Many worlds

In the Copenhagen (standard) interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are probability waves that evolve through time until someone peeks at them, and then suddenly one result is chosen from all possible results, and subsequently, the probability waves evolve from this new state.

In the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI), there are alternate universes in which everything happens. When someone peeks, he places himself in one of the universes in which he sees what he sees, but other versions of himself continue on in other universes, where they see something else.

The New York Times last week featured a Science Blogs entry by Chad Orzel.  There is a page full of on-line dialog by people with a range of opinions and a range of levels of expertise. There are a lot of people in the world to whom it matters whether the unity of consciousness as we experience it is actually an illusion derived from a gazillion selves living in a gazillion universes.

The question under discussion is, assuming the MWI is true, whether anyone ever experiences his own death. The argument goes like this: the versions of you that die have no experience, and there are always many selves that don’t die, and your consciousness has been carried by these, and always will be.

Read the discussion
Read my essay on implications for consciousness of different quantum philosophies

Renaissance man for our time

Alfred Brendel is best known as a pianist, interpreter of Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart.  In college in 1967, I owned a set of Vox vinyl disks, in which Brendel played Beethoven sonatas, and it was not new.  He has recently given up concertizing, but still writes music and poetry and criticism.  He has also been a painter.

Read Michael Henderson’s tribute to Brendel in The Spectator
Listen to Brendel play Schubert Impromptu Op 90 #3

Political Reality

To secure single payer health care here in the United States, it helps to understand how Canada did it. And to understand how Canada did it, we have to understand Tommy Douglas.  Not just that Canadians voted him The Greatest Canadian in a recent poll. We have to understand how Tommy Douglas built a political movement that toppled the two corporate parties in Saskatchewan in the mid-1940s. And what the lessons are for citizens in the USA. 

Tommy Douglas was born in Scotland in 1904. His family moved to Canada when he was six. He became a Baptist minister who supported unions and a public health insurance system. He became premier of Saskatchewan by running against Canada’s two major parties.

In a dramatic and decisive confrontation in 1962, Douglas then overcame a doctor’s strike against Medicare plan.

The Medicare for all single payer plan became law that same year in Saskatchewan.  And in 1966, his single payer program was adopted by the national government.

— Ralph Nader

Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this:
the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation,
whose meaning none of us will ever know.

— Mary Oliver

Violence declining

FBI records report a long-term, continuing decline in the rate of violent crime in America.  Violent crime is at a 40-year low, despite the economic stress of the current era, and despite the burden of returning, violence-trained GIs. 

Violent crimes are 1/3 of their peak levels in 1994.  Other crime statistics are also declining.

NYTimes article
WantToKnow article

The Fourth Precept

Do not avoid suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of the
existence of suffering in the life of the world. Find ways to be with those who are suffering, including personal contact, visits, images and sounds. By such means, awaken yourself and others to the reality of suffering in the world.
— Thich Nhat Hahn

It’s Thich’s job to convey to modern sophisticates the wisdom of Buddhism and he has done that superbly. It’s my job to offer uplift and inspiration, and I’m less certain I can do that. What can be inspiring about a commitment to be present to suffering?

I could say that there is no avoiding suffering, that distraction and self-deception bend us out of shape without producing a benefit. That’s probably true, not very inspiring.

In contemplating the suffering of others head-on, we learn to distinguish suffering from pain. It may not be possible to avoid pain, but we can avoid suffering, and it may be as simple as understanding what suffering is, and how our minds work.

We learn that suffering is often triggered by pain, but that its content is fear. We can become intimate with our fears, and befriend them.

Free Will

We are conscious of only a tiny fraction of the information that our brains process in each moment. While we continually notice changes in our experience—in thought, mood, perception, behavior, etc.—we are utterly unaware of the neural events that produce these changes. In fact, by merely glancing at your face or listening to your tone of voice, others are often more aware of your internal states and motivations than you are. And yet most of us still feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions.

— Sam Harris

Don’t deceive yourself. Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play... it is on things like these that our lives depend.

— Oscar Wilde (Picture of Dorian Gray)

I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue,
or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself!
Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.

What shall he tell that son?

A father sees a son nearing manhood.
What shall he tell that son?
‘Life is hard; be steel; be a rock.’
And this might stand him for the storms
and serve him for humdrum and monotony
and guide him amid sudden betrayals
and tighten him for slack moments.
‘Life is a soft loam; be gentle; go easy.’
And this too might serve him.
Brutes have been gentled where lashes failed.
The growth of a frail flower in a path up
has sometimes shattered and split a rock.
A tough will counts. So does desire.
So does a rich soft wanting.
Without rich wanting nothing arrives.
Tell him too much money has killed men
And left them dead years before burial:
The quest of lucre beyond a few easy needs
Has twisted good enough men
Sometimes into dry thwarted worms.
Tell him time as a stuff can be wasted.
Tell him to be a fool every so often
and to have no shame over having been a fool
yet learning something out of every folly
hoping to repeat none of the cheap follies
thus arriving at intimate understanding
of a world numbering many fools.

Tell him to be alone often and get at himself
and above all tell himself no lies about himself
whatever the white lies and protective fronts
he may use amongst other people.
Tell him solitude is creative if he is strong
and the final decisions are made in silent rooms.
Tell him to be different from other people
if it comes natural and easy being different.
Let him have lazy days seeking his deeper motives.
Let him seek deep for where he is a born natural.
Then he may understand Shakespeare
and the Wright brothers, Pasteur, Pavlov,
Michael Faraday and free imaginations
Bringing changes into a world resenting change.
He will be lonely enough
to have time for the work
he knows as his own.

— Carl Sandburg

Blithesom spirit

Fair June is here, she has not overslept,
Or dreamed too long ’neath the magnolia’s shade,
But tripping through the southland everglade,
To northern clime with blithesome spirit stepped.
With cheek of ruddy bloom her youth hath kept,
Her lips are wreathed in smiles like pearls inlaid,
She wears a garland of sweet rose-buds made,
And in her path by odorous breezes swept
The wild flowers nod, and o’er the waving grass
A welcome murmur seems to gently pass.
The wood-nymphs all in leafy bowers convene,
A happy chant the songsters swell en masse,
The hills and vales in gala robes are seen,
Glad festival for summer’s beauteous queen.

— M. J. Anderson  (more Shaker poetry)

The fifth precept of Thich Nhat Hahn

Do not accumulate wealth while millions are hungry. Do not take as the aim of your life fame, profit, wealth, or sensual pleasure. Live simply and share time, energy, and material resources with those who are in need.

This can seem like a call to sacrifice for the sake of others. It is only when we embrace simplicity for our own sake that we can rise above resentment and conceit and open to relationship that is mutual and reciprocal.

Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.

— Alan Watts

Reminds me of me

There is something profoundly disturbing and eerie about life at the molecular level. It is too purposive and awake to see it as inert matter – it is impossible not to anthropomorphize it or, more accurately, to attempt to make sense of its motives in the same way we do for people. And yet it is too alien to anthropomorphize in any useful way. Somehow, brute matter has figured out how to replicate itself and has exploded into a cacophony of form. Here proteins rush around cells carrying other proteins on their heads; other proteins slice and dice and reassemble yet other proteins. It is so easily seen as a parody of human ends. Looking into a microscope we are alienated from ourselves by our cells. We stare into a world of automata, a world made uncanny by the juxtaposition of its echo of and utter distance from our world. 

— Rishidev Chaudhuri, blogging at 3QuarksDaily

Love

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills.
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn't always understand.

~ Czeslaw Milosz, born 100 years ago today.