MEMBER MONDAY

Prometheus was the Greek mythological figure best known for having defied the Olympian gods by stealing fire from them and giving it to humanity in the form of technology, knowledge, and civilization. He was condemned to eternal torment for this transgression by being bound to a rock where an eagle would eat his liver only for it to grow back overnight so that it might be eaten again in a daily cycle. In the Western classical tradition, Prometheus represented human striving which carried the risk of overreach or unintended consequences.

American Prometheus is Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer-winning biography of a man – J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb – consumed by such striving. It was he who pulled this unimaginable nuclear fire out of Einstein’s quantum Olympian blackboard equations to unleash such existential power that it’s synonymous with the very term Armageddon (or nuclear holocaust). The biopic Oppenheimer, released last week to wide acclaim, was based on that story.

You need neither to have read the book nor have watched the film, however, to appreciate the many underlying moral issues raised by that "event" some eighty years ago. Our discussion piece is An Extended Interview With Christopher Nolan as the director of the biopic discusses his painstaking effort to faithfully capture the science and the ambiguous nature of the man behind the program known as the Manhattan Project…

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In 1947 W.W. ("Mac") Brazel discovered some unusual debris -- tinfoil, rubber strips, and sticks -- on his New Mexico ranch. People have been talking about it ever since. The military fostered the initial intrigue by claiming the recovered debris was from a "flying disc" only later walking it back with explanations centered around a weather balloon, then a top-secret project to detect Soviet nuclear testing, then a balsa wood frame carrying a radar target.

Too late. The July 9, 1947 headline in the Roswell Daily Record blared "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch In Roswell Region." Mr. Brazel helpfully added he did not believe that the debris was from a weather balloon.

The so-called Roswell incident became the centerpiece of all sorts of fear, speculation, intrigue, fascination, projection, and conspiracy theories, as the United States and other countries became enveloped in a "flying saucer" craze. “UFOs” have fired the imagination for some seventy-five years now.

The term UFO has actually been neutered by the more scientific “Unidentified Anomalous (previously, Aerial) Phenomena,” the official name given for subsequent sightings. Ongoing investigations are classified as either "identified" with a known astronomical, atmospheric (or otherwise human-caused phenomenon) or "unidentified" meaning there was insufficient information to make an identification with a known phenomenon. The latter category makes up six percent of total sightings…

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Do you recognize him in others or perhaps in yourself? Meet “Roy,” a masters student, whose perfectionism (as reported by his professor) led to his undoing (Roy):

His work became ever more dazzling and the delays in submission more protracted. When he came to see me a week before the deadline for his final dissertation, I spotted an angry rash across his forehead. In some alarm, I asked if he was well.

“It’s fine,” he snapped. “I just rub away at the skin when I’m stressed, that’s all.” I then noticed that his nails were bitten past the quick and his fingers had swollen red pads. I directed Roy to the student-counseling service ... Roy’s counselor helped him stretch [the deadline] until the following January.

Just before Christmas Roy came to see me, unkempt and staring glassily into the middle distance. There was no chance of getting his dissertation completed in time, he told me. By now I had learned the art of gentle remonstration. This was a Masters dissertation not his life’s work, I pointed out. It didn’t need to be perfect…

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A serious question posed to you vacation travelers: Is the going still good? The environment has changed since we first addressed the matter seven years ago (MM 11/21/16 Is The Going Still Good?) with the observation of 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, "The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room."

So why the need to travel? To penetrate mysteries? The earth scarcely withholds any secrets anymore, or at least not otherwise easily discoverable without all that expensive motion. For the trophies? For the bragging rights? Because it fosters some new forms of understanding? . . . .

. . . . which, as we addressed in the featured focus piece from that previous session: It may be a narcissistic fallacy of travel to imagine that one's mere passing through sets up a charmed understanding between traveler and native, or even a bare comprehension. A kind of Heisenberg Principle usually goes to work: the observation of visitors alters the behavior of the observed, sometimes in ugly ways. Theodore Roosevelt, age eleven, recorded a story in his diary of the family's grand tour in 1869. The Roosevelts tossed small pieces of cake to a crowd of Italian beggars: "We made them open their mouths and tossed cake into it." Like chickens, like pigeons in the park.

That same youngster, by the way, grew up to experience an altogether different level of travel as chronicled in River Of Doubt, the featured book in one of our pre-MM book club discussions, describing Teddy Roosevelt’s 1914 post-Presidency exploration of an undiscovered tributary of the Amazon. The number and the magnitude of the perils faced by that exploration party defies description but consider this: provisions were gone; the starving men were reduced to dynamiting the river to stun piranha; one man collecting fish, held another in his mouth; stunned fish comes around and bites off man’s tongue. Now that’s a travel experience…

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In the Arab world, there is a widespread belief that if a child is too beautiful or brilliant, s/he may attract the evil eye (Hasad). Parents are sometimes advised to avoid posting pictures of especially pretty babies in order to protect them (click: Evil Eye).

