Earlier today, Republican rural states, backed by a military fearing major cuts from the newly elected government, blocked the shipment of meat, vegetables and fuel to Democratic urban centres, attempting to starve people into political change unattainable via the recent election.
In addition, they promise more bad weather directed at urban areas, just like the ones they recently demonstrated on the northeast coast.
More as it develops…
The last time the remainder of my “nuclear” family got together, my sister gladly rejected the belief systems of her/our parents, making my mother sad and me angry at my sister for emotionally upsetting our mother.
The question I have to answer for myself — do I ever want to speak to my sister again?
Do I want to keep away from her (and her away from our mother) because she resoundingly rejected our parents who sacrificed their time and love for us?
My wife’s mother died more than a year ago, changing my perspective of family.
My father died this year, changing my mindset about life in general.
My wife and I have no children, only nieces and nephews who will be responsible for our care, should we live into our senior citizen years.
They say that blood is thicker than water but now that my mother in-law and father are gone, I can consider thoughts that I buried deep inside me a long time ago.
My sister was my rival from the moment she was born.
She clung to me wherever I went for many years so, as a result of my jealousy, I did everything I could to get her in trouble with our parents instead of me (and it worked most of the time).
I could not get rid of her until I started school.
Even then, we saw each other every day after school and usually on the weekends so, of course, I did everything I could to get her in trouble instead of me (and it worked most of the time).
For decades now, our belief systems have drifted further and further apart, reminding me of my early childhood experience where my sister was a rival for our parents’ love.
Now that my sister has demonstrated she is not interested in perpetuating our parents’ teachings, should I just tell her goodbye and let her drift off and away from our family’s core beliefs?
Every generation decides what the previous generation’s contribution to society was worth.
My sister and I hold different opinions on this matter.
I have many thoughts to consider before making a major decision about my relationship with my sister while my mother is still alive, especially with the holidays coming up.
More as it develops…
Using a few ballpark figures, I calculated that in the years we’ve had our two Cornish Rex cats (14 years for the first and 13 years for the second), we’ve spent at least $20,000 (I underestimated, I’m sure).
Wet food, dry food, cat litter, toys, treats, food/water bowls, litter boxes (plastic pans, covered boxes, electromechanical “automatic cleaning” boxes and plain cardboard boxes with plastic liners), cat carriers and medical care combined.
Not to mention developing/storing photographs, washing/drying bedcovers, shampooing the carpet and the cost of tapwater for all of the above, including for drinking.
In cat years, our feline companions are in their senior/elderly phase.
One is covered with “liver spots,” displaying two crooked ears from cat fights.
The other teeters and totters after his latest bout of vestibular disease, he, too, with a crooked ear (from an ear infection).
A couple of mouse-munching, cricket-crunching warriors.
They are unaware of our wars and national elections.
They warm up to us on cool days like this one.
They, like the redbud tree outside, teach me that the obsessions and vivid imaginations of our species are minor in comparison to the actions of the grander universe.
Yet they exist because of our species…
…our desire for change within our comfortable sameness.
A thought to remember again and again when members of our species get out-of-hand and seem out-of-control.
A while back, an American TV personality/evangelist announced that God had told him who the next president of the United States would be. Was God right/wrong or the guy too deaf to hear the correct answer if he wrote down the incorrect one?
Because I am a dying man, my life finite, my energy states infinitely remixed, I am not.
We seek fortune in fortunate times, inopportune times and impermanence.
For some reason I cannot fathom, I am alive, an entity diverted from procreativity to accumulate meanings, multiple meanings, in symbols, grouping sets and subsets with no meaning.
Meaning?
I am not a hard worker.
I am not a physical labourer.
I am because I have not chosen not to be.
There is enough space between me and my social connections that I can rarely talk to people in hours-long stretches but still feel socially viable, socially aware, socially engaged via virtual bonds.
I can listen to the unspoken communication/body language and not respond.
Somewhere in my thought patterns is a phrase, “I don’t care,” that tells me most social interactions are unnecessary.
I can give myself over to small talk when I want but find I’ve lost time, broken an internal conversation with myself that was planning out a new storyline.
Living inside my imagination where all around me is antiquated, quaint, nostalgic, is most often surreal but it’s what I have.
Such is the life of a solipsist.
A defense mechanism from childhood, perhaps?
Who knows.
I gave up analysing why a long time ago and went with the stronger feelings of my inner world, less and less interested in the day-to-day competition of members of my species for resources in the environment against/for other species in their local ecosystem.
If I’m going to die alone, my last thoughts unspoken, why not live the same way?
I need convince no one else my inner world is more exciting than their exciting imagination they’ve yet to discover.
My inner world needs no nourishment, no commercialisation.
My inner world knows no timeline, so it bounces from one thought set in historic placement to another without regard for logic.
I spend many hours a day lost in my inner world, sitting here occasionally to ask myself, to verify to myself, which is more real.
One day I might lose the distinction and babble on about a place and time that has never existed outside my thoughts.
Like melted wax, the two realities are fusing.
If you can’t tell when I’m talking about one or the other, that’s okay.
I look forward to that day.
Now, I sail into the sunset and dream within my inner world where everything is connected and we’ve stopped using labels like trees, animals and people to separate the components, the networked states of energy, that make us the temporary states of energy we once called ourselves “human.”
The words we choose follow in perpetuity, echoes crashing against canceling waves upon waves of grain and wheat and grapes and leaves.
