, before the approaching dark ages really take hold?

Sorry, but I’m a pessimist. I’d like to think that the next generation will learn from my generation’s mistakes. We listened to lovely songs about global brotherhood (remember “We Are The World” from 1985 — you don’t hear that one much anymore, probably as much because of embarrassment as musical mediocrity). But in the end, we allowed the big moneymen to define and shape our world. The problem for the future is that global warming is going to have different affects, based on where you now live and how much you now have. Other than Europe, where things might get very cold very quickly (strangely enough — global warming will have some surprising effects), the farther north you are and the more you now have, the better you will do.

As Greg Easterbrook points out in the Atlantic, some people (or even relatively large populations) are actually going to be better off because of global warming (while most people on this planet today, or their children, are going to be worse off — mostly those who are pretty marginal already). A lot of the people who could do the most to control greenhouse gasses are not going to have much personal incentive to make the needed sacrifices. Just the opposite, actually. You will certainly see plenty of public relations on the part of the big, mostly northern-based world conglomerates about how they are addressing famine, rising sea levels, and increasingly powerful storms lashing the central and southern parts of the planet. But it sounds to me like a formula for more of the same of what we’ve had here in the USA over the past 30 years. More free-market capitalism, more Republicanism, more “too bad if you’re not rich” social policy, more lottery tickets and rags-to-riches stories to keep the disenfranchised hopeful. Things will get worse and worse for them on average, but a handful of struggling families will be given a ticket to the good life. Just enough to keep the masses hoping that they will be next; just enough to keep them from getting crazy or going Bolshevik on us.

Oh, speaking of dark futures, I was watching Jericho last night, and it brought back a memory from the 1980s. The fictional little town of Jericho, isolated out there on the Great Plains after a terrorist nuclear apocalypse, thought that the Calvary was finally coming to its rescue. A band of grifters somehow got some Marine uniforms and an M-1 tank, and were looting towns like Jericho by pretending to be the vanguard of a federal re-building effort. One character, Mimi (an IRS agent on business in Jericho when the bombs went off), was extremely happy to think that her former employer was back in business. She looked forward to getting back to New York City — which, according to the plot of Jericho, was one of the few major cities that somehow escaped the nukes. She swelled with pleasure at the thought that she would soon walk Central Park instead of the cornfields of Kansas.

Central Park in Manhattan – I’ve been there, at least on the south end. And to be honest, I wasn’t impressed. Back in the mid-80s when I was married (when “We Are The World” first came out), I used to go to Manhattan a lot, because my wife felt at home there (even though she never lived there). What do I remember most about Central Park? The rats. They were bold critters, sneaking in and out of shadowy zones to recover whatever food dropped from the humans eating on the benches. Amazing just how close they would get to people. You’d see some young or middle aged parents, well-off and educated kinds of people, enjoying a sunny afternoon with their kids in the park. And the rats would sneak up to within 3 feet or so of they and their kinder. Yet I never saw anyone notice those furry little things with the long tails, or get panicky about having their kids so close to carriers of rabies. I couldn’t figure out whether New Yorkers, even the hip and well-off crowd from 68th Street or whatever, weren’t very observant, or whether they just took rats in stride as a cost of being part of “the big Apple”. Unlike Mimi, I just never caught Manhattan fever. If rats would make her feel more at home, I’m sure she could find them sneaking around the corn silos out in the heartland. Jericho must certainly have that in common with Central Park.

REFLECTIONS ON A BOOK I NEVER READ: A few weeks ago, I finally discovered Douglas Hofstadter. His new book “I Am A Strange Loop” just came out. That sounds like my kind of book! I’m hoping to pick up a copy in the near future. It’s about human consciousness, kind-of; but it’s also about advanced math and computers and the death of Hofstadter’s ex-wife . . . . Hofstadter is hard to put into any one box. He’s one of those expansive thinkers who have developed a cult following of sorts.

