And of a sudden, one finds that time has run out

Trains of thought drifting idly into strange directions...

Kafka's Before the Law is to a great degree about how people will do anything not to do what's needed to realize what they think they want—and probably actually do want. Until it's too late, that is; and then they can't do a damn thing...because, well, it's too late, and nothing they'll do will make a difference anymore, because the time for doing it has come and gone. Forever. Forever for this life. And since there's only one of those it is indeed forever for all eternity.

All that's left is usually bitter regret, which is, if the person concerned is capable of it, followed by endless rationalizations as to why it's either OK that things turned out as they did, or why they 'should have', or else by depression and the darkness accompanying the deep knowledge, no matter how hidden, that one has failed—and that one only failed because one didn't 'do' when one should have. In other words, there really is only one and only person to blame for the dismal position one has ended up in.

There are two basic rules of thumb when it comes to 'life'. They are not absolute, but they apply almost universally—with the odd exception.

Rule 1: Time probably is not on your side, unless you can prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that it is.

If anything it works against you in every way conceivable. Every heartbeat brings you closer to death: that's a given, no matter how long you live. Every heartbeat also takes you closer to, and ultimately carries you past, life's (missed) opportunities and milestones.

It can't be overemphasized how dreadfully final and unforgiving time is. And every opportunity that drifts past is indeed an opportunity gone forever. It doesn't matter how we rationalize that we didn't grasp it, or whether the reasons given are valid or not. Contingency doesn't give a shit. Opportunity gone. Forever. Period.

Corollary to Rule 1: There's never enough time to do what wasn't done when one missed one's chance to do it.

There are no exceptions to this rule. None. That's 'none'. Not a one. There never were, there aren't and there never ever, in the entire future history of the cosmos, will be any such exceptions.

Rule 2: Only dead fish go with the flow.

This saying has recently been revived by a certain US politician. I rather like it, though I've been known to tell people to 'go with the flow' and stuff like that. Thing is, if the fish is alive, it will actually not just 'go with the flow', but it'll use it to get where it is going to get there faster. Unless it swims against it, like Salmon for example, when they work their way upstream against some pretty formidable odds and forces. That is an option, of course, though it's kind of exhausting, and it'd better be worth it!

This is, of course, the point: it's not about going with the flow, but using it.

Don't just be a dead fish. You'll just start to smell. Very badly.

What turns a live fish into a dead one? (Yes, I know, I'm running the metaphor ragged!)

The usual suspects. Rationalization. Denial. Bullshit reasons that seem true and valid, but really are born out of the fear of facing that which might really make a difference to our lives—for a change. It's so much easier, by and large, just to carry on as things are. Even if it means that opportunities drift past.

Never to return.

DARK CITY and THE 13TH Floor (definite spoilers!)

I had occasion as of recent to re-watch both of these movies, which date from just about 10 years ago, give or take one.

Dark City was released in 1998; The 13th Floor in 1999. Both are infinitely superior, in terms of story-telling, characterization and asking existential questions, to the pretentious Matrix (1999) and its crap sequels.

Often, as is demonstrated by comparing the three movies, in order to tell a story and make it have a point, you really have to take it easy on heaping up too much philosophical claptrap, even if it's wrapped up in CGI Kung Fu scenes.

If you're looking for superb impressions of existential angst and despair, you won't find them in the overblown in-your-face sequence of Neo emerging from his goopy enclosure—but you may indeed find something clamp tightly around your chest when you follow Douglas Hall, as he drives out of the city and across deserted country roads to the end of his world, and faces the reality of his own artificiality and the destruction of everything he believed about himself; or Inspector Bumstead's numb and futile groping for his memories of a place called 'Shell Beach', or how to get there; and yet it's a place everybody knows—but can never get to.

Maybe the most desolate line is uttered by 'Douglas Hall' (13th Floor), after he realizes the truth and confronts a 'downloaded' person in his artificial world, who tells him that he does, despite everything, indeed have a 'soul'.

