What do you want? Truth or truth? Beauty or beauty?

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Anavysos Kouros, Church ceilings of the world., Living a life of little b beauty., What is beauty?, What is big B Beauty?, What is little b beauty?

A couple of posts ago I came down firmly on the side of little t for scientific truth rather than big T revealed Truth. The reason is simple for me, in that I can go and bring little t truth into my reality with personal experience. Whereas revealed big T Truth is always and forever hidden from me and I am compelled if I am to accept its Truths, to swallow the whole Kool-Aid. I much prefer untainted lemonade, which if I don’t like it, I can spit it out.

Can I apply this same style of judgment to the concepts for beauty? Is there such a thing as big B Beauty and little b beauty? What would be the qualities of big B Beauty? Applying the method above, big B Beauty would be fixed and I would be forced to accept it whole or not at all, and furthermore, there would be some form of punishment for not accepting it exactly as it is presented.

A couple of months ago I Googled beautiful church interiors and (click images and also go to) beautiful church ceilings – and I spent an hour marveling at the beauty and variety of this art form. And yet, as I see it now, it is a “take it or leave it” kind of beauty. It was created as a big B Beauty. In our modern world, we can go visit these Beautiful places without the threat of punishment but it was probably not always so. In their original formal settings, we would be compelled to enter these sacred places with our personal traditions in their proper place and inspected, or we were asked forcefully to leave and be forbidden from participating in the rituals.

What would little b beauty be? The beauties provided by “Mother Nature” come to mind. Sunsets, blue sky transitions, clouds, forest walks, waterfalls, still ponds, and quiet swamps. These we can all view freely without any form of punishment, if there aren’t any mosquitoes. Having been a lifetime people watcher, I would consider the most beautiful things on this planet to be people. The great variety of them and every one of them beautiful when you view them in the environment they have chosen to adapt themselves to.

Is that the core of beauty? Is any being located in an environment where it can thrive – just as it is – the key to its beauty? An hour ago I was looking at “The Anavyssos Kouros” on page 31 of “The Art Book” (which we got on a New Year’s deal for $10). What struck me first about this 530 BCE Greek sculpture was its obvious derivative qualities from classic Egyptian art forms, but when reading the caption it became apparent that this was a grave goods icon sculpture that accompanied a young soldier who died in battle. Is this sculpture’s perfect place for its existence accompanying a dead body of a beautiful young man?

I am presently living in a world of little b beauty and enjoying it very much.

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The Origins of Creativity by Edward O. Wilson – review

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Edward O. Wilson, Eveish Selection, John Shelby Spong, Science combining with Religion, Science versus religion, The measure of man, Women choosing mates

The measure of man and everything else.

As always, a book by E. O. Wilson is a pleasant experience because he has a deep kindly wisdom of his subjects based upon a lifetime of being in the center of his scientifically inclined intellectual world. The goal of his creative instinct is to “translate the previously unperceived into the limited audiovisual world of human consciousness. … the advance will come with understanding the evolutionary forge in which culture was shaped, slowly and often painfully, from animal instinct.” … “The study of religion is an essential part of the humanities. It should nonetheless be studied as an element of human nature, and the evolution thereof, and not, in the manner of Christian bible colleges and Islamic madrassas, a manual for the promotion of a faith defined by a particular creation story.” (p. 194-95) This way of approaching religion is similar to 1st Presbyterian Bishop John Shelby Spong‘s approach which I discussed in several posts. Both of these scholars have had a life-long pursuit of truth from very different perspectives but have come close to a common worldview.

In Wilson’s concluding pages, he writes, “The real limitation of present-day philosophy is not clashes of authorial logic but incoherence, due chiefly to inattention to science. This is curious, since we are in what can reasonably be called the Age of Science, and science is positioned to combine with the humanities to rekindle the spirit of the earlier Enlightenments. I believe that the two, meeting in common inquiry, can at last solve the great questions of philosophy. … At the base, we need to explore ever more deeply the meaning of humanity, why we exist as opposed to having never existed. And further, why nothing even remotely like us existed on Earth before. The grail to be sought is the nature of consciousness, and how it originated. Equally fundamental is the origin and proliferation of life as a whole.” (p. 196-97) These two longish quotes illustrate the coming together of Bishop Spong and Harvard Professor Wilson.

What caught my eye was the sentence bolded by me but emphasized by Wilson with the words “The grail to be sought, … and how it originated.” That is precisely what was discussed in Selection – Natural, Sexual, Artificial and Eveish. Below is a quote from that post.

