Memories, I feel, are something like a beach weathered by the waves.  At first they are like rocks: distinct, vivid, and occasionally jabbing us in the foot ;).  as time passes they are ground down by the oceans of our lives into sand.  A pleasant sprinkling of fine particles as far as the eye can see.

Not as intense as perhaps they once were...
But still warm (and pleasant to occasionally stroll through)

I hear people all the time saying we should be political, we should be active, engaged,
and aware of politics. That this is a clear and unadulterated good.
But when we say we are political, what does this mean exactly?

Is politics the desire to make things better for:

•   yourself?
•   your group(s)?
•   your country?
•   humanity?
•   some combination of the above?
  

I feel like people sometimes seem to avoid the issue...

Furthermore, I must ask, is politics necessarily the best method of achieving these things?

Consider the size, scale, and extraodinary variety of the known universe. A variety we
have made only the slightest impression of exploring.

Consider the existence of free will, consider the complexity and variety of life on this
planet alone, the diversity existing in human cultures.

Now are we to be told that the agent which created this is against diversity? Esposes
a narrow and constrained path. Does this seem even remotely plausible?

To state this is to take arms against the very nature of the universe. To deny not simply
logic and science but your very senses... yours eyes, your ears, your hands, your nose.

To me it just feels like an absurdity, to be frank.

Strip away everything: god, science, objective reality and declare it uncertain.  What is
left is sensation and feeling.  How they arrive is unknown, what it means or represent is unknown.  All that is certain is that there is information and we receive it.
(Descarte, of course, plays a little trick here, and tries to get it all back.   Long discussion there but at least in my opinion its just not that easy )

So the information gathered by our senses is terribly fundamental to our understanding of the universe.  Can it be argued that our constructs about the universe are merely derived from the existence of coherent and consistent information structures arriving as sense data?

Taking a small diversion, there is a decent amount of evidence that dreams are the brain trying to make sense of random firings in the spinal cord.  So...  In the absence of real sensory data the brain turns raw noise into a fuzzy kind of narrative.

But what makes us so confident that the life we live is so very, very different?

Can we understand the sensation of life/consciousness as a stream of decisions?

As I see it we have 2 worlds: the world as it is, and the world as it should be (or
perhaps, less grandiously: 'the world as we would like it be)

In this stream of decisions we can act to reduce the difference between these two worlds,
which in some sense, is fulfilling our wants and desires.  But I would rather not speak of wants and desires here as I'm trying to avoid the mundane decision making
(shall I eat pizza or get an ice cream cone).

So out of this stream can we find purpose?  That we should understand our decisions not in terms of short term wish-fulfillment, but as part of the realization of goals?

We must imagine a better world.  Then we must understand our own world in the cold clarity of reason.  And from this cold clarity derive the rational basis for our passion.  The necessary fire to produce this better world. For I do believe quite strongly that while fire unguided only destroys, but fire wielded with care and thought can achieve wonderful things.

Just read an interesting article in Wired on 'medical refugees' coming to India

I can see some strong negative reactions to this:

1. In the US: what about US jobs
2. In India: what about poor Indians who need access to health care, there aren't enough doctors to serve the needs of all Indian.

My response:

1. The needs of people who can't afford medical care for necessary procedures would seem to me to outweigh any concern about a few jobs lost.
   
2. Hopefully the influx of patients and money will assist in the creation of badly needed additional hospitals in India. Hopefully the additional business will perhaps inspire a few more people to become doctors (who tend to be quite badly paid currently compared to software engineers and in some cases even call center workers). Hopefully :(

Of course: even if my claims about point #2 are correct this will not happen immediately.  The short term result of this could very well be a situation where medical service for India's poor gets even worse (and it is already a very tough situation)
 
Perhaps a requirement that hospitals which cater to these tourists also provide some level of subsidized service to those in need could help to some extent?

The world just keeps on getting more complex, doesn't it...

Is it reasonable to say:

• Science is fundamentally an attempt to understand reality
• Art is an attempt to explore the human condition

Furthermore, can we then call Spirituality (i.e. all theology, metaphysics, and most philosophy) an attempt to bridge previous concepts?   Or to put it another way: a way of bridging the internal and the external worlds?

