May Day

“In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped.  The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern industrial labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character.  Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.  All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation.  The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation.  They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.  All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities.  The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.  The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole super-incumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.”

— Karl Marx (quoted by Bertrand Russell)

We are like people eating menus instead of dinners.

Making plans for the future is of use only to people who are capable of living completely in the present.

— Alan Watts

The most dangerous risk of all is the risk of spending your life not doing what you want
on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.

Aging breakthroughs

Sunday, journal articles came out from labs at Harvard and UCSF that documented the rejuvenating effects of proteins derived from the blood. In particular, one called GDF11 “is naturally found in much higher concentration in young mice than in older mice, and raising its levels in the older mice has improved the function of every organ system thus far studied.” [Doug Melton of Harvard, quoted in Science Daily].

The implication is that a small number of such blood factors might be sufficient to signal our bodies to become younger. More at my ScienceBlog page.

Google homes in on the self-driving car

“We’ve improved our software so it can detect hundreds of distinct objects simultaneously — pedestrians, buses, a stop sign held up by a crossing guard, or a cyclist making gestures that indicate a possible turn.  A self-driving vehicle can pay attention to all of these things in a way that a human physically can’t — and it never gets tired or distracted.”

— Read more at Kurzweil AI

Volvo, too, has been investing in the technology.

The potential is huge, not just for reducing accidents and providing access to transportation for people who are blind or disabled or epileptic or intoxicated, but also for coordinating road travel with internet-based meta-programs that eliminate traffic jams and reduce the need for traffic lights.  My concern is that the software will be written with a consistent choice of safety over speed, and sooner or later someone will sell a version with a slider-bar that the driver can use to select his preferred compromise level between safety and speed. —JJM

Is death the end of consciousness?

Here is a debate conducted earlier this week.

I love both sides of this debate. I don’t pretend I know the answer.

Raymond Moody on the ‘yea’ side did a good job of pointing out that our experience of consciousness is nowhere to be found in the nerve firings of the brain, and that any statement that ‘consciousness is an epiphenomenon of neuroanatomy’, or (equivalently) ‘the mind is what the brain does’ is a statement from metaphysics, for which there is and can be no evidence in support.

On the ‘nay’ side, Sean Carroll stated repeatedly that ‘we would have to be willing to radically alter our fundamental understanding of physics on the basis of almost no evidence.’ This is a bit disingenuous, and there was no one on the other side with a knowledge of physics sufficient to challenge Sean. So I will attempt it here…

There is a great deal of evidence for people knowing things for which there is no conceivable physical channel, and yet the science of parapsychology has been suppressed and marginalized because established scientists refuse to publish it, or even to look at the data, on the grounds that ‘we know as a matter of theory that this can’t be right.’

Sean said about the (absence of) relationship between quantum physics and consciousness that the argument boils down to ‘Quantum mechanics is strange and we don’t understand it; consciousness is strange and we don’t understand it. Maybe they’re related.’

If there were a physicist on the other side of the debate, he might have said that quantum entanglement demands long-range connections among electrons on the grounds that they are identical; that these connections are routinely ignored in quantum calculations for simplicity’s sake; that there are already indications that life is evolved to take advantage of quantum entanglement in ways that human experiments have yet to figure out how to do.

— JJM

Immortality

But only to be memories of spiritual gate
Letting us feel the difference from the real
Are not limits the sooth to formulate
Theories thereof, simply our ruler to feel?
Basques of statuettes of Eruptions long ago,
Of power in symmetry, marvel of thought
The crafts attempt, showing rare aspiration
The museums of the ancient fine stones
For bowels and cups, found Historians
Sacred adorations, the numismatist hath shown
But only to be memories of spiritual gate
Letting us feel, the difference from the real
Are not limits, the sooth to formulate
Theories thereof, simply our ruler to feel? 

— Samuel Greenberg (1893-1917)

Art is a limited human expression of a truth or divine reality, a kind of theory that we formulate in order to feel close to the divine. Isn’t the limitation of artistic expression, which allows us to sense our separation from an ungraspable reality, actually a memory of a spiritual gate to the divine?
— Camille Martin

One of the saddest lessons of history is this:  If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.  We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth.  The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.  Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

— Carl Sagan

I know plenty of people and I’m sure you do who have been taken in.
Too bad they are so unwilling to face truth.                               –JJM

Poem (that’s what she called it)

The spirit
  likes to dress up like this:
    ten fingers,
      ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest
  at night
    in the black branches,
      in the morning

in the blue branches
  of the world.
    It could float, of course,
      but would rather

plumb rough matter.
  Airy and shapeless thing,
   it needs
      the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,
  the oceanic fluids;
   it needs the body's world,
      instinct

and imagination
  and the dark hug of time,
   sweetness
      and tangibility,

to be understood,
  to be more than pure light
    that burns
      where no one is --

so it enters us --
  in the morning
    shines from brute comfort
      like a stitch of lightning;

and at night
  lights up the deep and wondrous
    drownings of the body
      like a star.