"...how can I?...none of this is real. You pull the plug; I disappear; and nothing I ever say, nothing I ever do, will ever matter."

You can't get it more existential-angst-ish than that.

If you haven't seen either of these flicks, treat yourselves to them. If you can't find them at video stores, just download them from your friendly neighborhood p2p network instead. Both deserve the appellation 'classic' and not having seen them is a definite loss.

Here we just sell small rectangular objects. They're called books. They require a little effort on your part, and make no bee-bee-bee-bee-beeps.

It's just possible that the 'Nothing', the dreadful thing that was about to consume Fantasia in the enchanting classic The Neverending Story, may be the computer.

I'm not saying this as a kind of Luddite, because I'm anything but that. And I rarely hanker for 'the old days' where things were better—which some may have been, but a great many really weren't—and we didn't have this and that which screws up our lives now; mainly because there were other things that did the same job, or an even better one, instead of what we have now. But in this instance things are different. In this instance what is being phased out—or at least people are attempting to do so; in the name of everything under the sun, from imagination to conservation of natural resources—is the book as a medium of story telling; to be replaced either by books on the screens of computers or digital reading devices like the Kindle.

The question as to why we should continue to read stories in books, as opposed to doing it on the screens of electronic devices, has been discussed by many people and in many contexts. So far, it has always appeared that any preferences either way were mainly a matter of taste or just habit.

Well, it now appears that there may be more to it...

Storybooks On Paper Better For Children Than Reading Fiction On Computer Screen

Clicking and scrolling interrupt our attentional focus. Turning and touching the pages instead of clicking on the screen influence our ability for experience and attention. The physical manipulations we have to do with a computer, not related to the reading itself, disturb our mental appreciation...

...reading on a screen generates a new form of mental orientation. The reader loses both the completeness and constituent parts of the physical appearance of the reading material. The physical substance of a book offers tranquility. The text does not move on the page like it does on a screen.

"Several experiments in cognitive psychology have shown how a change of physical surroundings has a potentially negative affect on memory. We should include this in our evaluation of digital teaching aids. The technology provides for a number of dynamic, mobile and ephemeral forms of learning, but we know little about how such mobility and transience influence the effect of teaching. Learning requires time and mental exertion and the new media do not provide for that," ...

"We experience to day a one-sided admiration for the potentials in the technology. ICT is now introduced in kindergarten without much empirical research on how it influences children’s learning and development. The whole field is characterized by an easy acceptance and a less subtle view of the technology,"...

"Critical perspectives on new technologies are often brushed aside as a result of moral panic and doomsday prophecies. ...there is generally little reflection around digital teaching material. What we need, is a more nuanced view on the potentials and limitations of all technologies – even of the book. Very often important discussions about technology and learning have a tendency to reduce a complex field to a question about being for or against," ...

The development of digital media leads to a need for more sophisticated concepts of reading and writing and a new understanding of these activities.

...

Even if children and young people do not read as many novels in book form any more, one may still argue that they actually read more than before. Most of what they do on a computer or on their cell phones, is exactly reading and writing.

"...we understand more and better when reading on paper than when we read the same text on a screen. We avoid navigating and the small things we don't think about, but which subconsciously takes attention away from the reading. Also texts on a screen are often not adapted to the screen format. The most important difference is when the text becomes digital. Then it loses its physical dimension, which is special to the book, and the reader loses his feeling of totality."

...hypertext stories... exploit the multimedia possibilities of a computer and use both hypertext, video, sound, pictures and text. They are constructed in such a way that clicking one's way around them comes close to a literary computer game.

...

"The digital hypertext technology and its use of multimedia are not open to the experience of a fictional universe where the experience consists of creating your own mental images. The reader gets distracted by the opportunities for doing something else."...

The last paragraph may be the most significant, because it folds into the consideration the factor of 'distance' between reader and fictional world and its importance to not only involvement in a particular story, but also to overall mental development. It appears that this involvement may be a critical factor in the development of a number of human faculties; and, unsurprisingly, it has to do with our relationship to 'narrative'.

