The birth of civilizations

Tags

Civilization, Göbekli Tepe, Mega structures, Pyramids, Survival of monuments

The Olmec people of Mesoamerica beginning about 1800 BCE began doing things that over a thousand years became the foundation of all of the North American “civilizations.” It is generally recognized as one of the six original independently created civilizations. There may have been a little transfer of information from drifting stuff lost at sea that found its way to any seashore. That does seem possible because there are strange resemblances between seemingly isolated cultures.

Wikipedia discusses … “Civilizations are intimately associated with and often further defined by other socio-politico-economic characteristics, including centralization, the domestication of both humans and other organisms, specialization of labour, culturally ingrained ideologies of progress and supremacism, monumental architecture, taxation, societal dependence upon farming and expansionism.”

Of all of those qualities, the one that we can still see is monumental architecture. The other factors may well define civilization when it is active, but when looking at a civilization that is dead, because it has been overwhelmed by other forces, the mega structures generally survive. The extreme examples are the various large pyramids around the world, like Egypt, Mesoamerica, and a list of others.

Göbekli Tepe (37.223056, 38.922500) isn’t a pyramid but it preceded all of the pyramids by thousands of years. It demonstrates the cooperation of large groups of people moving huge stones to create this monument. There needed to be large, at least temporary communities to haul twenty ton stones into place. There were no machines, wheels, draft animals, only people, ropes, and probably stone tools.

Cities didn’t build mega monuments; people came together to build the monuments.

How to measure beauty.

Tags

What is good art?, CAn art be measured?, What is bad art?, Olmec child

This blog has occasionally considered applying a numerical measure of beauty to a work of art. Even the thought of doing that has greatly offended my friends who are practicing artists. When I presented my flu snot in the sink to them they were disgusted and very annoyed with me for calling it beautiful. And yet, my written statement beneath the image did appeal to them.

“An image of a thing isn’t the reality of the thing portrayed! It is a visual representation of something conceived by the creator. I present this image as a challenge to re-view the reality that exists around us all the time. Each reality has its own unique relationship to beauty. It has been said that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” and many will find that image disgusting, but I say,

‘Beauty is in the mind of one who is presently perceiving a new reality.’”

Derived from the original post – Nothing special today except for this thing.

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Can the following ideas associated with beauty be measured and given a numerical value? Can they be measured on the Proba #30 template or something similar?

I have been working on a list of qualities that include, EMOTION, THOUGHT, INVENTIVE, ARTISTICALLY AGGRESSIVE, RISKY, CLEAR, DISTINCT, CULTURALLY ASTUTE, MOTIVATIONAL, RARITY, SALES VALUE. –

A second batch of thoughts. Is this work an example of a specific culture, a characteristic of an artist, an exploring of the limits of new world views? Is it pushing the boundary of humanly conceivable realities?

From – The Met – https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1979.206.1134/

I see this piece from 12th–9th century B.C. Mesoamerica as filled with excellent representations of the qualities listed above.

This beautifully crafted child fits perfectly into Olmec visual culture and nowhere else.

A lecture about bats. Also Die Nibelungen

Tags

Die Nibelungen, Fritz Lang

Earlier this evening, Debbie and I attended a Science Pub in Father Luke’s Room at McMenamins Old St. Francis School, Bend, Oregon. It was presented by a Ph.D. from the HERS Lab at OSU-Cascades in the field of bats, Tom Rodhouse, Courtesy Faculty, and Co-Director, HERS Lab. He is a lead architect of the North American Bat Monitoring Program.

There were about a hundred attendees who participated in the pre-test quiz on the subject of the night. I don’t know much about bats, and I did miss one multiple-choice question of the ten presented. It was one of those number questions of how many of this or that are living in the state where even the scientists who study the subject are estimating. Only one person of the hundred present got all ten right, but I did get the runner-up booty prize which included a useful usb battery backup for cellphones, etc. Debbie and I win the prize so consistently that I have been accused of cheating by one of my friends. I don’t cheat!

Anyway, you can cruise around the internet and discover all you need to know about bats, but you won’t get the enthusiasm for the subject that a person actually doing the fieldwork radiates.