“Eveish selection is a new term delineating what we humans have been doing to other humans for over 50,000 years. It is a form of sexual selection but with a human difference. The older sexual selection tends to choose a single quality as a marker for genetic health and thus environmental adaptedness but Eveish selection chooses a composite of many, many qualities. Human women make their selection of mates based not only on animal vigor but on all of the qualities in a mate including those which distinguish humans from other animals. It is a very complex decision process because the environment is very complex and the qualities being valued are difficult to assess, even for humans. Women converse at great length with each other about humans the various human qualities and it is generally given the derogatory name of gossip. But, it is this measuring of humans against some infinitely variable complex of qualities which is what gossip is about and it is what ultimately improves the quality of the human species from one generation to the next.

Eve chooses Adam with a little help from her friends.

I made this composite picture, derived from Michelangelo’s “God creating Adam” and Goya’s “Naked Maja” to illustrate my theory of human-style selection in action. The picture shows Adam having ascended some difficulty, showing his prowess over another man and Eve choosing him as her mate but with the advice and counsel of a group of angelic friends whispering in her ear.

Males are still choosing females based on their physical attractiveness, health and vigor but females have been choosing males since the beginning of modern humans and of speech for all of those qualities which make us human. It is reasonable in this view to replace Michelangelo’s God as the creator of the human species with Eve and her talkative companions.”

It is women who are measuring man and breeding with the best available one.

The big problems for Wilson and Spong are answered by observing human women and who they choose to mate with.

 

DESIGNA followed by SCIENCIA and QUADRIVIUM

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Archimedes, DESIGNA, Evolution of thought, QUADRIVIUM, SCIENCIA, Volume of a sphere

Here is a pleasant way for an artistically inclined person who has also had a strong scientific streak to spend a month or more. It is to purchase and read  DESIGNA: Technical Secrets of the Traditional Visual Arts. Be warned that this isn’t reading a book in the usual way but requires considerable effort and endurance to weave your brain into and through the complex windings of Celtic artists and Muslim graphic designers’ images and minds. For me it was worth it, because I now appreciate much more what other people have created. With that experience in mind I purchased another of the Bloomsbury Wooden Books series – SCIENCIA: Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Astronomy for All.

This is really dropping into an infinitely bottomless rabbit hole of mind-challenging reality. This book, as far as I have comprehended it, demonstrates our reality as it is rather than as some people wish it to be. On page 22-23 we encounter what made the Classic Greek Archimedes so happy he had it carved into his gravestone. It is a proof that the volume of a hemisphere equals the volume of a cylinder wrapping the hemisphere minus the volume of a cone that just fits inside the hemisphere: Πr³ − 1/3Πr³ = 2/3Πr³ (pi times radius cubed). This is only half of a sphere so if we multiply by two we get the volume of a sphere. Thus the volume of a sphere is 4/3 Πr³. That is the result of a few little problems that Archimedes figured out and are illustrated with a few drawings found in this book. It’s easy, so they say, but it does require following a tight argument. I have known that formula since high school but didn’t know how it was derived.

Apparently, I am a glutton for mental anguish because I ordered another book from the Wooden Book publishers – QUADRIVIUM: The Four Classical Liberal Arts of Number, Geometry, Music, and Cosmology. This is an approximation of a complete Classic Medieval European education under one cover, and it took an intelligent person several years to complete a classical education.

I did do a passable job of reading DESIGNA and have made an acceptable beginning on SCIENCIA but it seems unlikely that I can squeeze QUADRIVIUM into my brain.

Why You Eat What You Eat – Rachel Herz

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Book review Rachel Herz, Rachel Herz, Why You Eat What You Eat

Why You Eat What You Eat by Rachel Herz

This book is a wonderful source of facts about what people eat, and why. It is well researched, sourced, and written. Food is more than a substance we eat with our mouths, it is also an emotional connection to our family, our culture and our whole world. It is also a spiritual connection to those things and our own soul too. In short – food is life. It’s my life. It’s your life. Without food we don’t exist for very long. Food is important!

One of the important things about food for restaurant owners is that it is about the feelings the customers have while they are in their restaurant. This book has a multitude of thoughts on the feelings associated with the infinity of variations of what food can be and become. Many of these go back to Charles Spence, a gastronomic guru whom I blogged about a year ago in Gastrophysics – The New Science of Eating. That book influenced the way I eat because it made more aware of the fact that I am a dabbler, a little of this, a little of that, with quite a few different items on the plate at one time. I like to have lots of variation in the flavors, the odors, the smoothness, the crunchiness, the weird patterns, and colors of my food. Once I became aware of my natural inclinations I was able to exploit them and help to enrich my particular lust for life.