Notes: Science is not really structured to concern itself with human beings, when attempts are made to perceive science through the lens of humanity (ex. anthromorphic principle) they seem to fall into the realm of the bridging concept: spirituality. While I don't think art really seems to really be concerned with the notion of reality in itself.

For example: when landscapes are painted tthe point isn't an accurate painting of a landscape its a discussion of how we as human beings perceive the landscape, or relate to the landscape, or feel about the landscape.

Any comments?

Thought I'd start things off by maybe talking a touch about why I'm here. 

I ran into a friends blog here and ended up exploring the site a bit.  Some very interesting stuff.  Now I've been filing away some rough thoughts for a while now trying to polish them up into something vaguely coherent.   So why not put some of it up here for people to see, maybe get some comments, and share ideas back and forth on reality/philosophy/spirituality/etc with a community dedicated to things of that nature.

When responding to a new technology the media tends to simply give us raw data.
Futurologists make predictions, moralists will try to give some context.

But, who is looking at the big picture?

How will society react, is it wise to go beyond natural limitations, what do people have the right to do, what will change and how does society deal with it, the list goes on...

These issues are very real, quite serious, and seem to be coming faster and faster these days.

It seems to me (and do correct me if I have missed something here) that Science Fiction ( I'm really talking mostly about literary SF here) is the only medium that really seeks to address these issues in a holistic sense.

So the whole 'Wisdom of Crowds' meme has hit the mainstream.

Time magazine declared the person of the year to be 'You' , citing Wikipedia, YouTube, and
MySpace.

Nature put Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia up against each other head to head; and found that if Britannica has an edge its a slender one indeed.  Britannica of course, replied furiously...  the whole exchange can be found online.  Personally I think I'm inclined to trust Nature, probably the most prestigious scientific journal in existance, over an organization with strong business and personal reasons to object.

Now the common understanding of this phenomena is that it represants something new that has recently been enabled by advances in information technology.  I'd like to put forth the idea that individual authorship is whats new and that much of human wisdom is aggregated from multiple sources.  Anything proceeding the invention of writing, the oral history of the human race seems to me to fall into this category.  For example: most historians feel that the Illiad and the Odyssey to have been the product of many singer-poets (aoidoi) which was standardized into a canonical text, with Homer being more a title given to this aggregate than a single individual.  Sounds a lot like the wisdom of crowds to me.   This is also very true of other cultures myths and stories. 

Following the invention of writing distinct notions of authorship were created and have gained a great deal of authority.  Auteur theory in cinema presents directors as the authors of films, putting a distinct philosophical stamp on each of their works.  Is this particularly credible however?  In a film we have the influence of the screenwriter, the producers casting decisions, the cinematographers decisions, the actors interpretation, even the costume designers, set designers, and so on have an important role to play and influence the final product in complicated ways.  Isn't this also a crowd?  Isn't there also a sort of emergent wisdom here?

Perhaps wisdom has always been something that emerges from the interaction of human beings?  From our discussions and debates, from people bouncing ideas off each other and new ideas appearing...

There is a passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson that I have been pondering lately:
"I will not live out of me
I will not see with others eyes
My good is good, my evil ill
I would be free - I cannot be
While I take things as others please to rate them
I dare attempt to lay out my own road
That which myself delights in shall be Good
That which I do not want -indifferent,
That which I hate is Bad."

Is this the way to live? I believe quite strongly that we must forge our own path in this life.
But how far should this be taken?  At what point does being your own individual turn toward arrogance?  At what point does it turn into indifference to the needs and suffering of others? Harold Bloom in Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? claimed that Emerson in many ways defined the philosophical outlook we now associate with America...  I do find in Emersons' works much of what I love about America and what troubles me about America. 

