Stealing Your Attention, Or Your Wallet

A Pickpocket’s Tale - The New Yorker:

One of the regular themes I return to is that one of the most dangerous of human  weaknesses is that ALL OF US look at things from a human perspective! It is a weakness that shows the old "how stupid could people be to assume the earth was the center of the universe" hubris ding to be an even worse hubris ding at a higher level!

Well, they used their natural brains, just as you are using yours now! What is it that you expected them to do?

Case in point, pickpockets. I love the opening of the linked article:

A few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of the act Penn and Teller, was introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins, who has a reputation as a pickpocket of almost supernatural ability. Jillette, who ranks pickpockets, he says, “a few notches below hypnotists on the show-biz totem pole,” was holding court at a table of colleagues, and he asked Robbins for a demonstration, ready to be unimpressed. Robbins demurred, claiming that he felt uncomfortable working in front of other magicians. He pointed out that, since Jillette was wearing only shorts and a sports shirt, he wouldn’t have much to work with. 

“Come on,” Jillette said. “Steal something from me.” 

Again, Robbins begged off, but he offered to do a trick instead. He instructed Jillette to place a ring that he was wearing on a piece of paper and trace its outline with a pen. By now, a small crowd had gathered. Jillette removed his ring, put it down on the paper, unclipped a pen from his shirt, and leaned forward, preparing to draw. After a moment, he froze and looked up. His face was pale. 

“Fuck. You,” he said, and slumped into a chair.

Robbins held up a thin, cylindrical object: the cartridge from Jillette’s pen.

The whole deal is worth a read, but the bottom line is that our attention can be controlled -- advertisers know it, politicians know it, the media REALLY knows it, magicians obviously know it, and a world class pickpocket will take what he wants EVEN IF YOU KNOW WHAT HE IS DOING!

The absolute dumbest thing any of us have is confidence! It is true that we can't live without SOME, but it is also critical that we know our limitations! 

Those that are manipulating you know that your attention can be manipulated. You can't stop them ALL, but you can do MUCH better if you are aware!

"But physical technique, Robbins pointed out, is merely a tool. “It’s all about the choreography of people’s attention,” he said. “Attention is like water. It flows. It’s liquid. You create channels to divert it, and you hope that it flows the right way.”"

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The Feeling of What Happens : Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciouness

http://www.amazon.com/The-Feeling-What-Happens-Consciousness/dp/0156010755

The wide ranging book by Antonio Damasio takes a shot at explaining the "there, there" of being human --- consciousness.

One of his definition shots is: "Consciousness as we commonly think of it, from it's basic levels to its most complex, is the unified mental pattern that brings together the object and the self".

Another is: "...the presence of you is the feeling of what happens when your being is modified by the act of apprehending something. The presence never quits, from the moment of awakening to the moment sleep begins. The presence must be there or there is no you."

We all pretty much echo SCOTUS Potter Stewart with the "I know it when I see it" relative to obscenity in his case, but relative to consciousness here. I'm fairly sure one of the marks of autism (which Damasio doesn't mention)  is that many autistic people can't recognize others as conscious, and sometimes the consciousness of autistic people is compared to being possibly similar to that of some animals. (One of the people making this comparison was Temple Grandin, a PHD who is autistic ...)

He talks of two kinds of consciousness "core and extended". Core is "the feeling", extended is all your biography, knowledge, and creativity. Your "higher functions". The core consciousness seems to be largely a brain stem phenomenon heavily connected to your emotions and "body loop" (mental image of your body / connection to body).

I really like how he uses real known mental conditions to talk about specifically what brain injuries will affect core and extended consciousness and how.  I believe in "spirit", and also believe that consciousness (especially core) is where "matter meets spirit". My personal view is that we will eventually find some "quantum biological effects", possibly in a specific area of the brain stem that are the link to the non-physical.

Back to the book ... "Life needs a boundary. I believe that life and consciousness , when they eventually appeared in evolution, were first and foremost about life, and the life urge within a boundary. To a great extent they still are."

"The life urge"? -- pretty close to "The Force" of Star Wars fame, or even "the animating spirit".

My reading seems to be getting feverish here, and I'm behind in blogging what I've read lately -- "the creative urge" seems to be driving me. Where might that come from? Same place as the "life urge" I'd guess, or as I'm also in Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra", perhaps "the will to power" has a similar origin?

"Time Reborn" was about figuring out "what's out there" ... but the "mechanism" (if you are a strict materialist) that we are using (running on?) to theorize, develop equations, run experiments, etc is human consciousness ... "the feeling of knowing" ... "the life urge".