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I’m now going to watch some more of Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen, 1923-24. We are into our third viewing and only up to 3 hours 04 minutes and 33 seconds of 4 hours 35 minutes and 8 seconds. I’m so precise because this is a struggle. Not a life and death existential struggle for me, as it is for Siegfried and the other characters, but it is a painful challenge.

…

Just finished! We got through it. But, I would suggest that if you choose to watch this movie that you read the original poem first, or a summary. There is far too much confusing material to make sense of it. The sets and battle scenes are incredibly dangerous for the astonishing number of background actors.

Die Nibelungen is amazing, boring, hypnotizing, wonderful, dreadful, and excruciating to watch. It could only have been created by a battered nation of beaten people seeking meaning in an absolutely grotesque nightmare fantasy. It’s an emotional foundation of World War II, along with the reality of the situation at that time.

 

 

Human beings do have a purpose.

Tags

Human kindness, We create a conscious universe, Computers/robots/non-living-beings/IT, IT

Moving on from yesterday’s post about (google =) nihilism. “Existential nihilism, which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value.”

My life has been a struggle against the potential belief that I personally have no meaning and that the entire universe has no meaning either. There is a more reasonable argument that the universe has no meaning because it has no free will, it simply does what it does. It is a large inertial system that has a minuscule bit of arbitrary action at the quantum level. But that action itself isn’t volitional; it too is an inertial system based on preexisting biases that we can not perceive. We can only observe what the subatomic particles do after actions in a statistical way. Because the universe is made of such vast numbers of these random entities at the smallest level our humanly observed world is very smooth and thus predictable.

On the other hand, you and I have the ability to predict future behavior of many things, and we have the ability to change how some things will behave. I can do these things by physically moving them about to conform to my intention for my future wishes. Furthermore, I can request people to do things at remote locations from me. At my request Amazon sends me stuff from their storehouse that I personally choose  to conform to my wishes. These things usually arrive at my front door and satisfy my expectations, and if they don’t I return them and get my money back.

This afternoon, when discussing these things, I asked my friend Rock to move his water bottle a few inches forward on the table. He did that, and I said that there is no way the universe could have done that act without a vast amount of human cooperation of language, socialization, friendship and cooperation for a seemingly nonsense request.

My life has meaning because I choose to do things in the future, and the proof of its meaning is the creation of actions in the future that conform to my projected wishes. The natural universe doesn’t have this ability; it just does what its inertial responses necessitate and its future unfolds automatically. There is no thought, no goal, no necessity, no wish, and ultimately no meaning.

Meaning presupposes a future purposeful goal residing in a thinking mind. That was the condition until the last few years when it became possible to expose a general-purpose computer to a large number of chess games, and without supplying the computer any instructions, it learned how to play chess at a high level.

Computers/robots/non-living-beings/IT must presently be manufactured by people, but they are now capable of making adaptations to potential unknowable future environmental situations. These intelligent things now have some of the most important abilities that make human beings so successful. The computer/robots presently do not have the ability to manufacture themselves, but this is only a technical problem, and it is probably easier to do than to create carbon-based life. That took billions of years. These new non-life forms of intelligence are already halfway there, in only eighty years. The computer knows the basics of what needs to be done in the future, so it knows what to begin doing to create its future self. Carbon-based life was forced to stumble blindly forward with natural selection and most of its efforts died. What kept living was only what worked. But we humans and IT combined can build these new self-creating thinking beings in a few years.

We, humans, are the transition species that is capable of giving the universe what it has never had, and that’s the ability to perceive its various future options and to choose what it wants.

We human beings are about to give the universe the ability to create meaning for itself. That is the greatest kindness that humans will ever perform.

 

 

 

Why are we here? People? Earth? Sun? Hydrogen? Plasma?

Tags

Existential nihilism, George Carlin, human survival, Long term human survival, Nihilism, Why are we here?

One of the followers of this blog, R. Lee Darby, suggested that I/we watch George Carlin‘s stand-up routine about our place in the Universe, and Saving the Planet. It’s eight minutes of comedic challenges to humanity’s existence in this Universe, that I also recommend to you. Carlin brings to our attention many categories of things that we, as thoughtful individuals, need to think about and make our personal adaptations to our world.