A voice appears to appear in the middle of a laptop computer due to stereo speaker sounds competing for binaural ear stimulation interpretation.
I have no idea about today.
I live 1000 years from now, where sounds from this moment are embedded in layers of archaeological papers and electronic storage.
I have.
I live.
A historically accurate portrayal of Christa DeCicco vibrates the air from 2009.
Drumbeats.
Trumpets.
Happiness is sitting here, electricity lighting the air, my eyeballs, the wind, the desktop designed for a writing surface height, not a laptop computer keyboard.
Parties celebrate, mourn, serve, destroy.
Punch bowls, cookies, napkins, candy, cups.
Doing what I want, many expenses spared, nodding my head to the music.
Thinking ahead, behind, behead, ahind, letters and characters symbolically assembling thoughts rhythmically.
Composing the next video.
Looking for an artist, an ensemble, to complete the audiovisual puzzle.
Waiting…
As usual.
Waiting…
Very unusual…
Waiting…
Waiting…
Tables.
Bars.
Songs.
Nonsense words.
13,695 days to go…
Hum, did-ee, dumdum, doo-be, be-too.
250 films in 2.5 minutes — is that a record?
Another theory from a stranger from here:
Tony_Materna • 3 days ago −
Being a cofounder of a neural network technology company in the mid 1980s, I have been startled and disappointed at the lack of progress in developing “brain-like” machines. 25 years later, there are still no commercial neural net based products.The conclusion I have reached is that there is more going on in the brain than just the strengthening of synapses.
It seems likely to me that the brain is using quantum effects to create consciousness. If that is in any way correct, then mechanical attempts to create ‘artificial intelligence’ will continue to be stuck where they have begun. We will not be able to make significant progress until we have mastered the construction and operation of quantum computers.Samuel H. Kenyon IRT Tony_Materna • a day ago −
So let’s get this straight. Your company and other companies failed to productize neural nets, therefore consciousness is directly dependent on quantum effects. Sorry, but I’m missing the logic here.Tony_Materna IRT Samuel H. Kenyon • 13 hours ago
Dear Sam,My argument is not that because artificial neural networks have failed to produce anything useful, that leads ipso facto to the conclusion that the brain is using quantum effects.
What I was saying is that after a quarter century of study and development with nothing in the way of useful, i.e. commercial, results, the hypothesis that the brain is solely or mainly using synaptic strengthening to encode and process information may be insufficient. Undoubtedly synaptic strengthening is some part of the brain’s signal processing and sensor fusion, but it does not appear to lead to “thinking”, consciousness, or any result that beats traditional signal processing or probability analysis. Something else must be necessary to make the existence proof we have, our brains and consciousness, work.
What else can that be? The limitations of neural networks do not point us anywhere.
An alternate hypothesis can be formulated, and has been. Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, among others, have proposed that the brain is using aspects of quantum particle behavior to effect consciousness.
While I don’t have any particular feelings on their specific theory of how this is coming about, I do find it interesting that Penrose came to it from physics and mathematics, while Hameroff independently arrived at it from his work as an anesthesiologist and that they ended up collaborating. I am also influenced in my musings by the work of Dutch cardiologist, Pim Van Lommel, who after making a prospective study of cardiac arrest patients, and the reports from a subset of them of their near-death experiences, also has concluded that consciousness is a ‘non local’ phenomenon and that quantum effects are potentially the mechanism.
The well documented phenomenon of some people who are brain dead, i.e. their brains are inactive and silent (to the degree that our science can determine it so) and yet they report, often with remarkable precision, the actions and conversation of people around them or even in adjacent rooms or floors (the out-of-body experience), is observational evidence that suggests that consciousness is not contained only inside living brain matter but may have an existence in another plane or dimension. (Van Lommel proposes that the brain is a transceiver to that quantum plane, which is where “you” are encoded right now.) Quantum phenomenon, with its ‘spooky action at a distance’, non local properties, multiple simultaneous states and quantum entanglement, may provide the mechanisms that make thinking and consciousness possible.
The often reported and documented phenomenon of a family member dying on one side of the Earth and a close relative on the other side sensing something seriously amiss within seconds or minutes, sometime even understanding to a certainty what has happened, is inexplicable with traditional hypothesis of brain function, but potentially yields to an understandable, if still theoretical, result of two quantum brains becoming entangled.
You can immediately read Van Lommel’s research on Near Death Experiences in a paper that was published in Lancet, the peer reviewed journal of the British Medical Society:
http://profezie3m.altervista.o…
I can also recommend to you Van Lommel’ follow-up book on the subject:
http://www.amazon.com/Consciou…
For a more easily consumed version of his observations, if you can handle his strong accent, you can watch this video interview with, Dr. Van Lommel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
For a discussion of the possible mechanisms for quantum
conscienceness, this Wikipedia write up is a good introduction to the work of anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff and his work with physicist Roger Penrose:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S…
If you’d like to hear some first hand accounts of Near
Death Experiences and in particular some of the out-of-body observations, you might enjoy watching these videos:http://www.biography.com/tv/i-…
What is interesting to me is that whatever the brain is doing, it is doing it right now as you are reading my comments. Further, I suspect that all brains, dog and cat brains, mouse and wasp brains, have evolved using the same quantum mechanisms. As an engineer, and an entrepreneur, I
believe that as we fully understand them, we will be able to simulate these mechanisms, possibly with quantum computers, and then perhaps we can create thinking machines of our own design.
treetrunkdings 