MEMBER MONDAY

Has our culture fallen into an age of irony, that tricky word which for our purposes means a contrived knowingness that arises out of real or feigned detachment? It has certainly permeated so much of our popular media. It powers most situational comedy these days. If so, might that phenomenon be the root of a more pervasive societal cost in the form of insincerity, estrangement, and the trivialization of the things that matter? Life as a Seinfeld episode.

Perhaps true wisdom has devolved into mere cleverness, the topic of our focus piece The Impotence Of Being Clever, to a point where cleverness has become more of a nuisance. Yet there is something about cleverness in the right hands -- say Jewish humor -- that reframes alienation as the higher ground from which to provide unique insight. The article's citation of Woody Allen is an inspiration for us to select a film for later viewing that showcases his themes of WASPish domestic boredom and cosmic insignificance. Can’t wait (not meant ironically)…

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A sudden, visceral, perhaps irrational mindset presented itself the other day.

It started with an email: my PayPal account had been charged $699.99 for Google Play, with an invitation to call customer service with any questions; yeah, had questions i.e. had never set up a PayPal account, know nothing about Google Play; called the number, case # 9841, five thousand dollars racked up so far; the cause, they said, must have been a "leaked" IP number combined with my email address; will investigate.

What an idiot. Reflex over reflection. Of course it was phishing. Fortunately, I’d disclosed no financial info but my phone number was now outed. Discovered one could change an IP number (btw, IP8.com) by simply disconnecting and reconnecting the router. Did that one better. In lieu of trashing my computer, I left the router disconnected, went to bed, opened the window and listened to the rain.

The feeling of total isolation from anything outside of pure nature was exhilarating. Lifus Interruptus provided some quiet time in which to reflect, to savor, to ponder a life more permanently disconnected from technology…

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If there ever was a gathering worthy of some philosophical shaping it would be the two-day Longevity Investors Conference (Inside the billion-dollar meeting for the rich who want to live forever).

“Here’s to drinking wine well into our hundreds,” went the toast to the 150 mega-rich participants seeking to cheat mortality by extending their natural lifespan – presumably like that of the one 67-year-old man announcing his biological age had reversed and was now 49 years. Remember the simpler days when a man’s denial of the natural aging process was a bad comb over?

There’s certainly big bucks in longevity research. Much of the $4.5 billion over the past five years has been targeted to the aging process at the cellular level. Then there are all the other “anti-aging treatments” (er, “geroscience”) such as inhaling low-oxygen air and/or taking a vast array of supplements like NMN to help provide cells with energy, along with various non-medicinal boosters outside FDA purview. Sponsor note: the club offers freshly squeezed organic celery juice.

Others in the upcoming session may be in a position to better expand on the specifics of longevity science. Our discussion, however, will center around a matter we left off with in our MM 4/10/23 Existential Question session i.e. the denial of one’s mortality must rank as one of life’s most notable absurdities. Central to our pondering will be what we addressed in MM 10/29/18 It's About Time i.e. comparing the idea of time, as found in other philosophical traditions, as a cyclical phenomenon – so-called pattern thinking – versus the western notion of time as linear, always ascendant…

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Happiness is not the unalienable right enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, only its pursuit is . . . the rest is up to us. So how’s that working for you?, perhaps a revealing, even invasive, question. After all, for certain personality types, the attainment of happiness might not even be the top priority, perhaps ranking a very distant second to the preservation of an ego structure.

This pursuit of happiness can itself represent a tricky question. We might start out our own pursuit by teasing out examples of a related phenomenon, the experience of awesomeness – times we were able to untangle ourselves from what we normally were not. Anglers know something about this as they experience fishing as a kind of meditation in the way it concentrates the mind while, at the same time, liberating it – less about catching a fish than releasing the fisherman (MM 1/22/18 Awesomeness).

Recall the reverie, the suspension of time, how the excellence of the moment carried with it the prestige of the infinite. Surely such a state of mind can be replicable. The focus need not be limited to some signature event, say the birth of one’s child, to clear the general clutter…

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RESOLVED: Print (and broadcast) media have devolved to the point that they have become primary drivers of the divisiveness that characterizes American politics today.