Interesting pointers at the significance of all this may be found, inter alia, in research such as this:

Researcher Links Storytelling And Mathematical Ability

Two-thirds Of School-age Children Have An Imaginary Companion By Age 7

Imaginary Friendships Could Boost Child Development

Children Better Prepared For School If Their Parents Read Aloud To Them

Very Young Children Can Step Into The Minds Of Storybook Characters

I don't know if you ever had that experience: you walk into an office, the one you work in (you do, don't you?) or maybe a bank of whatever, and you see a whole bunch of people sitting before rectangular screens. I tend to take note of this. Once you've done it, the sense of the surreal tends to linger and draw your attention to the unnaturalness of itall.

Well, this is just one example of humans being put into situations for which they are cognitively unprepared. The results of extended exposure to such things range from the mild to the severe, from low-level chronic cognitive dysfunctionality at all levels of cognition, decision making, 'thought', emotion and action, to acute and obvious mental 'problems' that can become seriously destructive. I've been a software developer for many years, and I can assure you, from personal observation of my own self, as well as others surrounding me who worked in similar roles, that the effects are real and not anything to joke about. I still spend a shitload of hours behind a computer—as a tech writer as well as doing things like writing novels, laying out books, designing covers, editing video etc etc—and getting away from it and to a book, instead of glueing my eyes to the TV, another rectangular screen, for the remainder of my day, or just to some views of things that aren't rectangular and glowing, like trees and grass, and such like...that's tonic on my human perceptions. The same goes for the things one does. Like physical exercise. Training of of body coordination—martial arts are great for that, though they're on the back-burner right now. And so on.

We're not necessarily—well, we aren't, period!—evolutionarily adapted to reading books either, but in the context of narrative delivery, and with the social backdrop of having been read to from a book (Like that's going to happen with a Kindle! Mum reading to the kid from the screen. Ha!) and the whole-sense associations we have coming from that...a book is so much closer to something we can relate to. Thing is, books don't stand alone and without context against electronic media for narrative delivery. They have a historical/social context, and this actually matters, because humans are social/historical creatures. We can't exist without that. Books also are physical entities. A novel in a book is a 'package' of sorts, a whole, a unity. We close a book and take the story with us. Complete union of the object and its content. You cannot get that in a laptop, PDA or Kindle.

This isn't atavism, but connectedness to our nature; the fabric of our being.

Books also don't require electricity to run, nor are they likely to fail delivering if hit by power surges or cosmic rays. There is a sense of comforting security about them, and that, too, must be taken into account when considering such things. There'a s profound difference between a 'library' of e-books—an abominable misnomer, insulting every books in sight—and one of books. You just can't develop the same relationship them. You can't just pick one up, open it and just read a page, or two or one here and one there, or a chapter, or flick forth and back, stick your finger into the book to keep the page you're reading and flick back to something you've read before. The e-book is hidden on a medium unreadable by you, but requires an intermediate, very complex and fragile mechanism, whose functioning, though many of us are using it routinely, is basically incomprehensible to all but those who actually know this or that and preferably more about the technology.

If you want to do the finger-in-between-pages trick and try to look back to confirm maybe that a plot point makes indeed sense, or just because there was a scene there that relates to what one reads now, but which is somehow particularly interesting, enticing and/or thrilling...try that with an e-book and see if it can come in any way close to the 'book'-experience.

I know, many people claim they're just as happy reading from a screen as a real book—and there are those who love audio-books, something I've written about not so long ago; without much 'liking' involved—but I think the Bastian experience in the store is unrepeatable by e-book and will be so forever:

Mr. Koreander: Your books are safe. While you're reading them, you get to become Tarzan or Robinson Crusoe.
Bastian: But that's what I like about 'em.
Mr. Koreander: Ahh, but afterwards you get to be a little boy again.
Bastian: Wh-what do you mean?
Mr. Koreander: Listen. Have you ever been Captain Nemo, trapped inside your submarine while the giant squid is attacking you?
Bastian: Yes.
Mr. Koreander: Weren't you afraid you couldn't escape?
Bastian: But it's only a story.
Mr. Koreander: That's what I'm talking about. The ones you read are safe.
Bastian: And that one isn't?

