Random Acts of Kindness Day

Aaron Mathes has no heat in his apartment

It's true. I encouraged him to go outside even though the realfeel is 14 degrees. I thought it'd be good for him to make it to the gym. He has no hot water either.

Trading is Fun

Trading is fun. Giving money for goods is fun. Money isn't valuable unless its spent. Money in the bank can provide a peace of mind. But religion is much more effective at that.

Why music?

My latest intellectual hero Geoff Miller makes a good case that music and the arts have evolved as part of the interplay between mate choice and competition. I wonder why everybody isn't as consumed with the biological underpinnings of their passions as I am. Lucky for them.

Here's an example of Miller's thoughts on music in evolution to whet your appetite:

"Music, considered as a concrete behavior rather than an abstract facet of culture, shows many features that may function as indicators. Dancing reveals aerobic fitness, coordination, strength, and health. Because nervousness interferes with fine motor control, including voice control, singing in key may reveal self-confidence, status, and extroversion. Rhythm may reveal the brain’s capacity for sequencing complex movements reliably, and the efficiency and flexibility of the brain’s “central pattern generators”. Likewise, virtuosic performance of instrumental music may reveal motor coordination, capacity for automating complex learned behaviors, and having the time to practice (which in turn indicates not having heavy parental responsibilities already, and hence sexual availability). Melodic creativity may reveal learning ability to master existing musical styles and social intelligence to go beyond them in producing optimally exciting novelty. " (Miller 2000)
He mentions areas for future research at the end of the article and some of them I might be able to help with:

• the mate preferences people have concerning musical displays, and the inferences they make from manifest musical ability to underlying traits
• the sexual payoffs for different degrees of musicalitcy in tribal and modern populations.
  
• the perceptual and cognitive preferences people (and other apes) have with respect to many dimensions of musical stimuli
• the frequency distribution of actual musical productions with respect to those dimensions,
• whether there is strong assortative mating for musical traits
• whether there are genetic correlations between musical tastes and music-production tendencies in modern populations, which might indicate a runaway effect in progress
  

Its a bit of a bummer that creating aesthetically superlative musical performances satisfies a runaway evolutionary accident. Then again it all comes back to the bizarre accident of genetic reproduction and the links of genes as both reflections and manipulators of the environment.

Its all almost too much to grasp and leaves me breathless. Along the lines of the primacy of the gene, music can be seen as the penultimate demonstration of the complexities of life that are captured by genetic progress. I can live with this.

Instructions

How to be ethical:

• Become a professional rock star
• Keep a constant awareness of the miracle of existence
• Stay with these two tenets

To be a rock star:

• [x] Move to New York City
• [ ] Consistently release and promote groundbreaking albums
• [ ] Consistently improve performance experience and chops
• [ ] Play many many gigs
  

To keep a constant awareness of the miracle of existence:

• [x] Watch breathing
• [ ] Organize time around regular meditation

Compass

What does it mean that a compass points North?
dynamo theory could help us here.

The flow of large amounts of ionized liquids and gas move through an existing magnetic field sustaining a current. All kinds of peeps suggest that we should harness the Earth's magnetic field to generate electricity. That doesn't concern us here.






What's Important?
Earth happened. I don't know why. Some people know that God created it. I don't know that God created it. I do know that it doesn't make sense to me. I often think that sometime, in my lifetime, NASA or SETI scientists will make contact with a booklet that explains all the mysteries of the universe. This booklet would explain magnetism and time and Spacemen 3 and me. Once this information is disseminated, I won't have to live in doubt anymore. I won't have to wonder if what I'm doing is right or wrong. I won't have to wonder if there's universal laws that govern which of my sets of neural instructions.(Mayr 2003)

In my deepest, calmest understanding though, I know that understanding itself does not resolve to right and wrong, or to mysterious or unmysterious, or to answered or unanswered. This deepest, calmest understanding I tend to reference with a space in between quotations, like this:

" "

This is my reference point. I find that everything can be tested against this measurement, and that's how I can divide the world in a way that I'm comfortable with. When I think calmly, I realize that the magnetism that affects the compass will never be explained - because it cannot be. It can be discussed and analogies can be made. But a pure explanation is impossible of a natural event - explanations of communicative intention are all that can ever be said to be pure.