One curious “scientific” discovery that I have felt but don’t remember ever verbalizing is that people who are involved with something that requires their emotional and moral effort become short-tempered with other people who fail to make those same efforts. That concept is discussed on page 278-81 under the sub-title “Green and Mean.” In that section, we discover that people who get active in a special kind of moral cleansing and moral superiority are ultimately bad for humanity. There forms a strange reaction from these people who pursue a moral high ground of ethical foods and ethical behavior. You must toe their line of rectitude or suffer their judgments, or those righteous people will project feelings of moral transgressions upon you.

There is a moral undertone to this book that is covered beautifully with what feels like underpopulated small scientific studies.

What is the best behavior?

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John Shelby Spong, Love frugally., What is best?, What is the best behavior?

One of the basic ideas of the Wallace/Darwin theory of evolution is that the members of a species that fit the environment best are the ones that survive best and reproduce the most successfully. Before that selection can be made means the species has survived, or it wouldn’t have individuals available to reproduce. Because the environment constantly changes means no members are ideally adapted. Species that have survived have thus developed behaviors and genetic actions that include adaptability as a component of their being. 

That general statement applies to humans as a species, as social subgroups, and as individuals. With humans, it is the individuals who can perceive the facts of their environment and arrange those mental perceptions accurately as comprehensible ideas that fit the situation. Those who can do that best survive best. That ability requires having ideas but not having overly fixed ideas about the realities that come before them. They have the ability, either genetic or learned to remain flexible at the opening stages of a new problem. Other members of their group who are inclined to lock on to a fixed idea too early in a situation will obscure their exposure to facts of new realities with their preexisting ideas. The problem, for these individuals, becomes a misapplication of their personal resources because their preexisting ideas of what the reality actually is and what needs to be done don’t fit the situation well.

With that in mind, this next statement is a follow-on to my ongoing series of critiques of John Shelby Spong’s book Unbelievable: … Ultimately those individuals survive best who apply their available resources most responsibly and frugally. They give exactly what is needed for the optimal outcome. One characteristic that is observable from afar is that they never squander resources. But that is exactly what Spong recommends in the concluding sentence of his final book, Unbelievable. In this sentence, he states unequivocally – to love wastefully.

I would insist that love is one of a human being’s most precious attributes and it is to be given freely, but it is to be given frugally even to those who are deserving of our love.

Tyrant – Shakespeare on Politics – Stephen Greenblatt

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Book review, Empowering others, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, Narcissistic tyrants, Resisting tyrants, Richard III, Shakespeare, Shakespeare on Politics, Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant

Yesterday’s post concluded with I seek to help you along your self-chosen path because it will help me find my way along mine.

Today I finished reading Stephen Greenblatt’s latest book, Tyrant – Shakespeare on Politics, and it became apparent that the core problem with the coming into power of tyrants is that people surrounding them, and the public in general, enabled them. They could not have risen to power if the enablers had not made it possible for them to commit the offensive antisocial acts and crimes that eliminated the honest people who might have inhibited them. My problem becomes, is my stated goal a path to enabling tyrants?

Greenblatt skillfully uses the examples of historical persons vividly portrayed by Shakespeare to expose their evil techniques for grabbing power and gaining legitimate control of their states. He shows through the plays how intellectually honest people fall prey to obvious self-seeking lies of the manipulators and thus to support those mentally unstable narcissists.

King Lear, Macbeth, Richard III, Julius Caesar are historical figures who came to absolute power over their people and whose narcissistic acts ultimately brought ruin to themselves and to the people around them. The problems may be with the mental and asocial instabilities of an individual, but those qualities when unchecked bring an expanding circle of ruin. Ultimately it is the multitudes of common people, who have no input into the political processes of those few people in control, that are the ones who suffer the most and die, unknown and unremembered in vast numbers.

The preoccupation of these narcissistic tyrants is plotting for absolute power, using manipulation, hypocrisy, lies, betrayal, murder, assassination, all of which are motivated by unlimited greed of the potentate and enabled by the pervading abject fear of the impotent honest folk.

I started this post with I seek to help you along your self-chosen path because it will help me find my way along mine. And yet, I must now moderate that thought to somehow eliminate support for ideas of absolute power that the narcissistic type of personality attracts to itself. Perhaps the following is a better statement:

The goal must become to empower individuals to treat others better than they treat themselves.

 

What good is religion?