Hofstadter came out of nowhere in 1979 with a book called “Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid”. GEB is about math and physics and consciousness and paradoxes and various quasi-scientific ways of looking at reality. I just picked up a copy of GEB from a used-book web site. I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, but I plan to put a few chapters of it away before I get to “I Am A Strange Loop”. Reviewers say that GEB is a prerequisite for Strange Loop. On the Amazon web site, one of the customer reviews of GEB says “this is the book that made me weird”. Dang! Must be good. Then why didn’t I hear about GEB back in the 80’s?

At the time it came out, I was finishing up law school. I didn’t get a job with a high-powered law firm, and thus had some time to kill. So, with my increased spare time, I started reading non-legal books, and hanging out with a guy who was kicking around in my brother’s crowd. This guy, Mr. Shortman, was around my age. He also had an undergrad degree in engineering (although he didn’t go to law school). He was a heavy-drinking kind of guy (thus his affiliation with my brother’s friends), but his mind wasn’t totally gone yet either. He still took seriously all the stuff about critical thinking and openness to new ideas, which college profs try to cram you with even in engineering school. Good old Rick still hadn’t lost the habit of reading books.

And at the time, there were a lot of new, off-beat books for guys like Rick and me to read. Robert Pirsig had hit the scene with “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, and then there was Samuel Florman with “Existential Pleasures of Engineering”. Lewis Thomas also presented some “outside the box” reflections in “The Medusa and the Snail” and “Lives of a Cell”. Me and Rick discussed these books over many a glass of beer. Hofstadter’s book would have been right up our alley. But for whatever reason, it never made our list. I can’t figure that out.

On the dedication page of my used copy of GEB, there’s some writing under the author’s tribute to “M. and D.” The writing says “Much love to Dad from Alice, ’82”. Wow — so Alice heard about Hofstadter back then, and obviously so did Dad. It can’t help but make me wonder what happened to Alice and Dad – and who were they? And what ever happened to Rick S? I lost track of him about 10 or 12 years ago. We just both kind of lost interest, I guess. Rick moved to Ohio around ’88. Although for a number of years I made the long drive on Interstate 80 to stay in touch, I guess that I got tired of it, especially since Rick seemed to be losing interest in books and off-beat techno-metaphysical viewpoints. We’d still hit the restaurants and taverns, and wind up late at night in a go-go dancer bar (one of Rick’s key non-technical interests). But without the rambling discussions about weird and potentially brilliant new ways of looking at reality, the girls and the beers just seemed kind of low-life (instead of presenting a charmingly odd setting to discuss recursive feedback systems and quantum decoherence and spacetime topology). The fire in Rick’s mind had gone out. And that was really a shame.

Well, hopefully the fire in Dr. Hofstadter’s mind is still burning. I hope that Alice’s dad is still around, and that he gets to read “Strange Loops”. And I’m glad that I finally caught up with Hofstadter. It makes me sad thinking back to Mr. Shortman, though. Someone told me not long ago that he’s still alive, selling RV’s (it’s probably hard to hold a job in quality control engineering in Ohio now, with all the factories being shut; but I’m not doing anything all that earth-shaking with my life either). I can’t help but wonder if Mr. S somehow came across GEB and Strange Loops, would he perhaps pick them up, and maybe get the sense that these were once his kind of book? And maybe read them? Ah, but life buries most of us under so much rubble. To anyone young who might come across my words here (if anyone at all comes across them), I would admonish you to take seriously that line in Pink Floyd’s “Hey You”. The one that goes: “hey you, don’t let them bury the light; don’t give in without a fight”.

Last October I got addicted to Jericho, the TV show about life in a small town in Kansas after America’s major cities get nuked by some sort of shadowy terrorist cabal. As in 24 and other politically correct political drama-fiction shows and movies, the terrorists are nothing at all like Al Qaeda. No Arab / Islamic stereotyping allowed (and maybe that’s for the best, despite the blandness factor). We Jericho viewers are still not sure just who the bad guys are, but all the clues thus far point to red-blooded American stock behind the effort.