I began by comparing him to myself. In the Wikipedia article about George Carlin it states that he was born May 12, 1937, and died June 22, 2008. I was born in October, 1935, and am still living in 2020. Thus, I was almost two years older than Carlin, and I presently have lived almost twelve years beyond his death. I have really enjoyed those extra thirteen and a half years. In the photos taken in his last years, he looks old, even elderly, and essentially a burnt-out husk of his earlier self. My question to him would be something like, “Did you voluntarily give up your life to help save your audience from their probable follies?” It is not very different from a similar question to myself, “Did I voluntarily give up my life to save humanity, the Earth, and the Universe?” Those are absurd claims, but I can give examples of those ideas that were my motivations at various times. 

Carlin was correct about the problems he brings to us in his sarcasm, but his solutions to those problems are pure nihilism. “Existential nihilism, which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value.” He promotes the idea that our species is a plague on our planet, and on the universe, and our best behavior would be to die. The Earth will get by just fine without us. The Earth will continue going around the Sun, whether we are here or not. Even though many species are dying every day, life will recover and continue long after we are gone and have quit killing other creatures with our technological overspill.

Every living thing is programmed to survive and reproduce, and we as human beings are no exception to that generalization. I, being a human being, strive to promote my species and help it find niches where it can thrive. But, being a thoughtful species whose individuals can foresee the consequences of their behavior and preadapt to future situations, we have risen to a place of top predator. We have become super-successful and are squeezing out other species. In the long run of a thousand years, or a million, we need to find a sustainable balance rather than simply consume every last bit of resource that makes life possible and then vanish. Of course with our technology, H-bombs, DNA manipulations, etc., we are at serious risk of near extinction in a few weeks. Some well-informed people from the original atomic scientists who made the first bombs are astonished that we are still here.

Our potential role in the grander development of the Universe’s potential is to mutate the intelligence of our species into a silicon-based one that would be more stable, not across a thousand years, or a million years, but billions. That form of intelligence could permit the Universe to evolve into a thinking being. It would become something we probably can not conceive of, but which can not come into existence without us.

I enjoyed Carlin when he was alive, and with our technology, I can still enjoy him right now. Unfortunately for him, he can’t say the same about us.

WHO’s zero alcohol use versus the University of Otago’s 13 grams

Tags

How much alcohol is ideal?, How much alcohol is too much?, How much alcohol should I drink?, University of Otago's 13 grams of alcohol, WHO's zero alcohol use

A couple of days ago I posted I experiment with creating a habit. The statistics seem to indicate that a small amount of alcohol is better for health and longevity than total abstinence from alcohol. The data didn’t appear to exclude those people who have the self-control to not submit to their addiction to alcohol, but I think they should be excluded. With those who developed an addiction to alcohol or any other addiction, a single tiny relapse often results, in a short time, to a complete re-addiction.

My personal experience with this addiction problem is with cigarettes. I quit many times for over a month, and then assumed I had broken the addiction and could smoke a single cigarette after a meal. I do enjoy that kind of smoking, but that single cigarette caused me to fail every time, and a month later I would be smoking a pack a day again. Finally, I admitted to myself that I am a cigarette addict and thus can not have a single one … ever, without becoming addicted again. I’ve been successful with that coping strategy with my cigarette addiction for over forty years.

Fortunately, I am not addicted to alcohol, and I don’t want to become addicted to alcohol, but a small amount of alcohol does seem to maintain health and help in maximizing healthy longevity. The material available several years ago seemed to indicate that approximately a single drink per day was near optimum. So, I sip a little whiskey every day. The graph below appears to prove that assumption.

The hazard rate ratio of various diseases based on alcohol consumption

Image from Public Health Expert, University of Otago, New Zealand

From the graph above it appears that the bottom point average of the eight curves is 13 g. That is 13 grams of pure alcohol per day. That quantity conforms well to the WHO suggestions below for the maximum permissible for any day where a drink is taken. On the chart above all of the hazards are improving up to twenty-two grams per day except for coronary heart disease. Unfortunately, that’s a great exception because coronary heart disease is at the very top of the causes of death list: WHO’s Top ten causes of death.