Sit in a quiet place, Relax and take a couple deep breaths. Now, focus ONLY on your breathing -- gently. It's not a contest, there is no "right or wrong". You will likely have "intruding thoughts" -- you may actually get frustrated. What is getting in the way of YOU, and your attempt at simple relaxed focus on your breath is your mind -- your "ego". Your "busy brain" -- the Zen folks call it your monkey-brain.

My view is that the "you" that is observing your breathing is "core consciousness", and the distractions are coming from your "extended consciousness".  I believe that the connection to the infinite is from your core consciousness -- and that the extended is what wants to take over the ship and convince you that you and everything "out there" is a bunch of "stuff" ... and so are you. If it can't succeed in convincing you, it will work very hard to distract.

I'm definitely of two minds on this issue! ;-)

It's a worthy book -- it is well reviewed and has a lot of secular accolades. I sometimes look at books like this and the "Time Reborn" book as a NY Street game of "hide the spirit" -- see,  no spirit under this shell ... switch, switch ... oh, "life force"? "emergent"? "Principle of Sufficient Reason"?  ... nah,  "Pay no attention to that spirit behind the curtain"!

Arland , Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut)

This post may or may not be the start of my book and my blog becoming one. It's 3:15 AM ... the spirits that wake old men and speak to them in the middle of the night are at best untested.

As over 3K blog entries might tell you, I love to write ... or maybe more precisely, I HAVE to write. I also love to read ... as much as I love to write, I love to read far more. If I just wrote from now on I would never come close to writing as much text as I have read. Which is good I believe.

I don't like to proofread my own work, nor coherently organize disjoint chapters of it nearly as much.

I've read Vonnegut before. I find him cranky,  nihilistic,  disjoint and iconoclastic. I believe I share all of those save the nihilistic -- and that I fight with a passion because I believe that question of meaning or no meaning to be the true ultimate question of "Life, The Universe, and Everything", to quote Douglas Adams.

Vonnegut was captured in the Battle of the Bulge and ended up in a basement slaughterhouse numbered five in Dresden as a POW. Allies firebombed Dresden, killing 130K people ... the highest bombing total in history. More than Tokyo, more than either of the A-bombs, and likely more that both -- supposedly the A-bomb total for Hiroshima and Nagasaki together was 129K. In the book, Vonnegut would now say "and so it goes" ... because he decided to say that over and over after recounting death or deaths.

The slaughterhouse was basically an underground bunker, so the prisoners survived and ended up digging out bodies for days, and when that got too putrid to accomplish, digging holes and using flamethrowers to incinerate the corpses. Such things often have strong effects on people. In my universe, they are a message from God to "be ye not of this world", but to Vonnegut it seems to have explained this world as random, meaningless, and utterly lacking in even free will.

Part of his conception of the universe however weirdly lines up exactly with mine, which is the result of both imagination and actual physics. Vonnegut's main character, "Billy Pilgrim", travels through time and space randomly ... partially he exists as part of Vonnegut's group of prisoners in WWII, partially he is a man living a life in Illium NY at various points from his birth, marriage, life as an optometrist to his murder in Chicago IL after giving a speech. He also was kidnapped by aliens -- "Tralfamadorians" who explain one way that physics (and I) see space and time as "everything that happens has always happened and always will be happening". You can visualize it as your consciousness moving through a 3D movie, where your consciousness moving from moment to are the "frames" and which you see as "time".

Vonnegut stops there, but Hugh Everett, quantum computing, and myself believe that not only "everything" is happening always, but a very great number of options at every "decision point" are now, have always, and will forever be happening. For a programmer, what happens at these decision points is "simple" -- the Universe "forks", like a form of Unix process creation, and "everything is the same ... only different" in each of the now multiple universes ... as in different in that "both", or "N" of the "decisions" have ALL happened and are expressed accordingly in the now multiple universes.

This theory "explains" quantum effects because rather than there being "spooky effects at a distance" (which Einstein loathed) when there is a quantum "entanglement" (superposition) which "collapses", or "resolves", in the Many Worlds view, the apparent instantaneous effects that violate the speed of light limit are not needed ... at the "slight cost" of the creation of another universe where any set of entangled potentials have each happened accordingly!

From a philosophical POV, the single universe theory negates free will -- everything just IS, always has been, and always will be. We are, always have and always will be doing whatever -- it just "is that way", and it could be no other way. We have no "free will".

In my universe(s), our decisions create new universes, including new copies of us.  I believe our consciousness "forks" along with the universe -- and that is a base premise of MY book, and to some degree starts to make me a philosophical anti-Vonnegut.

