Analogous Thought: My Meandering Mind

I've accumulated a ridiculous, embarrassing amount of notes, links and ideas for subjects to write about - at least 200 broad categories of subjects - that, were I being paid for blogging, I could easily churn out five or ten blog posts a day, each on some separate topic. I've often used the acronym "FFUI" (for "free-floating unattached intelligentsia," a phrase I copped from Karl Mannheim) here at the OG; I think maybe I'm more the flaneur I mentioned near the end of my last blogspew. Or Herbert Gold's term, "magpie intellectual"? Then again, to quote Marlene Dietrich's last line from Orson Welles's Touch of Evil, "What does it really matter what you say about people?"

Benefits of Bilingualism

So yea: I was going to write on some recent articles that suggest bilingualism has some intriguing and beneficial aspects we weren't sure of only a few years ago. Then I was going to shift to the personal and talk about my ability to quickly remember 75-100 phrases in some non-English foreign language - usually the ones you'd need if you found out you were going to Country X in a week. ("Thank you," "Excuse me, but where is the ____,?" the days of the week, "Please, I'd like the (menu item)," "How are you doing sir/madam?," "Another beer please," and "How much?" are just a few of the obvious ones.)

However, like far too many Unistatians, I'm monolingual; I've yet to really immerse myself in one language and become truly conversant in it. I've at times memorized the sentence "I'm sorry, but I don't speak (the local language) very well," so well, and with an apparent accent, that native speakers have often thought I was being modest and went on, in something utterly incomprehensible to me. I've not studied the grammar of another language in depth, and the vast number of nouns needed to get by looks menacing to me.

                                 The Proto-Indo-European language family

I took a stab at Intelligence Increase a while back but barely made a dent; it turns out learning new languages has broad implications for getting smarter. The New York Times's Yudhuit Bhattacharjee recently cited studies that, rather than one language inhibiting the other in one's mental processes, it's more complex than that, that both systems are in use even when one is being used, which forces the brain to solve internal conflicts, strengthening cognitive muscles. Bilingualism enhances executive (frontal lobe) functions: planning, staying focused, and solving real-world problems. Having more than one language is linked to a heightened ability to monitor the local environment, and it also seems to make one resistant to the onset of dementia. I would consider all of these benefits to fall under the rubric, "intelligence increase."

                                        Daniel Kahneman, born 1934, still thriving, won 
                                        Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002 for work in 
                                        Prospect Theory, which annihilated the presumptions
                                        of far-too-rationalistic Econs. Kahneman came from
                                        the field of Psychology. The Econs needed this...
                                        But will they learn from it?

A University of Chicago study shows bilingualism helps eliminate certain unconscious biases and allows us to make better financial decisions. HERE's another take on this study, from Wired. Note that much of the core of these studies comes out the jaw-droppingly phenomenal work by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. If you get a chance, spend an hour or two with Kahneman's recent book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Some people deserve more than one Nobel Prize for their work...

Then there was THIS article by Robert Lane Greene, that argues for English speakers to pick French to learn, because Chinese is too difficult, which made me wonder. I knew Chinese was hard (I was only able to recite about 15 phrases, and had difficulty), mostly because of the tonal aspects, but I thought it might make me a better musician; also: reading Chinese would totally RAWK!, and I'd have more chances to practice speaking Chinese in Unistat than I would if I spoke French. But French really does sound sexy to me.

William Bright's Multilingual Might
Speaking of difficult languages: I'm reminded of someone I recently stumbled upon, the virtuoso comparative linguist William Bright. He is the father of "Susie Sexpert," AKA Susie Bright, whose work I understand FAR BETTER than her dad's knowledge of Native American and Southern Asian languages such as Karuk, Luiseno, Nahuatl, Wishram, Ute, Yurok, Lushai, Kannada, Tamil and Tulu.

People like this I find just astonishing. It reminds me of Kenneth Hale, who died about 18 months ago. There's a story - I can't remember where I read it so I'm probably getting it wrong - but Hale was legendary for picking up new languages very easily, and not superficially like the way I do it. He could become conversant at a speed that seemed superhuman. The story I recall was he was going to attend a conference in Sweden, and he didn't know Swedish...but he learned it on the plane!

Anyway, back to William Bright: he died in 2006 of a brain tumor of the type glioblastoma multiforme, which reminded me of someone else who had the same tumor and died from it.

Terence McKenna
Terence also had glioblastoma multiforme. Erik Davis did the last in-depth interview with Terence, and it's collected in Davis's envy-provoking-for-me book of essays, Nomad Codes, but it's also to be found HERE.

I had recently been sent a brief video of Terence's words being used to encourage Occupiers. It's about a minute long. "Find the others" was a recurring riff from Timothy Leary, and I think Terence is quoting Leary here, although I'm not sure.

When reading Erik Davis's piece I thought of Unistat and some of its marginalized - because of drugs, mostly - visionary intellectuals, and how they went out, a looming inexhorrible terminus in clear sight, yet their departures were with grace and courage, and yes, a certain style. William Burroughs's last words were about love being the greatest drug of all. Leary died surrounded by friends and family, throwing one last long party, dying on his own terms (see his vastly underrated book and libertarian  Design For Dying), and, as he went out, allegedly his last words were, "Why not?" Robert Anton Wilson wrote this to his family, friends and fans before dying five days later.

