Knowing things can tricky. Ask any scientist in artificial intelligence and they’ll agree. But ask them what it means to actually “know” something, and they’ll find some way to avoid the question. I’m not sure why, but I can guess. Maybe they avoid the question because they know certain stuff, but can’t be bothered to share it. Or maybe they have some theoretical hope they wish to protect – a hope that some day they might build a machine that can know stuff. Their best answer so far is that believing we know something is an illusion; a by-product of our bio-mechanical mind shifting through stored memories using some unknown process, and somehow all this paper shuffling results in us tricking ourselves into believing we have a consciousness, when in reality, our awareness is just some fast and perhaps simultaneous memory trick, all brought together in one place, that, well, isn’t really a place. So really, they reason, we don’t know things. We can only remember things. Or, I suppose, forget them. This they know. Or, don’t, rather. And that’s why they avoid the question altogether, waiving their “get out jail free” cards.

But for the purposes of this essay I will not argue with them. In fact, I will agree with them in large part. Many things we believe we know are simply illusion, a form of self-trickery, where our more evolved and “larger” mind decides to play a subservient role to the more primitive and earlier-stage part of our minds that deals with such issues as survival, hierarchies, aggression (and love). In this way, we can act in accordance with our self-interests, justifying them through claims to a social order, even with our greater mind’s complete understanding of reasonable realities to the contrary. In other words, we can easily keep doing things and believing things even when we know better. This is a byproduct of our evolving mind that is often at odds with itself in an ongoing struggle between our more primitive adaptations and our more recently-evolved, higher cognitive abilities.

Empiricists believe that you must be able to touch something and measure it before it can be true. In other words, for something to be real, it must be able to hit you over the head and raise a lump. This is very convenient within the context of social orders, of all types, large and small. On the other hand, rationalists believe that something only needs to make rational sense, to be true. Of course, you can rationalize all you want that something is not hitting you over the head, but doing so will not keep you from getting a lump. And similarly, you can affirm all you like that being hit over the head, or hitting someone else over the head, is just the way it is – after all, you can feel it and measure it, right? But perhaps that is no longer a reasonable thing to do. Or perhaps other undiscovered and unmeasured clubs have already been pounding away, that will eventually change everything.

We can go clear back to the 1700’s and listen to Immanuel Kant about this issue. He demonstrated, and pretty well, that rationalists, without empiricism, were vulnerable to fooling themselves, while empiricists, without employing reason, can lose all context and meaning in their measurements and constructions. The interplay between empiricism and reason still happens today through the vessels of their adherents, who adhere strictly to varying degrees. But it turns out, the deftness at balance between the two is what separates the men from the boys. And the rest, who are the largest majority, are more akin to that Middle English poem about bulls leaping and farting in the Springtime.

My kung fu sifu once said, “you do not sing to cows – it is stupid”. That is when I first lost admiration for him. It has also been suggested, on more than one occasion, that I am “singing to the choir”. Could it be that you, reading this, are a farting, leaping animal in my choir of cows? I doubt it. You are all wildly different, with mostly unique backgrounds and certainly different priorities and beliefs. I would bet you are all farters, though, and that, at least, is comforting.

We’ve traveled a long way in our awareness since Darwin brought us back from Saint Augustine’s purely disembodied esoterics, reuniting us with nature, in all our crazy beastliness. Whether or not we are entirely biological machines changes nothing in our ethical imperatives toward one another. We are alive. We all feel pleasure and pain. We all experience hopes and disappointments. We can behave wrongly toward each other, or rightly.