 

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World Health Organization (WHO) / Health topics / Data and statistics  / Do you drink too much? Test your own alcohol consumption with the AUDIT test / AUDIT /

There is some disagreement between WHO and New Zealand as to what one drink means. It might be 10 grams of pure alcohol or 13 grams, but looking at the hazard ratio chart above that wouldn’t make a significant difference.

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For example (approximate values as defined by WHO):

• 1 can beer (330 ml) at 5% x (strength) 0.79 (conversion factor) = 13 g of pure alcohol
• 1 glass wine (140ml) at 12% x 0.79 = 13.3 g of pure alcohol
• 1 shot spirits (40 ml) at 40% x 0.79 = 12.6 g of pure alcohol

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But the WHO recommends not drinking any alcohol. NONE! They admit that people will drink, so they put a maximum that is similar to the recommended amount from the New Zealand research. That seems to conflict directly with the data from the University of Otago, New Zealand, as shown in the graph above. The curves on every one of the health hazards studied there, except coronary heart disease, show a lessening of risk at ten grams per day of alcohol consumption, or thirteen grams. Above that amount of alcohol, the curves of risk with more drinking get worse, but they don’t cross over the index line of a non-drinker until about three drinks per day. Thus, there is a huge difference between the two authoritative reports.

Who do we choose to follow? It would appear to me that if you don’t have any cardiovascular problem, which most people do have, then it is okay, even better to have about one standard drink per day with food. But, if you are of average health you should follow WHO’s advice and should never drink any alcohol. 

One important thing these statistics didn’t mention is the concentration of drinking time. Surely, drinking three drinks just after work at a bar and then driving home is worse than a drink with lunch, a drink with dinner, and a drink with popcorn in the evening when watching TV. Spreading the drinking throughout the day, and diluting the alcohol with some food would probably keep the benefits and lessen the risks.

I have been drinking less than 13 grams of pure alcohol per day and today I repeatedly measured my usual sip as 4 grams whiskey which by WHOs measure is 4 x 40% = 1.6 grams. I do that an average of approximately five times per day. Thus, I have been drinking about 8 grams of alcohol per day.

I’ll just keep doing what I do.

Dr Mabuse

Tags

Dr Mabuse, Dr Mabuse the Gambler, Fritz Lang, Movie review, World War I aftermath

Debbie and I are well launched into our Fritz Lang film festival. Having watched The Spiders part 1 (1919), Destiny (1921), and just finished Dr Mabuse the Gambler (27 April 1922) (YouTube). These century-old black and white silent movies with German text and English subscript translations make modern movies seem like weak imitations of the ideas first explored in these pathological films.

How true are these film representations of Germany in the years shortly after these people’s loss of national dignity after World War 1; and the massive amount of dead young men and destroyed country? “A summary of World War I casualties, compiled by the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service, lists 1,773,700 German war dead, 4,216,058 wounded, 1,152,800 prisoners, for a total of 7,142,558 casualties, an amazing 54.6 percent of the 13,000,000 soldiers Germany mobilized for the war”

From the distributor’s hand-out for the film:

“The world which opens up before our eyes in this film is the world in which we all live. Only it is condensed, exaggerated in detail, concentrated into essentials, all its incidents throbbing with the feverish breath of those years, hovering between crisis and convalescence, leading somnambulistically just over the brink, in the search for a bridge that will lead over the abyss. This gambler, Dr Mabuse, was not yet possible in 1910; he will perhaps – one is tempted to say hopefully – no longer be possible in 1930 (sic!) But for the years around 1920 he represents a larger than life-size portrait, is almost a symbol, at least a symptom. Mankind, decimated and trampled under by war and revolution, takes its revenge for years of suffering and misery by eating its lusts and pursuing pleasure . . .” (Lotte H. Eisner, Fritz Lang, p. 57)

There wasn’t a trace of the recent horrific war directly mentioned or referenced, but the despair of the people was ubiquitous in the film’s over-acting, with its characters desperately seeking deeper meaning in their every action. This movie came out shortly before Hitler’s failed attempt to take over German politics with a putsch (a violent attempt to overthrow a government.) He succeeded in 1932. But the putsch of November 1923 was described in Mein Kampf. It was written while he was in prison for his crime. I make this comparison because Dr Mabuse said his goal was to take over the minds of people and the whole world through mind control.