Back to Terence, his tumor - which is really a nasty one and fairly common as brain tumors go, it takes out its hosts generally quickly - has recently suffered a setback of its own. From an April 17th, 2012 dispatch from U. of California at San Francisco: rather than brain surgery to remove the tumor as best as the surgeon can do, followed by chemotherapy and radiation, a vaccine that uses cells from the patient's own tumor, injected into the arm like a flu shot, extended the lives of patients for up to a few months. This technique seems promising for all sorts of cancers, and I particularly liked the term for the adversary of the cancer: "heat shock proteins."

Here's a surreal Portuguese film called The Manual of Evasion. It features Terence, RAW, and Rudy Rucker riffing on the topics of Time and Space. It's not a bad accompaniment to some choice herb. It's 57 minutes long...but according to the ideas of Terence and RAW and Rucker, "57 minutes" seems like a horribly prosaic idea!

Life Extension Notes

Completing the trifecta of Leary and Wilson's SMI2LE vision of a way out of technological materialism with no goal, no telos, is Life Extension. This one's a whole ungainly ball of wax, and I will have to do multiple posts on it over the coming months in order to feel like I've said anything substantial about it.

I previously posted on Space Migration HERE.
My stab at Intelligence Increase ("I" squared) was HERE.

Cellular Level
From my current view, the most exciting and radical research on life extension is the hard slog done at the level of the cell. According to some statistics, the combination of ever-faster computers and the fact that there are more scientists doing research now than at any time in history - by far! - means that key findings about how and why we age, how we can slow it down, stop it or even reverse it, are immanent. (Let us define "immanent" as something like "in the next 15 years," just for kicks, although many in the field will say that's being conservative!)

Around 1961 cytogerontologist Leonard Hayflick and his colleague Paul Moorhead defined what is now commonly called the "Hayflick Limit": they proved that cellular DNA can only replicate about 60 times during a lifetime; with constant replications, mistakes are made, gunk gets into the next generation, and accumulates over time. I heard one theorist describe it as like when you or your friends bought a Beatles record and taped it for friends. Then they taped it from the tape they were given, then those friends taped it from the taped tape, etc: after awhile you got a copy that sounded like crap. Well, when we get to be around 75, our cells are filled with gunk, the machinery has started to break down (I've seen the carburetor used as a metaphor a lot here too), and the processes that keep our hearts, brains, livers and other good stuff...rust and break. (We probably sound as bad as a washed-out Beatles tape, too.) We die. It seems we're programmed to be like that.

There are plenty of Very Bright People who think we can defeat these programs.

So far, the only proven method of extending life is to slow metabolism, which for humans means caloric restriction, or to eat less. The less food/calories, the less to metabolize, the slower gunk and noise accumulates at the cellular level. The problem with this is that it's really not very fun. I think Woody Allen put it best when he said that - I paraphrase from memory - "If you want to live to be 100, you need to give up all those things that make you want to live to be 100."

There's gotta be a better way. And it looks like there are a few prospects. I'll cover a few.

Sidelight: The literature on life extension is so extensive, it's easy to find oneself in a rocky and sedimented terminal morain. This precariousness seems heightened if the reader is a non-specialist, and who's more non-specialist than an overweening generalist? Still, I have found a few hot rocks. They seem to shimmer brilliantly. I call each one a possible fleck from the Fountain of Youth. Let us call each item a "de Leonite clue."


Here's a possible de Leonite: ELLPs. What are they? They're Extremely Long-Lasting Proteins, and they were recently found on the surface of the nucleus of a neuron by researchers at the Salk Institute's Molecular and Cell Biology Lab, led by Martin Hetzer. What's the big deal? Well, most proteins last for a few days at most. The ELLPs that coat a cell last a lifetime, and they're part of the NPC, or Nuclear Pore Complex. Okay, look at the cross-section of the cell above and note things called "microtubules," "microfilaments," and "plasma membrane." A cell needs to both protect itself from outside bad stuff and to let in outside good stuff - to put it like a nine year old. The Salk researchers found that bad stuff can happen because these ELLPs that coat the outside of the cell walls of a neuron like marble, erode over the years, and this is probably how a lot of gunk (there's our carburetor metaphor again) gets into cells. Another way of putting it: the gate keepers of the cell break down over a lifetime and allow toxins to get in, damaging DNA, and let us not even talk about the nasty stuff that happens when your DNA is damaged.

The results from this research could lead to better ways to treat or avert neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Hetzer's team were told the research they undertook would be too bold, difficult and expensive to conduct. You probably didn't hear about this in the "news" because it didn't contain enough blood, Beiber, ballgame or Beyonce.

Seriously, this is major stuff, because no one really knew ELLPs were what they were. Read more about it HERE.

Q: What are sirtuins? And what do they have to do with me?


I'm glad you asked. They are Silent Information Regulator Two proteins that act as enzymes, and were linked to life extension around 1986. Mammals have seven types of sirtuins, and Sir1 has been linked to the reason why caloric restriction works to slow aging. It gets really dodgy from here on out, for the OG.