The world of ideas dictates nearly all our actions. Ideas of ourself, and of others. Ideas of economic and political systems. Ideas of religion. Knowing anything may well be self-deception, just as some scientists claim (somewhat paradoxically). We pass ideas between each other, as surely as we pass them down to our descendants. They shape our ability to examine and understand the world and each other. Even the processes we use that lead to new ideas, are themselves, inherited ideas. How can we know anything true, when our very senses are merely tendrils that extend from that nexus we call our awareness? Not surprisingly, this itself is an idea that tends to appeal to and unsettle younger minds more readily than older. But after a while, we become settled within our experiences, having identified which hammers pound upon us and when, or which hammers we might possess in our arsenal to use. And this settling of our nature is the beginning of decay for any individual, and for any society.

Long before Kant, and long before Christianity, lived Socrates. We can trace the entirety of Western thought, the very basis of our intellectual abilities, both purely rational and scientific, through this line. Pythagoras, the “father of mathematics” had already completed his work in geometry fifty years prior to Socrates’ birth. Plato, who, like Pythagoras, was a lover of geometry, was a student of Socrates. However, Socrates was not entirely convinced that 2+2=4, when you really considered the question. Plato was convinced, however, and was even convinced that the mathematics of geometry were the basis for the atomic nature of the universe. In fact, the dodecahedron was so powerful that its existence was kept top secret, lest other, less worthy people, get it into their heads to play god. In fact, the dodecahedron was considered the “god particle”.

Socrates was more of a rationalist, however. He wanted things to make sense. And mathematics made perfect sense, as long as you remembered the context in which you applied it. Pythagoras, on the other hand, believed we could understand the universe through mathematics. He attributed a physical significance to numbers and gained a large following of his teachings, all of whom were tightly-knit collaborators upon their various mathematical equations and theories. Today, we would consider such a following a cult. At one point they were thrown into disarray and turmoil by the square root of two. You see, the universe likes whole numbers, or even ratios of whole numbers, which represent fractions. But the square root of two, they proved, could not be represented by a ratio of whole numbers, and the number two was far too important to exhibit such disturbing and provocative qualities. So the problem was downplayed, and even suppressed. They did not want this truth, even though they discovered it.

Plato, like Pythagoras, happily believed that the universe could be better understood through reason and mathematics, rather than relying on observations of nature, as Thales had said it must be understood. Most historians attribute Plato’s ideas that mathematics and reason are the best way to access the nature of reality as the primary force that kept science from advancing for well over a thousand years. In the meantime, Socrates, his teacher, who agreed that 2+2 may equal 4, but wanted to know what that really meant, was put to death by the Athenian state for embarrassing the ruling class by exposing their inadequacies as intelligent people who are obligated to lead well.

Some of you will see parallels in this, to the self-referential hallucinations that comprise a great portion of modern theoretical physics in its schism with the more sane disciplines of the observational. Some of you will see parallels with the insistently physical foundations of mind and consciousness, versus the more esoteric. And others will be gritting their teeth, wondering what on earth this has to do with the fleecing of the non-rich and the killing and torture of so many people. Still others will be convinced that this has nothing whatsoever to do with beer drinking.

The point is, people do have ideas, even if they’re only spouted when they’re drunk, and people do feel that they know things. And all these ideas have come to us, somehow. If we look back to Saint Augustine, we find a man who helped define what Christianity would mean for everyone who came after. He also was a philosopher, living long after the Greeks I’ve mentioned. He lived after Rome was transformed into something resembling civilization, after they conquered Greece. He lived at the time when Rome decided that Christianity was the one and only religion people could have. Saint Augustine was not a Christian then, but saw the light of Christianity while non-Christians were being put to death. One of his many contributions was giving us the concept of a “just war”, that is, a reasonable way to invade other countries, not because they have attacked you, but because they do not believe the right things, or because you would actually be helping them by invading.

Interestingly, it was around the same time that Rome was increasingly beset by the Vandals. No, they weren’t a punk rock band, but rather a very irritable group of Slavic and Germanic people who felt that they, too, were perfectly justified in doing and taking what they wanted. While Rome played their political games of backstabbing and power grabbing, the Vandals ran about pretty much willy-nilly through the empire. Saint Augustine actually died during a siege of Rome by the Vandals, probably from starvation. It’s certainly an interesting story about the power of the hordes.