DISCUSS: Our focus "article" consists of ChatGPT responses to a series of inquiries (from me) along the lines of the above resolution as a working hypothesis. Our discussion will center around the support, refutation and/or refinement of the proposition.

You may have noticed. Soon after a discussion about most any political matter, the other party sometimes exhibits a certain look. It's less the look of one who is genuinely and intently listening to the substance of what is being expressed than it is of a certain calculation i.e. are you on Team Red or Team Blue? Just try it sometime when it comes to someone outside your "tribe" whether the subject happens to be, say, race, climate change, energy policy, transgenderism, immigration, universal base income or pretty much anything that relates to "traditional American values."

The proposition itself serves as a kind of threshold test when it evokes a knee-jerk response like "Aha, correct, just look at the corrosive effect of (choose one) (Fox news)/ (MSNBC)!" There's the tell. Failure at the time to even acknowledge any countervailing media bias would seem to reflect a certain blind spot i.e. one side news/other side propaganda. Our discussion invites honest reflection by all "sides."…

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Y/N: Assessing today’s world of eight billion people, would you accept the hypothetical offer to be freshly born into it with the understanding your personal circumstances would be totally randomly assigned e.g. place of birth? A slight variation: With what you know today, would you choose to relive your current life without first having had the foreknowledge of how it has actually played out?

Apologies for such sophomoric questions but they are meant as a backhanded invitation to the broader philosophical question raised by Camus about the absurdity of life or, more precisely, the matter of how to live one's life in the face of its essential meaninglessness. He reduces that premise to the starkest of terms, "There is only one really serious philosophical problem and that is suicide" (from which all serious questions emanate).

A general philosophical discussion is one thing; real life may be another. At least one club member, in fact an occasional Member Monday participant, took her life a year ago, giving rise to the question whether some frank and honest discussion about an otherwise taboo subject might have made a difference. Our focus article (Living Through Suicidal Moments) provides an up close and personal account of a subject that probably churns below the surface of many age groups…

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With Nothing To Say

He Crams The Most Words Into

Smallest Idea

The above is a very amateur personal attempt at Senryu, the Japanese poetic form similar to the more-familiar Haiku with the 5/7/5 syllabic form but without the Nature orientation. It’s meant to be satirical, cheeky and rely on the reader’s imagination for meaning. Does that example not describe those insufferable talking heads and what sometimes passes for discourse? Even this attempted clarification detracts from an essence.

Our discussion article (click: A Lot With A Little), however, goes beyond poetry and writing to address enhancement through brevity as applied to many genres. In fact, the very term “less is more” was originally popularized by a minimalist architect and later transformed by advertisers into a platitude (see, Less Is More). Let us, however, explore this three-line unrhymed Japanese form in the spirit of its original lively, darkly humorous, and sometimes vulgar sense to gather some glimpse of man’s nature e.g…

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Member Monday has traced (chased?) the promise/peril of artificial intelligence for seven years now, most recently in our last December session which first introduced many to the Faustian bargain of MM 12/19/22 Chat GPT. Three months later, an eternity in AI time, the underlying debate/questions have only become crisper, compelling, more interesting and urgent.

We might frame the question thus: to what extent, if at all, might AI insinuate itself into what is commonly regarded as general intelligence.

Our first focus article characterizes AI as a loose term describing a world populated by programs that makes it feel as though they were intelligent, thereby allowing them to shape or govern our lives (NYT: This Changes Everything). Perhaps a good start though we’re still left hanging with an essentially self-referencing definition.

The piece, though, speaks to a vision of AI’s future that features improvements measured in exponential, if not outright disruptive, terms. The underlying research community is described as somehow living in an altered state of time and consequences; coders speak freely in terms of angels and demons as if they are destined to inherit the earth. Quoting Google CEO, “A.I. is probably the most important thing humanity has ever worked on – more profound than electricity or fire”. One catches a whiff here of both paradise found and the apocalypse…

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What me lonely? Why just the other day I was engaged in my own fascinating soliloquy, great points, no one to disagree. None other? So-called conversations are sometimes simply paired soliloquies, two people talking past each other. Besides, I have my books and my poetry to protect me. Thomas Jefferson frequently dined alone.