How cool would it be if we could find something that would activate the Sir1, without having to constantly feel hungry? When we start to starve - or we restrict our caloric intake by 30%--40% - as the theory goes, some genes kick in and protect us against the stress of being hungry, and protect our cells and vital organs. These are the sirtuins. Here's where red wine comes in: it looks like, when we drink certain red wines that contain resveratrol, that it activates a gene-complex very Sir1-like, and has the same effects as caloric restriction. Instead of caloric restriction/quasi-starvation, drink a hearty glass of red zinfandel! Sound too good to be true? (Wait for it...)

 MIT professor Leonard Guarente has been at the forefront of Sir1 research, from caloric restriction to providing a theoretical platform for new anti-aging drugs based on his (and other's) sirtuin findings. Glaxo-Smith-Kline paid $720 million for a company called Sirtrus, and...here's an article from two years ago. It's not going as well as we'd/they'd hoped. In many articles, Dr. Richard Miller, a professor of Pathology at the University of Michigan and critic of the sirtuin hypothesis, has been saying that the relatively simple story of the sirtuins was too simple, that sirtuins are probably just one of very many systems in cell-signaling that influence aging. But Guarente is holding firm, recently publishing a long paper on the miraculous potentials of the sirtuins.

Meanwhile, research on the other sirtuins is hot - there's potentially gold in them thar genes! - and for the sufficiently geeky, see HERE (Sir6 linked to longer lifespan!), HERE (researchers in London seem to see a chimera in the sirtuin hunt vis a vis longevity?), and HERE, for starters. Note this last article suggests mutations that increased sirtuins were linked to anxiety and panic disorders. I think the sirtuin road led to a terminal morain for this reader. But I will still pay attention to anything that might come up. You never know what Sir5 might have in store for us, for example. The sirtuins may yet yield a dynamite de Leonite/piece of the puzzle.

I want to get into telomeres and telomerase, but first a word from an Oracle, AKA Kaku:

Stop me if you've heard this one, or just bear with me: each one of our chromosomes has a sort of "cap" of base-pairs that can be visualized like a shoelace: if you didn't have that little piece of hard plastic at the end of your laces, everything would shred and tying your shoes would be an unpleasant task. A telomere is one of these caps. It strongly appears that, with each cell division over a lifetime, the cap gets shorter. End of telomere = haywire/Hayflick Limit. Cells can't repair, eventually TAFUBAR.

Now: there are two classes of cells that don't age: your germ/sex cells (sperm/eggs, which is good, or your baby will be born looking as old as you!), and our old nemesis, the emperor of all maladies, cancer. Cancer can just go on dividing forever! It's immortal! (Not all cancer cells, just...enough. Oy. As Professor Carlin wrote in Napalm and Silly Putty, "If you live long enough, everyone you know has cancer.") Until it - cancer - kills itself by killing its host (us or our loved ones). Let's not worry about cancer's problems. It's doing just fine for now.

So what makes sex and cancer cells immortal? Telomerase. Both germ and cancer cells produce the enzyme telomerase, which keeps the telomeres intact when cells divide. Can we come up with telomerase therapy that will effectively arrest aging, or potentially reverse some of it? Dr. Michael Fossel thinks so. He thinks it's about ten years away! (Other Big Brains I've read say 50-100 years and we'll have telomerase therapy. Aubrey de Grey says about 100 years, and that guy usually seems optimistic to me. Speaking of Mr. de Grey, get a load of him if you haven't already. There are endless videos to be found if you like this one:

Axiological Level
What really interested me about what de Grey says here about those opposed to longevity research - mainstream media people who seem to regard it as faintly ridiculous or science-fiction-y and throw in the word "immortality," and gerontologists. This last I found very interesting, because de Grey seems to perceive those engaged in regenerative medicine as knowing things the gerontologists do not. Which I find totally plausible. If one reads Leonard Hayflick, one rapidly sheds any optimism for notable improvements in human lifespan soon; Hayflick is a heavyweight in the field of human lifespan studies and he's not exactly sanguine about our prospects for immortality, to put it mildly. But I wonder if de Grey is rather talking about temperaments of researchers? Just note the impression the fields have on your own disposition towards improving human lifespans: "gerontology"....""regenerative medicine"? At what point do we reconcile these two, if ever? It gets weirder.

I think it has to do with axiology, the study of our basic values. We build whole worlds of thought, political systems, ideologies, laws, and dreams on the basic building blocks of our own values. And where did we get these values that are so important to us? It's a difficult question. I've written on axiology HERE and HERE, but I have barely touched the surface of the idea.

One of the major founders of Transhumanism, Max More. Check out what he has to say between 5:26 and 8:07:

This gets to a recent book review I read in Reason magazine. I have not read The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science In America, by Jonathan D. Moreno. Not yet. Ronald Bailey's review seems to extend the values issues that Max More brought up after his famous Free Inquiry  article from 1993, between "humanists" and "transhumanists," this latter group who were enthused about More's ideas probably not even self-defining themselves as "transhumanists" at the time. Coupled with Aubrey de Grey's gerontologists vs. regenerative medicine researchers (and IT professionals, libertarians, and Canadians), now we have the "biopolitics" of strange bedfellows: biocons, who object to things like embryonic stem cell research on strictly "moral" grounds; and egalitarian leftists, who see a disaster in runaway advanced new biological techniques: only for the rich, non-egalitarian, and lacking in human dignity. In this article, "biopolitics" is defined as "the nonviolent struggle for control over the actual and imagined achievements of the new biology and the world it symbolizes."