Just a few nights ago I was talking, late at night, to a store clerk about the helicopters that always seem to fill the sky throughout the night. She told me that earlier that evening the Arco gas station had been robbed, and that her building had been painted with street images by vandals. She was happy the vandals had been apprehended by police. Also, her young daughter stays with her mom while she works at night, and she is worried about her daughter because she is very sick and nobody can tell her why. She had to move back in with her mother because she was trying to pay medical bills. Also, the thick metallic money vault behind the counter will only drop out $20 every hour, which she can use for making change. While I was there, one hooded man came in, buying lighter fluid and cold tablets.

She has trouble trusting people now because her boyfriend, a salesman, used to beat her when she questioned anything he said, and sometimes just when she was being nice to him. She wanted me to tell her that everything would be okay. Yet somehow, I didn’t know where to begin. What I did say was that I was glad she was standing on her own now, and that she was finding her own strength, which looked to me, to be considerable. And that none of that is me – it is all you.

Sometimes there are so many thoughts or ideas, with no obvious place to begin. Sometimes we may drown in them. An interesting thing about Socrates is that he never produced any writings. He believed that philosophy and discourse was meant to be alive, between people. He believed that it was better for people to consider ideas for themselves, reaching their own reasonable conclusions, despite what others might say, or what others might believe, or what any social order or government might compel. The Socratic Dialogue, or dialectic – the examination of ideas we might erroneously hold as truth, discussed and worked out between people. It is no place for the instruments of power and coercion. To the mind of Socrates, the dialectic ennobles people through the revelation of truth that might otherwise be obscured. A dialogue between people, two-way streets, without fear, with open minds, in the interest of all that is greater.

I couldn’t tell her all this, all at once, but only set a little sign. Small moves, Jenny at the store, as we find the little stepping stones. The paths that lead home, and the winding, rocky trails leading out into the world. Desperation, anger, clinging to the one thing that makes sense, the acceptance of a still decline, turning in one place – when there is no voice: it is illusion. All acts have consequences, as certainly as none do. And this is what creates, the entirety of our lives.

The big young man who got out of his car, as I was returning to my own, moved here recently from Texas. He met his wife while he was stationed at Fort Lewis, nearby, and they were married before he left to spend four years fighting in Iraq. He was overly gregarious and disconnected from our surroundings, seeing in the way only those who have known combat do. I walked up to stand in front of him and took his hand, looking him the face, so that I was all that he could see. “Welcome back home,” I said, “I’m very happy you made it through whatever you did.” Then I moved to stand beside him. “You’ll see more clouds here than you’re used to, especially this winter. Look at them, and pay attention to their shape and texture. Be unhappy or happy. And tell other people about them. We all learn, in the strangest ways.”

Money. I’m sure everyone has heard by now that 1% of Americans have more money than the entire 95% of the rest of us combined. The fact seems to shock many people, but honestly, I don’t mind. As long as we are free and not torturing or killing people or things without the most ironclad justifications, and we can live a modestly comfortable life in our homes, without starving or suffering unduly from disease, I am, at least perfectly content with someone else having as much money as they want. In fact, others can have whatever fetish they feel they need.

I don’t even mind if their fetish is a notion of power instead. Sure, you go have a great time making the laws we must live by, or enforcing them, as long as you must live by them too, and they conform both in letter and spirit to the boundaries we have agreed.

I’m curious how the new Michael Moore movie will portray Capitalism. Will he demonize it, or will he educate us? With Capitalism, like all academic constructs, the reality is, they are meant to be examined and studied — learned from — and only rarely taken as absolutes. They are meant to serve and better us, as humanity, not we them.