Anyway, my point in bring Jericho up regards how even bad TV can make a valid point. Jericho should make you reconsider any intellectual flirtation you might have ever had with anarchy or radical libertarianism. Admittedly, Jericho is chock full of personal-drama cheese. And the writers of Jericho are not noted for their plot consistency or common sense (after watching a dramatic show-down or narrow escape scene, you often find yourself saying “why didn’t they just ….”). But as with On The Beach, Mad Max and Testament, Jericho does indeed make you think what things would be like if our highly complex economy and civic infrastructure broke down. It could be a libertarian’s dream – no more federal government (or taxes), the state police wouldn’t have the time for small towns, and the local cops would hardly know where to begin. For the most part, you could do what you want.

But – you’d pay the price. No more modern medicine. No reliable electricity or clean water or home heating. Dwindling supplies of gasoline, food, soap, clothing, mouthwash, etc. You would gather and hoard what you could, but little tribes and armed gangs would form, to rob you whenever they could. What you do for a living might now be totally useless. Unless you could chop trees or farm or make pottery or raise horses, you’d be mostly worthless. Your life expectancy would go down to about where it was in the Dark Ages – because you would be in the New Dark Ages.

So, my thanks to CBS and the Jericho team for giving the TV viewing public a little sociology lesson and reality fix. The scenes of ragged refugees and people freezing in homes and armed bands of thugs roving the land are probably “spot-on”, as the Brits would say. As Locke suggested, we trade our absolute freedom for the opportunities and comforts that civilization bring (i.e., the “social contract”). A handful of nukes could give all our freedom in the state of nature back to us. And Jericho shows that we probably wouldn’t want it.

Next, here’s a little science note. I recommend that you invest 5 minutes or so of reading on the topic of “hypercomputation”. At present, all of our computers and machines appear to have an absolute limit as to how quickly they can process information. There’s a hypothetical construct in the field of computation called “the Turing Machine”. I don’t fully understand it, but it somehow limits what any mechanical process can do. Some people think that all of nature and the universe are ultimately limited by “Turing machine equivalence”.

Thus far, every kind of computer that we have come up with have remained within the Turing limits. Some people think it is in effect a law of nature (they call this the “strong Church thesis”, a beefed-up version of a thesis put forth by some guy named Church). But others say that there are processes out there that go beyond the Turing limits, and that somehow, we can exploit these processes. If we did, we’d then have “hypercomputation”, carried out by hyper-computers. Others say no. Still others say maybe it exists in some fashion, but we could never make use of it. I think this is an interesting debate, and I’d like to live a few more decades to find out what becomes of it.

One of the biggest implications of hypercomputation, if it exists would be in regard to what goes on inside our heads. Do our brains turn us into “hyper-computers”? And just what would set off hyper-computability, whether in our brains or elsewhere? Some suggest that quantum processes might; thus the research going on in regard to quantum computing. A researcher named Richard Penrose has written some books saying that the brain in fact runs on quantum computation. But others say that the critical info processing structures (such as neurons) seem to be too big to be effected by tiny little points of quantum weirdness. So just what is it that makes us – and perhaps the Universe as a whole – different from the “Turing machine” family that human beings have come up with over the past 5 or so millennia? Or are we not different after all …. interesting question.

And one more science-y thing: I heard a Marketplace report on NPR the other day saying that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange often does poorly on windy days. A college professor from Texas Christian Univ. claims to have found a statistical correlation showing that prices for pork belly futures and such tend to go down when the wind blows. The professor thinks that positive ions have something to do with that. There have been studies showing that people who live in places where hot, dry winds sometimes blow get a bit surly when they do. Supposedly, crime rates and accidents go up when the hot winds are blowing. That’s because hot, dry winds have a lot of positive ions in them, and positive ions have been shown to mess with people’s bodies, causing lethargy and depression. So, maybe investors get a bit depressed when the ions build up, and keep their money in the bank on those days.

But, this research isn’t entirely conclusive. There are other studies showing that positive ions dissipate quickly, and don’t really have much time to effect people. Also, as to the stock markets: most of the big American cities where stock markets are based aren’t famous for hot, dry winds; however, the cold, dry winds of winter also have a positive ion build-up, although not as much as a hot wind.