We live in a world where "It's only a story." is part of our civilization's fabric; an insidiously pervasive and obviously truth, whose obviousness hides its contextual decrepitude. As if this truth were virtuous in some way. As if it helped us become better, wiser, more loving, more passionate, more intelligent and able to cope with what the world throws at us...and so on, and so on.

It's never "just a story", because everything that happens to us, everything we think about, we think about in narrative terms and sequences. Everything we hear said in the English language—unless its some pretentious avant-garde random linguistic abomination crap passing for 'art', probably!—is ultimately narrative. Every sentence is a more or less explicit mini or micro narrative; even those relating to the most abstract and obtuse kinds of subjects.

"It's just a story" may be the most existentially unperceptive thing anybody can say about...

...about our stories. But to actually understand that, you may just need—books.

News that Matter

Among the crap that passes for news—and, yes, I'm including those on the 'political' front, and, yes, those promulgated by the 'serious' organs (love the word 'organs' when connected to news!)—the ones that tend to get lost in the melee of attention grabbers are those that relate to us individually. Stuff that's about ourselves as people, as creatures, as minds, as mortal beings who would love not to have to get sick and/or age and(no 'or' here!) die, and things like that.

We tend to forget about these kinds of things, unless they're held up in our faces—because we or those we care about get sick or old or dead. You listen to, read, or watch the crap on the 'media' and you drown in what amounts to irrelevancies.

Science is a vast field, and it is true that much of it probably is of no interest to most people, who'd rather hear about the results emerging from said science—well, some of them. But surely those parts relating to anything having to do with our health and also our nature—as much as science can contribute to the understanding of the latter—should be of major interest and attention.

Well, here's a way to be reminded daily, and prompted maybe to probe and do some directed internet browsing. Just pick the topics you're interested in. Trust me, it's worth it.

Photoshop does not always rule

Have a look at this image. I can't hotlink it, because it's blocked, but if you go to the site, you'll see some truly amazing photography.

A lot of photography—au naturel or composited with tools like Photoshop—even that exhibited at fairly broad level, at exhibitions large and small, prestigious or just 'local', is, not to put too fine a point on it, lifeless, utterly dull and devoid of aesthetic value. It's the kind of crap you walk past at exhibitions, and you may stop and ponder, such as not to appear like a cretin, and as you do this, dragged to the place by who-knows-who, you try to see if it says anything to you at all; if you can maybe squeeze a little bit of meaning out of the dismal offerings.

It's something one usually remains silent about, because it's not socially acceptable to voice one's misgivings or assessments of the total void-ness of the offerings; if only not to offend the artist. That's the job of mean spirited reviewers. Besides, who knows? There may be 'meaning' in this and you just are the one who can't see it. But that last sentence is tokenism. In my experience, my personal lack of discovery of content in much of this work, like so much in the 'Arts', is usually shared by others. It just takes some effort to get them to open up an admit it.

There's also the argument—for me this is maybe more relevant in a literary and motion-picture context—that the person engaging in activities assessed by others as falling under the 'artistic' rubrik may himself or herself be producing a lot of similar...ahh, let me call it 'stuff'... that has meaning mainly, or maybe only really, to the creator. So, gotta be careful judging! Gotta leave that to critics; they will not be taken to task for producing shit. They don't, after all, create anything but wind and/or meaningless symbols on a written page.

I digress, as I often do.

The bottom line is, go to this photographer's website and have a poke around. As for me, I can't read a single line of what's written, but the images are more than sufficient. There's something about Russian (and those from nations associated with what used to be 'Russia') photographers, and what they see through the lenses of their cameras, that maybe unrivaled anywhere on Earth.