At the same time if we do not see with our own eyes, who's eyes are we to see with?  How do we temper our desire for freedom and individualism with compassion and humility?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6171083.stm

Continuing a bit on the recent medical theme heres something rather disturbing I just read at bbc.co.uk.  Ukraine has apparently become a hub for a lot of stem cell related activities and there is evidence that new-born babies may have been killed for their stem cells.  This doesn't seem to be completely proven yet but the evidence seems pretty damning and the BBC is a reasonably reliable news source.

This is, to be honest, something I've been kind of expecting to here for a while.  Its also, to reference an earlier post, the kind of thing science fiction writers have been warning us about for a while.  I feel the key problem here is that medical technology moves so fast and pulls us so hard.  Ethical lines blur sometimes when someone we love is very ill.

A different form of this debate has of course been raging in the US for some time now.  How do you tell someone that a cure exists for their cancer but it must be denied to them for reasons that seem so abstract and preachy?  I'm not really against stem-cell research, but I do feel we must be careful with these things.  What is human life?  Why is it so critical?  How do we protect it?  This are critical issues and its dangerous to throw them into this brew of commerce and need. 

I fear the commercialization of embryonic tissue, because once something becomes a commodity strange pressures are exerted on it. 

In a broader sense I feel that when a new medical technology arrives that has huge ethical implications like human cloning or stem cell research its important to take the time and understand the implications, even if it means delaying treatment to some.

I will admit that it would be terribly hard for me to look someone in the eye who needed this treatment and say: "I'm sorry, your just going to have to wait, we need some time to resolve the moral dilemmas inherent in this live-saving treatment".  But the human race is going into strange and dangerous territory, it has only just begun and I fear it will only grow harder and more complex as the next wave of technology and innovation arrives. 

Patience, humility, and understanding will be a necessity, imho.

Let me counterbalance the previous post a bit.

So I recently watched Little Miss Sunshine (fantastic movie, btw) and it got me to thinking about dreams.

One of the things I think is really good about America is the cultural acceptance of dreaming.  People have dreams and ambitions and while they might be unrealistic or something I personally don't understand: they have them, they care about them, and they fight for them.  In Bangalore I feel that people don't always even try out their dreams (or if they do, the people around them aren't necessarily terribly accepting of it).  Many people seem quite willing to do what society, their parents, their relatives and friends expect...  Their own dreams getting lost in the maze of familial and societal expectations/demands.  Is sacrificing some dreams at the altar of responsibility a requirement for familial/social stability?  I don't know, but  I do sometimes feel that there should be another way.

Rilke once said that love is two solitudes that reach out, protect, and greet each other.

This I firmly believe is what true love is. There is another love, a biochemical thing associated
with oxytocin, vasopressin, and so on which is far more common however.
More info here: (Economist article)

I think people frequently get confused between the two.

The love I'm talking about is an inhabitant of the mind, it is not a thing of pure rationality but it has respect for the rational. It is a meeting of souls, a decision to trust in a world where that decision frequently seems mad, it is the warmth of companionship in a world which increasingly only has room for icy superficial relationships.

Let me try to construct a more solid foundation for my rather meandering previous post.

I feel that there are 4 levels of moral action:

1. Instinctive: Simply doing what feels correct at any given moment.
   
2. Intellectual: Considering why you do these things and if they are actually right or rather just what society has told you is correct (and I think we can all agree that societies are not always right about these things)    
   
1. Note: this is not the same as coming up with some rationalized justification for doing what you want to do, and dressing it up with logical tricks(!).
   
3. Thoughtful: Seeking to deal with root causes rather than symptoms.
   
4. Deep Morality: Deep morality is often counterintuitive and can seem aggressively contrary to type 1, 2, and even 3 morality if the broad sweep is not seen.  It is also of course the trickiest form of moral action.

One example of deep morality might be the actions of the allies in WWII.  At first glance it seems deeply immoral.  Many people in Germanyand Japan were killed(often in terrible ways).  But I do feel it served a long term good.  Of course wars to serve a larger good can often go horribly awry, but that is another debate and this post is already long enough imho.

To wrap things up (and re-connect with the previous post) my feeling at the moment is that patience with certain parts of new medical technology though it may seem morally counter-intuitive does serve a deeper and more crucial sense of morality.