Right now a great deal of confusion is being generated through the people and mechanisms of this self-important abstract system, called Capitalism, that we have adopted. So much confusion is generated that we are even turning on ourselves. In essence, it is a holy war we wage, caught up in our own creation, adopted within our cultural myths and beliefs. And on all sides, real human lives are sacrificed in growing numbers upon the alters of progress. But what progress, really?

Is our measure of progress and success an accumulation of numbers, like the bizarre old woman whose attic gets filled to overflowing by her obsessive accumulation of trinkets? Or is true progress and success measured differently, more acutely, as the astonishing and previously impossible undertakings we have shouldered for one another in the interest of progressing our species onward to a better life for us all?

In a very real sense, Capitalism is a primitive structure, rooted in our most primal, and even barbaric instincts: conflict, gaining advantage, greed and strict boundaries. I can imagine no quality of Capitalism that cannot be reduced to at least one of those four. It is a reflection of our current world. It is a reflection of our beliefs, a reflection of work, and a reflection of nations. For most of us, it is a reflection of ourselves, even more so than a religion will shape even the most devout among us.

So what about the big bad word used by politicians and money interests to throw the brakes on any policy, law or even idea that tries to give, even the smallest amount of our public money back to the people who need it most, the ultra poor and even the mostly poor now, middle class? That’s right, I’m talking about the “S” word; Socialism, which, through a long history of propaganda, conjures images of evil Communists, secret police with interrogation cells, constant phone taps on citizens, disappearances, torture, and the invasion of foreign countries around the world to promote their oppressive way of life. Oh, wait. Hmm. Is that us?

Of course, there will be some among us who will claim, through hopelessly wrong reasoning, that it is the few wisps of socialist thinking recently entering into our political dialogue, that is to blame for our descent into that same state we claimed was so evil – evil, that is, when it wasn’t us. But that state is us, committing wanton acts of evil, and we are not a Communist state, nor even by a long stretch, a Socialist state. States become evil when they try, at any cost, to maintain themselves, unchanged.

I am not advocating Socialism, nor any other political or economic abstraction. However, I am advocating a thorough exploration of modern ideas, as well as old ones. It is unlikely that any one system will be good. We know that reality rarely conforms to ideals. Socialism is flawed because it requires that we can genuinely trust one another to adhere to the best principles for us all, through rational means. But unfortunately, we still have far too many liars. We still have far too many people who want things for themselves alone, despite the existence of other people. As long as this is true, more modern and humane systems like Socialism will be in danger of exploitation. We must learn to be honest, and care for each other, and not just in our own self-interest. But that does not mean we should avoid taking steps in new directions. In fact, we should. How better to learn, than to explore, with both our minds and hearts set to the task?

Pure Capitalism does not fulfill our social needs.It is wholly inadequate, and its shortcomings even go a long way to fostering ill for us, socially. Good does not arise, on its own, from greed. Capitalism is not wholly evil, either. But it impact upon our social structures must be tempered by something more humane than mathematics. It must be tempered by our desire to help one another, which all of us, when we are interviewed individually, possess a strong predisposition to do. We want to help others. And there is nothing wrong with that. And there is nothing wrong with making certain that those among us, who have benefited so greatly from us, also, to some degree, return benefit to us. There is nothing wrong with saying that ethics are every bit as important as profit. Doing so is a large step up in our social evolution and is one we are beginning to understand, and believe, despite the monumental efforts of purely capital interests.

Capitalism is not freedom. Nor is Socialism freedom. In the US, our notions of freedom arise from our founding documents, from which all subsequent law must, in theory, conform. Capitalism and Socialism are abstract ideals that we can look to and study, adopting those qualities we feel are right, for a given circumstance. I have heard it said by both liberals and conservatives, that the economic bailout of Wall Street was an act of socialism for the rich. That is not Socialism. Socialism would have that money go to all of us, not the banks, to pay off the mortgages. It was, instead, an act of Capitalism, and a telling example of how Capitalism can actually undermine a democracy – just as the trends in health care reform are also currently headed: a boon for capital interests, at our expense, with possibly something beneficial for us, coming down the road.