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Discussion of religion, John Shelby Spong, What good is religion?

In an organized book discussion with about sixteen guys who are reviewing John Shelby Spong’s book Unbelievable, the question came up several times, “What good things does your religion give to you?” There were quite a few responses which made good sense because they made the person saying them feel good.

Their church gives meaning to their life because they become part of something much greater than their self. Their religion existed before them and will continue to exist after they die. It gives a stability and meaning to their routines. It gives a whole family a structure and a feeling of unity which helps them focus their family values and thus it stabilizes their relationships to one another. It provides a way to help the greater community that they are immersed within in a more visible way than they could do as individuals. It gives a spiritual link to God through the group’s prayers that feel more meaningful because of the group’s harmonized unity of feeling while saying the prayers. It gives a structured way, in words and actions, to say prayers that bring about the feeling of being in communion with God. It gives plausible reasons for our human existence and for the evils that surround us at times.

In general, the group gave the feeling that they are happy to be alive and are comfortable with being part of the existence of life in the more expansive evolutionary sense. There were expressions of being comfortable with their mortality, and they hope for an afterlife, but even if that doesn’t happen, they are happy with being given the opportunity to have lived as long as they have in the world they are immersed within.

Although I am not a member of this group on Sundays, I do routinely participate in their excellent Monday afternoon book discussions. I generally agreed with what was said but submitted that I feel best about going to the UU church because it gives me a chance to do some good actions that help other people. I quoted John 10:10 “To help them live and live more abundantly.” I shovel snow, and carry rocks, and fill the water bowls for the animals. I did say that I am comfortable being alive and with the matter that constitutes whatever it is that I am and whatever it was before it was the living me. When I think about life in those terms I feel comfortable with being made up of incomprehensible subatomic particles.

Some people may think I am weird, but now I can say, “Of course, I am made up of quarks.”

The Fourth Age by Byron Reese – book review

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Book review, Byron Reese, Conscious Computers, Future of Humanity, Smart Robots, The Fourth Age, The future of the Universe

This was an important read for me. This author, Byron Reese, was formerly unknown to me but he had hit precisely on many of the ideas that I have been posting about in this Probaway blog. He is an excellent writer and explains various ideas much better than I do. However, there is one great distinction between his thoughts and mine. He generalizes about the way that things will develop, and gives cogent arguments for why things will develop in positive ways. For example, war is too expensive for the great nations of the world when the economies are making such wonderful progress. He asserts that is because of stable governments, enough fluid money to support infrastructure, and helping the bottom billion people become increasingly productive. But he places a huge emphasis on the ongoing boom in technology.

Reese usually presents his thoughts about the future in terms of general directions of how society will go, but my posts are more specifically aimed toward specific things that I, and we, as individuals can do to move forward. I suggest specific things we should do right now like make everything robot ready. For example, to make it possible for robots to create solar farms to create electricity, their food, without any human intervention. To RFID everything right now so robots can know immediately what they are working with.  To design all things with an ability to connect with one another. In comparison, on the penultimate page (317) Reese writes,

“I find inherent value in humanity, so my hope is that we do spread out into a universe that sure looks like it is waiting for us to pay it a visit. and I hope that a billion planets each have a billion humans on them, each of whom lives in safety, good health, and prosperity, all empowered to achieve their maximum potential.”

That aspiration sounds great but doesn’t give a path forward. It is very much like my previously published “poster” June 11, 2018, for helping the Universe to self-actualize its potential.

A request to the Universe put into a prayer-like petition.

Reese’s final chapter begins with a problem I coped with independently back on August 31, 2018, where I was trying to make an easily comprehended estimate of how very big the Universe is, to give a feeling for how many potential stars and planets and civilizations there might be in the universe. I chose the Moon for comparison and estimated how many stars there were hidden behind it at any given moment. The answer is fantastically large. Very approximately 200 trillion stars are always behind the Moon as it moves across the sky. Reese wrote a similar estimate but instead of the Moon chose a grain of sand. “Take a single grain of sand and put it on your fingertip. Then extend your arm toward the night sky and try to spot that speck of sand. If you see it, realize that it is blocking your view of thirty thousand galaxies.”

I was saddened by the fact that this fine book had neither source references nor index for the many great ideas and quotations. Fortunately, my hardbound copy of his book does have a signature-style bookbinding so it lies flat when open.

The Fourth Age by Byron Reese is a book that must be read by everyone who aspires to cope with the future.