Well, I must admit that dry, windy days do in fact get on my nerves. They can be very depressing, even when the sun is shining. Can’t be 100% sure, but maybe it’s the ions! Perhaps ion counts will be the next big thing for meteorologists, right up there with degree days and wind chill factors and pollen counts. Sounds good to me! Stay inside when those positive ions build up, wait until the negative ones come back. (You will have to remember to flip the ion meanings here: positive, bad; negative, good).

There are two recording artists that I miss very much: Warren Zevon and Elvis Costello. Both put out intellectually edgy tunes, powered by cynical lyrics that tried to say something profound and yet keep you from getting too comfortable with it. Warren Zevon is dead; and as to Elvis Costello, I saw him on TV the other day singing a duet with Tony Bennett. So Elvis is just as good as dead. (And as to the OTHER Elvis, well, who knows.)

As to Warren Zevon’s songs, I just don’t know where to begin. So I won’t right now. Let’s just say that it isn’t everyone who could get airplay with a song about Phillip Habib, an U.S. State Department career official involved in middle-east negotiations in the 1980s (recall Zevon’s “The Envoy”).

As to Elvis Costello, I DO know where to begin (even if Elvis didn’t, in “Accidents Will Happen”). Let me tell a little story about how one of his songs lifted an emotional burden from my shoulders.

I used to feel a bit guilty whenever I heard John Lennon’s “Imagine”. Especially the part where John wonders if we could even imagine a world with no possessions. Truth be told, I never could. In my opinion, people just aren’t ready for that; no more today than back in the late 1960’s, when such communal sentiment was popular amidst the young. And ditto for 1971, when Imagine was released. People are just too diverse in their thinking. It’s awfully hard for most people to agree about most things. Sharing everything from toothbrushes to shoes to refrigerators to 6-packs of beer just doesn’t seem like a good idea. It’s tough enough for married people to do it; 4 out of 10 couples who try it eventually wind up in divorce court. I couldn’t imagine it working properly for millions and billions throughout the planet.

But still, “Imagine” was an emotional song, a compelling song. So I felt sorry for not being able to imagine the peaceful world that John tried to sell us on. The world would not be one, and maybe it was my fault.

Then in 1991, Elvis Costello came along with an angry song entitled “The Other Side of Summer”. One of the most memorable lines in it went like this: “Was it a millionaire who said imagine no possessions?”

Darn, we need singers who know how to cut thru crap just like that. But it’s really tricky for an artist to catch the public’s fancy with a catchy tune that also acts as an intellectual smart bomb. Well, I’m glad that I was there when Warren Zevon and Elvis Costello were given air time on the radio and shelf space in the record stores. It may be a while until we see another one like them.

As you go through life and get older, you have to put up with a lot of loss. One thing that you naturally lose over time is your older relatives. Hopefully you won’t lose your younger relatives, because that’s a tragedy. I’ve been pretty lucky in that regard. But I’m now at the point where nature has taken its course with most of my elderly relatives. This morning I found out that my last uncle had passed. My last aunt had died a little more than a year ago. So, no more aunts or uncles, whether by blood or by marriage. The last aunt and uncle that I mention here were both by marriage. But in my family that didn’t matter. They were considered just as good as the blood brothers or sisters of our parents.

Well, to be honest, I wasn’t all that close to the uncle who just died. But that was just as much due to circumstance than to anything else. Whenever I did see him, I always got along with him. The last time I saw him was about 4 or 5 years ago. Well, there won’t be another chance now. And I regret that. One of the nicest things about youth was being able to take people for granted. You figured you’d always bump into the people you knew and liked, sooner or later. Now I’ve reached the age when that doesn’t work anymore.

Whenever someone that I know dies, I try to reflect upon the meaning of life and death. But today I didn’t have much luck with that. My mind has just been a jumble of little things floating in and out of consciousness. One of those things was the door to my uncle’s house. He and my aunt lived there since the late 50’s , but he moved out shortly after she died in 1992. When I was a little kid, the image of that door became etched in my mind. There’s something about the circular windows in it. It didn’t really spook me, but it didn’t make me feel happy either. It just impressed me, for some odd reason. It seems something like a Jungian archetype, some pattern deeply instilled within the mind by eons of nature and time, something you were just born with.