Anyway, back to Billy Pilgrim ... he keeps popping back and forth in time in his life, including being mated to a porn star also kidnapped by the Tralfamadorian aliens in a "Zoo" on Tralfamadore. The tale is full of gallows humor and dark satire as Vonnegut is wont to be. I find him moderately entertaining ... as a "guilty pleasure" when I was younger, and with a decent amount of pity for his soul now that I am older.

So what woke me up is that the working title of my book is "Arland" ... as in a play on "Our Land" and "Are Land", and also because it is the name of the Township I grew up in, as well as that of tiny town that used to be a church or two, couple bars, store, etc, but is now very close to being a sign on  county trunk "D".

PERHAPS I will have the "courage, gall, stupidity, "testicular capacity" to start dumping snippets of what bangs around in my head with dreams to be a book out here tagged as "Arland" to be "assembled later". Or probably not ... the whole thing seems to be less "stunningly brilliant" than it was an hour ago when the muse told me I was not getting back to sleep until I wrote it down.

I'm tired now.

Ignorance, My Bliss

The Case for Teaching Ignorance - The New York Times:

This article points to one of what I hope comes through in this Blog; I am ignorant, "the experts" are ignorant, all mankind is ignorant. It could not be otherwise -- we are alive, yet we can barely describe what "life" even is beyond "a really special chemical reaction". We believe we are "intelligent", but the "we" that we perceive as our consciousness is even less understood than "life" -- is it chemical, electrical, quantum, ????, spiritual, or more likely "all of the above"! The question of "the ghost in the machine" goes back at least to Descartes.

In 2006, a Columbia University neuroscientist, Stuart J. Firestein, began teaching a course on scientific ignorance after realizing, to his horror, that many of his students might have believed that we understand nearly everything about the brain. (He suspected that a 1,414-page textbook may have been culpable.)

Looking at a map can make one think they might understand the territory, but the reality is that even a very detailed map carries very little information about the reality of the territory (is it hot? cold? wet? crime ridden? loaded with bugs? ... etc). We are wired as humans to "the illusion of understanding" -- lest we cower in a cave in abject fear unwilling to face the (mostly) unknown world outside and the second to second prospect of mortality (see brain hemorrhage, heart attack, simple choking, etc).

So, as the students above, we VASTLY overcompensate -- we think a thick textbook HAS to cover most everything about the brain. We think that "a bunch of studies, many of them in agreement" on climate MUST correctly predict the future of climate. We especially want to be "more right than others" ... "less ignorant" ... the problem of accumulated "knowledge", much of it mere "data" is that it has a horrible tendency to actually make us LESS aware of our true condition.

Presenting ignorance as less extensive than it is, knowledge as more solid and more stable, and discovery as neater also leads students to misunderstand the interplay between answers and questions. 

People tend to think of not knowing as something to be wiped out or overcome, as if ignorance were simply the absence of knowledge. But answers don’t merely resolve questions; they provoke new ones.

Again, modern man is WAY behind the ancients. It was completely covered in Proverbs 9:10, no special classes required.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.

The ancients realized the state of their souls and the fragility of life -- that of being most unholy and uncontrollably near an eternity judged by an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God.  

For thousands of years, Western Civilization worked because it was based on: 

1. The fear (best read "awed respect") of a perfectly just and KNOWABLE (to some degree) God. 
2. That God had created an ORDERED and KNOWABLE (to humans) universe. 
3. Man had been given DOMINION over that universe. 

These were powerful beliefs that properly placed man -- as potential master of the physical, servant of the eternal, blessed with the ability to know both the universe and God. The base for western thought brought thousands of years of relative "advancement", and since say "1300", fairly rapidly so. 

But, as in the original Eden, the snake was busy. Did God REALLY create all this? Maybe not ... and if not, maybe he doesn't exist at all. If he doesn't exist, is there REALLY "truth"? Certainly not "ultimate truth" ... and whatever feels good seems a lot more like "human morals". Oh, and BTW, why does man have "dominion" -- is man not just an animal, and therefore no more deserving of a place on the planet than animals? While we are at it, maybe "the earth" is really "divine", and man should "serve the earth"? 

So now we have mass confusion. Our natural desires to "be as intelligent as gods" make us want to fake that we are not ignorant. Meanwhile, our hopeful promethean reach much exceeds our grasp, and we are lost in a random meaningless universe. Unsure of our place -- even relative to the dead rock of the planet, or the clearly less intellectually capable life forms that share it with us. 

We have traded legitimate and actually beneficial "ignorance" (humility, wisdom, the fear of God) for a false sense of "having figured it all out", while our spiritual state is beyond lost -- not knowing even OF God, and having lost all contact with our created place in the universe. 

Proper ignorance (humility) is indeed bliss! In fact, it is WISDOM! 

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