One wonders the extent to which loneliness, while perhaps essentially a subjective state of mind, is amenable to objective measurement. Our focus article would certainly say so as it triangulates neuroscience, behavioral cognition, and evolutionary design to report on the "profound" physical and psychological toll that loneliness exacts across the globe – 36% of Americans report "serious loneliness" (Loneliness Reshapes the Brain).

Loneliness, you see, doesn't necessarily result from a lack of opportunity to meet others or a fear of social interactions. Rather circuits in our brain trap us in a loop whereby our desire to connect with others works at cross-purposes with a certain neurological reluctance to engage with those who are seen to be unreliable, judgmental and unfriendly. We thereby keep our distance by maintaining a bias towards rejection, thereby consciously or unconsciously spurning potential opportunities for connection…

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Real Coffee With Scott Adams (the cartoonist behind Dilbert) had hosted a public (Youtube) livestream for an hour or so every single morning @ 8:00 (local) as he interacted with an audience of two thousand or so via real-time posted comments.

His session a couple of weeks ago (having just stumbled upon it) included the subject of race and race relations. Among his general points: the power of individual initiative; the importance of role models; the critical part that education (in the broad sense) plays in overcoming most life disadvantages. On the one hand, there seemed little to take issue with. On the other hand, in the context of race relations, that hour felt somehow charged, as if one were watching a bomb-defusing scene -- one twitch and the whole damn thing would explode.

Detonate it did, just one week later. In a subsequent podcast of February 22, Adams – citing a (Rasmussen) poll that apparently found only a slim majority of Black Americans agreed with the statement that "It's okay to be White" – was quoted as saying this demonstrates that the black community is effectively a hate group, that this racial divide was never going to go away, and that Whites would do well by "getting the hell away."

Boom. The aftermath was immediate, widespread, and punitive i.e. among a number of other consequences, the entire Dilbert syndication of over thirty years was summarily canceled…

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Sociopaths aside, most of us self-identify as compassionate. Compassion, in its most uncomplicated form, was an element, for example, in our recent sessions regarding wildlife preservation ( MM 8/15/22 Amazing Grace and MM 2/27/23 The Changing Face Of Conservation). Animals stir people in a profound way (“It often happens that a man is more humanely related to a dog or cat than to any human being”) as they are usually perfectly themselves, not the elaborately perverse psychological mysteries that people seem to become.

Our discussion shall concern itself with these psychological mysteries -- more specifically the hundreds (700 last count) of those currently unhoused in Boulder. One town, facing seven hundred individual stories, does not lend itself to facile answers. A recent development, however, has now put the matter front and center.

That is, the recently-published Downtown Boulder Vision Plan, a truly inspired imagination of what’s possible for our town over five years has one glaring omission, self-identified on page five, that begs the compassion question: “The recent uptick in homelessness, poverty, addiction, and mental health crisis has been a major concern . . . . (such that) these issues and related struggles are extremely complex . . . . (and thus are) not provided in the breadth of this Vision Plan.” The document thereby invites us to a “continued conversation.”…

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There in the middle of Aberdare National Park in central Kenya just east of the East Rift Valley is The Ark Lodge which overlooks a floodlit watering hole and saltlick from which one can observe a vast assortment of wildlife. A friend and I had the privilege some forty years ago to overnight there at the beginning of a ten-day private walking safari led by a Masai tribesman in traditional dress, complete with spear, and an Egyptian guide with a .357 magnum rifle to back him up.

The adventure highlighted wildlife conservationists' special role within the wider world of ecological consciousness. The animals were often largely hidden, almost mirages in the grasses. I recall feeling vaguely out of place, an intruder, within what Carl Jung once described Africa as being “the stillness of the eternal beginning.”

How long before the Mzungu – white men like me – would lay waste to this primal setting of lions, giraffes, zebras, impalas, Thompson’s gazelles, Cape buffalos, and wildebeests (for now) innumerable…

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The upcoming Member Monday session on dream interpretation will be a high-wire experiment in which the lead participant shall be linked live by Zoom into our normal interactive library discussion (which, if successful, would open brand new vistas for future Member Monday possibilities). Adding to the exotic nature of this experiment, this lead participant will be linked from Ecuador and communicate via near-simultaneous translation offered by none other than club member Desiree Fenichell (Peter's wife).