You know, I have given up being surprised by how many things lead me back to the general exploration of our universe, beyond all these ridiculous machinations. Those of you who follow NASA are familiar with the Augustine Report, commissioned to study NASA and its programs, then report back to the government. The preliminary report suggests that NASA needs more funding. And the GAO finds that NASA has not done enough to “develop all the elements of a sound business case” for its current human space flight plans.

If we used the money we have spent on the wars, and money we spend on the military in just one year, we would fully fund NASA, and more, for over 100 years, which is twice the agency’s current age. What “sound business case” is there for these wars, let alone humanitarian justification? The justification is oil, and its impending scarcity, and subsequent rise in value, which is also at odds with alternative energy development. Capital interests should not trump humanity’s interests. The question should not be how much money can we make, but rather, how much better can we make ourselves, through our understanding of each other and the universe we inhabit?

Imagine what we might come to understand and accomplish if just some tiny fraction of money were diverted from our military industry, or we decided to transform our military industry into scientific research? If we could just change from thinking in terms of offensive capabilities, to defensive, the savings would be enormous. The resources we could devote to energy, science and exploration could begin a new renaissance in our human endeavor.

I was listening to an astronaut speak a few days ago about his first sight of the Earth during a space walk. He’s a big, goofy Italian from New York, with all the trimmings. He said, it’s one thing when you look at the Earth through the window of a spacecraft, but it’s another thing altogether when you see the Earth clearly, right before your face. This big lug said, he looked at the Earth and words can’t even describe how beautiful it is. He looked away from it and thought to himself, God didn’t mean for anyone to ever see this. Then he looked again. And he thought, this is what Heaven must look like, watery-eyed, and worried that the moisture would do bad things in his suit, and that he would be given hell by his fellow astronauts now for telling this story. And then he thought no, this is not what Heaven must look like, this is what Heaven is.

It’s time we pull our heads out of money, power and war. It’s time we pull our heads out of never-ending ideological struggles that do not elevate us. It is time we devote ourself wholly to our own betterment as a species, not just to our own betterment. It is time we evolve. It is time we remember how, to show the way, by our example.

Remember, it is the ubiquitous things we seldom notice, even when they are fundamental to our life. Every day we travel to another world through a radical transition of our consciousness, where the real and the unreal intermix, creating who we are.

Each morning we pass through a transition, ancient as our species, when our mind, and our body, leaves its sleep, coalescing into wakefulness. This is, nearly always, the most radical occurrence of our day, yet we pay it no heed. For eight hours we live a life of pure imagination. For eight hours our body relaxes its form, completely. For eight hours we lay, trusting and vulnerable to all things. And then we wake, where the imagined life is closed.

Academics will tell you, the three greatest minds shaping the modern canon are Darwin, Freud and Marx. Darwin gives us our position in the world and defines for us many of our struggles within it, as a natural evolution. Freud creates a vocabulary for our mind, so that it might make sense, of itself, and other minds. And Marx lays bare our participation within the societies we inhabit.

If we are alive, then our lives are always in transition. Darwin’s ideas have, mostly, settled into our collective psyche; even into those people who rail against “Darwinism”. That apple has been eaten, and we create what gardens we can. Freud, also, is absorbed into our lives, if only “subconsciously”. Despite our ego. And Marx lit the fire that fuels our ongoing struggle for social justice and equality, against a tyranny of the few.

We see religions evolving, fighting to survive truths. We begin allowing ourselves to believe that caring for our sick and injured is more important than monetary profit, and that an injured Earth must also have care. We become aware that an incessant struggle to obtain money only creates more wealth for those who already have it, and the disparity becomes apparent. We wage a war of uncertainty, discontent, and a promise of hope within ourselves. We begin learning the lessons we already knew, were true. We begin to inhabit that disassociation, to resolve it. We evolve.