While perhaps it was an evil eye that was cast upon a certain kindergartener pageant queen in Boulder on that tragic Christmas day in 1996 -- call it the Jon Benet Ramsey effect --  Western culture generally bestows great privilege upon the beautiful. They tend to get more parental attention, better grades, more money, and overall satisfaction from life (click: Moral Hazards Of Being Beautiful, text also linked here).

Research seems to suggest that physically attractive people often cultivate self-serving beliefs in their superior power and status, even goodness, in a world that is fair and just and rewards merit. In short, unacknowledged entitlement. Just spend seven minutes here with Tina Fey (The Beauty Bubble).

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John Donne's sonnet Death, Be Not Proud is a reflection on mortality, presenting an argument against the power of death. Addressing Death as a person, the speaker warns Death against pride in his power. Such power is merely an illusion, and the end Death thinks it brings to men and women is in fact a rest from the world-weariness of its alleged "victims." The speaker further deflates Death's ego by calling it a "slave," beholden to such lowly, despicable earthly things -- like the things chronicled in our focus article How Not To Dig Your Own Grave, reflections on mortality by a human identification expert.

The author chose her career out of some uneasy feeling she should do something significant in her life. Her choice provided access to the endlessly fascinating hidden corners of America. She became an advocate for the voiceless, the dead. It’s up to you to decide whether all of that is something significant.

After fifteen years she echoed the sentiment of the speaker in Donne's sonnet -- a sense of relief for the victims, whether they be Bosnian war dead, the homeless, crime statistics of all ages and social standing, or even the specimens of her first encounter as a 22-year-old graduate student practicing a niche forensic discipline called Forensic Archaeological Science – applying the scientific rigor of archeology to crime scene work…

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Some years ago Constantin Reliu dropped out. He left his home country for a decade in Turkey. He lost all contact with his family. His wife sought and obtained his death certificate. Mr. Reliu returned. He appeared in person to appeal the finding. Appeal denied. It was time barred -- too late, ruled the Romanian court, he would have to remain deceased. His life becomes caught up in a Kafkaesque construct – now you see it, now you don’t (Who Are You?).

Mr. Reliu, very much “alive,” no longer existed, at least in the legal sense. We might now probe the meaning of existence in a different context – that of technology or, more specifically, the world of AI with the power to create virtually what the law, in Mr. Reliu’s case, presumed to cancel by declaration. The presumptive “you” may someday be exposed, created, transformed and, yes, canceled.

As a start, a website of four years ago This Person Does Not Exist renders, almost as quickly as you can click, random hyper-realistic portraits of completely fake people. We have also explored the degree to which AI has enabled deep fakes to the extent a “non fiction” book about Russian hackers was so real with its compelling narrative, extensive interviews, and vivid pictures that its authenticity remained totally unquestioned for months. The fact of its fakery was only revealed after the Norwegian “author” confessed, his broader point having been made (MM 1/24/22 Brave New (Fake) World). This example turns out to have been little more than a warm-up of things to come…

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You are of limited intellect. Nothing personal, we all are. We are a mass of people incapable of thought, part of a crowd that thinks in images, powerless when it has to do with sentiment. We are a collection of readily-hackable egos. We are a consumer culture, the essence of our discussion piece, A Brief History Of Consumer Culture featuring a broad swath of consumer economists.

Man's thoughts and actions, you see, are compensatory substitutes for suppressed desires. And so it is when it comes to consumption. Things are desired, not so much for their intrinsic worth, but as symbols of social position, as evidence of success. In Id-speak, we are creatures of sex, power, and security. Thus was born the twentieth-century public relations industry.

The timing was not coincidental. Capitalism had taken care of the production side of things. In fact, more than taken care of it, as the post-WWII problem was insufficient demand. Something needed to goose the flow. Enter demand creation – let loose the dogs of envy, or at least insecurity. Those of a certain age might trade examples of these implanted inadequacies (personal favorite "ring around the collar")…

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Language is a clunky means of communicating. Clunky is meant in the sense of its dependence on context. In that well-known exchange in Alice In Wonderland, Humpty Dumpty said, “When I use a word . . it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less,” to which Alice questioned whether he could make words mean so many different things, with Humpty Dumpty responding, “The question is which is to be master – that’s all.”

False choice. The real answer is that humanity has been stuck in a linguistically constrained phase of evolution for far too long and that a future beyond language is imaginable – the working hypothesis of our focus piece Life After Language.

We might first discuss whether language is even necessary for thought. After all, your dream last night was not some audio-book in English. You might later describe the experience in linear words but the dream itself was a collage of images and emotions – in a way like your internal thinking process…

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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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