(I analyzed Rick Santorum's views on bioethics vis a vis this wider conversation and will charitably designate him as some sort of "paleobiocon." I think I'm letting him off easy, too.)

The Reader has to decide where they stand on this stuff. Where are you, bio-ethically? The more I study this stuff, the more difficult it gets. On principle I like the idea of Unistat starting out as a country that values very highly new knowledge. And the history of the 19th/early 20th century Progressive movement and eugenics is sobering. On the other hand, I see Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book The Black Swan as prophetic (ironically!): we now live less and less in the old linear, Bell Curvey "Mediocristan" and more and more in Extremistan: the rich have gotten wildly richer and almost everyone else has stayed the same or has fallen lower. And I don't see much brightness on the horizon. Just look at the overtly bought elections. Just look at the appalling decadence in the basic fact that: the banks did what they did to our lives, got bailed out, and Obama has not been able to put in place any regulations with teeth to speak of, four years later.

However, as Taleb goes to great lengths to emphasize: we can only notice where there's risk/fragility built into a system and try to minimize it. All other bets about the future are off. No one knows. Certainly not "experts"!

I tend to be with Moreno's "bioprogressives," who welcome new advances, even if I probably won't be able to afford them. Hell, I can't even afford basic health insurance now...

Speaking of Taleb: "Don't talk about 'progress' in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness." - p.7, Bed of Procrustes


David Jay Brown's marvelous book of interviews, Mavericks of Medicine: Conversations on the Frontiers of Medical Research (2006) was an overwhelmingly stimulating read this past week - on this subject of life extension and other topics - and is largely to blame for the gap between my last post and this one. Highly recommended! (It's dedicated to Robert Anton Wilson, too.)


To end on a lighter note, Professor Carlin thought that "Dying must have a survival value. Or it wouldn't be part of the biological process."

Ray Kurzweil - no relation to Peter Bogdanovich that I know of - on aging and supplements, for a minute and 40 seconds: "We can't rely on 'being natural,' that's not good enough..."

Dreaming Large: Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension: Part One: Space

Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary called these three things together "SMi2LE." They were both enthusiastic science fiction readers (and writers, one far better than the other), and both were also voracious readers of science "fact" about space exploration, humans getting smarter, and living increasingly longer and more vital lives. Despite their PhDs in Psychology, they were both terrific generalists, and while both were too optimistic about their forecasts, they inspired many a young dreamy intellectual to pursue neurobiology, organic chemistry, quantum mechanics, microbiology and genomics, etc.

For this post, I'll limit my spew to space migration. Soon: some ideas on Intelligence Increase, then Life Extension. The Frankfurt School thinkers criticized modern capitalist societies for techne without telos. Leary and Wilson's visions - and many other similar visions by Dreamers - seem to answer the Frankfurters. (For my telos I'd first choose solving world hunger, overpopulation, the renewable energy thing, and a few other small items like that...which makes me sympathize with the Dreamers who saw the stars as our ultimate destination...Jared Diamond reminds us that, throughout history, technology has always meant power, which solves problems, but also creates new problems. And what kind of life would we have without problems? Consider that your zen koan of the day if you didn't already have one with breakfast.)

I've been actuated to write this blog post by my blog colleague Oz Fritz, who shares many of my influences, and knows more about kabbalah and Crowley than I do... See his recent, trippy SMi2LE stuff HERE.

"The future exists first in imagination, then in will, then in reality." - Barbara Marx Hubbard

Mars
After 1972, science fiction writers began to sober up. NASA was seen as a jobs program, with vision problems and in-fighting as to whether we spend billions on unmanned space telescopes that could do real, hard science; or to pursue unmanned and then manned trips to Mars. Venus was not as exciting, which I'll get to shortly. Sure, Mars has its drawbacks: it has 1/100th of Earth's atmosphere, which means you're bombarded with radiation, which causes cancers and that's only the beginning. You can build radiation shields, but they're prohibitively expensive. Mars is always freezing, there's (probably) no life, no organic chemistry, canals, or temperate zones. The surface area is basically rust.

But Venus makes Mars look like Central Park on a warm spring day: when we look at it from Earth it's the next brightest astronomical body after the moon, but that's opaque, reflecting clouds of sulfuric acid, not a lot of fun. Below that, it has a very dense atmosphere, in stark contrast to Mars. But the problem: imagine our global warming problem times, oh, I'll just say 10,000. Maybe a million. It's extremely dense carbon dioxide. Talk about a smoggy day! It has no carbon cycle, so the nightlife suffers catastrophically. The day life too. Hell: life. A "runaway greenhouse effect" probably caused it all, and it's just a tough break for us: we need hospitable planets: not too hot, not too cold, an atmosphere with oxygen, some weather, plate tectonics...is that too much to ask? Oh yea: A decent day on Venus is about 450 degrees Celsius, or about 900 degrees Fahrenheit, which is enough to melt your copy of Paul McCartney and Wings' Venus and Mars.