— Mary Oliver

DNMT-1

I’ve been taking an on-line Coursera in epigenetics. Here’s something I learned that I can’t get over.

I’ll try to explain why, but it takes a bit of biochemistry to get into it. The thing that amazes me is how smart a single molecule can be. The molecule called DNMT-1 is probably no smarter than a lot of other proteins, but it’s the one I’ve learned about and thought about. What it does would require thousands of lines of computer programing to replicate. And it’s all in one molecule.

DNA is the same from cell to cell, and what makes the cell able to do a particular job is that some genes are turned on and others turned off. One way to turn a gene off is to ‘decorate’ it with methyl groups.

Let’s say a liver cell is dividing to make two liver cells. Each daughter cell inherits the information about which genes are permanently turned off with methylation.

DNMT-1 is “DNA Methyl Transferase #1”. In the process of the cell dividing, the DNA copies itself by unwinding the double helix, and each strand makes itself a new strand. At that point, one strand is appropriately methylated to turn off selected genes, and the other strand, being newly formed, is not. So what DNMT-1 does is to crawl along the length of the DNA molecule and when it comes to a place where it “sees” methyls on one side and not the other, it grabs a methyl group out of the chemical environment and slaps it onto the opposite side.

A single molecule is smart enough to slide alog the entire length of the chromosome, to look left, look right, and methylate where appropriate.

The Visionary

SILENT is the house: all are laid asleep:
One alone looks out o’er the snow-wreaths deep,
Watching every cloud, dreading every breeze
That whirls the wildering drift, and bends the groaning trees.

Cheerful is the hearth, soft the matted floor;
Not one shivering gust creeps through pane or door;
The little lamp burns straight, its rays shoot strong and far:
I trim it well, to be the wanderer’s guiding-star.

Frown, my haughty sire! chide, my angry dame!
Set your slaves to spy; threaten me with shame:
But neither sire nor dame nor prying serf shall know,
What angel nightly tracks that waste of frozen snow.

What I love shall come like visitant of air,
Safe in secret power from lurking human snare;
What loves me, no word of mine shall e’er betray,
Though for faith unstained my life must forfeit pay.

Burn, then, little lamp; glimmer straight and clear —
Hush! a rustling wing stirs, methinks, the air:
He for whom I wait, thus ever comes to me;
Strange Power! I trust thy might; trust thou my constancy.

— Emily Brontë (1819-1848)

The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world — we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.

— Joanna Macy

carpe diem

One of the illusion is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated his 211th birthday this week

Profile in Courage

John F Kennedy was president when I came of age, politically. All right, so I was 11 the year he was elected. Still, I knew enough to admire his idealism, and sensed a different sort of courage, a different range of vision from Dwight Eisenhower, who had my support four years earlier, when I was 7. All right, so I was precocious.

I lived through the shock of his assassination, and was puzzled by the crazy events of that week, in particular the murder of Oswald while in police custody, with TV cameras looking on. But at 14, I was not equipped to question the reality presented to me by parents, teachers and newspapers.

Only decades later did I learn to distinguish Kennedy’s courage in office from his Democratic successors, who were elected on similar platforms, but retreated into political camouflage once in office.

I learned that the Bay of Pigs plot was conceived to force JFK to send troops into Cuba during his first week in office, and that he bravely said “No”. I learned that during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, he was surrounded by military advisors who thought that tens of millions of deaths in a nuclear war would be a small price to pay for defeating Soviet communism once and for all, and Kennedy stood alone in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and said “No”. I learned that Kennedy learned in office that the CIA was operating as a rogue organization and tried to dismember it, because he knew he could not rein it in.

I understood all too well why Kennedy died, and why we have waited half a century for a president willing to risk assassination by opposing the shadowy forces in Washington that have held the Federal government hostage.

“The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy.”

Sing a joyous song

Listen to Dvorak’s setting of Psalm 149