I thought about that door earlier today, but couldn’t attach any cosmic significant to it. It seems as though it reflects an earlier architectural trend, something like art deco and the big band era. Well, my uncle grew up in the 1930’s and was a young dandy in the 1940’s, so I could see how such a design would appeal to him. But that still didn’t explain why it got my attention, since I’m not an art deco or big band aficionado.

Then, later in the day, I read about the lunar eclipse that will be visible over Europe, Africa and the Eastern USA tomorrow evening. Hey, there’s an interesting analogy for the door – three circles – the sun, the earth, and the moon. When they line up as in the door, the moon lies in the shadow of the earth. A lunar eclipse. Hey, eclipses had strong effects on ancient peoples. Modern folk today still like to watch them. The first half of an eclipse makes you think about death – the light being swallowed up by the shadow. But then the second part starts, and the shadow slowly yields back to the light. There’s something metaphysically hopeful about an eclipse. A hint that perhaps the spirit doesn’t really die, despite the lack of objective evidence in that regard.

So, it was interesting timing for my uncle to pass on the day before a lunar eclipse. This is also the last full moon cycle before Easter week. The next full moon will come a few days before the Catholic celebration of Easter – which is just why the Catholics time Easter as they do. They see the full moon as a metaphor for Christ, brightly reflecting the light of the Father to a darkened Earth. (That’s what I read in a Joseph Campbell book, anyway.)

Well, the human mind is known for its powers of confabulation – finding patterns and explanations where none really exist. I.e., retro-fitting an explanation on to a reality without reason. Cognitive psychologists have documented this conclusively. So perhaps I’m just confabulating my initial reactions to my uncle’s death. But still, I refuse to give up on the notion that everyone’s life has some kind of meaning that goes beyond the obvious. I’m just not giving up on that, even if it is unscientific.

So, bye bye Uncle Matt. Perhaps we will, in some unimaginable trans-dimensional fashion, bump into each other again someday. Someday when the shadows are all gone.

I was just reading that Nietzsche’s two favorite historical figures were Socrates and Jesus. Nietzsche wasn’t a big fan of Christianity or religion in general. But he admired the fact that Jesus, like Socrates, went down for a vision and a cause.

Nietzsche also wondered why Jesus got a religion, one that has has lasted thousands of years, and Socrates didn’t. (Well, actually there was an attempt back in 2005 to get a Neoplatonic Church going; but their web site, www.neoplato.org, seems to be out of service these days). I guess it’s all in who picks up your cause. In Jesus’ case, it was Paul. Paul was hard-wired to start a new religion (obviously I disagree with those scholars who say that he was just as faithful a Jew as Jesus was). With Socrates, it was Plato. Another brilliant dude, but not a guy who warmed a lot of hearts. So, despite Socrates’ courage, integrity and wisdom, he remains mostly an academic subject, whereas Paul’s concept of “Jesus the Christ” was taken to heart by the masses. Paul and Plato were both brilliant, but in different kinds of ways.

You have to wonder how Jesus and Socrates would feel if you could bring them both back today and let them know the aftermath of their lives. I’m sure that they’d both be thrilled that they made such a huge dent in history, and that their names are still in common usage some 2,000 to 2,500 years later. But who would feel that their message got thru the centuries with the least distortion? I get the feeling that it would be Socrates.

Ya know what a lot of people say about me? They say that I’m different. The first person who said that to me was my second grade teacher, Mrs. LaGreca. Well, Mrs. LaGreca, I’ve found some statistical evidence backing up your theory about me.

Not long ago, I registered with www.librarything.com and cataloged 200 books from my collection. That’s the maximum number you can put up for free (you can put up more for a one-shot fee of $25; I may eventually do that). It represents about 2/3 of my overall book collection; I tried to select a representative sample, that reflects my reading interests and tastes.