Turns out getting humans to Mars to live or at least "hang out" is far more difficult than science fictionists had thought. The last Apollo guys were subject to solar flares and cosmic rays for about 12 days. A trip to Mars and back would run 18-30 months, or between 550-900 days. And the weightlessness is murder on your bone density. Micro-gravity causes us to lose as much density in one month as we would normally on Earth in a year. So: your bones age times 12. Your bones support your muscles, and we all see the implications there. Further: your tissues deteriorate under the radiation. Cancers are more frequent, and your brain gets damaged. Any pharmaceutical drugs are spoiled.

                                     Sulfur-rich rocks on Mars. Photo: NASA/JPL/Cornell

"But haven't you heard of terra-forming Mars?," you ask. Oh yea. But it turns out that's a far more difficult problem than we'd thought. Just think about fixing Earth's climate problems. I still think there's gotta be some way to do it, though.

Peter Diamandis says there's "no question" we'll soon genetically engineer single-celled bacteria or even algae that can withstand the Martian conditions, and a $1million X Prize is at stake for the first team to do it.

Gregory Stock thinks the technical hurdles needed to overcome the Martian landscape for humans are too much, and that any technology put toward the effort would be better used on Earth, and he is a strong advocate of fearless, ambitious genetic engineering. Stock thinks the exploration of "inner space" would be more rewarding at this time, and I think if Leary and Wilson were here they'd sit up and take notice of that notion.

Robert Zubrin thinks Stock has it all wrong: the hazards of an inhabited Mars trip have been vastly overstated; he thinks we must go because the frontier is where invention happens. He's a visionary, he's Mars uber-alles. I think he sounds sorta nuts, but what do I know? I'm sitting in my little boxy book-lined room typing away on a tiny computer.

In the latest ish of Reason magazine, Tim Cavanaugh thinks we can get to Mars, but - and this is "trippy" in at least two senses of the word - we need to genetically modify humans on Earth first. Yep. Modify them so they'll be ready to handle the trip to Mars and...whatever they'll do there. It almost certainly has no mineral wealth to help pay back the costs. But it's the frontier, man! Imagine telling a bunch of venture capitalists that they'll need to help fund the engineering of humanoid "freaks" (although wouldn't you steer clear of that language?) to minimize the potential problems for the trip. "Here's the corker - and stick with me here guys, this is brilliant - we manufacture the Martians here on Earth first!"

Maybe I just lack imagination.

You can read about the oh-so-human problems and logistics of space travel - including, rather famously, what to do when you have to poo - in Mary Roach's hilarious and very well-researched Packing For Mars.

Who Was Chesley Bonestell?
A space artist who fired the imaginations of a million young space geeks before we'd ever gotten there. Check out the ingenium on Bonestell! He teamed up - in a matter of speaking - with Werner Von Braun, who wrote imagination-catching articles on space stations, space flight, space travel, etc. He was one of the MVNs (most valuable nazis) Unistat got over the Russians in the immediate aftermath of WWII. And it turns out he was almost uncanny in his predictions about how things would go in space, up to this point. But check out books from your library about Bonestell's artwork, or check out one of the pages devoted to him, like this one.

                                        A Bonestell landscape: the stuff of dreams

Micro-Gravity and DNA
Instead of actually going into space, it turns out we can simulate very low gravity conditions on Earth, using magnets. When fruit flies were levitated for x number of days versus control groups, 500 or so genes were affected, including ones that regulated body temperature, the immune response, and stress levels. See this article from Wired. So: space trips would seem to already by changing astronauts into "freaks" (I'm sure there's a better word), or...Something Else. The fruit flies had trouble reproducing and developed slowly. This is turning out to be a Hard Problem, eh?

But I bet human ingenuity will figure it out. But what will Earth look like then? Will you or I still be here then?

Space Tourism
It's already happening. Listen to some interviews HERE. Charles Simonyi's been "up" twice. The tickets are really expensive, so it helps if you've invented a program that Microsoft sells billions of copies of. For now.

It'll get a lot cheaper if the science fiction-y character Elon Musk is right. Musk, born in South Africa, dropped out of Stanford's grad school, invented Pay Pal (Musk's worth estimated at $670 million), then Tesla Motors, and Space X, which seeks to lower the cost of dollar-per-pound for flight from $1000/lb to $100/lb. The Unistat government's costs to get stuff - including humans - up to the Space Station was $10,000/lb. Musk and his team have lowered that to $3000, then $2000, and now $1000. When Boeing and Lockheed merged, saying the merger would save the US government money, Musk scoffed, saying "When has a monopoly ever lowered costs?" Musk is brash, brazen, and...some sorta genius, as is - it seems - everyone I've mentioned in this blogspew.

Since NASA's Space Shuttle was decommissioned last year, it seems clear the future of space tourism is in private, corporate, commercial hands from here on out. And that may be the best thing that could've happened to our dreams of space travel, if only for cost reasons.