Through the scary things, and the confusing things. Through what we care about, and what we hate. Through our obsessions and our distractions, and our enjoyment. We evolve through our shame and guilt. Our obligations to each other. Our attention and expression. Hard and soft. And that which does not evolve, dies many slow deaths, one after the other. While here, it is our nature to become. Some would say, to be. We are, each of us, in this together.

The other day, I was listening to Grace Lee Boggs, a 92 year old woman who devoted her life to improving everyone’s life. She was nearly ecstatic about the urban community gardens she helped create in a decaying Detroit so many years ago; a movement that spread to other cities. Not for herself, but for the gardens; growing fresh food within communities on land reclaimed from the fall of misguided edifice. It was people, neighbors, shaping their own destiny independently. It was people, looking to each other, instead of waiting for direction from on-high. These gardens represented the cornerstone of what we are becoming. Excruciatingly slowly.

The world is rising, outside our borders. It has smacked us hard, saying, that is enough. We, beyond your borders, are not you. And the West, staring aloof, even amongst themselves, ratchets up its machinery. The grim countenance of bankers staring down upon these unruly children, who must be taught.

And the other day I watched Africans dancing, and singing in that rhythm which grips inside the gut, lifting up through the heart and skull, then bursts into a primal happiness. Children climbed the stage to dance, and fat women in wildly colored clothing, young and old, joined in the spell. This outpouring dwarfed the reach of our machines. But before this, I heard a story, of the mother, carrying her baby across a land, for so long, so tired. The vulture arriving through the air with its great wings, offering to lift her child home so she might rest, then join them at home. The vulture, who fulfilled his promise by returning her child with his heart pulled from his chest, consumed, and his eyes plucked out, explained himself: stupid woman, you deserve your grief, for trusting a stranger with your child.

Even our own stories, within our borders, tell of the bearers of the rings of Power, wielding them in the name of good. The great lady, who, when freely offered the One Ring that rules and binds them all, admits her desire to take it, using it only for good. But in her wisdom and restraint, she refuses. I pass the test, she says. I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.

To be alive is to live transition. I heard President Obama’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly. It was a beautifully-shaped formula, pompous and condescending to the nations of the world, yet laced with some truly good things. He spoke as if the United States was always the peaceful negotiator in a world whose nations held intractable positions. And now we, the United States, will bring the world together in the name of good.

The few of the Security Council, donning their rings of power, to bend the world toward good. But no good can come from them, nor any nation’s leaders. Good will only arise from those crazy children who walked onto the stage, simply to dance, and the large women who joined them, flowing across the field of view in bright, colorful boubous, simply for the joy of life’s rhythm.

Such a power in their dance, of raw life. Of a good, that is more than Good. This cannot be injected into people’s arms from points on-high. Good rises from the earth to gather in the chest, traveling out, only through our eyes. To each other. The world knows where we must go. We are in transition, in the garden. And our opportunity for good is to diminish, into each other’s midst.

Everybody likes computers. Everybody hates computers, too. Who knows how many computers, computed upon this message, that you are are reading now? Quite a few, for various reasons. And none of them understand it. They just do what they do.

Computers don’t understand what they do. They don’t know what a letter is, let alone a word. They don’t know where your monitor is, what a web browser is, or even what a picture is. They have no concept of sound, to play music, or hear another voice. All they know is how to measure a voltage of a tiny little thing, and lots of them, very quickly. Really, they don’t even know that. They just do that. And that’s how you’re reading this, or how you speak with another on the phone, or watch a show on tv.

Not long ago, people whose job was adding large tables of numbers were called “computers”. They worked in a sort of sweat-shop of the mind, fraught with error. And error irritated Charles Babbage (and others) who, back in the mid 1800’s, designed a “difference engine”, powered by steam, that could, in theory, add numbers, but never worked. His later design did work, however, after his death, when his son uncovered the designs and built it.