Reason and Rationality

Write or print this on a BIG piece of paper and stick it on a wall where it's in-your-face.

Just because people use reason, that don't mean they're rational.

This is what one might call the 'Objectivist Fallacy' (that is, the Rand-version of 'Objectivism', as opposed to the metaphysical kind): the notion that what has become a tool for survival, developed and refined through the process of evolution, is actually somehow 'fundamental' to how we should understand ourselves and our essence.

The evidence to support the Objectivist Fallacy is so close to non-existent that it's almost on par with the evidence to support the existence of God. On the other hand, there is evidence, as for example popularized by Dan Ariely, that irrationality is indeed our basic mode of functioning. The joke—on Rand-ian Objectivists; and that's only one of the jokes, because they unwittingly deliver others quite of their own accord—is, of course, that we can use reason, that powerful tool, to analyze irrational behavior; to the extent of actually being able to predict its occurrence and actions.

The whole thing came up, BTW, because a friend of mine simply appeared at a loss to explain what he considered the irrational behavior of tenants who rent a part of his rural property. Why would they act such and such, if this made no sense whatsoever?

Because...see above.

And surely the very assumption that other people share one's own sense of what is rational and sensible is in itself entirely irrational. The results of the use of the tool of reason is entirely dependent on pre-existing assumptions—like my friend's mistaken one! That's the danger with tools. To someone skilled in the use of a hammer every problem looks like a nail. To someone skilled in the use of reason, every problem looks like it's just waiting there for a rational solution. Which is may well be and in some cases it will be subject to rational resolution; but if said problem relates to matters of psychology, individual and social, the only workable assumption from which to proceed is that other people use reason but are not actually motivated in their action by it.

That it should be different may be closely related to this snippet of information:

Brain Represents Tools As Temporary Body Parts

...when we use a tool—even for just a few minutes—it changes the way our brain represents the size of our body. In other words, the tool becomes a part of what is known in psychology as our body schema...

I would like to submit that the processes that enable the Objectivist Fallacy to exist, are related to processes not dissimilar to this. It's not exactly the same thing, of course—after all, the 'tool of reason' is internal, if you will, and usually implicit, so we don't actually think about it as a tool. But that may be exactly the reason why the confusion arises to easily, persistently and ubiquitously.

Imagination, Memory and Age

Here's something for people—probably mostly those not still wet from crawling out of the egg—to think about. I'll comment on the significance of these studies at the end, but first let me present them in summary, with brief excerpts from the relevant pages. You can read the complete articles at the links provided.

First of all there's the article I cited the previous blog. Might want to refresh your memory on this (pun intended).

Then there is:

Having A Higher Purpose In Life Reduces Risk Of Death Among Older Adults

...Purpose in life reflects the tendency to derive meaning from life’s experiences and be focused and intentional..

...Possessing a greater purpose in life is associated with lower mortality rates among older adults...

Lack Of Imagination In Older Adults Linked To Declining Memory

...the ability of older adults to form imaginary scenarios is linked to their ability to recall detailed memories...

...episodic memory, which represents our personal memories of past experiences, "allows individuals to project themselves both backward and forward in subjective time."...

...Therefore, in order to create imagined future events, the individual must be able to remember the details of previously experienced ones extract various details and put them together to create an imaginary event, a process known as the constructive-episodic-simulation...

Think Memory Worsens With Age? Then Yours Probably Will

...Thinking your memory will get worse as you get older may actually be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Researchers at North Carolina State University have found that senior citizens who think older people should perform poorly on tests of memory actually score much worse than seniors who do not buy in to negative stereotypes about aging and memory loss...

Imaging Pinpoints Brain Regions That 'See The Future'

...remembering the past and envisioning the future may go hand-in-hand, with each process sparking strikingly similar patterns of activity within precisely the same broad network of brain regions...