Well, the “profile page” on librarything gives you a list of 50 or so other users whose library is most similar to your own (here’s the link to my page). It tells you how many books you share with those other users, and how many books they have total. I wanted to know what was the maximum amount of books that I shared with another person who has a library around my size, i.e. 200 books. The maximum number for that is 12, or 6% of my library (I share 33 books with one person, but they have 5,279 books!).

So I wondered how this compares with other people. To get a sense about that, I decided to look up about 25 or 30 other users with libraries around my size, i.e. 200, and see what their “maximum share” percentages are with other similarly sized collections. I tried to select these other users as randomly as possible, making sure that I didn’t overemphasize people having one particular predominant type of readership interest (e.g., religious books, adventure stories, romance novels, etc.). You’d expect them to have a lot of books in common with others like them. Well, I basically saw maximum overlaps in my selected sample of around 10 to 20%, with some going up to around 1/3 (again, between two collections each around 200 books). I didn’t do the math, but I’d guess that the average is around 15%. That would probably yield a statistically significant difference from my 6% maximum overlap with a similarly sized collection.

So there it is, folks. Mathematical proof that I’m a little more individualistic, a little more eclectic, a little weirder than most. And dang proud of it!

One final thing about books: I’m giving a free plug here to Better World Books. I bought a couple of former library books from them, pretty cheaply. They give good service, they give money away to support literacy campaigns, and they use low-carbon packaging to lessen their impact on global warming. I was quite happy to give some orphaned library books a home, via Better World.

Waiting On Godel: I’ve been reading and thinking about the nature of human consciousness lately. I’ve found out that anyone seriously interested in the subject must sooner or later face the question of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. Godel was a mathematician from the early part of the 20th Century. He was one of those brilliant guys who wondered what was behind mathematics. They call it “meta-mathematics”: it asks, what are the most basic ground rules behind the world of math. Whatever they are, they should be expressible as a system of axioms and associated rules. An “axiom plus rules” system should be compact and yet powerful, such that when you “unfold” it, it explains everything about how we do math. And if you take it further, it can explain all of logic, and ultimately, all of rational thinking in general. And maybe even all of our not-so-rational thinking too. Maybe it can explain everything about how our brains and minds work.

But maybe not. Godel showed that for any system of axioms and rules, no matter how powerful and brilliant, you can formulate a clever proposition that trips the whole system up. Such a proposition is usually self-referential; something like “I will never say that I am true”. Is that proposition true or false? If true, there’s a problem, since you then say that “I am true”, right after saying that “I am false”. If false, then “I” will say that I am true; but didn’t we just say that I is false? There’s a contradiction either way you cut it. In contradictions, the rules of logic tell you to do nothing; no answer is given; you tilt. But if so, then . . . . . well, then the proposition was right, wasn’t it? Even though the system for answering it (based on axioms and rules) couldn’t give an answer. (You had to “look above” the system of axioms and rules to see the ultimate outcome.)

Ultimately, Godel proves that we can never know if a “computational system” gives fully consistent and valid results in all instances, even if that system is in fact fully consistent – unless we can somehow get outside of it, use a bigger paradigm. This all sounds like a lot of mental masturbation, until you realize that the brain is probably a system that is ultimately reducible to axioms and rules. The interactions of atoms and molecules within the brain is complex, but ultimately is predictable. Ultimately there are only so many ways that any two atoms can interact. As for molecules, there are a lot more ways of interaction, but ultimately it’s a finite set. Our brain is the stage for a hugely complex set of molecular interactions. There may be billions or trillions of interaction pathways; but ultimately it is finite. It could ultimately be reduced to a set of axioms and rules, although an incredibly huge set, something beyond human comprehension.