Before he died, however, and further irritated by his own failure, Babbage designed an “analytical engine” that might read instructions from holes punched into cards. The daughter of the poet Lord Byron even wrote a program for this non-real machine to calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers. As such, Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, is often considered the world’s first computer programmer.

But how can steam and gears translate into the occulted computing machines we use today? If we leave the physical world behind and enter into mathematics, abstracting ourselves away, we’ll find the work of Alan Turing. This is the man who set the groundwork for a mathematically sound representation of computation itself, defining its process and limits. Turing created a machine built of pure mathematics that laid the foundation for computer science. After all, we don’t want some machine, in whatever physical form it takes, to add numbers wrongly under certain conditions.

Turing’s model went much further than any previous attempts in many ways, most notably by proving that a machine could handle any possible mathematical computation, as long as that computation was expressible as an algorithm. Basically this means, if you can write down the rules, a machine can do it. The Turning Machine is, to this day, the most fundamental focus of computer theory.

If this weren’t enough, Alan Turning also is generally attributed with being the force who broke the Nazi’s Enigma Cypher, without which the Second World War might have turned out quite differently. But, being a gay man, and after the code was broken, Alan was convicted of homosexuality and chemically castrated, then soon afterward, took his own life (apparently). Earlier this year, the British Prime Minister apologised for it, citing the different ways people view things over time. That’s for another piece…

But the Turning machine is worth looking at, even for non-computer scientists. You must use your imagination. Imagine a long piece of tape — infinitely long, in fact. This tape is bounded by lines, making squares all along it. In each square there is a symbol, or a “0″. The tape is on rollers that allows the tape to move left and right, bringing a different square underneath a head that can read or write to each square, one at a time. That head is designed to take certain actions based upon the symbol upon the tape underneath it. These actions can include moving the tape to another square, or changing what is on the square, or just reading it. The last, and most difficult to understand, is the “state register”, which basically can store the states of various symbols and actions performed along the tape, in defined ways.

All computers, no matter how modern, can be represented and work perfectly as Turing machines. In fact, if you’re designing new computer hardware, you will want to make certain your design works as a Turing machine first. If it doesn’t, it is far more likely you have designed something wrongly than discovered something a Turing machine cannot do. Actually, that’s a bit of a lie. Quantum computing, which does not yet exist, may not follow Turing’s models, and, in fact, may be hindered by trying to do so. This is a very gray area. We would like our machines to give sensible, meta-world results, even from the chaotic nature of the quantum world. As such, abstract quantum Turing machines are being developed. Although some results look promising, who knows where this will lead. If quantum computing does work, it may represent a spectacular revolution.

Some of you are glazing over. Others are scandalized by my reckless generalizations. It’s all in your head, which is not a computer, organic, quantum, or otherwise. Logic and reason is in the realm of the mind, not the computer. We tend to consider our machines during any period of history, as representations of the human mind. But the human mind is not a steam engine, nor is it a phone switchboard. The human mind is not a computer. Our mind is as much like a computer as it is a steam engine. Computers do not have logic, even in so-called “logic” circuits. They can only measure a thing, and pass a current. Dispassionately, with no real sense of logic.

Our memory is not separate from whatever process gives us awareness. They are intertwined, and are literally sitting above our passions. If we try to separate ourselves from passions, to “think” like a computer, what we will find is that our passions are not so easily quenched, but instead influence our decision making invisibly, because we assume we are acting dispassionately. We can look at raw data and make what we want of it, perfectly logically — perfectly reasonable. We can justify nearly anything.

Here is the letter ‘X’. It is not an ‘X’. Inside your computer, on its Turing tape of memory, we have a sequence of high and low voltages I have put there, all in a row: 0101100.  It traveled through many other computers to reach yours, in many different ways. Caught up in the great system, it enters your web browser or email program’s domain. It is passed through rules to a committee that hands it off to another. And this committee hands it away to another wholly distinct domain which acts upon it, turning lights and colors on or off upon a screen, in a shape you alone recognize as an ‘X’.