This reference point, of " " is my compass. Within it, I can find alignment, paradoxically, with my genes. By removing the necessity of (impure) explanations, I'm free to mine " " to simply see what is linked - to learn what I think. Can you learn what you think? Stunningly, we have the ability to use our efforts to actually watch what we think. This meta-existence, most likely a result of our pre-frontal cortex, results in a deep confidence in our understanding of the world in its totality, and allows us to watch our mind in a way that fMRI will never provide.

The genes are connected as the historical vehicle for the generation of the brain. Their beautiful competing reproductive strategies are constantly chemically reacting with their ever-changing environment. Permanently morphing and shuffling in their unique and beautifully complex self-generating reactions. No one can control them, because they are the source of all control itself. As a group, their effects result today in a mind that can explore and begin to understand them, and yet considers itself to be a unity. This unity, which ostensibly extends seemingly only to the individual genotype, expands throughout space and time to require all the laws of the universe to become.

The distinction of individuality is not an illusion, but rather its another lens, like the fish's eye, or the snake's tongue, or the bat's sonar, to relate to and measure changes in the environment. There is no limit to the development of these measurements. If a dog was bred that was the size of Australia he could develop magnetic vision allowing him to see the middle of the Earth. The information is there, the question is our degree of sensitivity to it. Our use of technology, of course, has sped particularly in the area of lenses. Our individual and collective entities have evolved to have a dire need to expand our environmental knowledge, which has led to our continued reproduction, multiplication and dispersion across the Earth.

My Ethics

Let " " be my compass. Look where it leads. My genes have brought me thus far. I am not separate from them. There is no me, without them. We are not a team, we are one. With " ", I can see, as clearly as I can, what the sum of their infinitely varied yet carefully organized built-in tendencies and influences. Which proteins they make and how my environment might respond to them. I can then chose to alter my environment, to test out various reactions and interactions, according to the truest tendency of my genes. In effect, they tell me something to do, tell the body, tell basic urges and instincts, but then they, as a conglomerate connected via the most advanced nervous system ever documented in the fossil history, allow an observation of all actions and a power to, with narrow but still generous limits, look at the big picture.

When I look calmly and honestly at my internal environment, my needs and thoughts, feelings and memories, I can match these with my knowledge of the environment to locate a best-guess as to the actions most likely to provide maximal returns to the genetic council. Perhaps, some would say, the genetic council is a tiny subset whose power is dwarfed by the power of the autonomic nervous system. In reality, the genetic council's inseparation from any genes allows its existence to reflect a representative of collective genetic action, regardless of the rapidly changing and evolving motives and responses.

GOALS
Amazingly, this power combined with a detailed memory allows incredibly complex missions which require years of planning to be accomplished using the awesome power of goals.

DESIRES
Desires are no different from goals. We tend to consider goals as cognitive, and desires as affective. However, they can be used interchangeably. They both refer to concerted effort towards a complex object (even obtaining food and feeding oneself is incredibly complex in comparison with the automatic procedures of breathing and temperature regulation) over a period of time.

Absolute truth comes in the form of " ". Like the compass, we're drawn. If we pay attention to where we're going, we can get there sooner.

Atomism

Three hundred years later, Lucretius in his epic poem On the Nature of Things would depict Epicurus as the hero who crushed the monster Religion through educating the people in what was possible in the atoms and what was not possible in the atoms. However, Epicurus expressed non-aggression to Religion or any other face of violence in the following statement. "The man who best knows how to meet external threats makes into one family all the creatures he can; and those he can not, he at any rate does not treat as aliens; and where he finds even this impossible, he avoids all dealings, and, so far as is advantageous, excludes them from his life."