Our lead participant also happens to be Desiree's sister, Monica, who has forever been fascinated by the world of dreams and what they mean. She describes herself as possessing a special intuitive gift attained by paying attention to the spirit world through which she is able to access energy fields. Monica’s capabilities are set forth in the attached "Welcome To the World Of Dreams".

While it may be easy to question (or even be skeptical about) claims of dream interpretation from a psychoanalytical standpoint, this session offers the optimal opportunity for us as a group to at least explore the dimensions of the phenomenon. Certainly many of you have had the experience of, say, a dream sequence reflecting or presaging some real-life event or emotional content. It’s often easy to overlook and dismiss such matters, especially given the ephemeral nature of the dream which causes it to quickly disappear from consciousness…

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The first of two focus articles (Is There Hope For Marriage? ) answers “yes” so long as we reject the connection between marriage and the prevailing cultural notion of "Big Romance." That does not mean entering into passionless commitments but rather "accepting that romance and affection are great but not the chief objective of a thriving marriage."

What a curiosity that whole idea of Big Romance has been, having arisen as a byproduct of industrialization with its transition from productive agrarian households to bourgeois industrial ones, marked by a sole nine-to-five, “honey-I'm-home” (usually) man breadwinner and the loss of (usually) women's economic agency in family life. Thus was born the "companionship marriage" premised not on economic necessity or transactional exchange but on mutual interpersonal romantic affection.

That may have worked for many (for others, good riddance) but times then changed -- fewer gender-specific jobs, loss of employment guarantees, remote working, e-commerce -- such that the largely historical economic dependency that had fostered the "companionship" marriages then shifted to "self-expressive" marriages in which Big Romance became less a factor…

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In a recent Guest Opinion by Boulder's own nonagenarian, Milton Slater (age 92) articulates the barely-heard voices of a certain elderly contingent i.e. those folks -- having overcome, having conquered, having survived a lifetime of challenges – now find themselves rewarded by . . . . . . . indifference (Milton Slater: Wisdom At the End of Life). Damnit, we have something to say. We have something to contribute. Beneath those wrinkles is a real human being

Dehumanizing the elderly is strangely illogical. Our discussion will center around that existential puzzle: why do we neglect and disdain the one vulnerable group we all eventually will join? Simone de Beauvoir had some useful ideas on why this self-harming habit exists: the not-yet-old are in denial, all the time, such that their aversion to the already-old expresses an attempt to flee from their own aging and mortality (Old Not Other).

But -- wait! -- old age is not contagious. You don't catch old age from old people. The shame of it all is that the already-olds become the “Other,” collateral damage from the not-yet-old's denial. The not-yet-old might be better served by taking stock as they come to terms with one of Sergi Cadenas’s thirty-second kinetic paintings…

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Oh the humanity:

Per the Royals, Harry saw "the red mist" when William shoved him onto the doggie bowl;

Per the Ukraine: "You are a 22-year-old Ukrainian who has just been handed a Kalashnikov, four magazines of thirty rounds, and body armor. Last week you were studying architecture at Kyiv University. Now an officer puts a hand on your shoulder and says: 'You’re a fire team leader. That's your team'. There are three people behind you. You’ve never seen them before. They await your command." Ukrainian's Paramilitaries.

So who's more alive? The answer might begin with a moving letter written by a young Russian refugee from Severodonetsk, a city in the Donbas region in the northeast part of the Ukraine -- or, maybe in Russia, depending on the day. The stream-of-consciousness account of this extraordinary girl named Ruslana -- having studied Ulysses, age fifteen! -- reflects a kind of "Joyce field" connection that bespeaks this entire besieged population "My Ithaca Burned Down, Too".

There's nothing like an up-close-and-personal existential threat to focus the mind, to give one meaning, and to achieve a hyper-alive awakening. Zelenski's pre-Christmas speech before Congress captured that certain essence with a vivid reckoning there on the front lines of Bakhmut, not too far from Ruslana' previous home (Zelensky Speech)….

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Highland does aesthetics. Its members embody the arts e.g. music, dance, painting, sculpture, architecture, calligraphy. The grounds and premises themselves are a tribute to beauty, evoking a sublime quality of life itself. Being sensitive to what is beautiful is the way to discover the ultimate value of the world, the subject of our discussion piece (Attuned to the Aesthetic).