There are records of it everywhere along the way. Traces. Systems are always being refined, and not only in the interest of efficiency. Systems have transformed our lifestyles, our businesses, our societies, and the world. We all know the word “glitch”. It’s a new word.

Lately we have experienced many glitches. Glitches in our political system, glitches in our economic system, glitches in Capitalism and Democracy itself. Glitches in the methodology of war. Glitches in religions. Glitches in what it means to be a healer, or even just a good person. Glitches in how we relate to our fellow human beings. Who are not just objects.

Glitches always reveal the inner workings, or the underbelly. Glitches cause the magical structure we take as given, and for granted, to become revealed in its gross, complex and patently un-magical and irrational form. And then, what is left? A quick patch to raise the circus wheel back into life? A redesign? Or toss the whole menagerie onto junk heap of history?

One thing is clear. Systems can help people. But for us to become the subject of systems, for us to become the fuel that keeps a system operational where some purpose of its aggrandizement outshines our own humanity, is a failure through short-sightedness, of that same humanity.

It is we who are the creators of worlds. It is we who are the destroyers. It is we who are sharing this brief time, here, together. And with this infinite tape of symbols and actions, what is it we create for each other, in the noble ascendancy of our aspirations? What universal language might we find that does not eventually cost our soul?

It took a man dying, but I joined Facebook. His memorial stuff was there. I’m in no condition to write. I received a message back from his wife after the last piece, saying Chris had died.

We all have friends. We all have lovers, both past and present. We have family. Yet even with friends, lovers and family members, some jagged bits of the universe conspire somehow to remind us, we are each of us, alone within our most personal experience.

For those of us unafraid to plumb the depths of the implications, or those of us who, perhaps by our very nature, are unable to quell the fierce drive to reach into those lonely and so common places, simply to say, “hello!”… For those of us, well, it is a difficult time right now.

It is possible, no matter who, or where you are, that you might be fortunate enough to find a soul mate. This is not friendship. It is not being lovers. It is when you can see another fully, and they, in turn, can see you. Time or space or matter in between you effects nothing. For when you know the soul of another, any change is insignificant. Our core always remains us; who we truly are.

But right now, I’m find that the death of a soul mate, who I am so lucky to have encountered, may be a distance that is too far away. It’s no longer just another shore. Now, it may not be a shore at all. I hope it is a lack of faith.

The last time I prayed was when Jeff’s aunt was having surgery, and I said that I would. Last night, I decided to on my own. I wanted him to be okay. And I wanted him to be happy. But he was dead, and I didn’t know what else to do.

I had a hard time even concentrating enough to pray. But eventually I managed. It turned out to be a threat: “you better let him in”.

Some petty god. Chris’ enormous heart and spirit. Wanting there to be a spirit, so that he might not truly be gone. I suppose I won’t know with certainty for a while.

This is what Chris would want me to tell you. Be good to each other. Pay the closest attention you can to each other, listen, even past what is being said, to what their heart is saying. Put yourself there. Let them pound on you for it. And only pound back when you should.

Don’t be afraid, question and explore everything. Be suspicious of the easy path. Take off your shoes, and wander into the woods. Stop. And listen. Feel what’s really there. Live the stories that you would tell! And even the ones you wouldn’t… Sacrifice anything, if it is the right thing to do.

Call people out on their bullshit, for the good of us all. Stand your ground, only when you know, without a doubt, that you are right. And if so, be willing to fight. He would not want you to be happy, unless you were happy. Or sad. He would give you a hug in your foolishness, and laugh, and soon you would be laughing, too. He would accept the same, and be honored, and embarrassed that you cared enough.

I can’t write any more of this. Everything is only half there and feeble right now. But if you are lucky enough to have a soul mate, from whatever time or place, call them up and say hi, and just that it’s good knowing they are there.