Musk has competition: Virgin Galactic (Richard Branson), which will launch from a large area in New Mexico. They want to charge you $200,000 (a $20,000 deposit please) to get out to the Karman line - the line roughly 62 miles "up" that separates Earth's atmosphere from outer space - and you'll get four minutes or so of weightless-play. The ticket costs will further more space exploration. Like space hotels.

Oh yea: the very wealthy space tourists are "biological cargo" according to some in the trade. And the Russians don't like the term "space tourists." They prefer "private cosmonauts." I understand.

Other competition for Musk: the aforementioned Boeing/Lockheed's United Launch Alliance; and XCOR, founder: Jeff Gleason. Another recent Reason article that covers these guys and their doings is HERE.

Here's David Pakman talking about "The Psychology of Space Exploration and Space Travel." It's 5 and a half minutes:

Reading and Writing History in an Altered State

In historiography, it appears that some of the more interesting "recoveries" of the deep past were written from a sort of mental yoga. Let me attempt to explain what seems "obvious" on one hand, but...

When Giambattista Vico was writing his "ideal eternal history" of humanity, translated in English as New Science, he tells us of a quandary and how he got out of it:


"As I sought to discover the manner in which the first human thought arose in the pagan world, I met with arduous difficulties which have cost me a full twenty years of research to overcome. For I had to descend from today's civilized human nature to the savage and monstrous nature of these early people, which we can by no means imagine and can conceive only with great effort." (pp.124-125)


Well then, how did he do it? This "great effort" doesn't smack of what we ordinarily think of as "research." But maybe the great historians have carefully-guarded trade secrets, much as magicians and other conspirators do? (If "they" have such secrets, a few have been willing to talk about them; see the rest of this article.)


First off, I love the scholar (in this case, the greatest magpie scholar ever?) who takes on the heroic Orpheus role to go deep underneath in order to attempt to recover and bring back what is vital. To put it bluntly: it livens up the game. Who wants to hear, "Well, I've read a bunch of books on Subject X and I sat at a desk at home for 17 months at long hours to get this to you. I hope you like it."? What does it hurt to say - or hint  - that you gained all this knowledge and produced this marvelously imaginative book not by mere research alone, that you used tricks learned in Wizard School to really make it go?

For Vico, this "great effort" appears to be something called in Italian: entrare: the force of imaginative insight used to gain an understanding of remote cultures. The stupendously wonderful intellectual and 20th century historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin agreed with this ability, and said he invoked the "force" himself. He wrote that, after his in-depth study of Vico, he moved on to study Johann Gottfried Herder:

"Vico thought of a succession of civilizations, Herder went further and compared national cultures in many lands and periods, and held that every society had what he called its own center of gravity, which differed from that of others. If, as he wished, we are to understand Scandinavian sagas or the poetry of the Bible, we must not apply to them the aesthetic criteria of the critics of eighteenth-century Paris. The ways in which men live, think, feel, speak to one another, the clothes they wear, the songs they sing, the gods they worship, the food they eat, the assumptions, customs, habits which are intrinsic to them - it is this that creates communities, each of which has its own 'life-style.' Communities may resemble each other in many respects, but the Greeks differ from Lutheran Germans, the Chinese differ from both; what they strive after and what they fear and worship are scarcely ever similar." -p.51, The Truth About The Truth: De-Confusing and Re-Constructing the Postmodern World, ed. Walter Truett Anderson


Berlin defends the above against accusations of cultural or moral relativism by citing this power, or force of "imaginative insight." Berlin asserts that "Members of one culture can, by the force of imaginative insight, understand (what Vico called entrare) the values, the ideals, the forms of life of another culture or society, even those remote in time and space. They may find these values unacceptable, but if they open their minds sufficiently they can grasp how one might be a full human being, with whom one could communicate, and at the same time live in the light of values widely different from one's own, but which nevertheless one can see to be values, ends of life, by the realization of which men could be fulfilled."


How does one "open their minds sufficiently" in order to gain access to the seemingly palpable "reality" of some remote culture? It reminds me of anecdotes of profound psychedelic drug trips (and I have collected many) in which the psychonaut relives past lives, vividly. Timothy Leary, in his book Info-Psychology, called this "Neurogenetic Receptivity." Leary says that when this receptivity is switched on by a large enough dose of psychedelic substance, "the signals from DNA become conscious. The experience is chaotic and confusing to the unprepared person - thousands of genetic memories flash by, the molecular family-picture-album of species consciousness and evolution. This experience provides glimpses and samples of the broad design of the multi-billion year old genetic panorama." - (p.120)


[Jeez! Am I tripping? Or did the OG just go from a discussion of Sir Isaiah Berlin's readings of Vico and Herder by linking their mysterious yoga-like ability to recover remote historical feelings, to Timothy Leary? Yes. Yes, he did. OG admits it was a stretch, but if he can't be interesting, he hopes to get a laff. But if the OG can't be interesting or get a laff, what he most wants is to blow your mind. - the Mgt]

Gore Vidal has written numerous historical novels, some based in the fairly remote past. My favorite is Julian, about Julian the Apostate, but Vidal did some of this peculiar mental yoga to go way back to the 5th BCE: Darius and Xerxes, Pericles, Anaxagoras, Socrates, Confucius, Buddha, Herodotus. Vidal somehow channeled the grandson of Zoroaster. See Vidal's novel Creation. 