So, our brain is felt by many scholars to ultimately be governed by a set (however huge and complex) of axioms and rules. If so, then Godel’s theories kick in. We cannot know for sure that our brains work according to a “sound” set of rules (fully consistent, no contradictory results), even if it does. At some point, our minds (the conscious workings of our brain) are going to tilt for us; they’re not going to be able to figure something out; not because we didn’t have our coffee this morning, but because of an inherent limitation in the brain’s algorithm” (the set of axioms and rules laid out by nature). If it’s a “performance” problem (our minds are just not up to it at the time), then eventually things will click for someone, and a good, solid answer will appear in lieu of the inconsistency that Godel talks about. But if it’s something inherent, if it’s a question from the outer limits, then the problem will go on and on, really getting philosophers and anyone else interested really ticked off.

I myself can’t help but wonder if the whole question of consciousness and “do I really exist, or am I just an illusion created by the workings of my body” (really the same question) are in fact Godelian questions. Human beings have been working on this issue for a long, long time now. No one yet has been able to crack it. Back in the late 1980s, scientists and philosophers and psychologists and computer people got interested in human consciousness once again, after a few decades of just ignoring the topic (in favor of stimulus-response behavioralism; i.e., just study what people do, don’t worry what does or doesn’t go on in their heads). Go back a hundred years or so, however, and people did talk about consciousness (most notably philosopher-psychologist William James). Go back many, many centuries to the days of Plato and Aristotle, and ditto.

Well, our modern minds and computers have been going at it full tilt now for about 20 years, and nothing much has been accomplished, in terms of an accepted, unquestionable theory regarding human consciousness. Some of the great minds say that human consciousness isn’t anything more than the physical workings of the brain. According to them, we THINK that there’s something more; it certainly FEELS like there’s a “little man” (or woman) in our heads who is ultimately the conscious being behind our existence. But these scientists say that this represents a mistake on every level (it certainly is on the immediate physical level; surgeons have cut working brains open, and there are no “little people” or ghosts roaming around inside the skull). From the Godel viewpoint, these great minds may be saying that this is just the result of lazy, superstitious thinking encouraged by ancient religious myths (i.e., it’s a question of poor mental performance). But they might also be implying that something is ultimately unsound with the program behind our mental workings, and that’s what causes the unenlightened masses to feel that we all have an “inner identity”. Let’s call that possibility number one. Something in the process of evolution came out a little quirky, making our minds crank out bogus results with regard to mental ontology.

Possibility number two, according to Godel, is that the background system works just fine, but we humans, who are trapped within the overall system (can’t see the ‘bigger picture’), will at some point perceive an unresolvable paradox, nonetheless. Godel hints that the paradox will have something to do with a self-referential proposition. Well, the question of whether we really exist looks to me a lot like the ultimate self-referential question. We only know things through our consciousness. Our conscious mind is “the observer”, the most sacred entity in empirical science. How can you observe the observer? How can you get a frame of reference to put it into?

As philosopher John Searle and others say, if “consciousness” really does exist, it’s not a question of God doing something outside the boundaries of our physics (by the way: Searle, like most consciousness researchers, proclaims himself to be an atheist; it’s quite the fashion). It’s most likely something within our physics, but something that we just don’t know yet; just as scientists in the 1800’s didn’t know about quarks and anti-protons and E = M x (C squared). Some people think it will ultimately be knowable (if it does indeed exist; if the cynical philosophers like Daniel Dennett are wrong about “possibility one”). And some others don’t. If the Godel “grey zone” is at work here, and we can’t figure out a way to “see behind the seeing eye of consciousness”, the
n maybe it will forever remain a frustrating mystery.

Well then, if there is a God, and that’s the way that such a God works . . . . . hey, then who am I to complain, so long as I get to enjoy the experience of having human consciousness? That would all be nice – but Godel would say “sorry, can’t take you there; the possibility of an unsound mind algorithm causing the delusion that consciousness has its own ‘being’ is just as strong”. So, we remain on the fence, despite some interesting thought experiments.

PICTURE TIME: Not too long ago, a friend from the past had occasion to look at my blog and he called it “word-driven”. Well, I must admit, it probably is time now for some “image-driving”. So here’s a pic I took last night, as it started to rain and sleet. It’s a lonely scene; no one wants to be out in the wet, bone-chilling cold. It’s also black and white; I took it in color, but somehow, b&w; expresses the mood better.