Dr Mabuse was made in personally violent times that make our current national threats seem insipid and foolish.

Recent action on environmental issues

Tags

Nothing has changed., Recent action., The tipping event is near., Tipping point is near!, Tipping point is now.

I recently went to an environmental action meeting and was terribly disappointed. They admitted that their cause was well-defined decades ago, that the issues were clearly stated, that the politicians and big money were the controllers of what was happening, and that population had continued to explode. All of which meant that the problems had grown much worse and even though the public is growing increasingly concerned, the various breeds of deniers were developing effective methods of misinformation and preventing any effective action. The pleas were to get out the vote, to support the anti-single-use-plastic movement, to use less one-time-use earth resources, to recycle more, and to teach the kids to do the same.

I remember going to an ecological event in Berkeley, about 1980, with over a hundred people in the audience, when a professorial-type guy stood up and claimed that all of the stuff they were proposing had been cooking since the 1950s. Nothing had changed. And, now sixty years later, nothing has changed. Isn’t doing the same old thing without significant results the definition of insane?

There are wonderful sparks of creative people, such as Greta Thornberg, making clear and impassioned statements, putting the shame directly where it belongs, but these truths have always died out. Nothing has changed. There have been many wonderful books, with clear proofs of the problems and what needs to be done, but nothing is done that can effectively change the obvious continuing catastrophe that’s already in progress.

At this meeting, there were the usual calls to join with other groups to form a more cohesive action group, coupled with breaking up into smaller groups to form more intimate personal relationships. Nothing has changed!

I mentioned the Earth Ark Project where we could save all, or nearly all, of the plants of the Earth by storing them at the South Pole in shipping containers. It would be easy to do and something productive would actually be done that would be effective. There wasn’t a trace of interest. Nothing has changed!

These over age sixty people spoke of trying to save the planet for their grandchildren. Nothing has changed!

I said the clear event tipping point would come within their lifetimes, with an example. No response. Nothing has changed.

Nothing special today except for this thing.

Tags

Beauty, Nothing special, What is beauty?

A few days after not getting a Tamiflu pill from the ER room for my impending flu, I discovered this in the bathroom sink after blowing my nose. I posted this photo on January 3, 2020, but I couldn’t help making it a little more visually exciting.

I cleaned the color balance of the photo and sharpened it a bit to emphasize its qualities. This represents my relationship with visual images better. An image of a thing isn’t the reality of the thing portrayed! It is a visual representation of something conceived by the creator. I present this image to you as a challenge to re-view the reality that exists around us all the time. This reality has its own unique relationship to beauty. It has been said that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” I say,

“Beauty is in the mind of one who is presently perceiving a new reality.”

I experiment with creating a habit.

Tags

Drinking whiskey habit

I don’t have a problem with alcohol, but I do like a frequent sip out of Jack Daniels. Just a thimble full maybe four times per day average. Part of my rationalization is that a single shot of alcohol has been shown to improve health and life expectancy. I wish the statistics were better on the ideal way to drink that single shot, but there isn’t any that I’ve found, and even Wikipedia isn’t giving the information I’m seeking.

What I have been doing is taking one of these sips of whiskey, and I hold it in my mouth as I put the bottle away. Then as I walk away I let the fluid drift from the front of my mouth to the back, and then from the back to the front. I do that cycle about five times before I swallow. Each of those cycles tastes wonderful, but here’s the problem with drinking whiskey that way. It is linking the pleasure too tightly with the act of getting the bottle out, opening it, sipping the whiskey, closing the cabinet, and walking away savoring the whiskey. Because I link it so closely, I am training my habit structure to link pleasure with whiskey, and that might lead to an addiction.

Therefore, I’ve been doing an experiment. I don’t begin to savor the whiskey until I have walked to a place where I can look out a window at nature. I then begin the sloshing sequence.

The idea is to link my habit onto looking at nature instead of tipping the bottle to my lips.