I once read an interview with Vidal and he said he used, not entrare, but Einfuhlen. When asked what that was, Vidal said he got it from reading Herder (!), and Vidal's understanding was that it meant "the ability to get into the past, while realizing that it's not just another aspect of the present, with people you know dressed up in funny clothes."

This sounds a lot like whatever it was that Vico did to solve his twenty year old problem, and it also sounds like some sort of psycho-archeological empathy. But there's got to be more to this act of what looks to me like a species of magick.

Back to Sir Isaiah, who tells the brave dissident Iranian intellectual Ramin Jahangebloo how he wrote his first commissioned work, a biography of Karl Marx:

"The history of ideas is the history of what we believe people thought and felt, and these people were real people, not just statues or collections of attributes. Some effort to enter imaginatively into the minds and outlooks of the thinkers of the thoughts is indispensable, an effort at Einfuhlung [note different spelling than Vidal's but seemingly the same word. - OG] is unavoidable, however precarious and difficult and uncertain. When I was working on Marx, I tried to understand what it was like to be Karl Marx in Berlin, in Paris, in Brussels, in London, and to think in terms of his concepts, categories, his German words." - p.28, Conversations With Isaiah Berlin


[Speaking of Timothy Leary, he - and Robert Anton Wilson - advocated sympathetically entering into other people's "reality tunnels" in order to better understand how your own nervous system works.]


I'm oddly relieved that this practice of Einfuhlung is "precarious and difficult and uncertain." It makes Sir Isaiah sound temporarily like Aleister Crowley. And yes, it must involve a yoga-like deeply immersive concentration on the many materials that feed the historical imagination.

Now that I think of it, what great history book that separates the historian from his/her subject by a sufficiently remote space-time does not entail some demands of entrare or Einfuhlung?

I see the historian doing months - possibly many years - of preliminary research, reading all sorts of information about the space-time in which she will journey, handling artefacts, daydreaming, invoking images...then, when in a deep enough state, commences writing amidst notecards and a feverish, active historical imagination.

And, if it's good stuff, the altered state passes from the pages to us, the readers. As if by contagion or by the well-known "contact high." Nudge, nudge, wink wink: we all want the Good Stuff, eh?

Mister Peabody and Sherman and their Wayback Machine to travel back in time:

Heretics: A Short Pass

From that quasi-heresy of social epistemology, Wikipedia, 19th century doctor and "savior of mothers," Ignaz Semmelweis:

>Despite various publications of results where hand-washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings. Semmelweis's practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory. In 1865, Semmelweis was committed to an asylum, where he ironically died of septicemia, at age 47.<


Heretic! Wash our hands? This is not what we were taught! 


"I know, I know, you want your 'geniuses' and you're ready to honor them. But you want nice geniuses, well-behaved, moderate geniuses with no nonsense about them, and not the untamed variety who break through all barriers and limitations. You want a limited, cropped and clipped genius you can parade through the streets of your cities without embarrassment."
-Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!


Reich died in an American prison, persecuted and prosecuted by the US government, egged on by the AMA, his books burned only 10 years after Unistat fought a war against people who, among other affronts to basic ideas of human dignity...burned books.


Robert Anton Wilson, who saw value in the ideas of such heretics as Wilhelm Reich and Timothy Leary, told Lewis Shiner in a 1988 interview, "As long as one heretic is locked up, part of my brain is locked up, and I'm not getting the nourishment I need."


And Kevorkian has died, much to the joy of many. No joy for me.


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"Between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, as many as one million European women, most of them poor and many of them widowed, were executed for witchcraft, taking the blame for bad weather that killed crops." - Superfreakonomics, p.20


There is a long debate about why these women were killed, and the one I grew up with - the narrative I grew up with that I found most compelling - was that the all-male disastrous "doctors" (bleeders, leech-appliers, etc) were jealous of the success old crones living in the woods or on the outskirts of town had in healing...with no formal training at all! They were a threat to male power over the body. Knowledge - empirical! - passed down through the ages, much of it orally transmitted, about plants, water, use of herbs, symptoms, loving care, hand-holding: dangerous! Levitt and Dunbar in the book cited above mention weather and the crops. There's probably something to that. But they're all dead anyway. 


For being heretics, for not belonging to orthodoxy, as established by Authority. 


 -------------------


U. of Washington zoologist, biologist and evolutionary psychologist and public intellectual David Barash urges in one of his essays in Natural Selections that, from a sociological and existentialist view, far more damage has been done by preaching obedience to authority; we must teach disobedience to the authority of political authorities, social authorities, and to "genetic inclinations." That is: we are probably genetically hardwired to do some nasty things to each other: let us disobey these "natural" urges!


_________________________


"Heresy is charisma's boisterous child, its role being to challenge the deadening effects of orthodoxy." - from Prophets, Cults and Madness, p.63 


Same book, p.175: "The essential difference between the messiah and the charismatic prophet is that the messiah advocates renewed submission to the Almighty whereas the charismatic advocates heresy." The authors of this book, John Price and Anthony Stevens, bring a sort of evolutionary psychology-psychiatry with a Jungian bent to the age-old phenomenon of origins of religions and "cults" and prophets, holy-men, Mansonoids, etc. What a fascinating book that was, and now that I'm quoting from it I feel like reading it again...