Previous MM sessions have been likewise inspired e.g. MM 6/3/19 Birthing Beauty (architecture, Dominique), MM 4/4/22 Are You Not Moved? (visual Arts, Van Gogh’s ’Night Cafe’), MM 8/12/19 Wabi-Sabi (Japanese aesthetic featuring beauty in imperfection), MM 8/29/22 Calligraphy (lettering as visual art, Amanda), MM 10/30/17 Music's Evocative Magic.

May we embrace this philosophy of life called “aestheticism” i.e. a life lived in pursuit and reflection of aesthetic principles (whether created, shared, or appreciated) which, in and of themselves, make the world worthwhile. It suggests a certain absoluteness, a kind of ultimate, universal, or final value. It needs no justification in terms of some other good. In fact, it may be harmful, like a storm or volcano. In trying to parse the phrase, the closest term that came to mind was “awesome,” the subject of MM 1/22/18 Awesomeness…

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One ambition of this experiment called Member Monday was (is) to distill complicated truths from false simplicities, the subject of our discussion article (In Praise of Bewilderment). 

Bewilderment, we are told, may sometimes seem a threat as it means surrendering a part of oneself as our various "certainties" function as nodes in our "web of beliefs," all interconnected to give us our worldview. We become vulnerable, especially in times of crisis, when that "tyranny of certainty" is challenged such that our amygdales flood the system and we are reduced to little more than braying pack animals seeking an echo chamber over meaningful interaction. That is why our MM protocol calls for active listening and a respectful pause such that the forum offers thoughtful exchange over mere reflex.

We might first ease into the necessary humility by recalling our previous session MM 11/14/22 Things (We Know For Sure) That Just Ain't So and then move on to our experiences with real-life paradoxes e.g. perhaps you discovered the counterproductivity in those vain attempts to exert control, or how you landed that important job only after you stopped trying so hard (in golf parlace, loosening the grip on the club), or how you've experienced or witnessed  that "never-enough" phenomenon where one's "wants" seem, on an accelerated basis, to perpetually outstrip one's "haves". Our MM 6/10/19 Good/Bad . . . . We'll See was all about the cause-and-effect mysteries in one's life trajectory. 

The point is one need not enter the Zen Buddhist world of koans to appreciate the limitations of locked-in certainty. Only with an open mindset are we ready for F. Scott Fitzgerald's dictum, "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind and still retain the ability to function" as we contemplate such possible topics as abortion, our increasingly porous national borders or, a personal favorite, the certainty of Free Will (given Man simply has no choice)…

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A very early MM discussion featured a conversation with Nick Bostrom, Oxford philosopher, on the subject of artificial intelligence (AI) as he maintained, “Artificial Intelligence can and very possibly will take over the universe, pushing humans into second place, if they still have any place at all” (The Guardian 6/12/16).

Don’t look now but the advent of Chat GPT (an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text) is now knocking on the door as it presumes its way into the world of poetry. Does it have our attention now?

The path to this point is well known and the subject of some previous MM sessions. There was, of course, the so-called Turing Test -- challenging a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior to be equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.

Philosophers of artificial intelligence over the succeeding generations got caught up in their own underwear trying to frame such questions as what is even meant by human intelligence i.e. what is the difference between consciousness and the simulation of consciousness…

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Now he tells me: perhaps my younger Self, had he chosen to listen, would benefit greatly from some of the thoughts and perspectives rendered by his then-future Self. Our session will be centered around the sharing of certain such imaginary retrospections which, given the passage of life experience, might even rise to the level of pseudo-wisdom. They needn't be fancy, only heartfelt. At the very least, the older participants may be surprised, comforted, and even entertained by the commonality of respective life challenges, triumphs, and missed opportunities.

But that's not the real value of the exercise. What’s impossible for the individual’s imagined time-travel retrospection becomes feasible when it comes to generational groupings i.e. my earlier incarnation might have benefited greatly from the chance to sit in the presence of trusted elders, not as one to be lectured at, but as an equal. As such, may our session particularly embrace our younger members.

Just by way of an example is a personalized sample entry (below), inspired by our MM 10/7/19 Second Mountain session:..

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