 

On the Future by Martin Rees – Book review

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Book review, Martin Rees, On the Future

This is a great book, an easy read filled with basic science properly presented for public consumption. However, it is a book aimed at Rees’s peers and the rest of the public gets to watch. It is written for the in-group and to some extent to chide the peripheral of the in-group for not being in the in-group. This slightly scathing remark from someone who isn’t remotely part of that gang can be verified on page 209, where the undertone of the whole book can be seen:

“It’s conventional wisdom that scientists don’t improve with age—that they ‘burn out’. The physicist Wolfgang Pauli had a famous put-down for scientists past thirty: ‘still so young, and already so unknown’ (p. 209). Of the many people mentioned in this book, nearly all were famous. I don’t know their biographies but nearly all of them were famous enough to be known to me, a distant outsider, and most, most probably before they were thirty.

In the concluding chapter, Rees does offer some suggestions to those aspiring to be scientists and still way under that magic age. “It is unwise to head straight for the most important or fundamental problem. You should multiply the importance of the problem by the probability that you’ll solve it, and maximize that product.” (p. 208). “Scientists, in contrast, (to music composers who build on what they know) need continually to absorb new concepts and new techniques if they want to stay at the frontier—and that’s what gets harder as we get older.” (p. 210).

There were cute sayings throughout the book, from famous people, of course; for example: “The unfamiliar is not the same as the improbable” (p. 118), “Extraordinary claims will require extraordinary evidence”, “Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence” (p. 162), and my favorite already mentioned, “past thirty: ‘still so young, and already so unknown.'”

Rees concludes this fine book with a frantic optimism: “Now is the time for an optimistic vision of life’s destiny—in this world, and perhaps far beyond it. We need to think globally, we need to think rationally, we need to think long-term—empowered by twenty-first-century technology but guided by values that science alone can’t provide.”

On the Future by Martin Rees is readable by everyone, but ultimately the advice is simply—hang on for dear life, the coming ride will be an adventure.

A robot society won’t need food for its own use but for us.

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A robot society, Robot farm equipment, Robot farms, The end of petroleum

Once a robot society is operating reasonably well with only some human assistance the question becomes, what does it need and not need for its complete independence? This question is approached from the opposite end in the chapter Are There Robot-Proof Jobs? (page 122-133) of The Fourth Age – Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity, by Byron Reese. There are presented ten questions for estimating if your job future is secure from being taken over by robots. He then makes a case that those people displaced by robots will find other work that robots haven’t learned how to do yet. But then they do, and the human moves on to something else the robots haven’t learned how to do yet, with the implication that this human can just keep adapting. 

That may work for a while, but soon the robots will learn how to do nearly everything that a human can do. The real problem for humans is even worse because as the robots take over they will be using their productive capacity to make more robots and not to take over human jobs. They will be making things that are robot-friendly and easy for robots to use and not human-friendly and easy for humans to use. The robots will have a strategic advantage because the energy supplies they need will become increasingly more available as there are more solar farms creating electricity.

The future problem is that humans need food to live and work, and that at present requires lots of petroleum energy to create, and petroleum is going to become increasingly more expensive in a decade or two. In that time frame, everything the robots are doing will become more efficient and more effective for their needs and everything humans are doing will become less efficient and less effective. As food prices go up the human population will go down, and with the current human population already consuming the petroleum, and simultaneously doubling in size,  there will be a tipping point. When that time comes humans will become dependent on the robots for their survival. The robots will be operating farm equipment with electric-powered engines instead of petroleum-powered ones and they will have several years of experience growing crops using those automatic methods.

Complex jobs, like running a farm tractor and tilling a field or planting crops with robot equipment, are already being done successfully by experimental farm equipment. Of course, they will occasionally encounter problems that presently require humans to solve, but after a while, those problems will become routine and their solutions will also become routine. Some problems will be too difficult for the field equipment, but remember these pieces of equipment will be connected to Thenet and it will have access to the most sophisticated computers in the world. If a problem can’t be solved quickly a replacement will be sent immediately or if it isn’t economical the project could be abandoned immediately and the equipment used elsewhere.

But the robots themselves won’t need the food they create, and food is a complex thing to create. The robot’s energy will come from solar farms that make electricity and those farms are very similar to one another, and thus can be built by robots in large quantities. Solar farms are simple to create and can be built in areas that are unsuitable for farming. Thus, to help humans survive the coming shortfall of petroleum, needed for the creation of food, we need to design robots that can build solar farms and make solar panels in large quantities.

It will take a lot of solar cells to power the farm equipment needed to feed coming billions of people so we need to find ways to get them installed now.