My cardinal sin: prolixity. One last word: At what point does a religion lose its authority for you? Take any religion. (I'm not conventionally religious in any sense of the idea, but am fascinated by religion, if only for the simple fact that it seems I MUST be fascinated by it; it plays such a large role in this mad world!) At what point in its history did it "blow it"? 


I like Ezra Pound's poetic answer:


"A religion is damned, it confesses its own ultimate impotence, the day it burns its first heretic." - Selected Prose, 1909-1965

Books, Reading, Memory

When Timothy Leary first began to be hounded for his advocation of "internal freedom" he was asked about the dangers of hallucinogenic drugs for some young people, and don't you think we should keep them from such drugs?

Leary, playing out (basically) the same cultural script Giordano Bruno played in the late 16th century and Socrates twenty centuries before Bruno said yes, we should keep kids from finding out about their own nervous systems. And furthermore, close all the libraries! Because books have caused far more damage than drugs! Look at the crazy - even murderous - things done in the name of some ideas someone read in a book! Aye, Leary was flippant. But isn't there a kernel of truth there? Or more than a kernel?

I say yes! To the unprepared mind, or the mentally unbalanced, books are freakin' dangerous things! And I call History to the stand as my first witness!

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

While openly admitting my life of inveterate-unto-stupefying reading has produced quasi-psychedelic moments, I think on the whole my reading has lead me to understand the "Lotus Eaters" section of Homer's The Odyssey quite deeply. Because books are more opioid (or narcotic?) for me than any other drug. Marshall McLuhan ingeniously wrote about different media as distinct environments. The fact that I was holding a "book" and decoding 26 letters in their combinations as "words," with adjunct punctuations, eyes moving left to right, left to right, decoding and visualizing, decoding and left to right, silent subvocalizations as I read, an abecedarian heretic of the worst sort, left to right, left to right, decoding and glossing abstract printed letters, words, left to right, left to right (psst! you're doing it right now!!!)....THAT was an "environment!" THAT was "the message." The "content" of the book was minor, compared to the historical fact of me (and you) doing those mental gymnastics that were now second nature to us.

And millions of people doing that since Gutenberg? The fallout was tremendous, and not entirely healthy. (Wanna blow your mind? Check out McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy. There you'll be, sitting quietly reading McLuhan's incredibly abstracted-from-actual-experience 26 letters plus peripheral marks and he'll be telling you what that very thing did to the Mind of Europe, over a period of 400 years. You gotta hand it to Irony. She gets the upper hand in the gol-derndest ways.) 

McLuhan once wrote about the environment of the morning newspaper. I'll never forget it: the newspaper was an avant-garde collage! The way it absurdly juxtaposed stories of war and bankruptcy with an ad for an elegant lady's evening dress and dimestore baldness cures. And yet, Daddy got into it like he got into his warm bath...Actually, that's a lot like what books were/are for me: opiate, but my mind is buzzing, alive. My interiority is jumpin'. I want to be enchanted, even by some book on semiotics, or a few pages of Hegel, or even a history of mathematics. Fiction? That's mainlining the good stuff. This enchantment is like a return to the opiate amniotic fluid-existence, and I'm safe and warm...But enough about me. Tell me a bit about yourself?

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The older I get the more I find I'm perturbed by how much I've read that I know I've read, and some of it made a major emotional impression upon me, but I can't tell you the title sometimes. Oh, it'll come to me in a minute. What were the main ideas? What was that guy's name? Well, it was mostly about how we respond emotionally to philosophical...no, that's not it: it was how I responded to it. But I wish I could tell you more. 

And yet I go on and on about books and ideas and a friend will say, "How can you remember so much of what you read?" I have no idea. It seems like the more I've read the dumber I've gotten! It seems like....no, I think it "is" true: the more I read the more I realize how ignorant I am! 

I never thought it would be that way when I was a kid. 

Noam Chomsky cheered me when I read an interview with him once. He said that when he was a kid he remembered...Oh wait I'll go find it in my stacks...

Ah, here it is:

James Peck: You once said, "It is not unlikely that literature will forever give far deeper insight into what is sometimes called 'the full human person' than any modes of scientific inquiry may hope to do."

Chomsky: That's perfectly true and I believe that. I would go on to say it's not only not unlikely, but it's almost certain. But still, if I want to understand, let's say, the nature of China and its revolution, I ought to be cautious about literary renditions. Look, there's no question  that as a child, when I read about China, this influenced my attitudes - Rickshaw Boy, for example. That had a powerful effect when I read it. It was so long ago I don't remember a thing about it, except the impact. (The Chomsky Reader, p.4)

This was Plato's big attack on this hot new medium of writing. It would degrade the old, pure medium: speech and memory. And we would lose our grip on the Real. Speech would become coarse, people would go out in the Agora and spout out things they had READ! (Television, anyone?) And I have a lot of problems with Plato, especially his proto-fascist utopian State, The Republic. But he may have had a point about that, like, ya know? That writing thing. Or did he have a good point? And what really was that point? Because, ya know...I forget.

Soooo...what have you been readin'? Anything good?