..."In our daily lives, we probably spend more time envisioning what we're going to do tomorrow or later on in the day than we do remembering, but not much is known about how we go about forming these mental images of the future," says Karl Szpunar, lead author of the study and a psychology doctoral student in Arts & Sciences at Washington University...

..."Our findings provide compelling support for the idea that memory and future thought are highly interrelated and help explain why future thought may be impossible without memories."...

-----

Most of this relates to 'older' people, but that makes sense, since they're the ideal subjects. Nothing works better than for decent scientific investigations into such things than to watch as things go wrong and how, especially if traits or capabilities disappear and such events can be linked to neurological phenomena; in this instance conditions connected to, for example, the hippocampus.

Summing it up in as few words as possible, it appears, strongly so, that imagination and memory are very strongly linked, if not basically the same thing. This is, in itself, a very important point from a purely philosophical perspective.

Of particular interest here is that we're mostly talking about 'episodic' memory and imagination. In other words, about mental narrative. One should also consider that 'purpose' in life is linked to all of this because 'purpose' is nothing but narrative about the larger context of one's existence and one's future existence.

I'll leave that stewing for a while, because I think readers can draw their own conclusions—which are fairly obvious and in-your-face, particularly with regards to what it actually says about the very nature of our memories and our very minds. I've maintained for a long time, with nobody really paying attention, that all explicit memory recall is either completely 'episodic'—meaning narrative—or at the very least framed in a context of narrative. In other words, whether we know it or not, but every time we remember anything at all, we tell a mental story in which the remembered item features prominently.

All other memory is 'implicit' and cannot actually be made explicit—or 'conscious', as some might put it—unless it is done, again, in the context of mental narrative. What connectionists refer to as 'associative memory' is actually misnamed, as it really should be called 'narrative memory'. Narrative isn't, as cognitive science would have it, just one incidental aspect of cognition and what we do with it. Narrative lies at the core of cognition and consciousness. It is the way these things work.

Narrative as 'story'—usually told in some form—is merely that form associated with the existence of some form of language; which, and I agree with Pinker in this, is by and large a tool of communication. It refers to 'internal' communication also. Language also imposes structure/constraints on certain categories and types of narratives that—in a swirling could around a center that we perceive as 'self', but which exists only in the same way that a 'center of mass' exists with regards to some physical body—constantly circulate in our brains. And when people say 'competing memes' they should be thinking of 'competing narratives', and a lot of things would become so much clearer. And our lives...well, they are, in a very real sense, stories, resulting from the interaction of our mental and physical contexts.

I have digressed. Something more practical:

Having read the articles above, and taking into account that use-it-or-lose-it is the absolute order of the day with just about everything physiological and cognitive, does it not suggest itself that, rather than training 'memory' to keep people alive—which is really boring; at least I think so; and besides, it produces a potentially unwelcome spin-off, namely too many irrelevant memories of really dumb bits of data—they should really be stimulated/encouraged to let their imaginations run free instead? It's so much more interesting and it has the desirable side-effect of training them to indeed have plans for tomorrow; by virtue of their capacity to create narratives for the future.

Ken Robinson has criticized the manner in which today's schools all over the world stifle creativity, courage to innovate and how they de-emphasize the value of 'imagination', favoring instead the learning of factual things; that is, committing things to memory, be they scientific facts or 'social norms', and thus making them into what is perceived, rather myopically and unimaginatively, as 'useful citizens'. With what I said above, is it not clear that the problem, which showed up by considering 'older' people, may actually spread into ever-earlier age groups over time?

In a population that is getting older—and in which, or so I hope, many of us alive today may actually achieve timely escape velocity and into a life of literally hundreds of productive years—is this not something that we should be acutely concerned about?

And, as a final thought, I just was reminded, by a programme on the radio, of the notion that the peak of creativity in many professions is considered to be achieved in a person's early years; typically in science you're talking 30-ish and in the arts 40-ish. I wonder how much—just like the memory loss myth alluded to in an article above–is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Actually I don't wonder at all.